The Art of Manliness - #556： How to Find Your Calling in Life

00:00:00.000 I'm Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.260 Nearly everyone has experienced the sense of being nudged and prompted to take certain

00:00:15.100 actions.

00:00:15.780 These intuitive hints can spur us to do big things like change jobs or smaller things

00:00:19.580 like text a friend.

00:00:20.640 My guest today says these nudges are callings, and if we don't answer them, they'll continue

00:00:24.680 to reemerge and can haunt us till the day we die.

00:00:27.040 His name is Greg Lavoie, and he's the author of Callings, Finding and Following Authentic

00:00:31.040 Life.

00:00:31.500 We begin our conversation discussing what exactly a calling is, and why it's not necessarily

00:00:35.060 the same thing as a vocation.

00:00:36.720 Greg then shares how callings come to people, why they're sometimes unpleasant and challenging,

00:00:40.780 and what you can do to attune yourself to their signals.

00:00:43.400 Greg then shares different ways people go about finding their calling, including rites

00:00:46.540 and passages, traveling, art, and community.

00:00:48.820 We get into how you can figure out if something you think is a calling is actually a calling,

00:00:52.400 and the idea that while every calling demands a response, that response can be negotiated.

00:00:55.980 We end our conversation discussing what happens when your calling ends what looks like failure.

00:01:00.700 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash callings.

00:01:04.320 Greg joins me now via clearcast.io.

00:01:17.380 Greg Lavoie, welcome to the show.

00:01:19.420 Thanks so much.

00:01:19.920 So, you've got a book called Callings, Finding and Following an Authentic Life.

00:01:25.800 It's all about callings.

00:01:27.260 I think people are familiar with this idea of a call.

00:01:30.140 But just so we can run on the same page, how do you define calling?

00:01:34.460 Is it the same thing as a vocation?

00:01:36.520 Does it have to do with your career?

00:01:38.160 What is a calling to you?

00:01:39.760 Yeah.

00:01:40.180 Actually, I broaden it beyond vocation, because the word vocation just originally meant to

00:01:45.900 be called.

00:01:46.940 So, it doesn't refer specifically to work, and I don't refer to that that way in the book.

00:01:51.980 Now, callings to me are all of those signs and signals and urgings, promptings that we

00:02:01.920 get really in the course of any given day or week or month that essentially tell us what

00:02:07.460 it's going to take to stay true to true north, whatever that is, whether this is what direction

00:02:14.360 to take at a certain intersection or what to do with your life.

00:02:17.380 But that's really what it is.

00:02:18.680 It's all the signs.

00:02:19.720 So, I'm pretty secular and pluralistic about all this.

00:02:24.020 It's not just waiting for the great, big, you know, calling, which I see people do all

00:02:30.300 the time and missing all the smaller ones that are right at their feet.

00:02:33.900 And frankly, I think of those as kind of the fire drills for the bigger ones anyway.

00:02:37.700 So, the way you describe callings in the book is that it may be to do something like go back

00:02:42.380 to school or have a child or to be something like be more creative or be more courageous.

00:02:48.680 And callings can come to you for big things like changing your job or for little things

00:02:53.360 like a nudge to text a friend or to call your mother, and they can come to you in all kinds

00:02:58.940 of different ways.

00:02:59.960 Yeah, absolutely.

00:03:01.060 Yeah.

00:03:01.360 I mean, one of the things that's always impressed me in this line of work is the sheer number

00:03:06.560 of channels that callings come to us in.

00:03:10.120 So, yes, an intuition to call your mother, a passion, a gift, a dream, I mean, as in a night

00:03:16.920 dream, body symptoms, there's just a lot of different channels.

00:03:21.860 I mean, just the section of the bookstore you always walk into first when you walk into

00:03:25.680 a bookstore, in a sense, that's a calling or a song lyric you can't get out of your head

00:03:31.220 for weeks.

00:03:32.740 There's a woman named, what is her name?

00:03:35.560 She wrote The Accidental Tourist, Ann Tyler.

00:03:39.760 She says, I can always tell what my husband is really thinking by the tunes that he absentmindedly

00:03:45.280 hums in the car.

00:03:46.240 So, in a sense, that's a calling as well.

00:03:51.020 And that's the level at which I'm encouraging people to look at this stuff is at the very

00:03:57.380 subtle level, not looking for the burning bush, you know, but looking for the little signals

00:04:04.360 that come in the course of any given day that tell you what's true and what's not.

00:04:08.800 And, I mean, what's the benefit of, you know, listening or being attuned to this sort of

00:04:12.980 stuff and acting on it?

00:04:14.260 Like, what do you think, what's the result of, you know, oh, I'm humming this tune all

00:04:17.900 the time.

00:04:18.320 That must mean, like, what happens with that?

00:04:20.480 Well, the first time I ever noticed that particular one in my own life, I was about to quit my job

00:04:25.140 out of frustration.

00:04:26.820 This was a job as a reporter at a newspaper.

00:04:29.120 And for about a week, right around that period of time, I kept hearing this one line from

00:04:35.400 The Wizard of Oz, day and night, if I only had a brain.

00:04:40.440 And what I realized after hearing this for a week was, oh, I'm not thinking this through.

00:04:48.060 So, you know, Joseph Campbell, we love to invoke Joseph Campbell.

00:04:51.880 He's the guy who popularized the hero's journey and, you know, gave us the bumper sticker,

00:04:56.900 follow your bliss.

00:04:57.540 He said, and this is his quote, the great sacrilege in terms of the soul's integrity

00:05:04.140 is what he called inadvertence, which pretty much means not paying attention, not being

00:05:11.820 alert, not being awake, kind of bumbling along and stumbling along through your life and not

00:05:16.220 really having the receivers turned on.

00:05:19.500 And so, I think that's what can happen when we just don't pay attention.

00:05:22.440 Our life can have a kind of a weird failure to it, a sense of being out of whack with yourself,

00:05:28.440 a sense of not being in integrity with yourself.

00:05:32.540 And I don't mean that as a moral issue.

00:05:34.020 I mean, it is a psychological issue, just being in integrity with who you are.

00:05:38.840 And I think that's one of the things that can happen when we just don't pay attention

00:05:42.820 to the calls that come to us is we're kind of out of whack with ourselves.

00:05:48.780 Well, I mean, you said you're approaching this idea of calling from a secular point of view.

00:05:53.420 And I think most people are familiar with the spiritual point of view.

00:05:56.020 You know, you talk about, you give them the example and sort of the prime example of a

00:05:59.480 calling story, you know, Jonah and the whale.

00:06:02.060 And that's something that people use in Christianity and Judaism as an idea of heeding God's call.

00:06:08.380 It's like, okay, if you're looking at calling from a sort of a secular point of view,

00:06:11.740 like where do these calls come from or what's going on when you see a call?

00:06:15.760 I mean, what do you think is going on there?

00:06:18.320 Yeah.

00:06:18.840 Well, I think that's going to depend from person to person on what your belief system is.

00:06:23.340 It is certainly not required that you have a belief in divinity or, you know, supernatural

00:06:28.920 beings or God.

00:06:31.060 It's not required.

00:06:32.700 And people define the source of calls depending on what their beliefs are.

