Are You Passionate About Your Career?

How important is it to be passionate about your career? I’ve been watching Masterchef on TV, a competition in which a bunch of amateur chefs get a shot at becoming professional.

It’s a gruelling competition, in which contestants are put through all sorts of tests, including cooking in a busy restaurant at lunchtime and producing a two course meal for food critics.  The final is next Monday and looks like an obstacle course!

The thing which keeps them all going in the face of culinary disasters and the judges’ criticism is passion, passion for food and passion for cooking.

 It’s well known that a restaurant is one of the most difficult businesses to get off the ground and one of the most likely to fail. And I can see why. I enjoy cooking and do quite a lot of it, but I’m not passionate about it, and it is definitely not a career I would ever wish to follow.

So how important is passion when it comes to career choice? Over a lifetime, we spend a lot of hours in our jobs. But passion isn’t always as easy to identify as it is for our cooks. Certainly, some people are passionate about teaching or writing or acting, but what if you can’t quite put your finger on your passion?

One way to find the answer is to become aware of when you are absorbed by what you are doing, when you are enjoying something so much that you forget the time. This could be something you do at work or in your own time. Try this out for a couple of weeks – at the end of each day think about what you’ve been up to and see if you can find clues to your passion.

Are there parts of your job that you love and others you hate? See if there is a pattern in the things you love at work and outside work. You might find that you are passionate about being creative, which could translate as coming up with creative ideas at work. Or it might be that you are passionate about acquiring knowledge or trying out new ways of doing things.

Of course, it is important to have a job which pays well enough to support you and your dependants, but if take a job just because you need the money, you could run into problems – boredom, frustration and resentment.

If you don’t like your job, spend some time assessing your skills and the activities you enjoy. Then do some research to see how they fit in with jobs. For more information go to finding your ideal career

 

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