Summary

Do you feel like you have a calling in life? Is there something when you wake up each day that you feel you are meant to do? If you don't feel like you do, this episode will help you find what you're missing. We'll learn from Prof. Jeff Thompson, a professor of management and expert in calling.

About Our Guest

Jeff Thompson is a professor at the BYU Marriott School of business and the George Romney Institute of Public Service and Ethics. Jeff Thompson is someone who thrives in the study of finding your calling, and he loves to ask questions like what makes a job a calling? And how do we find our calling?

Useful Links

Dr. Thompson's book The Zookeeper's Secret: Finding Your Calling is a great read.

Jeff Thompson also has a Google Scholar full of resources that will create a more meaningful work experience.

Dr. Hull company Neuroworx came from tragedy and is inspiring people every day.

Pleasant Pictures Music

Join the Pleasant Pictures Music Club to get unlimited access to high-quality, royalty-free music for all of your projects. Use the discount code HOWTOHELP15 for 15% off your first year.

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Hey Jeff.

Hey Aaron,

can you hear me okay?

Yeah, I can hear you just fine.

I just have a tendency to be kind of monotone.

I didn't use to be that way.

Like when I was, when I was in high school, I love

getting up in front of people.

I had this voice that we carry really easily and then somewhere along the line,

I just started becoming quite and boring.

You became a professor that's

That's probably what it was something in the air or water here.

Hi, I'm Aaron Miller.

And this is How to Help a podcast about having a life and career

of meaning, virtue, and impact.

This is season one episode one, Finding your Calling, How to Help

is sponsored by Merit Leadership.

Home of The Business Ethics Field Guide.

Do you feel like you have a calling in life?

Is there something that when you wake up each day, you feel like you

were meant to do, if you don't feel like you've found your calling?

Well, you're not alone.

It's such a common desire and one that so many find unfulfilled that

finding a calling is actually become a focus with scholarly research.

My guest today is Jeff Thompson.

He's a professor and a colleague of mine at the BYU Marriott school of

Business and the George Romney Institute of Public Service and Ethics Jeff's

principal field of study is calling he's fascinated by questions like.

What makes the job a calling?

How do we find our calling?

Can everyone find their calling in life?

I invited Jeff to join me for a conversation to answer

these and other questions.

And I guarantee that you'll find his insights to be fascinating, and actually

even surprising to begin, I asked Jeff to tell me a favorite story about

someone he knows who found their calling.

This is what he shared.

So the first that comes to mind is my friend Dale Hull.

He is an Obstetrician by training, was top of his game in the field.

Everyone wanted their babies delivered by Dr.

Hull.

One day though, after a day of work, he was out in his backyard,

jumping on the trampoline to unwind, pulled the back flip didn't rotate

far enough, landed on his head.

Heard a snap and fell.

Completely immobilized.

So as a doctor, I mean, he knew exactly what he was in for at that point.

And he shares that he immediately thought, okay, here's the doctor.

I need to see here's the, the therapy I need to pursue.

I'll never deliver another baby.

You know, I'll never be the husband and father that I've been, he

really felt like he had a calling in life and it was ripped from him.

His, story is pretty remarkable.

After that point, he pursued some very progressive, unorthodox therapies that

his insurance wouldn't cover, hired a full-time therapist and gradually

made some remarkable progress.

And over a very long period of time, got to the point where he can walk with

a cane can function pretty normally.

Still doesn't have the manual dexterity to practice medicine,

but, kind of the crowning moment was him being invited to pass the

Olympic torch to Karl Malone in 2002.

The Salt Lake Olympics.

Now, you know, when people hear about it, About Dale's story.

Of course, he starts getting a lot of, interest and he, he received inquiries

from people who wanted to know if there was hope for their loved one.

Know how, how did you pull this off?

How you know, is there hope for my child, for my spouse?

All of that kind of led Dr.

Hull realizing that he could still provide a great service to people by

developing his own clinic that has culminated in an organization called Neuro

Works has a brand new state-of-the-art really amazing clinic in Sandy, Utah.

They see patients from all over the Western United States.

When you talk to Dr.

Hull now, He expresses a sense of gratitude for everything that happened,

even though it was the most horrible thing you might imagine, he sees it

as the experience that gave him a sense of what his calling really is.

He's combined his medical expertise with a new found expertise for administration

and leadership, which has a, which has created a sense of passion for him.

That probably supersedes where he was as an obstetrician.

I've had the chance to get to know Dr.

Hull.

And his story truly is heroic, but what does it teach us about a calling?

