#215 Why “Follow Your Passion” Is Bad Career Advice—and What To Say Instead Transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT… PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS & GRAMMAR! xo-Lisa.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  00:52

Follow your passion. That’s a phrase that young people hear all the time. It comes from parents, teachers, coaches and really well meaning adults who in their heart, they actually really want the best for the kids. But here’s the problem, when kids here follow your passion, many of them, actually, I would say most of them, don’t feel inspired. They feel pressured, because it sounds like there’s one great passion that they’re supposed to have, and it should be obvious, and it should last forever. And if they don’t have those special ingredients, they’re not going to be able to find traction on what fits for their future. So today, in this solo episode, I want to revisit this series that we started about well meaning advice that backfires. I’ve got right now four episodes planned, but who knows, maybe you guys will bring me more bad advice, and we can go deeper, and we’re going to slow down, and we’re going to unpack why following your passion is first often going to backfire, and what to do instead, what’s going to actually help kiddos move forward. And I want everybody to hear me loud and clear, I said this last time. This is not about criticizing anybody, not parents at all. This comes from many adults, and I don’t even blame people like it sounds exciting and fun. Let’s go find out what your passion is, and go do it right? It’s got a lot of great, well meaning intention behind it, but intention and impact are not the same. See this encouragement that we’re trying to give them when it skips a process that often ends up creating paralysis. And what I hear from you guys, whether you’re educators or parents mentors, I often hear you saying, like, my kids frozen, they’re disinterested. You don’t even use the word frozen. You’re just like they’re unmotivated or not interested or they’re being difficult. And the idea here is they’re not they’re just motivated for safety and to get out of feeling overwhelmed. And when we tell them these well meaning pieces of advice, go back and listen to the first one if you want. In last week’s episode, all we’re doing is further creating those negative feelings in them so they seek safety. See, when we say, follow your passion, that starts to feel like there’s one right answer out there, and if you know me, I say yes, there’s a lot of bad fits. We talked about that last week, but there’s not just one good fit, and it doesn’t have to be the thing that you’re most passionate about. It signals often to kids that we should know early, because we should be born with this passion, and that this passion should be permanent. It should stay forever. But that’s not how real careers work. I think as adults, we can all think of our own career journeys. We can think of friends and family’s career journeys and go like, yeah, that’s not how it works. But yet, we continue to say this to these kids all the time. See follow your passion is not how confidence develops. Passion is rarely the starting point. But the good news is, it’s actually often the result when you put in the intentional work about what’s going to align for the individual. So when your kids hear this, they’re it’s signaling them like you should already know what you’re doing, what that’s going to be, and if you don’t that, there’s something maybe wrong with you, and if there’s something wrong with you, you’re seeking to fix that first right? And we’re also signaling them that there could be a wrong choice. It’s, you know, people ask me all the time, Well, which one should I choose? I get like, I got a call last week. It was, hey, we got to choose our high school. And you seem to know, a lot of high schools in our area. Here are my three options. Which one should I choose? And my answer to that parent was, they’re all good choices for different reasons. It’s. What aligns best, and you just going to have to make a decision, because there’s not going to be one right answer. And they’re like, oh, when we reframed it as that, it helped get the parent and the twin sons that were trying to make this high school choice out of overwhelm unfrozen, and they were able to start moving forward. So you know, when the expectation is certainty that there’s one thing doing nothing usually is what’s going to feel safer to the individual, whether that’s you as a parent making any decision, or if it’s our kids, and even more so, like we’re used to those feelings of not being certain, having to make a choice anyway, right? I mean, we buy houses and cars and we’ve been navigating our career and our family. We’re used to it, and it still overwhelms us when we’re faced with decisions. So let’s start reframing this for our kids. I keep saying like when we honestly choose our own lived experiences with our kids, instead of framing them up and putting a pretty little bow on it, it begins to normalize struggle and difficulty and lack of certainty. So why don’t we start first of all, talking about our own passions and not talking about them as if they’re permanent, but give them examples in real life about how they evolve over time. I know for me, I have some values that I can look back to when I was a young person, when I was in this 15 to 25, year old age group, and I can see values that I had that still in my 50s are lifelong values that I have clung to, right? But I’ve also had values that have changed and passions that have shifted over time. Okay, so if we approach this with you’re allowed to grow, you’re allowed to change, we’re allowed to let go of things over time that don’t fit. That begins to make our kids feel like, oh, I can figure this out, right? Here’s what I see again and again too. Oftentimes, kids will say to me, like, if we we look at a career option or a college major, they’ll be like, I don’t know how to do that. I’m like, That’s right. That’s why we’re going and getting an education or training to be able to do that. And then when they shift to like, oh, okay, I don’t have to know all the things to start pursuing something, and they start taking action where their skills are increasing as the skills increase. What I see over and over and over again is that the internal confidence, so skills on the outside increase, internal confidence begins to grow. And then when the confidence grows, enjoyment starts to grow. And as enjoyment grows, sometimes that ignites a passion. See as proficiency increases, often, not always. And we need to make sure they hear this passion can increase and we can discover something that excites us that we never even considered before. So this idea that we want to, I don’t know, inspire them with is confidence and possibly passion will be built through competence, not the other way around. We don’t expect competence on the front end and passion on the front end. We got to start by building the competence one step at a time, right? That’s why high school started out easier and it gets harder as we go. That’s why college, if you’re on that route, starts out easier and it gets more challenging as we go, because we’re not ready for that end result. We’re just ready for the next step. That’s all this proficiency creates momentum, and then the momentum will fuel the passion. You know, this is something that we talked about, if you want to go back to Episode 213 I had Jennifer gershberg on, and we really talked about how to build confidence with your young person. And so this would be a good one that kind of relates to this. If you want to go back and get some more content, but stick with me and then go back to it later. So you know one thing, one way I think about this, my husband knows this is, I don’t believe in soulmates, right? I have a husband. He is not my soulmate. I don’t believe, romantically, that there are soulmates, and I don’t believe that there is a job soulmate. Because when we say, discover your passion, and that passion should be your job, I hear people say all the time, discover your passion. You’ll never work a day in your life. Lie it.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  09:53

