Mightily Believe You Have a Calling 3
I HAVE CALLED YOU BY NAME AND YOU ARE MINE.
Isaiah
ALTHOUGH CALLS CAN and do show up in everyday life, the difficulties in answering them are many. Believing that you are experiencing a call in the first place is a big challenge—so fundamental in fact that we’ll discuss it as our initial, most basic hurdle. The challenges to answering your calls we’ll explore in this chapter concern their very existence, because so often your daily experience and the world you encounter is anything but call-conducive.
Here are the questions we want to address in this chapter:
- How can you persist with your sense of calling in a society that aims large amounts of its resources at keeping you shallow?
- How can you stay patient enough to live your calling during those chapters of your life when much of your activity doesn’t shine with purpose?
- How can you live out the limitless possibilities of a called life when your life is creased and bound by limiting circumstances?
LISTENING PAST THE SOCIAL NOISE
The social messages that divert us from our calls begin innocently enough early in our lives, when we are learning how to operate morally in a world of people: “Share your toys, Johnny, or your friends won’t think you are a very nice boy.” As we mature, the same vehicles for these early messages—the voices of those in authority—may support us as we try to answer our true callings. Helpful suggestions from a teacher who provides new vision or a board that invites you to participate as a director can make big and positive impacts. These messages from the world as we encounter it can be invitations in the right direction for composing a called life.
But although help may come through the culture, let us not be fooled: the dominant social drummer pounds a commercial and conforming beat that is intense and relentless. Madison Avenue tells us what is hot—on the radio we listen to on the way to the grocery store, on the billboard messages we see on the way to work. During tonight’s trek through Web land, the homepage will tell us what is going on that matters and what we should give our attention to. The beat of society’s drum thumps rhythmically, constantly, both in the forefront and in the background of our lives, and when we aren’t giving our conscious attention to social messages we let the drummer’s pulses affect us on an unconscious level.
Paul Anderson, the Bay Area coach and consultant whom you met in the introduction, offers his experience of the influence of the social voice. “[Earlier in life] I responded to what now feel like false calls, though maybe I needed to go there first,” he writes, looking back on his early life chapters. “The calls came from society, like majoring in economics and finance and spending quite a few years in related fields.”
Much like people who live near airports and learn to block out airplane noise, we adapt to the social beat because it is the background sound we are used to. We all make our life choices while tapping our toes to the beat of the social drum and we are at best only partially aware that the choices we consider fall into the very narrow range of human possibility that our culture allows. Meanwhile, the beat continues to pound out its core message: Don’t think too hard, someone else has done the thinking for you. Sign on the dotted line and don’t worry. Come, follow the beat.
41If your parents didn’t convince you to marry someone of the same religion, your boss will tell you what you ought to do on your climb to the corner office as the vice president of overhead. These impostor calls coming straight from the culture take the benign-looking form of help from those in positions of authority. A grandmother warns her beloved thirteen-year-old granddaughter “to be sensible.” Being sensible in this case means, “Don’t follow your gifts into music; play it safe and get a professional degree.” Well-meaning advice from families and others in authority diverts many from responding to their deeper calls.
When listened to without discernment, the social drummer pounds out confusion, turning even the helpful parts of the social voice into noise.
The cultural beat becomes a cacophony of pulsings and imperatives that drown out our inner voice’s ability to find the way to our authentic work.
Although many caught in this shallow and confusing world look desperate and out of touch, many more carry on looking quite poised and together. They hold their confusion on the inside, wondering what they are about, why the rat race is so demanding, and whether they will have the stamina to keep on.
MAKING MONEY AND THE SOCIAL DRUMMER
One of the very powerful social beats concerns the view of money and work.
The overwhelming social message is to focus on acquiring money. We all know people who are driven to make more money no matter how much they have. After all, it’s good for the economy to earn and spend healthily. It’s patriotic to consume whatever we can.