00:06:36.220 People who are, say, Christians in the sense I think you mean it is, yes, they will assume

00:06:40.920 that calls come from God.

00:06:42.500 But those of us who are more secular about it, like myself, think they come from the soul,

00:06:49.180 if you will, or the spirit or the unconscious, which seems to have, I guess, no matter how

00:06:55.440 you define this, they seem to have an image of the way we're supposed to be inside us somewhere

00:07:00.480 and constantly working toward it by sending us these clues on how to stay in integrity with

00:07:07.800 that vision.

00:07:09.160 But yeah, the whole notion of callings is pretty much brined in religious overtones and

00:07:14.200 it's tough to get away from it.

00:07:16.060 And in fact, when I've gone into corporate settings to do the callings work, I've literally

00:07:21.240 been instructed not to even use the word.

00:07:25.180 Don't use the word callings in here.

00:07:28.260 Relanguage it.

00:07:29.020 Talk about employee engagement or matching up the personal sense of mission with the corporate

00:07:34.900 mission, you know, things like that.

00:07:36.360 So, I think this notion of a calling probably can turn some people off just because it's

00:07:43.600 got all these religious overtones.

00:07:45.640 But frankly, I'm a word guy.

00:07:47.860 So, the word religion just means to reconnect.

00:07:51.440 Re-ligare, as in ligaments, means to re-bond.

00:07:55.740 And that's the point of a calling, no matter what your belief is, is about reconnecting you

00:08:00.700 to your, I suppose, your deepest self, your truest self.

00:08:04.540 And the picture I got, maybe, and correct me if I'm wrong, but sort of the impression

00:08:09.600 I got, the way you're describing callings, it's a way to look at your life that can provide

00:08:15.260 meaning and significance.

00:08:16.800 And it helps you make decisions not only on a cognitive level, but on an emotional level

00:08:22.500 as well.

00:08:23.140 So, yeah, yeah, that's absolutely accurate.

00:08:28.320 Callings require both.

00:08:30.380 I mean, just, you know, they require the cognitive and the sort of the feeling approach.

00:08:37.700 My dad, for instance, he was a scientist.

00:08:39.820 He used to say, the way that we work is we gather a ton of data, all the data we can possibly

00:08:44.800 pull together.

00:08:45.740 And then we make a decision based on what he called informed intuition.

00:08:51.440 And it's the same with callings.

00:08:53.620 I'm a big believer in just turning all those receivers on, getting the data that comes through

00:08:59.060 dreams or body symptoms or synchronicities or the books that mysteriously make their way

00:09:04.860 onto your night table or the kind of opportunities that unfold in your life.

00:09:09.000 And then connecting dots, you know, getting all this data and, but also so many of the

00:09:15.580 people that I've interviewed over the years, when I ask them, how did you know that this

00:09:20.420 was the right path of all the possible paths you could have taken in life, that this was

00:09:25.360 the right one for you?

00:09:26.480 A lot of people said, I don't know, it just felt right.

00:09:30.860 And that's really significant to me.

00:09:33.640 This is something they can't necessarily explain to somebody, but they can't deny it either.

00:09:38.580 It just feels right.

00:09:40.900 So both of these brain functions are active when it comes to callings, at least ideally.

00:09:46.540 Yeah.

00:09:46.640 And I've noticed in my own life, especially when you're making hard decisions about what

00:09:50.380 to do next to your life and you try to sit down and think through it and you pour through

00:09:54.520 the data, do all the research.

00:09:55.580 And even then you still can't come to decision.

00:09:58.420 So sometimes you just, you have to go with your gut or sometimes you just like, I'm going

00:10:02.140 to rely on, I'm going to open up a book and whatever.

00:10:04.480 I read this passage and that, like that, that act, it's a way to get to

00:10:08.560 you moving in a, in a direction you should, maybe not necessarily should go, but it gets

00:10:12.800 you moving that you probably wouldn't have done if you just sat there and just try to

00:10:16.380 keep thinking about it.

00:10:17.860 Right.

00:10:18.220 Yeah, exactly.

00:10:19.240 And you know, the brain is a terrific tool, but it isn't the only tool.

00:10:23.220 There's lots of ways of knowing stuff, dreams, the unconscious, you know, the body.

00:10:31.400 Are callings always pleasant?

00:10:32.580 Because I think when people think, oh, I found my calling and like, they just feel, feel

00:10:36.540 great.

00:10:37.000 Is that always the case?

00:10:39.040 No, no, unequivocally.

00:10:41.440 No.

00:10:42.000 In fact, you know, Campbell used to say that phase one of responding to a calling is running

00:10:51.040 the hell from it.

00:10:53.740 And there's a reason for that.

00:10:55.780 I mean, I'm thinking of the, the, the scene that sticks in my mind that really captures

00:11:00.200 that so beautifully was from a book called The Hobbit.

00:11:03.360 Most people are probably familiar with the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

00:11:07.300 Well, this was the prequel.

00:11:08.760 And there's a scene in the very beginning of it where the hero of that story, Bilbo Baggins

00:11:13.200 is sitting peacefully smoking a pipe in his little house in the Shire.

00:11:18.820 And he gets on the front door and it's the wizard Gandalf who says, I'm looking for somebody

00:11:26.440 to share an adventure and Bilbo Baggins response to that is absolutely classic, universal, inevitable

00:11:34.880 response to a calling.

00:11:36.700 He says, oh no, we're just plain, quiet village folk.

00:11:41.080 We have no use for adventures, nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things make you late for dinner.

00:11:47.460 Classic phase one response.

00:11:49.400 So this idea that a calling is pleasant is not really borne out by history or human nature

00:11:56.220 because a calling by definition is a disruption in the status quo.

00:12:01.400 It really is.

00:12:02.520 It's, it's, I mean, I went to Morocco a couple of years ago.

00:12:06.620 It was the first time I'd ever been in a Muslim country.

00:12:08.280 And I literally got to hear the daily calls that come five times a day from the criers

00:12:14.620 up on top of the minarets.

00:12:16.100 And they're literally calling people away from the daily grind.

00:12:20.640 I mean, whatever that is, you know, tending to the donkeys or making copper pots or something.

00:12:26.620 And literally you have to turn your back on the status quo and turn toward Mecca to pray.

00:12:32.300 And I think callings are doing the same things to people.

00:12:35.120 They're calling you away from the familiar and to face the unknown.

00:12:42.400 And no, that's not pleasant because I used to have a map on the wall in my office for years

00:12:49.060 and years.

00:12:49.480 I lost it in the last move, but this was an old map.

00:12:52.900 And we've all seen these maps at the edges of the known world.

00:12:57.580 The old cartographers used to draw monsters and dragons and, you know, just offshore, there'd

00:13:03.720 be a ship whose mast is, you know, entwined with the tentacles of some giant squid or something.

00:13:10.500 And I had that thing on my wall to remind me that I wasn't a chicken for being afraid of

00:13:18.760 the unknown.

00:13:20.000 And I put it up there when I quit employment for self-employment because that was what I

00:13:24.340 was called to do.

00:13:25.060 And I just, to remind me that a calling pulls me out of terra cognito into terra incognito.

00:13:33.480 And that stuff is just anthropologically deep in human beings to be afraid of the unknown.

