Pursuing Your Passion

Welcome to the Design Your Dream Life Podcast where it’s all about designing your life on your terms and now your host, Natalie Bacon.

Hey there. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for all of the reviews. Thank you for sharing this podcast. I see it all. I see the tags. I see the shares. I see the reviews. I am so appreciative and grateful for all of it and for you being here today. So let’s dive into what we’re talking about today, which is pursuing your passion.

I’ve talked a lot about goal setting and your purpose on the podcast. Today I want to talk specifically about passion. So I looked up the definition of passion. The definition I liked most was very simple. It’s just a strong liking or desire. The example was, “she has a passion for music.” I want you to think about your life and think about your interests. Think about if there’s anything that you are passionate about.

For some of you the answer is an obvious yes. For others of you, you’re not really sure. I want to speak specifically to you if you’re not sure or you think you might be passionate about something, but for whatever reason it’s not the right time. Or you used to be passionate about it, but you don’t know anymore. I think that as our life evolves and grows and changes, our passions also change. So for most of us, we weren’t born coming out of the womb with a desire or passion for music. Our passions then are learned. I think this is a beautiful thing.

Right now the Creator Program is open. You can head on over to nataliebacon.com/creator to learn more. I am opening up the doors to help women build their online businesses. It’s a brand new program. So of course you know that I’ve had the Creator Program for the last year, but this year I completely redid the structure of it. There are two tiers, a more beginner tier and then an advanced mastermind tier.

I’m bringing that up now because I have this passion for online business. I have a passion for coaching. I have a passion for personal development and growth. These passions evolved, and they grew. They grew out of my own curiosity, and also my own pain. For those of you that have been around for a really long time, you know that I started blogging about student loan debt.

I didn’t know about business. I didn’t know it was going to be an online business. I didn’t know I was going to be a life coach. I didn’t know I was going to create Grow You or the Creator Program. I didn’t know any of that. I think honestly if you would have told me everything I would be doing now, it may have felt a little bit overwhelming. So I’m so glad that I didn’t know that. I’m so glad that I just pursued what was interesting to me and what I felt like was the next step.

So if you are in a season of life where you’re not really sure what your passion is, or you are sure, but it looks different. I was just coaching someone in Grow You who is very outdoorsy. She has some chronic back pain or body pain. Her athleticism is challenged now based on her pain. So she’s creating this new identity and having to look to the future instead of how it used to be. She wants to continue to keep that outdoorsy part of her. She’s very passionate about it.

So now where the coaching comes in is how do we create this new version of you from your future? It takes so much more creativity in your imagination. It’s so much easier to go to the past and know what worked in the past because your brain has examples of it. So what I want to encourage you to do is to think about your passion from your future. It doesn’t have to be as big as if anything were possible, but I want you to be open to the possibility that it might be something that you haven’t yet thought of or given yourself permission to think.

So I remember when I first started learning about online business and started believing I could make $1,000 a month or $2,000 a month. Then that goal changed to $5,000 a month and to hit that first six figures. I became more passionate about it along the way as I created a track record of success. So of course there are going to be failures, but if you keep going and trying new things, you can cultivate something that you really like. It’s a way for you to express yourself.

So a lot of you listening might be thinking, “That sounds lovely, but I have a really packed life right now. You might even use the word busy. You might think that now is not the best time to start.” I want you to challenge that for yourself. Not to me. It doesn’t make a difference to me if you pursue your passion or not. As your coach and your mentor, I want you to think about how that thought that it’s not the best time to start is serving you.

What I hear a lot is it’s not the best time to start because we just moved. It’s not the best time to start because we just had kids. It’s not the best time to start because the kids are home from school right now. It’s not the best time to start because I’m in a job transition or my husband is in a job transition. You’ll know this is something that you are doing if you think back in the past, “Has there ever been a time where it was the right time to start?”  Typically the answer is no.

So what I mean by that is we often find there’s never a right time to do X, Y, Z. If you’ve heard there’s never a best time to have kids or there’s never a right time to go back to school or there’s never a right time to fill in the blank. So the opposite is always also true. The best time to do it is right now.

