054: How to Rediscover a Passion You Set Aside

What is something you once loved that you quietly stopped making room for?

Sometimes we assume we have lost our passion, when the truth is that life, responsibility, health challenges, work, family, and busyness simply pushed it to the side.

In this Identity, Passion and Reinvention Saturday episode, Fredricka Davis shares how she is intentionally reconnecting with several passions she has neglected, including painting, trail walking, horseback riding, and photography.

As she prepares for a short family trip, she is packing the supplies, shoes, clothes, and camera she may need—not because she plans to cram everything into three days, but because she wants to prepare for possibility.

Fredricka also explores what happens when you genuinely love your work but allow that passion to take over every available space in your life. Even meaningful work can become exhausting when your brain never gets a true break.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• Why you may not have lost your passion, but simply lost access to it
• How responsibility and busyness quietly crowd joy out of your life
• Why loving your work does not make you immune to burnout
• The importance of doing something that does not need to be productive
• How to reconnect with an old passion without turning it into another project
• Why lowering the barrier to reentry makes it easier to begin again
• How to prepare for possibility instead of forcing an outcome
• Why your next chapter needs joy, play, creativity, beauty, and rest

Not every hobby needs to become a business.

Not every creative moment needs to become content.

Not every activity needs to be measured, tracked, shared, or perfected.

Sometimes the purpose is simply the experience itself.

Reflection Question

What is something you once loved that you have stopped making room for?

Then ask yourself:

Do I no longer love it, or have I simply lost access to it?

This Week’s Reset

Choose one passion, hobby, or activity you have set aside.

Do not make a major commitment or try to rebuild your entire life around it.

Instead, lower the barrier to reentry.

Find the supplies.

Charge the camera.

Put your shoes by the door.

Look up the class.

Contact the friend.

Protect thirty minutes.

Prepare for the possibility that this part of you is still there.

Then give yourself permission to enjoy it without needing to accomplish, prove, post, or produce anything from it.

Learn more about Fredricka’s coaching, programs, speaking, upcoming events, and the free Limitless Living community for women who are becoming at FrederickaDavis.com.

Be rooted. Be resilient. And be limitless.

Grab Your Free Reset Guide and more at www.fredrickadavis.com

Continue the conversation inside the here: Limitless Living community.

If this episode resonated with you, you can also send Fredricka a message through the Fan Mail link in the show notes. Your questions may be featured in a future episode.

And if you know someone who needs to hear this conversation, please share the episode with them.

