One of the challenges I run into with people as we’re talking about what they might want to do next in their professional lives is this: We don’t actually know very much about the kinds of jobs that exist out there in the world.
We’re also facing a lack of familiarity with all the different things a given company or organization will need in order to fulfill their mission.
So, for instance, we’ll think an accounting firm only hires accountants, or chefs only work at restaurants, or fitness people only work at gyms.
But really, that accounting firm needs lawyers and writers and marketers and techies and coders and managers and business strategists and HR professionals and office people to make the day-to-day go.
Chefs work in restaurants, sure, but they also work in hotels, and airlines, and food manufacturers, and big companies, and for high-net-worth individuals. Fitness people work for gyms, and individuals, and companies, and hotels, and hospitals, and rehabilitation centers.
In other words, there are two separate but related pieces to figuring out what you want comes next: the kind of work you want to do, and the kind of organization in which you want to do it.
It’s easy to conflate them
Because many jobs have an industry that goes with them, it’s easy to conflate the two. But what happens then is that I hear people say things like, well, I want to do the work of consulting, but I hate all the consulting firms. Or, I love higher-level math, but I’d shoot myself in the head if I had to do actuarial stuff.
People dismiss the work they would love to do because they have a limited understanding of the contexts in which they could do that work.
The reality is that there are very few jobs that have only one context, one industry, one type of organization in which they exist. In fact, as I’m sitting here trying to think of some, I’m coming up blank.
So if you really don’t think a giant for-profit is for you, then look for something small and quirky. If you don’t think government work is for you, check out non-profits. If you hate suits and cubicles, look for a company that lets you go to work in jeans and flip-flops or that lets you work from home or whatever.
Whatever you want to do, chances are there’s a position out there in an organization you’d love to work for. The trick is figuring out both parts – what you want to do and where you’d like to do it – so that you can go out looking for that position.
Figuring out what you might like to do and where you might like to do it is some of what Jo VanEvery and I cover in our Choosing Your Career Consciously course. We’re starting another round of this 6-week course on June 12 – click here to learn more.
 Finding a job is one thing — and an important thing, to be sure. But unless we spend the time and energy to figure out what we really want to be doing, we’re going to land right back where we are now: frustrated, restless, lost, and unhappy. This is where we talk about how we can uncover the things we most want to do with our lives. It’s also where I test out tools so you don’t have to. Click here for past posts.
Let me tell you a brief story
There are lots of reasons I left academia. But one I don’t talk about as much is this: I was bored out of my everloving mind.
Sure, I could turn my dissertation into a manuscript. I was told that after you leave it alone for a while, it becomes interesting again. Um, fail.
Sure, I could research something sort of related but sort of different – it’s taking something in a new direction! Fail.
Sure, I could throw myself into my teaching. Fail, fail, fail.
And I can’t tell you that departmental politics, committee meetings, or advising were altogether diverting.
It really wasn’t them. It was me.
It wasn’t that my situation was unusual. Turning your dissertation into a book? Normal. Taking your research in a new direction? Normal. Engaging teaching as an intellectually rich endeavor (because it is)? Normal.
I, however, was apparently not normal.
And I suspect that many of you may be more like me than like my graduate student friends who are happily tenured and writing and teaching.
I see it again and again
Many of my clients – you could even say most of my clients – have something in common besides academia. They love learning for the sake of learning. Left to their own devices (and with sufficient money to make it happen), they’d probably just keep taking class after class, just because.
It’s how we all landed in academia in the first place. Where else does someone who loves learning go but on to more schooling?
The problem with that, of course, schooling has an end-point, and with that end-point comes the presumption that all of your schooling has been aimed at a career.
But what if it wasn’t?
Many of us went to graduate school because we loved the idea of being a professor. Few of us really knew what that meant, though. Sure, we knew professors taught students, but most of the rest of their job – advising, serving on committees, participating in shared governance, publishing or perishing – was invisible to us.
