I love my work, but it hasn’t always been that way, there have been times during my career when I have felt like I am stagnating and not tapping into my true potential, and times when I’ve felt that my creativity and freedom to be authentic and express myself was being stifled.
That all changed however when I decided to run my own business, initially it was my intention to find a way to do something that would enable me not feel any of the above that stirred me into action and to set up my own business back in 2008. I was so passionate about being able to be authentic, use my creativity and have the freedom to express who I am through my work I felt the only way to achieve this would be to work for myself.
Tapping into your passion is key to moving you forward in life, and once you tap into that passion there’s no stopping you!
So what are you passionate about?
Many of my clients will say to me I don’t know anymore I seem to have lost my drive or just don’t know how to get the flames of passion for my work roaring again.
If that’s where you’re at then, there are a couple of things that you can do to help ignite the flames of passion again.
Ask yourself what do you not like currently that’s happening in the world, your life, your business or just in general?
What really gets your up your goat?
Make a list and ask yourself, could I use any of this as a basis to become passionate about changing or improving something?
I underwent a course of CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) many years ago and found it very laborious and ineffective for me. Not long after completing a Counselling Skills Diploma I started facilitating a group that helped people who had experienced childhood sexual violence, where the majority of the individuals in the group at the time were doing some form of CBT.
​Many of the people attending the group reported how at times they too struggled with CBT and other forms of counselling and felt that at times they were just going around in circles and not actually experiencing any real change regarding them recovering from their trauma.
At the time I wasn’t trained in hypnotherapy or NLP. Yet intuitively I would think there must be a far more effective way of helping people to recover from these types of trauma without the need to continually assess every thought or behaviour that one ever experiences. Or have the need to relive experiences to heal from them, and I became extremely disillusioned and frustrated at how ineffective some of the support structures were for this type of work.
This experience combined with a few other rather disappointing experiences provided the basis for me to begin to turn that frustration and disillusionment into a passion, and so go on and specialise in helping people recover from childhood trauma.
It was never my intention to work in this area. In fact, when I first started studying Counselling and Psychology I made a vow to myself that I would never work with people who had experienced childhood trauma because I didn’t want to work in an area where I would constantly be reminded of my own traumatic experiences in childhood.
This is now my biggest client group and the area I have the most passion for!
As you can see you can even turn something that you are negatively passionate about into an opportunity to tap into your passion in a very positive way and align it with your work.
Get clear on what you are passionate about in life and in work and start from there.
Some questions you can use to help open your mind and tap into your passion:
What did you really love to do as a child?
Throughout your life what things have consistently made you happy and feel good?
What do you currently do that you enjoy doing?
How could you do more of that?
What areas do you already have experience or expertise in that you enjoy?
What would you be doing right now if money was no object?
What have you always dreamed of doing?
Tap into your passion and use that to guide you in building a practice that will be fully aligned with you and your work. Use your passion to allow you to explore and discover the kind of practice you can build, avoid the mistake of developing your business and bringing clients in only to find you are not enjoying the work you do.
In the early days of setting up my hypnotherapy practice, I was advised to build around the big two, Smoking and Weight loss. While I enjoyed that work and to be honest, it was so crucial in helping me become a skilled hypnotherapist and become an expert in using hypnotherapy for weight loss not to mention all the other areas this opened up. I knew this wasn’t the area I was completely passionate about there was always something missing for me. I took some time out and re-evaluated the work I was doing and used the questions above to help me tap into my passion again.
I had spent 20 years building a career in Coaching & Learning and development and loved Training and Coaching. I was so passionate about it and very successful in my corporate career as a result of that passion. I just didn’t enjoy doing it in the Financial Services industry.
After a few years working in private practice with clients one to one, I realised that I missed the buzz that Training & Coaching gave me. I decided to reignite my passion for training by applying those skills to what I was doing now, helping people change and transform their lives and thus my journey into teaching in the field of Hypnotherapy & Coaching began.
While initially, it was short workshops or mini weekly courses and groups it gave me the opportunity to fully connect and align everything I was passionate about into my business. I was helping people change their lives and doing it in a way that was aligned with my passion.
Yes, it took time and a lot of figuring out along the way, but as I look back on my journey, I realise if I hadn’t tapped into my passion, my love for helping people might very well have burned. All because I hadn’t aligned my skills and passion to my work.
I’m not saying I’ll be doing the same thing forever, in fact, I think it is good practice to regularly re-evaluate what you are doing and find ways to reinvent your work so that you stay fresh and on top of your game.
I am, though, hugely passionate about what I do and no doubt as my life continues to evolve and change my passion for my work will too. The secret, however, as with any good relationship is to let go of those things you are no longer passionate about to make room for you to explore new ways of igniting the flames of passion so that they can burn brightly and help guide the way for the continued growth of you and your business.
Love
Avril xx
P.S You can also connect with me over at my Private Facebook Coaching Group I am in there most days for support and encouragement.
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