Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
Key Takeaways
- Anna discusses aligning passion with career and its potential pitfalls and benefits.
- Understanding interests, values, and strengths helps assess job alignment with passions.
- The discussion highlights the importance of not monetising every hobby and finding joy in work.
- Assessment of current roles can reveal gaps and opportunities to align work with passions.
- Taking small steps can help navigate obstacles and move towards a more fulfilling career.
In today’s episode, Anna delves into the topic of aligning passion with your career, in the first of a series of episodes inspired by the month of love! She addresses the question of whether or not we should align our passion with our career, providing insightful perspectives on the potential pitfalls and benefits. Anna explores the importance of understanding our interests, values, and strengths to assess how our current job aligns with our passions. She offers practical advice on identifying career gaps, making meaningful pivots, and overcoming common obstacles. Join Anna as she navigates the journey of finding your professional love match, and stay tuned for next week’s episode on networking with heart.
00:00 Find joy in work for greater success.
05:12 Questions to discover values and priorities.
07:36 Reflect on job, pivot within or without.
10:13 Take action, challenge yourself, create meaningful life.
*Resources mentioned during the episode*
1:1 Coaching & Mentoring – If you’re looking for one-to-one support to help you achieve your specific life and business goals, Anna has a limited number of spots for individual coaching and mentoring. onestepoutside.com/coaching
Aligning Passion with Career
Should you align your passion with your career? It sounds obvious – of course you should. But it’s worth examining the question properly, because there are real pitfalls, and the path there isn’t always what people expect.
Should you align passion with your career?
The first question is whether we should do this at all. And I think the answer is yes – but with an important caveat.
There’s a version of this advice that says: take what you love and monetise it. Turn your hobby into a business. If you love photography, become a photographer. And sometimes that works. But sometimes it doesn’t – because the grind of making money from something you love can drain the joy out of it. The commercial pressures, the clients who want something different from your creative vision, the constant hustle to find work – all of that can make you fall out of love with the very thing that made you happy.
I used to do amateur theatre. I loved it. And when I was young and naive I probably dreamed of being an actress. But I didn’t want to be a professional actress – I wanted to keep acting as something joyful. Now I channel that into presenting on stage, running workshops, recording podcasts. The passion found its expression in the work without the work becoming the passion.
So the caveat is: you don’t have to monetise every hobby. Some things are better kept as creative pursuits. But that aside – aligning your work with what you genuinely care about has real advantages, for you and for everyone around you.
Why it matters – for you and everyone else
There’s that pithy quote: “do work you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” It’s a bit idealistic, but there’s something true in it. When you genuinely care about what you’re doing, you do better work. You’re more motivated, more engaged, more present. That has positive consequences for your employer, your colleagues, your clients – not just for you.
The opposite is also true. If you’re counting down the minutes until the end of the day, couldn’t care less about the outcomes, and just turning up to collect a salary – you’re not going to do your best work, you’re not going to have much of a future in that organisation, and you’re certainly not going to enjoy it.
That’s not a moral argument. It’s a practical one. Aligned work produces better results.
How to work out what you’re actually passionate about
This sounds simple but it isn’t. A lot of us lose sight of what we care about – particularly after years of following a conventional path where passion wasn’t really part of the conversation.
Start with your interests. What did you study at school, beyond what you were told to? What do you do in your spare time, if you have any? What would you do with a year off? What conferences would you go to? What podcasts do you listen to? What books do you actually finish? These questions get underneath the surface.
Then look at your values. What really matters to you – freedom, learning, excellence, service, growth? A misalignment between your values and those of the organisation you work for is quietly damaging – to you and to them. Knowing your values gives you a lens through which to assess whether a role or organisation is actually a fit.
And look at your strengths – not just hard skills on a CV, but the things you do that feel almost effortless, that people come to you for, that you lose track of time doing. The overlap between what you love and what you’re genuinely good at is powerful. It’s what some people call your zone of genius.
Assessing where you are today
Once you have a clearer sense of who you are and what matters to you, the next step is an honest assessment of where you are now.
How well does your current work align with your passions? It might be closer than you think – maybe there are aspects of your role that genuinely energise you, even if the overall picture is frustrating. Or it might be a significant mismatch. Either way, try to get granular: what specifically do you want more of, and what do you want less of or none of?
If you’re burned out, by the way, pause here. You don’t need to solve your career right now. You need rest. Come back to this when you have enough energy to think clearly.
If you’re bored and stagnant – in the complacency zone rather than the comfort zone – take action. Do something. Anything. Movement creates momentum.
If you’re busy all the time and can’t imagine how you’d fit in any kind of reflection, that’s actually the signal that you need to create that space most urgently. Busyness is often a way of avoiding the harder questions.
Where the gaps are – and what to do about them
Once you’ve assessed where you are, you can start to see the gaps. And those gaps don’t necessarily mean you need to change jobs or start a business tomorrow.
Within your current role, there may be opportunities – projects, responsibilities, secondments, mentoring – that would move you towards what matters to you. A lateral move within the same organisation, or a step into a different function, might be enough.
If you’re in full-time employment, you might start a side project or freelance work alongside it – not to quit immediately, but to test whether what you think you want is actually what you want.
If a bigger change is needed, the question is what direction and what pace. And the answer is almost always: smaller steps than you think. You don’t need to commit to anything dramatic. Try something. Volunteer. Find a mentor. Take a short course. See what it feels like before you burn any bridges.
The obstacles are real – busyness, fear of failure, fear of success, financial insecurity, the sense that it’s too late or too risky. None of them go away by thinking about them harder. They go away by taking one small step and then another.
What next?
Start with an inventory. Who are you right now? What are your interests, your values, your strengths? What does your experience and expertise add up to? Just getting that down on paper – or talking it through with someone – can reveal patterns you hadn’t noticed and gaps you hadn’t named.
Aligning your career with your passions won’t happen overnight, and it won’t be a world of unicorns and rainbows when it does. But the advantages – to your work, your wellbeing, and everyone you work with – make it worth pursuing.
If you’re at the point of questioning whether your career or business is truly aligned with what you want, the free Solopreneur Diagnostic shows you in five minutes where your business is working well and where it’s quietly pulling you away from what matters.
And if you want to explore these questions alongside a small group of established solopreneurs doing the same work, Off Script is the community built for that.
Generally yes – but with nuance. Doing work that genuinely matters to you tends to produce better results and more satisfaction. The caveat is that not every passion needs to be monetised. Some hobbies are better kept as creative outlets rather than income sources. The goal is finding work that draws on what you care about, not necessarily turning every interest into a business.
Start by looking at your interests, values, and strengths – not just your formal qualifications. What do you do in your spare time? What would you do with a year off? What problems do you find yourself drawn to solving? The intersection between what you love and what you’re genuinely good at is usually where the most satisfying work lives.
That’s more common than people admit – particularly after years of following a conventional career path. Rather than waiting for clarity to arrive, take small actions: try new things, have conversations outside your usual circle, take a short course, volunteer in an area that interests you. Clarity tends to come through doing, not through thinking.
Yes. Passion isn’t fixed. You can develop genuine interest and investment in work you didn’t initially choose – particularly when you get good at it, when you can see the impact it has, and when it aligns with your values. The question isn’t always “is this my passion?” but “can I become passionate about this?”
Start within your current role – look for projects, responsibilities, or mentoring opportunities that move you towards what matters to you. In parallel, test your ideas through side projects, freelancing, or volunteering before committing to a bigger change. Small steps consistently repeated create significant movement without requiring you to risk everything at once.
