#596: Passion Fatigue

Episode 596, Passion Fatigue. Passion fatigue is when you become an expert in your field, when you've been doing something for a long, long time, and one day you realize, I am so tired of doing this. I don't want to do any of this work. I'm done. I'm done. And then, of course, you panic because you think, well, what else can I do? Well, that's it. We're jumping into passion fatigue. How we can correct it, how we can get out of it, how we can move in new directions and refresh. So welcome to today's episode of Flow Dreaming. Flow Dreaming. It's a show where we talk about the power of your mind to change your world around you, to literally affect the fabric of your reality. We talk about this feeling of hope and joy and relief. And that is what being aware of your flow does. It gives you a feeling of power again in your lives. Breathe. I'm Summer McStravik, and welcome to another episode of Flow Dreaming. Hi, everybody. Welcome. It's Summer. And I am kind of excited about this quirky, funky little subject. Passion Fatigue. People don't really talk about it, right? Everybody's always striving and climbing and trying to get to the next place, the next point, the next pinnacle. But there's a whole lot of people who've been up on that pinnacle for years, and they're scratching their heads wondering, how long do I have to stay up here? When do I get to retire? When do I get to shift or quit or finally go back into making flamenco costumes or spotting whales on ocean liners or whatever it is that I really want to be doing. Because this thing that I have been doing, I think I might be done. Ooh. And all of the strange, weird feelings that that brings up inside you. So I dedicate today's episode of Flow Dreaming to all of you who are secretly passion fatigued. Maybe you're still going through the mot, or maybe you're not. Maybe you're actually in a state of paralysis because you have been going through the motions for so long. So let's look at this from the perspective of energy and flow as we always do in today's. Or not today's, but in all of our Flow Dreaming episodes. So welcome and enjoy this ride with me. And if you don't know who I am yet, yes, I'm Summer McStravik. I have been doing this show speaking of passion, perhaps not fatigue, but I'll tell you in a second how I've managed to get around that. I'VE been doing this show now for heading into my 15th year. Began it back in 2005 with Hay House Radio when I started and built that network, and have since just jumped and branched and moved all over the place in my life and career and so forth. But the one thing I've kept consistent is this very podcast. And yes, I have met burnout. I have met fashion. Fashion fatigue. That's a different one. Passion fatigue. I've met that here even with my own show. But we're going to go into ways that you can one, identify it in you and in your own life and make adjustments and really get to that critical sort of energetic, emotional evaluation point, which is, do I really want to keep doing something or is it time for me to go, to move, to spread my wings, to go into new waters, new territory? So let's go back to this idea of how you reach the point of passion fatigue. Many of us who've been working a very long time, and that is subjective for you, it could be two years in one job or 20, just depending on who you are and what your mood is and anything else really. So you are working or doing something and you started out loving it and you learned a lot about it and you did it more and more and more. And probably you got kind of good at it or maybe really good at it. Maybe you're an expert at it. Maybe you could do this work in your sleep, whatever it may be. Maybe it's childcare, maybe it's teaching or being a journalist or online e commerce, marketing, or like I said, you know, captaining a boat. Whatever it may be, you got good at it. You know what you're doing and at some point you realize, ah, there's not really any other place for me to go here. I think I've really explored this. Yes, I could in theory expand, go bigger and, and stretch out and broaden things. But you know what? I just, I just don't want to, right? And then the feeling comes up, what's wrong with me? How can you take something you're so good at and reject it and stop it? And what else could you get so good at? And how long would it take to get good at it? And who would pay you? And how would you support yourself in the meantime while you're figuring all of this out? And then you say to yourself, oh, my God, my expert status has put me in a little teensy tiny box. How in the world did I do that to myself? Well, let's back up a second. People become experts they reach that point of being so, so good at their job precisely because there was something inside of them, inside of you, that's caused you to explore and explore and explore, learn more, take in more, practice more, try more, do more, see more. So there is this driving desire in you. I'm curious about this, or how do I handle that? And this is a kind of natural way that experts are really born. And typically the thing that they're becoming expert in