It all started with a simple question. How do you maintain your passion, especially when passion can drive burnout? And when you're a Renaissance Person with multiple passions, is the challenge even greater??

In this solo episode, I dig into some research on passion and burnout from Harvard Business School professors Jon Jachimowicz and Ryan Buell and reframe them for Renaissance People. I look at the three facets of burnout and how they can be addressed.

I also share four strategies I use to feed my passions and that I support my coaching clients to do: find boundary-spanning projects, keeping a “sparkly” side interest, sharing resources reciprocally, and finding community.

If you're looking for a community of multi-passionate Renaissance People, I'm bringing us together virtually once a month in "Fertile Grounds" where we can support one another, share ideas and resources, and collaborate.

Promised Show Notes Materials (take a drink):

• Sign up for updates on my podcast and what’s happening in the Renaissance People Community.
• Get updates on Fertile Grounds, a monthly virtual gathering of multi-passionate Renaissance People, kicking off Tuesday, August 18, 2026&!
• Work with me to Find Your Golden Thread or for Career Coaching
• Join the Renaissance People group on Facebook
• The Anxious Achiever Podcast
• Can Passion for Your Work Drive Burnout? with Jon Jachimowicz (Anxious Achiever podcast episode)
• Dr. Jon Jachimowicz’s website
• Dr. Ryan Buell and operational transparency
• Four things I do to help feed my passions
• The Growth of Growing playlist on YouTube (clips also available on my Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts).
• AllSpice Culinarium
• Meryl Evans on LinkedIn
• More about artistic swimming

Follow Sara Kobilka on Social Media:

LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | BlueSky

A few themes I discussed:

1:06 Research on passion

4:08 The 3 facets of burnout when it comes to passion

5:12 How reducing demands helped me keep this podcast going

13:52 The 4 ways I feed my passions

20:47 Expansion, contraction and a definition of progress

23:20 How I’m building a web of support with Fertile Grounds

If you’re extra curious, check out Renaissance Woman Consulting to learn more about some of the many types of work I do.

And should you care to support the production of this podcast, I’d love it if you’d buy me an oat milk cappuccino, my caffeinated beverage of choice.

This podcast is hosted and edited by Sara Kobilka.

Theme music is by Brian Skellenger

Podcast distribution support provided by K.O. Myers of Particulate Media

Passion! Oh, how I love that word!

(sung Connecting the Dots with The Renaissance People)

Welcome to Connecting the Dots with The Renaissance People. I am your host, Renaissance Woman, Sara Kobilka. And today's episode is going to be just a little bit different. Instead of Renaissance People, you get a singular Renaissance Person, me talking a little bit. I haven't had an opportunity to record any episodes with guests, and so I'm taking a chance to just talk about something that has been on my mind lately.

So I was listening to a podcast episode, and a question just kind of like smacked me across the face, and that question was: how do you maintain your passion? So this was an episode of The Anxious Achiever with Moira Aarons Mealey, and the episode was called Can Passion for Your Work Drive Burnout? Short answer, yes.

Yes, it can. Anyways, in this episode, Jon Jachimowicz, an assistant professor at the Organizational Behavior Unit of Harvard Business School, he asked that question, and it really got me thinking because as a Renaissance Person with that Renaissance Mindset, which if you haven't listened to previous episodes, definitely check out the one that is the Renaissance Mindset manifesto of sorts, because that'll tell you a little bit more about it.

But anyways, my thought was, as really complex, multi-passionate people, it's almost worse. It's even more challenging to not have that burnout strike on us. So I was doing a little bit of research on Jon, you know, had to go down the rabbit hole. I've just started. I don't have enough time to truly dig into it right now 'cause I'm working on other projects.

But from Jon's website, which I will link to in the show notes, take a drink, my friends. That's right. Take a drink of whatever you've got. Mine, in this case, is ice water 'cause it is New York, and it is summer, and it is hot, so I am staying hydrated. Drink what you need to, and I celebrate sharing things in the show notes because back to that Renaissance Mindset, one of these things that I think a lot of Renaissance People do is share resources.

So they'll all be in the show notes. Dive in when you have a chance. But back to what I was saying. From Jon's website, and he's talking about himself, he says, "I study the experience, antecedents, and consequences of passion. My work reveals that scholars and the broader public often fundamentally misunderstand passion."

