That’s unacceptable. No person should have to slog through a job that fails to stoke their soul and fire up their imagination, especially when, according to HotJobs, three out of every four Americans believe that their dream jobs actually do exist and 50 percent of them would even take a pay cut to make it happen.

Making your passion your profession means finding what you really want to do, figuring out the way to make that profitable, and devising a plan to put things in motion. Dramatic career changes are the all-American pastime. Ronald Regan quit acting to get into politics (ditto Arnold); Harrison Ford gave up being a carpenter and chased show biz.

In part two of this series we continue our analysis discussion focusing on two critically important items – time and energy.

Time. Many people find themselves running short of time more often than they run out of money. Time is a scarce resource and one that inevitably gets depleted. By contrast, cash can increase over time with returns on investment. In the past week, what have you done with your approximate 112 waking hours? Again, consider the values you listed in part one, and try to map last week’s hours against them. (If last week was atypical, pick the most recent week that you find representative.) As with your money, allocate only those hours that clearly support your stated values.

Are you dedicating the most hours to the activities that are of highest value to you? Was there a lot of time you couldn’t account for – time that wasn’t being used to create the things you care about?

Energy. Physical energy is another scarce resource and, like time, one that decreases with age. An hour spent on an activity when we’re fresh and fully present in the moment represents a greater commitment than an hour spent when we’re exhausted and distracted. Do the hours you spend with your partner, for example, generally come at the tail-end of a 12-hour day and a six-day week? Was your mind plotting Monday’s PowerPoint presentation during church or synagogue?

If you look closely at how you spend your money, time and energy, you should end up with a fair analysis of the alignment between what you value and how you commit your money, time, and energy. The basic idea is to identify big gaps – stated values that receive little or none of your scarce resources or a single value that sucks a disproportionate share of money, time, and energy from other values. If your values and your day-to-day commitments are closely aligned, I congratulate you: Many people find it difficult to achieve and consistently maintain this balance.

Sometimes a gap results from a reluctance to commit time, energy, or money to what we value. A professional or personal failure, for instance, may shake your confidence and leave you gun-shy about making new commitments. Of course, there are times when keeping your options open makes perfect sense. Young adults, for example, experiment with a number of different jobs, lifestyles, values, and relationships – which is often painful for parents to watch, generally embarrassing in retrospect, but actually a discovery process.

A much more common reason for a gap is that people are entangled in commitments they made in the past. Are you bound by personal commitments you willingly made in the past but that now no longer fit? These commitments deplete time, money and energy and limit your freedom even if they’re no longer aligned with what you currently value.

This is referred to as “commitment creep.” We often commit ourselves without really thinking about what we’re taking on. It’s very easy to say yes to new commitments without reflecting on the long-term costs of honoring the implied promises or the potential conflicts that may develop with existing commitments.

Most people who undertake the self-exploration process we’re describing here find that it’s relatively easy to identify their own values, somewhat more difficult to analyze the gap between their values and the way they actually live, and harder still to analyze the reasons for the gap. But the hardest task of all is doing something about closing the gap.

So, whether your passion revolves around being on the water or on a mountain up near the clouds, there are a few simple steps for getting out of your cubicle. 1) Figure out what it is that turns you on; this is your life, so take the time to make a list of the things you love doing. 2) Devise an action plan for transforming your passion into profits; it’s a possibility that you may have to take a pay cut in pursing your dream (at least initially). 3) Scour appropriate websites and help-wanted ads in the newspaper of your desired locale, talk to others who are already in the field, take off a week from work and spend those days knocking on doors of prospective employers.

Spontaneity has its place, but it’s best to be well prepared before taking the plunge. This might involve saving money or tying up loose ends in your personal life or doing whatever prep work is required in order to switch fields. It could entail taking a class or training program, getting licensed, or brushing up on the particulars that will allow you to make the leap from inspired dreamer to doer.

Joe Hodowanes, a career strategy adviser in Tampa, Florida, offers a free resume and career analysis. Fax your resume to (813) 936-0201 or email it to jmwanes@jmwanes.com For questions, call Joe at (813) 936-0091 or visit www.jmwanes.com on the Web. All Job Search Advisor articles on this website are the property of www.jmwanes.com (J.M. Wanes & Associates). You may download
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© 2005 J.M. Wanes & Associates.