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The Power of Laughter at the Most Serious Times

August 3, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

I just returned from the #140edu conference in New York City, where I talked about our needing to have a discussion about values in our schools so that our kids have “toolboxes for living and working” when they go out into the world. (You can find much of what I had to say in posts I’ve filed here over the past month on values training, on learning your vocation, and on a school’s values being the beginning, not the end, of the discussion.)

Of course, values are not just something we should be talking about in our schools. We should be having conversations about what’s important to us—and how to act on our beliefs—with families, friends and colleagues so that we can boldly (and optimistically) face the difficult decisions that inevitably confront us all.  When you know what’s important to you, a lot of the bad stuff that comes your way can be put in a proper context, liberating you to move forward in a way that makes sense to you in spite of all the challenges and uncertainties.

But that’s the serious part.

As with all of the #140 character conferences sponsored by Jeff Pulver, this one was an amazing collision of thought leaders and their thoughts, with results that managed to be playful one minute and profound the next.

Because of the range of its take-aways, and still finding myself a little hung-over from “that amazingly broad moment,” I’d like to share with you a couple of stories (one from the conference, and the other from half a world away) because of what they have to say about the power of laughter at the most serious times.

In the “recovery room” outside the auditorium of the 92nd Street Y where the #140edu presentations were occurring in a fire-hose of 10-minute intervals, I found myself talking with a young teacher.  I quickly discovered that she needed to make an immediate decision to quit or keep her job in a Bronx classroom before the next school year starts. We weren’t three lines into our conversation when she said: “I can’t imagine going back.” What she didn’t say was: “I’ve been sitting on this fence for awhile, and I don’t have another job.” Her school had plainly done nearly everything it could do to make her feel devalued.

I appealed to the serious-grounded-thoughtful-and-obviously-talented part of her by saying:  “The best decisions I’ve made in my life were like jumping off a cliff with no sense of the bottom or how horrible it could be.  But if you believe in yourself and in what you are trying to do, you will land successfully—stronger and better—and never look back.  At least it had always worked that way for me.”

At this penultimate moment of seriousness, she looked at the huge nametag they had given me and said: “Don’t you find it ironic that we’re here at an education conference and your name is spelled wrong?” Of course, I hadn’t sensed the irony because I hadn’t noticed.  Because I hadn’t, and because of her inability to be anything other than a “teacher correcting misspelled words” during a conversation about a key decision point in her life, all of our seriousness deflated into laughter.

Now there was a glimmer of hope in her eyes! At that moment, her laugh made my jumping-off-the-cliff advice seem like it would really work for her—and there’s a good reason for that. Realizing goals you truly believe in is a whole lot easier if you can also manage to see the funny things that are happening around you along the way.

At around the same time we were talking, but a half a world away, another collision of the dead serious and truly playful was going on.

Belarus, one of the former Soviet republics, has one of the most deplorable human rights records in the world.

Sweden is close enough geographically that some of Belarus’ wafting stench led two of its courageous citizens, Thomas Mazetti and Hannah Frey, to try and do something about it.  Their goal a few days ago was raising awareness, challenging indifference, and expressing their solidarity with the human rights activists in Belarus, whose very small voice is barely heard outside their troubled country.

Thomas Mazetti & Hannah Frey

 

Mazetti and Frey believed enough in the values of freedom, courage and responsibility that they spent $184,500 of their own money to rent a plane, personally fly it over Belarus, and drop 879 teddy bears with parachutes bearing human rights slogans into the country.

While they managed to fly into and back out of Belarus without being shot down, killed, or imprisoned, there is no question that they put their lives at risk for something that was of the utmost importance to them.  But notice how they did it.  They alleviated their serious moment with teddy bears, and as a result, every news organization in the world picked up their story.

The #140 character conferences, a young teacher in the Bronx, and two Swedish activists all have something to say to us about finding a place where the most serious purpose can spend time with laughter and a sense of humor.

I’d love to hear your stories about when you’ve found a way to bring either laughter or lightness into your deepest commitments—and while doing so, made it far more likely that you would reach your personal goals.

 

Filed Under: *All Posts, Using Humor Effectively Tagged With: goal directed, grounded, humor, job change, laughter, preparation, purpose- driven work and life, trigger, values, vocation

Learning as Roadmap for Finding Your Life’s Work

July 12, 2012 By David Griesing 4 Comments

How do you decide what you should do with your life?  How do you figure out what “a good life” would look like for you?

How do you sort through the possibilities and choose the kind of work you will do?  After years of working, how can you transition from a deadening job to work that will energize you?

What happens if you never learned how to think and feel your way through questions like these?

Why aren’t we getting more help here?

One thing is certain: our schools should be doing a better job preparing our kids to lead good and satisfying lives at work and in their communities.

