From Passion to Career: Research, Planning, Action > Energy Awareness: The Key to Finding Your Passion > Make the Commitment to Find Your Passion > Wondering If It's Time to Act?: Trust Your Gut—Feelings > What About the Job Market? > The Big Picture >

 FROM PASSION TO CAREER: RESEARCH, PLANNING, ACTION

Recognize that if you want to do the work you love your passion will supply the purpose and content, the driving energy and sustaining motivation of your work. The career role or roles you choose to play will be the vehicles through which to realize your passion. Once you identify you passion, the next step is to research various career options to discover which provide the best fit for your purpose and talents. For each of the fields you are considering, find out what kind of training, degrees, and skills will be needed, as well as what kind of income, working conditions, and opportunities for advancement you can expect. If you determine that the best way to pursue your passion involves starting your own business, working as a freelance or starting a nonprofit foundation, you will want to begin researching these options as well. Spend the time necessary to thoroughly research potential new career roles—use the links above and talk to people who are in the fields you are thinking of working in. (Many people are unhappy in their current work because they didn’t spend enough time researching it in the first place.) An example of the kind of research questions you may want to ask and one person’s answers to these questions for a specific career is provided here. You may want to volunteer in, or take an internship, in the field to get a hands-on feel for it.

Once you’ve selected the vehicle through which to pursue your passion the next step is to begin developing a plan for making the transition into it. If the new career role will require going back to school, you may want to investigate financial aid options. When you have developed your transition plan, you may discover that it will take some time before you will be able to move into your new career full time. You may want to see about pursuing an interim job in the meantime, something that may not be your ultimate career destination, but will be in the field you want to pursue and/or will allow you to develop skills you will need later on. Check here and here for job search sites, and here for networking resources. Remember to take advantage of professional social networking sites such as LinkedIn or CollectiveX (Groupsite) to boost your profile and make connections that you may help you find a job or a consulting project, a mentor or a collaborative support group.

If all of this sounds like a lot of work, remember that you don’t have to do it all at once. Take each step one at a time: 1) Identify your passion. 2) Research career options for pursuing that passion. 3) Select a new career path and develop a plan for transitioning into it. (These are steps anyone can take in any economy.) If, thereafter, it takes some time to enter into your new career or to make it a successful full-time occupation (for example, starting a new business part time on a shoestring), remember you will likely be working many more years in any case. You owe it to yourself to go for what you really want. And of course, the sooner you begin, the sooner you will be enjoying a new more fulfilling experience of work. Don’t be afraid to ask for help along the way. Find mentors, ask for your family’s support, and/or build a support group of other folks interested in pursuing their own dreams. You may want to hire a professional career coach who can guide, encourage, and maybe even nudge you through each of the phases. However daunting the way ahead may seem, take one step forward and the next step becomes clear. Acting into your dreams slays the dragon of fear.

 ENERGY AWARENESS: THE KEY TO FINDING YOUR PASSION

Energy. That’s the key. Being aware of and honest about your energy will lead you to your passion. Some energy moves to us from the outside in. We are swimming in the energy of the world around us—touched by every animate and inanimate thing we interact with through our minds, emotions, and senses. Out of this great mass of energy, you’ll find that some frequencies resonate with you more than others. We’ve all seen movies; some people see movies when they are young and immediately know they want to be filmmakers or actors. We’ve all listened to music—but some feel a resonance so strong it becomes their life. We are all affected by politics, but for some there is a powerful resonance that keeps them engaged for lifetime. We’ve all seen birds—some people get so caught up in the bird resonance that the study of birds becomes their lives. It works much the same way with issues. We are all affected by issues related to the environment; yet some resonate so powerfully with this issue that they dedicate their lives to it. You, I’m sure, can think of many more examples. The question is, what resonates with you? Be aware. And be honest—let it be what it is for you—not what you think it should be or what others want it to be. If you feel there are more than a few strong resonances—go deeper. Identify no more than a handful of really strong ones—and select the one that has the strongest pull for you now from among these. You may get to the others later. Don’t make the mistake some people make. They can’t decide between two or three strong passions—things they really love—so they spend their lives doing “none of the above.”