Now, he is in the Harvard Business School, so his primary focus is on passion as it relates to a person's job and to their work. I would argue that we Renaissance People, that idea of passion is throughout our lives. It's not just the work that we do. It is everything that we really get excited about, whether we're getting paid to do it or whether we're just doing it because it feeds our soul.

He brought up something that's really interesting I had never heard before, which is that the German word for passion, which is Leidenschaft, translates to "the ability to endure hardship". Ouch. That feels kind of, uh, negative, but it really does get at the part of passion, which is it takes a lot of energy, and it doesn't always come easily to us.

People sometimes talk about, " Oh, if you do what you're passionate about, you'll never work a day in your life." Well, that is not true, and his research really shows that. But one of the things that he dug into is that idea of burnout, and Renaissance Person is happy because he, of course, went into the literature and looked at some of the research on it, as well as talked about his own personal experience.

The research that he was looking at that he brought up in that particular podcast episode was about the three facets of burnout because we Renaissance People know that nuance and complexity is there in most things, I would say. So there are three facets of burnout, and I might add, happy Renaissance Woman, it is not pick one of the three. It can be a mix of all three different things.

So here's the question that he suggests asking yourself if you are experiencing some burnout of your passion. So first thing, are you feeling emotionally exhausted? Emotional exhaustion can happen when you're putting so much energy into your passion. Whether it is you are passionate about cooking, making videos for YouTube, the work that you're trying to do to change the world, whatever it is, that can be emotionally exhausting, and solutions for that can be maybe you take a vacation, maybe you do a reduction of demands.

One thing that has been happening for me this summer was I was feeling a bit exhausted with all of the work that I was doing, and in fact, a lot of the work that I'm doing currently is going to an area of passion for me, which is talking.

I like to talk. In fact, I like being paid to talk, and I am currently being paid to talk for two other projects beyond Connecting the Dots with The Renaissance People. But during the summer months when I don't have as many hours to work, we do some traveling as a family, my kids go to camp, but the camp doesn't last all day long.

Because of that, I was feeling kind of exhausted, and I stepped back and I looked at what is going on, because I still love my podcast. I love the idea of it. I love what's happening with it. But it just wasn't getting me excited the way it had previously. And I realized that what I needed to do was just let what I'm calling summer Sara take over, which is Sara the recovering perfectionist saying, "It's okay if you don't do it every two weeks all summer long and release a brand-new episode full of show notes and links and everything like that."

So I'm doing every two-ish, three-ish weeks this summer, and that's been enough. That's been enough to help me feel good about the podcast. It's still going. The numbers dipped. I had been on a roll of increasing the number of people who had downloaded episodes in all of the first, I think, five, six months of the podcast, and then we got to June and the number dipped.

And guess what? July, well, it was a little bit better, but it was still lower than the three months prior to that, and that's okay. Because I had reduced the demand on myself. I let myself kinda catch my breath and recover, and so now that I'm back into it, I'm recording this individual episode right now, but I've got an interview set for a couple of weeks.

I'm super excited about that next episode. It ties back to something I said way at the beginning, so I'm keeping a promise to my loyal listeners, so that's very exciting for me. But I just asked myself, "What's making me feel burned out on doing this podcast?" I reduced the demands, and boom, I'm in pretty good shape.

So that's one of the three facets. The next facet that he brought up is asking yourself the question, are you feeling a loss of self-efficacy? Meaning are you feeling like you, you just can't make any progress with something that you're really passionate about. Some of the strategies for dealing with that is, you know, maybe that thing that you're really passionate about is huge, and you gotta take that big goal and break it down into smaller goals so that you can actually see the progress that you are making.

He might be a Renaissance Person because he got to, uh, share a little bit of a resource. So he shared a resource which, show notes You'll find it there. It's from another Harvard professor, Ryan Buell, not to be confused with the paranormal investigator that I found when I was doing a search for Ryan Buell so that I could have resources to put into the show notes.

Anyways Ryan talks about operational transparency. And so he talks about it again from a business perspective and is doing research on how an organization can be transparent to their clients and to their consumers, and that actually builds trust. And it is something that can help a person who is losing their sense of passion if they can actually see that they're making progress towards a goal that they want to achieve.

So the example that Jon gives in the podcast is you could set up a kitchen so that the chefs can see the diners enjoying their meal. Then they're not just in this back room sweating away, doing all this cooking, and not even knowing whether the people who are eating the food feel good about it unless, like, somebody sends it back.