00:13:42.940 Well, you're going back to Joseph Campbell.

00:13:44.280 When people think about when you accept a call, it means following your bliss.

00:13:47.960 We think, oh, bliss, it's happy, wonderful.

00:13:49.620 But even Joseph Campbell said, no, following your bliss.

00:13:52.380 Off it isn't blissful the way you think it's going to be blissful.

00:13:55.060 Right.

00:13:56.020 I mean, if you follow your bliss, you'll have your bliss, whatever that happens to be, whether

00:14:01.180 it's being an entrepreneur or being a painter or being a rock climber, whatever.

00:14:06.220 But that's all that's guaranteed, he said.

00:14:08.840 He said, you know, you're going to be tested.

00:14:12.220 You're going to be challenged.

00:14:14.540 You know, so this idea of the bumper sticker that says, follow your bliss.

00:14:18.200 It's not the whole story.

00:14:20.880 That's all.

00:14:21.540 It's simply not the whole story.

00:14:22.860 And callings can even, they have not just their challenges, but they can even have a

00:14:29.300 tragic dimension.

00:14:30.140 Because what if you are called to quit your job and your partner is freaked out by the

00:14:39.620 prospect of you not having a regular income anymore?

00:14:41.920 Or what if you are called to leave the town you live in and all your friends?

00:14:47.680 You know, I'm saying there's risk inherent in pretty much any calling.

00:14:52.460 And that's part of the plan.

00:14:53.960 I think this notion that if you follow your callings, the doors will swing open, the bluebirds

00:14:59.960 of happiness will alight on your shoulders and all this is fanciful.

00:15:04.080 I mean, it just simply doesn't work out that way in a lot of cases.

00:15:08.560 And people have to have the kind of intestinal fortitude for what the calling is really demanding

00:15:13.000 of them.

00:15:13.940 And it is a demand in my experience as well as my observation.

00:15:19.920 It's a demand.

00:15:21.040 It's not going to go away if you ignore it.

00:15:25.200 You see, that's the thing.

00:15:26.400 Callings are hard, but not following them is hard too.

00:15:28.740 And I figure you might as well suffer in the service of doing what you love than not, because

00:15:34.260 there's going to be suffering either way.

00:15:36.500 How do you, I mean, how do you attune yourself to callings, right?

00:15:41.040 Because it's so easy to go throughout your life.

00:15:42.920 You're busy.

00:15:43.520 You just, you got your head, nose to the grindstone, just doing day-to-day stuff where that's,

00:15:47.780 you know, this idea of a call, you might get it, but you're just ignoring it.

00:15:51.160 How do you attune yourself like, so you can be more receptive to them?

00:15:55.740 Yeah.

00:15:56.100 Well, you know, one of the things that really struck me over and over when I was interviewing

00:16:00.540 people for the book is just about every one of them told me that they had some kind of

00:16:05.940 self-reflective practice.

00:16:08.080 And that really jumped out at me.

00:16:10.280 And these are the kind of people who are really receptive to their lives and responsive to their

00:16:17.160 lives.

00:16:18.360 And they told me that they had some kind of practice.

00:16:20.840 And the whole point of it was essentially to strike up a conversation with themselves.

00:16:26.460 Ongoingly.

00:16:27.940 And that seems critical.

00:16:31.200 In other words, a call is something you hear.

00:16:34.320 So you need to find ways of hearing it.

00:16:37.120 And a daily journaling practices, a practice was really common.

00:16:41.760 Dream interpretation was really common.

00:16:44.060 People said artwork done in the service of self-discovery as opposed to just exhibition is another

00:16:50.040 way.

00:16:50.680 Regular short retreats, regular intimate conversation, contemplative reading.

00:16:56.200 For some people, therapy is a self-reflective practice.

00:17:00.760 Belonging to any kind of group whose members get together for the purpose of waking up.

00:17:05.160 So men's groups or women's groups or spiritual groups, mastermind groups, that kind of thing.

00:17:12.760 So this attunement question is absolutely critical.

00:17:17.560 And, you know, I have to share this because obviously we're having this conversation and

00:17:23.400 we're going to be listened to by people who are modern, technologically oriented, busy,

00:17:30.140 et cetera.

00:17:30.560 I read a story in The New Yorker just a couple of years ago.

00:17:37.240 It was written by a guy named Adam Gopnik.

00:17:39.840 And he's talking about his three-year-old daughter who's got an imaginary playmate named

00:17:45.340 Charlie Ravioli.

00:17:47.820 And that's actually what you'd Google if you want to read the story.

00:17:51.360 And it's a hell of a commentary on the culture we've created.

00:17:54.120 And what he's saying is that there's nothing unusual about a three-year-old having an imaginary

00:17:59.740 playmate, except this one is always too busy to play with her. 0.99

00:18:04.820 So she's calling up Charlie Ravioli on her toy cell phone and always having to leave him

00:18:10.460 messages.

00:18:12.360 And a month later, her dad, the author, says that she's now leaving messages with somebody

00:18:18.820 named Lori. 0.99

00:18:19.720 He says, honey, who's Lori?

00:18:21.840 And in her three-year-old fashion, she explains, this is Charlie Ravioli's assistant.

00:18:28.580 This is somebody he's apparently hired to return his phone calls for him.

00:18:33.440 And I'm mentioning this because the compulsion toward busyness is a pretty good definition

00:18:40.120 of workaholism.

00:18:41.920 And calls have a tough time getting through when they get nothing but busy signals.

00:18:45.820 Thus, the need for these self-reflective practices.

00:18:51.000 Because I think that even if all of your busyness is in the service of worthy and noble causes

00:19:01.840 and callings, I think when the means to those ends is an addictive process, I think the end

00:19:10.500 result is pretty much a loss of soul and spirit and whatnot, a depletion in some way.

00:19:15.600 So I just wanted to mention that in terms of this, your question about self-reflective

00:19:20.640 practices and attunement, because we are a busy, distracted culture.

00:19:25.600 And calls will have a tough time getting through to you when they hit that wall, you know, when

00:19:33.920 they have Charlie Ravioli constantly picking up the phone instead of you.

00:19:40.160 So I just thought I'd mention that.

00:19:42.200 You know, something also that happens with callings is that one of the ways that we are sort of

00:19:47.580 reminded that there is a call or sort of attuning ourselves to that is when something is disrupted

00:19:52.760 in our life, right?

00:19:54.100 It could be a job loss, a divorce, a death of a family member or a friend, like those

00:19:58.860 little, those things, they knock you off kilter of normal life.

00:20:02.740 And you start thinking about like those deeper issues.

00:20:06.180 And that's when you kind of become more attuned to those things too.

00:20:09.300 Yeah.

00:20:10.000 Yeah.

00:20:10.400 There's a lot to be said for good old fashioned crisis or like you said, a disruption.

00:20:16.360 Yeah.

00:20:16.540 Those, in my opinion, those are callings.

00:20:19.020 You know, this is why I expand my definition of what is a calling so that people aren't

00:20:24.940 looking up at the sky, waiting to see the bony finger of God.

00:20:28.880 You know, they're looking at their life and going, ah, what is this calling for from me?

00:20:34.200 You know, what is this job loss or this relationship loss or this, even this sudden windfall?