Your reviews mean the world to Fredricka and help other women discover the show.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Okay, hello. Welcome back to the identity, passion, and reinvention Saturday episode of the Limitless Living Podcast. I'm Frederica Davis, creator of the Limitless Reset Method, and your host. And every Saturday we talk about who you are becoming, what you may be ready to rediscover, and how to create a next chapter that feels more like you and the life you really want. So today I want to talk about something that really I see happening all the time. It's happened to me, it's happened to so many of my clients. I watch it, friends, all around me. And it's that we don't necessarily stop loving all of the things we once loved, our passions, our hobbies, things like that. We simply stop making room for them. Now, this is for very good reason. Honestly, life starts to get busy. Our, you know, we're working on our careers, we have families that are in need, and we're we're focusing on growing those and taking care of everybody and our businesses. If you happen to have a business, whether it's your career or a business, it'll start to demand more of you. Our bodies can change, and then the responsibilities we have start to change. And then sometimes we simply just go through a season in which we physically cannot do what we once did. I know I have absolutely experienced that. And then before you know it, something that used to bring you joy has quietly disappeared from your life. And this just happens to so many of us. Not because any of you are making a conscious decision to say, oh, I'm never going to do that again. You know, I'm going to give this up. It really just happens because we just keep saying to ourselves, hey, um, not today, I'll do it tomorrow, or maybe I'll get it done on the weekend, or when things slow down, I'd love to get back to that, or when I have more energy, or when the kids grow up, when I have more time, when I get a break at work, you get the picture. It goes on and on, right? Then one day we realize all of a sudden it's been years. That is what I've been thinking about as I am getting ready and preparing for an upcoming little mini break with my family. We're taking this short trip to upstate New York. Love it up there. We're going to Saratoga Springs. And we will be staying really close to Saratoga State Park. It's a beautiful place if you haven't been there. For a three-day trip, we we've rented a little Airbnb. You'd think, okay, well, you're gonna, you know, just relax, maybe wander around the town, go out to eat, whatever. No, I'm packing some extra things because if I happen to wake up early, or if I happen to stay up later and I have some quiet solitude, or if I want to carve that out and say, no, you guys go do this, I'll do this. I want to be able to do that with some things that are restorative for me. Now, this is only a three-day trip. So I'm packing sketchbook, watercolor paper, watercolor paints, pencils, and the things I might need. If I decide to sit down and create something. I haven't done art for a really long time, for too long. And I love to create art, come from a long line of artists, uh, serious artists. And I don't often carve the time out for it because I am busy using my creative juices in other ways, which I absolutely love. But I thought to myself, you know, that's a passion I haven't done for a while, and I really would like to bring that back into my life a little bit. So I'm let me take those with me and let me see if the urge comes to me and I'll be prepared. I'll have space because I'm creating space for this. Um, and it's something I can sit down and once I started, I can totally lose track in time of it. Now that's a passion that's restorative to your nervous system, it's restorative to your soul. So I'm bringing those with me. Whether it happens or not, it's okay. It's gonna be there for me. And I'm also going to pack my trail shoes and some clothes and my my pack for my waist to go trail walking because, weather permitting, I would love to get into the Saratoga State Park trails. And they're just gorgeous there. If you haven't been up there, I highly recommend. I haven't done nearly as much trail walking as I used to. I used to do it all the time. Every week I would be driving to the Pocado's or finding a more local trail and at least once or twice a week. It's very restorative. The trees, the energy, the earth, it's really, really good, not just for your body, but for your mind, your heart, your soul, all of it. Now, I haven't, not because I'm not walking, but because there for a while, I had, I mean, years a while, my body had started, you know, just having such problems and breaking down. I couldn't. My body would not allow me. I physically couldn't. Now, if I'm being honest, it's because I'm just so busy with all of the wonderful projects and ideas that I'm creating, working on. And these are also passions. However, I'm working on them so much that yes, I'm still working, I'm still walking. I haven't made the time, though, to go find a good trail and do that. And it's a different level of restoration when you spend time in that kind of nature and that kind of a surrounding. So I'm taking all of that with me. And I'm also packing horseback riding clothes. Now, I know I'm being extremely optimistic here with these three things. It's only three days. I don't want this trip to turn into one of those trips where we try to squeeze 17 activities into three days, and then we come home needing a vacation from the vacation. I am not about that. That is not the goal. Horseback riding, that's simply another possibility. It's something my husband, my daughter, and I could all join enjoy together, depending on what everyone wants to do when we get there, what's available to us, and what the weather's like, and so on. And then I'm packing one more thing, my good old-fashioned Nikon camera, because photography was and still is