Following your passion can be difficult with the realities and demands of life. When you hit a fork in the road, it’s a good time to take stock and make changes.

When I was younger, (a lot younger :)), I thought that everyone was supposed to be like me and be so clear about their passion that they couldn’t do anything else but find work and make a career out of what makes their hearts sing. But the more I worked life-coaching people by creating safe containers so they could radically accept themselves, I came to realize that people like me are fewer in number than I had expected.

Of course that put a wrench into my surety of succeeding in manifesting what I thought was the panacea of all the low self esteem I saw around me: that if you just followed your passion your life would be hunky dory and your desire to live ‘self empowerment’ would be fulfilled. I saw the struggle that so many folks lived with for decades around buying into the new age belief set that if you didn’t follow your passion, or if you didn’t get your dream job, you were doing something terribly wrong or, even worse, you yourself was less than and lacking.

One of the consequences of my passion is that when I hook onto a visionary idea (like ‘follow your passion’) and my assumption of definition proves to be inaccurate, I can’t give it up. It is like the idea relentlessly keeps stewing in my psyche. I know from deep in my spirit that there is something to the idea. I am oh so grateful to the constellation of teachers that encouraged me to define the essence of the idea. Once I get to the essence of an idea I then apply a skill that I call re-framing. I look at the essence of the idea (‘following your passion’), realize that one way to do that is to find that dream job and then I hunt for other definitions that may not be part of my internal ‘lingo’ as of yet. As a result, other definitions I have come up with for ‘following your passion’ include:

• Live your life learning what the essence of you is rather than trying to find the dream job. This attitude allows you to have any job or career because the information you get from participating in life as it is, contributes to you knowing yourself deeply and intimately.
• Allow the ordinary to be extraordinary. This is that attitude that finds the smile on the barista’s face to be the mirror for you that you are beautiful.
• What if simply being alive is an opportunity to know that you are following your passion? One of simplest and foundational skill set that an intuitive counselor shares is the practice of the ‘attitude of gratitude’. We aren’t talking about that punitive voice saying ‘Be grateful for what you have!!!’ here. It is a more quiet voice that illuminates whatever is bright and shiny in your life.
• For some of you ‘following your passion’ may simply mean to let yourself deepen the intimacy in your significant relationship(s). What if doing the work of loving your partner and/or child is the ticket? Then you get a job with the idea of it providing the money you need to relax into living by loving.