When I was in my early twenties, I always knew that I wanted to work for myself and I came up with a business plan for opening a coffee shop. I thought that this would be a really good way of making money whilst also becoming my own boss.
My sister Caroline also in recent years began to realise that she wanted to change career and instead of working as a nurse she determined that she would like to potentially work for herself. She decided that she would perhaps become a yoga instructor. I should mention that she has never practiced Yoga before but she thought that this career path could be a viable option! What I should also point out is that my sister is a very talented artist and she loves to draw and paint and create works of art. The question you might wonder is – why didn’t she choose to take this path and become an artist, rather than looking outside of her talents for other potential career options?
In truth, she didn’t believe that she could do something that she absolutely loved while also allowing this to be her career and at the same time make money from her art.
I would have thought the same in a sense, I was looking for things that I felt I was capable of doing, make lots of money from and that I could work at. Work being the key word here, we all feel that in order to have a viable career, we have to work hard and we also need to struggle.
That’s not to say that we won’t be working hard doing something that we love, in fact we will probably work harder than we ever would at another career that we are not passionate about but just doing to make a living. On the other hand, exactly because we decide to take the brave and bold decision to do work that we love, it isn’t a struggle; it’s a pleasure to do, even if there are difficult days, they are never as difficult as the days we spent in careers that were not our calling.
This is where most of us fall short in our beliefs that we can’t and don’t deserve to have it all. We can’t have a career, an income and a passion for what we’ve decided to do. That’s not to say that it’s an impossibility, as we all know there are plenty of people that have done this and taken that step towards their passion and have achieved great success from it. And I would encourage you to do the same.
Let go of any self doubt, any ingrained notions or thoughts that you have adopted or been taught about your career and about what you can or can’t do.
Embrace your abilities and know that you can make money from and live off your talents and more importantly be a positive contribution to society and help others through doing what you love. This is your own unique gift that you were born with, that you may have nurtured and mastered over the years but a talent nonetheless that you have been given for a reason; it’s not just something extraneous that has happened upon you.
It’s your duty to share your strengths with other people, with the world and if you don’t embrace your passions, it’s such a waste. Not only are you robbing yourself of your gifts, you are robbing others of your gifts which is the bigger travesty. You are here to share your talents and if you don’t do that then you are depriving others.
Your passions are things that will help other people.
You have no concept of how much you can help friends, family, your community and even the world through embracing your passions. For example, going back to my sister and her love of art; the amount of joy, inspiration and pleasure that she can bring to others through her paintings and her creativity knows no bounds. Even she has no concept of how far reaching that can be.
It is the same with all of us, we have no idea of how great the positive impact of our gifts can be if only we decide to unveil them; to stop hiding behind supposed traditional careers that are “safe” and “stable” jobs and allow our joy and talents to shine.
You’ll be glad to learn that my sister Caroline did do just that, she left her nursing career of 16 years and started attending art college. She began painting and her art is testament to her wondrous talent. Only recently she said to me that during a life drawing, she felt so much emotion for the subject that it almost brought her to tears and while submerged in sadness and empathy, she at the same time felt so much joy and appreciation for what she was doing and this passion clearly shows itself on the canvas.
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