00:20:40.300 It could be any kind of an event.

00:20:42.100 But I think that the point is to look at your life through the lens of a calling and say,

00:20:47.860 what is being called for here?

00:20:50.280 What kind of response is this asking for from me?

00:20:53.560 What do I need to do to reconfigure my life or make a course correction or something?

00:20:59.400 And I just think that that's, at least for me, it's been a really useful way to live is

00:21:04.820 to look at it through the lens of anything and everything is a potential call.

00:21:09.100 And so, I'm setting up a kind of a call and response relationship to life.

00:21:14.220 So, I'm not just bumbling along and stumbling along and doing the inadvertence thing.

00:21:20.180 Right.

00:21:20.380 That's so useful.

00:21:21.200 One thing I've read from other people similar to that is this idea, whenever you experience

00:21:25.980 friction or some sort of disruption in your life or some inconvenience, ask yourself,

00:21:30.200 like, what's life trying to teach?

00:21:31.600 Like, what's life asking of me right now?

00:21:33.700 Like, what is it?

00:21:34.320 Right.

00:21:34.900 And people might think like, well, life's not asking anything.

00:21:37.140 It's life.

00:21:37.540 It's just existence.

00:21:38.220 But like, looking through the world that way, it gives you some sort of meaning and

00:21:43.840 coherence to your life that allows you to move forward.

00:21:47.220 Right.

00:21:48.640 Yeah, absolutely.

00:21:49.460 I remember seeing an episode of The Simpsons to go from the sublime to the absurd here.

00:21:54.460 And I remember hearing Homer Simpson say, oh, life is just a bunch of stuff that happens.

00:21:59.000 Right.

00:21:59.180 And, you know, that's one way to look at it.

00:22:02.800 But, you know, friction.

00:22:04.400 I mean, that's a fascinating one, too, because I think that's one of the ways that callings

00:22:08.840 make their way into our lives is where is there friction in your life?

00:22:12.960 Where does head argue with heart?

00:22:17.000 Where does passion bump up against security?

00:22:21.140 Where do you fight with people?

00:22:23.360 You know, what are you fighting for?

00:22:25.080 Where does walk not exactly match talk?

00:22:27.640 So there's something to be said for that as a form of calling is because it's like out

00:22:33.480 in the natural world.

00:22:34.680 Friction happens where changes are taking place.

00:22:36.980 So there's what are the changes that are trying to happen or trying to come through?

00:22:42.520 What's what's trying to emerge in your life?

00:22:45.480 I mean, that in itself, I think, is a good question to ask yourself.

00:22:48.320 What is my gut feeling about what's trying to happen in my life right now?

00:22:52.400 What's what wants to emerge?

00:22:54.820 What wants some airtime?

00:22:56.860 And and it's often really just right below the surface for a lot of people.

00:23:01.480 As long as they stop long enough to ask the question or listen in.

00:23:04.680 Do calls come out of the blue, like when you're least expected, or can you invoke them?

00:23:11.700 Invoke them?

00:23:12.400 Yeah.

00:23:13.860 Who was it?

00:23:15.760 Jungian analyst named James Hillman wrote a great book called The Soul's Code.

00:23:21.220 He said, when you want to know what your soul really wants, turn to your images.

00:23:28.300 By which he meant primarily art and dreams.

00:23:32.260 And both of them are great ways of invoking calls.

00:23:35.840 And for instance, asking for dream guidance.

00:23:39.320 When you fall asleep, I had to train myself.

00:23:41.540 I didn't have great dream recall for years.

00:23:43.980 And then over a course of about a month, I trained myself to get it.

00:23:47.040 And it wasn't really all that hard.

00:23:49.340 I just as I was falling asleep, I had to just specifically ask for dream guidance.

00:23:55.040 Sam really needs some guidance right here.

00:23:57.000 I promise if I get woken up at 3 a.m. with a dream, I'll write it down, even if I've got a meeting at 7 a.m.

00:24:05.200 And there's something about that setting up that little trust piece that brings them on.

00:24:10.500 And that's one way of invoking calls is to go, is to ask for them, is to ask for dream guidance.

00:24:16.580 Because, again, art that's done for the purpose of self-discovery is another way to invoke them.

00:24:23.640 Drawing, for instance, I belong to a little mastermind group.

00:24:26.700 And we get together and we use the creative arts to help people move their lives forward.

00:24:32.320 So somebody will talk about some challenge that they're dealing with.

00:24:35.800 And then we'll all just spontaneously make art right on the spot.

00:24:39.580 Could be a drawing.

00:24:40.860 Could be writing a poem.

00:24:42.260 It could be a collage.

00:24:43.480 It could be anything.

00:24:45.340 And just feed back to the person what their challenge feels like to us as channeled through art.

00:24:51.740 So that's another way of doing some invoking work is using the creative arts.

00:24:56.500 Right.

00:24:56.840 Well, I mean, some people may be listening to this and like, wow, dream recall, dream training.

00:25:00.540 That sounds kind of woo-woo.

00:25:01.720 Like what would you say to those guys as the skeptics?

00:25:05.280 Sure.

00:25:06.200 Yeah.

00:25:06.820 Woo-woo. 0.89

00:25:07.640 Well, what is woo-woo?

00:25:09.080 It's something outside of the box for us.

00:25:11.220 It's something that's maybe a little more feeling oriented than brain oriented.

00:25:15.740 But, you know, in the research I did for the Callings book, every religion on earth agrees that the dreams, and I'm talking about night dreams, because day dreams are ambitions.

00:25:26.800 That's a whole nother ballgame.

00:25:28.600 Night dreams are one of the primary channels through which the gods and the goddesses have historically spoken to the mortals.

00:25:36.780 And we're sleeping through them most of the time, because dreams are just – they're data.

00:25:44.880 They're just data.

00:25:46.440 They're telling us things that we really know, telling us things we really feel or really believe, but unconscious.

00:25:53.880 It's not quite conscious yet.

00:25:55.300 And dreams, if we're willing to work with them, they have a lot of information and a lot of consequences if we ignore that information, because they'll just keep coming back.

00:26:03.880 Like, everybody's had experiences of having recurring dreams or certainly recurring themes in their dreams.

00:26:10.020 And, I mean, I understand the thing about woo-woo.

00:26:13.260 I mean, my God, I live in Santa Cruz, California, and I'm a New Yorker, you know, and this is the land of woo-woo.

00:26:20.700 But woo-woo just means the things you can't necessarily explain with logic or science or reasoning.

00:26:29.700 And I think to really honor callings, you've got to expand your, you know, your toolkit.

00:26:36.720 Am I using all the right manly metaphors here?

00:26:39.380 Yeah, yeah.

00:26:40.040 Toolkit.

00:26:40.660 That's good.

00:26:41.160 But you have to expand the toolkit and be willing to look at dreams because they're just the information that you're not conscious of during the day.

00:26:50.240 And they have a lot of – here, here's an example.

00:26:52.520 I was given an opportunity at one point to turn the callings book into a reality-based television show.

00:26:58.580 I was flown out to Los Angeles, wined and dined by a couple of execs and an attorney from HBO who were interested in this project.

00:27:08.500 And, I mean, they even took me clothes shopping, which I thought was presumptuous at the least.

