How To Create The Habit Of Finding Your Passion?

 

I was coaching a client yesterday who didn’t understand why it was so difficult to find her passion.
She was hoping I would be able to tell her what it was. She was hoping for a profound moment of recognition when her calling would suddenly reveal itself.

It does happen this way on occasion. You read about people who know from childhood they want to be a doctor or a teacher. Or you see people whose natural talents lead them to a passionate career or pursuit. Maybe they’re artists, athletes, or speakers.

These people seem to find their passions effortlessly. It’s handed to them on a silver platter. And it’s usually these stories we hear about . . .

• The teenager with a passion for computers who builds them in his garage, only to eventually found the most innovative computer company in the world;
• The young black woman with a passion for helping others, becoming an iconic media personality and one of the richest women in the world;
• The struggling single mom in the UK with a passion for writing who publishes seven fantasy novels, one of the bestselling book series in history.

Read about these people who seem to have been born with a passion, you naturally jump to the conclusion that your own passion should have made an appearance by now. You wonder, “What’s wrong with me? Am I just boring, uninspired, passionless?”

 

The answer is no.

You are none of those things.

But you are busy and distracted. You are living your life, doing what must be done to pay the bills and take care of your obligations and responsibilities. You are also filled with doubts, confusion, and the very natural fear of change.

For most people, finding your life passion takes time and focused effort. For most people, it will not make itself known until you do the work of discovering it. The discipline of finding your passion needs to become a habit.

It must be something you work into your day, every day, until you wake up one morning and find yourself feeling so engaged and excited about what you’re doing that you can’t not do it.

This work can takes months. Sometimes it takes years.

But . . . and this is critically important to understand . . .

The habit work of finding your passion is a blip on the radar screen. The joy of living it lasts forever.

Here’s how to create a new habit in your life?

Set aside time

Ideally you’ll want to spend an hour a day working on your passion. You won’t spend this much time in the beginning, but eventually you will. The beginning stages of finding your passion involves more internal work learning about yourself. You can do this any time of day. Maybe early mornings or after work is a good time for you.

Later on, you’ll need to contact people, make appointments, and conduct some real-world research, so you’ll want to do this during the workday. For now, you can start with mornings or evenings.

Find a trigger

When you decide the best time of day to work on your passion search habit, you will need a trigger or cue to remind you to do the habit. This trigger is a previously established habit you perform every day, like brushing your teeth in the morning or checking your email in the evening.

Be sure it’s something you do every day. Your passion work habit should immediately follow this trigger.

Start small

In the beginning, you’re just trying to fit this new activity into your life and make it habitual. It’s hard to insert new behaviors into our lives. It takes regular repetition before it becomes an automatic action.

To help with this, start with just five minutes a day for the first week. Be sure you pick actions that you can easily keep to five minutes.

This seems ridiculously easy — and for good reason. You don’t want any excuses not to work on your passion. You can increase your time by five minutes weekly until the habit feels automatic, and you reach the optimum time you want to spend working on it.

Reward yourself

After you perform your habit, give yourself a reward. It can be anything that feels like a reward to you, like having a cup of tea, talking a walk, or hugging your spouse.

A great reward is putting a gold star sticker on your calendar every time you perform your habit. Seeing all of those stickers lined up at the end of a week really gives you a boost.

Create accountability

Find an accountability partner or group to whom you report your daily success. You can ask a friend, your spouse, or even your Facebook friends to help you stay on track.

Every day, report back on whether or not you worked on your passion. Knowing you have to make this information public is often enough to help you overcome any resistance.

Prepare

Before you begin working on your passion, make sure you have everything planned and prepared.

Determine the time of day for performing your habit, and decide on your trigger, reward, and accountability system. Choose a space to do the work that feels comfortable and where you won’t be interrupted.

Make sure you have access to a computer, pen and paper, and a calendar. If you need a glass of water or cup of coffee while you work, prepare that in advance. Also have your reward handy to enjoy immediately after you do your work.

After a month or so of working on your passion search habit, you should be able to cut back on the number of days you do the work. You might want to drop weekends, and continue your work on weekdays.

And as you get further down the road in finding your passion, you’ll likely have to spend time outside of your home pursuing some of your ideas.

However, any of the administrative work (making calls, doing computer research, brainstorming) can still be done at your regular habit time.

The action steps

Now you’re probably wondering what you should be doing during the habit time you’re creating for yourself. There are many, many steps involved in discovering your passion. You can read a list of 25 here in this post to get you started. Or you can read my book, The 52-Week Life Passion Project, which is currently on sale in the Kindle version.

 

Learning the skills of creating this habit will not only help with finding your life passion, but also it will help you accomplishment any goal or build any positive habit in the future. What better habit to begin with than uncovering a pursuit that will upgrade every aspect of your life?

 

Make the commitment today to form the habit of finding your passion. Before you know it, you’ll have many other new habits to pursue related to the work you love and the new life you’re creating.

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