I have three teenage children.  They’re currently being asked what they want to do with their lives – something that most people never truly discover.    Indeed, very often, as people grow older they realize that they have no idea what they want to do other than knowing that what they’re currently doing doesn’t turn them on.   And they’re the people who are attuned enough, reflective enough and aware enough to actually ask themselves these searching questions.  They are the lucky ones because years of research would suggest that these thoughts never even occur to the vast majority of so-called normal people who go through their lives on automatic pilot.  Yes, that is what decades of research prove.  The normal person is brain-dead, their mind aimlessly wandering in their long lost childhood, while their bodies just about inhabit the here and now.

Assuming that you’re one of the luckier, more aware people and that you’ve actually found yourself at a crossroads in your life, how do you find what it is that will really turn you on?  How do you find what you’re “meant to be doing” with your life?  As one client put it to me recently, how do I find my true passion?  You don’t find what turns you on – you don’t find your passion.  Your passion finds you.

We’re all, to a greater or lesser extent, stuck with a normal mind.  This mind has developed over millennia to enable us perform our routine tasks without needing to devote any attention to them.  That, obviously, has many benefits – we don’t need to devote our attention to the thousands of muscle movements involved in taking a single walking step.  Nor do we need to re-learn how to drive our car every morning (the traffic is bad enough already, thank you!).  But this psychological faculty has a major downside because, sooner or later, everything becomes routine – I often ask clients if they experience the same excitement on waking up beside their nearest and dearest after fifteen or twenty years as they did the first morning they awoke beside them! – and familiarity doesn’t just breed contempt, it switches us into automatic mode and we go through our day mindlessly.

“Blessed” with this normal mind, it is absolutely impossible for us to have any idea of what might truly turn us on.  We might think we know, but a little thinking is a dangerous thing!  We might even feel we’re sure, “set our minds” on a certain outcome and devote years of struggle to actually reaching our objective.  But that reminds me of a client who, for many years had his heart set on being the National Sales Director of a life assurance company (as I said to him “Whatever turns you on!”) only to feel empty on the day that he ascended to this lofty position.  He told me that he had climbed to the top of the hill and, not only did he not like the view, he believed that he may have wasted all that time climbing the wrong hill!

The normal mind cannot know what turns us on in terms of our life’s purpose – the normal mind mistakes pleasure for passion.  The normal mind, programmed from childhood with normal thoughts, defines success and happiness in competitive and comparative terms.  I have a bigger job, I live in a better house, I drive a bigger car, I go on better holidays is how the normal mind sees the world.  And even after the economic carnage that we have witnessed over the last eighteen months, websites and new books still shout about becoming wealthy, fast.  Bankers are returning to what President Obama describes as obscene bonuses.  Nothing has changed.

But, if you’re lucky, you want to change.  You want to grow.  You want to let your passion find you.  This is done with a clear and present mind – the only state of mind worth being in.  With an open mind one is attuned to the subtler messages that daily life offers us, the opportunities that each day presents to those with eyes to see.   Carl Jung called it synchronicity, modern quantum physics might call it potentiality.  Either way, the universe is waiting to give you the opportunity to do what turns you on, to live the life that is best for you, to be all that you can be.

You need to cultivate your clarity and presence of mind.  Meditation (and there are so many different forms that you should be able to find something that suits) is the shortest route to clarity of mind – when done with a purpose, when that clarity is then practiced practically in the ordinary of the everyday life.  But there are less strenuous forms of “mental exercising” that will get you there just as surely.  I suggest to my clients that they use their routine to break routine.  That they brush their teeth with the hand with which they don’t normally brush their teeth – something that simple enables them brush their teeth mindfully.  And mindfulness is what we’re looking for, because the normal life is mindless.