What Color Is Your Parachute? (54 page)

1.
Seven vs. eight depends on whether you put Goals and Values on one petal, or two.

2.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or “MBTI®,” measures what is called
psychological type.
For further reading about this, see:

Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger,
Do What You Are: Discover the Perfect Career for You Through the Secrets of Personality Type
(Revised and Updated). Fourth Edition. 2007. Little, Brown & Company, Inc. For those who cannot obtain the MBTI®, this book includes a method for readers to identify their personality types. This is one of the most popular career books in the world. It’s easy to see why. Many have found great help from the concept of personality type, and the Tiegers are masters in explaining this approach to career-choice. Highly recommended.

Donna Dunning,
What’s Your Type of Career? Unlock the Secrets of Your Personality to Find Your Perfect Career Path.
2010. Nicholas Brealey Publishing. This is a dynamite book on personality type. Donna Dunning’s knowledge of “Type” is encyclopedic!

David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates,
Please Understand Me: Character & Temperament Types.
1978. Includes the Keirsey Temperament Sorter—again, for those who cannot obtain the MBTI® (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator)—registered trademark of Consulting Psychologists Press.

3.
If this kind of financial figuring is not your cup of tea, find a buddy, friend, relative, family member, or anyone, who can help you do this. If you don’t know anyone who could do this, go to your local church, synagogue, religious center, social club, gym, or wherever you hang out, and ask the leader or manager there, to help you find someone. If there’s a bulletin board, put up a notice on the bulletin board.

4.
If you have extra household expenses, such as a security system, be sure to include the quarterly (or whatever) expenses here, divided by three.

5.
Your checkbook stubs and/or online banking records will tell you a lot of this stuff. But you may be vague about your cash or credit card expenditures. For example, you may not know how much you spend at the supermarket, or how much you spend on gas, etc. But there is a simple way to find out. Just carry a little notepad and pen around with you for two weeks or more, and jot down everything you pay cash (or use credit cards) for—on the spot, right after you pay it. At the end of those two weeks, you’ll be able to take that notepad and make a realistic guess of what should be put down in these categories that now puzzle you. (Multiply the two-week figure by two, and you’ll have the monthly figure.)

6.
Incidentally, for U.S. citizens, looking ahead to next April 15, be sure to check with your local IRS office or a reputable accountant to find out if you can deduct the expenses of your job-hunt on your federal (and state) income tax returns. At this writing, some job-hunters can, if—big IF—this is not your first job that you’re looking for, if you haven’t been unemployed too long, and if you aren’t making a career-change. Do go find out what the latest “ifs” are. If the IRS says you are eligible, keep careful receipts of everything related to your job-hunt, as you go along: telephone calls, stationery, printing, postage, travel, etc.

7.
If you resist this idea of
cutting down the territory
—if you feel you could be happy anywhere just as long as you were using your favorite skills—then you’ll have to go visit them all. Good luck! We’ll see you in about forty-three years.

8.
For more names of search engines, see Danny Sullivan’s
SearchEngineWatch,
at
http://searchenginewatch.com/links
. For tips on how to search, see
http://searchenginewatch.com/facts
.

 
 

As I started writing this section, I toyed at first with the idea of following what might be described as an “all-paths approach” to religion: trying to stay as general and nonspecific as I could. But, after much thought, I decided not to try that. This, because I have read many other writers who tried, and I felt the approach failed miserably. An “all-paths” approach to religion ends up being a “no-paths” approach, even as a woman or man who tries to please everyone ends up pleasing no one. It is the old story of the “universal” vs. the “particular.”

Those of us who do career counseling could predict, ahead of time, that trying to stay universal is not likely to be helpful, in writing about faith. We know well from our own field that truly helpful career counseling depends upon defining the
particularity
or uniqueness of each person we try to help. No employer wants to know what you have in common with everyone else. He or she wants to know what makes you unique and individual. As I have argued throughout this book, the inventory of your uniqueness or
particularity
is crucial if you are ever to find meaningful work.