What we thought they did, in addition to all of that teaching, was read. Think. Learn. Of course those of us who love to learn things would think it was a great idea.
Breadth vs. depth
But one of the realities of academia is that you are, to a large extent, limited in what you can dive into. Jobs are disciplinary. Contracts are disciplinary. Teaching is disciplinary.
My friends who love academia look at me a little strangely, because they did go on to learn other things. The difference was that they looked at a different 19th century educator, or dipped in to Burke, or wrote about bodies in the same era of rhetoric they’d been writing me.
Me, I wanted to go learn about geography. (There is such a thing as cultural geography! Feminist geography! How cool is that?) I wanted to learn color theory. I wanted to learn whale speech. I wanted to learn psychology.
English is an admittedly baggy field, but it wasn’t baggy enough for me. And my department and my teaching requirements were definitely not baggy enough for me.
If I had paid any attention to my own patterns, I would have been able to predict this. See, my particular strength is not depth, it’s breadth. I know lots and lots about many different things, things that don’t, on first glance, seem to go together.
I’m what Barbara Sher calls a scanner. And many of the people I talk to who are unhappy with academia are scanners too.
Scanners are the Renaissance people of our times
There are lots of types of scanners, scanners who return to the same four beloved but disparate topics, scanners who are always finding new projects, scanners who love to become masters at things, and scanners whose intellectual CV looks a lot like the Energizer Bunny took a run through the encyclopedia at high speed.
We’re the people who really like learning about personality types, and transition theory, and how to build houses, and how paint colors came to be discovered and invented and created, and the history of ballet, and mind/body theory, and how investigative police work happens, and how proto-humans ate. All at the same time, probably while building a bike and learning how to take photographic portraits and teaching the dog to behave.
It used to be that people like us were beloved, but in the last few decades, specialization has taken over from the fascinated generalist. And nowhere more than in academia.
Scanners and academia don’t get along
Academia is predicated on depth of knowledge. By its very structure, it’s predicated on everyone staying within the confines of the discipline.
You can see where things might get hairy for those of us who thrive on dipping our toes into new topics all the time.
Because of this mismatch, it’s easy to think we’ve failed, that there’s something wrong with us. But there’s nothing wrong with us. We don’t thrive in this environment, is all. We need a different climate in which to truly flourish – one that has our particular version of scanner-ness built in somehow.
If you love to learn and yet are finding yourself struggling in academia, chances are, nothing is wrong with you.
Want to read more about scanners? Click here to go to an affiliate link to Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose on Amazon.
If you’d like some help figuring out what else you might be able to do, Jo Van Every and I are running a 6-week course designed to help the academically inclined expand their sense of career possibility. You can learn more here.
 Finding a job is one thing — and an important thing, to be sure. But unless we spend the time and energy to figure out what we really want to be doing, we’re going to land right back where we are now: frustrated, restless, lost, and unhappy. This is where we talk about how we can uncover the things we most want to do with our lives. It’s also where I test out tools so you don’t have to. Click here for past posts.
Your hobbies are useful to thinking about your calling
When you’re thinking about what you’re called to do – or at least what you want to do next – don’t forget to look at your hobbies, all of those things you do in your spare time, all of those things that make you relaxed and happy and creative and accomplished.
Before you start hollering at me that that’s impractical, just hear me out.
What your hobbies get you
First of all, you already do your hobbies without getting paid to do them. You run or do ceramics or paint model horses or knit or climb boulders or invent small machines that will fish the socks out from underneath the couch. By definition, a hobby is something you’re passionate about to some extent.
Second, because you’re engaged in this hobby, you’ve assimilated to one degree or another all of the specialized language, knowledge, and insiderness of that field. You know and understand things that people who do not participate do not know and understand.
Both of these things – passion and insider knowledge – are valuable.
It’s probably not what you think
I’m not suggesting that you can start making a career tomorrow out of climbing boulders. Or knitting sweaters. Or drinking beer. Or whatever form your hobby currently takes. While that may actually be possible, it’s probably not the simplest way in.
