The Perils of Finding Your Passion

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inding your passion is something that many people want help with. Many people actually already know what their passions are, but what keeps them feeling that they do not know is they actually encounter anxiety when they start to do things in the direction of their passion. The anxiety confuses them and they start to doubt they are on the right path, so they start searching all over again. People spend their whole lives in this cycle—starting and stopping and feeling bad about themselves that they can’t do anything.

It isn’t so much that finding your passion is the issue. It’s more what happens next. Few people talk about the difficulty they face when they start to live their passion or do what they love. Yet there are many things that arise both within oneself and from those around you that isn’t easy or at all blissful. In fact, many people try and start to do what they love, but then they hit against these obstacles and retreat. After a period of retreating, they start searching again for something else that could be their passion. What’s happening, though, is that the anxiety can throw you off course. It is not that the passion isn’t right. it’s more that the anxiety that has appeared needs to be addressed.

If you don’t know how to move through these ditches or canyons caused by fears, then you’ll feel you can’t move forward and resign yourself to give up on your dreams. When you do what you love, many things fall into place easily, but you will also be confronted with new situations that are scary. These are situations you avoid when you don’t follow your passion. In our core we know that our passion is not only important, but also vital to the meaning of our life. We want to go forward but can’t. Knowing about how you can go off course like this, learning how to be kind to yourself, and then learning to work with the obstacles instead of retreating is where it all starts to come together and you are no longer stuck in the false notion that you’re still finding your passion.

Don’t Resist the Fear

Doing anything creative, anything that calls upon your deepest joy, or feels like a deep gift you have within yourself, will simultaneously activate anxiety. Maybe there are the few people out there who don’t experience this or they have worked through it so well they can’t remember what it was like when they first began. Overall, however,  most people will encounter anxiety when expressing their inner core self. Trying to push it away or  wanting to be someone who has no fear, or thinking you should feel differently, is completely unhelpful and can keep you stuck your whole life. This belief that you shouldn’t experience anxiety or fear will trap you into never finding a path towards fulfilling your passion.

Be Where You Are

The way through begins by accepting what’s occurring for you. If there is fear and anxiety, accept that it is there, that it happens for you when you are creative, and may happen every time you take new steps forward. Don’t be surprised. Come to accept it. Don’t wait until it is different. As my coach Sonya says, “it is normal to feel this way when you take a step forward with your authentic self.” Accept that anxiety comes with the terrain, and instead of retreating, commit to learning how to deal with anxiety, commit to loving yourself with the anxiety, commit to learn to give yourself such impeccable care that you can handle the fear.

Finding your passion can sometimes be the easiest part. The real work comes in learning how to navigate the internal resistance that comes form the inner fears that are a normal part of the experience. These fears can be called “fear of success, fear of responsibility, fear of criticism, fear of rejection, fear of intimacy” etc. There are a hundred different faces that our anxieties can come in, only by learning skills to cope when these faces show themselves can finding your passion turn into living your passion.

I found the book Mastering Creative Anxiety by Eric Maisel to be extremely helpful in the process of overcoming the many pitfalls that come along as one starts to do what one loves, particularly if it is a creative pursuit, but the concepts can apply to anything.