CHAPTER 5
Repacking Your Work Bag
How Will I Do My Living?
Since our only possession is our life, or rather our living, our most fundamental question is “How will I do my living?”
The quest for the answer is a lifelong journey. But people don’t fully commit to it until they’re ready — not one moment sooner. Being ready usually means feeling a level of pain or frustration for which repacking is a remedy.
Readiness emerges at various times during our lives. The common theme is a period of transition. We find ourselves in that in-between state in life, leaving behind an outgrown but still perfectly serviceable past, and moving toward a future that resists all efforts to bring it into clear focus. As we contemplate what’s ahead, we feel a strange combination of disorientation and excitement.
Gazing back on our lives is more than just sifting through memories. It also involves poring over images of what the good life has meant to us at various points along the way. We recall the happy times and wonder how many more of them there will be. We review our achievements in life and work and wonder if our best days are behind us — or perhaps, ahead.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, what we often long for most is some way of extricating ourselves from who we’ve been. We need some way to break out of the boxes we have built for ourselves. We want to break free, to cast off an old self-image, like a nautilus moving into a new chamber. The same natural process that causes the nautilus to leave old chambers leads human beings to grow new ones.
At times we all wonder if we’re alone in our doubts and questioning. And yet we’re reticent to share our doubts and questions with others. Most of us, therefore, have what turns out to be a secret longing to discover more in life, to explore “what’s next.”
Sadly, we end up letting other people take our adventures for us. We let “professional explorers” on the Discovery Channel have the real experience while we participate only vicariously.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Adventuring, and just as importantly, inventuring — adventuring in the inner world — is possible for all of us, throughout our lives. In fact, if we allow ourselves to, we can make it the focus of our attitudes about life and work.
The big question when we were children was, “what do I want to be when I grow up?” It was too early, perhaps, to ask, “How will I do my living?” The modern dilemma, as sociologist Max Weber put it, is, “Do we work to live, or live to work?”
Many of us will admit that we have lived to work. We’ve drawn a distinction between what we have to do and what we want to do. But if we’re lucky, we can one day discover that the distinction is specious. When we’re really adventuring and inventuring, what we have to do merges with what we want to do.
The difficulty, though, is in letting go of all the “have-to’s” we’ve accumulated earlier in life.
Ultimately, what we are searching for is that sense of internal rhythm that explorers feel on their most exciting journeys. It’s that feeling of internal and external connectedness: knowing where you’re going, but not knowing how to get there. It’s about pushing ourselves to new limits, testing our edges, and keeping our curiosity alive.
Living the good life means being a “practical romantic” — seeing the calm beyond the storm and making our way through. We have to deal with making a living, paying college tuitions, loving our partner, doing the right work. We have to pay mortgages and car loans. Thus, we have to continually ask “how will I do my living?” To that extent we have to be practical.
But we also have to be romantic. We have to rekindle our passion. We have to be in love with people, places, and purpose. We have to be willing to engage in the utterly romantic and passionate quest to live the good life. Although we have to be practical and use our heads, we also need to be romantic, and follow our hearts. Even though the path it leads us on wanders all over the place
Life, though, was not meant to be linear. The path from birth to death is not a straight line journey. It’s a zig-zag. A loop-the-loop. A switchbacked trail, broken up by much retracing of steps. Our society, however, typically tries to reject this. And the result is the horrifying prospect of ending up “successfully retired,” at the end of a linear life.
The linear point of view tells us to first get an education, then work hard, then retire so you can finally begin living. But by that time many people have forgotten how to live — or else they’re so exhausted by getting where they’ve gotten that there’s no life left.
The alternative is to live all our life — as fully as possible. To challenge the existing script. To wander as opposed to sticking to the straight and narrow. Of course, this is scary. It’s not easy. It means we have to continually ask questions about our life, our love, our work.
On the other hand, there’s no escaping it. Sooner or later, in every life, there come times when established patterns, around which we have organized our lives, come apart. We come to question our assumptions about nearly everything. The patterns that have gotten us where we are begin to feel more like heavy weights than reliable guides. We begin the struggle to “let go” — to unpack and repack our bags. We feel like children all over again, and find ourselves asking once more, “What do I want to be when I grow up?”
