Stop Finding Your Passion, Let It Come To You! Says 60 Years Old Life Coach
Finding your passion is overrated. The hustle culture has increased the unnecessary pressure of being obsessively passionate about something. If you are not finding your passion then you are wasting away your life.
Zen is a 60 years old life coach. He has been coaching people for 30 years of his life. His path toward becoming a life coach is rather ordinary and subtle. He claims that he almost instinctively knew his life purpose.
“Yes, it is true that I have always known that being a life coach is my calling. It was in my gut but I ignored it for quite a long time. I hated preachers and I definitely did not want to become one” says Zen, quite honestly.
Zen has seen many interesting people with insane amounts of talent, skills, and compassion. He believes that life coaching is much more than throwing advice here and there. It is about giving the person strong support, autonomy, and the tools to evoke the magic that lies within them.
“I vividly remember a man whom I met on my flight to Australia. Planes make me anxious and the only way to feel less anxious is to talk to people. I almost forced him to talk to me since he was a quiet man who preferred music over people’s voices. Long story short we ended up working together. He was a man on the mission of finding his passion but was stuck under the burden of societal expectations, family life, and murdered dreams”
What is Passion?
Finding your passion is an abstract concept and it is best not to try to squeeze these vast concepts into specific definitions.
Yes, having some basic ideas or guidelines can definitely nudge you in the right direction of finding your passion.
Passion is something that makes you glad that you are alive. It is something that pushes you out of your bed even when you don’t quite feel like it. Finding your passion is all about getting in touch with who you truly are.
Finding your passion is not based on the expectations of society. There are many young people who feel that their life is pointless simply because they don’t have the glitz and the glamour that is often shown on social media platforms.
Passion is something that you do only for yourself.
A boy was passionate about bike rides. He would roam the streets on his bike in the middle of the night. It was his ritual that he never ever missed. Every time he was on his bike, feeling the cool midnight wind and wandering the quiet streets he felt truly and incredibly happy. A sense of peace and contentment glowed on his face.
Isn’t that what finding your passion is? It was a simple passion but one that added value and happiness to his life.
The man who met Zen on the flight to Sydney, Australia shared a similar story. He believed that he ‘needed’ to find his passion. The need of finding passion made him feel inferior, and angry and he began to resent his family because he was convinced that he had to give up on his dreams and passion because of them.
“I listened to his story. I listened as he vented for long hours. I did not say a word to him. His feelings were valid and I was nobody to tell him what he should feel and not feel. I asked him to meet me for lunch two days after we landed in Australia”
Finding your passion is not a need. A need could be rooted in desperation and bring out many fears.
Finding your passion comes effortlessly even when we may not realize it. We simply have to remember it because it has always been present in our souls.
Hence, the trick to finding your passion is not finding it all. It is simply the practice of calming your mind, releasing yourself from the fears, and then listening to your inner voice.
Simple, no?
Zen would disagree. In a fast-paced life where surviving and earning take priority over living and enjoying, it becomes almost impossible to silence your mind. There are duties to fulfill and expectations to live up to. And there is no time to listen to what your ‘soul’ has to say.
“We worked together for quite a few sessions. He was an incredible man. He was funny and witty. He loved his family. But he had also formed many unhealthy beliefs. He believed that he needed to be perfect at all times, and whenever he was not able to live up to his own unrealistic standards, he felt guilty and angry” shares Zen
The real challenge to finding passion is doing the inner work. In your life, you will be bombarded with many opinions on how you should live your life or what constitutes a ‘good life.
If you sit too long with your family, you will start believing that a good life is settling down and having kids before you turn 30.
If you hang around for too long with hippies, you will feel that life is all about wandering and feeling carefree.
The real and the biggest challenge of finding passion is to silence the voices of others and listen to your own.
Zen continues, “He loved cooking. That was his passion. But he shied away from it because cooking was not a passion. It was merely a hobby. When we challenged this belief, he realized that cooking made him truly happy. He would lose himself every time he was in the kitchen cooking up yummy meals.
He resisted it because society did not think like that. Passion was supposed to be rough and manly. It was supposed to make you reach the sky. He denied his inner voice and chose to listen to the opinions of others. Once he stopped doing that, he understood that he always knew his passion and there was no ‘need’ to find your passion but only to accept it”
Are you finding your passion too? These are some questions you can ask yourself:
Close your eyes and visualize a situation, a place, or an activity that fills a sense of happiness and peace in your heart. Something that immerses your mind completely.
What is it that makes you feel truly happy?
If you had to choose a topic to talk about for hours and hours, what would you choose?
“I cannot shut up about movies. I can bore you to death about my personal interpretations of different movies” says Farhan. He has been writing a movie blog for years. It is not his main source of income but it is his main source of happiness.
If you could do anything, absolutely anything in this world without any judgments, barriers, or expectations, what would you do?
“I would just sit and study birds,” says Urvi
Finding your passion is not a task on your to-do list. Passion is the essence of who you are. It is the paint that colors your soul. It is the glow that radiates your face. The absence of which makes you feel dull and drained” A Philosophical View of Life Coach, Zen.
Stop finding your passion. Instead, question yourself, snap out of your head and tune in to the voice of your soul. If you are finding it difficult to calm your mind, do the inner work, and realize your true passion then you can talk to a life coach.
Sometimes we are so clouded with our fears and past experiences that we fail to look past them Life coaching helps you to release these fears and provides you with support, guidance, and autonomy that encourages you to do the inner work and realize your passion.