is something in their own life that maybe they needed to figure out, right? That old proverb that the therapist is crazier than their patients, that the plumber's pipes are always broken at home, the mechanic's car never runs, he can't get his own car out of the garage. These are kind of old, you know. You know, what do you call it? Wise, Wise, wise women or old wise sayings. I can't remember the right phrase. But the idea is that we teach what we need to learn. We practice what we had, what we were weakest at that we had to figure out for ourselves and get better at until we mastered. Kind of makes sense, therefore, that once you have mastered something, you will want to go on and master something else in your life. But a funny thing happens as you master it, other people want it. They look at you and say, well, can you teach me how to do that? Or, now I really want to hire you. Or, of course we're going to give you a raise and, yeah, we're going to give you tenure. And look at you go. So precisely when you reach that point where you feel like, hey, I've got it, I figured it out onto something else, is when people start really rewarding you for it. This funny little catch 22 seems to happen in your life. You figured it all out, you know what you're doing, you've got it down, you're ready for the next thing, and now everybody wants you to stay in that thing, what do you do? How do you pivot? How do you stay fresh? How do you satisfy your own yearning, longing, desire to move into fresh pastures while at the same time serving and benefiting from the excellence that you have acquired in your craft, in your field, in your knowing. That is the key. So we're going to shift a second. Look at this from energy flow, universal perspective in the world of flow, as you grow more attuned and more to the top of your skillset in something, right, you have, in essence, probably put a great deal of energy and practice into this thing over the course of your life. You in Other words, have built up the energy. Built up the energy, built up the energy. Imagine every time you've done your thing, it would be like you throwing a little tennis ball in a room. Well, you've thrown a lot of tennis balls in that room. It's full. It's completely full. Your energy, your field of being, is heavy, is dominant, dominated by this practice that you have acquired through all of this time. Energy, emotional focus, intellectual focus that you have poured into it. It's therefore a really big part of you. And so when we want to pivot away, when we want to go into a different direction, what we feel is there's this huge part of me that I'm now shutting the door on. I'm reject, leaving. It's like a piece of myself, a huge chunk of myself that I'm no longer going to be pulling on and accessing from, relying on. And this manifests as perhaps feeling guilt about it, perhaps the feeling of, well, I just can't let it go. Of course you can let it go. The bigger picture is you feel like you're letting go of a big chunk of yourself. And that can be very scary, especially if you've reached some kind of expert status. Everyone likes to be the expert. We all love to feel like, I know what I'm doing. I've done this a million times. I can handle this. I feel confident and I feel secure in this. But the minute you close the door on that expert status and you go into what I call child mind again, beginner's mind, you are walking into a new arena where you are not the expert. You don't know what you're doing. You're unraveling and going all the way back to that open beginning, new, fresh. There are no tennis balls in this room. Room. Oh, my God. I am not used to this feeling energetically, emotionally. We're creatures of habit. We get used to certain feeling states in our life. An expert is a feeling state that you occupy, that you inhabit. It's also a big chunk of your very being, your very soul, your very essence has been changed and made by this thing. So when you pivot in a new direction, you are walking away from all of that, purposely putting yourself into a place of child mind again, I don't know what I'm doing. I might not do well at this. I might not make it at this. It might take a long time. Maybe nobody will want me doing this. You see how all these feelings come up again? How will I support myself? That's a classic one, right? Because that's the one that hits us right in the wallet. Well, I can't change careers because, boom, my income will go away. Very practical. But again, from Flow perspective, the more that you're reiterating to yourself all the reasons why you cannot do something, the more, in essence, you're locking yourself out of any possibility of ever doing that thing that you want. Because you're always rationalizing, explaining to yourself, buying into your power leaks about why you can't. So let me go back for a second and use this very show as an example. Pretty much every three to four years, I've gotten infinitely bored with this show, I will admit it. And at first, the first time it happened, I thought, well, maybe I've just said everything I have to say. I mean, maybe there's no more to it. I thought about