Unfortunately, our students aren’t prepared, because our schools aren’t helping them to identify what they value the most, or showing them how their values can transform the work they will do into a vocation. Increasingly, our kids are left to figure out “how best to live” with no real guidance from educators at all.

Every student is seeking information that will give their lives direction and meaning. But instead of providing this information in a user-friendly way, students get a lesson here (a glimpse of the heroic in English class) and a lesson there (on the football field, in the lab, or from a counselor), but are generally left to put these assorted pieces together on their own. As a result, most students never manage to assemble a roadmap they can follow when they go out into the world.

What follows should not be surprising.

Our kids spend time doing this and that, and dream impossible futures, but they are increasingly unable to discover a path in life that will bring them genuine satisfaction. (For years, Stanford education professor William Damon has discussed why so many young people “fail to launch” in books like The Path to Purpose (Free Press, 2008))

While it won’t change everything, there should be a class in every school that will help students identify what they value the most, and how to apply those values to the decisions they are confronting everyday.

–       Students could be given tools like the Rokeach Value Survey to identify their most important terminal and instrumental values.

–       They could learn about the value choices made by peer groups and admired individuals, and consider how making different values their lodestar (like “equality,” “fairness,” “freedom” or “security“) can influence their choices about life and work.

–       They could learn how their values will change over time as their value awareness improves, and how those changes relate to new goals they will start identifying for themselves.

–       They could learn how their behavior and decision-making is guided by their values, not in the abstract but by considering decisions that are being made around them everyday:  about allocation of school resources (new equipment for the football team vs. a new chemistry teacher), school conflicts (like bullying) or a political issue polarizing their community.

There might be an institutional drive to combine these value-choice exercises with resume writing or work-interview101—an extension of what guidance counselors are doing in our schools already. That’s ok, because this curriculum has everything to do with the work you will do after school. But it is not just about finding A Job, it is about ultimately finding or creating The Right Job for who you are and what you value the most, so you will gain fulfillment from your effort and maintain a life-long sense of purpose.

To help ensure this result, “resume writing” and “mastering the interview” modules could be combined with an extended exercise where each student prepares his or her own plan for the future. It would be a practical exercise on where their individual values might lead them in the real world. (I’ll elaborate in the next post.)

Why aren’t we giving our kids this kind of learning experience today?

image/kolenya

Most students leave school without a compass for navigating the working world. Having only vague ideas about the kind of work that will bring them satisfaction or how to go about getting it, a tremendous effort goes into finding any job—any kind of paycheck. But it doesn’t have to be this way. When students truly want to do something, know why they’re suited to do it, and understand the value to themselves and others that will be gained by doing it, their goals aren’t random and ill-defined, but specific.

Our schools need to be helping students to identify what they value the most, how to identify real-world work that vindicates those values, and how to bring their strongest competencies into their working lives.

What kind of coursework could be more relevant to them or to the challenges they face in the world?

When our schools start integrating their disparate lessons into a curriculum that helps students find their vocations in life, they will be providing our young people with a valuable roadmap that points the way to working lives with both meaning and purpose.  And as teachers, Americans, inhabitants of a troubled planet, we would get something too:  a chance to mold a hopeful and energized generation to go forth and make the world a better place.

(I’ll be talking about values and education at the #140edu conference, which will be taking place at the 92nd Street Y in New York City later this month. Join me by registering today.)

 

Filed Under: *All Posts, Building Your Values into Your Work Tagged With: good life, learning, meaning, purpose, Rokeach Value Survey, values, vocation

On Having Courage and Dignity Under Fire

June 22, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

You pursue work that matters because you want to leave the world a better place than you found it. By doing so however, you

inevitably run afoul of those who want to keep everything more or less like it is.

Attracting controversy also pushes you into the spotlight. With the lights in your eyes and a welter of voices clamoring around you, the heat of the moment calls upon you to say and do things that can either advance your goals, or set them back.

How you’ll respond at such times is important. It’s helpful to think about it, start visualizing how you want these moments to play out before they arrive.

While there are many who have handled these situations badly, there are also those who have summoned up the kind of amazing grace we can learn from. This past week brought just such a lesson.

Margaret Farley is a nun, a member of the Sisters of Mercy, and the emerita professor of social ethics at Yale Divinity School, where she has taught for 40 years. Throughout, she has been a celebrated teacher as well as the author of numerous books and articles, including Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York, 2006).

Last week, after concluding an investigation that had lasted 3 ½ years, the Vatican’s Magisterium (or Teaching Office) condemned Just Love, because it “affirms positions that are in direct contradiction with Catholic teaching in the field of sexual morality” and therefore “cannot be used as a valid expression of Catholic teaching, either in counseling or formation, or in ecumenical and interreligious dialogue.”

