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Exploring Your Passions
Your passions are those activities that give your life purpose and meaning. They help
you to define who you are. It is a good idea to define and explore your passions so that
you can work to keep them a part of your life.
As you grow up, your parents help you to get involved in various activities in the hopes
that one or some of them will catch your attention, enhance your strengths, and make
you happy. They might get you involved in sports; music; art; volunteer work; outdoor
activities; intellectual pursuits, such as reading, science, math or languages; computers;
etc. For most of us, as we participate in these activities, suddenly one of them will
catch our attention, make us feel good about ourselves, and make us happy. We end up
loving to do this activity, work to excel in it, and spend a good amount of time doing it.
It becomes a passion. If we love to do this activity enough and begin to excel in it, we
might come to identify ourselves by this activity. We couldn’t imagine ourselves not
being able to participate in it.
The most obvious example of someone identifying with a passion is someone who
plays a sport. To play a sport like basketball, baseball, skiing, volleyball, or gymnastics,
people need to practice every day for hours to become competitive. As their practice
makes them become more competent at the sport, their self-esteem rises, and they begin
to identify themselves with the sport. This becomes especially true if they gain the
praise of adults and peers because of their talents. They become highly attached to the
sport and continue to spend a great deal of time practicing and playing. They feel joy,
accomplishment, power, respect, and love for the sport and see themselves playing for
the rest of their life. Eventually, they might identify with a sport so much that if they
injure themselves they feel as if their lives are over. Sound like anyone you know?
So passions are important to us because they add meaning to our lives and help us define
who we are. As we grow older, we need to be protective of our passions because life can
get so busy sometimes with just the daily responsibilities of work and family that we
can lose the time and energy to keep pursuing our passions. That is why the exercise of
exploring your passions is an advantageous one. It will help you to recommit to your
passions as your life as a college student becomes more challenging. It will help you to
become protective of your passions so that you don’t let them go by the wayside as your
other responsibilities take precedence.
(Excerpted from
Life Vision Portfolio
by Janice Mettauer, published by Pacific Crest)