That was the answer I received when I asked an experienced coach back in the beginning days of my coaching dream how I was to determine my “niche.”
All I needed to do now was figure out what she meant! In true coaching form she resisted the urge to just explain and instead challenged me to discover it for myself. It took a few years (OK, so I’m a slow discoverer), but it all became clearer as I evolved in both my coaching and my personal leadership.
Instead of asking yourself what is your niche or your purpose or your calling in this world, ask instead where those most tender, most powerful, most emotional places are inside of you. What causes you to feel, to fear, to dream, to be vulnerable? This is where to begin, but remember, those pain points are likely just doorways–the answers generally lie deeper within.
Perhaps it’s easier to see this when you compare it to the opposite: something you don’t care about and therefore don’t have a genuine pain or passion for. For me it could be programming a computer. I have no pain with that because I don’t try, and if I did I would be frustrated and annoyed, not in any way passionate. It doesn’t hurt me, there is no emotion around it, there is no striving. If somebody told me, “Wow, you’re a terrible programmer,” my response would be “Duh!” It wouldn’t matter to me. If somebody told me that I’m a terrible speaker or coach—now that hurts, because therein lies my passionate pain. I can tell the difference by how important it is for me to do well. It’s not about saving face, but serving my client or audience.
It’s important to differentiate here between bad pain and good pain. Pain inflicted on you by an outside source is not the same as pain welling up from inside you when you are being challenged, pushing yourself, and caring about doing well. That’s the kind of pain I’m talking about—the kind of pain that can reveal your passion. It’s not someone else hurting you; that has nothing to do with your passion and everything to do with your human rights being violated. Pain that reveals your passion is an internal struggle. It’s something that remains incredibly difficult, but we nonetheless find ourselves unwilling to walk away from it. We refuse to not care about it, regardless of all those internal (or external ) voices telling us that we aren’t good enough, strong enough, smart enough, eloquent enough… to be successful in that field. You don’t walk away from this pain or its subsequent (but ever-so-temporary) failures because you care. If you didn’t care, there would be no risk. If there’s no risk, there’s no motivation, there’s no vulnerability. True, if you walked away you couldn’t get hurt, but then again you couldn’t fly, either. And after all, aren’t we talking about the passions that give you wings?!