The truthful answer isn’t as simple as it once was. Work has many “truths” for each of us. Since childhood, most of us have thought about what work means, and we constantly scrutinize our assumptions and reframe them as we come of age. Just as love has different meanings at different stages of life, work, too, takes on new meanings along the way.
Here are three “truths” that — at this point in our journey — we think are true about work. It seems to us that these three truths influence, even define, how most people do their living.
Work Truth #1:
People Don’t Choose Their Work,
It Chooses Them
Life is not long enough to try everything to discover our right livelihood. Where we grow up, when we grew up, and our vocational family tree all influenced our work choices. How did you choose your work?
Here are some answers we’ve heard:
• I considered a number of options seriously, explored each one, then picked one. Choosing my work was a difficult decision.
• At an early age I decided what I wanted to do and never considered much else seriously. Choosing my work was easy.
• I didn’t have a clue about what I wanted to do; I just took what was available and things developed from there in a way that’s kept me satisfied enough.
• I was forced to take whatever job I could find and I just stayed in that field. Through circumstances, my work chose me.
• The decision was more someone else’s than mine. It was just expected that I’d enter a certain line of work and I did. I’ve never committed myself to it, though I’m good at it.
Work satisfaction has a lot to do with how it was chosen. The key ingredient is how consciously and with how much autonomy we’ve made our choice.
Because most of us don’t know who we want to be when we grow up, we must get experience under our belts to be sure of our calling. But by the time we get that experience, some people feel it’s too late to make a choice. So they ignore the calling or just refuse to listen. As a result, there are many more people who are never sure of their calling than those who are sure.
During the first part of our lives, someone else usually writes our work script. Later, we are challenged to co-write, edit, or toss the original script.
We are dynamic, not static. We grow and our needs change. False starts or productive mistakes give us a “practice field” to learn what work we most enjoy doing, our calling.
Vocation comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a person is called to from the deepest part of their being.
But the quest for a true calling must be renewed and deepened throughout our lives. Joseph Campbell captured the essence. “The call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration. The familiar life horizon has been outgrown; the old concepts, ideals and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for passing the threshold is at hand.”
This is often what is happening when we reimagine career changes. We are not just switching jobs; we are pursuing our calling. And this requires crossing a threshold into a deeper part of ourselves.
Work Truth #2:
People Are More Sure of
What They DON’T Love to Do
Than What They DO Love to Do
Ask many people what their talents are and how they enjoy expressing them, and they’ll tell you they don’t know. But ask them what they don’t like and what they can’t do, and you’ll get a list a yard long. Experience has educated them in the negatives, but done little to inform them about the positives. This makes sense, actually. In order to truly dislike something, we have to experience it.
Try this out. Consider what are the two or three worst jobs you’ve ever had. What did you like least about them? What kind of people did you work with? What did you learn about what not to do in the future?
Hopefully, the jobs that you hated most came earlier in your work life. When we’re first starting out, we often have to take jobs we don’t like — just to make ends meet. We’re forced to try a lot of jobs that we wouldn’t otherwise think of.
For most of us, when we’re younger, the problem isn’t just that we don’t know what we like — we also don’t know what we’re good at. We haven’t identified our talents. Or even if we have, we haven’t developed confidence in them. Or in ourselves. Belief in yourself comes from the knowledge that you have the talents to be what you want to be.
Talents are a source of energy within each of us that is always waiting to be discovered (or rediscovered) and expressed. Tarthong Tulku, a lama from Eastern Tibet, speaks of this in his book Skillful Means. “By using skillful means to enrich our lives and bring our creature potential into everything we do, we can penetrate to the heart of our true nature. We then gain an understanding of the basic purpose in life, and appreciate the job of making good use of our precious time and energy.”
This knowledge of what we call doing the right work, together with a strong sense of talents and purpose in life, is an essential part of answering the question, “How will I do my living?”
In their classic Living the Good Life, Helen and Scott Nearing propose that the “objective of economic effort is not money, but livelihood.” They explain that the purpose of working is not to “make money” or “get rich,” but rather, to secure an existence that is harmonious with one’s deepest beliefs and most powerful feelings. In 1954, when their book was first published, they noted they knew of few people who shared their attitude, and that this was the source of much of the hardship — economic as well as emotional — that they observed. No doubt the numbers are no greater today … and the hardship certainly no less.
A high percentage of people who truly feel that they are living the good life have work that uses their best-loved talents as opposed to a job they do mainly to earn money.