It did make me think about my favorite cooking show, Top Chef, where they occasionally will set up episodes where the chefs get to watch the judges. Um, I don't know if that necessarily helps, uh, their passion for cooking because those judges are tough, and sometimes they are not enjoying what they're eating.

And looking over to see Tom Colicchio, uh, making a grumpy face might not make you feel better about yourself. But that's a tangent. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. It's totally fine, and it's a little bit different.

Okay. The third facet of burnout that could be part of the mix that is leading you as a Renaissance Person to feel burnout about one or more of your passions leads us to ask the question, are you just feeling cynical about something that you were previously passionate about? And it could be that world events are making you just feel frustrated, like there is nothing I can do to fix this problem. It is so much bigger than me.

As someone who has been deeply involved in the DEI or DEIA or IDEA, whatever you wanna call it, space, that one has been kinda hard for me. Because efforts to do diversity, to include more people, to give more opportunities, to recognize that some of us have privileges that other people don't have, or the importance of making things accessible, it feels like you're fighting an uphill battle that is just getting harder and harder.

So one of the things that he suggests doing when it comes to cynicism about something that you were previously passionate about is ask yourself the question, what initially made you passionate about that thing? And the answer is gonna be something very deeply personal and something that you need to find a way to get back to that and to find how to support yourself with that and find the right level of connection with other people, maybe community of other people who are interested in that. Maybe it's a support person. Whatever it might be, it's very individualized when it comes to answering that particular question.

So I'm really looking forward to using this as a resource with the clients that I've been working with. I think I have been, without realizing it, doing this very thing. A lot of the people that I work with in my Renaissance People coaching are fellow Renaissance People. And so we do ask kind of these questions of like what's stressing us out.

If they are a person who's looking for a new job, why are they feeling so frustrated in the job search? Yes, it is a very difficult, um, time to be searching for a job. There's a lot of upheaval in a lot of different industries, AI is in here. There is different funding, changes in political situations, all that sort of stuff.

Each of these require a different strategy, but that's why I really enjoy working directly with people and coaching them because we can ask these things. We can find what's that mix that is maybe making you burn out or feel frustrated, and then what steps can we actually take to try to fix the situation, or how can I help them figure out which step they want to take?

Because sometimes we get analysis paralysis. There's just so much information. We dive down rabbit holes, we dig into it, and then we're just like, "I don't even know what to do. I'm so overwhelmed." And that's where I get to step in.

So I want to finish this with giving you four things that I personally have found work well for me and for my clients in order to feed our passions, and that is passions plural.

I think when you have just that one passion area and then you lose it, that is a loss of identity. That is just a loss of everything of who you are. And I know a lot of people who are journalists who got out of journalism and had that identity crisis happen.

I think as Renaissance People, we have a slightly different situation. Because we are multi-passionate, our identity becomes being multi-passionate and being complex and that sort of thing. And so sometimes our frustration can come when we aren't able to be complex because one single thing or maybe two single things are taking all of our energy.

So here's the four things that I personally do to feed my passion and that I recommend to my clients.

So one is I take on projects that allow me to span boundaries and connect the dots. Name of the show, right? I like things that expand the boundaries of the complex Venn diagram of who I am and what I can do. So I do look for those things that are not niche, that are not just one specific thing, but have some complexity to them.

It also helps me to be involved in those types of projects, because I feel like my complexity as a Renaissance Person makes me a huge asset for whatever project I'm working on and whatever team of people that I am working with.

The second one is an idea that actually came up with one of my coaching, coaching clients this summer.

So I've been supporting her as she's taken on this huge project, and what I'm really doing for her is serving as an accountability buddy and a fresh set of eyes on what she is creating. So what she said to me is that there is this other thing that she is doing right now that is not directly tied necessarily to the big project, but she described it as having that sparkly thing.

And I thought about it and I'm like, "Yeah, I do." I like to always have something sparkly that I can spend time on that really feeds my soul. Now, sometimes that side sparkly thing is actually work, a project that I'm just really excited about. Sometimes it's outside of work, though I oftentimes find that it ends up connecting kind of serendipitously to my work in the future in some sort of capacity.

So things that I've done that have been my sparkly side thing to just kind of give me that little energy boost, it's almost like when you see, uh, my daughters and I we were watching the national championships of gymnastics on TV, and there was a gymnast who had a pouch, and she was eating something out of that pouch.

