Month: February 2019

I spent my twenties and thirties on a quest to find my passion. Or, more accurately, I tried to figure it out. I researched, analyzed, experimented, tested, analyzed, researched, again and again.

I thought passion was a thing wrapped in exactly the right circumstances – a job in a certain type of environment or serving certain groups of people. I just didn’t know what the job was or who the people were.

I did find something I really love doing – coaching – but it’s not my passion. Coaching itself isn’t my passion, because passion isn’t a thing or circumstance or situation or profession.

What I was looking for turned out not to be a passion, it was a feeling. It was so much simpler than the hunt for My Ultimate Calling, so much easier to find because it was part of me all along.

My “passion” was really just a feeling of being energized, an internal fire, an intensely joyful oh-my-god-I-LOVE-THAT feeling.

If you’re trying to find your passion, if you’re feeling stuck not knowing what you should be doing with your life or if you’re looking for purpose, start from the inside out.

What do you love doing? What would you do for free? What do you already do for free, just because you love it? What fires you up, sparks joy, energizes you?

It’s not actually about the what, it’s about the feeling. Once you’re clear on the feeling itself (it took me a while to get there), all you need to do is follow it. It’s your inner compass, your true north, and tuning into it means you have found your passion. Now, you can go about the fun of seeing where it takes you.

Sonder: n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

I remember feeling sonder at a very young age. Back then, it came with a twinge of disgust. We all walk around with entire universes in our minds, yet at another scale we’re just undifferentiated ants bumbling about. I was embarrassed by the banality of the human condition and my complicity in the belief that there was anything special about my own little world.

These days, as I drive and walk and work and live among all the other humans, I think about the entire universes in each person’s mind. Entire universes. Billions of infinite universes all around me. Instead of the sameness of repetition, I see a blur of traffic passing millions of lighted windows merging into an exquisite endless bright light.

I have two websites: one for my consulting work and one for coaching. One uses my legal name, the other uses my nickname. It’s not initially obvious they belong to the same person unless you’re really trying to connect them (or unless you speak Polish and are familiar with the nickname).

I intentionally separated the consulting part of my self from the coaching part of my self. I think it had something to do with the difficulty I had calling myself a coach.

I’ve enjoyed many aspects of my consulting career, but I didn’t love it. I always tried to ensure the work I was doing was in some way improving human experiences but in many cases this was a stretch. It became harder and harder to squeeze meaning out of products that helped people buy stuff more easily or sell more stuff more profitably. I spent many years doing work that I sometimes enjoyed but that rarely felt genuinely important.

On the other hand, coaching feels important. I love coaching. I’ve never had to do a second of work to convince myself that coaching is meaningful. Coaching doesn’t ever feel like work. I still can’t believe I get to spend time with amazing human beings and watch them transform – and that it’s my job.

What I do as a coach is one of the most important things I’ve ever done. I think this is why it was hard to call myself a coach for the first few years. Being a coach is not something casual, it’s not yet another consulting gig, it’s not what I do for money. It means something to say I am a coach.

My consulting domain is expiring next week. I’m not going to renew. I’m not a consultant anymore. I’m a coach.

In your own life, in your culture, in the things you read about or talk about or think about – how much has to do with what’s outside of you? What things, if we could just have them or be them or do them, would solve our problems?

Enough money
More money
The right job
The right product
The right strategy
Less stress
More time
More sex
Different sex
A different spouse
Any spouse
Kids
No kids
Less clutter
More stuff
A bigger house
Any size house
A decent place to live
A new car
A childhood that didn’t suck
Better laws
Better ways to get everyone to follow all the laws
Jobs for everyone
Universal healthcare
A different president
A different body
A different life
A different world

The cosmic joke is that none of these things can solve our problems. None of these things can actually make us happy.

The way we feel isn’t caused by anything outside of us. Nothing outside of us can change the way we feel.

What we feel is caused by what we think.

Our experience is created by our thoughts and the meaning we attach to those thoughts.

The cosmic winning lotto ticket at the end of the rainbow that we all have, at all times, is that there will always be a fresh thought, and we can always attach new meaning to it. We can be happy from the inside out.