Myths of Calling Conclusion

Over the past weeks, we have identified 6 “Myths of Calling” and then proposed a truth, or a Reframe of that Myth. This list is hardly exhaustive, but it does identify some of the top myths we encounter in our work with people who are seeking clarity or finding themselves stuck in some way.

Another way of describing myths might be to call them dysfunctional or limiting beliefs. We all have them, they keep us stuck in some way as they have become part of the story we tell ourselves that disallow us from moving forward.

The six we identified here were:

• Myth #1: Pursue your Passion

• Myth #2: Clarity of Calling brings Ease and Comfort

• Myth #3: God’s Will for me is a job, a house or…..

• Myth #4: Our Worth is Determined by our accomplishments and the approval of others.

• Myth #5: Calling is Discerned Individually

• Myth #6: I can achieve work/life balance if I am clear on my calling

The countering truths or reframes are worth going back and reading through again. Which ones keep you stuck? Perhaps it was none of these but another one-any of these sound familiar?

• I judge my life by the outcome, not the journey.

• Life is a finite game with winners and losers.

• I should always know exactly where I am going

• If I am successful, then I will be happy ,

• Happiness is having it all.

If you are interested in exploring more of these myths and dysfunctional beliefs and how to reframe them in ways that are fruitful and productive, then you may want to join a group discussion this fall using the Designing Your Life resources. Stay tuned for details to be announced in August.

Next week we will start a new series- Living and Working in a VUCA world. thanks for reading along, and as always please reach out if you’d like to explore deepening your Wholeness Journey.

Lisa

Myths of Calling Part VII

MYTH #6 I can (or it is possible to) achieve work/life balance if I am clear on my calling.

This past weekend I spent two days becoming certified as a coach for the Designing Your Life (DYL) process with Bill Burnett. Leveraging the principles of Design Thinking—Accept, Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test—Bill and his Co-author Dave Evans have taken their wildly popular class for Stanford Design School students and developed an accessible and practical set of tools and resources to help you, well, Design Your Life.

In their work, they us the language of “Dysfunctional Belief” and “Re-Frame” (rather than Myth and Truth) to describe the many ways we keep ourselves stuck in patterns of thinking and working that are at best self-limiting and at worst paralyzing. The myth, or dysfunctional belief, around work/life balance was an important one that we tackled early in the certification process because it is so prevalent and enculturated in our thinking and habits. When I hear the phrase work/life balance, the visual image for me is something called a bongo board- it is an old toy that requires a great deal of tension and strength to keep it perfectly level. But no matter how strong you are, eventually you fall off. Even for the most skilled, it is not sustainable over the long haul. The same is true for the myth of work/life balance- we may think we have it perfectly aligned, but sooner or later, something happens that throws our carefully constructed system out of whack.

TRUTH #6: I can find healthy rhythms of work, love, play and health for different seasons of life when I understand how my calling plays out in each of these 4 areas.

Evans and Burnett contend that work/life is a false dichotomy and that our lives actually have (at least) 4 dimensions that need to be considered:

• Love (relationships. family)

• Work

• Play

• Health

Work is actually a part of life, so thinking of these things as distinct and separate leaves us with a binary choice, a false dichotomy, that creates a no-win situation for us.

When we break this into the 4 categories we can now begin to assess more clearly how we are doing on this by using the DYL “Balance Dashboard” and, as honestly as possible, giving ourselves a ranking from “0” ( I have none of this in my life) to 5-Full (I am committing time and energy to this intentionally).

So, for example 45 year old woman re-entering the paid workforce might have a Balance dashboard that looks like this:

·      Love: 3.5- my kids are grown and out of the house, while I still want to be available to them, they require much less of my time and energy. Want to invest in my marriage intentionally during this new season and spend more time with close friends who also have more time.

·      Work: 4.5- while I have back-burnered my career while my kids were at home, I am now ready to re-engage in the paid workforce. I know that it will take me some time to get re-acclimated to the work world, and I may have to invest in developing some new competencies that make me more marketable.

·      Play: 2.5- While I love to do fun stuff, I know for this next 12-18 months, I will have a bit less ‘play time’ as I ramp up my work opportunities.

·      Health: 4.0- my health is extremely important to me so I will ensure I have enough time to work out or exercise every day and prepare healthy meals for my husband and me.

The dashboard offers a place to assess where you are currently and where you would like to move and then define a few incremental steps that would move you towards the “full’ end of the scale.

This is a far wiser, and more nuance approach as you give yourself permission to choose in each of these four important parts of every human life how you will best spend your energy and time for this season (not forever).

When we consider our calling and understand that calling transcends all four of these categories, we can let go of the myth that any one of the 4 define us. Rather, we know that who we are and what we believe can be integrated and brought in service to any and all of these four dimensions of our human existence in the world. This is the coherent—the ‘Tamim’—life.