Walter Kerr, in The Decline of Pleasure, writes, “If I were required to put it into a single sentence, my own explanation of the state of our hearts, heads and nerves, I would do it this way: we are vaguely wretched because we are leading half-lives, half-hearted, and with only one-half of our minds actively engaged in making contact with the universe about us.”10
To say that many people feel half-alive at work is probably an understatement. In our interviews, a much more common complaint is that they feel “half-dead.” People are secretly frantic. They sleepwalk through their days, half-heartedly using half their minds, but at the same time, they’re terrified that they’re wasting potentially half of their one and only life.
Each of us wants to feel unique. And what most of us mean by that is that we hope to discover some innate specialness which is our birthright, which no one else has in quite the same way. Ironically, most of us are so scared to be different that we hide our uniqueness any time it rears its ugly head.
So, we’re hungry to discover and express our talents because we need to be reassured of our uniqueness. We all want to feel that we’re not just another grain of sand on the beach but that we’ve been put here for some unique purpose — a purpose no one else can fulfill.
When it comes to acknowledging or owning our talents, most of us are terminally blind. We’re taught not to brag or extol our virtues. Richard Bach notes in his book, Illusions, “Argue for your limitations and sure enough they’re yours!”11
Everyone has some excellence seeking expression. Everyone has talents of which they are unaware or which they downplay. Uncovering those talents involves a learning process which has steps to it, much like the process by which one learns to ride a bike or to swim. Each step has to be mastered before the next step can be approached. But like riding a bike, once you’ve got it mastered, you never forget!
Work Truth #3:
Work Repacking Is a Critical Survival Skill Today
The idea of a permanent job is obsolete. These days, no one’s job is safe! The work world is in constant turmoil. Once-powerful industries teeter on the brink of extinction. Companies whose names used to be synonymous with security are laying people off in record numbers. Your job may disappear at any moment without warning. These days, nearly everyone will be “between jobs” or out of work at some time.
It doesn’t even matter how good a job you’re doing. Excellence is no defense. You solve problems creatively? You consistently add value? These are no longer safeguards against searing competition, rapid technological change, and relentless restructuring.
You must be prepared to go job-hunting for the rest of your life. No one owes you a job — not your present employer, not your union, not even if you work for Mom and Dad. It’s up to you to create your future. Today, everyone, up through the highest ranks of professionals, feel increased pressure to reinvent themselves as a marketable “portfolio” of talents.
As the paradigm of work shifts to a “creator economy,” work itself is being redefined. We’re seeing an increased need for re-learning and creative thinking, less focus on “what you know” than “how you add value.”
All of us will be unpacking and repacking the structure of our work. Most of us will end up working for a “network” of organizations linked to customers and suppliers via technology. If you’ve been keeping up with your reading, you’ll recognize this model as the “networked society” — a place pared down to its core competencies and sending out for everything else — including lunch!
In the future, the key question for most people will not be “What’s my job?” — but “What value do I add?”
So it’s time to ask yourself that same question.
What value do I add?
Too many of us define ourselves these days by our “tools.” When someone asks us what we do, we say, “Oh, I work with computers.” Or, “I’m in technology.” Even highly trained professionals define themselves like this: “I’m a radiologist.” Or “I run a network.”
The problem is that many, if not most, of those tools are going to be obsolete in a few years. So if you’ve built a career based on your tools, you’ll be out of luck. And out of work, too.
Instead of getting known for your tools, you need to build a reputation based on the distinct value you can offer.
Regardless of where you work these days — at a large corporation, a small business, or at a computer in your basement — the message is the same. You are on your own. You have to see yourself as a business. You have to consider yourself your own corporation, “You, Inc.,” and like any corporation, be ready to develop a comprehensive strategic plan for growth.
If we can recycle bottles, cans, and newspapers, we can certainly “recycle” ourselves. To prosper in this volatile world of work we must be ready to recycle ourselves. In other words, to repack our bags.
And even if this weren’t the case, even if the workaday world was as stable and predictable as in years gone by, there’s an even more important reason why life and work repacking is a critical survival skill:
Most of us tire of our work once we have mastered it.
Feeling burnt-out? Rusted-out? Bored? Maybe you’ve reached the end of the road on your current job.
All jobs have “lives”: cycles of learning, mastery, plateauing, and declining.
