5 Tips to Help You ‘Find Your Passion’ For Purposeful Work

From entrepreneurs, start-ups, portfolio careerists, and the more traditional pathways still holding strong; getting started with a fulfilling career has never been more complex.

We’re told to ‘follow our passions’ to start building the type of career that brings us meaning, purpose, and fulfilment. But what does this really look like in practice?

Understanding What ‘Find Your Passion Really Means

Psychologists at Stanford and Yale-NUS College examined theories of interest, specifically fixed theory (our passions are inherent and hidden within us) and growth theory (passions are developed and nurtured over time). 

Over the course of five studies with the same participants, they found that those who tested positive as being fixed theory inclined developed less and less interest in articles and media linked to their designated interest.

Lead researcher, Paul O’Keefe, advises on the implications of the results:

“Telling people to find their passion could suggest that it’s within you just waiting to be revealed. Telling people to follow their passion suggests passion will do the lion’s share of the work for you. A growth mindset makes people more open to new and different interests and sustains those interests when pursuing them becomes difficult.”

Truly Finding Your Passion

Many of the young people I work with don’t really know what they want to do for a career in the long run. They tend to have a multitude of ideas they’re really keen to explore. 

It’s the latter that I encourage because being open to new experiences is ultimately what helps build on our initial ideas and keeps us receptive to any new pathways that may emerge.

Below are five ways we do this in the classroom — that can definitely be applied outside it too:

1. Consider Your ‘Flow’ States

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi devised flow State, and colloquially you may know this as ‘being in the zone’. It’s the state we find ourselves in when we are fully immersed and engaged by the activity we’re doing. Flow state is more than just being engaged; however, it also means that you derive a strong sense of enjoyment from the activity's entire process — not just the result.

The activities that encourage this state do so because they enable us to utilise our core and innate strengths. The more we pursue them over time, the better we get at them. They speak to us because we’re doing the things we naturally feel good at.

If you want to find out what passions might be worth spending more time exploring for fulfilling work, finding the activities that allow you to enter a flow state is an excellent starting point.

2. Develop a ‘Growth’ Approach

The popular ideas of Growth and Fixed Mindsets, developed by Dr Carol Dweck, remain so because they are so simple to understand and yet immediately applicable.

In a nutshell, a Growth Approach (or mindset) means you remain open to new experiences and possibilities. When challenges arise, you see these as opportunities to learn and grow, not barriers saying you shouldn’t or can’t achieve something.

Once you’ve identified your flow states, you should ask yourself:

• What is it about the activities exactly that fully engages you?
• How could this apply to other activities?
• Where can you build more of these activities into your current work life?
• How could these activities translate into career or work opportunities?

3. Conduct a Skills Analysis

In the classroom, I have a worksheet I’ve created for students to use that encourages them to think about the careers they’re interested in, the skills needed, the skills they have, and then look at the gaps. I encourage them to pair up with other students interested in the same careers to share ideas. It gets them thinking.

I’ve also used this with graduate students and adults wanting to switch careers. Do you know what I’ve found? They struggle just as much as my secondary schoolers to articulate a clear picture. 

Taking the time to sit down and do this is great because it not only helps you formulate a plan for pursuing a specific idea/s you may already have, it can help you discover new areas to focus on.

When breaking down your skills, consider two areas:

• Technical/Professional Skills: These will be specific qualifications, licenses, or ‘hard’ skills needed to do the job you’re interested in.

   

• Personal Skills: These are the qualities, values, and strengths that you think are needed to be good at the job. One way to assess this is by looking up people doing the job/s you want and seeing what it is about them that makes them good at it. Now think about the ones you have or might need to work on.

4. Get Stuck In

If you want to learn more about what a potential passion career you’ve got your eye on might look like, you need to transition your ideas from theory to reality. A great way to do this is by undertaking voluntary work or an internship within the industry you’re interested in.

It’s straightforward for us to view our passion career from a distance with rose-tinted glasses, but taking the icy cold plunge is what will let us in on some of the realities we might not have considered just yet.

5. Build Your ‘T’

Something a fellow educator introduced me to a couple of years ago is the concept of a ‘T-Shape’ Career. The analogy she used was this: there are two kinds of career people: the Pancake and The T-Shape.

• Pancake Careerists have one specific area they work within, and they spread themselves out over that area (like a pancake).
• T-Shape Careerists have one core area that they focus on as their pillar, but siphoning off from that central pillar, like little tree branches, are other areas they work in that are usually connected to or complement their main career focus (but they don’t always have to).

As someone who regularly has their nose stuck in an article or two about the ‘future of work,’ this whole concept seems the best guidance we can give young people to build longevity and security in their work lives.

It works so well because we don’t have to have just one thing as our core focus. We can have multiple roles that we pursue and derive a sense of purpose and meaning without compromising our sense of identity or financial security. Finding your passion or fulfilling work need not be limited to only one thing.

Review Refresh Repeat

When I work with graduate and adult clients, they tend to work through some of the guidance or exercises, get to the end and then throw their hands up in exasperation because they haven’t had that ‘light-bulb’ moment (or they were expecting me to hand them all the answers on a plate along with the job that magically ticks all their boxes).

In the classroom, we don’t do this. When one of my students completes a round of work experience, we sit down and review their skills analysis, adding anything new they’ve learned or skills they feel more confident with. Then, we have a good discussion about what they learned, what they liked and didn’t like. 

Finally, we decide: do they want to get some more work experience in this area or try something new?

The point is there is no magic formula. Finding your passion and seeing how it fits, feels, and works for you in a career or work context takes, well, work. You have to continuously review and reflect on what you’re doing, deciding if it’s working, if it feels ‘right’, and if it’s still worth committing to.

Only you can do that.