42The movie Wall Street—which may achieve Hollywood classic status but stands as a great period piece on the greed of the eighties at the very least—provides a striking portrayal of this obsession. The young hero, fresh out of school, starting a life and looking for role models, encounters an exciting character of obvious business success, the flamboyant Gordon Gekko, who lives life large. At first the youth thinks Gekko’s energy and creativity may be a source of creative capitalism and self-expression. But by the middle of the movie he is confused, as he assesses whether Gekko’s drive to make money is positive or destructive.
His confusion is understandable.
From the outside looking in, especially to the unpracticed eye, the drive for money in any profession could seem to be a true calling to pursue excellence. A healthy, excellence-driven professional and a sick, money-driven professional may look the same on the outside: they are both very busy people doing many of the same things, spending long hours out of intense commitment, and earning big salaries.
But what is happening on the inside of those people is vastly different. Making money is only one measure, and an external one at that, of what is going on. People who are answering their call find self-expression through their work, achieve excellence and raise standards, and meet real human needs. The money-driven souls are after the big reward alone, pursuing proof that by making lots of money they are happy or at least better off than those who don’t have as much.
In Wall Street, in Hollywood nick-of-time fashion, the young hero finally decides that the money- and power-mad Gekko is a wounded, dangerous, lost soul, sickened by the social pathology and suffering from the curse of Midas. When he realizes the depth and perversity of Gekko’s obsession, he yells at him in disgust: “How many yachts can you water-ski behind?”
One, most likely, but someone will always be there to sell Gekko another yacht, or to sell you or me another television—the one we really need.
GOING BENEATH THE NOISE
The first step, then, for all who have a desire to live a life of sustained purpose, is to ignore the social din whenever possible, whether it is about money or power or being cool. We can buy nice things and pursue careers and do the normal, and then we have to pursue the abnormal, go contrary to fashion, swim upstream. We need our own set of drums with which to beat our own rhythms.
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You must mightily believe that beneath the noise is a call to a deeper life that only you can respond to in the unique ways that your gifts allow and your life path has led you.
This is a belief in a deeper message, an important purpose or set of purposes that keeps the soul on target in a world of consuming and conforming and norming to a social mean that saps passion and wastes time. This is a belief in an essential you.
MAINTAINING PURPOSE WHILE MANAGING THE DOLDRUMS
Among the unwelcome features of life are the large periods of time when we engage in activity that is not in itself bad or worthless but that just doesn’t carry a big psychological punch. After the marriage begins, when the honeymoon is a memory captured in a picture book, the work of maintaining the marriage and the family starts. After the career is launched with all its promise, the work of staying focused for the long haul, managing the ups and downs over time, becomes the daily chore.
When the rush of the beginning stages is gone, when the motivational tapes no longer pack a punch, when you live long periods with little inspiration, in sum, when the wind is gone from your life’s sails, you encounter the doldrums, one of life’s primary call-negating periods.
Frederic Hudson and Pamela McClean of the Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara are superb teachers of what happens in the doldrums. They taught me to spot them and explained how unprepared most of us are for these long stretches.
44Living your call even in the midst of these flat and uninspiring times is a critical skill and mindset to develop. (Much of this book is devoted to describing what kind of thinking is needed to pull this off.) Although we can experience the doldrums in parenting and everything else we do, some thoughts about our work life can get us started on the discussion.
Our work starts with a job, for most of us, something that we are lucky enough to “find” or “get.” The job is out there, and if we look hard enough we can discover it and gain the means to pay our bills. The point of control for this search—unless you are a natural entrepreneur or at the top of your class—is as much with those making the offer as with those making the search. That is why one “gets lucky to find” such a good job.
But in a normally healthy economy of job creation, it doesn’t take too long for most to go beyond the job-holding phase to the career management phase. We know this shift occurs when the point of control moves from those making the offer to those who are searching.
Unlike the job seeker who says, “Where will I be lucky enough to find good work?” the question for those managing careers becomes, “Who is going to be lucky enough to have me come work for them?” or “What kind of business do I want to create?”