00:27:15.700 But the night before I was supposed to sign on the dotted line, I had a dream about those three people that were taking me around and interested in the project.

00:27:25.480 And I dreamed that all three of them were wearing costume jewelry and patent leather shoes.

00:27:32.980 And I turned that project down because what it said to me is, I don't trust them.

00:27:39.080 Fake leather shoes, patent, you know, costume jewelry.

00:27:42.420 And this decision made my more hot-blooded entrepreneurial friends go nuts.

00:27:48.500 You did what?

00:27:50.100 You turned down what based on a dream? 1.00

00:27:53.400 What are you, crazy?

00:27:54.640 But having done dream work since high school, I learned that this was something I could trust. 0.64

00:28:01.060 I didn't trust these three.

00:28:03.620 And I turned the project down and I've never regretted it since.

00:28:06.920 So, some people may call dreams woo-woo, but that was real data to me and helped me make an important career decision.

00:28:16.060 So, let's talk about different ways in detail about how you can invoke callings in your life.

00:28:20.140 One you talk about is rite of passages.

00:28:21.740 What is it about a rite of passage that can help people uncover their callings in life?

00:28:26.300 Yeah, well, one of the rites of passages that I've done over the years is a vision quest.

00:28:34.060 A lot of people have heard of vision quests.

00:28:36.660 And this is essentially a rite of passage that pretty much every culture at some point in history has come up with to send one of their individuals out of the village into the wilderness to cry for a vision.

00:28:50.000 That's actually a phrase that they use in this rite of passage, crying for a vision, and then bringing that vision back to the tribe.

00:28:58.620 So, I've gone on a couple of these, including a 12-day vision quest in Death Valley.

00:29:03.120 And this is a brilliant and brilliantly designed rite of passage.

00:29:09.680 And it was facilitated by an outfit somewhere here in California called the School of Lost Borders, which I just love.

00:29:18.540 And they designed it so that the first four days is you're explaining to the small group of people you're with, maybe a dozen people, why you're there.

00:29:28.600 Why have you chosen to step outside your life and try to look back in through the shop window from a distance?

00:29:35.560 And it's really important to get off-site for some of these rites of passages.

00:29:39.980 Get out of dodge.

00:29:40.880 Get away from your desk.

00:29:42.380 Get away from the roles and responsibilities that define who you are and get out there into the wilderness.

00:29:48.220 And the second four days is a solo fast.

00:29:51.300 You pick a spot somewhere out in the desert and you cry for a vision.

00:29:55.740 And the last four days is a return where you sit around the fire again with those 12 people and explain what happened to you out there and what it means.

00:30:07.660 So, this rite of passage is great for reorienting people.

00:30:11.700 And you know what was interesting to me was the reactions my friends had to hearing that I was going to be taking this vision quest.

00:30:18.660 Just about every one of them wanted to book lunch with me the minute I got back and hear about it.

00:30:26.260 And that was really significant to me because what I sensed was that a lot of people are feeling like there's something they need to do with their lives that they're not doing.

00:30:38.340 They're not letting themselves or getting themselves to do.

00:30:41.360 And they need a kick. 1.00

00:30:45.500 And a rite of passage like this is a kick in the butt. 0.99

00:30:48.720 And they wanted to know because I think they were hungry to make a change in their lives and were afraid to do it. 0.96

00:30:54.920 And so, I spent weeks after I got back telling the story to people who were absolutely rapt.

00:31:01.240 I could just tell.

00:31:02.360 They weren't even eating their food.

00:31:04.860 And so, I think that there's something that speaks to people about these kind of rites of passage is as a way to find what your calling is, what your vision is, what your work in the world is supposed to be,

00:31:16.460 what your gifts are, what your contributions are.

00:31:20.000 And this is stuff that it seems to me everybody wants to know.

00:31:25.040 It's like, what am I here for?

00:31:27.000 What is my place in this whole scheme of things?

00:31:30.200 What is my contribution?

00:31:33.960 What is my legacy? 0.99

00:31:34.700 And I think these kind of tools can be very useful, especially if you know that you're at a place where you need a kick in the butt. 0.98

00:31:43.980 And I've been in that place a number of times. 0.98

00:31:46.460 It's interesting.

00:31:46.800 I mean, I've read a lot of books about, you know, great famous men from history.

00:31:51.000 And a lot of them have had like sort of rites of passage they did for themselves, but I think unknowingly.

00:31:57.480 You know, where they go out of just the regular life and get out to, usually it's out to nature.

00:32:01.420 One that comes to mind is Theodore Roosevelt.

00:32:03.460 His wife and mother died on the same night.

00:32:06.620 And it just devastated him.

00:32:08.600 He was active in political life in New York.

00:32:10.700 He decides after that, he just quit political life and he started a ranch out in the Dakotas, in the Badlands.

00:32:17.860 And just he wanted to get away from things.

00:32:19.660 And then after that, that ranch failed.

00:32:21.860 But something about that experience out there in nature, away from New York, that energized him for his next phase of his political life where he eventually became president of the United States.

00:32:30.560 Right.

00:32:32.700 Yeah, I understand that impulse.

00:32:36.420 I did my own version of that when I left city life for country life.

00:32:40.700 For the first time in my life.

00:32:42.620 So I also grew up in New York and pretty much lived within honking distance of big cities my entire life.

00:32:48.880 Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Cincinnati, Tucson, Albuquerque.

00:32:54.400 And at one point, I moved to a little town north of Taos, New Mexico.

00:33:01.820 A little town called Arroyo Seco, which means dry creek in Spanish.

00:33:08.480 And it freaked me out big time.

00:33:11.440 But I moved there, I think, because I knew that I needed to hear something that I could not hear with all the distractions of the city.

00:33:19.900 And moving there, I literally slept 12 hours a day for the first nine months that I was there.

00:33:25.160 I'm not exaggerating.

00:33:26.080 And a friend of mine said I was detoxing from a lifetime of just being immersed in the prevailing zeitgeist.

00:33:34.660 But what began to come to me when I got that quiet out of the desert was the Callings book.

00:33:44.040 And I don't know that that would have come to me if I'd stayed in the cities.

00:33:48.180 I don't know that I was listening at a deep enough level that I could have heard that book.

00:33:53.320 And now I really understand why there's a whole spiritual tradition about moving to the desert, living in the desert, the whole desert father's tradition.

00:34:02.660 I really get that now.

00:34:05.020 So, yeah, I think there are times when you sense that something is trying to come through.

00:34:10.280 And it isn't.

00:34:12.900 And years are going by.

00:34:14.740 And you're feeling the sense of deep restlessness.

00:34:18.200 Not just, you know, like the little, I need another dopamine hit kind of restlessness.

00:34:23.420 I mean a deep soul restlessness.

00:34:26.100 And sometimes you will do something like this.

00:34:29.180 You'll take yourself really out of the box and give yourself one of those.

00:34:33.280 And now for something completely different kind of experiences.

00:34:36.600 And sometimes that's exactly what you need and you know you need it.

00:34:39.780 And that's one of the reasons I recommend things like vision quests or a pilgrimage or a retreat or something that just takes you out of status quo and lets you listen down deep.