I asked Jeff to explain why he chose to share this experience.

When you're looking for a calling, I mean, all of the

ingredients are in that story.

It begins with having a talent or a unique gift that you're aware of and want to use.

It begins with recognizing that there's a need for your talent, just as Dr.

Hull found a need for his expertise that he had gained through going

through therapy himself, and then it's gained by your life

experiences and how they shape you.

Did you catch all three ingredients to finding a calling?

This is what they were first having a talent or a unique

gift that you want to use.

Second, recognizing a need for your talent and third letting life experience

guide you to using your talent.

Now Jeff is going to explain all of these for us in greater detail, but

I actually want to do on the last one for a moment, letting life lead you

to a calling sounds pretty daunting.

If it has to be through a tragic experience like Dr.

Hull's.

Do all callings have to come from tragedy?

Yeah, not necessarily.

I mean, ironically speaking, it can help to experience adversity because it sort of

, you know, equips you with understanding that other people don't normally

have, but it's much broader than that.

Callings really come, from your unique life experiences.

As much as from your unique talents.

None of us go through the same experiences, the same trials and , you

know, the same roller coaster of life.

And so a lot of time it's that uniqueness of the path that's

brought us to where we are that that equips us to a particular calling.

So it isn't tragedy necessarily that leads us

to our calling, but simply the life experience that's unique to us.

What do you describe some far more common than the kind of journey that Dr.

Hull experienced?

I pointed this out.

And so Jeff had another story to share.

Well, let me tell you a less, heroic sounding story.

I still think it's heroic, but it it's something that maybe.

More of us can relate to.

And this is a student of mine who had gotten his degree in psychology

at the University of Utah and was just convinced that this was

going to lead to a great career.

But as he approached graduation, he realized he just,

he could not find a job with a psychology degree.

And so he took whatever job he could.

His girlfriend worked for the city and she got him an

interview to be a groundskeeper.

And as he describes the story, she kind of felt like, you know, this has beneath

me, you know, I almost have a psychology degree, but he sort of concluded.

I'm going to make the best of this.

I'm going to take pride in what I do.

And he says, you know, I don't think the parks have ever looked better

than when I was whacking the weeds.

Well, he, then he graduated.

Couldn't find a job.

And someone from the city came to him and said, Hey, we've been watching you.

You've got a great work ethic.

We've got a job for someone to be a meter reader.

You know, it's tons of walking.

Would you like this position?

He had no other alternatives.

So he thought, okay, I'll be the best meter reader I can be.

And he did that for, I think, six months or a year.

And then eventually, because now he was part of the, public utility in the city.

He was offered another position that was in an administrative

role in the organization.

That was very low level, but he, once again, decided, okay,

I'll throw myself into this.

That led to other opportunities.

And as, as he talked to me about this, he said, and never in a million years,

would I have thought that my dream was to be the director of a public utility.

Now that's, that's what I'm working for.

He said, I've, I've found some, a place that uses my skill.

My psychology training still applies.

I'm learning new techniques that I find them very good at.

And I'm really invested now in building my community and making it a better place.

So he found his calling and maybe the unlikeliest of ways.

If you're like me, you are released, saved to know that

the satisfaction of a calling doesn't require something glamorous or heroic.

I mean, after all, we can't all be founders of an incredible nonprofits

fixing people's spinal injuries.

And also along the way, carrying the Olympic torch.

The second story tells us that finding a calling is actually

much more common than we realize, listen to how Jeff describes it.

And this story to me is much more representative

of what I see in most people.

When they find a sense of calling it may not be glamorous.

It may not be something that ends up splashed in the newspaper, but it's.

Allowing life's experiences to lead you to the place where you can use

your gifts to best serve others.

And for most people, it comes as a surprise

surprise.

We generally think of surprises as good things waiting in anticipation

are part of the fun, but finding a thing that you love to do, that's not

something you want to wait around for.

Describing it calling as a surprise makes it sound like finding your calling

just comes down to luck to serendipity.

If that's part of finding your calling, is it even possible to be

deliberate in the way you find it?

Yeah.

Great question.

I'll go back to the story of my student there.

Cause, there was something I mentioned a few times that's really key and that

is with each opportunity he decided.

To do his very best to make it something he could take pride in

and frankly, something that he could use to serve other people.

And, and that is really the key ingredient to be on a path to a calling.

It's not waiting around for your dream job to land in your lap.

I don't even believe there is such a thing as a dream job, rather it is saying,

okay, here's where life has put me.

