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How do you figure out what career you should pursue, especially when you’re not even sure what exactly you’re passionate about? Many people, even after years of working, are not sure what they’re passionate about. Some of them are not even sure what career they should be getting into.

The truth is if you really want to find the career that you’re going to be excited about, and that you’re meant to do, then your career doesn’t necessarily have to involve your passions, but it does have to involve your talents, your gifts, and basically the things that you’re good at doing.

Passion is a funny thing. Some people can go through their whole lives not having one thing that they’re truly and utterly passionate about, whereas there are other people who can go through their whole lives having all kinds of passions, and getting confused by that, because they don’t know how they relate to one another. For example, maybe you have a passion for eating good food. You like to try different things and you like eating food that tastes good. But that doesn’t mean that you are necessarily going to create a career out of the idea of having to eat good food. That’s something that you might just like to do outside of your job.

Reason for this is that passions don’t necessarily equate to a truly meaningful career. It’s your talents that equate to a successful and meaningful career. This is because passions can change over time. Sometimes you may confuse something as being your passion, but it may just be something that you’ve created as an idea in your head, or something that you happen to want to do or enjoy doing. There’s no problem with that, but it’s your innate talents that are going to help you to carry forward that passion or that career to the next level.

If the passion is causing you to have to really strain and stress, then it’s not worth it to try to make it into your career. Leveraging on your natural inherent gifts, or things that you’re really good at, will enable you to do your work more easily. People are going to appreciate the quality of your work, and you’re going to be able to do the work with little effort and energy. That in turn is going to help you to stay calm, relaxed and centered, as you pursue that career.

So the takeaway from this post is that you should focus on the unique gifts and talents that you have. Your talents were given to you for a reason. When you can recognize and then make use of your own natural God-given talents, you’re allowing yourself the opportunity to express yourself more fully. On top of that, because this is you leveraging the gifts that you already have inside of you, you’re going to feel much more comfortable within your own skin. You’re going to feel authentic and honest as you pursue this career.

Sometimes we develop unrealistic expectations of ourselves, because we want ourselves to be seen in a certain way by other people. Therefore, we look at this one type of activity as being a passion of ours that we want to pursue. If that’s how you’re thinking, that’s not really a passion. That’s just trying to impress others. For example, I’m naturally a strong communicator. I would say that that is my natural God-given talent that I’ve always had throughout my life. Since I’ve been able to recognize that this is a talent of mine, I’ve been able to leverage it and use it in the career that I’m in now. With my strength in communication combined with my passion in helping others to promote their business through effective digital and content marketing, I’ve been able to create a good client base for myself that leverages my own talents.

If communication weren’t part of my strengths, it would be really difficult for me to do the work that I’m doing. If I was more of a handy person and I was good at building things, but yet I went into the career of marketing and content development, I feel like I wouldn’t be able to do it very well. So that’s why it’s so important for you to recognize what your natural gifts are, because that’s what’s going to carry you forward.

If you get what I mean to say and you catch my drift, then you are ready to figure out what you’re meant to do. Here are some action steps that you can start taking now.

The first step is to list out three to five natural gifts or talents that you possess. Step two is to then match them to real-life jobs that would value these talents and gifts that you happen to possess. Step three is to develop a step-by-step action plan on how you plan to achieve that job.

Hope that helps!