But every hobby, every passion, has a whole host of companies, organizations, activities, and stuff that make that hobby possible. Someone has to design and manufacture the equipment. Someone has to distribute it. Someone has to manufacture the actual supplies the hobbyists and experts need. Someone has to make it available for you, the hobbyist, to access.
Someone has to be the expert teacher. Someone has to organize the tours. Someone has to coordinate getting that yarn into the hands of the knitters who want it. Someone has to convince bars to stock this new brand of beer.
What I am suggesting is that your passion and your knowledge are valuable in all of those spaces, because it’s less you have to learn. And if you combine your passion and your knowledge of your hobby with the other skills you undoubtedly have – organizing people or things, public speaking, teaching, designing curricula, coaching people one on one, etc. – then you’ve got an incredibly useful set of things to talk about in an actual application.
You do not have to turn your hobby into anything
This isn’t to say that your hobby is automatically the way to go. You may want to keep your hobby a hobby. You might be the kind of person who likes to dip lightly into dozens of hobbies and never dive deeply into any. That is okay.
When I suggest you look at your hobbies, what I’m really asking you to do is to look around at the rest of your life for clues, ideas, and directions for where you might go next. It’s easy to get so caught in the academic mindset that we don’t actually look beyond our academic work. But you have a whole, valuable life that’s full of all kinds of things you’ve already done and could do. Just look.
If you’re struggling to figure out what you’re called to do, or even what you might want to do next, Jo VanEvery and I teach a telecourse on choosing your career consciously. It covers how to find things you might want to do, how to pay attention to your life for clues, and how to look at what you actually bring to the table. If you’d like to find out when it’s running again, click here to sign up for our advanced notice list.
Finding a job is one thing — and an important thing, to be sure. But unless we spend the time and energy to figure out what we really want to be doing, we’re going to land right back where we are now: frustrated, restless, lost, and unhappy. This is where we talk about how we can uncover the things we most want to do with our lives. It’s also where I test out tools so you don’t have to. Click here for past posts.
The myth of the straight line
We have this idea that successful lives are linear, that if you were really meant to be a pianist or an engineer or a kindergarten teacher that the seeds of that life would have been manifest in our earliest days.
This is only reinforced by the way we talk and think about celebrities or “great people” – Tiger Woods, Mozart, Jodie Foster, Mahatma Ghandi. Whatever the reality, we want their lives to be written like novels, full of foreshadowing and fulfillment. It meets some deep need in us for resolution.
But as Mark Twain famously said, “Of course truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”
We aren’t likely to become celebrities
There are lots of reasons why our lives aren’t going to look like the public version of theirs.
First off, the narrative of their lives published in glossy magazines and thick biographies is likely to be much, much, much different than their lived experience of their lives. We can’t compare our insides to their outsides any more than we can compare their insides to their outsides. They’re always different.
Second, the people who get profiled and written about are nearly always the best of the best of the best. They’ve risen to the top of a very narrow field, and to do that requires the proverbial 10,000 hours of deep practice. Crazy focus is the wages of reaching those heights.
But I’m going to guess that you don’t actually want to be Tiger Woods or Jodie Foster.
Let’s define success
Our culture likes to define success in terms of three things: fame, money, and prestige. Ideally you want all three, but any one will do.
While I’m sure none of us would turn down the kind of money thrown around in “successful” circles, I’d also challenge us to think more deeply about what it means to be successful.
When researchers study happiness, what they find is that it’s not money that makes people happy, nor success as conventionally defined. Rather, it’s time spent in work that is challenging, absorbing, and meaningful to the individual.
Back to this idea of linearity
All of that means that, as we grow as people and as we have ongoing experiences both professional and personal, what is going to be challenging, absorbing, and meaningful to us is likely to shift over time. If it didn’t, challenging would soon become monumentally frustrating. Absorbing would become obsessing. Meaningful would become proving a point.