How can I use my very best gifts and talents to make

things better for other people?

And when you adopt that sort of approach to work, two things happen

first, you start to realize what you are good at and what you love.

You get much, you get in tune with it much faster if you're investing yourself.

And secondly, other people notice that and they can open opportunities

to guide you where you fit.

That's something that we so often forget when we end up in

a job that feels like a bad job.

Our tendency is to withdraw and kind of do the minimum.

I fell into that trap as a young employee.

That's precisely what to do if you, if you don't want to fight your calling.

So it is, striving for excellence and seeking to serve in the best way you

can, wherever life has placed, you.

What Jeff just shared is a much deeper meaning to

the third ingredient in his list.

The idea that we need to let life's experiences guide us.

It's not something passive, instead is taking each moment or opportunity and

giving it our best and not just our best effort, but the best of our talents and

abilities we have to show up in a way that reflects what we're especially good at.

But what if we don't know what that is?

So many of us feel like we don't have any special talents or abilities that

there's nothing that makes us stand out.

Jeff is adamant that that's not true.

He's convinced by his research that everyone has some special skill.

The trick is just knowing how to find it.

And he knows the first place to look.

Yeah, I have conversation so often.

You start with childhood.

My first question will always be, what did you play when you were a child?

When, when no one was telling you what to do.

I mean, in childhood, it's like the most organic expression of our natural

self and most of our gifts manifest themselves in some way in childhood.

So, I think the challenge with finding your gift is that we overlook the ones

that come natural to us because it feels so naturally we don't even get

it, give it credit for being a talent.

It just seems like something we want to do.

And I do think childhood is like the easiest place to discern that.

I hope this insight helps you see what your unique talents are.

If you're not sure what they are, then they're probably hiding

in plain sight, even something as simple as your childhood.

Jeff went under recommend also the idea of talking to others who know you

well, ask them what you're good at.

He promises that a conversation like that will often surprise you.

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So, if you know what you're good at and you find where you put it to use,

then what can you expect from it?

After all, having a calling reflects the deep desire to find

personal satisfaction in our work.

So success and finding it must be a source of constant bliss.

Right?

Well, actually there's something much deeper going on.

So I think it's really important in answering that question

to get to a definition of calling because I, I don't believe that it

means what most people think it means.

If you listen to, sort of popular media, today.

And there's a lot of dialogue about finding your calling in life.

People talk about it like a dream job, a destination.

You know, I finally get to where I meant to be and now we'll be

happy for the rest of my life.

Yeah.

That's really a distortion of what a calling means.

And the concept goes way, way back we're to the Protestant reformation.

Martin Luther described a calling as an obligation, we have to use

our gifts, our talents, to help and bless other people around us.

And idea of calling's been, been lost, been distorted to something that's

very self-serving self-gratifying.

And in my research on this topic, what we found is the people with the deepest

levels of satisfaction, like, you know, sort of several standard deviations out on

the satisfaction scale, or working in jobs that feel like a duty and an offering.

To other people and not something that is as self is necessarily

self-gratifying, it's gratifying, but that's not the point of it.

The, the gratification comes as a by-product of dedicating themselves

to something worthwhile and important

. Aaron Narration: A calling is a duty

I love this insight.

It's not about personal gratification.

It's about contributing to a higher purpose.

One of my favorite things about Jeff research is where he looked

for insights into calling.

Instead of looking to careers with high prestige or rich financial rewards,

he and his co-author Stuart Bunderson looked to zookeepers to better understand

what it means to have a calling.

It turns out that they are a group, especially motivated by their work as a

calling the experiences of zookeepers.

In fact, helped answer a pressing question that I had for Jeff.

What if you're calling doesn't pay the bills.

Yeah, there are cases where fulfilling, what you

believe is your calling is not going to be financially rewarding.

The zookeepers are kind of an extreme case of that.

And despite the fact that it's a hard job, it's smelly, it's exhausting.

It can be dangerous.

You don't make any money, you don't get any recognition.

You know, all those things that we attribute to job satisfaction,

despite all that their satisfaction with their work is off the charts.

They have this deep sense of fulfillment.

And for them, that is worth the financial sacrifice they make.

Otherwise they wouldn't stay.

Now.

I'm not trying to say that, you know, once you found your calling, you just

need to accept the vow of poverty.

Because for most of us, our calling manifests itself in many different ways.

I don't believe a calling is a destination.

I don't believe there's a dream job.