And my daughter asked, "What, well, what is she doing?" And I was like, "Oh, well, that's, you know, an energy pouch. It gives you that little push. It probably has some, some sugar in there to kind of keep you going. They'll do that when they're running a marathon as well. It's just like that little push of energy."

And that's kind of what that sparkly thing is for me. So things that I've done include I am now participating as often as I can in a monthly singing circle where we just get together and we learn a song or we pull back a song that we've learned before and just connect. It's me and a bunch of women and treble voices connecting for two hours and singing, and also they do a little chatting circle, which was wonderful because we literally were talking about community.

And there we go. I went to this side sparkly thing just 'cause I wanted to sing with other people, and we ended up talking about our definitions of community and where we find community. And I got to pull that in to the work that I do. So it was lovely.

I've also hosted murder mystery parties. I used to be part of a group with my friends in Des Moines who we both did murder mystery parties, and then we also had a gathering that we called the Second Sunday Supper Club.

And we would get together and have a theme. And it might be red, white, and blue, and we made red, white, and blue food. Or we did a dessert themed one, or we went to a farmers market one time and we bought fresh produce and meat and everything at the farmers market. Then we walked over to a store called Allspice in Des Moines, Iowa. Highly recommend it. And you can get olive oils and balsamic vinegars and, uh, all sorts of spices. And so we got the spices, and then we cooked up the food, and it was lovely. so that was a little extra thing on the side.

A thing that I'm doing that's maybe a little bit more work aligned right now this summer that has actually taken quite a bit of my energy and has kept me a little bit away from the podcast, but I'm okay with that as well 'cause i'm using it to connect in, is that I'm doing video shorts. I'm creating a video shorts series throughout the summer and into some part of the fall, and I call it The Growth of Growing, an idea that my friend Theresa suggested, a fellow Renaissance Woman, so thank you, Theresa, for that suggestion.

And the entire theme of it is gardens, gardening metaphors, and anything that I think about when I am looking at my garden, looking at the produce, thinking about my gardening methods, anything like that. So I film these. They're one minute long. I film them on my phone whenever I get inspired. Sometimes it's like six of them. I'm super inspired today. And then over the next, you know, six to 12 days, I release that, so if I'm not super feeling inspired to make a video one day, I don't have to 'cause I made this whole backlog of them. And they're only one minute long, so it takes a little bit of the, uh, pressure off of me .

Third thing that I do that is really helping me to feed my passions is that I share resources with other people.

And the way that sharing resources with other people feeds my soul is, and my passions, is that I share it in hopes that we can nerd out together about it. I share a resource 'cause they say something and, "Oh, that makes me think about this thing. You should totally listen to this podcast!" Or, " I read this article the other day, and you should totally read it as well!" Or, "Oh, I know the perfect person who you should talk to! Let me check with them first, but then get you connected through LinkedIn or whatever."

And I love it when I share the resource, and then they come back to me and they're like, "That was exactly what I needed, and I came across this thing, and this also ties to it!" And then I get a new resource. And that reciprocity, that sharing with one another, that almost like, like bartering system that my barter buddy, where I give you this and you give me that, and we both do better because we shared with each other, that feels so good to me, and that feeds my soul.

And that kinda connects to the fourth and final thing that I've got for what feeds my soul, which is I find community with other Renaissance People, where we can support one another.

Sometimes that's sharing resources. Sometimes that is just encouraging each other when we are feeling down, when we're feeling that sense of burnout. But also helping each other to rein in ourselves or specifically just to focus our energy because, yeah, you can't do everything simultaneously. You can do lots of different things, but there is also value in putting your energy towards a particular thing for a particular amount of time. And then you can move on to something maybe completely different and, like, cleanse your palate or whatever it might be.

So we are also ever-expanding in who we are, but sometimes there's a little bit of a contraction. That is natural. To go back to that gardening idea, that is the seasons. We're not always going to be having every single plant flourishing in the garden simultaneously. We're not going to be gathering harvest all the time.

There has to be a fallow time. There is a time of quiet in the garden, and then it comes back, and then we get to go back out there and work on it. So when I say ever-expanding life, expanding, just like the word progress, my friend Meryl Evans has this graphic that we've used in trainings we've done that was about accessibility and disability awareness. And talking about progress in that space, a space where people can feel a lot of burnout and cynicism, in fact, because of how difficult it is.

