Yesterday someone asked me mid-coffee, “What’s your passion?”

And I stumbled because the question felt too small for what it was trying to contain. I hesitated, aware that whatever I said would sound either glib or incomplete. Passion, for me, isn’t a single statement. It’s something far messier: an ongoing relationship with life, with work, with the people I meet through it.

The day before, I’d had another conversation with someone in a difficult situation, caught between a demanding manager and a worse boss. We weren’t talking about passion at all. We were talking about survival, about finding composure when the system you’re in seems designed to take it away.

I realised: passion sometimes feels very far away. When you’re just trying to hold yourself together, passion can sound like a luxury. And yet, it’s often in those gritty, unglamorous stretches of endurance that the seeds of real passion take root: in the act of staying present, of not turning away, of finding meaning even in discomfort.

These two conversations were about the same thing.

When I started my business, I had a ready answer to the passion question: “My passion is helping others identify and realise their potential.”

It sounded right, and it was honest. But over time, it began to feel too smooth, too certain, like a well-worn phrase that had lost some of its edge. These days, I experience passion not as a headline, but as texture, the shifting feel of each week, each conversation, each client encounter. I recognise it in the moment someone’s thinking unlocks, when they breathe differently, or when I notice myself fully absorbed: not analysing, not performing, just present. Passion, then, isn’t something I declare. It’s something I notice usually after the fact, in the quiet satisfaction of seeing someone else move forward.

That’s why I tell people: don’t waste time trying to find your passion. Live fully. Work honestly. Pay attention. If you stay open to experience, your passion will find you. It may not arrive as fireworks. More often it arrives quietly — in the texture of the work that holds your attention, or in the relief that follows a hard-won breakthrough. Passion hides inside presence. It grows in the small acts of showing up, again and again, until something begins to hum between who you are and what you’re doing.

I’ve seen this again and again with mid-career professionals. They say, “I’ve lost my passion,” when what’s really happened is that their relationship with it has matured. Passion used to mean excitement. Now it means engagement. It used to be about novelty. Now it’s about depth.

It’s not gone, it’s just wearing a quieter voice.

So maybe the better question isn’t “What’s your passion?” but “Where do you feel most alive lately?” Where do you lose track of time? Where do you feel that combination of effort and ease, of meaning and movement? That’s your passion, showing up in disguise.

For me, it often appears in those difficult coaching moments — when someone feels stuck, angry, or unseen. Those aren’t the glamorous conversations, but they’re real. They’re where courage begins. Passion, I’ve learned, lives not in the outcome, but in the encounter.

And so when someone asks me now what my passion is, I might say:

“It’s in the moment someone finds their way back to themselves.”
“It’s in the texture of the day — the pattern that only makes sense after you’ve lived it.”
“It’s in staying close enough to life that it keeps surprising you.”

Reflection prompt:
 

When was the last time you felt fully alive in your work — not necessarily happy, but awake, attentive, engaged? What were you doing, and what did it awaken in you?

Don’t look for passion as a noun. Listen for it as a verb — the quiet pulse of something that’s already at work in you.

Next steps:

If you still see this as a journey you must travel now, let's talk here.