May 26, 2021 in Career Coaching

Passion vs Purpose

Difference between Passion and Purpose. Coaching questions to figure out your purpose.

When we talk about a career change, we all think about different feelings of frustration, a job which we do not like, a job that is not our passion. Moreover, here it comes the issue we will talk about today. The famous passion when we speak about careers.

In school, they tell us what to do and how to do it, leaving a very narrow space to improve our innate skills and develop our talents. We should be excellent in all subjects, and if we are not good at everything, it looks like failure. I still remember how stupid I felt; because I was not great at math, but if I am honest, I was excellent at learning other languages, and my communication skills always have been outstanding. We read everywhere that if we found our passion, everything will be easy and will look like we do not work a single day of our life.

Here is the tricky thing: liking or loving a subject or a career does not assure us that this will be our purpose or who we are.

The pressure to find your passion start early; when you graduate from High School, we have the question, so what you go to do now?

How possibly people will believe that at 18 years old, you will choose a career and this career will last all your life? I find it impossible because that will be admitting that people do not grow over time and experience. I choose to be an accountant at 18. At 25, I was bored to death of that job, and don’t get me wrong, I was in a good enterprise, I had good pay, but being an accountant was not who I was. One thing is liking your job, and another thing is that your job is aligned with who you are. And another thing is being good at something, and the other thing is loving what you do.

In this journey of following my passion, I decided to move to the Travel Industry. I got it wrong once, so this time, let’s do it right; what I like to do a lot? Travel. Okay, so that’s my passion, right? At 23, I decided to start in the Travel Industry; I started from the very bottom, being the receptionist at a hotel; I like it but not love it. Then, I decide to start in the wholesaler world, and I absolutely love it, and want it, and got so much into it, that I got very good at it. At that moment, I wake up every day excited to go to work, learning new things, advising people, playing in a big team, travelling to various destinations for work, attending fairs. I really enjoyed it. It was exciting.

Time passed, a few enterprises and years later, I found myself at 32, hating my passion, hating what I was doing for almost 10 years! So right away, my first thought was to deny it. How was this possible? For the second time, I got it wrong. Because I never thought it like that, passion is not a plan is a feeling, and feelings change. Example: I was passionate one day about my ex-boyfriends, and another day I was not passionate about them! 

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