Career Success Formula: Find and Sustain Your Passion

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The end of the year is a great time to reflect on your goals for the New Year and beyond. Take some time to reflect: How are you going to find and sustain your passion? As you think about your career goals, you may consider focusing on incorporating something you’re passionate about.

One of life’s oldest questions. What’s my purpose. For many, we identify a large part of our identity in purpose with what we focus on 40+ hours a week. Are you in a job, a career, or a calling? Each is important and your mindset matters on which one you identify with.

Know Your Passion

It probably will not surprise you to know that the majority of people are not passionate about their work. In the United States, 77% have no job passion (Deloitte LLP, 2010). Conversely, only 16.8% of all age groups are “passionate” about their job.

Many are not even aware of the absence of passion in their professional life. However, knowing and sustaining your passion is important, if not necessary for the career success of executives. Without knowing what motivates you, how can you motivate and lead others? Without knowing what motivates you, how can you define your career goals and make the next successful career move? Your passion is also your source of strength. Without it, you do not aspire to your greatest self.

Define Your Passion

I define passion as any strong feeling of affinity, enthusiasm, desire, or love for someone or something. Any person can have several passions at a time. Passions evolve over time and can be brief or forever.

Everyone Can Have Passion for Their Job

Although most people don’t, I believe everyone can have passion for their job. You just may not be in the right position or mindset. Realizing your passion is a journey that will give you an epiphany, a revelation. It will give you a purpose that will make you more motivated, ambitious, and most importantly happier.

Do Not Fool Yourself

Fooling yourself means that you fall into a trap of your own making without realizing it. You describe your dream, passion, and innermost career aspirations and find out later that this is not what you wanted at all. How could that happen? As Nobel Prize Winner Richard P. Feynmann once warned, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Taking pause to open the image you hold of yourself to friends, family, and especially yourself means seriously checking in and evaluating whether or not you feel fulfillment, enthusiasm, or fun from what it is you do every single day.

Use a Coach

One person cannot be and do everything. Use a coach to avoid fooling yourself. Use a coach to help you find and sustain your passion. It is only when talking with people, working with people, that you will begin to realize not just what kind of passions you have, but which one is critical for career success and how to articulate it best. You can better define what you are passionate about with the advice and support of a professional coach.

Identify Your Passion

One very simple question the coach should ask executives is: What do you really like? People love their work if they can feed their passion. According to the Harvard Business Review, many people confuse achieving day-to-day business goals with performing truly satisfying work.

Executives often try to encourage, coach, train, or incentivize under-performing staff. However, much of this activity is inefficient for the underlying truth is that many people have boring work. Behavioral psychologist Frederick Herzberg was right when he said: “You cannot motivate anyone to do a good job unless he (or she) has a good job to do.”

The Need to Measure and Track Passion

Executives need a Passion Measurement System to measure passion and sustain passion improvement initiatives. “What gets measured, get done,” says management expert Peter Drucker. Executives must also measure and evaluate their staff’s passion when assessing a project. Companies must measure and evaluate executive performance in terms of passion in addition to quality and profits. The role of the coach in the establishment of a proper Passion Measurement System cannot be overemphasized.

Your Coach As Accountability Partner

Your coach holds you accountable. As an accountability partner, your coach pays attention to details, corrects you when you drift away, and assures steady progress and achievement of deliverables during your passion discovery and improvement initiative.

Knowing your passion and how to nurture and maintain it at high levels over a sustained period is a career success formula for you. If you need help discovering your passion, connect with an executive recruiter at Artemis Consultants to see how we can help you find a career path you will be passionate about.

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