it and I said no, because my interests are still, you know, growing and changing, and I still work with energy, and I love working with people and my clients and my students. And I love recording Flow dreams. So it can't be that. It's just something that I'm bored of. For me, I realized it was often the format, the way that I was doing it. So it would have been. I didn't want to take callers anymore. Many years I took lots of calls, so I would completely stop taking calls. Few years later, I loved doing the live show. Now I don't really want to do a live show, so I would move into podcast only, give myself more flexibility for how long I want to record for, et cetera. And then I would get tired of that, and I'd move back into live, and then I'd move back into callers, and then I'd realize, well, the topics I'm speaking into, I have started to limit myself. I've pigeonholed my audience, thinking that all you guys want from me is to do a live Flow dream and give you some insights, and that's it. And I think, well, yeah, that's cool. It's a great format, and I love it. And I've done a lot, hundreds of episodes like that. But. But I kind of also want to try something else. Maybe my audience would like me to talk about other subjects not so directly related to Flow. Right. I did this show just a week or two ago called Love Bombs, and that's all we did, was talk and felt up how beautiful we are, how amazing we are, how talented we are. That's all we did, is we just felt that and felt that and felt that, and that was the entire show. Very Strange. Different format of a show. But I had to give myself permission to change. I had to give myself permission to disappoint all of you. Possibly who would say, no, I don't like the new direction. Well, maybe you like the old direction. Go listen to the older shows. Maybe there are people just tuning in. They're saying, I love this. I love this new direction. I don't even know what the old direction was, but I'm loving this. In other words, I'm giving myself permission to change, to possibly fail. I'm not underestimating. Underestimating. I can't talk today. For some reason. I actually. I'll tell you why, just as an aside, I took my whole family snowboarding this weekend, and they had a wonderful time. I did not snowboard, but I did stand out there at the side of the mountain for about seven hours watching them. And I forgot to put on my snow sunblock. You know, I'm not at the beach. I'm at the snow. I didn't think about it. It's obvious, of course. So I ended up getting this terrible sunburn all across my cheeks, my nose and my lips. My lip, My bottom lip is so swollen and, like, you know, it's blistered. It's like, oh, so I am having trouble speaking, but that's just as an aside. Oh, that's a perfect example. Actually, another misconception, conception I used to have about this very show was they don't want to hear about my private life, my personal life. You know, they're coming here to learn about flow and energy. And by golly, my job is to teach, teach, teach. And then eventually I thought, you know, I kind of want to talk about my life a little bit. Maybe give you a peek about who I am and, you know, the things I'm into and the way I see the world and the stuff I get up to. And again, I gave myself permission. If they like it, they'll stay. Maybe new people will like it. Because of that. People who don't like it, they will go. So this is the first main point that I am getting at. All of you who have passion fatigue, it is time to throw open the doors and the windows on what you're doing. Do it differently. Change it, tweak it. If you're going into the office five days a week, go in, too. If you're only seeing one kind of patient or client or student or customer, open it up. Do another. If you have a retail store and you're selling bath soaps and bubbles, open up Another corner of it where you're selling journals and notebooks and move into a whole new direction with it. The point is, you have to allow yourself to keep expanding into your interests, not necessarily the interests of your audience, customers, clients, business partners, whatever it may be. You have to expand into your interests. And if they seemingly don't fit, fine, see if you can make it fit. See if you can cobble together some disparate pieces. Some of my favorite people, some of my favorite podcasts, my favorite shows, my favorite business mentors. They will bring the weirdest combination of things together, right? It's not just business business, it's business plus my skydiving. I'm like, well, I'm kind of fascinated by your skydiving as well as your business, right? And they didn't think to themselves, or maybe they did, but they got through it. My audience doesn't want to hear about my skydiving. They really want to hear about this business stuff that I teach. Well, actually, I'm a business skydiver, so I kind of do want to hear about that. And when you shift and you're like, well, I'm not a skydiver now. I'm going into canoeing, and we're going to go canoeing all over. I'd say, well, well, I'm kind of an adventure enthusiast. I'd love to hear about adventuring while