This shift in control—from the job market to the person with the career journey—makes discovering and living a calling more possible. The chore of keeping a job evolves into the drama of creating a career, and the self-actualizing features of career-crafting engage the mind and heart.
Still, almost all the careers I have observed or had the privilege to coach include the doldrums. The long haul of a work life is rarely spiked with perfectly timed adventure and growth and newness. Exciting careers have flat periods, months and years of doing some of the same things that become routine.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the manager of someone in the career doldrums came to him and declared: “We have noticed that the travel is getting to you and that the trips to San Antonio and Houston are becoming a bit routine. So we have decided to cut back on those meetings for you, give you a few very exciting tasks, and throw in a few European junkets every quarter, so you can stay fresh, OK? How does that sound?”
45This declaration is from the It-Will-Never-Happen Department.
So although a career can have excitement, it is laced, sometimes even laden, with doldrums and routine, sameness and flat times.
Although a calling may begin with a job and continue with a career, it doesn’t end in either place. A calling is a long-haul proposition with a daily commitment to renew and recommit. We go from jobs to careers if we are at all skillful and willful, but for the purposes of answering a call, a career is nowhere near enough.
To handle the doldrums, we need to go with our core longing. We need to will ourselves past career management into deeper territory.
Callings start where careers leave off.
To experience a calling, a seeker has to delve under the surface of a career of busyness or sameness and find significance and a sense of lasting contribution. Such work demands developing a higher form of will. It takes a mindset and a heartset that is beyond the norm.
Nearly two decades into a corporate career, most of it as a consultant, this well-known consultant and author had a conversation that took him past the doldrums. Peter Block described it to me this way:
The work came closer to a calling about twenty-five years later [out of college]. I was in Stockholm at a conference. I was there to run a small workshop and out of curiosity I attended a talk by a philosophy professor, Peter Koestenbaum. He talked of every person’s need to confront the questions of destiny, isolation, meaning, death, relationship, and spirituality. The seriousness with which he spoke knocked me over. I had heard the words but never thought they were every person’s concerns. After that talk, I went to see him and asked him if he would work with me as a client. As he worked with me, I began to accept, in my fortieth year, that something more was to be pursued in my life.
Block was spurred on to his vocation, past the success of his booming career in the training and organizational learning field, one in which he had already created his first best-selling book. He believed he had something bigger to address.
Still, the doldrums don’t permanently disappear because of onetime conversations. The encounter with his mentor Peter Koestenbaum was the start of a different drumbeat for Peter Block, but hardly the end of the old one. The journey from head-engaging careers built around our egos to heart-reverberating vocations founded in our souls is usually a long one, and some of it travels over very stale and stagnant water. The doldrums appear any time the routine of the days and weeks and months starts to take the shine off the significance of the moment.
Career people with the ability to seize the magic in the moment and make their work a vocation, who expand their work into a calling that elevates the spirits of those whom they contact, are our models. The regular magic-making of people answering their call can happen only when they have beliefs, mighty beliefs. Mightily believing, in spite of all the facts to the contrary, is what breaks the bounds of ordinariness and set us on our way to significance.
One secret for keeping your calling alive is to declare the direct opposite of your doldrums experience. You negate the negation of your call and deem it something else.
When your career stalls in work that feels separated from meaning, precisely at this time you must affirm your work purpose, you must declare that the calls will come.
Override the feeling of staleness with an energizing and totally opposite thought. Doing so is an act that wills purpose into the seemingly purposeless. It is an absurd act of faith and defiance that defends your core being from the absurdity of the meaningless parts of the world and your life.
“Making one more sales call is a way to provide service, needed and necessary and humanizing service, to the customers in my marketplace.”
47“Handling this angry customer is not my favorite thing all the time, but if I can help him go from frustration to a better mood, I have done a little good.”
“Going over these numbers is a pain in the rear, but it is a part of my providing stewardship for this organization.”
