Answering Your Call

Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Contents

Preface.......................................................................xiIntroduction: You Are Called..................................................1Part I: Getting Started with a Calling........................................11Chapter 1: What Is a Call?....................................................13Chapter 2: Common Calls.......................................................25Chapter 3: Mightily Believe You Have a Calling................................39Part I: Summary...............................................................53Part II: Breathing Depth into Common Calls....................................55Chapter 4: Endure the Saboteurs...............................................57Chapter 5: Pass On the Evocateur's Gift.......................................76Chapter 6: Provoke the Stifling...............................................91Part II: Summary..............................................................108Part III: Keeping Focus for the Long Term.....................................109Chapter 7: Go Gently Against the Ego..........................................111Chapter 8: Work the Veil......................................................129Part III: Summary.............................................................141Appendix: Questions in Interviews for Answering Your Call.....................142Notes.........................................................................144Index.........................................................................146About the Author..............................................................151

Chapter One

THINK OF THE WORLD YOU CARRY WITHIN YOU.... BE ATTENTIVE TO THAT WHICH RISES UP IN YOU AND SET IT ABOVE EVERYTHING THAT YOU OBSERVE ABOUT YOU. WHAT GOES ON IN YOUR INNERMOST BEING IS WORTHY OF YOUR WHOLE LOVE; YOU MUST SOMEHOW KEEP WORKING AT IT.

Rainer Maria Rilke Letters to a Young Poet

Calls create specific and lasting effects, and they reveal themselves in many different ways. Before we explore their consequences or revelations, however, let's put the first question first: What is a call?

If we can address this question well we will have a beginning. The other questions asked in this opening chapter also belong near the beginning:

* What do calls do?

* What does it mean to respond to a call?

* When do calls happen?

Working Definitions

Calls are invitations from life to serve, to activate your will toward a cause worthy of you and the human family. They are purposes with a voice, visions turned into inner commands. Calls draw you into the specifics of a purpose and a vision.

A call is the impulse to move ahead in a meaningful way. It is a mind-body push into the future.

A call is part intellectual and part emotional; your human will, moving you in one direction and not in a thousand other possible ones.

A call is sometimes heard as an inner voice, sometimes seen as an image or mental picture, sometimes felt as a self-administered kick in the butt. It urges you to go past the surface level and do something that has lasting value. It may be the message to stop working on the significant efforts that you are helping others with and instead to work on the significant efforts that are more uniquely yours.

Calls are the source of the lasting creativity in our lives.

Does this answer the question of what a call is? Of course not.

No one knows for sure what calls are. That is the best part about them. Calls remain in the realm of the mysterious. The experience of calls—or callings, or vocations, as some refer to them—has attracted its share of efforts at definition, including by me. (Vocations tend to be viewed as lifelong, career-type efforts. We'll use "call" more broadly than "vocation," but won't avoid the term.) If you know of anyone who has a precise or scientific definition, or a poetic or religious one, and you like it, use it. But don't pretend you know completely what a call is, any more than you can summarize what love is. It is useful with mysterious, complex life phenomena like calls not to confine the discussion to what they are, but also to ask what they do.

And calls do many things.

They provide soul-mandates, orders to live the large part of our lives, to attach ourselves to a cause that pulls us out of the limits of our personal history.

Calls create dissatisfaction with the successes in life that our egos wish so much to attain: money, security, status, even the little pleasures beautiful in themselves and banal when inflated to the level of reasons for living.

Calls pull us out of the psychic wounds and inhibitors we inherited. The wounds and limits come from parents who lovingly raised us for the most part, but messed up doing their best, and from the culture that negated the whole of us and instead made us partial people who would fit its purposes.

Calls create the urge to do something significant, providing the inner drive that informs us it is time to get on with it. They provide the sense of being drawn to contribute, to use our wisdom and gifts in ways that benefit others, that enhance life.

Calls draw us to the depth level of whatever roles we may already have. They turn insurance policy peddlers into advisers of needed financial security, grocery store employees into health and nutrition suppliers, doctors into healers, secretaries into stewards, businesspeople into entrepreneurs, bureaucrats into civil servants, writers into dream weavers, parents into co-creators of life.

With all these positive effects, you might think that people would spend the great bulk of their lives trying to respond to their calls. But most of us don't.

There are two significant reasons why we don't respond passionately and constantly to our calls. First, we don't always know how to do so; even when we know that calls exist and what they do we are a long way from having the wisdom to live them well. Second, we focus on other concerns and ignore or sidestep the depth level of our lives. We get distracted from the deep work and play out our lives on their surface, with considerable encouragement from our culture for diversion and avoidance.

For all the importance of calls, it is not often easy to figure out how to live in accordance with them. The process of staying aligned with a call can be a strenuous, even exhausting, struggle. The times in our lives when we are obviously in harmony with our call and flowing with it grandly are matched by times of dissonance, feeling out of sync, and grinding it out.

Responding to the Call

So what is answering a call all about?

As before, mystery takes over here, but it is worth attempting to explain, again as much by describing what a response requires of us as by what it is.

Answering a call is rising out of bed in the morning one more day to get the kids off to school, to go to the workplace, and to attend to the multiple stations in our lives so we can bring whatever it is we believe in into the world.

Answering a call takes refinement and discernment. Starting the response with "I want to do good" is a help, but not much of one. As Lily Tomlin says in her one-woman play The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe: "When I...