one of my passions. But now we take pictures with our phones constantly. We snap everything, we immediately look at it, we enlarge it, we decide, oh, we don't like that. We delete it, we adjust it, we filter it, then we post it. It's a whole big process. And it's we're it's not the same. It's just not the same level of creative outlet when we approach it that way. So sometimes we barely even stop to look at the actual thing we were trying to create, and we're creating things with agendas. This is something very different. There is something very different about walking around with a real camera. You slow down, you look at the light, you look at the details, you notice the angles, you see your surroundings through a different lens, literally and figuratively. So, yes, for a three-day trip, I have packed art supplies, trail shoes, horseback riding clothes, and a camera. Four different possibilities. Some of you are already laughing at me. It's okay. I'm laughing too. I laugh at myself all the time, and it's okay because genuinely, one of the most important things in life you can learn is how to laugh at yourself and how to handle it when someone else laughs at you. So go ahead, have at it. You can give me a good chuckle. I'm taking these four options now. Why am I taking these four options when the whole point is to rest? It's because I know myself. If I get there and suddenly think, uh, this would be the perfect place to sit and sketch or paint. I want to know and that I have them and I can just walk out to the car, grab them, and then sit down and do that. If I wake up and I feel like walking through the woods and I want my trail shoes, I'll have them. If we decide to go horseback riding, I want to be prepared. And we're in a car, we've got room to put them in there. You know, if I want to wander around the whole time or just for a day or an hour by myself or whatever happens to work out with my camera and take pictures simply because something catches my eye, I want to be able to do that. Now, I am not creating an itinerary because that says I must do all four. I am creating access and I'm preparing for the possibility. And that may be the first lesson in rediscovering a passion that you set aside. You do not have to immediately commit to doing it every week. You don't have to sign up for six-monthly lessons. You do not need to buy the best equipment either. And something else to remember, you don't need to turn your passion, your potential fun, your potential activity into a goal, a project, a challenge, or God forbid, a new business. You may simply need to put the supplies in the car just in case. Or maybe you just need to take the camera off the shelf or out of the drawer where it or the case and have it sitting there and ready. Maybe you need to find your hiking shoes and just put them by the door for the moment. Maybe you need to create an opportunity for the part of you that love that activity to just show up again. Maybe you just need to sit down, take a pause, and make a list of the things that you kind of miss doing and wish you could do again. Now, here's another part of this that I have realized about myself, and I've seen it with clients who are in similar positions. Now, maybe you're not somebody who is passionate about what you do yet and you have not figured it out yet. But if you are someone like me and you're passionate about that, I have seen this in myself and those of you who are that way. And it's the natural tendency that whenever I go anywhere, I want to take my laptop. Whether it's a vacation or not, it's the, well, I'll bring it just in case. It'll be so much less I have to catch up on when I get home. That thought, like, well, if I get a chance, I'll work on my book, or I'll work on that next uh training I'm gonna do, or I'll work on next week's podcast. Uh, or it might be I'll work on that new module I want to put into our membership for everybody, and so on. I might have an idea and I'm gonna want to put it in a folder. And here's the truth I probably will have ideas. I probably will have moments where I want to add something to something or work on something. Because when I disconnect, more ideas often come to me. This is the beauty of disconnecting. It's in the quiet that we often solve problems. It's in the quiet that ideas come to us. And they do, they come to me like crazy. And I genuinely, absolutely love what I do. I'm passionate about everything I do. I love my career. I see, I love seeing my clients in my office. I love working with someone one-on-one over Zoom or in the groups, uh, creating the programs, planning the retreats. I love writing, researching, learning. I mean, I go on and on. Podcasts, I listen to them all the time. I take courses and I feed my brain constantly. I'm always thinking, oh, that's interesting. Oh, I could really create something around that. Oh, here's another idea. You know, what do we call that? Shiny object syndrome. Well, some people call it ADD, some people call it ADHD, and some people call it entrepreneurism. Uh, you want to, you pick, pick the idea. Now, I am a knowledge, pick, pick the label if you want. Although, do we really need to label? We don't. I am a knowledge, research, creativity, shiny object, rabbit hole. Let's do this. I've got this. Let's look at every detail once I figure out the big picture. Let's work backwards, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, kind of woman. And quite frankly, that is part of what makes me as capable as I am at doing the things I do. It is not a problem either that needs to be fixed, but it does need intentional moments of pause. Okay, because when you have built a career or a business around something you genuinely love, it becomes very easy to work all the time. You don't even always recognize this as overworking because you're enjoying yourself. You're genuinely enjoying yourself. You're interested, you're inspired, you're excited about the result, but your brain and your