Whistle While You Work

Heeding Your Life's Calling

Richard J. Leider, David Shapiro

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781609944063
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Everyone wants to live a life that enables them to make the most of their unique gifts, interests, and passions-to find their true calling, the work they were born to do. Whistle While You Work is a liberating guide that uses powerful stories and exercises to help readers find truly satisfying, fulfilling work consistent with their deepest values.The authors combine a thoughtful and practical discussion about calling with examples showing how to apply these ideas to one's life. They mix in dozens of inspiring stories featuring individuals who have found, or are in the process of finding, their calling with straightforward advice and suggestions on how to discover one's calling. Most importantly, they provide readers with a solid path for embracing calling, a subject usually addressed abstractly in a useful, fun, and systematic way.Through a unique Calling Card exercise that features a guided exploration of 52 "natural preferences" -- such as Advancing Ideas, Doing the Numbers, Building Relationships, Performing Events -- the book gives readers a new way to detect and reflect on the core of their life's work. By using this and other tools in the book, readers develop their own answers to three critical questions: What gift do I naturally give to others? What gift do I most enjoy giving to others? What gift have I most often given to others? In answering those questions, they will reveal to themselves their calling-and ultimately move toward new realms of success and fulfillment.Whistle While You Work is an inspiring, effective, and entertaining approach to discovering one's calling. It will equip all of us with the mind-set, stories, coaching, and, perhaps most importantly, the hope we need to find our way ahead-and see a clear picture of what our right work is and what to do with our limited time here on Earth.

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Chapter 1
what do I want to be when I grow up?

Everything Happens for a Reason

I’m already late for my plane. The alarm in my hotel room didn’t go off—or maybe I slept right through it. I’m stressing hard; if I miss this flight, I’ll be two hours late for my meeting, not to mention deeply embarrassed in front of my clients when I finally do show my face.

Traffic is awful. My taxi driver coughs and shifts in his seat as he faces the long line of cars ahead of him. I see his reflection in the rear-view mirror. He looks like he’s straight from Central Casting’s cab driver department: the big, red, Karl Malden nose, the watery bloodshot eyes, the few greasy strands of hair sticking out from under the flattened wool cap.

“What time’s your flight?” he asks, glancing up at the mirror to meet my gaze.

I tell him—the hopeful, pleading tone of my voice all too apparent.

The driver shakes his head. “You ain’t gonna make it. Sorry. This traffic’s outta control.”

I sigh involuntarily and mumble something about the meeting I’m going to miss.

My driver waxes philosophical. “Everything happens for a reason,” he says. “You wanna know why I’m a cab driver?”

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Why not? I’ve got time to kill now.

“Because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.”

This I’ve gotta hear.

“Yeah,” continues the driver. “You ever hear of the Sullivan Act?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer. “Four brothers—all Navy—got killed in the bombing. So Congress passes a law that if you have a brother on active duty, you can’t be drafted. Okay. My brother, who’s a cop, is in Vietnam. And back in 1969, I’m just outta high school, and because I always do everything he does, I’m gonna enlist and go over there, too. I write him a letter telling him my plans and he writes back saying don’t do it, this place is a mess, so I stay home, get into some trouble with the law and disqualify myself from following my brother’s footsteps onto the police force. ‘Course I wouldn’t have that option if it wasn’t for the Sullivan Act—I’d a been drafted. My number’s already called. So you see, if it wasn’t for Pearl Harbor, I’d be a cop today. Instead, here I am.”

Sounds like he was fated to drive a cab.

“It’s a good thing, too,” says the driver, smiling wryly. “If I were a cop, I’d be dead. I got the kind of personality, you put me on the street with a gun, I’m not so sure things would work out, know what I mean? So, you see? Everything happens for a reason. If it wasn’t for Pearl Harbor, I wouldn’t be driving this cab. And if weren’t for missing your wake-up call, you wouldn’t have met the best taxi driver in town.”

Think about your own life and the complex turn of events that led you to where you are today. Perhaps you can’t trace the origins of your current career all the way back to the Second World War, but you probably recognize that a few key events played a major role in determining who and what you are today. The question to ask is “How involved was I in the course of those events?” Did you make choices that reflected what you really care about or were you pretty much borne along by forces outside your control? Are you, in other words, being what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Whistle While You Work

The Disney classic, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, features the unforgettable song, “Whistle While You Work.” The tune, sung by 13Snow White and the forest animals who come to her aid, captures the feeling of work done with a sense of joy, commitment, and focus. As Snow White works and whistles, we are reminded that, ultimately, the way we work is an expression of who we really are. And we share in Snow White’s feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction as she busily completes her many tasks.

