She was running from meeting to meeting, deadline to deadline, and one project to the next (or multiple at a time). She had chosen a career that she thought was for her, but it wasn’t panning out like she had imagined. It was exhausting and sometimes mundane. All the super ambitious goals she had with her degree seemed to be put on a back burner by the daily “fires” at work. Corporate America was taking its toll on her. She was losing herself in work, but that higher-level purpose was missing. Is this what adulting was all about? What happened to her dreams of being a yoga instructor or being in the Peace Corps? She knew she had to change something, but she had no idea what…

Instagram and Pinterest are full of great quotes about soul searching and leaving everything behind to find your passion. This post isn’t about that.

In a perfect world your ideal job would be the thing you are most passionate about. Sorry to be the bearers of bad news, but you’re not living in a perfect world. Well, we sure aren’t. Of course, there are people who are insanely passionate about their jobs. But the thing about passion is that it doesn’t always go well with paying the bills. Sure we may want to be yoga instructors or travel enthusiasts but that doesn’t pay school loans and allow you the freedom to enjoy a steak dinner or season tickets to your favorite sports team (and yes! if they’re not in your budget yet they can be in your future).

Also. Eat, pray, love. Not real (for the average person). Unless you have a trust fund (and if you do, this probably isn’t the blog for you), you can’t just quit your job because it’s not your passion and go find yourself in Italy, India, and Indonesia [an aside: we do, however, recommend taking a pause after graduation and possibly teaching English in a foreign country – read our post on it being okay not to know what you’re doing after graduation].

So you’re not Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love and work is a little blah. What do you do?

Don’t quit your job just yet. Instead, find a way to do what you love outside of work. It took us awhile to figure this out but once we did it made a difference. Take it from us, save yourself some time and lost 401K savings and find something you love outside of work.

But there’s more to finding something outside of work than keeping your (hopefully decent, yes we need to write that negotiation post…) paycheck.

One of our former bosses was a volunteer production manager at a community theater in the evenings. At the time she was working on a huge and incredibly time-consuming project at work, and yet at nights she would volunteer at the theater until 10 or 11pm. At first one of us thought she was either insane or Wonder Woman but then we realized she was doing it because when work was crazy stressful and difficult, the theatre also served as an outlet.

Theatre isn’t really our thing. Though, one of us is thinking about trying it out. We already knew what our main passions were [and we figured this out without gallivanting around the world soul searching – but that would have been totally cool!]. In addition to the things we thought we loved, there is a list of things we have attempted outside of work (e.g., blogging, yoga instructor, wine enthusiast, Crossfit games, biking, hiking). Some are more successful than others. As you can tell, neither one of us is a Crossfit athlete. But we are strong advocates of trying new things and continuous development in all areas of your professional and personal lives.

Let’s take a glimpse into our after work lives:

Jackie love cats. Laura calls her a non-committal cat lady (keep reading). Jackie finds that fostering cats is very rewarding. Sure it doesn’t pay anything and they claw the crap out of her stuff, but helping a cat find a home is a great feeling for her and she is extremely passionate about it. Fosters = the non-committal part. Laura is passionate about disaster response. So much so that she wrote a dissertation on disaster response. She’s involved in a volunteer organization focused on helping communities that have been impacted by disasters. Oh and there’s the crochet thing that they’ve been trying – Jackie is better at that one.

You can’t always quit your job to do what you love. Especially if like us, you may not necessarily excel at some of your passions or they’re just not financially rewarding. Also, if you are having a bad day, bad week, or even a bad year at work but you have a something that you love doing outside of work, it will help you get through the aggravating or mundane times. If our managers are reading this, don’t mistake us – we love what we do now. But we have passions in addition to change management and organizational design, and sometimes…we just need an outlet.

From our experience, when you can’t quit your day job, you may need to balance it with a passion or two.

You’ve heard ours, now let’s hear yours…