Pursue What You Love

Cindy Lopez:
Welcome. My name is Cindy Lopez, the host of this CHC podcast, Voices of Compassion. We hope you find a little courage, feel connected and experience compassion every time you listen.

Today’s episode is great for all of our listeners and especially for young adults. So please share it with the young adults in your life. And we have guest host, Natalie Tamburello back with us. You know, I think we’ve all heard find a job you love and you’ll never work another day in your life or pursue your passion, but is all of that really possible? And do we have to choose between what we love and a healthy salary? And what if we’re still figuring out what fulfills us? So while pursuing your passion may not be as easy as it sounds, Dr. Sharmila Roy, Special Projects Consultant at the Schwab Learning Center at CHC shares her sage advice in this special episode. Take it away, Natalie.

Natalie Tamburello:
Welcome to the Voices of Compassion Podcast. My name is Natalie Tamburello, and I’m a member of the Community Connections team at CHC, and I’m hosting this episode where we will discuss why it’s important to follow your passions and the different ways you can pursue what you love. Welcome, Sharmila.

Sharmila Roy:
Hi. Hi Natalie. I’m Sharmila. I am here at CHC as a consultant for the Schwab Learning Center, and I work with college students, and I do a variety of other projects for them, and I also have another role. I am an educational therapist, so I have a small boutique practice. Also I’m an instructor with the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Educational Therapy Program, where I’m also the program chair. So it’s a busy life, and it’s such a privilege and honor to be here on this podcast with you.

Natalie Tamburello:
So we can just jump right into it. So the topic of pursue what you love. Why is this so important?

Sharmila Roy:
For me, it’s really important to pursue what you love in order to find a work-life balance, because it focuses on developing you in addition to your career or resume or mainly focusing on your affect, on building your confidence and helping you to discover your own strengths. It’s really important to send out the message also that pursuing your passion or pursuing what you love is not an either-or cliché. For a long time, I think young people were led to believe that if they monetize their passion, it would lead to great outcomes, desirable outcomes of stability, security, with a little bit of discriminatory income. But here’s my question: social status and prestige are values that are attached to working yourself to the bone for probably subpar pay with no time left to grow, invest in relationships, build community, and learn to not only be tolerant of diversity but to actually include them and accept them and love them for who they are, not for what they do.

Natalie Tamburello:
Yeah, what’s interesting is I think this is something that we’re now valuing more today in society than maybe two or three years ago before the pandemic, is really taking a stock on what we do on a daily basis, and that our life is not entirely about work, but also work life balance.

Sharmila Roy:
Yes. And I think that the pandemic taught us that we don’t need to be in our seats in front of our screens five days a week 10 hours a day. We can do a hybrid version. You really don’t need to be in person all the time. Of course certain things are much better delivered in person, discussions and, you know, but I find that when I teach online courses, I have access to so many different people from different countries even. Most young people that I meet who are in high school or in college and even beyond, are so consumed by their academics and so pressured by their careers that they really have very little time for self-care, to figure out that they need support for their mental health, for their growth, for self-care, for friendships, family. These things are important in our self-development, in our individuality to be part of the community and it’s a part of discovering what you love. I think that if you are living an isolated kind of life, then it’s much harder to find out, hey, you know what, this is what I really love doing, but sometimes you meet a bunch of people and you’ll find that, oh, you know what Natalie actually does graphic design, and it’s something that I’m really interested in or I want to draw cartoons, and you meet people and you see how they work, you find mentors. It’s really a choice. If you are ambitious, and you want to buy into the corporate life, then you have to be prepared to give up 50 hours of your week to that life in order to succeed at it, to excel, to reach the top, but if it leads to burnout was it worth it for you?

Natalie Tamburello:
Yeah, burnout can sneak up on you too. I think a lot of people work very, very hard and not realize that they’re, you know, burning the candle at both ends. What would you say to young adults who are kind of wrestling with what seems like a binary decision? Do they pursue money and stability or do they pursue what they love? What’s your advice for them?

Sharmila Roy:
You can do is my belief and my experience, by making a choice to enjoy the life you’ve been given and not suffer a career that is devoid of any delights, by making the choice to appreciate life’s gifts and not always measuring their monetary worth. By that I don’t mean to exclude folks for whom financial security is the top most priority. That is a huge amount of burden on each and every one of us, to provide financially and it’s not just to get by, but to actually put something away for later, for enjoying your delights, and for later on in life. What impresses me most is that young people today are really, when I heard about the gig economy, I didn’t believe it until I met the people who are really practicing it. So, they work really, really hard, for like 20 days a month and the other 10 days they go somewhere else and they’re working from somewhere else, Lisbon, you know, Morocco. What about if you compare, let’s say, a Goldman Sachs banker who, you know, had an Ivy League education and makes a gazillion dollars a year, with let’s say someone who is doing ride share, ride share driving, and does it all full-time, makes $110,000 net per year and decides when he’s going to work, what time he’s going to work, and he sets time aside. He has not given up his life to his work. His net worth, his self worth is not that attached to what he does. What he does is what he does and who he is is separate from that. So I feel you can do both, Natalie.