It puts this pressure on there that there’s one thing, soulmates do not exist. Hear me. Loud and clear, you might love your job. It’s not your soulmate job, if it ended today, adults, you probably could give me a short list of other things that you would be good at and enjoy. Okay, I love my husband. I chose my partner. He chose me. We choose to build a life and a family together, and we love it. We have a deepened commitment to each other as we navigate life, our understanding of one another has grown, and with that, my appreciation for my spouse and even the fun that we have and even the passion that we have, it increases. That’s why you hear people talk about marriages that last 3040, 50, my own parents celebrating 60 years this year. It’s because of a commitment, and with that commitment, then passion grows. It just doesn’t come from magic. It comes from investment. Passion will come from investment so and you can tell my husband that I said I don’t believe in soulmates. He knows that I believe this. The other thing that we want to give our kids freedom on, besides everything that we’ve already been unpacking, is if we do have a passion, that passion does not have to equal career. When we say, find your passion, follow your passion. It it makes it seem like that passion has to be encompassed into our career. If it’s your passion, it should be your job. That’s what they’re hearing when we’re telling them this message. And that is not true at all. This is again. Let’s start having real conversations at home. Many of our passions live outside the workday. I am passionate about and I actually can look all the way back to high school and college. I am passionate about working with 15 to 25 year olds and supporting them and their parents. I do have a passion about that, but I’m also super passionate about my designing a yard that feels like an oasis. I don’t do that during my work day. And by the way, it’s snowing outside my window right now as I record this, so I really would not want to be working outside. I am passionate about healthy remember, and I’ve confessed this before, this is a the woman who drank two liters of coke every day of her life, an entire two liter in my 20s, 30s and into my 40s, and now I am passionate in my 50s about healthy eating and healthy living, but I don’t do anything with that during my work day. So let’s normalize that we have while we will spend more hours at work than any other place, by the way. Do you know that we will spend 95,000 hours on average working in our adult working life? Yes, so we want to make sure that we’re in alignment with those 95,000 hours, but there are still a whole lot of hours on vacations, with PTO, holidays, weekends, evenings, that can support our passions. So we don’t have to have every profession become part of our every passion become part of our profession, right? So if we shouldn’t be putting the pressure on them, of follow your passion, and passion is not bad, but that piece of advice for career planning is not serving them. What should we say instead? Instead, it’s about noticing what tasks, what environments, bring energy. I always say, like the things that you would do all day long and still have energy to go out with your friends at night, those are the things that are positive. They’re signaling, oh, I might enjoy that as part of my work, the things that we avoid and put off and procrastinate on that’s bringing negative energy, lack of alignment. So let’s have conversations around tasks and environments, things like that. Let’s start talking about instead of, what are you passionate about? What are you curious enough about to learn more, become skilled at continue practicing. That relieves something. So it’s like, oh, I’m curious. And as I continue to learn, if I’m continuing to enjoy it, let’s start building that proficiency and dig into it as maybe part of my career development, but along the way, you might also learn something that you go, Oh, this is no longer in alignment. Okay. Now we have through a validation process. We’ve decided that doesn’t fit, so that curiosity now gets put aside and we start to prove. Pursue something else that maybe we’re curious about, and then what are you willing to spend time on getting better at right? Even if it’s hard, I love it when I’m working with a student like in our launch Career Clarity course, and they say to me, I’ll say, Well, what are your favorite classes at school? Which I don’t think that that’s how we should choose that’s not the one thing. It’s a piece of the puzzle, right? I love it when I hear a kid say, you know, I love science, but and then I say, would you rate it as easy, moderate on the difficulty, or hard for you to do? Difficult, I love nothing more. When I hear a young person say, I enjoy it, but I have to work hard at it. And I see that a lot, we’ve got to have conversations around that with young people. It’s not just about what is easy. See Passion makes it sound like, oh, it should be easy. And you talk to any adult becoming proficient, getting trained, doing the work each day does not have to always be easy to be fulfilling. And I think a key phrase to add this, add to this when we say, like, what are you? What are you not proficient at yet, but you are willing to continue to work at even when it’s hard. The key word in that whole phrase is yet not proficient, yet not confident, yet. But there’s more to come, right? So you know the last episode, if you missed it, was when we’re telling the kids the lies of you can be anything which also only serves the overwhelm, and this time we unpacked, follow your passion. We’ve got another one coming up in the next episode, and here’s what we’re trying to do with this series. Clarity doesn’t come from pressure. It comes from a process. So let’s release the lies, the myths, the pressure that we’ve not been intending to but we’ve been putting on these young people. So if advice like follow your passion has felt confusing or unhelpful to your young person, there is a better way. And I created a complimentary video called the career identification compass. We unpack more mistakes that we’re making and show a calmer, more realistic way to help support career confidence in our young people, because they have got to have career confidence and be able to launch into a career for them to be able to launch out of our homes, right? So you’ve watched a free video at flourish, coachingco.com, forward slash video. I’m also going to link to it in the show notes, my friends, this is figure outable. Even if you’re feeling stuck, your child isn’t behind. Let’s just give them a better way to do this and not fuel the fire with bad advice. Okay, see you guys next week as we unpack yet another well intentioned, but pressure filled statement that we’re giving young people.