Progress doesn't look like a line going straight up the entire time on a chart. It can go up, and then it dips down for a little bit, and then it goes up, and then maybe it goes really far down, but then it goes up, and in the end it's higher than it was at the beginning.

And that's progress. One step forward, two steps back, but then if you do four steps forward, that's, that is still progress. You're still making it in the direction of your goal. So sometimes we Renaissance People have to be there to support one another and encourage each other and rein ourselves in and really focus our energy, and maybe, we need to have our combined powers. We can be Captain Planet, "With our five powers combined." And we, we put that energy, and we all work together, and we, like, lift the other person up.

I like to watch in the Olympics when they do... it used to be called synchronized swimming, now it's called artistic swimming. And they are under the water. And they all, like, swim together into this clump, and then, like, silently in their heads go like, "One, two, three."

And then everyone pushes, and on the really good teams, they launch the one smallest person on the team into the air, and they do a splits, and they flip and whatever. And so sometimes it's all of us putting our energy together to launch someone up and help them succeed, and then when we wanna be launched up, they've helped us, and we're gonna support each other. And we've built that, kind of weaved that web, connected those dots, and made that web of support that a community can be.

So what I'm doing tangibly to make that happen is something I'm calling Fertile Grounds. So continuing with the gardening theme of The Growth of Growing and why doing that video shorts series actually does align with some of my work goals is I'm gonna use that as a way to promote and invite all of you to join me for Fertile Grounds, which is gonna be the monthly virtual gathering of the Renaissance People community.

And the language I've came, come up with that makes me delighted, uh, as I describe it, is we're going to play with ideas and pollinate possibilities. How many Ps can I put in, and will my shield protect that from popping every single time I say that?

So anyways, what we're gonna do with fellow multi-passionate, lots of passions, lots of different areas, let's focus together. We're gonna find a way to give each other help. And you can get maybe an outsider perspective on a challenge that you're facing, whether it's a project, whether it is just personally a challenge that you're facing being a Renaissance Person.

Maybe we'll find collaborators, and we'll grow a new project together. We'll co-create, we'll co-garden something. That doesn't sound right, but yeah.

We also are going to supplement the soil by contributing resources from our own unique experiences. Because Renaissance People, man, are they interesting when you look at the background, the diverse things that they've done, the people that they've met, the things that they know.

So much fun. And then it's just a fun time to exercise creativity. Renaissance People and our Renaissance Mindset makes us more childlike. We ask the what if and why questions, and then we try things. And that kind of, like, mental playing, that mental playground is what Fertile Grounds can be.

What's gonna be the balance of all of those different things? It's gonna evolve. And in fact, the very first meeting is gonna be happening next week on Tuesday. You can sign up to learn more and join your first meeting for free. I'm gonna have a link for that in the show notes.

And it's gonna be something that we're gonna talk a little bit about in that first meeting. What do you want? What do you want out of this space? What would help you the most? Make it what you all want, along with my ideas. I'll bring some ideas of things that I'm thinking we could try out.

And then we'll plant the seeds, and who knows what'll grow. And maybe we'll get some volunteers. I always have volunteers pop up in my garden, and um, instead of, like, pulling them, as some people say you're supposed to do, I give them a chance. Let's see what they might turn out into.

So if that sounds like something that would be of interest to you. Or if you need an accountability buddy, somebody to kinda coach you through because your multi-passionate self just isn't feeling that full energy that you used to have, reach out to me. I am here to help. I work with people one-on-one and try to help them figure out whether it is find your golden thread because you're so complex and you wanna tell your story, but you don't know how ' cause you've just got so much going on, or there's a project you wanna work on, and you need some support to make progress in that thing.

I'm here. I'm the person who can help you, who can understand, who can show compassion to you. So that's what I've got for today's episode. Please join me again in my next episode, where I'm keeping a promise from way back in one of the very first episodes. I won't tell you what, um, partially 'cause I can't remember which episode.

But I'm keeping a promise, as long as something doesn't go wrong and we can't record. But anyways, I'm putting it out in the world. Get ready for the next one. And for now, remember How can you feed your passions? How can you maintain your passions? You can do it, and I'm here to help. See you next time.

(sung Connecting the Dots with The Renaissance People)