building a business. You see, you never know where your own personal passions and interests will end up leading you. But the thing not to do is clamp down on them and say, no, I don't trust it. I don't know if people will like it. I don't know if it will work. If you do that, you will hit a dead end of passion fatigue, and you will stay there twirling in little circles until everything pretty much starts to die and wither around you. Your customers, your audience, your workplace, your whatever it will be. Because you see, what's happening is that energy that's supposed to be moving, right? Flow. Always think of that beautiful rolling river or stream, flowing water, fresh and clean, its movement. It's life, it's growth. But when that water starts to get caught in an old pool and you know, the stream is drying up, it becomes that water hole you always see in those, you know, African documentaries and all the poor little animals are drinking from this shrinking hole of water that's just getting murkier and more like ill and so sick until it just dries up. And that's what happens to the energies in our life. So this Idea that being an expert and having to stay the expert, not changing away from that status is actually a doomed way of thinking. It's a completely incorrect supposition from the get go, masquerading as something that seems to be correct. And I should do, and I should do, and I should do, right. Most people with passion fatigue have this whole lineup of I should, I should. Well, I need to, I have to. It's a shrinking water hole, and it's out of your hands now. It really is out of your hands now. Now, I've seen plenty of people who just kind of milk things along, right? They're the last four years of their career and they're like, oh, summer, I want to change, but I really need to get through this last three years to get my pension. And I'm like, well, if you think you can last, okay. But I still want to encourage you to start moving into those new directions. Pivot. Pivot. Pivot. In fact, pivoting becomes my favorite word every few years because that's what I challenge myself to do, to pivot. Where do I want to take flow dreaming this year? Where do I want to take energy or emotional work? How do I want to re characterize it? Maybe I won't even call it flow dreaming anymore. Maybe I'll just call it emotional work or, you know, some sort of active meditation. Maybe I'll change the entire way that I offer it to the world and perhaps open it to an entirely new audience than who would ever have looked at it when I called my work in this world flow dreaming. So this brings me to my second point. The way that you move through passion fatigue is one, realize that this safety that you. Or no, I'd say two. We already did one. Two, realize that the safety that you have in your expert status is actually an illusion. It means that your water hole is shrinking and you can throw all the tantrums you want about it, but there it is. I mean, that's just it. So pivoting means where are you going to go next? Can you throw those interests in that you thought had no relation? Can you start building those interests on the side? Can you start budding into something new? Think about a, you know, a rose bush. You guys hear me talk about my roses all the time, right? So I have a formal rose garden that I've planted. I have two of them because I love roses so much. And the rose puts up its beautiful stem and it puts up its bud and it blooms and it's gorgeous, and then the bloom is over. Meanwhile, that busy little bush has put up another bud and another and there's all these little side things shooting out. That's you, right? That one bloom may last you 20 years or may not. But all your other interests that are bubbling and percolating inside of you, they could bloom too. And they might even bloom faster and more furious and bigger and bolder and brighter than that first expert one ever did in the first place. That's another fallacy. It's gonna take me 20 years to get there. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe I just did for the first time the first thing that you did or built or were super excited by. Maybe the second one will only take 12 months, eight months. You don't know. You cannot base all of your future experiences on what has happened in the past. Yet we tend to do that because our minds like to tell us, well, this is how it happened before, so that's gonna be how it happens again. Our minds like us to feel safe. They like us to try and know what to expect, expect. So they're always giving you these ideas that are often quite wrong. And I love it when I can expose an idea that I can be very wrong about. Right. Flow dreaming for me has been a 15 year passion. And as I let little side shoots come up and grow around it, I don't know where it's taking me. It's taking me into all different directions, took me into inflow radio, to building up this other little sort of niche in my company. It will probably take me someplace else this year. I don't know. I've been mentioning I might even open up a new podcast, right? Really kind of play in other areas and expand and it may not take 