Catalyst 4 Change Article - Vocation: Your Life's Autopilot

There is a fine difference between the meanings given to the words career and vocation. There is however, a significant difference between their impact upon the quality of life and work for the individuals actualizing them. Think of a career as a field of experience, expertise or knowledge wherein you do something to earn a living. Now feel the difference. A vocation is, a field of passionate talent or interest wherein you fulfill a greater purpose for living.

Face it. If you are thinking career instead of vocation, you are hanging on to shifting Industrial Age paradigms. Every aspect of daily 20^th Century life and work is undergoing profound change. Within a few short years from now, many career choices will have obsolesced. Your best hope for emotional and spiritual stability may well be found in a vocation. After all, with but one letter away from a vacation, how wrong can we be?

Economic landscapes, once vibrant, have turned barren. Forced to reassess their lives, many abandoned workers questioning their past corporate devotion, do so while coming to terms with their troubled souls, shattered relationships and threatened futures. Not unrelated to this point, many suddenly single parents find themselves in desperate need of self-inspiration. Sensing that the rest of the world is as much out of joint as is their individual lives, they yearn to heal both in meaningful ways. Setting out into unfamiliar frontiers, many of these disillusioned souls now look to various forms of entrepreneurship. What they discover along the way becomes their personal catalysts for change. Reflected through Jay Earley's Life Purpose Coaching website, an essence of these personal vocation-creating catalysts for change is captured.

Steps toward a Meaningful Career - and Life
~ Jay Earley, PhD

"I define life purpose as a contribution to the world that uses your whole self fully and gives your life passion, fulfillment, and meaning through dedication to something larger than yourself. I believe that everyone has a life purpose, to be discovered or created. It involves:

a way of being in the world that has a positive influence on family, friends, and perhaps all those you touch, and
a career (or a volunteer project) through which you benefit other people, society, or the natural world.

Follow in Jay's Steps

"Anticipating a new reality is the beginning of the process of creating it", proclaimed Futurist Faith Popcorn in her Popcorn Report. It is with anticipation for the new realities that we invite you to consider creating for yourself, a vocation that complements the current socioquake.

Facilitation, is an excellent example of a complementary vocaton, replacing such obsolescing careers as teaching and conventional consulting. Implementing and actualizing models much as suggested by my Integrative Development, can only be achieved through facilitation.

The facilitation vocational field will rapidly expand as more and more IONs seek wholistic solutions. Should you sense that your higher purpose in life is to help people achieve what, at first blush appears to be impossible, set your guidance systems towards Nancy White's web of resources or consider following the evolved discussions underway at her Online Facilitation listserv.

There are good reasons that it is said, "Do what you love and the money will follow." Pursuing a vocation is solidly based on your deepest interests, talents and values. To think that your knowledge would not easily increase, nor your expertise established, is inconceivable. Self-confidence and determination are but a few of this pursuit's benefits.

The degree of self-awareness involved with pursuing a vocation makes for enlightening journeys of personal growth and professional development. This self-realization process tends to put your vocation's pursuit into an automatic pilot mode.

"Yes! You too can save yourself from the stressful anguish of years of expensive, irrelevant education. Increase your sense of self and purpose. Improve your relationships to boot!"

Dwayne Cox On Vocation

Often as human beings we either follow a path seeking approval from an elusive they, or else we choose to follow our heart and our passion.

Through my twenties, I was sort of choosing my own path, but always thinking in the back of my mind what people would think of who I am and what I am up to. I began to value life more and more, knowing there is never a guarantee of tomorrow. More and more I began to ask myself such questions as, "What will my current path get me?" "Am I aligned with my gifts?" I believe how I am choosing to invest my time and talent now, coaching winners, is about as close to my true nature as I'll ever get. I believe we know we have reached alignment when it just feels right, like what we are doing is what we are supposed to be doing. Like we are fully expressed now.

Dwayne Cox Interview

These claims are based upon the natural, internal process of targeting a vocation that is right for you. It might not be right for what others expect of you, but then just whose life is it anyway? The process of self-examination establishes a sense of higher purpose to your life's existence since it defines:

Who you are - or wish to be;

Where your talents and interests lay;

What gives you the greatest sense of fulfillment; and

What you are most passionate about.

Jonathan Reams On Vocation

Reading this, I think of the term dharma - that which is your life to live out in service of God, spirit, higher self, world soul or whatever you may call it. Dharma lives for you. It is not something you choose or create at the mundane conscious level of everyday awareness. In the everyday sense of personality, identity, etc., you surrender to vocation, or dharma. That distinguishes it a great deal from the concept of career.

Parker Palmer's wonderful little book, Let Your Life Speak: Listening To The Voice Of Vocation is very relevant to what is being said here.

Jonathan Reams Interview

Once all of that has been established, it then becomes a matter of considering how you can apply this self-awareness towards the fulfillment of what you may now sense is your greater purpose for living. At this point the automatic pilot usually kicks in. If prior to this, you were not a member of the cultural creatives movement as previously revealed in An Evolution in Human Convergence - more than likely you soon will be.

Flemming Funch On Vocation

The appearance that it is difficult to go for, and follow vocational dreams, is an illusion; an elaborate lie constructed from all the logical shoulds in our minds. Pursuing vocations usually collides with what we are supposed to do according to our parents, teachers, governments, and moral guardians.

The fit will fit, and the flow will flow when, and only when, you start doing what you are made for. Once you stop trying to fit round pegs into square holes, you rediscover the surprisingly difficult skill of doing what comes naturally.

Flemming Funch Interview

The Cultural Creatives reports that 26 percent of the adult U.S. population belongs to this movement without even being aware of one another's existence. Evolving marketspaces targeting this fast growing demographic is where your vocation will find vigilant consumers. More so if you appeal to their needs for personal growth and professional development. This catalyst for change, along with other interrelated trends tracked by Faith Popcorn's Brain Reserve appeared in September's Human Capital: Integrity By Example.

A Societal Transformationalist is hardly a career title but a vocational aspiration. I have grown up within a stagnated community. I know all too well the hidden wealth of social and intellectual capital available to bring about a speedy regeneration. I was frustrated seeing 20^th century tunnel vision and fear of change hold my community back from renewed greatness. Now, as an aging Baby Boomer, I dread the impending collapse of conventional economic systems. Without meaningful work, my children will be forced to look to more progressive communities in which to raise my grandchildren, putting both out of arms-reach of the only asset remaining for me to give them - my love.

Knowing that I was far from alone in these concerns, I reflected deeply upon my own contributions to the present state of my personal life, and that of the world now threatening our future well-being. Societal transformation was the destination to where my automatic pilot brought me. Without becoming a ripple on the sea of change, I would have little chance of making waves large enough to counter the sinking Industrial Age's destructive force. Without myself becoming a catalyst for change, I dreaded to think of the fragmentations imposed upon communities and families. My life's higher purpose and vocation were revealed to be in Healing Fragmented Communities as opposed to my career as a technical illustrator. Both have provided me challenges and acclaim. Societal Transformation however, enriches my life with pride in knowing that my talents, interests and passions are dedicated toward leaving my family and community a lasting legacy.

Having pursued this unusual vocation is what now enables me to present you with an enlightening interview and reaction piece from a couple of panel members of the C4C Initiative. Now available at through the Quick Topic servers, you can participate in spin-off discussions that these articles and interviews might be generating. At Quick Topic, each new paragraph is capable of yielding comments, feedback and ideas from anyone wishing to contribute. You do not even have to register, or leave your real name.

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