For those of us who aren’t going to be the very best ball player or flautist or dancer or corporate raider or whatever in the whole entire world, we don’t need 10,000 hours in one thing. We need constant growth and curiosity and exploration.
Our lives don’t have to be linear, because we’re writing a different narrative.
That doesn’t meant that, as we find and explore the work that is challenging, absorbing, and meaningful to us that there won’t be threads that connect the different eras of our lives – because there will be. We will always be ourselves doing all of these things.
But it does mean that we don’t have to identify or understand the thread in the present. Our only job is to continually seek out work that is challenging, absorbing, and meaningful to us.
The wide, wide world
One of the challenges of a non-linear life is being able to identify what comes next.
When things are linear, there’s a clear next step. When our lives are non-linear, we often have to seek out the next step. That can be frightening both the possibilities are both infinite and unknown. There are far more jobs and careers out there than are dreamt of in our academic philosophy.
But there are ways to tame that fear, because there are ways to both explore the unknown and limit the infinite. Remember – in a non-linear life, your job is not finding the Thing You Will Do Forever. It’s only finding the Next Right Step.
And that is simply a matter of marrying your curiosity to some everyday explorations.
Jo VanEvery and I are teaching an 8-week class by conference call that helps you do just that. If you’re interested in learning more, click here.
But whatever you do, remember that what comes next doesn’t have to be determined by what came before it. It only needs to be something challenging, absorbing, and meaningful.
Finding a job is one thing — and an important thing, to be sure. But unless we spend the time and energy to figure out what we really want to be doing, we’re going to land right back where we are now: frustrated, restless, lost, and unhappy. This is where we talk about how we can uncover the things we most want to do with our lives. It’s also where I test out tools so you don’t have to. Click here for past posts.
And then there was a bolt out of the blue…
It’s easy to think, when you’re searching for the Right Job, the Right Career, your Inner Calling, that one day, somehow, you’re going to get a bolt out of the blue and you’ll know what it is. And then, knowing fully what it is, you can set about making it happen.
That’s not usually how it works, unfortunately.
Most of the time, we encounter or search out a job or a career that’s simply better than where we are – more in line with who we are and what we need. And so we make the jump. After a period of time, we start noticing all the things about this job or career that don’t quite fit, that rub us the wrong way. It’s tempting, at that point, to think we did it wrong. But we didn’t. What we did was take the Next Right Step – and now there’s another Next Right Step to take.
Calling as incrementalism
If you have an experience that hands you your calling wholesale, then I bow down before you (and not so secretly envy you).
Most of us, however, get to our calling incrementally and experientially by trying things and then noticing what does – and doesn’t – work. Every time we find a new job or a new career, we’re refining the process, taking with us more and more knowledge about what does and doesn’t work for us.
Most people balk at this process
It’s true – figuring out your calling and your career is going to take the rest of your life.
But that’s only a problem if you buy into the notion – built into our very high schools with the notion of guidance and career counselors – that you were supposed to figure it out once and for all and then be happy. (As a teenager!)
In fact, that assumption keeps more people paralyzed than any other I know of – because people assume that if they aren’t happy, it’s because they’ve done something wrong, instead of being part of the natural evolution of a human life and career.
Frankly, I don’t think I trust my 20 year old self to have figured out the rest of my life. She was a sweet kid, sure, but not so much on the life experience. Chances are, your 20-year-old self was the same.
It can be an expansive process
If you think about it as the natural evolution of a life, then it’s not a shameful remediation but an exciting journey. Where will you end up? Who knows? But following the bread crumbs is likely to be an exciting process. You’re learning more about yourself and the world every day – and what else is a life for?
The problem, for most people, is having no idea where to begin that journey – because they’ve never thought about or explored anything else. That goes double in academia, with its highfalutin assumptions about the intellectual wasteland that is the rest of the world. (Supposedly, anyway. In reality, not so much.)
