Finding Your Zone

If you don't know what your passion is, how can you fulfill your creative potential?

a ballet dancer lost in the music

You hear about it all the time, that “zone” where athletes excel with apparently little or no effort. Footballers seem to attract the ball like a magnet and place it exactly where they want it with ease. An archer can't seem to miss his target, whilst the gymnast can't put a foot wrong.

In business, especially sales, too, “the zone” is a well populated place. From deals that seem to close themselves to thorny scientific problems that are suddenly truly clear, evidence of it abounds if you listen to the speech of the achievers.

There are two things to note about this zone experience. First, it's no accident. Whatever the sport, the athlete who excels in the zone can only do so because of the years of training that have gone into building the skills and physical abilities needed to perform well. Without the background knowledge, no amount of raw talent will sustain zone performance for any length of time. The rookie may experience this sense of infallibility briefly, but without time and training, the bubble will burst sooner rather than later.

Secondly, every one of us has a zone. We all have a talent within us that we are meant to hone and practice until it is second nature. For some this talent is obvious, such as singers, entertainers and other artists, athletes, and journalists, even politicians.

For others, our talent may be less obvious to us. We may feel there is no one thing we excel at, or love doing above all others. Or we may just feel that our interests are not worthy of such attention.

Perhaps your first love is food, and you feel guilty for that because it's led you to be overweight, rather than being channeled into a career in catering, or even as a dietician. Or maybe you loved playing with plasticine as a child, but your parents frowned on it, so your inner sculptor has been buried. Maybe it's been so long since you even tried the thing you love that you've convinced yourself you wouldn't enjoy it anymore. For me, I loved writing poetry and short stories as a child, an activity my mum considered “silly and pointless.”

The thing is, if you don't know what your passion is, how can you fulfill your creative potential? And if you do know what it is but never give it the time and effort it deserves to develop your skills, you are depriving yourself of that zone experience.

And that's unfortunate, because most of us could and should live in the zone, or at least near to it.

So, coming up are some ideas to help you find YOUR zone. If you have any suggestions, feel free to add them. Or tell us what your zone activity is. What is the one thing you love to do more than anything else, and how did you come to realise that that was your thing?

This post originally appeared on Paying Hobby on October 9, 2009.