Natalie Tamburello:
I think a lot of times we equate our self-worth with what we do, and it’s really hard to separate who we are from what we do. It’s usually you know, the first question you ask at a cocktail party is, oh, what do you do? Who do you work for, rather than who you are as a person and what your hobbies might be or your interests might be. And so I think that’s a really important distinction is that your self-worth is built from more than just your career and your job. I’m really glad you brought that up.

How do you identify what you love? So how do you distinguish what is something that you’re just skilled at versus something that you’re passionate about?

Sharmila Roy:
I’m a classic example of that. I had absolutely no idea when I was in high school what I wanted to do. I was, you know, like an average student. I passed out of high school, went to college, got out of college still didn’t know what I wanted to do, and so, thankfully, I had parents who said, okay, go try a bunch of things. Okay. So I tried a bunch of things and finally came back to the one that I knew I could do well, I had actually a skill set to offer and that I could sustain frankly throughout my life and now I feel I’ve done it for such a long time that I’ve sort of put in little bits of delights and joys. I know what gives me the joy and what is part of the job. I’ve been able to make that distinction. Almost any job that you have will have little delights built into it, and it’s up to you to find that and so that it doesn’t become, oh my gosh, you know, I have to get up and go and, you know, and do this and do that. So, it is all in your own perspective to flip that conversation in your head to say, I will do what I love and inculcate it and put bits of it into what I do.

Natalie Tamburello:
Yeah. That’s really important. I think, you know, I’ve worked with so many students who they wanna become a singer or they want to become a rapper or an actor, right. And drilling down what they love about that is performing or coming up with a sketch to convey some sort of meaning. And a lot of those students that I’ve worked with have become teachers because that same skillset of performing and keeping a captive audience is a part of teaching. So you never know what career might give you joy in a different way than you had anticipated and maybe the acting doesn’t work out, maybe the singing doesn’t work out, but the same joy you can experience in a career that might have unexpected benefits, to, you know, pursuing your passion.

Sharmila Roy:
I would really welcome people to come to Children’s Health Council because we developed a series of salons called, “Pursue What You Love” that rose out of a book that we read for book club called Can’t Even, and it’s by Anne Peterson, talks about millennial burnout, and this whole series of salons focuses on prioritizing your delights, the excitement of possibility when you discuss it, when you look at it in visual terms in front of you, when you see, oh wow, here are the possibilities that my interest, look at all these branches that I can explore. And then that’s how you unlock your strengths and recognize and learn to love yourself more than you do now.

Natalie Tamburello:
For those of you who want to work with SLC to discover what you love and pursue what you love, you can go to chconline.org/slc to learn more and sign up on our website.

Mike: CHC’s Voices of Compassion podcast is made possible by the generosity of people like you. To learn more about supporting CHC, go to chconline.org/donate. Also make sure to follow us on social media for more inspiring and educational content from CHC.

Natalie Tamburello:
So do you need to discover what you love or can you work to develop a passion? Maybe you’re not someone who has a passion that they can immediately think of. So how do you develop a passion? How can you work to develop that?

Sharmila Roy:
If you really don’t know, like I didn’t know, then you have to invest some time to figure out what it is that really grabs you and will give you some joy. You don’t have to think of it for the rest of your life, even if you think that it’s going to give you happiness and joy in that activity. For me, it is meeting with friends. It gives me an intense amount of joy, so I make the effort to meet them, and it doesn’t have to be a long, prolonged meeting. So whatever gives you joy, make time for it.

You know what neuroscience says, right? It says that your brain matures at about age 25 finally. And for our population, for the people we are talking about, you know, who haven’t kind of matured by then, I would say anecdotally in my experience, that the age you really figure out what you want to do long term is about 30 plus. So give yourself that time. Give yourself the belief. Believe in yourself that eventually you will be doing exactly what you’re meant to be doing. So if you explore yourself, and you give time to finding out what you love, then life will love you back.

Natalie Tamburello:
Yeah. So what if you’re someone who really loves something, but you’re very nervous that you’re not good at what you love? When I think about this question, I think about people who are like me, who are dyslexic and have been told a lot of their K through 12 life that because you’re dyslexic, you can’t pursue careers related to reading and writing, but there are so many people with learning disabilities or mental health challenges that actually have passions in their areas of weakness. So I’m curious what you think about people who wanna pursue passions that might challenge their skillset.

