Your passions are what motivate you in determining how you want to spend your time.

• What makes you get up early or spend hours thinking about doing?
• What gets you talking enthusiastically with your family and friends?
• What do you most enjoy doing?

If your passions are not met, you will not be happy. While passion is always an excellent motivator, in terms of your career it must also be partnered with commitment, creativity, talent, strategy, and a lot of hard work. Keep in mind that not all passions clearly align with a feasible professional track. There will often be compromises.

The idea that we need to ‘find our passion’ in order to be happy and successful is an oversimplification. It takes hard work and a lot of fearless soul searching to get in touch with our passions. It’s realized by building valuable talents and using them to guide our career path. Here are some guidelines:

• Identify your transferable passions; those that you are innately inspired by but are also applicable to building a career.
• Create a strategy based upon your transferable passions.
• Learn and build marketable skills around your passions.
• Be realistic about where your current skill levels are at and how to grow them.
• Know what prospective employers are looking for when it comes to jobs you are passionate about and identify the skills they’re looking for. Compare them to yours.
• Be courageous about pursuing work that will be meaningful for you.

Start building a list of your passions then prioritize them. For each passion, determine if it aligns with realistic work you can do by comparing it to job postings. For those that do, determine your level of “passion expertise.” Make a plan to acquire skills, abilities, and competencies that need development. Identify how and where to get those competencies and make it happen.

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