Because we have brains, we require new stimulation for growth, food for the mind, body, and soul. Some people try to ignore this. Others create life crises on purpose. A friend of ours claims, “Three years is enough for anyone in one job path. After that it’s a repeat performance. The fun challenges will have been met and creativity expressed. Your curiosity fades, productivity flattens and numbness settles in!”
When Hall of Fame baseball player George Brett ended his career after 20 record-breaking seasons, he admitted that his desire had waned. He said, “I wasn’t that excited when I did something good. I wasn’t getting that down when I did something bad. I wasn’t that happy when we won. I didn’t feel as bad when we lost. There’s something about riding a roller coaster. If you ride a roller coaster 162 times, you’re ready for something different.”
The Ideal Job?
Many people have settled for work that makes them mildly miserable day after day, month after month, year after year. When they feel the pangs of frustration or burnout, they attempt to bury their fear. They rationalize, “Hey, it’s a living! What more can you ask for these days?”
The message is that drudgery is tolerable as long as it pays.
Our response to these people is probably exactly what they don’t want to hear. First, we believe that all the money in the world doesn’t make drudgery tolerable. And second, we’re convinced that you don’t have to settle for less than your dreams. It is possible to find the job you really want. Such good fortune is not just for a lucky few.
Everyone knows what the “ideal job” is: you get paid a huge sum of money to work in a lovely office all by yourself with unlimited travel to beautiful places and lots of time off. And nobody tells you what to do.
But the truth is, that ideal job doesn’t exist. Not if you define it the way most people do — as one that has no bad parts to it, no “latrine work.”
Every job has its good parts and its bad parts. It’s hard to imagine any kind of work that would be enjoyable 100% of the time. Even sports heroes and movie stars have their bad days.
So, the “ideal job” isn’t really about full-time enjoyment. Instead, it’s one that mirrors perfectly the person who holds it. And people do find — or invent, or create — these jobs. They do it by working a process — a surprisingly simple one.
It’s a process that links who you are with what you do.
The process involves developing a clarity about your talents, passions, and values: looking inside yourself to discover what you love to do, what you truly care about, and the type of working environment that supports what you care about most. And then combining all three to develop a clear vision of the kind of work that links who you are with what you do.
When we talk with those who are energized by their work, who are truly enjoying it, we notice they are not in “perfect jobs.” But, they are in situations that they have freely chosen. If and when they change work directions or retire, they eventually “choose” something again.
Many do a combination of things as they reach for a quality of life that involves, as Robert Fulghum writes in All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, “learning some and thinking some and drawing and painting and singing and dancing and playing and working every day some.”
The ideal job isn’t a standard of living — it’s a state of mind and a state of being. In the ideal job, you’re applying the talents you enjoy most to an interest you’re passionate about, in an environment that fits who you are and what you value.
The Reimagined Life
We’re inspired by stories of people whose talents, passions, and values are in alignment, and who have the courage and conviction to regularly reimagine and recreate their work lives. We’ve noticed common threads running through their stories, and have taken to calling this the “reimagined life.”
Here are some of the common threads of people who are living the reimagined life:
• They have a purpose larger than their own needs, wants and desires — a sense of how their lives and work fit into the larger scheme of things.
• They have an internal compass which keeps them “truing” to their purpose in life.
• They have clear boundaries around their two most precious currencies — time and money.
• They have a sense of their potential talents, the limits of which have not been fully tested.
• They have marked adaptability when faced with obstacles — they simply handle them as a natural feature of living.
• Their abundant energy is infectious — it gives them and the people around them even more.
• They see their work as more than just a job; they are motivated by a sense of “calling.”
• They have a feeling of lightness — a sense of not being burdened by the burdens they are carrying.
We often hear about “visionaries”: inspiring people whose lives center around their talents, passions, and values. People, who, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, “dream of things that never were and ask, ‘Why not?’”
Understandably, we tend to put such people on a pedestal, and convince ourselves that we could never be like them; that they have something we could never have.
It’s true, most of them do have something few of us have, but it’s false that it’s unavailable to us. In fact, the main difference that we’ve observed between these “visionaries” and the rest of us can be observed in just two simple qualities:
First, these “visionaries” tend to have clearly identified for themselves their purpose — their source of meaning in life, the reason they “get up in the morning.”
