5 Signs of Confusing Your Calling & Career | PASSAGES :018
Thoughts on Calling (part 3), guruwari, and from being to doing
Welcome back to STILL. So glad you’re here. I’m continuing my series on Calling this week. Check out the previous two posts:
Thoughts on Calling, part 1: Your Inner Design
Thoughts on Calling, part 2: Calling Is a Conversation
Also, if you are enjoying my writing and reflections, please let me know by liking, commenting, sharing, and subscribing. Thanks!
“Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.” -1 Peter 4:10
“Nothing is ever lost in following one’s own dharma.” -Bhagavad Gita 3:35
The Walpiri, one of the largest Aboriginal tribes in Australia, have a word for “purpose” that conveys a foundational aspect of what calling is. Guruwari, or “totem design,” is the innate potential of a thing. Guruwari is what something is purposed for. It is a word that captures what was going on in the Elder and the Stone story I recently shared, in which the elder detected, released, and harnessed the essential purpose of a quartz stone by fracturing it into the specific tool it was meant to be.
Guruwari is not just used to describe stone tools. Each particular thing in nature has its own guruwari. Its own unique power, planted like a seed by the creators. Its own purpose. Every ant. Every lily. Every landscape. Every sparrow. Every person.
While our occupation-obsessed society says, “You are what you do,” guruwari declares, “You do what you are.”
For the longest time, I defined who I am by what I do—instead of the other way around that guruwari reminds us about. My sense of self-worth was wrapped up in my work. This definitely had a lot to do with stories I told myself about being loved for what I achieve, about being accepted in society for accomplishing things.
But I think something else was going on too. Perhaps something more… virtuous? I poured myself into my work because I felt called to it. I viewed my job as my vocation—the thing I’m purposed to do in the world. So I gave and gave and gave myself. And then, eventually, I lost myself.
Looking back, I don’t doubt that it was my calling. I was a good pastor and community developer. However, I can see that I confused my calling with my career, my purpose with my profession. My calling, I learned, was something deeper and wider than the particular daily work roles I had—flowing from who I am. The jobs were just delivery systems for my essence and gifts.
It took a lot of inner work, but I’m in a different place now. More in line with the guruwari view of things. And yet, lately I’ve been asking myself if I’ve been confusing my calling with my work again.
You see, for the past two years since I got laid off, I have been in a season of intense creativity overflowing with purpose. I started my Milwaukee-based and beyond meditation/wellbeing and coaching practices. I finished a book and, miraculously, got not only an agent but also a publisher—The Way Home is available now here. I became a volunteer hospice companion. I co-wrote a comedy TV pilot that hopefully you get to watch someday. I launched this newsletter. I was even a taproom manager for one of my brother’s brewery locations for six months.
Despite all of these meaningful, impactful endeavors, the math isn’t adding up financially right yet. And so it is causing me to ask all sorts of questions about which of these things I’m called to.
Do I need to let go of any of them?
Place some on pause?
Add some additional paying work?
Wait a bit longer and keep focusing on growing the business aspects of my work?
Make some creative compromises?
I’m concluding—perhaps in this exact moment as I write this—that I have not confused my purpose and my professional life this time around. I’ve had clarity about each different thing I’ve been up to in the past two years. I also have not been resistant to taking on a job just to make some extra money, e.g. the brewery gig, which of course ended up feeling super purposeful—a confirmation perhaps of that fact that when I am aligned with my true self, I will carry a sense of purpose to everything I do.
Nevertheless, as I’ve reflected on my history and examined where I’m at right now, I’ve identified these five potential ways of confusing calling and career, along with the how it can diminish your purpose. For each one, I’ve also identified the benefit of understanding that your career does not contain your calling.
Hopefully these reflections help you discern your calling and stay true to your guruwari!
You pour yourself into your work without limits. You burnout. The contributions you are called to become dulled because you are doing work out of a place of anxiety and exhaustion. You function with half your power. If the impact of this isn’t felt at work, it will show up in other areas of your life.
Instead, when you understand your calling to be bigger than your career, you are capable of expressing your full potential and power.
You neglect opportunities to express your calling beyond your work. Not only do you become one-dimensional, but even worse, the world misses out on what you have to offer.
Instead, when you understand your calling to be bigger than your career, you are multidimensional, dynamic, and more creative.
You stubbornly refuse to get a job that can serve as a funding mechanism for your calling. When you expect your purpose to become your profession—as so many supposed coaches and influencers these days insist must be the case—you can undermine your capacity to carry out the creative work to which you are called.
Instead, when you understand your calling to be bigger than your career, you have greater endurance to do what is yours to do.
You stay in a job way too long. Once upon a time, you may have been called to a particular career or job. But what about now? Are you still listening? Confusing your calling with your career can lead to staying in a role long past its expiration date, subsequently keeping you from stepping into new delivery systems for your purpose.
Instead, when you understand your calling to be bigger than your career, you remain relevant to the needs of your community and the world and are able to make fresh, timely contributions.
You mistreat people and justify it because of the goal you are working towards. Without staying connected to your source, your sense of calling can become distorted, misguided. When your relationships with colleagues or collaborators become purely transactional or when you only let your family and friends get the leftovers of your energy, it’s a sign that you’ve lost connection with your calling.
Instead, when you understand your calling to be bigger than your career, you radiate goodness and life into the world around you.
So here’s the thing: whatever your job is, regardless of how passionate you are about it, and no matter how strongly you feel called to it—it is NOT your calling; it is merely a vehicle by which your calling is expressed. And it is never the only vehicle. Your calling is also carried out in moments, relationships, hobbies, communities, volunteering, and more. Of course it is. That’s the only way it could be. Because it is your guruwari—who you are flowing forth into what you do.
Thoughts? Comments?
Thanks for sharing. I have been struggling with this of late – trying to convince myself that my career is my calling, which is really not the case.