In doing so, we are naturally led to wonder about our own jobs. Like Snow White, many of us have too much to do. And like her, we are bothered by many troubles. How many of us, though, are able to put on a grin and start right in? How many of us find ourselves really able to whistle while we work?

Of course, Snow White’s whistle is only half the story. Behind the scenes, the movie offers an even clearer model for joyful, committed work: the model of Walt Disney himself. Through his movies, his artwork, and his vision for the fantasy kingdom, Disneyland, Walt Disney created a legacy that any of us could hope to aspire to. An incredibly gifted animator, director, and businessperson, he was also incredibly passionate about his work; his values for high-quality family entertainment came shining through in all he did. Who can doubt that Walt Disney, as he created the many characters and stories that are now so deeply a part of our culture, whistled while he worked?

Naturally, we can’t all be Walt Disney. Most of us, in fact, probably have jobs more like Snow White’s friendly dwarfs. But this doesn’t mean we can’t bring to them the powerful sense of calling that Walt Disney did. And it certainly doesn’t mean that we can’t find a way to whistle while we work.

This feeling of doing what we were meant to do—of performing the work that we were born for—is something every one of us craves. We have a deep hunger to feel useful and to know that our natural abilities are being employed to their fullest potential. The desire is especially powerful because we’ve all had a taste of it; we’ve all had the experience of being deeply connected to what we’re doing—that sense of timelessness and flow that fills us when we’re doing exactly what we were meant to do.

When we were kids, we imagined work would be like this when we grew up. When parents and teachers asked us what we 14wanted to be, we usually had a ready answer. “An astronaut. A fire fighter. An explorer.” We envisioned a life of excitement and challenge on the job—a life in which we’d employ our best-loved talents on projects we were passionate about.

For many of us, though, it hasn’t exactly worked out that way. We find ourselves in working situations that are far from what we envisioned as children. Our jobs are just jobs. They pay the bills, but they don’t provide us with the joy that, in the end, is what really matters. We’ve lost the whistle in our work. Even worse, we’ve forgotten what we wanted to be when we grew up.

So maybe it’s time to ask ourselves again:

What do I want to be when I grow up?

Maybe it’s time to take a lesson from a group of sixth-graders Dave worked with in a Seattle middle school. They all had very strong feelings about what the future ought to hold for them—and even stronger feelings about what it ought not. Each of them had already answered the question that we’re still asking:

What do I want to be when I grow up?

Dave tells a story that made this abundantly clear to him, in a way that helped him realize what his own answer finally was.

We’re playing a game called “Hand Dealt,” which explores the question, “Is life fair?” by providing each player with a predetermined “life.” Students are each dealt three cards; one card determines a fictional relationship they are in, one establishes a fictional job or jobs; the third tells them where they live. There is a wide range of relationships, occupations, and accommodations, from the quite affluent to the extremely poor. Thus, one player may end up having been dealt a “life” of two parents, one of whom is a chemical engineer making $80,000 a year, the other of whom is a banker earning $125,000 annually, two kids, living in a four-bedroom house, while another player is dealt a “life” of an unemployed single parent of 4 children living in a one-bedroom apartment. Not surprisingly, the kids who get the “good” lives tend to respond to the question of life’s fairness in the 15affirmative while those who are dealt less desirable lives usually respond that life is horribly unjust. This gives us the opportunity to wonder aloud about the relationship between monetary success and happiness, and ultimately, about just what it means for life to be fair or unfair.

But that’s not all. It also gives us a chance to explore what it feels like to be dealt a life we didn’t choose. And this, more than anything else, is what energizes our discussion. The kids are adamant about the injustice of having to live with choices they didn’t make.

“I wouldn’t mind being a janitor,” says a boy I’ll call Carlos, whose bleached-blond surfer look belies an unusual level of thoughtfulness for an 11 year-old, “if being a janitor is what I wanted to be. But since it isn’t my choice, I don’t think it’s fair.”

But the cards were passed out fairly, weren’t they? Didn’t everyone have an equal opportunity to be whatever they ended up being?

