#19: The Bliss of Following Your Passion

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Credits: 

Song: Green Lights
Performed By: DLP
Written by: Daniel Labate (BMI 100%)
Published by: Boss Soundstripe Productions (BMI 100%)

Song (Trailer): Epic Hybrid Trailer Music
Performed by: by 2CoolFire
Licensed by: Envato Market

Cover Photo: Angela Clifton Photography
Hair and Make-up: Casey J. Cheek

Transcript

This is The Neat Lifestyle Podcast, episode number 19. In today's episode, let's talk about the bliss of following your passion, so stay tuned.

Welcome to The Neat Lifestyle Podcast. My name is Katia Mesquita. I'm a personal organization expert, an online business entrepreneur, and your host on this weekly variety show. I'm excited to bring you an extra dose of inspiration to become more organized, stay organized, and make things work better for you. My goal in this podcast is to help you achieve a more functional, harmonious, and meaningful life. I can't wait to connect with you today. Thank you so much for tuning in, and now let's begin. Hello and welcome to the Neat Lifestyle Podcast, now present in 39 countries all over the world. I'm so excited. Thank you so much for listening, and I also want to welcome those who are listening for the first time. I'm your host, Katia Mesquita, and what's your passion? What drives you? What drives you, like, with this sparkle? And what lights you up? Some people know exactly what they are passionate about, and of course, I'm talking about some activity, working with passion. Now, I'm finally working with what I am passionate about, and I really want everybody to experience that because it's amazing. It requires we get rid of some things, especially fear, but we are going to get there eventually. 

Anyway, people ask me the difference between passion and purpose, and I want to take the chance to clarify that here a little bit. Purpose is more related to something that can answer that question, "What am I leaving for?" We feel like we finally found a reason for living in this planet, and passion is more related to an activity that you really enjoy doing. It's something that lights you up, something that you enjoy spending time with. You want to learn more, you want to go deeper and deeper and find people that also like this, and they talk about related subjects and so on. So, what are you really passionate about? Some people are working with what they're passionate about, but some people are not sure yet because of course, some of them are young and didn't have the time yet to experience enough things to find out what they are passionate about.

Some other people that might be a little bit older and they're not sure yet, it's probably because they didn't experience too much in life. I really know some people who avoid a little bit suffering, and then they kind of avoid going out, avoid experiencing things, talking to people or something, or learning different things. Basically, not living, just existing. That's why some of them don't find their passion, but if you know what you are passionate about and you are not following it, I don't blame you. I also have been there. I know what it's like for so many years I have worked with things that wasn't really my passion, especially things that people told me to follow because it would be the best for me. When I spent some time 10 years in my life working as attorney, I graduated in law school and it was not my choice or my passion at all. It was something that someone told me, hey, it would be good for me, and it would be good for me to make money. It was a promising career, and oh, okay, let's go, let's do it. I kind of liked, okay, but it was not my passion. Anyway, do I regret? No, I don't regret because I feel like it's never too late to find our passion, and we can have so much good experiences in the journey until we find out all the eventual suffering that we experience has a value for something has a meaning. 

For me, every challenge had a meaning because I was facing some opposites and I could learn how to appreciate good things better. For instance, we can experience more joy in drinking water when we have experienced before how is like to be thirsty. We enjoy more eating something when we had before experienced hunger. We enjoy the good times today because we experienced before hard times, so we know the difference. Then everything that I experienced before helped me to become who I am, but I would regret if I haven't taken this type of following my passion, and it's also one of the things that dying people usually say. There is a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, and the number one regret I'm gonna read for you. They say, "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." And this kind of hit me, and I'm so glad, so glad I took this step because even though I am now 46 years old, about to become 47, I feel like the happiest person in the world. Even when I have my ups and downs, even when everything is not perfect, I feel like leaving my dream work by doing my podcast, by having my coaching clients, and yes, that's why I created this episode because I really want to inspire you to think to reflect on this because some people are spending their entire life doing something they don't enjoy until they die, and I don't want that for you. 

Of course, I'm not trying here make anybody feel sad. What I'm doing is actually saying, "Hello, you are here, you are still alive, and you still have time." And so many people don't follow their passion because of some frustration they have experienced before related to it by, like, trying to get there or do that and not really achieving in the first attempt, which I call a temporary defeat, but they didn't recognize that, that they could pursue taking different approaches and persist until they get what they wanted. And this is kind of one of the things that happened to me because when I was a teenager, I remember that I finished high school and I wanted to go to medical school. I wanted to be a doctor at that time. I cannot tell that it was a passion for me, but it was what I believed that it was some kind of, let's say, something that I was highly interested about, but what happened was that I didn't get into medical school when I first tried and I immediately gave up. I was never told that I could persist, that I could take different approaches to get there, and actually I stopped believing, and I had this idea that when we don't get what we want, because probably they were not meant to be, so probably medical school was not for me anyway. I'll just get a job, and then I started to get different jobs here and there. 

