Common Calls 2
I FEEL LIKE I HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO DO GREAT THINGS. THIS [FEELING] CAME FROM MY FAMILY AND FROM TEACHERS.… I WANT TO BE PREPARED FOR IT.
John Stormer
Bay Area business leader
I THINK MY CALLING IS TO WORK WITH PEOPLE I LIKE AND TO MAKE GOOD THINGS HAPPEN.… I AM OMNIVOROUS, DRAWN TO ALMOST ANY PROJECT THAT PRESENTS A CHALLENGE AND INVOLVES WORKING WITH—OR MAYBE FOR—SOMEONE I LIKE.
Sandy Smith
Consultant and coach, Seattle
WE HAVE DESCRIBED CALLS and our response to them. Now, let’s be very practical and look at how calls work in our everyday lives.
Mother Teresa often talked about her calling to work with the poor. Before a meaning-filled train journey she had been a teacher; after she had a prayerful conversation with God on that trip, she changed her life mission and served the poor. Her life was one of the great modern examples of answering a call.
But for two reasons, in this book we will concentrate less on the inspiring examples like Mother Teresa, although we won’t ignore them. First, her life was very different from the lives of most of us who have normal family and work roles, kids or grandkids or aging parents, jobs we want to build into careers, and careers we want to be fulfilling. On top of that we have life maintenance chores—we buy groceries and make mortgage payments, cut the grass and clean the refrigerator. Mother Teresa, a shining portrait of a called life devoted to service, most likely had a lot of normal life activities too, but she is hard to relate to. Her life is saintly in the extreme.
26Second, Mother Teresa had a conversation with God in a prayerful moment that marked the rest of her life. My experience is that most of us have multiple conversations and calling moments in a lifetime, and often we have to move on when the calling is anything but clear and singular.
So the questions we address in this chapter are these:
- If you have talent but not overwhelming gifts, how can you shape your response to callings so that you give meaning to your daily activity?
- Can you consider the various calls in any systematic way as you respond to the many sides of life, all of which are worth living with high intention?
- How can you use your past, review the calls you excelled in answering, the ones you managed well enough, and the ones you botched up terribly, so you can move into the future with greater wisdom?
CALLS BOTH OBVIOUS AND SUBTLE
There are those among us who have a talent and an aptitude so well developed and seemingly such a gift of genetic endowment and upbringing that their answer to their call is to develop that talent or that aptitude to its fullest. By doing so, they endow all of us. Musician, athlete, and entrepreneur are a few of the roles that seem to invite the supertalented and that are brought to us by the media.
Tiger Woods is a cultural athletic endowment. Ravi Shankar is a musical one. Einstein, a scientific one. And there are thousands like them. It is a pity when we observe someone with great talent who does not pursue it for whatever reason. We say that is a waste and wonder why it happened, sometimes finding answers and sometimes not.
But these standouts, for a different reason than Mother Teresa, are not unlike her; they are equally difficult for all of us of more average talent to relate to.
27Most people are not given an extraordinary talent to develop, nor, as much as they may reflect, a clear direction during a train trip while in prayer. What happens in the everyday world is that we discover our talents and our flaws, come across problems that intrigue us and roles that absorb us, and make commitments to give our best. Some of the roles we take on last for decades, if not a lifetime. Some last for a much shorter time.
In the stew of everyday problems and ordinary life tasks we gain opportunities to do something about them. This, combined with the cultivation of our talents as we discover them, helps us arrive at our callings. We find ourselves summoned to make something better, to do something worthwhile. When we say yes to the summons, we are acting on our calls.
These are the less obvious calls that engage our minds and hearts, do not win us trophies, and yet make all the difference to society and to ourselves when we make the decision to do something worthwhile. People who answer these calls include the schoolteacher devoted to sparking the minds of his students. The sales manager wanting to deliver a superior service and develop her people to the fullest. The engineer designing the best, safest, most efficient building. The parents patiently doing homework with their child. The social worker addressing one more difficult case.
Unlike the mega-calls for the supertalented or saintly, a portfolio of everyday callings is at work for us at any particular time in our lives. One or two calls may take up most of our time—such as being a good parent and adding as much value as possible through our daily work—but other smaller calls—like staying true to a friend facing cancer and needing support—may also work their way into our lives. It is the waxing and waning of calls during the months and years, duties and roles that need our best intentions and solid attention, that create a life. Most of us live a portfolio of calls of our own making.
To describe this kind of approach to multiple calls, there is a quote on a grave at Arlington National Cemetery that says it well:
Few of us have the greatness to bend history itself. But all of us have the opportunity to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped.
28Having courage and belief in the numberless tasks and routines of living a life is answering a call. The quote is from Robert Kennedy.
