Where Talent Meets Passion: Cherish Your Life as a Career?

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I realised this week that I treat so much I embark on as I would a career, be it my relationships, my health, parenting or something I do to make money. I want to get the best I can from everything, I want it to lead somewhere, mean something.

That doesn’t mean everything I do is on track or on topic, sometimes I have to graze my way through half of life’s options to find what is most “me” and I have taken plenty of wrong turns but it’s all good information.

I had been asking Anne Macnaughtan about the difference between job and work versus career matters, as I noticed they are positioned in different houses astrologically. I think I was being intuitively led to ponder my own path as I am transitioning from one life phase to another. She said that a career path is different from what we do on a daily basis in order to earn money. The sixth house is the house of hard work and the tenth house is what a person is ultimately striving for.

My main job in recent years has been that of motherhood, which I came into late on. Day to day it is often not a job I’ve relished; I can find the domesticity, schooling, expectation and behavioural management mundane and tedious. However, with a longer term objective of growing humans who truly know who they are - and respect others for their uniqueness also - I relish much of their emotional, spiritual and psychological development. That is the aspect of it that is more like a career.

Entering parenthood I had anticipated more help with the aspects I see as more of a job, but now I find myself at a juncture where there is regular respite and this makes me more determined than ever to focus more of my attention on things that are meaningful and fulfilling.

Prior to motherhood, a great deal of my career had been spent on doing the groundwork to a number of corporate transformation programs that had great visions of transforming customer experiences by changing the hearts and minds, skills, systems and processes within various organisations.

On every occasion, within a year or two, the organisations were in a cyclical cost cutting mode and “luxuries” like transforming their customer experiences (which were arguably longer term investments, a bit like parenthood) were ditched, trading short term gain for longer term pain in my humble opinion.

What I’m saying is that I’m done giving the majority of my time and energy to things that aren’t sustainable or meaningful in some way, I’m looking for more joy in the day to day work of my end goals;  life is about the journey after all, not the destination.

Annette Noontil – in Your Body is the Barometer of Your Soul - acknowledges a soul is happy when it keeps evolving. She encourages that we organize our time by applying our skills (whether that means sharing our knowledge through speech or actually performing a skill), but warns that if we are putting out too much without learning from it we will deplete our energy.

That has been a saving grace for me through years of parenting, relationships that weren’t quite right, jobs that weren’t quite “me” and so on, I have learned much and grown from each and every experience. Now I’m ready to employ everything I’ve learned so far to embark on experiences that I can enjoy for a much higher proportion of the time.

In Sir Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica’s book Finding Your Element: How To Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life, they talk about the point where talent and passion meet being where we feel most inspired, most ‘at home’ in our self.

This sounds like good advice to me, one without the other can be painful. I was doing an exercise recently that gave me a good lens through which to identify – among other aspects - my talents.  The kinds of things I identified are:

• grasping underlying principles and integrating perspectives
• strategizing, giving structure to reach distant goals dictated by a strong vision
• foresight, using insights to deal with complexity and ambiguity
• composing, using whatever is to hand to get a harmonious result
• making sure things are taken care of so others can feel comfortable, involved and succeed
• interpersonal sensitivity, supporting whatever allows the unfolding of a person

As to what I’m most passionate about, when I was answering questions posed by Janet Attwood, author of The Passion Test a while back, I realised I have a real passion for authenticity. So I set about defining my top five passions as:

1. Being the full authentic expression of myself; and helping others discover their own unique authentic expression
2. Being with my children in their full authentic connection and being a space in which they can express their authentic selves and respect others’ uniqueness
3. Recognising the body as a litmus test of how close or how far to that authentic expression I am  and the patterns, illness and disease that show up within it when I’m not
4. Creating structures in society that thrive on and enhance people being their full authentic expressions of themselves
5. The inherent connection I have to all of life, and the idea of thriving on that and enhancing others and things because of that connection

It is where I can apply my talents to these passions I’ll feel most “me” and get the most joy from whatever I’m striving towards in life.

What about you, is it time to cherish and treat your life – or aspects of your life - as more of a career than a job? Where do your natural talents lie? And what are you truly passionate about? Identifying these could be the key to a more fulfilling life.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What Value Are You Adding to the Currencies in Your Life?, How Living Your Passions Fully Combats Feeling Lonely, Profit, Purpose and Personal Fulfillment Can Thrive Together - A Remarkable New Organisational Construct, What is the purpose of YOUR life? And Value Your Uniqueness. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.