To help the academically inclined figure out where else they might be looking – and where the Next Right Step might be hiding – Jo VanEvery and I have cooked up a free teleclass that will give you a high-level method of figuring out what your options are. To learn more, just click here.
Finding a job is one thing — and an important thing, to be sure. But unless we spend the time and energy to figure out what we really want to be doing, we’re going to land right back where we are now: frustrated, restless, lost, and unhappy. This is where we talk about how we can uncover the things we most want to do with our lives. Click here for past posts.
They’re all the rage these days, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t incredibly useful when you’re trying to figure out what you want to do with your life.
Yep, I’m talking about life lists.
What’s a life list?
Simply put, a life list is a, well, list of a bunch of things you want to do before you die. Sometimes called “bucket lists,” these lists contain everything from “taste 50 rums” (one of Karen Walrond’s items) to “visit every country in the world” (one of Chris Gillebeau’s items).
Exactly how to go about it varies depending on who you’re talking to. Some people swear by 100 items, or 77 items, or “as many as you want.” Personally, I like using 100 as a goal, both because it’s a nice round number and because stretching for a longer list than we might initially come up with can help uncover things that really are important to us.
Two, two kinds of useful!
Whenever I read someone’s life list, I immediately learn things about them — what’s important to them, what they value, what they care about. Writing your own list can have the same effect, showing you themes and connections you might not have noticed otherwise.
But life lists are more than intellectual. When you have a life list, it’s a hell of a lot easier to start doing or planning for some of the things you really, passionately want to do in your life. And bringing into your life the things you really want to be doing — no matter the state of your career planning — is going to increase your happiness, unleash your creativity, and give you reasons to go after big dreams.
Are you game?
I’ll be honest — I’ve never sat down to write my own. But I’m pledging, here in public, to do just that, and I’ll post it over at Holy Longing. I’d love to hear what’s on yours!
A few comments about comments
The whole question of being unhappy in academia — no matter what stage you’re in — can feel fraught. If you’d like to comment but are feeling shy about “being out there,” feel free to make up a persona or comment anonymously. You can also email me directly.
First-time commenters are always moderated (because you wouldn’t believe the spam I get), so if your comment doesn’t show up immediately, hang tight! Chances are, I’m not right on my email.
And most of all, let’s all practice compassion for ourselves and others in this difficult time and space.
Finding a job is one thing — and an important thing, to be sure. But unless we spend the time and energy to figure out what we really want to be doing, we’re going to land right back where we are now: frustrated, restless, lost, and unhappy. This is where we talk about how we can uncover the things we most want to do with our lives. Click here for past posts.
They’re all the rage these days, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t incredibly useful when you’re trying to figure out what you want to do with your life.
Yep, I’m talking about life lists.
What’s a life list?
Simply put, a life list is a, well, list of a bunch of things you want to do before you die. Sometimes called “bucket lists,” these lists contain everything from “taste 50 rums” (one of Karen Walrond’s items) to “visit every country in the world” (one of Chris Gillebeau’s items).
Exactly how to go about it varies depending on who you’re talking to. Some people swear by 100 items, or 77 items, or “as many as you want.” Personally, I like using 100 as a goal, both because it’s a nice round number and because stretching for a longer list than we might initially come up with can help uncover things that really are important to us.
Two, two kinds of useful!
Whenever I read someone’s life list, I immediately learn things about them — what’s important to them, what they value, what they care about. Writing your own list can have the same effect, showing you themes and connections you might not have noticed otherwise.
But life lists are more than intellectual. When you have a life list, it’s a hell of a lot easier to start doing or planning for some of the things you really, passionately want to do in your life. And bringing into your life the things you really want to be doing — no matter the state of your career planning — is going to increase your happiness, unleash your creativity, and give you reasons to go after big dreams.
Are you game?
