Does Your Passion Feel Like A Chore?
Yay, pursuing passions! Doesn’t it sound great? You create space in your life and in that space, you do the things you love most. Dance. Play the guitar. Paint, write, read, study. Geek out about your favourite topic. Run, rollerskate.
The funny thing is that a lot of us start dragging our feet when it comes to regularly pursuing their passion. My clients keep telling me variations of: “There’s something wrong with me. I wanted nothing more than time for writing. And now I do anything but!”
To spoil the conclusion: There’s nothing wrong with you. In fact, there’s a really good reason why you might not pursue your passion as much as you thought you would, and wanted to.
In this article, I’ll explore why this is so, and give you steps towards turning it around.
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Haven’t I said this before?
Yes, I have. I’ll also say it again – as many times as it is necessary for you to actually make the necessary changes. You see, knowing and understanding this stuff isn’t what matters; doing things differently, is.
Repetition is one of the best ways to learn things. In advertising, they say that a consumer needs to see an ad about 7 times on average, before they’re ready to bite (read: buy). The same principle goes for changes in your behaviour.
If there’s something you wish to enhance in your life, some change you’d like to make – persist. Don’t get frustrated because you haven’t taken action yet. Instead, keep exposing yourself to the message and one day, you’ll find that you’re ready.
It may require a little kick in your backside, or to hear/read what you need to hear a 10th time, but in a slightly different way, and that’s what’ll make the penny drop.
Two reasons why your passion feels like a chore
So, you have created some time and you thought you’d be at your piano every evening. You were, too, in the first weeks. But now it’s six months later and you can hardly drag yourself to practice once a fortnight. You feel terrible.
Have you lost your passion for the piano? It’s possible. What’s much more likely though, is that you’ve falling into one of the two following traps:
You’ve made time but forgot the three pillars. As a reminder, the three pillars are rest, self care, and passions. In your eagerness to get to the third, you forgot to honour the first two pillars, and ran out of steam. Self care is pretty self explanatory, and rest is incredibly important, not just at night, but as actual downtime during the day. You need time for just hanging out and doing something unproductive, including nothing at all.
You’re stuck in the work mindset. Our world is dominated by practical thinking. We need to be efficient at work, in planning our chores, our time with friends, everything. But this mindset doesn’t go well with passions. If you’re structuring your piano practice (as an example), set fixed daily times and go about it with military precision, you’re killing your passion. Passions, even the non-arty or creative ones, demand a different headspace.
The missing element
So, you’ve taken care of the three pillars and created some balance in your life (see the first step above). Now it’s time to shift gears in your head.
At work, when you’re supposed to deliver a certain performance in a certain timeframe, at home, when you organise the household and plan your grocery shopping for the week, you need to be methodical. Efficiency, logical thinking, practicality are winning cards in this space.
In contrast, your passion requires a sense of play. Even if it’s not a creative passion: If it’s supposed to light you up, you need to approach it with a sense of child-like wonder, the excitement of exploration, of ever-newness.
You need to give yourself up to the experience, even if parts of it do contain elements of practicality (like a workout plan to achieve a goal in a sport that’s your passion). This letting-go despite full concentration is what also produces the wonderful state of Flow.
How to switch over
The easiest way to do this is by using a method such as the half-hour unplug I suggested recently. Because the main reason why your passion, or multiple passions, feel like a chore, is that you’re approaching them like one!
If I feel “meh” at the thought of practising the piano, I throw my scales and etudes out the window for a while and leaf through my piles of sheet music. Soon, I’ll come across a piece I love but can’t play yet, or one that I used to play as a kid, and then I sit down and fumble my way through them.
I get lost in the emotion and beauty of it all, even if I sound awful. Completely absorbed in what I’m doing, I stop noticing how time passes. Eventually, I’ll also practise the pieces I’m currently working on, and in the end, I’ll get up with a fire in my belly.
That’s passion. That’s how it should be. If you’re missing that, connect to your playfulness, your childlike wonder and joy. Holding on to these feelings, creating this counterweight of playfulness to our default state of rationality, is one of the healthiest things you can do for yourself.