It's Valentines Day, So What's Your Passion?

Passion is a very evocative word, visually I imagine it to be red in colour, taste like good quality chocolate and feel very powerful.

The dictionary states it to mean deep love or desire. Some of us are lucky enough to find a job or a whole career that we are truly in love with.

I’ve met lots of people for which this is true…the lady who had a deep love of fabrics and who just loved making things on her sewing machines.

Another, who after a life in Finance had discovered their love of photography.

To be truthful some I remember had stranger passions than most, for example the man who was in love with rats and wanted to run a pest control business.

However, for an awful lot of people their true love is never found and their career passions lay lost deep in side. They never ever see the light of day or a declaration heard.

For others passions are put to one side and reserved for spare windows of time when all other activity is finished. These are rare weekends or snatched evenings of illicit wonder.

So how come some of us find a career we love, and yet others don’t?

I believe for a lot of us career passion is lost in the wonder years…these are the years just before and just after we leave full time education. Very often the loss is caused by a savage but innocent silent kill…by a passing comment from a parent or teacher.

For example, the fabric lady in fact became a nurse, even though she knew after her first term of studying she hated it and loathed the whole environment, but she kept at it because she felt she had to.

She had to keep at it because her enthusiasm had been killed some thirty years earlier, by a passing comment from a careers teacher that sewing was not a proper job.

Yet today a proper job is no more, a proper job is what my father had, for over 50 years he worked for the same organisation and I believe by luck his job was incredibly suited to his skills.

Today in the world of work we can to a certain extent make jobs, bit by bit piecing the elements of things that we enjoy the most, often this happens by taking on projects or covering for colleagues. So slowly we can tap into our passions and our love to give us enthusiasm at work.

Sadly I believe most organisations don't understant passion, they just don’t comprehend. Managers don’t understand that if they can find out exactly what their team member really enjoys doing life for both of them can be simpler.

I suspect this happens because a lot of organisations today are just such huge lumbering giants, making so much noise they can’t hear what’s going on in the offices, the corridors and the shop floor. So totally blind to the natural abilities, talents and natural love, emotion and passion that reside there.

So what’s your career passion?

Is it alive?

Or is it buried so deep you just can’t remember? Or can you remember, but had it crushed a long while ago?