I’ll be honest — I’ve never sat down to write my own. But I’m ple
Finding a job is one thing — and an important thing, to be sure. But unless we spend the time and energy to figure out what we really want to be doing, we’re going to land right back where we are now: frustrated, restless, lost, and unhappy. This is where we talk about how we can uncover the things we most want to do with our lives. Click here for past posts.
They’re all the rage these days, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t incredibly useful when you’re trying to figure out what you want to do with your life.
Yep, I’m talking about life lists.
What’s a life list?
Simply put, a life list is a, well, list of a bunch of things you want to do before you die. Sometimes called “bucket lists,” these lists contain everything from “taste 50 rums” (one of Karen Walrond’s items) to “visit every country in the world” (one of Chris Gillebeau’s items).
Exactly how to go about it varies depending on who you’re talking to. Some people swear by 100 items, or 77 items, or “as many as you want.” Personally, I like using 100 as a goal, both because it’s a nice round number and because stretching for a longer list than we might initially come up with can help uncover things that really are important to us.
Two, two kinds of useful!
Whenever I read someone’s life list, I immediately learn things about them — what’s important to them, what they value, what they care about. Writing your own list can have the same effect, showing you themes and connections you might not have noticed otherwise.
But life lists are more than intellectual. When you have a life list, it’s a hell of a lot easier to start doing or planning for some of the things you really, passionately want to do in your life. And bringing into your life the things you really want to be doing — no matter the state of your career planning — is going to increase your happiness, unleash your creativity, and give you reasons to go after big dreams.
Are you game?
I’ll be honest — I’ve never sat down to write my own. But I’m pledging, here in public, to do just that, and I’ll post it over at Holy Longing. I’d love to hear what’s on yours!
A few comments about comments
The whole question of being unhappy in academia — no matter what stage you’re in — can feel fraught. If you’d like to comment but are feeling shy about “being out there,” feel free to make up a persona or comment anonymously. You can also email me directly.
First-time commenters are always moderated (because you wouldn’t believe the spam I get), so if your comment doesn’t show up immediately, hang tight! Chances are, I’m not right on my email.
And most of all, let’s all practice compassion for ourselves and others in this difficult time and space.
dging, here in public, to do just that, and I’ll post it over at Holy Longing. I’d love to hear what’s on yours!
A few comments about comments
The whole question of being unhappy in academia — no matter what stage you’re in — can feel fraught. If you’d like to comment but are feeling shy about “being out there,” feel free to make up a persona or comment anonymously. You can also email me directly.
First-time commenters are always moderated (because you wouldn’t believe the spam I get), so if your comment doesn’t show up immediately, hang tight! Chances are, I’m not right on my email.
And most of all, let’s all practice compassion for ourselves and others in this difficult time and space.
If you’ve been reading along in my explorations of Finding Your Calling, you know that I’m a big proponent of finding clues — all the descriptors of your ideal life, all the qualities of what you want to do in the world, all the lessons you’ve learned from things not working out, how you’d describe your values, what you’re passionate about.
So maybe you’ve got a nice big pile of clues. Now what?
First, collect your clues
Get all of those clues in the same place, a place where you can see all of them at the same time.
Me, I like writing each clue on its own post-it in Sharpie marker and then posting them all on a blank wall, in a big cloud. That way I can see them, but I can also interact with them.
But that’s not the only way. You can write them all in a cloud, you can make slips of paper, you can have lists, you can draw cartoons. However you get them all together is up to you.
Next, play with their relationships
How do all of these clues go together? What do they have in common? Are there themes?
Group the clues together in ways that make sense to you — and see what you learn.
Maybe you discover that, despite the fact that you adore people, many of your clues suggest that your calling involves solitude. Or maybe you discover that your calling must, absolutely, no exceptions, involve people. Lots of people.
The themes you see are going to call out the deeper qualities of your calling.
Finally, we call on Metaphor Mouse!
