I used to teach a lot of classes around organizational culture, personal development, positivity, and the such.
Job/Career/Calling was a common tool used to get people to think about why they did what they did from a work point of view.
The simple version is this:
It's a Job when your body comes.
It's a Career when your mind shows up.
It's a Calling when your heart is there too.
It's pretty straightforward and it always seemed to resonate with people.
Over time I realized that a Calling is not necessarily the specific work you do but how you do it.
In other words you may have a calling to serve others, have a dead end job in a restaurant that you despise, yet manifest your calling to service in the daily performance of your duties.
I think many people enter a profession with a sense of calling, even if they don't articulate it that way at the time, but it gets lost over time. The Calling becomes A Job. The daily effort becomes something to run from rather than to each day. Healthcare, education, and law enforcement come to mind.
I dropped out of high school after my junior year. No need to go any longer, I pretty well knew everything thank you.
So the summer of 1972 I'm driving down a street in St Louis and suddenly to the right there they were: Army-Navy-Air Force recruiting stations. I pulled over and took the vacant space in front of the Navy office, fully intending to visit all three.
The Chief tested me and I remember him being amazed at the difference between my actual test scores and my physical appearance. Remember, hippie stuff was still in and I was oh so cool. OMG.
I'm so glad there are not many pictures around from those days.
Much to his amazement, he said well I guess you can choose any Navy school you want.
(Around Dec. 1972, San Diego Naval Training Center)
He gave me this big book, it seemed like a Sears catalog to me, and I leafed through it. It had everything from Boiler Tech to Machinists Mate to this thing called Hospital Corpsman. I said 'what's a Corpse Man?" He said 'Coreman.' It's what the Navy calls it's medics. I said ok I'll do that.
I'm a 17 year old moron at the time. I wasn't stupid and in fact I was such a voracious reader on a wide variety of topics that I knew a lot more stuff than anybody really understood. But why after going through the catalog of every single job you could do in the U.S. Navy did I choose Corpsman?
Some kind of Calling thing? Or just the usual thing that happens when we start to gravitate toward whatever interests us?
To this day I get my greatest satisfaction from helping other people. First it was on the patient care side, as a Corpsman (apparently the Navy is going gender neutral so that title will become Corpsperson?) and then as a P.A. Later it became important to me on the business side as I helped young managers.
Maybe my calling was service, I don't know. Frankly it sounds a little too self congratulatory for my taste. No machine is capable of understanding itself, including humans, so I'm not sure I can make the call on my own calling.
But it is easy to see how years of the grind can turn a Calling into a Job. It's also easy to see how particular events at particular times of your life could even turn you away from your field.
I feel some of that for healthcare now. I don't have any fire to do that work even though I am absolutely certain of my capabilities. I believe I could walk into any hospital right now and do things to start improving it.
As a result I seek the Calling through other paths. Maybe that's a good thing. As I said earlier it's not so much the job as it is how you express what's important to you.
Maybe it will change. Maybe some kind of healthcare urge will hit me, I'm just now sure.
But what about you? What are you doing today? Why are you doing it? If you've been at it a long time as a nurse, or a teacher, or a cop, is it just a job? If so why?
Have you let circumstances or other people steal your calling and your happiness from you?
Why don't you do something about it?
Job/Career/Calling was a common tool used to get people to think about why they did what they did from a work point of view.
The simple version is this:
It's a Job when your body comes.
It's a Career when your mind shows up.
It's a Calling when your heart is there too.
It's pretty straightforward and it always seemed to resonate with people.
Over time I realized that a Calling is not necessarily the specific work you do but how you do it.
In other words you may have a calling to serve others, have a dead end job in a restaurant that you despise, yet manifest your calling to service in the daily performance of your duties.
I think many people enter a profession with a sense of calling, even if they don't articulate it that way at the time, but it gets lost over time. The Calling becomes A Job. The daily effort becomes something to run from rather than to each day. Healthcare, education, and law enforcement come to mind.
I dropped out of high school after my junior year. No need to go any longer, I pretty well knew everything thank you.
So the summer of 1972 I'm driving down a street in St Louis and suddenly to the right there they were: Army-Navy-Air Force recruiting stations. I pulled over and took the vacant space in front of the Navy office, fully intending to visit all three.
The Chief tested me and I remember him being amazed at the difference between my actual test scores and my physical appearance. Remember, hippie stuff was still in and I was oh so cool. OMG.
I'm so glad there are not many pictures around from those days.
Much to his amazement, he said well I guess you can choose any Navy school you want.
He gave me this big book, it seemed like a Sears catalog to me, and I leafed through it. It had everything from Boiler Tech to Machinists Mate to this thing called Hospital Corpsman. I said 'what's a Corpse Man?" He said 'Coreman.' It's what the Navy calls it's medics. I said ok I'll do that.
I'm a 17 year old moron at the time. I wasn't stupid and in fact I was such a voracious reader on a wide variety of topics that I knew a lot more stuff than anybody really understood. But why after going through the catalog of every single job you could do in the U.S. Navy did I choose Corpsman?
Some kind of Calling thing? Or just the usual thing that happens when we start to gravitate toward whatever interests us?
To this day I get my greatest satisfaction from helping other people. First it was on the patient care side, as a Corpsman (apparently the Navy is going gender neutral so that title will become Corpsperson?) and then as a P.A. Later it became important to me on the business side as I helped young managers.
Maybe my calling was service, I don't know. Frankly it sounds a little too self congratulatory for my taste. No machine is capable of understanding itself, including humans, so I'm not sure I can make the call on my own calling.
But it is easy to see how years of the grind can turn a Calling into a Job. It's also easy to see how particular events at particular times of your life could even turn you away from your field.
I feel some of that for healthcare now. I don't have any fire to do that work even though I am absolutely certain of my capabilities. I believe I could walk into any hospital right now and do things to start improving it.
As a result I seek the Calling through other paths. Maybe that's a good thing. As I said earlier it's not so much the job as it is how you express what's important to you.
Maybe it will change. Maybe some kind of healthcare urge will hit me, I'm just now sure.
But what about you? What are you doing today? Why are you doing it? If you've been at it a long time as a nurse, or a teacher, or a cop, is it just a job? If so why?
Have you let circumstances or other people steal your calling and your happiness from you?
Why don't you do something about it?
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