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In the beginning...

Jennifer had worked at the same company (a large software company in Redmond, WA) for ten years. While she had once found her work exciting and stimulating, it had grown stale. "I couldn't see myself there for even another two years," she recalls. "There was a lot of frustration. A lot of hand-wringing. I had been thinking about a change for years, but I was really stalled out. I didn't know how to even go about doing it."

Fear of making the wrong decision, an uncertainty of how to go about it, and a time-starved schedule all stood in her way.

Jennifer had found Curt's information a year before finally contacting him. "Getting myself to make the call was the most challenging part of the process," she says. "You feel like this should be obvious. You're looking for the lightening bolt moment. But having spent some time around it, I don't think it's something most people have a lightening bolt about."

And now…

Now, most of her fear has disappeared, and she is taking action. The deeper awareness gained through creating her Passion Core took much of the perceived risk away, and reduced the worry of making the wrong decision.

"The Passion Core has a very real, tangible quality to it," she says. "I can see what's missing from my life now, and how I can get some of that back."

The process has helped her take action towards making changes. "Before, I wanted to make changes, but short of just quitting - which I was too scared to do - I wasn't sure how to do it. After developing the Passion Core and getting some focus and ideas of baby steps to take, you start to look at it and say, well that's not so scary. That's do-able."

She is currently actively exploring a number of potential paths that she identified during her work with Curt.

Jennifer's Passion Core has also helped her re-engage at her current job. "Looking at opportunities here, and writing my goals and objectives that we do company wide, I actually use my Passion Core to identify the things that I want to spend time on. I'm helping define the job I have right now, and I get to focus on some things I discovered in my Passion Core that make it more satisfying.

The process

For Jennifer, the way the process unfolded in a way that was specifically relevant to her - rather than being locked in to a pre-defined set of questions and tasks - was ideal. "The fact that it seemed very organic and really custom to me made it easy for me to do some discovery. It was kind of like guided freeform."

Working with Curt

"Curt is very easy to work with," says Jennifer. "He has a gentle but persuasive way of getting people to hold themselves accountable to make sure they're actually making progress.

"It's a very comfortable environment for discovery," she continues. "It had the whole feeling of, 'We're just having a conversation about this.' Like the classic brainstorm - no bad ideas."

The whole story

When she started, she wasn't completely sure it would work. "It's unlike anything I've ever done before," she says. "So it wasn't something that I felt like, 'I'm going to go in and bang this out in x number of weeks.' I wasn't sure how it was going to unfold, but keeping an open mind and just going with it worked for me."

She found the fact that she could break things into baby steps very useful. "It wasn't one of these things where, 'by the time I'm done with this I will need to have quit my job and enrolled in school and found sixteen new different things to keep me occupied.' It's a very realistic and comfortable way of looking at things."

The ability to focus on small steps also helped her incorporate forward motion into a very busy life.

The unique and individual nature of the process was important for her. "It recognizes that not every path of exploration for everyone is the same," she says. "Your reaction starts driving things. 'Oh, I reacted really strongly to that, positively, or negatively.' It makes for a very sensible way of finding your passion."

Jennifer looks back at the process and says, "I think the whole Passion Core approach is a really good one." It also helped that Curt illustrated the idea with his own Passion Core. "The fact that Curt uses his own makes it very real. It's good modeling."

To Jennifer, it just made a whole lot of sense. "You're able to put that down on paper. That's a great measurement tool. So any time you ask 'Does this career, or this job look interesting to me,' you can very easily see whether you'd like it or not."

Creating her Passion Core also took a lot of the fear out of choosing her next step. "The fear for me was wrapped up in making a bad choice. I think I want to do this, but what if I'm wrong. Now, with every choice I make, I know this is something I have an interest in, and have passion for. It all adds up."

She also notes, "You feel like you're not being emotional about it. Like you're actually making a rational, logical, sensible choice - which sounds kind of weird when you tie it to something that has passion in it."

The process continues to unfold for Jennifer. "I'm still in the discovery process of getting my feet wet on some of these things I discovered," she says. "Even though I haven't made any radical changes, I'm already starting to move down a couple different paths. The end goal might shift a little bit, but I'm definitely working towards doing more things that make me happy and that I have passion for."

Before she started working with Curt, says Jennifer, "I might have, in a fit of frustration, done something rash and quit. I feel like that would have been unenlightened. It might have worked out, and it might not have. Whereas now I feel like I'm making some pretty well thought out choices."