Metaphor Mouse is a technique Havi Brooks adapted from Suzette Haden Elgin, and it enables us to take all of the themes we’ve found and put them together into a coherent whole — a whole we can then use as a north star to orient the compass of our next steps. (Her version is about reimagining the things we want to do but have resistance to.)
Here’s how it works. List out all of your themes, one after another. List as well as of the clues that seem absolutely, totally, and unmistakably central to your calling.
Then ask, what do all of these themes, qualities, and clues remind you of?
Describe it in as much detail as you can — is all of this like throwing the coolest party in the world for the people you love most? Is it like diving deep into the sea to discover the fish that have no eyes? Is it like building a very precise scale model of the universe?
Once you’ve got a description, ask yourself, Is there a metaphor here?
For Havi, the central metaphor for her business is a pirate ship — which reinvents the standard way one might go about having a business.
Yours might be being the hostess with the mostest, or being an undersea explorer, or being an architect of the stars.
Oh, the places you’ll go!
It’s going to sound counterintuitive, but figuring out the metaphor of your calling is going to get you much farther — and much more likely to actually living into your calling — than being “practical” or “analytical.”
That’s because our callings aren’t head-centered. They’re more about the totality of who we are, our uniqueness. And that uniqueness can be manifested in lots and lots of different ways. The more we can center ourselves in a felt sense of that calling, the more we can imagine manifesting our calling in ways we might not have even thought of before.
And what does that give us? That’s right — options.
I don’t know about you, but I really like options, especially when it comes to things like finding a job or a career or a next step. Options mean that if one path doesn’t work out (and let’s face it — so much isn’t under our control), there are other paths. Options means it’s not this-or-nothing. Not black-or-white. Not if-you-don’t-win-you-are-screwed.
So get creative. Get intuitive. Get playful. Get exploratory. See where your metaphor can take you.
I don’t mean, is it a good calling? (That, after all, makes it sound like a puppy.) I mean, what are the qualities you would use to describe your calling?
After you’ve come at it from lots of different angles, you’ve probably got a sense of what it is or what it looks like, even if you don’t know quite how it’s going to manifest in the world.
Is it creative? Inspiring? Powerful? Quiet? Meditative? Revolutionary? Is it experimental? Purposeful? Curious?
How would you describe it?
This is not a flippant question
The qualities of your calling are as important as the “content” of your calling. In fact, they’re more important.
Because we’ve been so trained to think in terms of “careers” and “jobs” and “tracks” and etc., when we start working on finding our calling, we tend to get stuck in descriptions that at least tangentially fit careers and jobs and tracks.
We want to teach, or we want to research, or we want to invent, or we want to write, or we want to dance, or we want to make beautiful chairs. These are outcomes. These are manifestations.
Your calling, on the other hand, is bigger than outcome and bigger than manifestation. Your calling is about what special quality, what special message you bring to the world.
I think Martha Graham said it best:
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
That vitality she points to, that life force — that’s your calling. And it is unique. It cannot and will not be duplicated or repeated by anyone else, no matter how many other people have the same job title or work in the same field or career.
Words will not encompass it
Your true calling is a lot like the impetus a writer has for a novel. The best novels can’t exactly be reduced to a “message,” but at the same time, you get something out of them — you’re changed. There’s something there.
Our callings, too, can’t be reduced to a message, but we can point to them the same way we can describe a really good novel.
Even though we can’t express our callings fully in words, pointing to it with qualities is useful because that pointing gives us a direction. It gives us something to measure our manifestations against. It gives us something to return to regardless of what happens in our jobs and our careers.
Calling can be — okay, usually is — a fraught subject for unhappy academics. You see, so many of us thought we had already identified and started to live our calling. And then our calling betrayed us.
Or so we think
Our calling has never betrayed us. Our calling is, in its purest form, the shape our soul wants to take in the world, the work we’re meant to do, the gift we bring to the brokenness of the universe.
