Maybe You Don't Need to Find Your Next Passion

As athletes, we're given a lot of hard things to do. And for many of us, doing hard things is actually pretty motivating.

But when we transition out of sport, we're given an almost impossible assignment without even realizing it:

Go find your passion.

There's just one problem.

We already know what deep passion feels like.

News flash: I know what I'm passionate about. I love, love, love playing volleyball at a really high level.

Newer news flash...

I can't do it anymore. (For many different reasons.)

For 15–20 years, many of us organized our lives around something we loved. So when we leave sport, we're definitely not starting from neutral.

We're comparing whatever comes next to something that took years to build.

Years of practice. Relationships. Mastery. Competition. Progress. Belonging. Sacrifice. Success. Failure. Identity.

And then we transition out and are basically told:

Okay. Go find it again.

Can't imagine why most things look a little flat.

Think about it for a second.

How lucky were we to find something we were passionate about that we got to do and organize our lives around?

And now you expect me to find that again?!?!?

That alone feels daunting.  And, well... like a pretty big ask.

But there's another part of this that I think we forget.

Our passion for our sport wasn't fully formed the first time we stepped onto the court (or field, track, pool, etc.).

I'm old, so I grew up playing multiple sports before I eventually settled on volleyball.

I tried things.

There was T-ball in second grade. Ballet until I was 13. Basketball. Volleyball. I think gymnastics was somewhere in there too.

Eventually, volleyball became my thing.

And even within volleyball, I experimented.

I played different positions. My relationship with the sport evolved. I got better. I became more invested. I had increasingly meaningful experiences. I developed relationships. I competed at higher levels.

At one point or another, I played every position on the court for either club or college.

Except libero. That position didn't exist when I played. Because, like I said, I'm old.

In other words, I didn't find my passion. I built it.

I think that's a pretty important distinction.

And it changes the post-sport "assignment" significantly.

Instead of:

Go find something else you're passionate about.

What if the assignment was:

Go find some things worth getting curious about.

Then go explore. Try things. Pay attention. See what happens.

Some things might stick. Others won't. You might start something, stop, change directions, or stumble into something you never would have expected.

And maybe, over time, something gets the opportunity to become meaningful.

That feels like a much more realistic assignment to me.

Oh, and one more thing…..

Before we go searching for whatever is next, I think we need to understand what made sport matter so much in the first place.

What was it about sport that made you love it?

What was the best thing it gave you?

Competing? Building toward something? Teammates? Shared goals? Challenges? Seeing yourself get better?

Because once we understand what made us love sport in the first place, we're no longer trying to find Sport 2.0.

We start looking for pieces of what made sport meaningful to us. And those pieces can show up in places that don't remotely resemble a volleyball court

And maybe there's something else that's hard to admit: we don't actually know what we're looking for.

I might even argue that **we don't know that we don't know.  (Wrap your brain around that!)

So we keep telling athletes and ourselves…. to find our next passion. Or we try to answer the question, 'What do you want to do next?' without first trying to understand what made us so passionate about sport in the first place.

So maybe we're starting in the wrong place. What if we started by understanding the passion we already had?

Then we get curious. And let ourselves experiment. Start. Stop. Change directions. Learn.

And give ourselves enough time for something new to matter.  Without panicking when we don't have it all figured out as fast as we (or someone else) thinks we should.

After all, it took us years to build the first one.

Why would we expect the next one to happen overnight?

Cheering you on,

Jill