This particularity invades
everything
a person does; it is not suddenly “jettisonable” when he or she turns to matters of faith. Therefore, when I or anyone else writes about faith I believe we
must
write out of our own particularity—which
starts,
in my case, with the fact that I write, and think, and breathe as a Christian—as you might expect from the fact that I was an ordained Episcopalian minister for many years. Understandably, then, this chapter speaks from a Christian perspective. I want you to be aware of that, at the outset.

Balanced against this is the fact that I have always been acutely sensitive to the fact that this is a pluralistic society in which we live, and that I in particular owe a great deal to my readers who have religious convictions quite different from my own. It has turned out that the people who work or have worked here in my office with me, over the years, have been predominantly of other faiths. Furthermore,
Parachute
’s more than ten million readers have not only included Christians of every variety and persuasion, Christian Scientists, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and adherents of Islam, but also believers in “new age” religions, secularists, humanists, agnostics, atheists, and many others. I have therefore tried to be very courteous toward the feelings of all my readers,
while at the same time
counting on them to translate my Christian thought forms into their own. This ability to thus translate is the indispensable
sine qua non
of anyone who wants to communicate helpfully with others in this pluralistic society of ours.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition from which I come, one of the indignant Biblical questions was, “Has God forgotten to be gracious?” The answer was a clear “No.” I think it is important
for all of us
also to seek the same goal. I have therefore labored to make this chapter gracious as well as thought-provoking.

         R. N. B.

For many of us, the job-hunt offers a chance to make some fundamental changes in our whole life. It marks a turning point in how we live our life.

It gives us a chance to ponder and reflect, to extend our mental horizons, to go deeper into the subsoil of our soul.

It gives us a chance to wrestle with the question, “Why am I here on Earth?” We don’t want to feel that we are just another grain of sand lying on the beach called humanity, unnumbered and lost in the billions of other human beings.

We want to do more than plod through life, going to work, coming home from work. We want to find that special joy, “that no one can take from us,” which comes from having a sense of Mission in our life.

We want to feel we were put here on Earth for some special purpose, to do some unique work that only we can accomplish.

We want to know what our Mission is.

When used with respect to our life and work
Mission
has always been a religious concept, from beginning to end. It is defined by
Webster’s
as “a continuing task or responsibility that one is destined or fitted to do or specially called upon to undertake,” and historically has had two major synonyms:
Calling
and
Vocation
. These, of course, are the same word in two different languages, English and Latin. Both imply God. To be given a Vocation or Calling implies
Someone who
calls. To have a Destiny implies
Someone who determined the destination for us
. Thus, the concept of Mission lands us inevitably in the lap of God, before we have hardly begun.

I emphasize this, because there is an increasing trend in our culture to try to speak about religious subjects without reference to God. This is true of “spirituality,” “soul,” and “Mission,” in particular. More and more books talk about Mission as though it were simply “a purpose you choose for your own life, by identifying your enthusiasms.”

This attempt to obliterate all reference to God from the originally religious concept of Mission, is particularly ironic because the proposed substitute word—enthusiasms—is derived from two Greek words, “en theos,” and means “God in us.”

In the midst of this increasingly secular culture, we find an oasis that—along with athletics—is very hospitable toward belief in God. That oasis is
job-hunting
. Most of the leaders who have evolved creative job-hunting ideas were—from the beginning—people who believed firmly in God, and said so: Sidney Fine, Bernard Haldane, and John Crystal (all of whom have departed this life), plus Arthur and Marie Kirn, Arthur Miller, Tom and Ellie Jackson, Ralph Matson, and of course myself.

