At any age it is difficult to find what makes your heart sing. You can experience it in fleeting moments, but often connecting these moments together so that you have clarity into what gives you the most joy, is difficult.

According to author Whitney Johnson, there are four questions you should ask yourself:

1. What skills have helped you thrive?
2. What makes you feel strong?
3. What made you stand out as a child?
4. What compliments do you tend to ignore?

I especially like the last question. I tend to dismiss my obvious strengths by taking advantage of compliments that seem frivolous. When actually, they are things that I’m doing with ease. Something that comes naturally to one person, could be rare and valuable to someone else.

Sometimes, once we find our passion, it can actually help us in other areas of our lives as well. My sister, Kathy Pfeiffer, recently discovered, through a dream experience, that if she applied how she approaches art to how she approaches other things in life, she could find great understanding and joy.

In her dream, a man appeared and asked her what she liked to do that made her feel the best when she does it. She answered that it was when she was making crafts. He opened a closet door that was filled with random pieces of metal. He told her to handle these things the way she did her crafts. Then he left as mysteriously as he had come to her.

She realized that the metal pieces represented things she didn’t like. And that she was supposed to do thing she didn’t like in the same manner as how she approached doing crafts. The sequences she used were to comes up with an idea, gather supplies, play with them until she perfected it, work on it only when she wanted to, and then to put it out to the world without worry. She found that the answer wasn’t what she should do, but rather how she should do things.

Unknowingly, through her artwork she had been teaching herself how best to cope with life.

So perhaps you may want to give this approach a try. Find your natural muse and use what it has shown you to find joy throughout your day!