nervous system still need to shift gears. Passion does not make us immune to burnout or overwhelmed. So loving your work, loving all the things that you do does not mean that you never need to stop doing it. And being grateful for your life does not mean that every minute of it should be spent producing, helping, learning, creating, or accomplishing something. Some of it can be just being. Now that's part of the reason I'm being intentional about not taking my laptop on this trip. I genuinely do not have a constant, I genuinely do not have a major problem with constantly checking email. In fact, if anything, I could check it a little more often. I do not need to be on social media every day. I have learned to be fairly disciplined with all of those things. But my temptation is different. My temptation is creation. It's research. It's, ooh, let me work on this idea while it's fresh. Let me outline this program. Let me investigate this question. Let me just open the laptop for a few minutes. And three hours later, I've created a new project that no one asked me to create. So some of you I know are probably chuckling, going, oh my God, to do the same thing. And others out there, you might be thinking, oh my gosh, does she ever turn off? Both of those reasons are exactly why I need a break, an absolute break from the particular kind of thinking, that kind of thinking. Not because it's bad, not at all. And not because I no longer love it, I'm not going to do it again, but because I love other things too. There should be room for both. And those other things deserve a place in my life the same way they deserve a place in your life. Now, maybe you love your job or you love your business or you love taking care of your family. Of course, you love taking care of your family, but maybe you love planning things for them, supporting them and creating memories with them and all the things that make everybody happy. This is really deeply meaningful. But here's the question I want you to sit with. What are you passionate about simply for the sake of doing it? Not because it helps your family or anybody else, not because it earns you money, not because it improves your resume or grows your business, not because it becomes more content or gives you more social media reach, not because you are particularly even good at it. What do you simply love because you love it? That kind of passion brings you different joy. And it creates a different kind of connection with yourself. It can give your mind somewhere else to go. And it will likely help your nervous system step out of its usual patterns. It gives you an opportunity to use your creativity or your attention or your physical body in a different way. Now, research has literally found that doing enjoyable leisure activities can give you better psychological well-being, lower your stress levels, and healthier physical functioning. That is based on research. There's also research connecting hobbies and creative activities with better mental well-being. We have a world filled with mental discord right now, all over the place. And doing hobbies, taking time for yourself, making room for creative activities can decrease that. Why are we not making these a higher priority? Why are we feeling guilty about taking this time and doing these things for ourselves? If that's how you're feeling, ask yourself that. There's reason to do this. And we know that spending time in nature, that's been proven to support your mood, increase and improve your attention and reduce your stress levels. Now, think reducing cortisol and think helping all your hormones balance out a little bit better because you've reduced the crazy overload of one. Or think weight loss. Okay. You reduce your cortisol reducing by reducing your stress. Well, when you're doing these types of things, you reduce the stress. There are a million reasons to make time. Now you know what it's like when you begin doing something fun, something that's a hobby, something that you used to do, such as painting or gardening or singing. Maybe for you it's cooking or sewing or photography or I'm wandering around a bookstore, whatever it is. You lose track of time. And you know that feeling of doing something that does not require you to have to prove anything. That matters. So sometimes we say, okay, I don't know what I'm even passionate about anymore. I've had lots of clients say that. I have not had that problem, I must admit. Um, I just have far too many things. But I do have a lot of clients in your in the camp thinking yourself, my God, I don't even know what I like to do anymore. You're not alone. That might very well be the case. Maybe you're in a season of rediscovering something completely new and figuring out what the things are that you do want to do. I don't think this is because you've lost your passion. So, in my experience, this is not necessarily because you've lost your passion, or maybe you feel like you never even had your passion. It's really more likely because you've given up access to it. You've lost the access to it, because it's become buried underneath responsibilities, or you became disconnected from it when your health changed, or you stopped connecting with your passions because you didn't have the money, or because your children needed you, or because you moved, or the person you used to do it with was no longer in your life, or because you thought you weren't good enough at it. Whether you enjoyed it or not, you just thought you weren't good enough at it, so I shouldn't do it. Or maybe it's because it didn't seem like a practical thing to do. Or maybe you stopped because you turned it into something productive and eventually it began to feel like work. Now that last one's important for my entrepreneur types. Sometimes you love photography as an example until you decide every photograph needs to become a social media post. Sometimes you're gonna love writing until you decide everything you write needs to become