THE PASSION PROJECT : PART II | Smitha Shetty
As far as I can retreat to retrieve into depths of my mature mind, there has always been this one obsessive idea that has propelled me through my professional life – “Why work doesn’t feel like work for some people?”. Some people seem to breeze through the weekdays, hardly waiting for the weekend to come and when it does, they simply carry on working, oblivious of the calendar constraints. Monday morning blues is not a relevant thing for them. They get up every day rejuvenated with a sense of excitement for the day ahead and what they are about to achieve. These are of course people who have found their passion in life that is now leading them purposefully in whatever they do. And yet, as we have these real-life examples strutting around, it seems like an almost-alien concept that doing something you love, professionally, is even a remote possibility. It’s just a myth they say, something out of a fantasy film they feel. “Nobody is that happy with their job”. But that is exactly the point. For these people, what the do isn’t a mere job, it is the joy of their existence. I have stumbled through life, trying to find that joy for myself. And while I still may be an amateur, I thought to seek out the experts who may help shed some light to find what we all are looking for. This series encapsulates those people who have not only found their passion but are living it. And I hope their stories will inspire you to live your purpose too.
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“Passion is the difference between having a job and having a career.”
– Anonymous
A LinkedIn notification popped up on my laptop screen and as I distractedly pulled my eyes away from the new worry of the week that I was working on, I saw an unfamiliar name on the message. Smitha Shetty. I opened it, trying to rattle my cramped brain and see if I could conjure up any connection to my past acquaintances, though nothing jumped at me. But the message from her sure did. She introduced herself, an executive coach and an alumnus of my previous institution who was trying to reach out to the people in her network during these difficult times for a complimentary coaching session. At first, I thought I was a wrongful recipient of the message but something that she had penned there, stuck with me, “There are opportunities hidden in adversity. We just need to find them.”
And so, once I had typed in my affirmative response and hit send, I had the fortune of someone helping me give that perspective and nudge to start doing what I love to do. At the end of our long call, I asked her what made her reach out to her network for free, and she replied, “Well, I just love what I do, and I wanted to use that to help as many people as possible.“
In that moment, it was like her spark lit mine up and I could feel a warmth spreading inside. We parted with her now knowing a little more about me and helping myself know a little more about me too. But our paths crossed once again and this time around I knew that I wanted to be the one listening. So, as we finally connected over patchy internet after going through every single mode of communication for two people staying thousands of miles away, I expressed my gratitude and offered an explanation for taking away her Saturday afternoon.
“We are living in a world where most of us don’t believe in working with a purpose anymore. How did you then find out that this is what you are passionate about?”, I implored her intriguingly. “It took me quite some time too actually. I found out my life purpose after hanging around for 37 years. But I could see in myself quite early on the grit of not settling for something that I didn’t love. I realized that something like engineering wasn’t going to cut it for me. I think that was the beginning. Because it was a decision to do things that I truly enjoyed. And that has stayed with me throughout”, she replied. But these humble beginnings soon began shaping up much of what she did and how she saw her career going. “About 6 years ago I had heard of executive coaching and thought to just explore it. I started by coaching my friends and family to get a sense of it. I had taken on one such assignment where my client had to make a very serious decision in a matter of just a week. It was quite intense for both of us because of the gravity of the situation but I was so amazed to see the turnaround. It was heartening to see how much impact our time together had on the person. That’s when I knew this is it. I have found my calling.”
It is interesting to note how Smitha actually related this feeling. In her own words, “How you feel when you find your passion is extremely grateful. It’s like falling in love and you feel giddy. I have had a checkered past but to finally find something that clicks is a heady feeling, it’s a feeling of I have finally arrived where I needed to be.”
Her journey truly had been quite varied, I found out as we talked. She had started out as a professional in the banking and consulting world, shifted to process management and is currently into the field of data and analytics along with her executive coaching. She has dabbled in design thinking and agile methods, and also is a part of the women empowerment initiative in her company. She is also someone who has moved out of her home country, moved into completely different corporate world, then bid a temporary adieu to the office when she became a mother and then got back to work when the kids were grown up. “It’s best to do such kind of experimentations and extended stints to help you understand what you are good at, I think. For some time, I also contemplated about the work I had done already. The experiences I had were telling me that coaching might be the one for me. But at some point, you have to move from that gut feel to actionable pursuit. So, I obtained my coaching certification, took a leap of faith, and started my own practice. And the kind of satisfaction I derive from helping my clients every day and how my clients look forward to connecting with me on all the important matters, I think that is what corroborates my hunch every day.”
Unfortunately for some of us, our gut just talks to us when it’s time to eat rather than signal about our passion. So, I probed her more on how someone can actually find their passion, to which she turned me to the three C’s – courage, curiosity, and calculated risks. “But out of all these, the first one is the most important. Passion is something that you may be born with or you may find along the way. What sets apart some people is that they have the courage to follow their passion. In fact, for me to find my passion, the biggest obstacle was me. I have myself had bouts of doubts and anxiety, struggled with imposter syndrome and have been scared to take up different things. But the bigger picture is that we are here to experience life – in all its forms and glory. ”
Smitha calls this as her ‘Wheel of Life’. Like a wheel, life has many spokes. You have your family, your relationships, your professional work, your hobbies, your health, your passions and so on. You must ensure that you are enriching your life through each of them and not just dependent on one. ”It’s like exercising different muscles”, she says. It’s probably due to this hard-core exercise regime built over the years that she is now able to storm any weather. “In the starting days, it does get bleak because you still want to do something that is not working out. And if you had asked me then how I would have managed not having a passion, I might have said that I would have had a complete breakdown. But now when something is not working, I will definitely be down, but I will snap back out because I have more to look forward to, especially like my kids, my day job, or my social impact work I just want to fill my life with lot of positivity and multiple passions.”
If only the cogs of such wheels ran so smoothly! But we all know that however much you may polish your wheel or exercise your muscles, you are bound to sometime find a spoke splintered, or a muscle injured. I questioned her about the how to tackle the practical side of having a passion because when all is said and done, passion doesn’t come directly to your career fair giving you a permanent job and benefits. She pondered before professing, “See, I am a very risk averse person. Even when I started coaching, I didn’t quit my job but just gave coaching sessions for free to practice and put my name out there. So, staying hungry to follow my passion is not something for me. But I do give myself deadlines to see if something works. I don’t quit without giving it a fair shot. In my mind, if even in 6-8 months I am still uncomfortable with the work I do, I move on to something else, try to change some variable in that equation. I give my kids this rule too, and I think it helps keep us grounded. If, however, what you love isn’t working out, maybe take a job that you still relatively like, and then branch out into the fields that you actually have a passion for. But at the end of the day, what triumphs all is whether the things you do make you feel contented because that is what fuels you. So, the barometer should be whether you are hungry and miserable or whether you are hungry and still happy.”
While I wanted to keep extracting more wisdom from her, I could hear her personal and professional life calling out in the background through the muffled clang of chores and intermittent mail notifications. “How has your passion for coaching changed you?”, I tried to squeeze in one last question. “It all started out with an experiment of not saying no”, she said with a smile that I felt I could see even over the virtual call. “I just decided to grab every opportunity that came my way, try out whatever I was interested in, say yes to everything. And it was like moving from a one-dimensional universe to a multidimensional one. Now I feel like I can manage so much. If something interests me, I can manage time for it. And it has definitely made me more comfortable with failure too. So, if tomorrow I have nothing more but just the experience, just what I have now, I will still be supremely happy. Because my passion has laid such a solid baseline across different facets of my life that is enough to keep me going. So tomorrow, if everything is just the same or different, I will still be grateful for what I have, what I do and what impact I can make. I will still be grateful for saying yes.”
This is first in the series of The Passion Project. To know more about the author and the origination of this series, read here.
