Finding Your Passion

I just recently returned from Catalyst East and let me just say that it wrecked me - in the best way possible.  The theme of the conference was "Be Present", and between the various speakers I am full to overflowing with so much new and amazing information/thoughts/ideas that it's going to take me a while to fully process it all.  I will say that if I could summarize my overall takeaway it would be this: Don't just sleepwalk through your life, be fully engaged in every moment of it. Be passionate about what you're doing and why you're doing it.

This leads me to ask myself so many questions that quite frankly, I'm overwhelmed.  The question that continues to prod at me the most: What is your passion?

I'm not even going to begin to dive into that answer right now because I feel like I'm just starting to peel away the layers that have slowly covered up my true passion to where I'm not sure it still exists underneath it all...do you know what I mean?  It's just buried so deep that you wonder if you still have it??  So I've been reading, researching, journaling, praying and setting up time to meet with mentors and friends that I know God has very specifically placed in my life for that very purpose and more.  In researching I came across an article by Michael Hyatt that gives a good starting point to the "peeling" process called "Find Your Passion in Three Steps".  In this article, he mentions several reasons why we have such a hard time identifying our passions:

• Our insecurities define us more than our hidden, suppressed dreams.
• We are afraid to boast.
• We see the vastness of the world and feel insignificant or overwhelmed to make a difference.
• We feel it’s selfish to become introspective.
• We’re extremely busy maintaining an overbooked life and don’t have time to reconsider why we’re working ourselves to death.
• We think it’s wrong to do what we love.
• We feel the sting of rejection the last time we tried operating in our passion, and we’ve let that rejection scare us.
• We are afraid if we identify it, we’ll have to do something, to act on it (and that means risking failure).

I don't know about you, but I have to be completely honest in saying that every single one of those points hits home with me.  I can't even quite get to the three points to discovering my passion because I am still dealing with the "blockers".

So, that's where I'll end for today...although I'm sure this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Stay tuned for more.