So if you're doing something that feels like you're calling, but it's not paying

the bills that the goal should be to find another place that's or another

application of those skills that may be, may allow you to provide for your

family in the way that you want to.

Most of us are not locked in zookeepers in a way are lucky

because they have a very crisp, clear idea of what their calling is.

But in a way they're unlucky because being able to manifest that

gift for them is fairly narrow.

For the students that I teach their skills are generally based

on interpersonal effectiveness, being able to organize collective

action, being good communicators.

And those sorts of skills are really, really portable.

And so I think most people can find their calling in many different places.

This last comment by Jeff made me feel like a calling really

is something that everyone can find.

But for whatever reason, finding a calling still seems like such a rare thing.

I asked Jeff if a calling is really just something that comes to a

lucky few and not to everyone.

A strong no, well that's really.

Yeah.

I think, I think it's one of the great distortions, that comes with

this modern definition of calling and finding a dream job because that kind

of sets you up for saying, you know, you gotta be lucky if I don't land

the right job out of college, how am I ever going to get to my dream job?

Eventually, and so when we view calling in that way, it does kind of make it like a

fairy tale, you know, are you, are you the lucky one that found your Prince charming

and you know, and had, had your happily ever after because human beings are

infinitely varied in what they're good at?

That means that everyone, every, every human on the planet has some capacity

that's unique and coming to terms with coming to appreciate one's own unique

capacities, means that everyone, should be able to find a unique path to

contribute to the world around them.

I'm excited to share two last insights

that really hit home with me.

First.

I asked Jeff how he can spot a person who has found their calling.

I mean, after all, he is a world expert in this to answer my question, he

referred back to the story about Dr.

Hull.

When he tells his story, he always ends by saying, I'm grateful that this happened.

I can look back at all of these circumstances and

feel a sense that I'm, I am.

I'm lucky.

I'm blessed.

Life has been good to me.

That doesn't mean that every moment is fun.

Zookeepers suffer, they sweat, they bleed, you know, they, they hurt for

their animals, but it's not, it's not that it's a calling in spite of those things

in a way it's a calling because of those things, because we're, we're willing and,

even in some cases eager to make personal sacrifice because the end is so important.

I love the idea that a calling creates a

sense of gratitude in a person.

If you're unsure about your calling, that strikes me as an especially helpful guide.

What work would you be grateful to do?

I mentioned that there were two final insights that really stood out to me.

The second was an answer to my question.

What does the world look like?

When everyone has found their coat and his answer completely surprised me.

Well, I, you know, I, I think, let me put it this way.

I can't envision a world where everyone is currently in their calling, because as I

said before, calling is not a destination.

I'd like to think of it more as a world where.

Everyone is striving for their calling who are in search of the

best place to use their gifts.

And the journey is important.

I look back on my career.

I spent a year and a half in a corporate environment that just.

That it's slaughtered my soul.

I was really, really unhappy, but I look back on that now and

I wouldn't trade it for anything.

I learned so much about myself and who I need to be.

So.

I'm not sure.

I really envision, a perfect world where everyone has landed in their calling.

Rather, I think that the richness of calling comes in the search

for who I am equipped to serve.

And if everyone is doing that and growing toward a deeper sense of

calling, that's a pretty good world.

The richness of calling comes in the search

for who I'm equipped to serve.

What a powerful insight.

Having a calling it turns out is not a destination.

It's a way, it's a way of using what life gives you each day and

improving it with your unique talents.

I think this means when it comes to your calling, that there's no getting there.

There's no finally making it, even if you're in a job that you love.

If you stop searching for ways to uplift others through your talents,

that job will no longer be a calling.

Your calling reveals itself and how you work, not just in what you do.

Many, thanks to Professor Jeff Thompson for sharing his wisdom with us.

In this episode, if you're interested in learning more about his research, I've

linked to some of it in the show notes, along with other resources that can

help you find and stick to your calling.

If you want to keep up with how to help consider subscribing, to our newsletter,

which you can find it, how-two-help.com.

You'll also find a link for it in the show notes.

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We have some fantastic episodes coming up.

Next time, we're going to be talking with Dr.

Abigail Marsh, neuroscientist and professor at Georgetown and a Ted speaker.

She's also the author of the Fear Factor, and we're gonna, I'll

be discussing her research into the neuroscience of altruism.

Thanks to Merit Leadership who sponsors this podcast and to our production team.

Which included Cyndi Hall, Travis Stevenson, yours truly,

and Eric Robertson, who did the editing and the music.

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Finally, thank you so much for listening.

I'm Aaron Miller and this has been How to Help.