Nor are we alone. In the U.S., anyway. This country is one of the most religious-in-belief, at least, on the face of the Earth. Back in 1989 the Gallup Organization found that 94 percent of us believe in God, 90 percent of us pray, 88 percent of us believe God loves us, and 33 percent of us report we have had a life-changing religious experience. And that these figures had remained virtually unchanged for the previous fifty years. (This was reported in George Gallup Jr. and Jim Castelli’s
The People’s Religion: American Faith in the ’90s,
Macmillan & Co., 1989.) Ninety-two percent of us, according to the Pew Forum polls conducted in 2008, still believe in God.

However, it is not clear that we have made much connection between our belief in God and our work. Often our spiritual beliefs and our attitude toward our work live in separate mental ghettos, within our mind.

A dialogue between these two
is
opened up inside our head, and heart, when we are out of work. Unemployment, particularly in this brutal economy, gives us a chance to contemplate why we are here on Earth, and what our Calling, Vocation, or Mission is, uniquely, for each of us.

Unemployment becomes
life transition
, when we can’t find a job doing the same work we’ve always done. Since we have to rethink one thing, many of us elect to rethink
everything.

Something awakens within us. Call it
yearning
. Call it
hope
. We come to realize the dream we dreamed has never died. And we go back to get it. We decide to resume our search…for the life we know within our heart that we were meant to live.

Now we have a chance to marry our work and our religious beliefs, to talk about Calling, and Vocation, and Mission in life—to think out why we are here, and what plans God has for us.

That’s why a period of unemployment can absolutely change our life.

I have learned that if you want to figure out what your Mission in life is, it will likely take some time. It is not a
problem
to be solved in a day and a night. It is a
learning process
that has steps to it, much like the process by which we all learned to eat. As a baby, we did not tackle adult food right off. As we all recall, there were three stages: first there had to be the mother’s milk or bottle, then strained baby foods, and finally—after teeth and time—the stuff that grown-ups chew. Three stages—and the two earlier stages were not to be disparaged. It was all Eating, just different forms of Eating—appropriate to our development at the time. But each stage had to be mastered, in turn, before the next could be approached.

There are usually three stages also to learning what your Mission in life is, and the two earlier stages are likewise not to be disparaged. It is all “Mission”—just different forms of Mission, appropriate to your development at the time. But each stage has to be mastered, in turn, before the next can be approached.

Of course, there is a sense in which you never master any of these stages, but are always growing in understanding and mastery of them, throughout your whole life here on Earth.

As it has been impressed on me by observing many people over the years (admittedly through
Christian spectacles
), it appears that the three parts to your Mission here on Earth can be defined generally as follows:

1.
Your first Mission here on Earth
is one that you share with the rest of the human race, but it is no less your individual Mission for the fact that it is shared: and it is,
to seek to stand hour by hour in the conscious presence of God, the One from whom your Mission is derived.
The Missioner before the Mission
, is the rule. In religious language, your Mission here is:
to know God, and enjoy Him forever, and to see His hand in all His works
.

2. Second, once you have begun doing that in an earnest way,
your second Mission here on Earth
is also one that you share with the rest of the human race, but it is no less your individual Mission for the fact that it is shared: and that is,
to do what you can, moment by moment, day by day, step by step, to make this world a better place, following the leading and guidance of God’s Spirit within you and around you.

3. Third, once you have begun doing that in a serious way,
your third Mission here on Earth
is one that is uniquely yours, and that is:

a)
to exercise the Talent that you particularly came to Earth to use—your greatest gift, which you most delight to use,

b)
in the place(s) or setting(s) that God has caused to appeal to you the most,

c)
and for those purposes that God most needs to have done in the world.

When fleshed out, and spelled out, I think you will find that there you have the definition of your Mission in life. Or, to put it another way, these are the three Missions that you have in life.

The distinctive characteristic of these three stages is that in each we are forced to
let go
of some fundamental assumptions that our culture has taught us, about the nature of Mission. In other words, throughout this quest and at each stage we find ourselves engaged not merely in a process of
Learning.
We are also engaged in a process of
Un
learning. Thus, we can restate the above three Learnings, in terms of what we also need to
un
learn at each stage: