The Courage Way by Shelly L. Francis

Author:Shelly L. Francis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2018-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

Listening for the Voice of Vocation

As Jonathan discovered, courageous leadership is based in bringing your full self to your work. We need as many people as possible addressing the world’s challenges with compassionate, creative thinking, so we need people committed to discovering their gifts and becoming aware of their shadows. We need leaders who are committed to showing up, sleeves rolled up, to apply themselves for the long haul. If it’s going to be hard—and it often is—then it helps when leaders can tap into a sense of meaning and purpose, heartaches and joy.

The typical way of seeking meaningful work—or vocation— is to figure out how to match your strengths with possible work or professions. Countless books and processes exist for identifying your personality, strengths, and interests to help you discover whether you are aiming for work that will be a good fit. That’s valid and valuable, but it is only part of what is needed.

The word vocation is rooted in the Latin for “voice.” Finding your vocation, then, first asks that you listen to the voice of your life. This is not the voices telling you what you should do to achieve success, or the ones telling you to follow in somebody’s footsteps or to satisfy harsh inner critics. It is not the voice of your ego demanding with grim determination that you make your life something it’s not.

In Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer writes, “Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”1

Have you ever noticed how life itself is informing you and inviting you to show up, whether the work is what you had planned or not? Listening to your life speak—all of your life, through heartaches and mistakes, as well as your joys—can help you find the clarity and courage to bring your true self to your life’s work.

This isn’t about showing up as your work self or best self. It’s about showing up as your whole self. Showing up fully as a leader is not limited to bringing the parts you think are expected, demanded, or acceptable.

We invite you to reconnect who you are (your soul) with what you do (your role). Note that we say reconnect, not connect. Our assumption is that deep inside everyone is a true self that knows itself well. Other voices, authority figures, circumstances, and fears can cause you to hide or forget many aspects of your essential core self, but those aspects do not have to remain hidden or lost. Vocation is not a function of external expectations or aptitude or talent. Vocation is an inner sense of what your life is asking you to do, which is to reconnect your soul and role. You might say that a “calling” is your life speaking, and vocation is your response to that call with your choice of work.

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