a book. Or sometimes you might love baking until everyone begins expecting you to bake for them every single event. And sometimes you'll love exercise, taking a walk outside until all of a sudden maybe your body has changed. And now you've turned every single walk into a tracking event where you're timing it, tracking the steps, measuring it, and turning it into a goal, and now you don't love it anymore because you feel like it's this chore. Not everything you love needs to have an outcome. Not every passion needs to become profitable. Not every hobby needs to become part of your personal brand. You're allowed to do something really badly and just do it because you enjoy it. You're allowed to do something privately. You're allowed to enjoy something that no one else ever sees. You're allowed to create something and then throw it away. It's all about the creation. You're allowed to take a picture and never post it. And you're allowed to walk without recording the number of miles. You're allowed to paint without deciding whether or not it's good. You are allowed to ride the horse without asking whether it counts as exercise. And honestly, the purpose can just simply be the experience itself, the memory, the moment, the disconnect, the experience. So, how do you actually begin bringing one of your passions back in? I'm gonna give you four simple steps, not 20, not an entire life overhaul. As always, I like to keep things simple, doable, just four. So, step one, remember what made you feel like yourself. I want you to start asking yourself, you know, what was it that I used to love doing? Now, this is not you asking yourself, what was I the best at? This is you asking yourself, what did I used to love doing? I mean, maybe you loved art until people said, oh my God, that's awful. What do you have? What the heck is that? Enough people said, what the heck is that? And you thought, oh, I'm terrible at this, and then you stopped doing art, but you used to love it. Chances are you still love it. You just got caught up in what other people thought about it. I want you to ask yourself, what did I used to love doing? Not what impressed other people? What made you feel like yourself? What did you look forward to? What made the time disappear for you? What did you do before life became so serious? So scheduled out. Or so focused on everyone else's needs. Now, maybe it was something all the way back from your childhood. Maybe it was something that, you know, was in your teens. Maybe it was something in your 20s, or in a period between this divorce and that remarriage, or whatever. What was it? Was it painting or gardening? Could it have been dancing? Oh, again, these there's a long list. Restoring furniture, sewing, going to museums, oh, playing an interest instrument, writing poetry or cooking or lying outside looking at the stars. It can be that simple. It doesn't have to cost money either. Create yourself a simple list. Do not edit it. Do not immediately dismiss things because they seem unrealistic. Maybe your body can't do that just yet, or maybe you don't have enough money to do that just yet. Or maybe you don't have the time to do that. Don't discount. Just write your list. Do not edit it. And step two, ask yourself, what caused me to set this aside? So this is not about blaming yourself. You might have had a really, really legitimate reason. You know, again, maybe your body did not cooperate, something happened, you physically could no longer do it. You know, you may not have had the time, the money, the childcare support, or energy, whatever it was, caretaking for somebody else. What was it that made you stop doing it? Maybe you even just simply got out of the habit. And understanding why it disappeared will help you figure out what would need to change in order for you to have it return. So for me, trail walking disappeared because my body started to break down. My health was a problem. My body was breaking down, and my autoimmune system was ramping up, and that was serious. And trying to get through the day to take care of myself, handle the pain, keep a business going, uh, manage a house, all those things, of course, things I like doing got put on hold. That was real. But later, now that my body's become more capable again and I've healed so much of it and I've really restructured things differently, and so on, that habit still hasn't automatically returned, but it's one of my next things. So now I know the reason, and it's no longer a physical limitation for me. It was also about busyness, as you heard. It was also about creation. I was not choosing to make the room to create the room for that. So this is an important distinction. So when we go away, I'm making the room for that. That's one of my first things to bring that back in. So sometimes the original obstacle can be gone, but we still haven't made the change and we're still living as though it's there until we make the room for it to return. Okay, step three: lower the barrier to re-entry. Do not begin by asking how you can completely restore this passion to your life. And okay, what's the smallest way I could reconnect with this? Could you put the art supplies on the table? Could you make time to find one local easy trail and go walk? Could you take one dance class or plant one container instead of creating an entire garden? How about could you borrow the equipment for something before you buy it for something that you love? See if you still love it as much as you thought you did. Or how about listening to music that you used to love? Or could you take the camera with you one afternoon? Just have it with you in case you want to. How about return to cooking more? Cook one recipe you have not cooked and experiment. Your first step should feel almost too easy. The goal is not mastery of anything. The goal is not overwhelm. The goal is simply reconnection. Step four, prepare for possibility. Okay. And I'm uh that's what I'm doing as I plan my packing