When Your Calling Doesn’t Call: What Do You Do Without a Life Passion?

Interesting headline? Read on... 

“If we don’t know what we want to be when we grow up, is there something fundamentally wrong with us?”

Following our joy, chasing our bliss, finding our dharma: these are good things, right? We want to be like the heroic people who gave up the security of some well-paying 9-to-5 in order to move to Greece and start a goat farm that can power a small village. Amazing, right? Let’s all follow our passions!

But what if we don’t have one? What if there’s nothing in particular we’d want to give up our steady paycheck for? What if we care about living a meaningful life but don’t know what, exactly, that would look like?

If you feel this way, you’re not alone. The people that turned their passions into lucrative careers are happy to toot their own horns about it, and loudly. But most of us aren’t doing that. We haven’t found our calling, so we keep waiting for the phone to ring. We join the circus or buy a mobile home to sell our jewelry out of, and for a while, it feels like a life calling. It feels meaningful and important. Then, after a while, exhausted from working too hard and making too little, we realize that we’re bored and frustrated and maybe we’re not in love with what we thought was our calling anymore. Turns out the call was just spam.

Then we start to wonder: If we don’t know what we want to be when we grow up, is there something fundamentally wrong with us?

There isn’t. It’s a myth that we all have some single grand life passion that we must be following or we’re living some pale, flaccid version of life. It’s as mythological as the idea of The One for romantic love.

Read the rest of this fascinating article here.

While you do that, I advocate that you should identify a Purpose that aligns with your strengths. This purpose is not written in stone - meaning, you can change it whenever you like, or even have more than one Purpose at a time. I support my Strengths-based career coaching clients in this journey.

If you want to know how to do this, contact me on +919820155778 or write to ryanbbarretto@hotmail.com for a discussion.

Don't resign - Reassign: Crafting your Job

 https://www.iedp.com/articles/dont-resign-reassign/

As a career coach, I get enquiries from prospects and clients about how to find meaning in work.  I coach them to design their work so that they are working with their strengths instead of their weaknesses.

Wonderful article on how to craft your #job to suit your #strengths - this is something that I coach my clients on. A sure way to increase your #jobsatisfaction in your #career.

Read this article here.

Feedback - Design Your Life Workshop

I had the pleasure of conducting a workshop entitled "Design Your Life" recently for 30 young participants of St. Blaise Church,  Amboli.  They were initially shy and then warmed up to ask interesting questions and make the workshop more engaging.  Interestingly, we had a few parents who also attended too, and that added an interesting dimension to the discussions.

We covered aspects of planning one's career and life (both are intertwined anyway). 

I shared with them tools such as a Personal Values Exercise, a Personal Brand Exercise, How to identify where they may have talents, how to build flow, how to identify areas of success to work on, and a few more reflective exercises, that would help them make better decisions for their career.  I also spoke about the #PRISM Brainmapping Career Match Report that is great in helping people identify possible career paths. Please call me onn +919820155778 or write to me on ryanbbarretto@hotmail.com to know more about this neuroscience-based tool..

My sincere thanks to Fr. Leon and the volunteers who provided all the necessary support.  Here are some images that depict what the participants are going to work on, and a wordcloud that shows what they felt after attending the session (the range of feelings was expected, as it demonstrates to me that they started to think about designing their careers).

Interview Prep - The Jobseeker's Search for Green Flags

If you are going to look for green flags when applying for roles, you need to do some critical prework before you research the company - on YOURSELF.

The prework is that you have to get:

1. A clear understanding of your strengths & weaknesses.
2. Clarity on what kind of work is aligned with your strengths.
3. Clarity on what kind of work environment will suit your strengths

Info on point one you can get by introspecting on feedback given to you by colleagues, peers, bosses, customers, vendors (for freshers - classmates, teachers), or through a validated psychometric assessment like the PRISM Professional report (Ask me about it, I'm a Licensed Practitioner) because:

• It's validated at 0.9 on the Crombach scale
• It is based on neuroscience and identifies our preferences without labeling us
• It covers points two & three mentioned above in vivid detail.

Thereafter, your research from GlassDoor, social networks, customer forums, industry trends. past employees if you can contact them, current employees too if possible.

Once you have all this information, create a list of top five questions that cover your key non-negotiable points.  

Practice asking these questions, instead of reading them out, since you will come across as more prepared and professional.

To know yourself through the PRISM professional and to download a sample PRISM Professional Report, please visit www.prismbrainmapping.com