00:34:53.880 Well, yeah, traveling or going on a journey is another common way people, you know, find their calling.

00:34:58.860 Like, I'm going to go on this big trip so I can find myself.

00:35:02.060 But, you know, the criticism that people invoke or throw at that is, well, you're not really finding yourself.

00:35:07.020 You're just trying to run away from the problems you have here instead of facing them.

00:35:11.900 So how can you ensure, right, that you're doing these things like with vision quest or, you know, pilgrimage or going on a trip?

00:35:18.280 How can you ensure that you're actually doing that to, like, find that calling instead of just running away from your problems?

00:35:25.500 Yeah, that's a great question.

00:35:26.700 Yeah, it's one of the accusations that's leveled against the restless.

00:35:35.520 It's like, are you running towards something or away from something?

00:35:38.200 And, you know, I guess every guy's got to discern that for himself, whether whatever I'm engaged in at the moment, is it moving towards something or just distracting myself?

00:35:51.560 A word, by the way, that means to be pulled apart.

00:35:54.300 And life, of course, is full of distractions.

00:35:56.560 So, I mean, it's the same with the calling, too, is how do you know when the material that you need to know hasn't made its way to you yet and you need to continue doing more research and more listening and more self-reflection and more attunement or whether you're just plain old procrastinating?

00:36:14.560 And that's something that, you know, takes some time to just tease apart.

00:36:19.460 That takes some time.

00:36:21.060 But just to ask the question, I think, is an important part of it.

00:36:25.180 It's like, am I taking this vision quest just because it'll be another kind of notch on my exploratory belt?

00:36:32.780 Or am I really hungry to learn something about myself?

00:36:36.580 And I just think just the question itself is possibly halfway to clarity about that.

00:36:41.920 But it's a good thing to ask.

00:36:43.400 I mean, I'm a writer.

00:36:44.440 I'm used to having this dilemma where when am I done doing research on a piece and I just need to sit my butt down and write the thing?

00:36:52.980 And when have I not completed all the research?

00:36:55.660 And I've noticed that sometimes doing research is a way of avoiding sitting down and writing, which is way harder than researching in most cases.

00:37:04.620 And especially if you're doing anything like first-person writing as opposed to third-person writing, which really is the difference between confessing and preaching.

00:37:14.020 It's scary to sit down and actually write.

00:37:17.380 Or for that matter, to do your real work in the world, to follow your real callings.

00:37:22.340 So this is a great question is to ask, you know.

00:37:27.180 But, you know, I think restlessness has a bad rap.

00:37:30.440 One of the people that I interviewed for the book said, interesting word, rest less.

00:37:36.340 So if you're experiencing restlessness, what wants to move and where does it want to go, which I love as a reframe of restlessness because we just think of it as escapism.

00:37:47.540 And it's – in fact, I interviewed a guy years ago when I worked at the Cincinnati Inquirer as a reporter.

00:37:54.180 He was a professor at Ohio Wesley named Bernard Merchland, and he came up with the Ten Commandments of Creativity.

00:38:02.000 And one of them was restlessness.

00:38:05.140 In other words, never quite being satisfied with the status quo as it is, always wanting to improve and tinker and explore and get into novelty.

00:38:15.620 And I really get that.

00:38:18.000 So I just think it's important to sometimes take the pejorative off the word restlessness and ask yourself, what wants to move and where does it want to go?

00:38:26.580 Well, speaking of this issue of trying to figure out whether that thing you're doing, whether that trip you're doing is going to something or away from something, a related question that comes up with callings is, is this actually a true calling?

00:38:39.320 Or am I just doing something and deluding myself and calling it a calling because it makes me feel better to call it that even though it might not be?

00:38:46.100 So, I mean, how do you, how do you figure that out?

00:38:49.460 Yeah, that's the, I guess that's what spiritual communities call discernment.

00:38:55.040 And yeah, that can be sticky, tricky stuff and sometimes requires patience on the order of years for people to really clarify.

00:39:04.560 But, you know, I ask, I ask everybody this question, like I said, is like, how did you know that this was right for you?

00:39:14.920 And the responses that people have given me over the years are so incredibly consistent that I'll literally list them because it's that easy.

00:39:24.560 People said they know, they knew a call was true because it kept coming back.

00:39:30.780 That was one, it just year after year, it just kept coming back.

00:39:36.060 They knew that it was true when it came at them from a lot of different directions, not just an idea they got one day or a occupation they picked out of an occupational handbook or something.

00:39:46.420 There was a clustering effect.

00:39:48.560 It was coming through their dreams or their little synchronicities that happen or the things that they fantasize about while they're at work.

00:39:59.220 I mean, just there's a clustering effect and you have to connect dots.

00:40:02.260 People said they knew a call was true because it scared them.

00:40:07.120 That was always interesting to me.

00:40:08.720 One guy said, I figure if a path feels really safe and easy, there's something suspect.

00:40:15.540 But if it scares me, it tells me at the very least I'm close to something vital.

00:40:20.900 I thought that was an interesting take on it.

00:40:23.120 Let's see.

00:40:23.960 Discernment.

00:40:24.400 People said they knew a call was true because their enthusiasm for it sustained itself over a good period of time.

00:40:31.960 Didn't just flag after a month or something or a semester in the case of college kids.

00:40:39.100 And they found that they even had a certain, what's the word, affinity for all the mundane stuff that's involved in pulling a calling off in the world.

00:40:50.520 And they all have it, no matter how exalted or glamorous or exciting a calling feels.

00:40:57.560 Every one of them has got its version of licking stamps and stuffing envelopes.

00:41:01.960 But people said, like, if you've ever been in a band or performed in a play or something, you know this, that the amount of time you spend rehearsing compared to performing is like 90-10 or 80-20 or something.

00:41:16.480 And the fact that people are willing to practice the same lines or the same lyrics or the same chords for, you know, thousands of hours for the chance to take it public a tenth of the time, it says, I think it's largely passion that explains people's willingness to put up with that equation.

00:41:34.840 That, to me, your willingness to abide by all of the practice is a diagnostic that you're on the right path.

00:41:46.200 So that's another piece in the discernment puzzle.

00:41:48.400 But ultimately, everybody said this.

00:41:50.360 The only way I figured this out was I had to try it out.

00:41:53.320 I had to go down the path a certain way, even when I wasn't sure it was the path, and take field notes, you know.

00:42:03.280 So this ultimately is what it comes down to for discernment.

00:42:07.240 Take a step toward something that feels like it's calling to you, whether it's in the vocational arena or the relationship arena or the creative arena, and look at the feedback your life immediately gives you.

00:42:18.460 So, you feel better or worse, you feel more awake or more asleep.

00:42:24.140 You take another step.

00:42:25.280 What is your body telling you?

00:42:26.500 Take another step.

00:42:27.260 What are your dreams at night telling you?

00:42:28.620 You take another step.

00:42:29.400 What are your friends telling you?

00:42:30.860 It's like, wow, Brett, I haven't seen you this excited in years.

00:42:33.440 What's going on?

00:42:34.780 So there's this feedback loop that you set up that really, over time, helps you clarify.

00:42:41.160 What happens when you say no to a call?

00:42:44.240 So a call, there's a response involved on your part, and that response could be yes, or it could be no.