If this is actually a desire that’s in your heart, then the best time to start is now. That doesn’t mean that you have to overhaul your entire life to make this fit. It just means that you can carve out some space for you to pursue it at a level that’s very available to you right now. So if you love music and that is your passion, it might be that you start taking the guitar lessons once a week or whatever it is. That might just be once a week that you do it.

What I find fascinating as I go from being single to married to being a mom, how much we prioritize our kids and their growth and development. And how often in that shift to prioritizing their growth and development with education, with swim lessons, with dance classes, with golf lessons. Whatever it is, all of their growth and development and hobbies, which I think is amazing. We sort of lose sight of doing that for ourselves, which I think is fascinating.

So there’s this shift from, “I’m going to grow myself and take care of myself,” to, “I’m going to grow my kids.” What I want to offer to you is that the best way to show your kids what living fully is really about is to grow yourself.

So I love the rule of for every activity that anyone gets to do in the family, including kids, mom and dad get to do one too. So if kids are in two activities, mom and dad get to do two activities as well. I think this really will enable you to drop any guilt that you might have or anything where you’re thinking, “Oh, this isn’t important for our family right now, and now is not a good time.” I think now is the best time for you to get started.

When I think back to starting my own business, in some ways it was the absolute worst time to get started. In others it was the absolute best time to get started. I had $200,000 of student loan debt. I was an attorney. I really felt like I was overworked, and I had no business experience at all. There were so many things in my life that I wanted to change. I wanted to change where I lived. I wanted to get married. I wanted to get out of debt. I wanted to work less. All of those things you would look at and you would think, “Yeah, not the best time to start a business.”

Starting a business is work, and there are failures and there are obstacles. It’s a lot easier to go out and get a job and make money, but I started it anyway. I did it in the empty space, in the white space. I created that white space. I got up early and I worked on it, and I fell in love with it. That is why I have grown it the way I have is because I pursued it from this place about being passionate about it. But I wasn’t passionate about it from the beginning. I thought, “Let’s try out this blog thing. Then it evolved into a passion.” I think this is one of the best ways to grow your passion is to do it from this place of wanting it, but from also being detached to it.

So when you want something so badly and you’re so attached to the outcome, your emotions depend on you getting the thing. So if your life depends on it, if every win and every failure creates huge emotional ups and downs, huge swings like that, you’re very attached to the outcome.

I talked about this a little bit on Instagram and got a lot of questions about it. I talked about it with respect to becoming a mom, and how I’ve always wanted to become a mom. Yet I made peace with not becoming a mom so I detached from it meaning I knew I could be happy either way, but I still wanted it. That is where the magic happens because then you allow your desires to go to work for you and you attract that. So it’s not like I gave up on it. I still wanted it, but I didn’t make my happiness depend on it.

So when you think about something that you want to be passionate about or pursue, I think it’s so much better to do it from a place of, “Yeah I want this because I just want to do something different with my life. I think I’d really like it and enjoy it. I know I like the little bit that I dabbled with.” If it’s music or art. “I want to pursue it more.” That’s from a place of detachment.

When you’re attached, it’s, “If I don’t pursue art or music, I’m going to be sad and depressed forever.” We sort of hang our emotions on the outcomes, which we never want to do. So you want to set goals, pursue your passions from a place of having a really clean mind and feeling good.

Sometimes the question comes up, “Well if I feel good already and I’m content, why would I pursue the passion at all?” I like to say because it gives your brain something to do. So if you don’t pursue the desire that’s in your heart and you just go about living, there’s nothing wrong with that. Your brain gets a little bit restless. It is going to be so much more likely to focus on the little dramas and the little things going on that you don’t have as much control over, the things outside of you.

Contrast that with when you have a goal or you’re pursuing something you’re interested in. You let those small little things fall to the side. You don’t care as much. So when you pursue your passion, it gives your brain a sense of focus and direction. I think it fulfills a part of you that is otherwise missing if you don’t.

Now I want to talk about quitting. Why might you quit? I am very pro quitting. So if you decide to pursue this passion of music, and after six months or a year you decide, “Yeah, that was fun to do and to try, but I want to take a break from it.” I love that reason for quitting. What I don’t love is quitting from the place of, “I don’t have the result yet. So I want to give up.”

So if you want to become a mom and you’re very attached to the outcome, then you can’t really deal with the ups and downs. So it’s easier for you to just give up on it totally. That’s what that would look like. Quitting from this place of, “I don’t have the results yet, and it’s probably not going to happen.” That’s very different than just deciding, “Yeah, I don’t really want to be a mom anymore.”

Or in the case of weight loss. This is another one that comes up a lot. “Well I haven’t been able to do it in the past. So I should just give up. It would make my life a lot easier and less stressful, and I’m just tired of it.” So you quit because you don’t have the result yet. It’s because it’s so painful for you to pursue this goal or this passion. You’re failing and it’s horrible. What I say is let’s take a step back and pause and look at the fuel that’s motivating you to pursue that goal or to pursue that passion.

You want to think of a spectrum. So on one side it matters so much that your emotions depend on it. On the other side, it doesn’t matter at all. What I want to encourage you to do is go in the middle where it does matter, but my entire emotional wellbeing doesn’t depend on it. That is going to keep you moving forward at a much milder pace than having these huge ups and downs.

So you can quit for any good reason that you have. Like I say, you can decide to do anything just like your reason. So if you’re quitting or you’re putting this desire of yours on pause, what’s the reason? Is it because it’s not happening? I don’t like that reason for myself. Or is it because you genuinely just decided this isn’t a desire that you have anymore? To me, I like that reason.

Something that I like to remember when I want to feel like quitting but the reason is because I don’t have the result yet is that I can feel good and pursue this. I can fail over and over, and I never have to quit. What? Isn’t that amazing to know? You never have to quit if you don’t want to. If you work on your emotions and you have goal fuel that feels good, so you’re having fun along the way. You are not too attached to the outcome. You can continue to pursue it. You never have to quit.

I remember when I worked with a coach about dating. This was right before I had met Steve. She coached me a lot on getting clean with my attachment to the outcome. She would say, “You know you never have to quit, right? If it’s not with me then it will be with someone else. You can keep pursuing this forever.” It actually helped me feel so much better just to think about it differently.

I had been thinking about it from this place of this should be happening already. Why hasn’t it happened? Time’s running out. This should be happening faster.  Those thoughts are coming from a place of attachment and scarcity. What she helped me do was to see that if I want it, I can continue to want it from a place of loving my life right now, and I never have to quit. I never have to stop. That felt so much more peaceful to me. There’s no time that’s running out. I’m not behind.

For you, whether it’s something like your marriage or kids or whether it is pursuing music or art or your online business or whatever else it is. If you have this desire in your heart and you want to pursue it, you can pursue it from a place of feeling good and having fun with it. You can care about it without making it mean that your life depends on it, so that space in the middle. You never have to quit. You can just take the next step.

You can carve out 10 minutes a day. You can carve out however much time or if it’s money. Whatever it is. That next step to pursue that passion. I want to encourage you to do that and to know that since there’s never a best time, it’s always the best time right now to start. And to give yourself permission to prioritize your growth and development, including through the pursuit of a passion that you otherwise might think is not important.

Particularly as we get older, we have families, and we have other priorities. So we think, “Oh, well this hobby isn’t important.” I think the opposite is true. I think that just like we have our kids and activities, so too should we have activities that allow us to grow and express ourselves.

So whatever your desire is in your heart, pursue it. Pursue it from a place of a whole open heart knowing that you don’t ever have to give up on it. You also don’t have to be so attached to it that your emotional wellbeing hangs in the balance of it. If you are interested in pursuing your passion of building an online business, join me for the Creator Program. Head on over to nataliebacon.com/creator. I will talk with you next week. Take care.

If you loved this podcast, you’re going to love Grow You. Grow You is my virtual life coaching program where I take everything on the podcast to the next level. I invite you to join our amazing community of women and moms and deepen your own personal development. Head on over to nataliebacon.com/coaching to learn more.  

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