What Happens When You Work With Your Passion?: The Kathy Harris Story

 Being one of 10 children in a rural community and with little money to spare for extras, I grew up knowing that my place was in the pink collar arena of work. I completed the secretarial program in high school and immediately went to work in the fastest growing industry at the time – computers. My job was to keep track of the input/output flow of programs to be run on a main computer (the way things used to be done in the old days!).

I wasn’t there long before I got really bored and felt compelled to change jobs. Luckily I found one in the same organization and I became – get this – a secretary! However, I struggled to understand things like why the Executive Assistant to the Director didn’t like my ideas on how to re-structure the hanging files to make them easier for people to access. Soon I was restless again.

Fortunately for me, someone in the programming section noticed something about me they liked and offered to make me over into a computer programmer. I started the classes, took six weeks to travel, came back and ended up on the Dean’s list. I was flabbergasted because I went all the way through high school living with the fear that I might not graduate!

I became a programmer – a programmer who never completed a program the whole time I worked there. Surprisingly, however, I kept getting told by my superiors that I was doing a great job. Go figure! It was the most uncomfortable place I have ever been in because I kept thinking that any time soon someone would figure it out and the axe would fall.

They never did. Instead, I left to become a technical writer – which bored me to tears and frustrated me beyond what I ever believed was possible. By then, I was all of 24 years old. I simply couldn’t figure out how I was ever going to work another year, let alone another 41!

I bailed at the first opportunity, which luckily for me – and this time for those I worked for – landed me in the career industry. It was an interesting contrast for me. I certainly got frustrated and I struggled to keep up with the demands of my job, children, part time BA program and active social life with my husband. Yes I got tired, but it took very little to rejuvenate me. I never got bored.

In hindsight, I now realize that this work was allowing me to use my passion in many ways every day, and because of that, I not only enjoyed the work but I was compelled to do it even when I was exhausted from being up all night with a sick child… even when I had to do tasks that drove me crazy …even when my boss suddenly changed his mind about some task he wanted me to take care of.  I was doing what I loved to do!

At the time, I could not have told you what that actually was, but it certainly compelled me along a career journey that has grown increasingly challenging, interesting, expansive and further up the chain of command, until I am now president of an organization. Who would have ever thought that a high school secretarial program graduate would end up running a business and making a difference in places she had only dreamed about as a child?

Putting my passion into words happened because my passion compelled me to do something to take care of a professional angst I was experiencing – the fear that I was not doing a good enough job of helping young people figure out their career journeys. My professional angst led me to develop a career decision-making program that de-mystified the process and put each person squarely at the centre of their own decision-making. It allowed me to see a way to help people ‘hear’ and articulate their own passions. Finally I had a way to understand my own career journey in terms of the passion that drove it.

Some people call what gets revealed in the “hearing” the intrinsic motivator; I called it a Focus or driver – that unique thing that gets us up and going and connected to things in our world every day. It is what gives our lives purpose. It is there when we are very young and it never changes until we are too old to contribute to our world anymore. My Focus is ‘removing barriers that stop people from getting to exciting opportunities’. It was what I was doing when I tried to convince the Executive Assistant to change the filing system; it was what was missing in the input/output work; it was the root cause of the accolades for being a programmer who never programmed, but one who got all the other programmers to communicate and socialize and stop the work overlap. It was exactly what I got to do as a career counsellor and career information specialist.

And it did not stop there. The career decision-making process became known to people across Canada, including a guidance counsellor who was also experiencing professional angst about not doing enough to help her students move on with confidence. She recognized the need for teaching career decision-making skills to all students in Canada – and if we live long enough, in the world! My work with her started me down a path of training teachers to implement the program in schools.

Then the process got noticed by organizational leaders who asked me to come in and ‘fix’ their people which really meant to get them to step up and take more responsibility for helping the organization succeed and grow. That led to the realization that, as with individuals, the career journey of organizations was often murky and built on shifting sands. I had a career decision-making process for individuals, and soon developed a parallel decision-making framework for the organizations themselves, one that included giving the organization its own Focus. Out of that came the awareness of a strong need to coach managers, directors, leaders, etc. on how to align the two journeys so that employees were able to live their life with purpose by doing the work the organization needed done in order to move along its career path.

I doubt that this journey is even close to being over. That is how ‘working with your passion’ causes you to grow, flex, shift and work – harder than you have ever worked before. So be prepared. If you choose to figure out your Focus – to give clear definition to your passion – you will never be able to look back. You will find yourself compelled along a path that enriches your life in ways you never believed possible. It will also put you in a place where you work harder than you ever imagined you would be able to sustain – and you will love every minute of it!