All the Places to Go ... How Will You Know? by John Ortberg

Author:John Ortberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RELIGION / Christian Life / Spiritual Growth
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2015-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

CLUELESS

HERMIT

But if I’m deeply aware of myself and deeply aware of the world around me, then I’m ready to be a change agent. That’s being wise as a serpent.

SELF-AWARENESS

Who are you? Andy says that this question is the foundation of all vocational exploration and career development. By having a clear sense of your interests and strengths (those skills that you are good at and enjoy using most), aptitude, talents, personality, aspirations, and life experiences, you can begin to envision the type of work—and life—that would be appealing and meaningful to you. Perhaps you love learning, or you come alive when you are leading people or building a team. Maybe you are creative and artistic, and you love beauty. Or you might delight in bringing order to chaos, or in bringing healing to the hurting. Maybe you already have a highly accurate intuition of all this. However, likely you would benefit from working with wise, balanced, and unbiased mentors to clarify and confirm your unique wiring. By knowing yourself, you will develop a new set of valuable lenses to evaluate potential opportunities and to prioritize work that you could pursue and work that you probably shouldn’t.

A crucial aspect of knowing yourself is being able to define where your self-identity resides. Often people’s dreams and career interests are driven by what they think will please their parents, impress their friends, be acceptable to their spouse, or provide personal benefits like money, power, influence, or prestige. Some can name these attachments; others can’t without an external perspective as well as reflective introspection. These attachments are often things that people might perceive as important to them but, upon close examination, really are not.

If I know what most motivates me, I will be able to live a life of sustained engagement. If I know my wounds and weaknesses, I will be able to grow and perhaps even conquer them. If I know the kind of people I best work with, I will be able to be part of a team and not just a solo act. So self-awareness means looking at my passions, my scars, and my partners.

Passion is that area of life that fires you up, what I talked about in the last chapter as your problem. It might be world hunger, or it may be neglected veterans, or maybe it’s education. You see little kids growing up in underresourced school districts, and they’re never going to have a chance to learn, and it just kills you. Or you see people with AIDS who have been not only marginalized but are stigmatized, left alone, and hopeless. Or unwed moms, or just the cause of evangelism and the gospel being proclaimed clearly. There will be something that fires up your passion. Your passion is what makes you hop.

An often overlooked area of self-knowledge is to be aware of your scars, where you’ve been hurt, because that will equip you to help other people. I talked to a man this weekend whose son has severe autism,

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