Day 13: Identify Your Passion

Today you will learn about what a passion is, the two key requirements for something to be a passion, and how you can identify a passion from your interests.

Summary

What is a Passion?

A passion is an activity and a set of behaviors that you enjoy engaging in and are motivated to set goals for getting better at those actions.

• Interests turn into passions when you are self motivated to spend so much time learning, practicing, engaging in the world of that interest that you set goals for yourself to get better.

Why is Passion important to purpose?

You will notice the definition of passion includes two key items:

• Taking Action: in order to actually fulfill the dreams and aspirations you have for yourself, you will have to take action. If an activity or field does not hold your interest enough to take action, you will not be successful in it.
• Setting Goals: if you are going to be successful in mastering a particular field and set of actions, you must be motivated to learn and get better. Its not enough to stay at your current skill level. When we turn passion into a purpose, it is going to call forth the best version of you that you could possibly be. That is only attainable by setting goals, milestones along the way to reaching that potential.

How to identify your passion

Over the course of your explorations, you should have received some clear signals to the passions of your life, and even begin to get a hint of how those might be turned into a purpose. Its now time to review each of the explorations that you have done.

Note: If you're somebody that skipped all the previous lessons in this section in discovering yourself, go back through those because they are the real steps that are going help you identify your passion. Today will only help you to review the explorations from the previous steps.

Exercise: Review Your Explorations

In this exercise specifically focus on the experiences you can see yourself taking consistent action in and how compelled you feel for setting goals to getting better at them.

Review the explorations you conducted for your interests and journal on the following questions:

• What did you enjoy? What did you not enjoy?
• How did the experiences align or not align with your interests & personality?
• What strengths and weaknesses were revealed to you during these experiences?
• Which experiences, and particularly the people within those experiences, aligned with your values?
• How do these experiences fit within the vision for your life?
• Do these experiences align with your WHY?

Exercise: Go Public

• Something that may help you in the reflection of these experiences and whether they're your passions or not is to go public with your passions.
• Here you'll be able to get feedback from others because a public success is nothing more than positive feedback from other people.
• And taking things public doesn't require you giving a TEDx talk on what your passions might be. Simple conversations with strangers will get things going.
• What's going to happen in these interactions are people are going to give you some feedback about the ideas you have and the passions you may want to pursue. Try to listen objectively as possible without letting others discourage you from pursuing this passion.

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Activity

Using the exercises above, review you the explorations you have conducted so far and evaluate them to see if any stand out as real passions for you.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.