How To Find Your Passion When You Feel Like You've Lost It

The concept of passion is a funny thing.

You’ve most likely felt it at some point in your life whether in romance, career, or a personal pursuit. It can feel intense, exciting, all consuming, and so much more. However, one day it’s there, and the next it’s gone. After all, “Passion is fleeting”, as they say.

In the last few years, I feel like passion has become a massive buzzword that ends up making people feel guilty, lost, and like they’re behind everyone else. As an emotion, passion is difficult to sustain in the long-term. Like a fire, it roars intensely for a time and then settles down into a low flame. If that’s true, then it makes sense that passion is cyclical. For example, a new romance is hot and heavy at first, but then settles down after a while into something more comfortable and less intense.

The way you emotionally define the concept of passion can cause anxiety, depression, and fear if you believe that it’s supposed to be completely known, understood, and maintained indefinitely. It can be difficult to maintain anything in the long term much less something so intense as passion!

My clients who have anxiety and depression often tell me they feel an increased sense of pressure to find their passion.

They feel like something’s wrong with them if other people find it but not them. Not only that, but when they compare themselves to others, they feel like they’re just trying to get through the day and passion sounds too exhausting. Every one’s supposed to have it though, right? This inner conflict causes a lot of stress for my clients, so let’s break it down.

I’m going to show you how to find your passion if you don’t know where it is, what it is, or how to use it.

If you feel completely lost or disconnected when it comes to your passion, then let’s stop using that word. Subconsciously, your emotional brain attaches definitions to particular words. If you have anxiety when it comes to a word or concept, then changing the word to something different is often enough to divert your brain away from being focused on something you have a negative emotional attachment to.

For example, if passion feels too far away or intense and you just can’t connect to it, then try the word joy. Joy is less intense but more widespread. Think about the holiday season. There are lots of different holidays in December, but they all center around happiness, togetherness, and good feelings.

What if you can’t connect to joy either?

This is true for some of my clients that have experienced chronic depression. To them, joy and happiness mean the same thing, and they’re not feeling any of it. So, we’re just going to repeat the above exercise and replace the word, concept, and emotional definition.

If you can’t connect to passion, joy, or happiness, then the next word we’re going to use is curiosity.

What kind of things are you curious about?

What have you always wanted to do, but haven’t had the opportunity because of time, money, health, or work?

What did you want to do as a child, but your parents wouldn’t allow it?

What did you used to do, that you gave up because someone or something got in the way or didn’t approve?

Believe it or not, answering these questions will give you massive clues about what your passions in life might be. At different times in our lives, we’ve had moments of clarity and purity. Unfortunately, we don’t think of them as being clues to our passion and life purpose.

For example, I’ve always loved mysteries. As a kid, I was obsessed with the Bermuda Triangle, stargazing, ancient cultures, and basically trying to understand how things fit together. Even though I’m not a marine biologist (seriously, every Gen X kid wanted to be one at some point), archeologist, or astronaut, I still managed to follow my passion of solving mysteries in my work. I help people of all cultures, faiths, and beliefs figure out what’s making them unhappy and help them fix it.

It was only through taking note of my interests and following my curiosity to indulge them, that I was able to see the pattern of my strengths. Following your interests, strengths, and patterns will lead you to your passion. Plus, you’re probably going to have fun along the way!

In other words, indulging your curiosity will trick your brain into finding the joy, happiness, and passion that you were looking for all along!

If you’d like to chat about how to overcome the fear and anxiety blocking your passion, then book a discovery call HERE.

April Darley is a Resilience Coach specializing in helping people release stress, anxiety, pain, and sabotaging behavior. Through the Three Brain Realignment Technique (TBRT), you'll learn how to step into your own power, comfortably deal with life's challenges, and stay calm and balanced.