Sharmila Roy:
Are you not good at it or have you not spent time finding it or have you not practiced it? So those are three categories of finding out. Okay what you’re good at. Every person that is successful today has spent countless hours failing, countless hours figuring out that, hey, that really didn’t work. So the mindset that it’s okay to fail and try again, that is the mindset that you don’t turn the lens on yourself and say, okay,  I’m a failure for life because this one thing didn’t work because I was trying writing gothic novels and it didn’t work. Who said that a dyslexic can’t write a book? Look at the technology out there today. You can dictate a book, right? You can have software that will edit the book. We want your voice. We want your thoughts. We want your imagination, your innovation. I mean words are manmade, right? But your imagination is natural. Your ability to speak is natural, and so we can always capitalize on the dyslexic’s creativity on their imaginations, on their ability to look at big pictures, to make stories, right? So we have solved that problem. We have stopped waiting for the individual to suddenly wake up to all of these abilities that essentially are not required to cater to their strengths and help them succeed. If you look at all the famous people who are actors and film directors in Hollywood, a bunch of them are dyslexic, you know, and they actually listen to words and they can remember them and they can repeat them. Those are skills that doesn’t require reading. So we have so many ways today of helping individuals with challenges in school, and they were told unfortunately, that they would never succeed at this or that. My only advice for that would be you don’t know until you try it. And if you go out and get the support and seek the help and be authentic, you will find it. You will find that passion. You will find the person also who will help you and give you that leg up you need and help you to find yourself.

Natalie Tamburello:
Yeah and maybe you do it in a different way, as you mentioned, that’s not the traditional path or the traditional way of writing a book or writing a screenplay or whatever it may be. And you found a new way that works for you, and I think that hill to climb can be very intimidating. So it’s encouraging to hear you say, don’t give up, keep trying, and you don’t know until you’ve tried a few times and maybe tried your own way instead of someone else’s predetermined way. So what advice would you give to young adults who might be listening to this podcast right now, and you want them to walk away with one or two valuable pieces of advice What are your takeaway thoughts for them?

Sharmila Roy:
I usually don’t like giving advice because it sounds preachy and it sounds like I have it all figured out. I don’t. I’m still learning. There’s no huge hurry to reach that shiny goal is the only thing I can tell you. If it’s a circuitous route that you need to take to get there, take it. You know, believe in yourself and take that route that will take you to the best person that you can be. No one else can fix you. There’s nothing to fix. That’s the other message is that there’s nothing to fix about you. You are perfect as you are, and do things that give you peace, give you joy and keep you centered. That’s all. They’re very broad, but keep trying. Perseverance is a huge aspect of finding and pursuing what you love.

Natalie Tamburello:
I have one other question for students listening to this or young adults listening to this and they’re thinking, well, my parents would never let me do that. You know, academics are really highly valued in my home. Becoming a doctor or a lawyer, or at least making above a hundred thousand dollars a year is really high value to my home. How do you talk to a parent who is struggling to accept that their child wants to pursue something that may not be as lucrative or has a passion that is not accepted in their family structure.

Sharmila Roy:
I would speak to them to buy time to say, okay, can you give your child one year or two years, like gap years to go and do this other thing that they’re so passionate about, give them a chance, let’s see what happens, you know, that would be the line is not to give up what they’ve worked for, not to stop being an engineer or a lawyer or a doctor, but to give them the time to go and do this other thing so that they don’t feel that they’ve been deprived of the chance or the opportunity to seek that thing, whatever it is, you know. It could be traveling, it could be going and volunteering in a camp and to teach in Africa. It could be going and building homes in Nepal, whatever it is that they want to do. I think they should be given a chance to explore, playing the cello. If you’re being expected to earn a hundred thousand dollars or more than that, then you’ll probably receive the education for it.

Natalie Tamburello:
Yeah, and I’m listening to you, and I’m thinking about my experience in high school and most of the things that I learned that I tangibly remember today, or skills that I have today are ones that were applied to the passions and the volunteer opportunities that I pursued, not geometry or advanced calculus. So I think that’s really important and we underestimate how much you can learn in a non-school setting, in a non-academic setting that are actually academic skills, but are in a volunteer setting or pursuing a passion. So I think that’s really important.

Sharmila Roy:
Most of the learning that happens, happens outside the classroom.

Natalie Tamburello: And what is retained? What is retained when you’re making those decisions? Like, as you said, when the brain matures at 25 or maybe 30, for those of us with learning differences, what is retained? What do you remember that you learned is when it’s applied to something you’re passionate about, not in a vacuum or, you know, at a school desk.

Sharmila Roy:
Great point. That’s a really great point. Yes.

Natalie Tamburello:
As a reminder to our listeners, CHC is here to support you. We have many free resources in addition to our podcast, including our resource library, our parent support groups, and our collaboratives for school counselors and learning specialists. And you can always make an appointment with our Schwab Learning Center at CHC. You just have to go to chconline.org/slc. Thank you so much, Sharmila.

Sharmila Roy:
Thanks, Natalie.

Cindy Lopez:
Visit us online at podcasts.chconline.org. Make sure to subscribe to Voices of Compassion so you never miss an episode, and we’d love it if you’d leave us a rating and review. Have a question? Send us an email or a voice memo at podcasts@chconline.org. We’re here for you when you need us.