Step 3 to Portable Career – Reconnect with your Passion!

How to talk to you about loving what you do and how to help you (re)connect with your passion as you define and create your portable career?
You are on a self-discovery journey at the moment and what better timing to really connect with your true self! To stay motivated and be successful, please don’t settle for a portable career that will only have you ‘go through the motions’ on automatic pilot!   Your portable career should be something that you enjoy doing, that you find satisfying and worthwhile your time! It really is worth taking a good chunk of time out to think about what makes your heart sing early on in the process, to prevent more heartache in the near future!

There are various ways to uncovering your passion, I like going through the following steps with my clients:

1. A blast from the past – listing your experiences and accomplishments that left you feeling proud and buzzing with energy for some time afterwards.

You can write these in a form of success stories where you concisely describe the:

→ Situation (What was happening at the time?)
→ Task(s) (What needed to be done, what was the obstacle?)
→ Action (What did you do?)
→ Results / satisfaction / benefit (What was the result?)
→ Reflection (What did you learn? What would you do the same / differently next time?)

Your stories can be simple or more complicated, varying from planning a memorable holiday to winning a specific award, helping a friend or family member in need, achieving some challenging job targets, raising your children etc.

2. Bring in your values; which you explored in Step 3 to a Portable Career.
By identifying your values, you can uncover the elements that you need in your portable career to find your fulfillment. Look back at your success stories and see if your values are reflected in those or if you identify more values that weren’t on your original list?

3. Speed writing exercise (take 20 mins).
Complete the following statements (just let your thoughts flow fast, don’t worry about writing full sentences, correct grammar and puctuation – just don’t stop writing until all your thoughts are on paper):

→ People who inspire me are… and they are passionate about…
 → Things that I dislike doing are…
→ My core strengths that I want to use every day are…
→ My best self comes out when…
→ In the past I have been passionate about …
→ I loved my life / job when I was doing…
→ What motivates me in doing the best I can in what I do are…
→ The job of my dreams is…
→ Next year I want to…
→ If only…

These exercises can be quite demanding, but are worth your time. When you have written all your thoughts down, let them sit for a week before coming back to them to explore the common themes and highlighting the areas that touch on your passion!