00:42:51.380 In your own life, and just re-talking to people who've rejected calls, what typically happens?

00:42:56.940 Well, for one thing, they don't go away.

00:43:00.400 That's absolutely clear.

00:43:01.940 Callings will eventually turn into wake-up calls.

00:43:05.280 That's another thing that I've seen happen over and over, in my own life as well.

00:43:08.540 Well, so they start off as, you know, tap on the shoulder, you know, whisper in the ear kind of thing.

00:43:19.640 And they escalate in volume, and occasionally violence, the longer we ignore them.

00:43:27.040 Frankly, I think a lot of illness is a result of people not paying attention to the signals that are coming from their own life.

00:43:34.540 Not just through the body, but through the heart and soul, if you will.

00:43:39.480 So, and I don't mean this to scare anybody, but my experience, rubber meets the road, is that if I ignore callings, they keep coming back.

00:43:49.200 Again and again.

00:43:49.960 And we'll try to pop through the big ones, especially, until the last possible minute of life.

00:43:55.360 Well, something you also point out in the book is that sometimes refusing a call might be a necessary step for you to actually accept the call.

00:44:02.360 Yeah, yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that.

00:44:07.500 Because part of the beauty of callings is they are negotiable.

00:44:13.480 You know, this is not like a divine subpoena.

00:44:15.900 They're negotiable, and you have a vote.

00:44:20.160 So, I mean, I'm thinking of a guy that I interviewed who was a corporate executive, and his real passion was abstract painting.

00:44:29.700 And so, what he did to negotiate that call is he wanted a family, he wanted a house, he wanted money.

00:44:37.980 And so, he stuck with the job for 25 years, but he also painted on the side that entire time.

00:44:44.060 So, ultimately, this is the point of callings.

00:44:46.380 Get it in your life to some degree sooner than later, to some degree.

00:44:51.840 So, that's what he did.

00:44:53.040 He did his painting on the side for 25 years, and when he finally, he had the kids, and he had the house, and when he was ready to shift his life, the painting was up and running.

00:45:04.360 He had contacts with gallery owners, he had a body of work, he had confidence in that calling.

00:45:10.600 And so, he was able to make this shift, you know, and 25 years is a long time to wait to do something you'd rather be doing full-time.

00:45:19.520 But he got to do, you know, he had several callings, and that's what people often have to negotiate, too, is there's a call to have a family, and there's a call to be an abstract painter.

00:45:31.020 They don't necessarily go well together.

00:45:32.700 But he was able to do both, and so I think there's a way to work that out so that you get the bliss in your life to some degree and say yes to it to some degree.

00:45:46.020 Callings are not necessarily asking you to flip the whole circuit, you know, to turn the whole thing upside down and quit your job and whatnot.

00:45:55.360 It's saying respond.

00:45:57.760 That's all a calling is, is a request for a response.

00:46:00.240 And even a small yes is still a yes.

00:46:03.740 And it's better than a no, and it's definitely better than a maybe.

00:46:07.800 I say that because maybe can just steal decades out of your life.

00:46:12.140 I think that's a good point, that you don't necessarily have to go all in on your callings.

00:46:15.880 I think when people hear calling, they think, oh, I got to quit my job.

00:46:19.260 Right.

00:46:19.460 I got to sell the house and move.

00:46:21.680 Not necessarily so.

00:46:22.400 You can keep your job as an insurance adjuster.

00:46:24.820 Sure.

00:46:25.100 Because it provides a living for your family, allows you to fulfill that calling to have a family.

00:46:28.780 But you can do something on the side that calls to you.

00:46:32.120 And, you know, I get it.

00:46:33.120 A job is, by definition, work.

00:46:35.160 You're often tired at the end of the day.

00:46:36.780 And the idea of going down into the painting studio or into the, you know, out to the work shed or whatever, it can be challenging when it's just easier to flip on the TV or any of the multitudes of social media and all that.

00:46:52.320 But the fact is, you don't have to quit your job.

00:46:56.640 That's not the point of a calling.

00:46:58.580 A calling was simply to say yes to something that wants expression in your life.

00:47:03.640 That's all.

00:47:04.440 It wants expression.

00:47:05.680 And give it some opportunity to express itself.

00:47:09.160 You know, if you've ever been in a grocery store and been standing on a checkout line and seen a parent with a little kid who's tugging on their pants.

00:47:17.020 It's daddy, daddy, daddy.

00:47:19.840 They don't stop until daddy bends down and gives them attention.

00:47:25.780 Callings are really exactly the same.

00:47:28.340 They just, they want our attention.

00:47:30.300 They want some way to express themselves.

00:47:33.140 And they're not going to stop tugging on our pants until we do.

00:47:35.820 So what role does community or other people play in our callings?

00:47:40.120 We often think of calling as a very personal, internal thing, but your decisions affect other people and other people are going to say things about your decision.

00:47:47.840 So what role does that have?

00:47:50.040 Yeah.

00:47:50.640 Yeah.

00:47:51.120 That's, uh, callings are community property.

00:47:54.800 I mean, you, you are the one who's called, but you're not the only one who's going to be affected by what kind of a choice you make around that, especially if you're a, have a family or run a company or are in a men's group.

00:48:10.960 I mean, it's going to affect all those communities.

00:48:13.600 So in fact, I had a young woman come up to me at a university some years ago and say, she loved the presentation, but it's culturally biased.

00:48:22.880 She said, because you come from an individualistic culture.

00:48:27.200 She said, I'm from the Philippines.

00:48:28.900 I come from a collectivist culture where decisions like this have to be made sometimes with a whole village in mind.

00:48:36.040 So there's something to be said for looking at the impact you following your calling is going to have on your community.

00:48:42.680 But here's another take on that.

00:48:45.340 You alone are called, but that doesn't mean you've got to figure it out all by yourself.

00:48:50.120 And I'm, I'm always encouraging people to draw on their community to help them clarify what they're, what they should do.

00:48:57.180 And so I'm talking about anything from having a personal board of advisors, which is really, it sounds more exalted than it, than I mean it to.

00:49:06.720 That's just a bunch of people you pull together from your circle of acquaintances to meet once a month.

00:49:11.880 They come to your house on Tuesday evening, you cook them a meal, and then you sit around for two hours and they ask you questions and they give you feedback and they give you homework.

00:49:24.580 All right.

00:49:25.940 To help you clarify.

00:49:27.140 And I've been on both sides of this board of advisors things.

00:49:31.080 It's, it's another one is the, the Quaker tradition. 0.51

00:49:33.820 It's called a clearness committee, which you can just Google.

00:49:36.980 And this is again, a bunch of people you pull together to help you clarify a call is literally what they were designed for a hundred years ago by the Quakers. 0.69

00:49:46.300 And so you're sitting around, you're the focal person, there's 10 people sitting around you and there's exactly one rule, questions only, no advice giving, no fixing problem solving or any of that, only asking questions, which is murder, you know, and people often try to couch advice as a question by saying things like, don't you think, you know, technically, yes, that's a question, but it's a leading question.

00:50:12.440 So there's another example, a brainstorming session is another example.

00:50:15.900 So ways of pulling community together to help you clarify what the call is and how to respond to it is.

00:50:23.980 I just think don't isolate is my point.