This portfolio idea needs some emphasis. Some of those who support the notion of callings get entirely too grandiose about it. I once heard a speaker at a convention talking about destiny and calls and using Jesus and Martin Luther King as examples for the audience. Although I found the stories inspiring and sensed the speaker’s intent, I think he had the emphasis wrong.
I wanted to tell him to chill out, to get considerably less heroic about it all. We are called to live courageously in the little events more often than the historically significant ones. Some calls are obvious and big; most are subtle and small. Look for and live the small ones.
Being a mother, a great mother who raises loving whole kids, is a calling.
Being a ditchdigger may be a calling too.
Years ago, while I was giving a seminar, a man I will call Romanelli (not his real name; I can only remember the Italian part) told me a story about his grandfather, who was a laborer in his son’s (Romanelli’s father’s) construction firm of the same name. The son had gotten the education, and now it was the grandson’s turn to work in the family business, starting with the physical labor part of it, and learn from the bottom up.
One hot summer day, the grandson was digging ditches and going through the motions halfheartedly. Grandfather Romanelli was watching and decided it was time to teach his heir a little about callings.
In his heavily accented English, which you can add with your imagination, the older man approached the teenager. “Why are you not digging with energy, boy?” queried the elder. “We gotta long a way to go down this road.”
“Grandpa,” answered the grandson, “you know this is lousy work and I can’t wait until it’s over.”
“When you diggin’ the ditch,” said Grandpa with teachable-moment emphasis and strength in his voice, “you dig the ditch with pride. That’s no ordinary ditch. That’s a Romanelli ditch!”
We assume ordinary roles. We can make them more than ordinary when we will them to a higher level.
29The Working Quadrant of Calls
There are many such calls to significance in ordinary life. In this section I describe the quite common ones, and I use a simple two-axis grid to categorize them. When I hear people describe what it is that they are trying to accomplish in their lives, how they are adding value, and what their inner voice is urging them to address, I hear the following calls more than others. I encourage you to add your own to the list, because this is not intended to be comprehensive, and make your own grid, because the categories are also open to additions.
It doesn’t take much observation to see that calls come in polar opposites. Where one person feels attracted to a field exploring an inner frontier, like psychotherapy, another will be attracted to an outer frontier, like cataloguing the world’s tectonic plates. It’s a yin-yang phenomenon. What one person is drawn to and develops his gifts for, another abhors.
As Ecclesiastes reminds us: there is a time for every purpose (and call) under heaven.
The horizontal axis of the grid shows the internal and external polar opposites of calls. In a field such as science, for example, there is a spectrum from internal, which stays primarily in a mental mode or abstract state, to external, the more visible one. The internally driven scientist works in primary research and knowledge for its own sake; the externally driven scientist applies science to the world and builds or makes things.
Those driven by calls to the internal focus on creating mental models and knowledge; those responding to calls to the external concentrate on applications and working models in the real world of space and time.
Imagination versus applied imagination. Knowledge versus applied knowledge.
For the vertical axis of the grid, I’ve chosen to make the spectrum the head and the heart, or the fields of human endeavor divided along our thoughts and our emotions. This leaves out the body for now, but we will have a word on that later. The head is obviously about cognition, and the heart concerns the emotional intelligence work that imbues calls of many kinds.
30So here is the grid.
The danger in any such illustration is oversimplification. Of course, much human endeavor combines head and heart and is both internal and external. But I use the grid to describe the degree of internal-external and head-heart, not to isolate one calling as solely one type or another.
What’s useful about making these distinctions is that in pursuing a call, you can match your strengths and analyze your history as a source of knowledge for the decisions ahead of you. You can better discern what your options are. It may be time, for instance, for someone who has worked in the field of human emotions and intelligence—customer service professionals, for example—to redirect themselves to the head spectrum of the field, to analyze customer contact patterns and devise new service options, perhaps. Same field, different spin on the calling.
There are an endless number of calls by virtue of our uniqueness. We sit firmly in the world of paradox here, as the career counselor giving the college student advice says: “Remember, you are unique, just like everybody else.”
Like genus and species and subspecies, the list of calls could go into the thousands. But knowing the greater call patterns is the place to start.
Then refine them to your own purposes and that of others.
31When you support an adolescent beginning her quest, it is helpful to teach her to make the distinction between the joys and demands of the call of the family and those of the call of the marketplace. Later she can decide for herself if she wants to devote herself to the details and daily drama of raising kids in a Cleveland suburb, pursue equity financing to buy a bagel franchise, or both.
COMMON CALLS
Knowing how many calls exist is not as important as understanding how to respond to the real thing and how to combine them in harmonious ways to make a life of meaning. When we respond well, the choices we make create a beautiful life tapestry worthy of hanging in the Call Hall-of-Fame. When we respond poorly, we end up with an unsightly mess, not worthy of hanging anywhere.
