Passion as a Profession

I life the life I love and I love the life I live.

- Muddy Waters

I consider myself a very lucky person. I love what I do for a living. Instructional design is just something that suits me. It lets me be really creative and really organized at the same time. It lets me solve puzzles. It also makes me feel (just a little bit) like I'm doing my part to make the world a better place.

That's not to say that there aren't some days when what I do is annoying, frustrating and not a whole heck of a lot of fun. There are other days when my alarm clock goes off and I just want to keep hitting the snooze button as a way of avoiding what I know is going to be a hard slog to meet a tight deadline.

Why does that happen? Why does the passion fade? What should you do when you feel it fading?

Honestly, your passion for your work can fade for any number of reasons: stress, fatigue, distractions, communication issues, unexpected changes, working too hard, illness - you get the idea.

I could sit here and give a lot of advice on things you can do to re-energize yourself to get the passion back on the days when it's lacking, but I'm not going to. There are lots of experts out there who have great ideas which would probably be much better than anything I could come up with.

What's spinning in my head is the notion of how you recognize for yourself WHY (whatever the reason is) your passion is slipping away from you. Sometimes the answer isn't as easy to understand as you might think.

I can't answer that deep why for anyone else but myself, I can recommend not giving up until you've figured out what it is. It's not until you have the answer to WHY that you learn the WHAT and HOW of recapturing your passion.