A post about passion - conveyed with passion

In my ideal world, we all spend our days maximising our uniqueness, living our dreams and letting others get on with theirs. This is a world where we have pleasant, productive conversations and there is no one wanting to ambush our plans or hijack our work. 

In other words, we all live and work in relative harmony. Why not?

Is this a picture of your ideal world? Or are you already objecting, saying things like 'I like a bit of competition, it keeps the adrenalin pumping', or 'That's impossible. The world is not a friendly place. we just have to suck it up. Life wasn't meant to be easy.'

Besides, I hear others say, 'We can't just have everyone doing what they want! That would be anarchy. Who would collect the rubbish, clean out the sewers, gut the fish and change baby diapers? Who would clean up after the incontinent old people and put up with their ramblings'

Actually, plenty of people - probably the same as now. Nobody is holding a gun to anyone's heads, at least in Australia, so one can only assume people willingly take on these roles. Why? Because people are prepared to do some of the shitty work if it means they can do other things they love. And, luckily, we are all different, we have different things on our 'I will never do that' list, just as our hopes and dreams are all different.

As a writer, my shitty work is editing the fourth, fifth, and even tenth draft of what I started writing as an 'almost perfect' manuscript. I would sometimes gladly give that part up and go clean toilets for a week - er, no, not really.

Seriously, if we want to even start having a conversation about passion, we have to see the world as having some kind of natural form and rhythm, as chaotic as it seems to us.

Then, we have to see ourselves as well-formed beings who can instinctively tell where we belong - if only we would stop trying to tell ourselves and each other what we should be doing.

After that, we have to start seeing everyone (including our children - especially, our children) as unique, with skills and talents to bring to the world. As adults, it is our place to nurture their gifts and show them how wonderful they are.

If we don't do all of these things, the world will continue to spiral downwards into a very scary place where humans will start behaving worse than animals (oh wait, that is already happening), resenting the people who seem to have what they don't, who dress differently and who have different belief systems, and complaining about all the injustices in their world without taking any personal responsibility for them.

We have amazing resources at our disposal, inside us, and if we don't use them, we will lose them. Our brains and our souls will frizzle up and die under the weight of indifference. We will become robots who cannot think for ourselves, and like Pavlov's dog will spend our lives salivating in anticipation of the ever-decreasing morsels the corporate machine is prepared to give us - just enough to keep us working.

That scenario sucks doesn't it? But it is happening all around us. On the treadmill, I see people going about their working lives, too tired and too fearful to contemplate that they are ruining their health, their family lives, their relationships, and their chance of happiness.

As you can see, I am passionate about this.

Let's reverse that trend, starting now. Please.

As Dr Seuss wisely said,

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.

I am not advocating that everyone quits their job and makes their home in a tree. I am advocating that people use those brains in their heads to at least identify how they are being subjected. At the end of the day, if they are truly

happy with this, then all power to them. But - I don't see this, as I look around - instead I mainly see people who are stressed, anxious, depressed, mentally ill, tired and with body parts fatigued by overuse.

Maybe none of what I am saying applies to you. Maybe you love your job, you feel no physical or mental pain, you are never stressed about a meeting that is coming up. You never cringe about needing to explain why you didn't finish something on time or did something wrong - after all, that's what life's about, isn't it? Maybe you always reach your KPIs and only ever work from nine to five (with an hour for lunch). Maybe none of this is true, but you still feel happy and fulfilled. (Are you wavering on that?)

As a career specialist, and I know that not everyone in my field will agree. By passion, I mean a career that is fuelled by:

A strong or extravagant fondness, enthusiasm, or desire 

(that is just one of several definitions, but it's the one that fits my interpretation). 

To my mind, logically, if something is fuelling a passion, this is our instinct speaking loudly to us, guiding us. Denying this is what has led many of my clients to be miserable and disconnected.

For any psychologists reading, no, I am not a qualified psychologist and I speak from a perspective of wisdom, observation, and interest that has been built up through experience - my own personal experience, and that of the people I have worked with. When I started out studying for my Bachelor's degree, I though Psychology would help me to understand people and the world - it did not; my passion was fuelled instead by the disciplines of Sociology, Linguistics and English Literature. These areas of study helped me to give myself permission to write and to work with others who were seeking their own pathways, through work, study and a range of other activities.

I have wanted to say this for a long time. These words and phrases have swirled around in my psyche for years, I have not spoken them out loud or put them down on paper or in a blog post, mainly out of fear of ridicule. This fear still sits in the pit of my stomach as I send this out into the ether, but it is a message that must be sent, and I am the vessel who is sending it. I am my passion, my passion is me - finally.

So, to come full circle back to my opener about my ideal world, in which we all get along; passion-driven careers may cause some debate as people explore their passions, but if everyone is unashamedly working towards self-fulfilment, rather than competing for those empty rewards of dollars and ego-driven recognition, we will be heading to that better place, I am sure. As a career advocate, this is my best attempt from where I sit right now at living my passion, which has, for several reasons, lain dormant for the best part of ten years (and is the subject of one of the books I am currently writing).