 If you are interested in learning more about the Designing Your Life Coaching process or may be interested in joining a Designing Your Life coaching group this fall, please email me at lisa@tamimpartners.com 

Next week, I will close this series with a reflections post and give you all a sneak preview of the new series launching in August.

Seeking Tamim together…

Lisa

PS The Designing your Life website is a rich set of free and available tools for anyone who has the book and wants to dig in a bit. The Coaching Process goes much deeper and as a certified DYL coach, I now have access to many additional resources, as well as input and wisdom from the authors and DFYL coaching community.

Myths and Truths of Calling Part VI

MYTH #5 Calling is Discerned Individually

This myth is tricky, because of course there is some truth here. In fact, you are the one who will ultimately gain clarity of calling as you go through the excavation and uncovering process of vocational discernment. For some professions, there is actually an expectation that there was a specific moment or experience during which calling was revealed in its entirety. An example of this is the ‘call’ to pastoral ministry. Some seminaries even require incoming candidates to describe the moment when they ‘received their call to ministry’.  I am not sure what the expectations are—An audible voice from God? A flash of clarity in the midst of a spiritual experience? A Damascus Road moment of scales falling away and vision being restored? I am sure there are some for whom it was this clear and concrete. But for the rest of us it is messier and requires both individual work and a community of wise advisors.

To paraphrase author and Enneagram Master Suzanne Stabile,
“the discernment of calling is individual work, that can only be in the context of community.”

TRUTH #5: Calling discernment requires individual work AND wise healthy advisors.

The individual work is hard and takes time. It means being willing to acquire new knowledge about oneself, pay attention to activities that energize and engage you, as well ones that don’t and the ability to self-reflect. As my colleague Rick Wellock coaches,

“Catch yourself in the act of being yourself. But don’t judge it, just pay attention.”

In our practice we use a number of assessments that provide useful insight towards growing self-knowledge and self-awareness. Among them are the DiSC behavior style profile, Gallup’s Strengthsfinder Assessment, MCORE which focuses on motivation and giftedness and the Enneagram, an ancient wisdom typology tool. The last two are particularly useful, as they not only identify your core motivations or type and the good about it, they also compel you to examine the shadow or vice side as well.  

All of these tools are valuable, anything that expands your self knowledge and deepens your understanding of who you are and how you are different or like others is helpful. But it is not enough to know about yourself, you must be willing to do the hard work of really digging into how you relate to and impact others. How does your shadow side show up? What do others experience when they interact with you? What are you doing to yourself when you operate from a place of un-health? To those who you impact up close and personal?

While we all are aware in some ways of how we impact others, we must be willing to invite others into our life who we trust to give us loving but truthful feedback. Without it we will not grow, we will not fully step into calling and the unintended consequences of not knowing and not creating a community of such advisors can be catastrophic.

Brene Brown, in her groundbreaking work on shame and vulnerability, counsels us to consider carefully whose input we receive and whose we reject. In Dare to Lead, she advises we find our “Square Squad” which she describes as follows:

Your Square Squad is the very short list of people whose opinions matter. [1]

These are the people who care enough about you to be honest, rather than telling you what you want to hear. They should not be people who just blindly agree with you no matter what.

People on your list love you not despite your vulnerability and imperfections, but because of them.

They will point out when you are out of your integrity or when you have messed up, and they will support you to fix things.

To get clear about who belongs on your square squad, use a one-inch by one-inch piece of paper, write down the names of the people in your life whose opinions really matter. The paper is small because it forces you to narrow the list to only those people who have earned the right to an opinion.

Don’t listen to criticism from people who aren’t on your square squad. It is hurtful and unproductive.

The discernment of calling is personal work and requires the ability to deeply self-reflect and learn. It is not enough to adopt a moniker “I am an entrepreneur, I am a doctor, etc.”  and then stop doing the work. Calling is deeper and more complex than that. It is also work done in the context of community- people who can be trusted, whose opinion matter and who love you enough to tell you the unvarnished truth when it needs to be said.

Dig in, start learning and find your squad. If you need help taking some first steps, we’d love to talk with you. This is what Tamim Partners cares about most.

Lisa

lisa@tamimpartners.com

[1] Excerpt From: Brené Brown. “Dare to Lead.” Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/dare-to-lead/id1384267645

Myths and Truths of Calling Part V

MYTH #4 may be the hardest one of all to tackle. It is the Myth that our worth is determined by our accomplishments and performance as well as by the approval of others. We often confuse calling and performance. Are we being productive? Are we delivering results? Are we getting positive feedback? Are we advancing in our chosen field of work? If we seek to put these questions as our priorities, then we risk understanding calling through the lens of productivity and approval. And if we are not producing results or people are not responding positively to us, then we must be operating outside of our calling.