“That’s not the point,” says Miranda, a rather small girl with a rather large personality. “What makes it fair or not is that it’s your own life and that nobody’s forced you into it.”

“Yeah. Some people are actually happy being, I dunno, schoolteachers. But that for me would be like worse than prison.” This comment from Will, one of the class’s several class clowns, elicits a humorous grimace from his teacher and chuckles from his classmates.

“Could you imagine coming to school for the rest of your life?” shouts curly-haired Maya with a theatrical shiver. “What a disaster!”

Amidst the general assent of her fellow students, I wonder out loud what kinds of things these 11- and 12-year-olds could imagine doing for the rest of their lives. I’m taken aback at the assurance with which they respond.

“When I grow up, I’m going to be a movie director,” says Erin, a seemingly shy girl who spends much of her time drawing. “I’m going to start by doing commercials and then videos and then feature films.”

Ryan, who collared me the moment I entered the classroom to show me his daily journal, in which he is recording tidbits for the autobiography he is working on, pipes up that he’s going to be a writer. “Maybe I can write your movie scripts,” he says to Erin.

Other students have similarly well-formed notions of what they love doing. I’m enjoying immensely talking to them about what they plan to do, how they plan to do it, and the philosophical implications of 16their choices—and their freedom to make those choices. I’m wondering how they manage to have such optimism and clarity about their lives at this young age. I’m wondering how—at this age—they seem to know themselves so well. When did they have the discovery that so often eludes adults: the discovery of what they want to be when they grow up?

And suddenly, I come to understand that I am having that same discovery myself. As I stand in a classroom, doing philosophy with children, I realize that finally, after years of searching, I am at last doing what I most love to be doing. All the other jobs I’ve ever had—from busboy to videodisc designer to corporate training consultant—have been merely steps upon the way to where I am now. I feel completely connected to the process of inquiry we’re conducting; I’m immersed in the subject matter and delighted by my young colleagues and their inquiring minds. Time flies by. What I notice is how authentic it feels for me to be helping these students to better understand the questions and answers we are exploring and in the process, to better understand themselves. And it occurs to me that in all the other jobs I’ve ever had, this is the common theme that has given me satisfaction. At some level, “fostering understanding” has consistently been key.

And I realize that after all these years, I’ve finally become what I always wanted to be when I grew up. It’s taken me more than 40 years to rediscover the answer to the question that my young friends in this classroom have found for themselves in just over a decade.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

The Roots of Calling

At a fairly young age—by fifth or sixth grade, certainly—most of us have a pretty good sense of what we love to do—and what we don’t. Of course, we usually can’t put a job title on it at that point; for an 11-year-old, loving to draw doesn’t translate into being an art director; nor is finding math class fun a sign that a youngster should think about becoming an accountant. Moreover, given that well over half of the jobs that kids will grow up into haven’t even been invented yet, it’s obvious that we can’t expect too much specificity in career choice at such a young age.

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Still, the essential core is already there. Our gifts, though nascent, have already begun to take shape. Deep within, a part of us knows that we are here on this planet for a reason. A sense of destiny, unformed as it is, lies just beneath the surface of our awareness. And, even as children, we naturally incline towards the experiences that allow us to express this.

Somewhere along the line, though, we get sidetracked. We silence that voice within that speaks to us about what really matters. We make choices—or have them made for us—that are driven by practical concerns. We set aside “childish” dreams in the interest of making a living or satisfying someone else’s plans. We seem to forget what we knew as boys and girls—what we most love to do.

But that wisdom never really goes away. It can be revived. We can open ourselves to that innate knowing that guided us when we were young: the inner urge to give our gifts away.

The roots of calling in our lives go back very deeply—to even before we were born. Calling is an expression of our essence; it’s our embedded destiny. The seed of this destiny lies within us; one way or another it seeks to fulfill itself in the world. So the question we need to ask ourselves is whether we’re doing all we can to bring the fruits of our calling to bear.

Seeds of Destiny

One unmistakable conclusion that Dick has drawn from a lifetime of coaching individuals about life and career design is this: we all possess seeds of destiny. Each of us has within us God-given natural gifts—unique potential for creative expression. From birth we have what we need to become all we can be. The challenge, of course, is to figure out how to make a living with our uniqueness; how to connect who we are with what we do.

But often we don’t have to ...