“I may be a programmer (or customer rep or consultant) like many others, but I have something of lasting value to add here.”
Maintaining a sense of purpose, then, reminding yourself of the lasting value of your work, even the more mundane features of it, is one of the essential tasks to sustain a call, and turn a career, or even a job, into a vocation that elevates humanity.
THE MONASTERY VERSUS THE DOLDRUMS
In this lesson of making magic through the doldrums, monks have much to teach. Monks take vows to stay in one monastery the whole of their lives, to do ordinary work. They are spiritual specialists answering a call to live in the antidramatic confines of monastic life. They choose to live a life of significant insignificance. Confronting the mundane is a huge part of their spiritual discipline, willing and praying meaning into it. And waiting, of course, waiting to see what illumination may come with the patience to do only the simple, only the unspectacular.
Author Michael Downey puts it this way: “In the ache of the ordinary, the monk’s mind may wander, and he may wonder: Will there ever be just one Friday when it’s not tomato soup and cheese sandwiches for supper? What is the point of this life? Why don’t I do something?”1
So monks plunge into the routine for a lifetime, to see what is really there. And they stick with it, making no effort to escape the conditions of sameness that create doldrums for most of us. They know that doldrums are more a state of mind and heart, a lack of commitment and mindset, than an external condition.
48Monks know that every day is a day with limitless possibilities. As monastic expert Downey put it: “We need to stand still long enough, stay in one place awhile, sink roots deep enough to see the sacred in (an ordinary) Wednesday.”2
Monks mightily believe they have a calling. From them we can learn. Anyone who wants to answer the call of family or the professions through the inevitable doldrums can take inspiration from the monks.
Taking the Execs to the Monastery
One of my firm’s leadership programs ends with a four-day trip to Aspen, during which time we discuss ethics, soak up the atmosphere of the great thinkers and of the Aspen Institute, and engage the big questions of human nature, corporate social responsibility, and our capacity for good and evil. In the previous five months, we have spent days with the business leaders in more mundane places like hotel conference rooms, studying more earthly topics like strategy and finance, and working on emotional intelligence skills for executives.
But Aspen caps it off. And on the second to the last day we head to Snowmass to the monastery to meet Fr. Theophane, and Fr. William and Brother Micah. We discuss contemporary issues and we attend one of their services and join them with some Gregorian chant. And they share their monastic commitments and doubts. The monks talk about their callings.
We take pictures and buy books and gifts at their bookstore. And we drive back to Aspen moved by their authenticity, courage, and depth of their inner lives.
On this last day of the intense five-month experience, the executives consider what they are being called to do in the next phases of their work and family and community life. They have seen the radical callings of the robed and prayerful monks. They use the monastery experience to reflect on their own calling, and the necessary commitment to living a life of meaning.
49FOCUSING ON THE LIMITLESS WITHIN YOUR LIMITING CONDITIONS
Mightily believing in a calling despite the social noise and even during the doldrums are two problems to manage in living your call. A third is that the calling, and the expansiveness it evokes, needs to be lived out in the confines of totally ordinary duties and roles that are often anything but expansive.
During years of facilitating vision and mission statements for clients, at some point during the process I remind the leadership team that the vision is both absolutely necessary and totally insufficient. The vision needs to be lived through the confines of a plan and even—heaven forbid, no not that, anything but that!—a budget. Sweeping visions eventually find expression in budgets and the resources connected to them. Most of us have noticed that for visions to happen someone has to order the paper clips and keep toner cartridges in the printer.
Like a company fashioning its mission, individuals responding to their callings express them in the most concrete forms. Such expression is the ultimate human act—to take the limitless and give it limits. In many religions, a core teaching is that God the limitless somehow becomes incarnate, thus saving us from the ignorance, pridefulness, and selfishness that destroy our infinite nature. God saves us from our limits by making our spirits limitless.
The lesson is this:
Spirit needs matter.
