What do you do in your free time?

What are you passionate about?

I was having a great conversation with a team mate about this yesterday, Friday afternoon, a few hours before the weekend. We were discussing, how does someone find their passion? Here on LinkedIn, we talk a lot about work, and we find inspiration from those we follow that have seemed to marry their passions and their work.

My response to this thought would be to look to your weekends for that answer. Why? Well your weekends are when you have the most “free time”. Time where we aren’t getting paid for use of your time, but rather time spent on doing whatever you want. You also have free time before and after working hours on the weekdays, but let’s be honest, most of that time is spent trying to rest so that you can prepare for another day of work.

So now that we have established the basis of what is free time, why does free time tell us what we are most passionate about? By asking yourself: What do you do with your free time? Do you cook? Do you sing? Dance? Do you spend time with family? It can be a lot of things. But your free time and what you do with it is entirely determined by you - versus paid time, that is determined by deadlines, projects, client asks, etc.

The reason why reflecting on your free time is important for discovering your passions is because this is time you have voluntarily chosen to spend on things you ACTUALLY want to do. Not to say that you don’t want to do the things you do during paid time, but likely you want to do less of those things. Your free time and what you do with it is probably is a good area to start when it comes to discovering what you really want to do with most of your time.

As for me, I love to dance, take photos, listen to people’s life stories and learn from them. So, in a way I guess you could say I enjoy connecting and engaging with the world immediately around me. So, I’ve made a conscious decision to pick paid time opportunities where I get to do this. Whether that connect and engage with my clients, team mates, co workers, or help my photography clients by better understanding their stories - it has now become my life’s work to just keep doing more of this, all within the scope of helping others.

So, what do you do with your “free time”?