How to Find Your Calling in Life

Today's blog post is based on a podcast from The Art of Manliness, and it ties in with the three part series from last week.

Nearly everyone has experienced the sense of being nudged and prompted to take certain actions. These intuitive hints can spur us to do big things like change jobs, or smaller things like text a friend.

My guest today says that these are callings, and that if we don’t answer them, they’ll continue to rememerge and can haunt us til the day we die. His name is Gregg Leroy and he’s the author of Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life. We begin our conversation discussing what exactly a calling is and why it’s not necessarily the same thing as a vocation. Gregg then shares how callings come to people, why they’re sometimes unpleasant and challenging, and what you can do to attune yourself to their signals. Gregg then shares different ways people go about figuring out their calling, including rites of passage, traveling, art, and community. We get into how you figure out if something you think is a calling is actually a calling or not, and the idea that while every calling demands a response, that response can be negotiated. We end our conversation discussing what happens when your calling ends in what looks like failure.

This gets back to the idea of what we want to be when we grow up and is a huge part of adulthood. As we talked about last week, if you don't follow your "dream", there will be problems in the future, especially during the transitions.

Anything we can do to help us find the right job is probably a good thing.

They talk about some of the smaller callings like texting a friend, or calling your mother. These are what we call a prompting in SendOutCards and I talked about them a while back and used it as the topic of my presentation at my Gold Star meeting last week.

Here are the highlights from the program:

• What is a calling?
• The difference between calling and vocation
• The various natures and channels that callings take
• What’s the benefit of being attuned to these callings?
• Can callings be secular in nature?
• Are callings always pleasant? Do they always feel good?
• How do you attune yourself to hearing life’s callings?
• The ways in which busyness disrupt your self-reflection
• How crises can disrupt our life in positive ways
• Can you invoke calls?
• What about dreams? Do they have any meaning? What about folks who pass them off as “woo woo”?
• The power of rites of passage
• Why every man needs quiet and solitude (often out in nature)
• How restlessness can point you in new and better directions
• How to discern if callings are “true” or delusions
• What happens when you say no to a call?
• Negotiating multiple callings
• The role of community in our callings
• What can listeners do today to start tapping into their callings?

One of the rites of passage that was discussed was the vision quest, which reminded me of the movie "City Slickers", although it wasn't what would be considered a true vision quest, the characters did leave their "village" in search of their calling. Especially the part where Curly talks about "the one thing", which I wrote about here.

Be sure to check out the podcast and also the series on finding your calling.

Interesting days

Today - Chocolate Covered Anything Day and Day Of Reconciliation

Tomorrow - Maple Syrup Day and Wright Brothers Day

Month long celebrations:

November 28 - December 31: A Blue Christmas

Next Monday - Festivus and Roots Day

Month long celebrations:

November 28 - December 31: A Blue Christmas

January 16 - Nothing Day, Women’s Healthy Weight Day, Religious Freedom Day, Appreciate A Dragon Day and International Hot and Spicy Food Day