Experiencing Your Life as a Calling - Part 1

What if we viewed life not merely as a series of daily tasks and events, but as a unique calling, drawing us towards a more fulfilling existence? ?This is part 1 of a two-part series on Experiencing your Life as a Calling.? This week, we explore the ideas of job crafting and work orientation, and how they relate to our quest for greater happiness.? Next week we will dive deeper into the benefits of experiencing your life as a calling and then discuss some practical strategies for how you can discover your calling / purpose.

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"Your calling isn't something that somebody can tell you about. ?It's what you feel. ?It is a part of your life force. ?It is the thing that gives you juice. ?The thing that you are supposed to do. ?And nobody can tell you what that is. ?You know it inside yourself." ?- Oprah Winfrey

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Hospital Janitors and Happiness

In 2001, Amy Wrzesniewski (Yale) and Jane Dutton (Univ Michigan), two researchers in the field of organizational behavior, published a profound study on the relationship between job perception and job fulfillment among a group of university hospital janitors. ?For a job that society often perceives as menial, there was a striking difference in how the individual janitors viewed and experienced their roles at the hospital.?

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While they all objectively performed the same duties (e.g., collecting trash, cleaning bed pans, etc.) and interacted with the same groups of people (e.g., patients, visitors, and hospital staff) …

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Some janitors saw their work as merely a cleaning job.?

Others saw it as a career or a stepping stone to get promoted.

And still others experienced the work as a calling.?

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Their perceptions had a significant impact on their experience at work. ?

Not surprisingly, those janitors that experienced their work as a calling, reported higher job satisfaction and fulfillment.?

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Job Crafting

An intriguing observation was that this smaller group of janitors engaged in what Wrzesniewski termed, ‘job crafting’.? They individually redefined their job descriptions to include tasks and extra duties that brought them deeper meaning and a deeper sense of purpose.?

For example, janitors that experienced work as a calling would go out of their way to interact with the patients, visitors, and hospital staff.? Additionally, they might alter or take on extra daily tasks that they felt were beneficial to the hospital. ?They communicated concerns about patients and visitors to the staff.? They were doing more than the job description actually called for.

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In doing these things, they transformed the meaning of their work from being merely a cleaning job to a role that was integral to healing in the hospital.

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The study demonstrates that how we perceive the work that we do has a profound impact on our sense of purpose and life satisfaction.?

It also shows that how we perceive and approach our daily tasks is more important to the experience of meaning and purpose than the actual job itself.

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Work Orientation Categories and Core Energy?

From the university hospital study, three work orientations were considered.

• Job orientation
• Career orientation
• Calling orientation

People in each category perceived their job in a different manner and experienced different motivations for working, and thus viewed their work through different “lenses” of Core Energy?.? You may recall from my previous article on Core Energy?, that higher levels are associated with increased personal fulfillment and greater happiness.

For the person who views their job merely as a job: (job orientation)

• The job is something I have to do.?
• I’m doing this for the paycheck.
• I’m counting the days until I can retire.
• Is it the weekend yet?
• Work is boring.?

This is a form of performance orientation where the focus is obtaining something in the future, e.g., a paycheck, the weekend.? In terms of Core Energy?, job orientation amounts to catabolic energy – generally level 1 or level 2.

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For the person who views their job as a career: (career orientation)

• The job is something I tolerate.
• I’m doing this job so that I can get to the next step in my career.
• I’m motivated to work by the prospects of a raise or promotion.
• Power, prestige and climbing the corporate ladder are what is important.
• Work is a rat race.

This is a form of performance orientation where the focus is obtaining something in the future, e.g., a raise, a promotion.? In terms of Core Energy?, career orientation is straddled at the cusp between catabolic and anabolic energy levels.? The idea that the job is something to be tolerated is a classic example of level 3 energy.

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For the person who views their job as a calling: (calling orientation)

• The job is something I want to do.
• The work itself motivates me to do this job.
• My work contributes to a better world and deep personal fulfillment.
• This person experiences work as purposeful much more of the time.
• Work is meaningful and deeply fulfilling.

This is a form of mastery orientation where the focus is experiencing and enjoying the process itself, in the present.? Mastery orientation is always associated with greater happiness than performance orientation.? In terms of Core Energy?, a calling orientation is well into the anabolic energy territory and varies between level 6 (joy) and level 7 (absolute passion).

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Wow - I just can’t wait to get to work on Monday!!

*grin*

While you might not experience every moment of the workday as a calling, consider how different and fulfilling your work (and life) would be if you derived more meaning and purpose from your daily tasks.

On any given day or hour, we may experience different categories of work orientation.? Some days we may want to just stay in bed.? Other days, we may be "in flow," i.e., tapping into our inner genius, with our soul on fire because we are fully absorbed in doing something that we are passionate about.?

The more time that we experience our life as a calling, the more content and happier we will be.

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Concluding Remarks

There is no need to seek out extraordinary or grandiose experiences in order to lead a meaningful life or to experience your life as a calling.? The power to transform our experience of life and work, lays within how we perceive and shape our daily activities and tasks. ?

It is a choice.?

As we continue our quest for experiencing greater happiness in life, again we see that we are immensely powerful beings.? Our happiness has less to do with our circumstances and more to do with how our brains choose to see and experience the world around us.?

Raising our own awareness allows us to embrace life as a calling, which in turn fosters a more joyful existence.?

Be sure to tune in next week where we explore practical strategies for how to discover your calling / life purpose.

How would things be different if you experienced your life as a calling?

Reference:

Wrzesniewski, A, Dutton, JE (2001) Crafting a job: revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management. Review. 26;179-201.?

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Thanks for reading!

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Cheers,

Tracy Davis, MD PhD

Certified Life Coach (CPC, ELI-MP, COR.E Dynamics Specialist)

The Happy Physician

I help physicians (and non-physicians) who want more out of life, to create the life of their dreams and be happier.

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