15 years to reach expert status in whatever it is I do next. I love that feeling. That feeling excites me, makes me feel like hungry. I want to do this. And now you can already feel the fatigue. The dead endedness starts to wash away from you and all the thoughts you have in your mind of. I'll never feel this passionate again. You know, I just, ugh, I don't feel like doing anything. Well, you know, maybe you're really just tired too. Maybe you just need a break. Maybe it is time for a few weeks off or six months off. Or maybe you need to just not pay attention or care so much for a little while while you figure out what that new passion is that wants to come up inside you, that just hasn't had enough time to expose itself inside of you. Give yourself that. But know, know that it's There know that it's always there. These other side shoots are always there. And they can happen fast or slow. They could be even bigger than the thing that you think you're already fatigued and tired and top of your game at go in with this wide open, curious energy. I wonder where this will take me. And those of you who've been flow dreaming for a long time, what you're recognizing, what you're hearing, the subtext here as there is an emotional endpoint that we're going for. That emotional endpoint is I am curious and I am allowing and I am not shutting down. I am opening up and I'm not fearing. Instead, I'm offering. You see, this energy completely shifts. Passion fatigue is an energy of closing down. Sometimes it's an energy of a resentful closing down. The opposite of it is an opening up. It's a lightness, it's a curiosity, it's a wondering, it's a. I don't have to push this, make this, squeeze this into something too quickly, but I'm interested. And that's the last thing I want to leave you with. If you're interested in something, think of it like a little creek bed. And this one little bit of water is saying, ooh, if we travel over here, we can get to our destination faster, right? So the creek splits and this is how rivers jump course over the years. They're always finding the little better way there. But that's where the energy wants to go. That's the power in you. You've gotta let it go there, give it permission, say yes and trust that it knows where it's gonna go. So we're not gonna do a flow dream in this particular episode. But if you're curious more about what flow dreaming is, about what I do, what I teach, how my students learn from me. Two resources for you right off the bat, before we wrap things up, one of them is going to my website, flowdreaming.com. there you're gonna find a free kit. And that kit will teach you the basics of flow dreaming. There's a PDF in it, there's some MP3s. I show you how to get into this marvelous, wonderful, energetic emotional practice, right? It's co creation at its. It just feels so good. And if you're on your phone right now listening, you can just go to the app store. And if you get the flow dreaming app, you can basically it comes with the free kit. So just open it up, you know, register, get yourself in and you can grab the kit that way too. So that's the best. The second is once you're at the shop. Flow Dreaming Explore. Look around at all the flow dreams that I've recorded. These are not meditations. They're very active, emotionally changing audios that when you go in you will feel differently at the end. That is the result of them. The feeling different changes both you inside and it also changes what you're attracting, co creating and making around you on the outside. Those are the very best ways to start the process. And if you discover that this is some really dang good stuff and I like this and I like the way you think, then come join me in me school and I am more than happy to take you under my wing, bring you in with my other students and begin really teaching you how to recreate your life in a big, big way. And this is also an open invitation to those of you who would like to coach with me privately and personally. I do have some spots open right now and so I am looking for a few people who want to work with me multiple times a month directly, one on one. And I'll help you too. So that's it. You can think of that as the show sponsorship. Thank you for listening. I love you guys and I hope you got a lot from this show today. I'd love to hear from you. Please leave a review for this show that would mean so much to me. And with that, kisses and hugs to you all. I'm gonna go put on some more chapstick and I'll see you all again next time for another episode. That's a wrap for today, but if you want to keep things going, then download my free Flow Dreaming apps. That's right, there's two of them. The first app allows you to listen to this podcast anywhere you want on your mobile device, as well as search and favorite episodes. The other app hooks you up with my Manifesting Store, which includes an oracle to help you see what direction you most are in need of right now and advice. You can also sample all kinds of Flow dreams and put together a library of your own. So to find these apps, just search Flow Dreaming in itunes or on your Google App Store.