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Working with a life coach can help you find your calling and understand why the process is often frustrating and confusing.
Finding your calling has more to do with grit than passion.
I struggled for years trying to figure out what my calling was. I sought to understand what skills interests, and talents I could use to create a business. I wanted that business to be something that brought me great joy and served others. I kept hitting wall after wall of obstacles, some real and some based on my level of self-worth at the time.
Every time I hit a wall, two things would happen:
1. I would either get stuck and not know how to take a step and quit.
2. I would find something new that interested me, and I would suddenly be off in a new direction.
I have so many interests and I love learning, but at a point, I became so frustrated by the feeling of constantly starting over, and never gaining traction, that I knew I wanted to change the way I approached finding my special thing.
Every time I sat down to try to figure it out, I couldn’t.
I realized that it’s not something you can figure out by thinking. You can only figure it out by doing.
In the book Grit by Angela Duckworth, she explains the three stages of achievement.
Stage one: The Discovery phase.
It’s the stage in which you investigate a curiosity, learn more about it try it on, and get to know it as a possibility. It’s also a very fragile stage in the passion investigation process because it’s easy for someone else to interject a damaging opinion or if you don’t have support, your budding interest can be very easily abandoned especially if things are challenging or hard. It’s easy to step off the path at this stage because something that seems newer, shinier, and better can capture your interest and off you go.
The problem with this is that you never, ever get to the part where you build and experience meaningful growth. Much like a serial dater who goes from women to women, who can never make a commitment to get engaged because they’re addicted to the excitement of the ‘newness and possibility and are constantly battling the tension that arises with the feeling that something better might come along. You may be holding out for the perfect thing that doesn’t exist.
This was my problem. When things got hard, and I didn’t have the support or skills I needed to stay with things, I would quit and move on to something new, and struggled to rise to the next phase of achievement.
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Stage two: The Development phase.
In this stage, you are skill-building with consistent, focused, deliberate practice, time investment, and building and stretching the boundaries of your skills. Most people want to skip this stage and rush right into the marriage.
You cant get to the third stage of achievement without investing in this development stage. Sadly this stage is where most people drop out.
Sometimes it’s genuinely not the right path, and it’s ok to keep investigating.
However, I noticed that when I would get to this stage, I would quit because I was mistaking the challenge for disinterest, based on something I like to call the passion myth.
The Passion Myth will keep you stuck…
The passion myth
The belief that there is one perfect passion for you and when discovered, it will be effortless, make you happy every moment, and doing it won’t feel like work because you love it so much.
The passion myth makes us feel that if you are not completely in love with what you are doing all day every day, that it’s not your thing.
The truth is, meaningful things take deliberate practice, constant commitment, and work.
Whenever I was ready to claim and commit to a territory, someone would inevitably ask me, if I was passionate about it, or did I love it?
And because I wasn’t sure if I could genuinely answer that question, it made me doubt my commitment. If fireworks weren’t going off, I assumed that I wasn’t passionate about it. I was mistaking momentary confusion about my commitment with the feeling that comes from experiencing novelty. Human beings are hard-wired to seek novelty. Eventually, you will realize that the new guy you’re dating has stinky feet sometimes, and throws his socks in the middle of the floor. You wouldn’t throw out a good and loving man for being imperfect, and you definitely don’t want to abandon a calling that could give you a lifetime of wonder and fulfillment because of the passion myth.
Rather than asking yourself if you are passionate about something, or if you are in love with it, a better question to ask about passion is, “are you willing to stay with it, when things are hard.” Are you willing to commit to it, on days when it feels boring, challenging, or impossible.” those are better self-determining questions. And they are better for pinpointing what your path is.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your feeling in the moment is an indicator of the passion you feel for something. Passions come with a depth and range of emotions. The deeper you go, the wider range of thoughts and emotions you will experience.
Stage three: Deepening.
In the deepening stage, you are using your skills that you have built in stage two, to strengthen your voice, hone your craft, and you will experience flow.
Duckworth gives a wonderful metaphor about the difference between a job, career, and calling. Three men are asked what they do.
The first man says, “I’m a bricklayer.” Clearly a job.
The second man says, “I’m building a church.” He has a career.
The third man says, “I’m building a house of God.” That man has a calling. He is locked into a bigger purpose, and though all three men are essentially performing the same task, they each have a different relationship with those tasks.
So part of making a commitment to your calling is identifying the larger purpose through doing the work, and creating a mindset shift about the parts of the work that are not as enjoyable.
One of the key things that I discovered by developing my calling as a coach, is that my calling wasn’t clear until I started doing the work of development. You can’t reap the rewards of a beautiful marriage without first making a commitment, and then deepening that commitment over time.
You probably already have an idea of what your calling is, but might need help with defining the details.
For example, when I was in search of my calling, I had a lot of different parts and pieces I struggled to sort through. I knew I loved style, self-actualization and personal development, I also loved creativity and helping people. I knew that I thrived when I had time to be alone to think. I knew I loved working one on one with people and that creative, process-oriented things are where I shine. I had all of these clues but struggled to piece them together into something viable, that I wanted to commit to. That was before I understood different stages of achievement, and it was before I knew that I needed help recognizing my sustainable strengths. I learned that it would take support to get past the novelty-seeking phase.
Your calling is lifelong and will continue to grow over decades, and will be filled with goals and achievements more epic than we can tackle in a coaching series. I also know that you have unlimited potential and I believe that with coaching that supports you to discover the scope of your territory, and develop and claim your calling, that you will tap into the deepest expression of your potential and share it and inspire others.