And second, they view work as a calling, a vocation, as something they were meant to do. In short, they have discovered work that is rich in purpose.
Choosing Work That Is Rich in Purpose
What is the purpose of your work?
Before choosing work that is rich in purpose, we must first clarify what our work’s purpose is. To put it another way, if we don’t know what we want, how will we know if we’ve gotten it?
But even before knowing what we want, we need to know why we want it. Knowing why we want something means knowing a little bit more about our purpose in life.
So what is “purpose”?
Purpose is your reason for being, your answer to the question, “Why do I get up in the morning?” It is the spiritual core that helps us find the aliveness in our day-to-day work life. Nevertheless, for a lot of us, the “purpose” aspect of our lives is the hardest to understand because it can’t really be measured and it’s hard to see.
A purpose is not a goal. A goal is something that can be reached. A purpose, though, is never achieved. It exists before you, and lives on after you’re gone.
Purpose is a direction, like “west.” No matter how far west you go, there’s still more west to travel. And like directions, a purpose helps you choose where to go along the route.
Purpose is your lodestar, your personal compass of truth. It tells you, in any given moment, whether you’re living your life “on purpose” or not.
You use your purpose to set your course in life. It’s the quality around which you center yourself. Without a clear sense of purpose it’s like being on a ship without a rudder somewhere in the middle of an ocean — you’re lost, and out of control. Having a purpose, though, enables you to find your direction. It makes choosing the right work enormously easier.
Often it takes a crisis for people to discover (or rediscover) their calling — their authentic work. Here are some questions, though, that can lead you to uncover your calling.
1. What are your talents?
Name all of them — this is no time for modesty. Then choose three you think are most important and write them down. Narrow down each to one or two words. “Loving, caring, teaching, listening, creating, etc.” If you’re blocked, ask a Repacking Partner for suggestions.
Richard’s example: “My three most important talents are my deep listening ability, my simplifying, and clear speaking.”
Dave’s example: “My three most important talents are my sense of humor, my optimism, and my resourcefulness.”
2. What are you passionate about?
What are the things you are most curious about, that you daydream about, that you wish you had more time to put energy into? What needs doing in the world that you’d like to put your talents to work on? What are the main areas in which you’d like to invest your talents?
Richard’s example: “My passion or focus is to help people awaken their spirit for the sake of discovering their purpose in life.”
Dave’s example: “My passion is on helping people to communicate more effectively, and in doing so, to foster understanding among individuals and communities.”
3. What environment feels most natural to you?
In what work and life situations are you most comfortable expressing your talents?
Richard’s example: “I most often express my talents and interest in casual learning settings (e.g., workshops) or sitting around campfires with people.”
Dave’s example: “I most often express my talents in a one-on-one situation, either with another person or with myself.”
4. Now take your answers to questions 1, 2 and 3, and combine what you think are the most important elements of them to make a complete sentence as in the following example from Richard:
“My purpose in life is …” (answer to question 1): “to use my listening, my simplifying and my clear speaking”
(answer to question 2): “to help people awaken their spirits”
(answer to question 3): “in natural environments.”
Richard says, “Over the years my purpose has evolved to one simple statement that moves me: “To help people awaken their spirits.”
It’s important that you state your purpose in the present tense to ensure that it is always current. Again, you’ll probably find that, in many ways, you’ve already been living your purpose all along. The choices you have made throughout your life have supported it. It does help, though, particularly during work changes, to have your purpose statement clearly in mind. That way the stresses make more sense and you’re better able to connect the changes to new insights and healthy choices.
One last note: You may find you have several purposes — several issues you care deeply about. If you keep investigating, though, you’ll eventually find a common thread that ties them all together. So, repeat the questions above as often as you wish to clarify your moving purpose.
Identifying Your Calling
Calling is the inner urge to give our gifts away. We heed that call when we offer our gifts in service to something we are passionate about in an environment that is consistent with our core values.
The roots of calling in our lives go back very deeply — to even before we were born. Calling is an expression of our essence; it’s our embedded destiny. The seed of this destiny lies within us; one way or another it seeks to fulfill itself in the world. So the question we need to ask ourselves is whether we’re doing all we can to bring the fruits of our calling to bear.
Although calling runs through our whole lives, we are not called once for life. It is something we do every day. Calling breaks down into daily choices. Responding to our calling, we ask ourselves again and again: “How can I consistently give my gifts away?”
