Beware the Dream Job Syndrome: How to increase your career passion potential

Do you want to exponentially increase your potential for finding passion in your career? Then avoid this one simple mistake – defining passion too narrowly!

For most people, pursuing their passion means following their dream to be an artist, or a writer, or an organic farmer, or whatever. For many, for a variety of reasons both valid and imagined, those things remain out of reach. And so the idea of experiencing a passion-packed career gets relegated to pipe dream status.

After a dozen years of helping people create careers that energize and inspire them in my Passion Catalyst work, it’s clear to me that most people have far too narrow a picture of career passion, and that limits their options. I call it the Dream Job Syndrome.

How to increase your passion potential

How do you expand your picture? Start with my definition of passion:

Passion is the energy that comes from bringing more of you into what you do.

It’s doing the kinds of things, in the kinds of ways, in the kinds of places, with the kinds of people, etc. that naturally energize you.

What I’ve found is that everybody has underlying themes that tend to be there when they feel energized and engaged – underlying reasons why they love what they love (for example, a big one for me is “exploration & discovery”).

Feeling passion in your work is actually about experiencing those underlying themes. I think of them as fuel cells we can hook into. Looking at it that way, that dream job is really just a vehicle for experiencing those energy sources.

And that’s where the passion potential expands, because there are a lot of other jobs that will let you experience those underlying themes as well.

If you define your passion as cooking, your options for a career are limited specifically to things where you can cook. But if you identify the underlying reasons why you love cooking, you can in turn ask, “OK, what kinds of careers would allow me to experience those things.

You might love the aesthetics, or perhaps understanding how the different elements interact and work together to get the result you’re looking for. Or maybe you love creating on the fly with whatever is on hand. All of those things could be experienced in different ways in other jobs.

So don’t limit yourself. Passion is much closer than you might think. And it all starts with understanding why you love what you love.

(Check out my post How to find career passion for more insights on finding a career that lights you up.)

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Time for a career change? Start with The Occupational Adventure Guide