You were never meant to pick just one

There's a message most of us absorbed somewhere between childhood and our first performance review: pick a lane. Get good at one thing. Stop dabbling. Grow up.

Dr. Kimberly Murray and I have both heard versions of it our whole lives; from parents, from managers, from the structures of workplaces that want us legible and categorizable. And we've both spent years figuring out how to build work and lives that don't require leaving half of ourselves at the door.

In a recent conversation as part of my summer series, Kimberly, an applied psychologist, leadership coach, TEDx speaker, and professional photographer, joined me to talk about what it actually means to be multi-passionate. Not as a brand. As a lived experience.

Here's what came out of that conversation.

When kids say they want to be a ballerina and an architect and a veterinarian, adults find it endearing. Somewhere along the way, that same range of interests stops being charming and starts being a problem. The message shifts: pick the practical thing, the thing you're good at, the thing that signals you know who you are. Having multiple passions starts to read as immaturity; like you haven't quite figured it out yet.

Kimberly named something I recognized immediately: even as a full-grown adult, she'd catch herself looking at someone with a clear, linear path and thinking I want to be like you when I grow up. Not because she wanted that path, but because the cultural story still had enough of a hold that she could feel its pull even when she knew better.

I felt it too. Growing up, I was told I had too many hobbies and needed to pick one. Later, managers at work gave me the same feedback when I took on side projects outside my role. The message was consistent: your range is the problem. What we're here to say is that it isn't.

One of the most useful distinctions from our conversation: being scattered and being multi-passionate are not the same thing, even if they look similar from the outside.

Scattered is chasing every shiny new thing, moving from one exciting opportunity to the next with no thread connecting them. Multi-passionate is different. When you're multi-passionate, there's an underlying coherence even when the surface looks varied. The thread is usually your strengths: your natural way of thinking, feeling, and doing. The same strengths are just being expressed in different contexts.

For Kimberly, that thread runs through her work as a psychologist, her photography, and her coaching; all of it involves deep observation, pattern recognition, and helping people see themselves more clearly. For me, it shows up across research, coaching, teaching, and this podcast. The forms look different. The through line is the same.

Your values work the same way. You may not have named them when you were younger; I didn't, but they were guiding you. If you look back at the different things you've done and been drawn to, the thread is usually already there.

When I asked Kimberly whether trying to fit into a single lane had cost her anything, she didn't hesitate. Peace of mind. Feeling disconnected from the things that energized her. An internal conflict between what she knew would make her feel most alive and what felt most practical.

I've felt that tension too. A few years ago, I was offered an adjunct professor role while working full-time. I went through the proper channels, got told no — even though others on staff were teaching. That moment clarified something: if I couldn't honor that part of myself in an environment, I needed to know before I got any more invested. I ended up leaving. And now, asking whether a role will let me teach and coach is one of the first questions I ask.

Kimberly also hid different parts of herself depending on who was in the room; concealing her photography around her technical colleagues, downplaying her doctorate in photography circles. Most multi-passionate people know this performance. The question is how long you want to keep doing it.

Both Kimberly and I are in seasons right now where we're doing real-time recalibration. Full-time jobs, businesses, young kids, grad school, the works. We're both dialing things up and down based on what this particular season can actually hold.

Kimberly's question for herself when evaluating a new opportunity: what does this require of me, and what will I have to give up to do it? Not as a reason to say no, but as an honest accounting before she says yes. She's also been asking herself whether her stated priorities are actually hers, or whether they're the answers she thinks she should give as a professional, a parent, a person with a certain kind of ambition.

Her framing for not saying yes to everything right now: "not right now doesn't mean not ever." A speaking career she's been building toward may need to wait until the rest of her life has a little more room for it. That's not giving up. That's sequencing.

My version of this: I think about the doing and the being separately. The doing is what I want to accomplish. The being is how I want to feel. Multi-passionate people tend to live almost entirely in doing mode; I want to do this and this and this. The being question cuts through that. How do I actually want to feel? Does what I'm adding move me toward that or away from it?

The through line of everything we talked about is this: being multi-passionate was never the problem. The problem was a system that needed you to be simple, predictable, and easy to categorize and told you that your complexity was something to fix.

It isn't. The range of who you are is an asset. The work is learning to trust it, find the thread, and build a life that can hold all of it; not all at once, not in equal measure at every season, but over time, in a way that's actually yours.

You were never meant to pick just one.

You can connect with Dr. Kimberly Murray on Linkedin and if you want to join the next live conversation in this series, head to learnmindfully.co/events to see what's coming up.

This episode of In Her Words is available wherever you listen to podcasts.