Myth #4 Our worth is determined by our accomplishments and performance as well as by the approval of others.

TRUTH #4: Your worth and identity come solely from who you are in Christ.

Many of us (me included) are ambitious, and ambition is a good thing. But the minute you place your own sense of worth in your accomplishments, you will be setting yourself up for disappointment.  We all have lots of skill in avoiding pain and suffering, but it may be that pain and suffering are actually what is required for us to grow into our calling. God intends for us to fail and to suffer the consequences of that failure; in fact, He promises it. His promise is not that we won’t, but rather that He will be with us in the suffering and for many of us, those deep valleys will be the moments where we experience God’s pleasure the most.

Recently two thought leaders, Arthur Brooks, until recently President of the American Enterprise Institute, and NYT columnist and author David Brooks (no relation to Arthur) have written and spoken on this topic.

Arthur Brooks, in his recently published essay in The Atlantic, Your Professional Decline is Coming (much) Sooner Thank You Think, starts his piece with the story of a world famous man, now well into his 80’s and known for his bravery and courage, he overhears on an airplane bemoaning that he is no longer needed and wishes he was dead. A few moments later, as the gentlemen exits the plane, many people ‘greet him with veneration,’ including the pilots. His entire countenance changes and he beams as he receives approval for his many accomplishments and ‘past glories.’ As Brooks essay unfolds, he makes the case that the work we pursue as we age should shift from a ‘success’ orientation to a ‘wisdom’ orientation. That in our 20’s, 30’s 40’s and even 50’s, the pursuit of accomplishment which is more self-focused, is often how we (at least in this country) think about what gives our lives meaning, especially our careers.

David Brooks, in his recently released book The Second Mountain: The Quest for the Moral Life, makes a similar case. That the ‘first mountain’ is the pursuit of success and ‘happiness’ while the ‘second mountain’ is the pursuit of ‘joy’ and a moral life of meaning.

Both make the case in their unique and thoughtful way, that when the second half of our lives is marked by rich relationships, spirituality and the shift to a service and ‘giving ourselves away’ mindset we will experience deep satisfaction and joy.

 And I think they are both onto something. Both the essay (which I am hoping becomes a book) and the book are on my must-read recommendation lists for 2019.

But I wonder if we must wait until mid-life to make these shifts. (Both men are in their mid 50’s and on their own self-admitted journey of discovery in this season of their lives.)

What if at the heart of Christian calling is a radically counter cultural posture that steps back from performance and approval as the early ‘scorecards’ of success and recognizes that we must do the hard work of self-discovery early, and then in an ongoing way. That suffering, failure, service and risk are the pathways to real joy and we can embrace this early in the journey of calling. Perhaps this is the key to deep coherence, Tamim.

That suffering, failure, service and risk are the pathways to real joy and we can embrace this early in the journey of calling. Perhaps this is the key to deep coherence, Tamim.

Consider the story of Eric Lidell. The movie Chariots of Fire was made about his life. Lidell was being educated to be a pastor and missionary when he made the decision to pursue the Olympics as a runner. He was discouraged by many from this pursuit, saying that it was a distraction to his ‘true calling.’ He is often quoted:

“I believe God made me for a purpose, he made me fast and when I run I feel Gods’ pleasure”,

but I think the more important part of the quote, the part less often noted is this:

“In the dust of defeat as well as the laurels of victory there is a glory to be found if one has done his best.”

 Remember again the words of Steve Garber:

“The word vocation is a rich one, having to address the wholeness of life, the range of relationships and responsibilities. Work, yes, but also families, and neighbors, and citizenship, locally and globally—all of this and more is seen as vocation, that to which I am called as a human being, living my life before the face of God. It is never the same word as occupation, just as calling is never the same word as career. Sometimes, by grace, the words and the realities they represent do overlap, even significantly; sometimes, in the incompleteness of life in a fallen world, there is not much overlap at all.” (emphasis mine)

Calling is not about the pursuit of success, although you may be successful. It is not about performance and approval, although you may deliver amazing results that receive accolades and recognition. Because when those things fall away (and they will fall away), if you have built your identity around them, you will be like the famous elder statesman in Arthur Brooks essay, bemoaning your life is over when you no longer stand in the spotlight.

Serve an audience of One, impart whatever wisdom you hold generously and with great humility, invest in your relational world.

Perhaps Bono got it right in the U2 song, Yahweh…

Filled with Your wonder
Here I surrender
Held in Your mystery of grace
Calling me closer
Waking desire
Coming alive in Your name

This is the heart of calling.

The Wholeness Journey will be off next week, returning on June 15th. Happy 4th of July!