We bring our calling to our work every single day. And we do so by expressing our gifts, passions, and values in a manner that is consistent with the legacy we want to leave.
People who have discovered their calling and choose to bring it to their work tend to be phenomenally energized about what they do. They have an almost childlike passion for their projects and a great sense of gratitude for their good fortune. By aligning who they are with what they do, they have answered the eternal question we face every day: “Why do I get up in the morning?”
Discovering that calling, though, can be made easier through the use of the Calling Cards — a list of natural preferences that have emerged in our discussions and research with hundreds of people over the last few decades. Each of the callings describes a core gift. Each calling comes directly out of someone’s experience. We have been collecting callings in seminars, workshops, and coaching sessions with individuals and groups from all walks of life. The list of 52 callings we have come up with represent the “essence of essences” in our research. (This doesn’t mean that there are not other callings than our 52; it does, however, mean that these 52 represent those that have best withstood real-world testing.)
Using the Calling Cards in a simple self-examination helps us name our calling — that gift which is invisible but wants to be unwrapped and given away.
The lives we live emerge from the words we choose to define our lives. So, as you examine the Calling Cards, listen carefully to what you’re telling yourself. To find joy in our work, we need a clear, simple way to name our calling. We need to reframe our concept of calling until the words feel natural and come to us easily. We must settle for nothing less than a description of calling that fits us and no one else exactly the same way. No one can choose our calling for us; no one else can tell us how to express our calling once it is found. Each of us, individually, must hear and heed our role in the world. Each of us must choose or create the Calling Card that expresses the gifts we feel an inner urge to give away.
So … go within. Examine the Calling Cards. Explore the possibilities of calling. Name your calling.
Calling Cards Instructions
Step 1: Your Natural Preferences
Ask yourself: What do I love to do?
Examine the entire list of 52 callings. As you study them, arrange the callings in three groups according to your natural preferences.
Group #1: Those that fit what you truly love to do.
Group #2: Those that are not things you love to do.
Group #3: Not sure or can’t decide right now.
Don’t rush. Use your intuition. What does your hand turn to naturally? What calls to you? Continue to look through the first two groups to identify those callings that fit you best.
(An interactive online version of the Calling Cards is available at www.inventuregroup.com.)
Step 2: Your Five Most Natural Preferences
Ask yourself: What five gifts do I most love to do?
Concentrate on the Group #1 callings. Explore them more carefully. Which ones seem to be the “best of the best”? Without thinking too much about it, identify the ones that seem to call to you automatically. Select the top five callings from this group — those that best describe what you naturally enjoy doing.
Step 3: Your Single Most Natural Preference
Ask yourself: What gift do I most love to give to others?
Consider the five callings you have selected. Knowing yourself as you do, which one card seems to “call to you”; which is the one that, throughout your life, you have most consistently loved giving to others? If you were forced to pick just one, which one would it be?
Step 4: Your Calling Card
Study your number one card. If the words don’t fit exactly, feel free to edit so that your own calling describes you accurately. You may find it useful to use words from your top five callings to perfectly describe your calling.
Step 5: Make a Call
Discuss your Calling Card with a Repacking Partner. See if others have insight into your calling that can help you refine it further.
Step 6: Imagine a Call
Imagine that you could do any kind of work in the world; anything at all — as long as it fits your Calling Card. Jot down three or four things you can see yourself doing. What does this list tell you about your calling?
Perhaps you’re thinking: “This Calling Card looks great. But it’s not my job! Moreover, I don’t have the financial resources or personal freedom to do the work I love the most. How do I heed the call when I first have to heed my bills, my boss, and my family?” If you’re asking questions like that, ask yourself these questions instead:
• Does your work give you a small opportunity to express your calling? Does it ever let you do what you most enjoy doing?
• While you’re working, do you ever get the sense that you’re doing the right thing in the right place? How often does it happen? When it happens, what are you doing?
• What’s one thing — a little thing — you could do right now to express your calling at work? What’s stopping you?
Another Way to Use the Calling Cards
An alternative way to arrive at Your Single Most Natural Preference is to work through the callings, pairing them two-by-two, and choosing which of the pair you think more accurately reflects your calling. This works especially well with a partner.
