Dr Emily Musgrove

Do you have any experience of that, like noticing that?

Exactly.

That's the key is that it's hard to persevere when I don't have the same kind of investment, sense of pleasure, engagement with this thing.

It's really interesting though, and I see this a lot, this is in therapy, that actually for a lot of us, it's really hard to identify our interests.

And that sounds like a really strange thing to say.

But it's really hard to identify what I feel really strongly about, what lights me up, what brings vitality, that actually that can feel really hard to decipher, particularly when we have been told what to like or we have expectations from others about what we should pursue.

So when it comes to uncovering our interests, what the research says is that at its heart, we need to what's called sample widely.

So we need to try a lot of things.

And it really deeply speaks to also how we parent kids and even when we reflect upon our own childhoods, this idea of trying heaps of different activities because we only gain interest from experience.

The analogy that kind of comes to mind is like –

Like imagine that someone says maybe you'd be really good at rock climbing.

I'm like, oh, yeah, that could be interesting.

And so then I go and ask a whole lot of people like what's rock climbing like.

I go and watch stuff on YouTube.

I maybe look at the wall.

I really like a journal about it.

I really kind of deeply think about it.

I am not going to know if I'm interested until I try it.

And this is the same for, you know, for anything.

And this is the same with our kids is that we don't want to specialize.