Even as energy moves to us from the outside world, so energy moves from us into the world without. Your visions and inspirations, your talents and intuitions, move from the inside out. When you are aware of what is arising from within, you are in touch with a powerful source of energy and direction. It helps if you can quiet the mind enough to hear what the deeper part of you is saying—enough to feel where the inside energy wants to take you. What visions or inspirations have repeatedly come to you? What things are you naturally good at? What intuitions have you had about meeting certain people, taking certain classes, going to certain places, etc?

Trust your inspirations, your talents, and intuitions, even if you are not quite sure how they fit into the bigger picture. Trust the strongest resonances you feel with people, events, issues, things in the outside world, even if you’re not sure how they will lead you to a new career. Awareness of these inner and outer energies provides the key to your passion. Embrace these energies and begin to explore how you can start moving in the direction they want to take you.

 MAKE THE COMMITMENT TO FIND YOUR PASSION

It’s easier to move toward something you love than away from something you hate. (If hate is too strong a word, it could be bored with, overstressed by, or just plain tired of.) The first step and most important step to doing work you love is determining what it is that you would love to do. After all, if you don’t know what you are after, it’s going to be pretty hard to find it. If you don’t know, don’t feel bad. You are not alone. I can tell you from experience, that many people can’t tell you what kind of work they would love to do. (They usually don’t have the same problem when it comes to telling you what they don’t like doing.) Nevertheless, to begin creating anything, we must have at least a general idea of what we want to create. Imagine a painter sitting in front of a blank canvas, saying to herself, “I don’t want to paint this—I don’t want to paint that—I don’t want to paint that either.” She can’t really get started until she decides what she does want to paint.

If you aren’t clear on what you want to create in your work life, gaining that clarity is a good place to start. It doesn’t take quitting your job, rearranging your life, or inheriting a financial windfall to begin clarifying what you’d like to be doing. You don’t need anything to begin except the determination to do so. It may, however, take some work to see it through to clarity. It’s not the kind of work that involves a lot of straining or intellectualizing. It’s really a matter of getting more deeply in touch with yourself. After all, no one else can tell you where your passion is. Nor can any battery of tests. Finding your passion is a movement into greater self-awareness. You’ll find it where your energy naturally wants to go. The trouble is, many of us have learned not to trust ourselves: either we don’t trust that we know what we want and/or we don’t trust that we can make it happen. So, how do we go about turning this around? Take them on—one at a time.

Begin with the commitment to get clear on where your passion is—on the work life you want to create. If you need a reason to make that commitment, you might begin by looking at where you are in your work-life trajectory. In other words, look at how many more years you are likely to be working. If you can see ten or fifteen more work years in front of you, that’s a long time. If it’s more like twenty, twenty-five, or thirty-plus years, that’s a very long time, indeed. You can choose to let those years go by or you can choose to make the most of them. If it looks like a long way from where you are now to a truly fulfilling career, remember that even if it takes you several years to get there, you will still have many more years to enjoy that work. On the other hand, if you don’t seize the initiative, those years will go by—just the same.

 WONDERING IF IT'S TIME TO ACT?: TRUST YOUR GUT—FEELINGS

It is never too early or too late to begin acting into your desire for a more engaging, fulfilling, and meaningful experience of work. Assuming that we are talking about something sustained and not a passing whim or a few intermittent “bad days,” if you are doing work that you feel isn’t right for you, there are only a few options. 1) You can ignore (suppress) that feeling. Most likely, this will result in a loss of energy and passion for life—anything from mild apathy—all the way to depression. 2) You can let it move you. If you let it move you, it will come out in one of two ways. It will cycle around and around in agitation, frustration, and resentment or it will prompt you to act. Perhaps, it will come out the first way for a while—until—finally, you decide it’s time to act. Acknowledging, and really allowing ourselves to feel, the negative emotions we may have around our current experience of work can be the catalyst that sparks change. On the other hand, it’s not a good idea to get stuck in or overwhelmed by these feelings.