Here are some of the most common calls and a description of where they could be placed on the matrix.
THE CALL TO FAMILY: EXTERNAL HEART
This is the most widely received of calls. We seem hardwired genetically to devote ourselves to the good of our families. One generation’s care for the next, or the former, takes on the dimensions of a calling when we see that the well-being of those we are connected to as family depends in great part on the love, resources, and attention we provide.
THE CALL OF THE MARKETPLACE: EXTERNAL HEAD
This common call activates millions as they formulate plans to build the business in which they participate and make free enterprise the playground where they focus their talents. Their natural bent is to think about beating the competition, getting more customers, increasing shareholder value, and generating wealth. This call, like the others, can take a person out of balance if pursued to the exclusion of other calls.
32THE CALL TO LEADERSHIP: EXTERNAL HEART AND HEAD
This call most often combines new ways of thinking with the ability to influence others. Authentic leadership shows up whenever someone facilitates and stimulates collective change for the good of the whole. The failure of stepping up to a call to leadership shows up in lack of vision, stamina, communication know-how, and most notably, courage. This call shows up in all walks of life, integrating unchanging purpose with continuous change, generating productive action stemming from core values.
THE CALL TO SCHOLARSHIP: INTERNAL HEAD
Far from the day-to-day hype of pop culture, those in the community of scholars are called to advance the knowledge of humankind through research and the rigors of their discipline. Those called in this way often work behind the scenes for the good of humankind.
THE CALL TO SPIRITUAL SERVICE: EXTERNAL HEART
This one is not reserved for the clergy, but activates anyone whose devotion to God or a higher source is strong in their lives. Clergy in any religion make this call the cornerstone of their lives. The examples we have of those living this type of call are huge—from all the saints and Mother Teresa to Aunt Millie, who never missed her daily prayers and never had anything but a kind word for everyone.
THE CALL TO A HIGHER MORAL ORDER AND JUSTICE: EXTERNAL HEART
This call accompanies many of the other calls and it is a powerful force in history as good tries to overcome the regressive forces in our nature. Sometimes a provocateur like Nelson Mandela emerges on the world stage to usher in a new moral order. In our everyday lives, this call may be lived by a community trying to make the best use of its economic resources for all, poor and not poor. The distinguishing feature of these calls is that they are ennobling in and of themselves and act as a cornerstone of free societies. 33
A rare and powerful form of this call is when someone endures a life wound to turn it into a passionate cause. A person is deeply injured by an injustice or a tragedy—a murder of a loved one, an environmental disaster that destroys a neighborhood. The victim, rather than healing the wound privately, transforms the inner pain and anger into an outer cause. The women who created Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) are perhaps the most widely known example.
THE CALL OF THE ROUTINE: INTERNAL HEAD OR HEART
The counterpoint to the call to a higher moral order and justice is this call to take on the insignificant-in-themselves tasks and routines and transform them into acts of human accomplishment. As long as we have bodies and live in space and time, large numbers of the human family will be serving food and cleaning buildings and processing claims and sorting mail, even if it’s email. No higher moral order here, but it has to get done. People with this call commit themselves as evocateurs to breath life into the ordinary, to make the menial meaningful. Although the routines may be external, the work to infuse them with meaning is internal.
THE CALL OF THE PROFESSIONS: MAINLY EXTERNAL HEAD AND HEART
(A word of explanation: the engineer is a typical head call; the social worker a call of the heart.)
Those who start out as engineers or chemists or nutrition specialists transform themselves when they get this call. They go from thinking about making a living through their profession to thinking about giving back to the world through the positive impact their profession can make. Those who respond to this career call are connected to the deeper aspects of their work. Whole professions occasionally get denigrated, like lawyers and car salespersons, so these people have special work to do. 34
THE COMMUNITY CALL: EXTERNAL HEART
The glue that holds together the quality of our lives in communities consists of the millions of people responding to the community call. These people are lured by the vision of enhancing the quality of life in their communities; they volunteer on boards, work in not-for-profit organizations. Taken to the limit, they are professional volunteers.
THE CALL OF NATURE: EXTERNAL AND HEAD OR HEART
Even among the ultra-urbanized who believe that bread comes from the shelf at the grocery store, magically concocted at a bakery somewhere, the call to nature continues to draw many of us to our biological or natural state. From visiting the national parks, to tending to the garden tomatoes, to working on local issues to preserve wetlands and wild habitats for distressed species, this call is a powerful one for many planetary citizens.
THE CALL TO BEAUTY: LOCATION DEPENDS ON THE ARTIST AND THE MEDIUM
(That is why I have placed it in the middle of the grid.)
