This article is written by Abhyuday Agarwal, COO, iPleaders.

From time to time, many of us experience a lack of connection with our goals.

Usually, it will happen after one or more critical life events throw us off-guard, every now and then. It could be a university examinations that go bad, or a project has gone awry, an illness, a vacation, a personal loss, or a professional attack, crisis at work, or family trouble which could come up in the way of your next career move, or working on your passion, or enhancing your skill-sets.

You are then so consumed by the crisis or distraction, that you stop prioritising or even thinking about your goal. Everything ceases to matter, but the problem in front of you.

This is in the very fabric of human nature. It’s called a tunnel vision. Faced with crisis our brain exclusively focuses on the crisis, and ignores everything else, as nothing else exists.

This fuels a cycle of short-term decision making. It destroys long-term goals and takes you off the road from even lifelong quests.

Suddenly, it feels like your commitments, goals that you live by, life’s purpose, and even the dreams that you dedicated yourself to, do not matter anymore.

Sometimes, we believe this absence of a connection to be real and quit on our dreams.

It is, of course, tempting to take a ‘comfortable’ path such as giving up and just live with the waves. But the biggest mistake we make is that we believe our experience of dwindling passion to be true, even though it may not actually be so. This is just a false signal!

Your commitment to accomplish a goal, including your life’s passion, will not come automatically from some natural and innate place of passion that doesn’t require nourishing. We can experience deadness, by default.

Your strongest and most burning desires will also need to be generated, fanned, grown and developed, time and again. There will be no one day when distractions cease to exist or matter. The conclusion that we are no more passionate about what was dear to us, is a false alarm.   

When you are thrown off-guard and try to come back, you might face anxiety or the guilt of having lost valuable time being distracted, which you could have invested in working on your goals.

Surprisingly, that time lost does not matter in the long run. What counts is how many times you can get back to and sustain what you intended to accomplish. Losing a few days, weeks or even months is not material.    

Your growth does not happen when you miss a pee break or skip a vacation to give every living moment you have to work. But it happens when, after being unsettled each time by any distraction, illness, or life reality, you get back to doing what you set out to do. The enthusiasm, really is artificially generated, until you become one with it, through this process.

Every single time you come back, despite the failings, distractions and hopelessness and begin working on what’s really important, you move up in the levels of the game. There are no points or counter, racking up golden stars. But that’s how life works, silently but surely.

There will never be a time when you are not thrown off-guard. There will never be a better time to reconnect with your passion.    

For some years at iPleaders, my focus was on our survival (it’s crucial), and I tried to make sure everything is perfect and that no one is making mistakes. That drained me out. I was becoming a shop owner (read: ‘Lala’), I wasn’t a passionate entrepreneur or a teacher. One day, I reconnected with the reason why I started iPleaders – which is a passion for learning the mysteries of law and business and sharing them with the world. When I tapped into that passion, I could focus more on what I enjoy doing. This helped me bring in more innovation in our courses and the teaching-learning process, in an online environment.

It also enabled others in the company, to feel more connected with what they were passionate about and express that in their work.

The vision of the team literally expanded as each person’s own expression, found its way into our work. More people started to gravitate towards us with similar career goals.

In fact, some of our best team members joined us then. Komal, our content team head with 12 years of experience in the financial sector had an interest in corporate governance and several business-related laws. Suman, a company secretary with litigation experience, expressed her expertise with some excellent guides. Harsh, a UGC-JRF NET scholar and a judicial services exams coach, has an interest in criminal laws, business laws and several other access to justice-related legislations.  We all started working together to create an entirely new generation of law courses to be delivered online!

This is not a team that has to be pushed, prodded and managed, these are people driven by a passion to make something amazing.

Perhaps that has become what differentiates courses by LawSikho.com, from let’s say what another online course company or university offers.

What can connecting with your passion do for your work? Looking at mistakes and ensuring perfection, did not seem so important any more to me. Yet things improved, without my express focus on it.

While I was innocently thrown off guard, I focussed on ensuring people don’t make mistakes, rather than ensuring that everyone operates from a place of passion, which would ensure better outcomes. It didn’t matter in the long run that, I’d accidentally spent a lot of time being distracted. What mattered, in the end, was, whether I could pull myself together to sort it all out, and take the work a notch ahead, with a superior focus.

Which are the big career goals in your life, that you have not been able to focus on? What distracted you? Which false signals did you believe to be true and lost your passion? Reply to this mail, I will read every answer and respond.

Some of you may have been inspired and blown away by what you imagined possible in your career if you’d learnt practical legal skills. You may have seen examples of Steve Jobs’ negotiation skills on the internet, or a gripping movie such as the ‘Social Network’, or a Wall Street drama. Did it not make you wonder about how charisma, power and success are possible to realise if you had a sense of how exactly law impacts the work that you do?

It might have lasted for a few moments, and then, you may have been distracted by what’s on your plate or dismissed the idea of your possessing legal acumen as fanciful, wishful or idealistic. There could be various reasons for it. Maybe you didn’t find the right guidance or some resource you could trust. But what matters, in the end, is, that you gave up on something that mattered to you.

At this time, taking the next step can make the difference between your passion growing or dying out. Remember that your passion for your goals will require cultivation to grow into something bigger, and yield results. Successful people simply keep taking the next action, consistently over a period of time, to grow their passion.

Also, make sure you connect with and surround yourself with other passionate people. Passion is infectious.

Which action will you take now, to grow your passion?  

If exploring and exploiting the mysteries of law to your advantage is of interest to you, here are some of the courses you can try out:

• Executive Certificate Course in Companies Act (see here)

• Executive Certificate Course in Real Estate Laws (see here)
• Diploma in Companies Act, Corporate Governance and SEBI Regulations (see here)Diploma in Industrial and Labour Laws (see here)

Learners have really appreciated our new methodology which we invented in May this year. It adds live online classes and real-world exercise simulations. This is what one of the learners who took up one of the course courses had to say:

All the above courses feature this new methodology.

Don’t fall for a false alarm. Your passion will grow when you cultivate it. Take the next step to grow your passion.