Figuring out a passion

26 October 2017

The Broadcast Training Programme is being delivered in partnership with NTS Radio, Worldwide FM and Somethin’ Else.

When you’re living in London and you're hearing things like Lucy had landed her dream job as a fashion PR and James just got an internship at JP Morgans, it can be a little daunting - well especially for me.

I’m 21 and I’ve slowly learnt that making good eye contact, having good posture and a perfect smile is simply not enough to land you your dream job. It’s about having a passion.

I know, if I had a penny for every time someone said that to me, I wouldn’t even need a job. But how do I figure out what the one thing that I want to do for the rest of my life is when I'm not even enthusiastic about anything in particular? I mean, whenever someone asks me what I enjoy doing in my spare time, I awkwardly laugh and respond with “blogging and travelling” - because I'm just used to saying it.

When I was 18, I thought my passion was being a Receptionist at a law firm, which quickly changed to a Marketing Assistant at 19, followed by a TV Production Assistant at 20. But none of that seemed right, and now my passion is blog writing and creating visual content. So I thought I’d take you through a few pointers that helped me figure that out.

I’ve just completed an amazing 2-week radio/podcasting/ broadcasting programme at Create Jobs, and on one of the days, Chris Skinner (Exec Producer of The Bugle) came in to talk to us and spoke about having a niche subject. He told us we needed to have something unique about ourselves so that way we can be an expert in our field. Whether it was making a radio show about a cricket subject - it meant that I would have great knowledge and passion for my subject through the way I spoke about it. This naturally entices people to listen because it’s unique and they can trust your words on it. If you do something more general, it is trickier as everyone is doing it, making it 99% harder to stand out and say things that haven’t been said before. Making it even harder to attract an audience when there are already loads of others doing the exact same thing as you.

After creating my own podcast for 2 weeks, I noticed two very important things about myself that made me realise what my passion is.

I realised that I wasn’t fearing judgement on how professional my voice sounded in the podcast, I was concerned with the opposite - how the visuals looked and how the blurb sounded when read out aloud. I was so eager to take all the photography to support our podcast which was about record shops in London. I spent hours editing it and I perfected my 4 line blurb many times because I was afraid that people wouldn’t like it. That very quickly made me realise that writing and creating visual content was a part of my core and very important to me because I feared the judgement on it. So you have to ask yourself, what area do you fear judgement on? What is most important to you?

I also realised that I was spending hours researching little details about the podcast - such as creating a gif, or what sort of photography already exists that I could add to, how we could market ourselves differently to music podcasts. Even when we were recording certain parts that we needed for the podcast, I was also very keen on getting good quotes from the amazing DJ’s and people we met at NTS. I took a lot of photos and just noted key things about my environment to write/film about later if I could. Before I knew it the 2 full days we had to create our podcast were up. That leads to my final piece of advice. What can you spend time doing for ages where you lose track of time and lose track of yourself? You don’t even have to filter anything out, if you spend a lot of time talking and socialising - then you can think about how to incorporate that with your passion (a podcast maybe?)

Whatever your passion is, you won’t get there without taking a step into a new experience to help you figure out what is right for you and what isn’t - I am so grateful for Create Jobs as they allowed me to have different experiences in broadcasting for the past two weeks and they let me focus on my passion and strengths and develop that for my portfolio.