From the Experts Professor Craig Hassed Lessons Learned on Following One’s Passion In June, CGS Alumni Professor Craig Hassed OAM (1977) spoke about the benefits of mindfulness in education at the Parent Education Seminar. Here, he shares his journey and insights into following your passion and how mindfulness can help you find direction. I have often been asked by the students I teach for advice about which career path to follow. My response has always boiled down to encouraging them to follow what they are truly passionate about. Thankfully, I adopted this principle in my own life. It has never let me down and has guided me to opportunities and insights I never could have dreamed of let alone contrived. Here is a brief telling of my story and some of the lessons gleaned from it. When I was a Year 12 student stepping out of the gates of Camberwell Grammar and into the wider world I was clueless about what course or career I wanted to follow. I had a lukewarm interest in many different careers but a conviction for none. I thought perhaps the best approach might be to eliminate things I certainly didn’t want to do. With an aversion to blood and gore, the first thing I eliminated was Medicine.
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Lesson 1:
Lesson 2:
It has been said, ‘be careful what you wish for’, but equally it could be said, ‘be careful what you wish to avoid.’
Pay attention, even to the things you find uncomfortable, because that is how you learn about life and yourself.
This method of elimination didn’t get me very far though, so I reflected again on what I was really interested in. What I came up with was the ‘mind’. Curiosity about the mind and how it worked expressed itself in many ways such as in how I noticed that distraction and worry not only reduced my ability to function well but also had very negative effects on the body. The mind-body relationship fascinated me. I noticed that when I worried about future events, like the interschool swimming championships, even though the future was in my imagination, my body reacted as if I was in the water with a shark. It made sense to train myself to stay in the present moment and to focus on reality and what I could control in order to reduce anxiety. During Years 11 and 12, I practiced staying in the moment while studying, then I extended this to staying calm and focusing to deal with the pressure of the exam room. At the time, all this made intuitive sense to me, but many years later I realised I was teaching myself what I now call mindfulness.
This interest in the mind was the first thing, but I also recognised that I was much happier when I was helping others so my career path needed to include this. Interest in the mind and a helping career led me to study Medicine at Melbourne University with a view to later doing Psychiatry despite my aversion to blood and gore. I resolved to teach myself how not to be ruled by this aversion, which I did.