Discontent can be creative or destructive, depending on what we do with it. We can allow it to consume our thoughts and energy in a reoccurring cycle of complaint and recrimination (whether directed at ourselves or others) or we can recognize it as the prompting of our souls, urging us to create a deeper expression of who we are. When we are ready to turn feelings into action, we are likely to find there is something we can do to begin creating into our discontent. Even though it may not immediately change your circumstances, this creative engagement will allow you to reclaim and redirect energy that may otherwise go round and round in frustrating and ultimately meaningless circles. With this newly reclaimed energy and your decision to act, it becomes possible to begin taking steps that (no matter how small at the start) can ultimately transform your work life. Embracing yourself as a whole person and accepting that your feelings might be trying to tell you something, could be the starting point of a new adventure—the journey towards a truly fulfilling career.

 WHAT ABOUT THE JOB MARKET?

The problem with talking about “the job market” in general terms is that in reality there are many. It depends on where you live and what field you are in. For example, in July the unemployment rate in Salt Lake City was 5.9 percent, in Metro Washington D.C. it was 6.5 percent, while in Metro Detroit the rate was 17.1 percent. Clearly, these are not the same job markets. Similar fluctuations are to be found within various career fields (a few have even seen net increases despite, and throughout, the recent downturn.) Keeping this in mind, what can be said about the wider outlook? Recent employment forecasts vary considerably. Some see net job growth beginning in the fourth quarter of this year; others don’t see net increases coming until early next summer. While no one knows for sure, it’s probably fair to say that, in terms of both the state of the broader economy and the rate of new job losses, the worst is over. (For the self-employed, the outlook has already begun to turn a corner.) This isn’t to say that the job market is going to be great in the near term; it will likely be at least 2011 before the unemployment rate returns to something like pre-2008 crash levels. On the other hand, most analysts agree that the outlook for the next year will be much better than it has been over the past year and that it should continue to improve in each of the next several years thereafter.

If you need a new job tomorrow or in the next few months, the state of today’s economy is relevant. For most people looking to do work they love, the state of today’s economy is less important. That’s because they have some work to do before they will be ready to move into a more fulfilling work experience. If you begin today identifying your new career path and developing and executing a transition strategy for realizing it, it could easily take a year or more (in some cases several years more) before you will be fully established in your work. And as we saw above, by that time, we will likely be looking at a very different employment picture. The point is, if you feel as though the work you are doing now isn’t right for you, the time to begin doing something about it could well be Now!

 THE BIG PICTURE

The economy aside—if you can’t imagine doing work you love, it’s probably not going to happen for you. Now that may sound cliché, and I will be the first to say that a lot of clichés are just hot air. On the other hand, some clichés end up becoming clichés because of the truths they contain. The point is, it matters where you place, what psychologists call the locus of control. In other words, it matters whether you think your destiny is determined by you or you think that it is determined by external forces beyond your control. Obviously, the approach you take will make a difference in terms of both the way you feel about yourself and the actions you take. Now, the approach you take is just that—an approach. It is not based on evidence—rather it selects the evidence you see as significant. If you believe that you have control over your destiny, you will take actions that will demonstrate and reinforce the validity of this belief and if you conclude that it’s all out of your hands and determined by others, you will find plenty of evidence for this as well. As Henry Ford said, “If you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.”

From a deeper, more poetic, perspective we can recognize the inner prompting of our hearts as manifestations of the same universe that is the so-called outside world. And therefore, since this desire has arisen within your heart, then the means for its attainment have also arisen within the universe. The only way to find these means is to act on the inner promptings, trusting that they will be supported by the universe out of which they were born. Taken in this spirit, action unites the desire with the means of its fulfillment. Again, there is nothing that anyone can do to prove this. Until you learn to swim or ride a bike, someone telling you that you can do it won’t help you much. (It may even annoy you.) It will only be real to you when you dive into the water, jump on the bike—try it for yourself.

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