This is where the artists hang out, whatever their medium. Those who hear this particular call have a need to create art for their brothers and sisters, to collect it, display it, or somehow feed their souls with regular and frequent visits to the deeper dimensions of life that great art and beauty take us to.
THE CALL TO PUBLIC SERVICE: LOCATION DEPENDS ON THE PUBLIC SERVANT AND THE PATH TAKEN
This is the call to serve in government. It includes calls and subcalls, from the military to elected positions to lifelong civil service in a variety of executive departments. Answering this call—which has been much denigrated by those campaigning against “the bureaucrats” over the past several decades—attracts many who want to make a difference in making our governing processes serve the greater whole. 35
Here is how these calls look on the grid. I have added a few others to be specific, like prayer, a spiritual call for those in convents and monasteries, and professions, like teaching and writing.
External calls are more common than internal calls because most people are called to do something that is outwardly visible that takes an already-existing social form, like a profession. My observations and many conversations and interviews lead me to believe that at least 80 percent of us respond to external calls. On the head-to-heart scale, it is much closer to 50-50.
WHAT ABOUT THE BODY?
While head and heart both go into any athletic or dancing career, the body alone is a calling for a significant portion of the human race. You may add to the previous list of calls the calls to use the body. Craftspeople, masseurs, and all those who work with their hands to heal and create beauty and function and value are responding to such a call.
There is no question that some are called to perform with their body as the medium for their work. Eventually, when the body ages, many of those gifted in this way are called to evolve into another aspect of their work or another career entirely, so they can again be called to do something significant. Frequently the change is from performance to coaching or mentoring, from the external to the internal.
But not always.
36Henry Moore, the sculptor, used his hands to create beauty into his nineties. When asked how he could continue this work for so many decades he said he had such a consuming passion for it that he could never chip it all away.
GIVING THE ROLE MUCH MORE THAN YOU THOUGHT YOU HAD
One word of caution.
Merely accepting or carrying out the duties of a role you like is not responding to a call. Using language like a “portfolio of common calls” can make it sound as if all life tasks are callings. In fact, a role only becomes a call when you will greatness and lasting spiritual substance into it, when you see the possibilities for something transcendent in a role that doesn’t on the surface seem to have many lasting possibilities. Digging ditches or being a parent or working for the government is a role, a job, or a calling, depending on how much courage and intention you bring to it.
The role turns into a calling when something inside you feels summoned to live the essence of the role and when you say yes to the summons. When you provide ample amounts of care and intention to a role’s root meaning and when you surrender to its most profound mystery, you transform the role into a calling.
When many of us talk about our marriages, or raising a family, or a job we have taken, or even a position on a board that we accepted, we often reflect on what our decisions got us into. “If I had known what this was going to take ahead of time, I never would have done it. What was I thinking?” shriek our egos out of a sense of being trapped and burdened.
Yet when we hang in there and keep saying yes, keep surrendering to the largeness of the task, when we negate our ego and its search for ease and a pain-free life, we start to transform our roles into callings. We live with the painful joy of knowing that we took on life with all we had.
Building a Portfolio of Calls
37The obviously gifted have the challenge of using their gifts for the world’s benefit, whereas the more moderately talented inherit the challenge of living with high purpose and intention in the ordinary roles that society provides.
Living with high intention in the roles we choose leads to the everyday greatness that can come with a portfolio of calls over the decades that mark our lives. History calls a few to greatness, but life calls all of us to make a difference in the situations we choose and into which we are sometimes thrown.
Our talents and preferences may take us to thinking or feeling, or internal or external work, but opportunities to respond to life’s duties more completely and humanly, if sometimes in hiding, are always near.
In the next chapter, we look at how the world around us would rather we stay chronologically bound to the surface of these roles than listen to the voice from kairotic time that can give roles soul depth. But we can believe our way past the shallow dimensions of the world if we insist that our calls make themselves known, and when they do, respond to them with clear and full intention.
EXERCISE: REVIEWING YOUR CALL HISTORY
Take some time, as much as you find valuable, and go back over the major chapters of your life to see what calls you were responding to that made up your life tasks at that time. Then evaluate your response to those calls—a simple assessment can help you see if you gave it your all but didn’t have enough skill, or if you had the aptitude but not the desire.
Here are two examples of life chapters: early career in New York and child-rearing years in university community.
You can use the decades of your life as a handy way to divide it into chapters, even if the chapters don’t fit precisely into ten-year increments. The following examples may help prompt your own thinking:
38Think about your life chapters and the calls you responded to, those you ignored, and those you heard faintly in the distance but didn’t devote enough of yourself to respond in a meaningful way. Consider the calls that make up your life now and what new calls may make themselves heard as your life progresses.