True Vocation

Okay, as you can see the last initiative was short lived. Of course, I'm sure you all expected that. I'm blogging now on official business. I'm putting together a career mapping session for an upcoming Leadership conference I'm co-facilitating, and I want to base it on Parker Palmer's work on discovering your true vocation... This is, of course, ironic, because I have yet to discover my true vocation. There are pieces of it in my current work, but I still have some sorting out to do. In Palmer's article (http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/working-for-life/now-i-become-myself), he talks about how as children we are our true selves but that gets lost along the way, and the best thing we can do as adults is rediscover who we really are and that will inherently hold what our true vocation is supposed to be. As I was working on this, I remembered a story that I think speaks to this process...

When I told my dad that I was leaving my two years tenure as a Technical Writer to go back to school for a Master's in International and Intercultural Communication, he asked (with some concern in his voice) what sort of job I wanted to get with this sort of degree. I responded hastily that I wanted to become a writer for National Geographic. "Really?" he said. "No," I replied, "I don't know what I want to do."

This story has always cracked me up, but what is so interesting to me in this context is how quickly I made up a job that sounded on track with my writing background and new degree aspirations. I hadn't meant to lie outright to my Dad, but I quickly chose a vocation that seemed respectable so he wouldn't be so concerned about what his forcefully independent yet naive daughter was headed into. It was a perfect example of my choosing a vocation on the spot because it seemed like a reasonable next step. Luckily, I caught myself making up a future on the spot and fessed up.

Anyway, I thought I'd ask all of you who see this new post what your experience has been in figuring out your "true vocation."