Set the callings down between you and your partner. Have your partner name the first two callings. Quickly — within three seconds or so — choose which is the better expression of what you most love to do. Put the “winner” in one group, and set the “loser” aside. (If you honestly can’t decide — that is, if they’re both “winners,” put them both in the “winning” group. If neither seems appropriate for you at all, discard them both.)
Having gone through the callings once, you will have a group of 26 winners. Repeat the process from above, going through all 26. Now you will have 13 winners. Repeat the process with this group. You’ll have six winners. Then three. Then one. This final “winning” card is your Calling Card.
Get Into It!
Having chosen our Calling Card, we are faced with the unavoidable choice of whether to heed it. Either we do or we don’t — and the time to decide has arrived.
Calling isn’t our work, it’s what we bring to our work. The core idea of calling is a simple and liberating truth: “It’s not what you do that matters, it’s how you do it.”
In order to understand this aspect of calling more fully, it’s helpful to ask yourself two questions. The first is “What do you do?” What kind of work are you currently performing? How consistent is it with your stated calling? Should you stay or leave your current job? The second question is “How do you do it?” What part of your job fulfills your sense of calling? How can you give away your gifts, even if you’re in a job that isn’t exactly what you want to be doing? How can you express your calling, even if only partially?
Elements of our calling can be expressed in almost any job. When we begin to see what we do as an opportunity for heeding our calling, nothing changes — but everything changes. We still have our reports to write, our students to teach, our clients to serve. We still have our up days and down days; empowering colleagues and irritating colleagues; interesting projects and boring projects. We still have days when it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning. Nothing seems to have changed.
But on the other hand, everything has changed. By expressing our calling, even in small, partial ways, our work is suddenly more fulfilling. We find meaning in what we do, even when it’s not exactly what we think we were meant to be doing. On occasion, throughout the work day, we feel that we’re in the right place, with the right people, doing the right work, on purpose.
We have, in other words, found that formula for reimagining our lifework.
“Get a Life”
With a clearly identified calling in our lives, we are ready and able to reimagine our lifework. We are finally able to lighten up and live — quite simply, to “get a life.”
The word “light” in the word “enlightened” is often thought of in the sense of illumination. Enlightened people have “seen the light” or “see things in a new light.” There is, however, another use of the word “enlighten” — that is, “a lightening of the load.”
In The White Hole In Time, Peter Russell explains, “The heaviest burdens in this life are not our physical burdens but our mental ones. We are weighed down by our concern for the past and our worries about the future. This is the load we bear, the weariness that comes from our timefulness … To enlighten the mind is to relieve it of this load. An enlightened mind is a mind no longer weighed down by attachments; it is a mind that is free.”12
Dante was 35 years old and frustrated with his life when he wrote the first line of The Inferno — describing perhaps the first midlife crisis in Western literature.
Midway through life’s journey I was made aware that I had strayed
into a dark forest, and the right path appeared not anywhere.
However it is described, middle age remains a key period in people’s lives in which they choose to lighten their loads.
Many people ask themselves, “Wasn’t I supposed to be somebody by now, or at least to know what I want to do with my life?”
Our investigations lead us to conclude that there are no set stages, transition points or predictable crises. What happens to people is often the result of accident, personal experiences, financial circumstances, and the historical period in which they live. People naturally move in and out of phases of life.
What does commonly happen, however, is a more subtle acceptance of life’s limitations and possibilities. One of two things seems to happen by midlife: we achieve our dream or we do not. Either way it creates a problem. The sooner we accept the idea that life may not turn out as we originally planned, the more likely we are to reimagine our lives in a positive manner. Often a major life event — divorce, illness, losing a job, kids leaving home (or returning), or the deaths of parents, spouses and friends — can bring about profound reimagining. These can happen at any point in life, but they seem to mount up in midlife and beyond. Our ability to prepare for and respond to these challenges is what reimagining our lives is all about.
Life Reimagined Postcard Exercise
Try to imagine how your life reimagined could look. Here’s an opportunity to clarify your vision.
Directions
• On your postcard, write down your Life Reimagined Formula: (Talents × Passions × Environment) = Calling
• Imagine that you are living that life. Write a couple of sentences describing the work that you’d love to do. It need not be an essay, but make it more than “Weather’s fine, wish you were here.”
• Send your postcard to your Repacking Partner. If possible, get together with them to converse about your Life Reimagined.