Answering Your Call

What is important to you? What gives you the greatest satisfaction professionally and personally? In today's uncertain world, faced with challenges from terrorism to recession to figuring out who'll pick up the kids from school, people are asking these questions more often as they search for purpose and meaning in their lives. Executive coach John P. Schuster examines these common themes in a new book entitled Answering Your Call—A Guide for Living Your Deepest Purpose (Berrett-Koehler, 2003).

What exactly is a "call?" Schuster writes, "Having a call may mean having a lifelong, somewhat specific purpose that draws you into roles in a clear progression. Colin Powell goes from soldier to colonel to general to Secretary of State. But such a clean script, an obviously progressive set of steps, is not for all of us by any means. More of us go from starting a career in sales, for example, to becoming a devoted parent when raising our kids takes precedence over everything. Our various roles combine and have equal weight—parenting for 25 years is as important, or more important, than the business career we build and like or even love for the most part."

All of the roles we take on throughout our lives make up the various "callings" that we feel compelled to follow. The trick, says Schuster, is "to balance and combine them, respond to them in a creative fashion, renew them and rediscover them with growing sets of roles and skill." All of these callings combine to help give life its purpose. However, before you can answer your call or calls, you first must learn how to recognize them, says Schuster.

Schuster recommends asking yourself some questions to help you sort through all of the daily clutter long enough to see things more clearly and to find more meaning in everyday life. Ask yourself:

Whatever your call or calls—to leadership, family, the marketplace, community, public service, the environment, etc.—the key is to take time out to truly listen to your own inner voice and to follow it. As Schuster writes, "The first step, then, for all who have a desire to live a life of sustained purpose, is to ignore the social din whenever possible, whether it is about money or power or being cool. We can buy nice things and pursue careers and do the normal, and then we have to pursue the abnormal, go contrary to fashion, swim upstream. We need our own set of drums with which to beat our own rhythms."

According to Schuster, various supporters and tormentors will come and go in your life who will either encourage or discourage you from reaching your goals. The tormentors, or saboteurs, as Schuster calls them, are the people who don't believe in you, who spread negativity and destroy your self-confidence. Here are his recommendations on how to deal with these nay-sayers:

The following AMA seminars cover related topics of interest: