Confronting our Passion
A confronting question was posed to me last week: Where have you limited your passion?
I’ve found that for myself and for many adults the confronting thing is not only where we’ve limited ourselves but that we may no longer know what we’re truly passionate about. Somewhere in the course of adult life and the attention that the day to day demands, it can feel like we’ve misplaced our passion and don’t know how to find it again.
The really confronting questions: How can we not know? How can we not know ourselves?
A few years ago during my prior life as an investor, an entrepreneur asked me a bold question. Describe your perfect day as if there were no limits. To be honest, I had a hard time answering. There was the easy stuff I knew I didn’t want such as being anywhere near a slack notification. I knew that I would want close friends and family nearby. But I found it hard to conjure a specific picture of exactly how that day would go and what I’d be doing. It was even difficult to imagine exactly what it would feel like.
Looking back, I think there was something blocking my ability to dream up something different. I think I knew deep down that investing wasn’t my greatest passion but I wasn’t ready to admit that yet.
If I wasn’t an investor, what would I be doing? What would people think? Would I ever find mentors and bosses again that would treat me so well? Could I make enough money doing something else?
It was a familiar refrain of the “what ifs.”
Fast forward and my life has changed quite a bit. I admitted the scary thing and ended up leaving my job a few years after that conversation. I am now a leadership and mindset coach and haven’t thought about new investments or getting a deal done in almost a year. It feels like a total 180 from the time in my life when I thought investing would be the thing I would spend my entire career doing! I’ve also experienced a lot of other changes. I moved from Los Angeles back to New York. I met my life partner and we moved in together. I fell in love with the game of golf. I even started participating in a fantasy golf league ( a true shock!). I went to therapy for the first time and started working with my own coach.
And even after all of that, the picture of the perfect day and vision for my future can still feel elusive at times.
What I’ve learned is that the puzzle pieces start to come together when we take action on the glimmers of possibility and get started somewhere. Like this blog. I don’t know where it’s headed or what my vision is. I just know that I like writing and it’s one of the few things that puts me into a state of flow. I love writing about sports and golf and creativity and what it means to know ourselves deeply. These posts seem to spill out of me in a way that almost nothing else does. It’s fun!
In her book, “Big Magic,” the writer Elizabeth Gilbert shares a story about her friend, Susan, who grew up loving figure skating as a child. She put away her skates during her adolescent years and returned many years later when she turned 40 and found herself feeling restless and searching for something meaningful. She started skating three mornings a week before work and found that she still loved it.
Gilbert’s point is not that Susan fell in love with figure skating again and went on to make drastic life changes (she did not quit her job or move or try to become a professional figure skater). Instead, Gilbert maintains that Susan still skates to this today because of what it does for her.
“...skating is still the best way for her to unfold a certain beauty and transcendence within her life that she cannot seem to access in any other manner. And she would like to spend as much time as possible in such a state of transcendence while she is still here on earth.”
My invitation to anyone that reads this is to take those first steps towards any small act that unlocks such a state of transcendence within yourself. I am here with you taking those first steps before I really know what it will look like. I am holding space for our collective fear of the unknown and standing for the possibility that comes when we continue on ahead.
