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After years of active addiction and even during early recovery, you may feel defined by your addiction. From both a personal and professional standpoint, these feelings can cause you to feel stuck and unable to move forward. One of the main focal points of recovery is re-establishing your sense of self-worth and capabilities to understand that you are not your addiction. Achieving this takes discovering your purpose and passion for pursuing a life where your true self is nourished and expressed. So, if you are not your addiction, who will you be?
Shift Your Perspective
If you enter into an environment where you predetermine that you will have a lousy time, guess what? You would likely have a terrible time. You won't explore the situation with the time or attention needed, and it is unlikely that you will find something in this environment that you can enjoy. The same principles can be applied to finding your passion. When you adopt a negative perspective or opinion of yourself and your capabilities, you then close yourself off from the endless possibilities of life. You may even overlook the opportunities and signals that can help guide you toward something that can deliver your passion and purpose. How can you expect to find your true passion if you don't believe it exists?
Adopting a positive perspective that seeks and values any given situation's good elements can help you get more out of yourself and your experiences. You can start by looking at your friends, family, support groups, and peers. Look at these friends and family and determine whether they are motivated and inspired to follow their passion or have a negative outlook on their career goals. Sometimes expanding your circle and associating with people that are motivated to seek their true passion can help shift your perspective to feeling motivated and inspired to do the same. At START UP Recovery, we strive to expand our community with motivated and inspired people to continue to promote success and motivation for our clients.
Mix The Ingredients of Your Talents
When you realize that your passion can become a reality, it is time to look at what you already love to do. Taking time to practice mindfulness meditation or even exercising can spark inspiration and connect you with past experiences of your life that reveal what you love to do. Taking time to explore these experiences can offer you the ingredients needed to manifest your desired life outlook. However, at first, these ingredients might seem disconnected, and you might wonder how you can construct a career from your love of playing music, brewing coffee, or painting.
Sometimes it takes looking beyond these elements to determine what area your talents and inspirations might fit within. For example, you love music, coffee, and painting; you might envision yourself opening up a coffee house where you can brew coffee, feature music, and display your favorite paintings. You might also consider playing music at a coffee house or asking if they can hang your original paintings and even sell them. The idea is to look at your talents' connection and draw wisdom to think beyond each act. Sometimes having a broader scope of the bigger picture is what it takes to get you outside of stuck thoughts and motivated to work toward the bigger goal.
Set Reasonable Expectations
Having multiple hobbies in recovery is essential to sustainability. Perhaps you like to write, play music, or assemble model kits; however, you are also beginning to fall in love with a specific one of these hobbies. It is excellent to find an activity to enlighten, engross and light you up inside, but if you are looking to make a career out of it, you might ask yourself who would benefit from your newfound talent. While it is always encouraged to dream big, you should also try to be realistic about it and set reasonable expectations in the sense of what you need to contribute to make your ambitions a reality. Start by asking yourself these questions and then focus on each question to see if this venture is realistic:
- Can you turn your hobby into a career?
- How much time and money would it take to get this off the ground?
- Where do you see it existing initially, and how will you market it?
- Who should you consult?
- Will you still enjoy doing it?
At START UP Recovery, part of our transformative process helps you answer these questions. We offer an expansive network of knowledgeable professionals who do what they love for a living. They can also identify with the struggles of overcoming addiction and seeking their true passion. You will not only identify with their experiences, but you stand to gain so much inspiration from these women and men. You will feel comfortable in this environment and never like you're outside or defined by your addiction.
You establish your pursuits of passion and happiness in recovery. Trying to live up to someone else's expectations is always a recipe for creating a negative self-opinion if you do not meet these expectations. Remember, your bravery and courage develop at your pace. You do not need to manifest all of your dreams in a day. Finding passion and success is about being honest and confident with yourself, knowing when to take the risk – but not always living in fear. It is also about maintaining recovery and looking toward your support system to help you work through challenges and put your best interest first. At START UP Recovery, our effort is to help you expand upon your comfort zone to bring out the best in you and even build a career out of your passion. Whenever you feel stuck or in need of help, these are the times you may consider reaching out. Your recovery should always come first. To learn more, call START UP Recovery today at (310) 773-3809.