What happens also is that many times when we want something, when we have passion about something, sometimes we put that thing on a pedestal, so up high that we start to believe we cannot reach and this is the problem. Having a belief that is not for us, it's untangible, it's difficult, it's impossible, there is no way. So, it's a lot related to the belief system, what we choose to believe. But before we go deep into that, let me just make a disclaimer. The things that I'm discussing here in this episode are based on my experiences, my personal experiences, and should not be taken as advice whatsoever, okay? With that said, let's get back to this episode. 

Another situation is that when we have unclear passion. Just to give you an example, sometimes we do certain things believing we are pursuing because we are passionate about, but no, it's not about passion, it's about significance. One of the, let's say, major needs of the human being is to find significance. Significance itself is not a bad thing, but depending on the perspective, it could be related to vanity. For example, when we want to do something that has a significance for our personal achievement before ourselves, it's okay, but when it's related to feel significant before others, it can be a little bit related to vanity. In my case, I had experienced vanity, and what I thought it was a passion, wasn't. It was a situation in which I found a job with events and I was working with TV stars from a popular TV station. For me, it was a dream work because I was close to some celebrities at the time. I felt like I had attention, a lot of people calling me, a lot of people sending me invitations, and I was attaching this significance that I could have to this job, and I was, like, afraid of losing this job because it would represent at the time that I would lose significance until I was completely stressed. I didn't set any boundaries. I was completely stressed out, burned out. I finally quit that job five years later after traveling a lot, but anyway, what happened is that I figured out that I have my significance. It was so good to realize that it was really a freeing experience. 

Another interesting situation about passion was a hidden passion for me. I was always looking for what industry I would feel like passionate about. People were asking me, "Okay, Katia, are you going to transfer your law degree here to the US and do the bar association exam?" I was, "Oh, yeah, yeah, this is my plan, okay..." but actually, I didn't even have the drive to go after it because it was really not my passion, but I kept going, and as so many of you know that I spent some time here in the US working as a cleaner and organizer, and I also started to coach people one day when I was helping some people with their personal organization stuff more related to life coaching stuff, I realized that I love coaching and teaching, and I realized that when I was a kid, I used to help my friends to understand what my teachers were telling. I would teach them, and when I was working in whatever job position I had, I would always help some new people, especially new hirings to train them, and when I was an attorney, I would teach some of my clients how the law system works and how their lawsuits work. Even when I worked with cleaning an organization, I would be teaching people how to clean, how to organize, and I was like, oh my God, I'm here helping with life coaching. My thing is teaching and coaching, and it applies to anything, basically, most of the things, so whatever I teach or coach, I feel a bliss, and this is awesome because wow, it was so hidden. I also have heard of people who get tired of working with what they're passionate about, and I can see two different scenarios for that. 

One is when the person has no boundaries, they work 24/7. Even when they work with what they are passionate about, they need to have some time for themselves, for their families, some time to rest, some time to recharge, because if you don't set any boundaries, no matter how much you love the thing you do, you are gonna get tired of it. You are gonna have your energy totally drained, so it is important to set boundaries, to have some time off, to have vacations, to have some days during the week. So, to follow your passion, you also have to take care of your time, your calendar, your time to rest. The other scenario that I see as a possibility is when that thing is no longer a passion for the person, and the person doesn't realize that. But the good thing is I believe it's never too late to follow what we are really passionate about. We can feel happier, alive, more self-motivated. Everything starts to fall into place. It feels right even for a certain activity in particular, when we cannot do anymore because of certain limitations, because time is over, for instance, for some athletes, they have a special moment in life in which they can perform their sports competition until certain age or until certain body condition, and after that time they cannot do that anymore, but they can still follow their passion by working with something related to it. If you listen to your heart and get really honest to yourself, you will see that it might be telling you something, and you need to listen. 

And there is a quote I really like. It says, "Build your own dreams or someone else will hire you to build theirs." I hope you had some good takeaways today. If you did, please send me a DM on my Instagram. I'll put the link on the show notes of this episode, and you can also follow me there for extra inspiration. And I also want to invite you to listen to previous episodes of this podcast. There is no outdated content here. I usually create the episodes in a way that no matter when you listen to, it's still going to be updated. You'll just scroll down and see what topics resonate with you. I'm Katia Mesquita, and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye!

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you liked what you heard today, be sure to share it with those you care about so they can also benefit from it. If you aren't already following me on social media, do so by clicking on the link on the show notes or simply by visiting my website at neatlifestyle.com. I appreciate you so much. I hope you have an amazing day. I'll see you in the next episode of The Neat Lifestyle Podcast.