00:50:26.920 Don't isolate.

00:50:28.460 You know, we come from a rugged individualist culture and especially for guys, we, we want to do it.

00:50:34.600 We want to figure it out by ourselves.

00:50:36.100 It's not necessarily in our best interest to do it that way.

00:50:39.760 What do you do if you, you follow your calling, right?

00:50:42.340 You feel like this is the thing you should be doing, but it doesn't end the way you were expecting, right?

00:50:47.660 You start a business and it's just an abject failure and you have to declare bankruptcy.

00:50:52.420 Like, does that mean like you, you, you weren't like you were following an untrue calling or maybe that was just part of the gig?

00:50:58.900 Yeah, I would, I would go with door number two on that one.

00:51:05.180 Yeah.

00:51:05.620 Cause it's easy to jump to conclusions and assume that because you quote, and I'm going to put that baby in big quotes, failed at what you perceive as a calling.

00:51:16.500 It meant it wasn't a true calling.

00:51:17.800 That's not necessarily the case.

00:51:19.340 It may mean you need more training.

00:51:21.740 It may need you, you need to farm some things out that you're not farming out.

00:51:26.020 It may need, mean you need more education.

00:51:28.900 It could be a lot of things, or it could be that this isn't the way to make it happen.

00:51:35.140 It could be, it could be a lot of things, but assuming that it's a quote failure isn't necessarily the case, even though of course it feels like a failure.

00:51:43.020 And, you know, I remember sitting right before I was going to quit my job to be self-employed, I sat with one of my mentors over lunch and I told him I was terrified of failing at it.

00:51:55.380 And he, I will never forget this.

00:51:57.420 He leaned across the table at me.

00:51:58.820 He said, Hey, you know, if you're not failing regularly, you're living so far below your potential that you're failing anyway.

00:52:08.980 Which explained why I had lunch with this guy maybe once a year.

00:52:11.640 I mean, there's mentors and then there's tormentors, which is a good thing actually to cultivate.

00:52:17.880 But, you know, this, this fear around failure, my dad, again, scientist, he used to say, you'd be better off in life if you quit focusing on failure or success.

00:52:29.680 Life is just an experiment.

00:52:31.520 There's just results.

00:52:32.780 Just think of it that way, which is a really interesting reframe.

00:52:38.000 I don't mean to make light of failure.

00:52:39.660 I've certainly had my share of it and it, it sucks, but every growth spurt in my life.

00:52:45.960 And I recently made a timeline of all the growth spurts in my life have often come as a result of a quote failure.

00:52:52.860 You know, I was at USA Today as their behavioral specialist.

00:52:56.220 It was a terrible match.

00:52:57.900 Looks great on my resume.

00:52:59.020 I was at USA Today, lousy match.

00:53:01.280 And I was the one and only job I was ever fired from.

00:53:04.700 And it was a utter, I just went back to the Cincinnati paper, which was the deal with Gannett, with my tail between my legs.

00:53:12.040 But it was exactly the crisis that gave me the clarity and determination to become the freelance writer I was called to be.

00:53:21.820 See, being at USA Today was an elaborate form of avoidance that caught up with me.

00:53:27.020 It was a lateral move.

00:53:28.480 It wasn't what I really should have been, what I was really called to do.

00:53:31.460 So, sometimes failures are like what Joseph Campbell called a directive crisis, or some people call it falling up.

00:53:39.520 So, there's a lot, obviously, to be learned from failure.

00:53:42.460 Right.

00:53:42.960 And maybe you might be working on a calling that's bigger than yourself, right?

00:53:47.760 And it might go on even after you're dead.

00:53:52.040 But your little work at it helped with it.

00:53:55.200 I mean, there's a lot of examples of you can think of that.

00:53:58.060 Just pioneers, right?

00:53:59.160 Like, you know, the people who founded, who came across America, probably died along the way.

00:54:04.760 But their efforts, you know, gave us what we have today.

00:54:07.980 Or you can even do like, here's an example from the Bible, right?

00:54:10.760 About, we're going to go callings.

00:54:12.480 Moses, right?

00:54:13.320 He was called to get the Israelites out of Egypt, but he wasn't called to take them into the promised land. 0.91

00:54:19.780 He didn't get to get there.

00:54:21.060 That was Joshua's job.

00:54:22.680 Right.

00:54:23.080 So, maybe your call is, you know, it only goes so far.

00:54:26.640 And it might look like failure, but in the long run, it's not.

00:54:31.060 Yeah, that's a great point.

00:54:32.500 I'm reflecting now that you've mentioned that on several people and people who have been mentors to me who said that I need to hook up whatever I do in my life with a much deeper frame of reference.

00:54:45.520 It's a purpose that there's no way I'm going to live long enough to see.

00:54:49.920 You know, it would be like something like peace on earth or a cure for cancer or, for that matter, even just building the Chartres Cathedral, which took a couple of hundred years.

00:55:00.560 And most of those people never lived long enough to see it.

00:55:02.720 But there's something about hooking yourself up to a deeper purpose that is an important part of motivation, is an important part of legacy.

00:55:14.540 And so, I think there's a lot to be said for this idea of yours that your calls are hooked up to much, much larger callings, larger voices that want to speak through you.

00:55:24.560 And I think that's a very useful way to approach it.

00:55:27.360 It doesn't feel like it's just personal to you, but you're hooking up to something bigger.

00:55:33.520 Well, so, Greg, what's one thing you think someone can do who's listening to this show and they's like, I want to tap in to this idea of a calling.

00:55:39.340 What can they do after they get done listening to the show to start tapping into that?

00:55:43.480 Well, where I immediately go is find some kind of self-reflective practice that works for you.

00:55:49.640 So, whatever that happens to be, that's just some way that you're going to have a regular conversation, ongoing conversation with yourself.

00:55:59.500 I mean, you can do it every morning like I sit down and I do free writing.

00:56:03.960 That just means stream of consciousness writing.

00:56:06.200 That's one of my primary self-reflective practices.

00:56:08.800 Or you could do dream work or you could join a men's group or something that begins a self-reflective practice in your life.

00:56:17.000 That would be my go-to recommendation right off the top because it's something people can do and do regularly and find some version of it that works for them.

00:56:26.900 Well, Greg, this has been a great conversation.

00:56:28.280 Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

00:56:30.560 Oh, well, World Headquarters for me is greglavoy.com.

00:56:34.540 G-R-E-G-G-L-E-V-O-Y.com. 1.00

00:56:37.680 All right.

00:56:37.900 Well, Greg Lavoie, thanks for your time.

00:56:39.040 It's been a pleasure.

00:56:39.920 Thanks so much.

00:56:40.540 I appreciate it, Brett.

00:56:41.560 My guest today was Greg Lavoie.

00:56:42.680 He's the author of the book, Colleons, available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:56:46.420 You can find out more information about his work at his website, greglavoy.com.

00:56:50.380 That's Greg with two Gs.

00:56:51.660 Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash callings where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:56:57.100 Well, that wraps up another edition of the A1 Podcast.

00:57:06.940 Check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles we've written over the years about personal finance, how to be a better husband, better father.

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The Art of Manliness - October 30, 2019

#556： How to Find Your Calling in Life

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