Checking in on your passion

"Checking In On Your Passion"

    Whether you’re talking about business goals or our personal lives, passion is the all-important motivator that gets us to where we want to be. Sometimes it strikes us out of nowhere and suddenly we find ourselves chasing a new horizon. But other times, before we realize it, passion can quietly drain away and leave us wondering why we ever started doing something in the first place. 

    That’s why it’s worth it to check in on your passion now and again and evaluate how you’re feeling. What this means is taking a step back and seeing if what you want has changed since you initially set out to achieve a goal. You can ask yourself a few basic questions to start:

• Is the goal you set for yourself something you still want to achieve, or have you just kept going because of inertia? 
  
• Further, how would you feel if you gave up on that goal?
  
• Have the other circumstances of your life shifted and shuffled around your priorities? Are there other things you want more?
  
• Did you set out to achieve this goal alongside someone else, and if so do they seem like they still want it? If they don’t, does that change how you feel?
  
• Have you been inspired by anything new that has you thinking about your end goals in a different way? Would you be reenergized by a paradigm shift?
  
• Picture what you initially thought what success looked like when you started: Does success still look like that? 
  

These are just a few examples of questions you can ask yourself periodically to make sure you continue to direct your time and energy toward things that truly matter to you. This evaluation is also useful because it can reveal whether or not your processes need to adapt in order to achieve your updated goals or adjust to the unplanned things that come up in life. What you wanted a year ago might not be exactly what you want today, and being honest with yourself will ultimately ensure that you don't end up burning out.