High purpose seeks lowly form.
Vision leads to plans.
The unbounded soul wants time and space boundaries.
Answering the call finds expression in the confines of our ordinary lives.
If we don’t keep our perspective on this paradoxical union of opposites—the finite and the boundless—then the finite world can destroy the sense of expansiveness that a calling needs. The limits that define our lives—the money we do or don’t make, the job titles we live with, the education we do or don’t have, the sheer intractability of a problem that won’t go away—can shrivel up the sense of having a call, of contributing to something of lasting value.
50When soul-shriveling occurs we end up being “realistic,” paying attention to the social drummer—”Maybe I should be a food specialist and forget the entrepreneur thing”—losing our capacity to take a path chock-full of soul.
Two famous twentieth-century figures, both with callings, addressed this issue of finding the infinite in the finite. They encouraged our belief in being called by suggesting that humans have the ability to transform the nature of the moment, to break the bounds of space and time and roles, through the attitudes they choose and the beliefs they adopt.
Abraham Maslow, the mid-twentieth-century psychologist of human possibility, saw that the self-actualizing people he studied had turned their careers into vocations (my words, not his), transforming the limits they found in jobs and marriages and life into pools of possibilities.
He even warned against the desire to experience miracles. He saw miracle-seeking as a means to assure the seeker that there is indeed a deeper dimension to life than can be found in the very nonmiraculous ordinary routine in which we spend so much of our time. Looking for miracles in life because you need the excitement and the proof of the extraordinary becomes a dangerous habit. You attribute to an outside source what is possible to find on the inside. His advice, in my paraphrase, is this:
Don’t look for miracles. Instead, develop high levels of appreciation and insight because, when viewed with gratitude and freshness, with the eyes of children, everything is miraculous.
Another famous figure who saw the limitless in the limited was Mother Teresa, whose career—when applied to her, doesn’t that sound like an abomination—became a world-class vocation. She projected her will on those she served, refusing to see the downtrodden of the earth and instead concentrating on them as children of God. Her calling is a strong reminder of how we transcend the limits of our lives by declaring the limitless possibilities they contain. In a paraphrase of her words:
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A calling depends not on how big the actions are that we take; it is about how much love we put into those actions. For God it is all infinite. You do what is small and you do it with love and God will make it infinite.
We will come back to this notion often, and explore more ideas on how to live limitlessly within the everyday limits.
Willing Your Calls into Existence
Mightily believe you have a calling, even as the world is trying to keep you shallow and your circumstances are anything but filled with purpose and significance.
Some people and things in the world will help you find your purpose, but most will not. Ignore, reject, and distance yourself from the parts of society that keep you on the surface of things.
Especially in the flat times, assert your belief in your calling. When there is no evidence of your impact or the significance of what you do, declare your highest intentions.
It is within the confines of the ordinary aspects and roles of your life that your calling is lived. Although you may have a grand set of roles to play in your life, most of us have ordinary roles ready to be injected with meaning and joy if we believe and will our depths into the everyday stuff of life.
In the next chapter, we will examine the negation that comes when you mightily believe in your calling. Believing is the first step; then you will encounter those who don’t want you to believe.
52Exercise: Heeding Your Inner Voice and Believing When the Evidence Is Sparse
Here are some questions to help you see if you have listened past the social noise long enough to hear your own callings and to will your way into the deeper aspects of your ordinary roles.
- Have you listened to your inner voice recently?
- Have you…
Gone against a popular opinion?
Disagreed with your imposing boss? A co-worker?
Told your parents a truth about yourself?
Pursued a hobby others thought weird?
Turned down more money so you could have more meaning?
Decided not to stay in style? - Have you looked for the depth dimensions of your ordinary job with its ordinary routines?
- Have you asked, “What does it really mean to be taking the kids to school, to write this report, to analyze this budget, to meet this customer? How can I make this significant?”
- How is your ordinary life laced with meaning, if you allow it to emerge?