That doesn’t mean that in academia we necessarily found the only or even best expression of it.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — callings do not map neatly onto jobs, even when they seem like maybe they have the same shape. Callings are much bigger than any job or even any career.
And that’s a really, really good thing.
A small story
I’m going to use myself as an example here, although I’ve seen this play out with dozens of clients.
I walked through the big oak doors of academia because I loved to read, and I loved writing, and I loved the idea of teaching. (There have been worse reasons to go to graduate school, but oh lordy, there have also been much, much better ones.) I never lost my love of reading or my love of writing or my love of the idea of teaching. But I never did find my love of actually teaching.
What I did find was almost more interesting. Teaching groups is not my deal, as a general rule. It alternately bores and stresses me. One-on-one teaching, on the other hand, always made me happy. I’m also not interested in writing per se — what fascinates me is helping people learn to connect with and trust themselves.
I never would have learned those things if I hadn’t been in academia. And that insight has led to any number of jobs in which I got to work one-on-one with people to help them get out of their own damn way, whether as a supervisor, an editor, or a coach.
Same calling. Different expressions — including ones it never would have occurred to me would be expressions of my calling.
All of which is to say
If you’re struggling with academia, and especially if you’ve left, there’s going to be grief. There just is. It’s totally normal and appropriate to be sad and angry and despairing and furious and bored and dismissive and insert-your-favorite-emotion-here.
But that struggle — and that grief — don’t mean that your calling is moot. It doesn’t mean that you aren’t going to live your calling. It only means you might not live out your calling in the way you expected to.
It still sucks — but not as much.
Your passion still matters
When you can, when it doesn’t feel quite so pointy and craptastic, if you’re still feeling called to your calling, you’ve got the perfect experience to learn something important from.
What about academia did, in fact, express your calling? What activities, what experiences, what tasks, what roles? What about academia didn’t actually express your calling?
You can do this for every job you’ve ever held, whether it was paid or not. Expand it to every notable experience, good or bad. That club you were part of once, when you learned how much you love leading discussion. The mountain bike ride on which you really, really got why people become avid athletes. That night at the improv when you stood up in front of a crowd of semi-hostile people and realized that however much you like the idea of being on stage, being on stage in reality makes you want to throw up.
Everything is a clue. Everything is a breadcrumb. Everything will lead you to your calling, if you let it. Even your struggle with academia.
If defining your passion and your values is creating stuck or resistance, try getting to your calling by starting from a vision of your ideal life.
Here’s how it works
Put yourself someplace you can concentrate without interruption. Take a couple of deep breaths to center yourself. Then begin imagining your ideal day — not a vacation day, but your ideal everyday day.
Where are you when you wake up? What time of day is it? Who’s with you? What does your sleeping space look like? What are you wearing?
What happens next? Do you eat breakfast? If so, what is it? Where do you eat it? Who, if anyone, do you eat it with?
What does “getting ready for the day” entail? What are you wearing when you’re ready for the day?
Where do you go next? Who’s around? How far is it? What does this space look like? What do you do there?
Where do you eat lunch? What does that consist of? Who, if anyone, is with you?
What happens after lunch? Where are you? What are you doing?
What does the time between lunch and dinner consist of?
What do you eat for dinner? Where do you eat dinner? Who’s with you? When does it happen?
What happens after dinner? Where are you? What are you doing?
When do you go to bed? What does “getting ready for bed” consist of? Who’s with you?
Why this is useful
It’s easy to get caught up in “what’s possible.” By focusing on our ideal (every) day, we can free ourselves from our limited ideas of what’s possible and start honing in on the lifestyle and activities that speak to our deep selves.
Once you’ve got a sense of your ideal day, you can work backwards — what does this tell you about your passion and your values? If you already had a sense of your passion and your values, what insight does your ideal day provide about how you want to be living? What does this imply about what happens next?
Using your passion, your values, and your ideal day to create a map of your dreams creates the ground for thinking about how to turn those dreams into a lived reality — and that’s what we’ll be talking about next week.
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