list. I'm preparing for possibility. I'm not promising myself that I'm going to paint, hike, ride horses, take 200 beautiful photographs, or any of that kind of good stuff. That would actually turn my three-day short weekend to be connected with my family into another performance. Instead, I'm preparing for the possibilities. I'm taking the shoes, the camera, the paints, I'm putting them all in the car. I'm making it easier to say yes. Okay. What would preparing for possibility look like for you? Maybe it means leaving your sketchbook where you can see it, or tuning that old guitar or piano. Maybe it means putting air in your bicycle tires, or researching one local class to join. Maybe it means making a date with a friend who used to enjoy that same activity with you. Or it means protecting one Saturday morning next month. Or maybe it means protecting one Saturday morning next month. You do not need to force the passion to return to it. Create the invitation for yourself. Create the space. And then notice what happens next. Do not turn this into another assignment. And something I want you to really make a point of is not turning this into another assignment. Here's the warning. I need to give this to myself all the time. Do not turn rediscovering your passion or passions into another enormous self-improvement project because you do not need a color-coded spreadsheet or a to-do list with 12 passions, performance metrics, and clearly marked quarterly targets. I mean, come on, I know some of you might think like that. My high-performing clients, even when they don't feel like they're high performing, they're still doing it. It just they can't, they they have a hard time disconnecting, hard time stopping. All the more reason to not turn this into a project. It completely defeats the point. You do not need to rediscover everything all at once. Just try something you once loved and discover if you love it still the same way. If you don't, that's okay. That's allowed. You have changed. That activity may belong to a previous version of you. Or you might discover that that passion is absolutely still there and you decide, you know what? I think I do want to experience this a little bit more now, even if it's a if it's differently now. And I don't know whether I'll sit down and and paint or sketch and feel immediately reconnected to art to art. I may. I may look at the blind the page and go, oh my gosh, what do I do? I can't, you know, my juices may not flow. It might not be enough of a disconnection to get my juices to flow. But I might. I might also create something that looks terrible because I haven't done it for a while and decide, oh, I would rather go for a walk through the woods. I don't know whether we will be going and doing any of that. You know, if I go for the walk, I don't know how far my body will want to walk and how it will feel with the uneven terrain because I've been doing hills and I've been doing neighborhoods, but it's not the same as uneven wooded terrain. So I don't know how my knee will do that's still torn. I don't know. If if the moment presents itself, I'm going to do it. This is part, this is all part of the experiment. The question isn't how much can you accomplish? It should be what part of me wants a little room to breathe again. So on Saturdays, we talk about identity, passion, purpose, reinvention, you know, all the things about creating your next chapter. And I want to remind you that your next chapter cannot be built entirely around what you accomplish. Your next chapter also needs joy. It needs play and beauty and curiosity, and it needs rest. You can still, you can still build the successful business. You can become healthier, you can clarify your purpose, you can create the programs, you can reach your goals. But somewhere inside all of that, somewhere inside of all of your life, there also needs to be room for you to simply enjoy being alive. This is not frivolous. This is not wasted time. It's part of becoming whole again. So I'm gonna leave you with one reflection question for the week. What is something you once loved that you have stopped making room for? And then ask yourself: do I no longer love it or have I simply lost access to it? Those are two very different things. So, for this week, choose one passion, hobby, or activity you have set on the back burner. Do not commit to bringing it back forever. Simply lower the barrier to re-entry. Allow it back in. Find the supplies, put the shoes by the door, you know, charge the camera, look up the class, whatever it is. Block the 30 minutes and prepare for the possibility of you bringing it back in. Maybe you're still gonna love it. And then give yourself permission to enjoy it without needing to produce anything from it. And permission to be okay with you don't enjoy it and to find something that you do. We'll let you know which one of my four possibilities I wound up connecting with when we go away. And remember, the goal is not to complete the list that you've made of things that you love or once loved. The goal is to remember that there is more to you than what you produce. And there is more to life than doing and more doing. If this episode brought something back to mind for you, come find me on Facebook. Tell me what passion you are thinking about rediscovering. Join the Free Limitless Living Facebook group. And I'll put the link in the show notes. And if you know another woman who has become so busy taking care of her responsibilities that she has lost touch with herself, with the things she once loved, share this episode with her. You can learn more about my coaching and programs, events, and so on and our community just by visiting my website, ww.frederica davis.com. And if you haven't given the show a review, please do give the show a review, subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Thank you so much for spending part of your day with me. And until next time, be rooted, be resilient, and be limitless.