Have Your Cake And Eat It, Too: How to Be Multi-Passionate

There seems to be quite a trend in finding one’s “niche”; whether that be in the blogging community or outside of it, people are always telling others that they should just stick to one thing and focus on that rather than be a Jill of all trades.

This really sucks for people like me who get easily bored. Sticking to just one thing isn’t possible. For me, life is like afternoon tea; it has many tiers filled with lots of sweet surprises. Are you really going to stick to just the one level – the sandwiches on the bottom – when you have this whole platter of cakes in front of you? To stick to just one passion, because that’s what people tell you to do?

Well I say screw that, I want to have my cake and eat it, too.

It was hard, though, because (like when eating afternoon tea) I did start to get a bit nauseous and tired and had to take a break for a while. But I began to learn when that’s about to happen and finally had a firm grip on exactly how to tackle each tier of cakes/passions. I’ve spent months trying to figure out the best way to handle my multi-passionate nature and took a lot of mental notes along the way until they finally found themselves in this blog posts.

So, here goes… Here’s what I’ve learnt.

Have Your Cake And Eat It, Too: How to Be Multi-Passionate

01. Start Afresh

Earlier this year I decided to abandon all of my passions and chill out from a while. Netflix became my new best friend and I avoided thinking about my passions for as much as possible. I even took up reading again and basically allowed my mind to rest.

I waited.

After a week or so I couldn’t stop looking at things without thinking, “Oh! This would be a good shot for my blog!” or “This is so inspiring… I kind of want to draw something from this” and that’s when I knew which of my passions were the “strongest”. The ones that I wanted to devote more time to. In the end I knew I had to juggle: my full-time job, my blog, and my art life outside of work.

02. Write Lists of What Each Passion Entails

I looooove lists, and so the next thing I did as soon as I learnt what I needed to juggle was what each passion entailed. For my blog is was things like writing posts, taking pictures, editing old posts, and harnessing my social media, and my art life involved drawing (obviously), searching for inspiration, and harnessing my social media.

Now try and figure out how you can fit your passions around each other. Maybe you find that you are more inspired to do one thing on weekends, and another during the week. Balance is a unicorn so don’t worry if you spend more time on one thing than the other.

03. Tackle One Passion At a Time

Which list was more achievable? Which passion do you enjoy the most at the moment? Reign in your multi-passionate nature and decide which passion is to be your starting point. Focus on that first, and once you have a strong hold over it then move onto your other passion. And when you’re at that point, then you can refer to that list in my previous step to fit your passions around each other. I found that I could only take on more than one passion once I’ve had a firm footing over my blog, because then I won’t have to worry about it when less attention was paid to it.

04. Slowly ease yourself into each passion

Go into each new passion slowly so that it’s not a culture shock to your system. For example, if you were a food blogger you wouldn’t suddenly create a post about beauty, would you? It would completely throw people off and you might not get the feedback/views/comments that you desired. Instead, slowly introduce your next passion into your current one. So with that food-blogger-to-beauty-blogger example, you could start by incorporating more of yourself into your food photos by holding up a cupcake (with super jazzy nails) and build up on that before throwing yourself into simply doing nail shots.

05. Schedule the Sh*t out of everything

My week is a huge mess if I haven’t organised it beforehand, so when I say that scheduling will save your life I mean it. It takes a great deal of stress away knowing that your passions can survive without you on days when things don’t turn out the way they are. I schedule a month’s worth of blog posts, and every week I used Buffer to schedule a week’s worth of blog tweets/FB posts. I also plan out my instagram feed every couple of weeks for my blog.

This leaves me to go ahead and do as much drawing as possible during the week outside of my full-time job, occasionally checking in on my blog stuff every now and then to post on Instagram and comment on other people’s blog posts.

06. Give Yourself Breaks

Like that feeling when you’ve eaten too many cakes, you’ve got to give yourself a break every once in a while. Listen to your body and your mind to avoid burn-out. I can easily spot the signs when my body is near burn-out point and try to have at least one weekend a month where I do absolutely nothing. Sometimes it can be hard to avoid the guilt of not working, but your body and mind needs it.

So despite what everyone tells you, you don’t have to stick to one niche… You can start with just one niche, sure, and then once you’ve had a firm footing with that you can start building up your other niches. You can have your cake, and eat it, too!

Are you multi-passionate? Are there any pieces of advice you’d like to give? What’s your story?

Love,
Lizzie xx