A Surprising Question to Help Find Your Passions

What do you hate?

Self Improvement is so popular these days, which is great! I’m glad that the stories in a lot of current Disney films often focus on the main character finding out who they are, what they want, and practicing self-acceptance. The only problem is, sometimes they make it look too easy.

There’s a lot of advice out there saying “Find your passion!” as if it’s just lying around on the floor somewhere, and upon discovering it your life will light up and you’ll suddenly never want for anything in life ever again.

If only it were that easy!

I’m not going to lie to you, discovering your passions and what you want to do with your life isn’t a short process, it takes time, experimentation, and patience, even if you’re starting with some clues. So before I get into what you should do if you don’t have a clue, I have 3 things for you to ponder over.

A secret about passion is that it’s not just lying dormant under the surface, waiting to be awakened when you first lay your eyes on it. Passion develops over time spent with an activity. I did not have a passion for writing before I started blogging, I just found it enjoyable to express and articulate my thoughts. As I carried on I found that enjoyed the craft of writing more and more and a passion started to ignite!

If you’ve read some of my other blogs, you’ll know that when I was younger I dreamed of becoming a marine biologist, working with marine animals and conservation projects across the world. But I fell out of love with that dream (the details of why are here).

From that, I learned that it’s silly to assume that one passion, one major interest, is going to see you through your entire time here on earth! I look back on my student years and I can’t believe that I thought I’d be happy with doing that ONE THING my whole life.

When you start dating, you don’t expect to find Mr/Ms/Mx Right on the first try. Sure it would be nice, but you generally expect that you need to try a few people out to figure out what you want and what is right for you in the world of partnership. Well finding your passions is no different.

You won’t just know which is the right thing to try, you’ll just have some idea of the things you want to try out. You try them out to find out whether you like them enough to want to carry them on.

I started archery not long ago. It was something I’d always wanted to try so I found a club and started going every week to shoot. It didn’t grab me though, there was no spark. As much as I enjoyed it, unlike writing, it didn’t ignite a passion in me, and I only know that by trying it out.

Now that we’ve looked at some of the realities around finding your passions, let's look at what to do if you really don’t know where to start.

This is the best trick I’ve found to do if you really don’t have a clue is to work backward:

I want you to write a list of things you hate and things that you will NEVER be ok with doing.

Let’s sort them into 3 simple categories to make it easier:

There will probably be some crossover but this is just to make it a little more manageable.

If you’re struggling to think of what you hate, take some time to think about the times when you weren’t happy and why that was.

When you have thought about the above questions, you might start to have a list that looks a little like this:

Once you have a list like this you can start looking at the things that you DO like and enjoy. It’s a lot easier to know what you hate, so sometimes starting there is the easiest thing to do. Now you can look at the opposite of your list.

The Tasks/Actions section of this hypothetical person may look like this when turned around:

With that list, this person can start to think about what kind of job would involve/exclude the sort of tasks that you do/don’t want to do and you can start to form a direction that you want to head in.

If we look at this person's General Interests section, you can see that they clearly like being active, but don’t like team sports. From knowing that they can explore some physical activities that don’t involve playing in teams.

If I was working with you, and this was your list, I’d get you to write down every physical activity you can think of and then go through it and see what you think of each activity. You’ll likely find more things that you don’t like, allowing you to further narrow your search.

You can put everything together and summarise like: “Right, well I want a new job where I can be active and on my feet, have colleagues with a ‘get sh*t done!’ mentality, with no cleaning and is kinda close to where I live.” What a great starting point!

There are so many places you can go with having a list in front of you of all the things you don’t like, you just need to ask yourself why you don't like them and think about 1. what’s left without those things? And 2. what are the opposite of those things?

And voila! Now you have some answers for the “Where do I even know where to start?” questions.

Some people don’t like focusing so much on the negatives, thinking that spending time thinking about what you don’t like will be depressing. But I like to give you the benefit of doubt here. I know that you’re perfectly capable of approaching this exercise without dwelling too harshly on the things that you don’t enjoy.

I want to show with this exercise that even the supposed bad things in our lives can actually be the inspiration for joy and passion. Being aware of what you hate will always be a valuable tool, whether it’s to know what to avoid or, as you’ve read about here, to find the things you love.

Just go easy on yourself. Finding your passions is going to take some time. Enjoy that. This is time spent learning about you, and everything you learn will be incredibly valuable.

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