Looking for passion to find your job: Why is it a bad idea ?

“I’d love to change job but I don’t know what to do, I don’t have a passion for anything in particular”.

This is one of the sentences I have heard the most when coaching people who are looking for a career change and I went through that phase myself at some point in my career and thought it was well worth a post!

Why looking for “passion” is hindering you from moving forward with your career change?

1. Passion is a highly subjective term hence misleading when deciding what’s next in a career path. What does passion really mean? Is it at all measurable? How do we define it? The fog around the word passion gets thicker and thicker as we attempt at defining it precisely and the more vague we are about a destination the less likely we are to ever be reaching it…

2. One of the most common misconceptions is that passion (regardless of how we define it) would somewhat mostly come from the job itself. Any series of action we perform in life (painting a wall, cleaning a room, saving a life, smoking…) are by essence neutral, empty of any specific meaning, they start to become full of sense and to carry a specific weight purely because we project an intension, an emotion, a meaning, an energy, a mental interpretation into these actions when doing them or when seeing them being done by someone. Too often, people associate finding their passion job with something out there waiting to cross their path and awaken or trigger that positive and intense feeling in them. But it usually works the other way around. It usually starts from understanding what is already inside of us, what is important to us and why and then confront it with the outside. In other words we associate too often looking for a passion job with the idea of looking mostly externally for something that in fact begins with what already lies within us.

Some people who love going to work would tell you it’s not even the job itself that they love but what they can achieve through it (having more free time for their family thanks to part time hours, meeting interesting people, earning a lot of money, working in a specific city or in a specific language, etc…).

3. In most cases it’s not an absence of “passion” that is really blocking the career change it is about being in the dark about the root cause of the current frustration or unsatisfaction and how to address it to feel better. This implies taking a broad look at the situation, not just work but often times the type of life we are experiencing versus the one that would perhaps be a closer match to fulfil our deepest needs.

4. Not being full of passion about a job is very healthy as it allows having the right distance to contribute to it. Being too emotionally involved does not mean being happier or better at doing any job. For a lot of people I coached, the job was recovering the largest part of their emotional and time investment hence passion becomes key when they want to change job as huge portion of their life revolves around work. A good way to lighten the pressure of finding a motivating next job is by also investing emotions and time outside of the pure professional sphere so that identifying the next job will be less pressurising as the positive and nurturing emotions would not be provided solely by work.

5. When people say I don’t have a passion what they they truly mean is something else...

Some people are interested in many things and do not limit themselves to one topic which means a nurturing factor for them could be diversity of tasks, avoiding routine types of activities. For other people not having a passion is more associated to the fact that they have trouble identifying and or even accepting (because of education, beliefs…) what makes them feel proud, joyful, balanced, relaxed, energized and that’s precisely when a career coach can be of help.