In other words, the views Margaret Farley expressed in her book put her outside the boundaries of her faith. Her teaching itself—through argument and discussion in her book—was found to be an improper path for believers to follow in seeking either truth or understanding.

A half century ago, Margaret Farley chose to commit her life to a religious vocation of teaching within the Church. Since then, her work and her life have been united by this spiritual purpose.

Given her choices, the judgment she received last week is different than the rebuke of an employer, on the one hand, or the criticism of vested interests you are challenging, on the other. In each instance, what she has faced is more extreme.

The leaders of her own community of believers have publicly found that her work is incompatible with those shared beliefs. They have defined her as standing separate and apart from them. For a citizen, the word would be “traitor.” In a community of believers, it is usually “heretic.” Imagine standing where she stands today.

My aim here is not to take a side in this controversy but to comment on how Margaret Farley has conducted herself and continued her work in the midst of it. It is her courage and dignity—not her scholarship—that is teaching us today.

Her response was: Simple. Straightforward. Clear. Amidst a blizzard of media commentary (including in the New York Times and Washington Post) Margaret Farley issued one statement and gave one interview. She said her book was never intended to express “official Catholic teaching” but rather to help people “think through their questions about human sexuality.” It was an effort to move away from “taboo morality” and bring “present-day scientific, philosophical, theological, and biblical resources” into the discussion.

Not Angry or Contentious, but Disappointed about issues never addressed and opportunities lost. The Church said: “Sister Farley either ignores the constant teaching of the Magisterium or, where it is occasionally mentioned, treats it as one opinion among others.” She, in turn, asked: “Should power settle questions of truth?”

If we come to know a little more than we knew before, it might be that the conclusions we had previously drawn need to be developed, or even let go of. [To say that wasn’t possible] would be to imply that we know everything we need to know and nothing more need be done.

Not Seeking the Spotlight, but Standing her Ground once she was in it. Because the Church “is still a source of real life for me, it’s worth the struggle. It’s worth getting a real backbone that has compassion tied to it.”

Margaret Farley was my teacher at Yale. I know her as humble and earnest: engaged like the best teachers, careful like the best scholars. I sense enormous reluctance in her notoriety: for her to be taken as a champion for divorce or gay marriage, or even as a spokesperson for believers who are drifting from their Church because of its difficulties addressing questions of gender and sexuality. But her reluctance does not preclude her resolve—and this is where we find her today.

Once Margaret Farley was thrust into the spotlight, she knew what to do.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Heroes & Other Role Models Tagged With: alive, better world, capable, clarity, controversy at work, empowered, grounded, inspiration, potent, productive, purpose- driven work and life, role model, social ethics, visualize, vocation

Different Marching Orders for Work That Makes a Difference

May 23, 2012 By David Griesing 2 Comments

What we value is as different as we are. Our basic goals and commitments—indeed the fundamental ways in which we view the world—are as different as our individual life experiences. So it should come as no surprise that in seeking work that has personal meaning, the approaches we take to finding itare different too.

In recent commencement addresses this month, Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney recommended two very different approaches for graduates entering the workforce. Wherever you find yourself as a worker—just starting out, trying to improve your experience in the trenches, or thinking about a second or third act in your working life—their recent remarks can help you when thinking about your own “next steps.”

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, columnist Daniel Henninger compared their messages in A Tale of Two Commencements. Henninger clearly preferred Mr. Romney’s. But rather than “either/or,” I see their approaches as speaking to broad (and sometimes overlapping) segments along a procession of worthy vocations: from personal service as a quiet witness to political struggle as an agent for change you can believe in.

As we search for purpose-driven work that can bring us genuine satisfaction, there’s a place that’s right for each of us somewhere along this continuum.

Mr. Romney’s address was at Liberty University, the largest evangelical Christian school in America. Lincoln’s “doctrinal statement” says, in part:

We affirm that the Holy Spirit indwells all who are born again, conforming them to the likeness of Jesus Christ. This is a process completed only in Heaven. Every believer is responsible to live in obedience to the Word of God in separation from sin.

In other words, Mr. Romney was speaking to individuals who had already committed to living their lives in a particular, value-centered way. Most if not all in his audience already understood that transforming the world begins (and ends) with transforming yourself.

For Mr. Romney, your work in the world is not dictated by the social problem to be solved.

The great drama of Christianity is not a crowd shot, following the movements of collectives or even nations. The drama is always personal, individual, unfolding in one’s own life. . . [Here] men and women of every faith, and good people with none at all, sincerely strive to do right and lead a purpose-driven life.

“What we have, what we wish we had — ambitions fulfilled, ambitions disappointed; investments won, investments lost; elections won, elections lost — these things may occupy our attention, but they do not define us,” he continued. Those things happen within us. For Mr. Romney, making the world a better place through your work is the result of “conscience in action,” and the never-ending commitment that it takes to always be ready for it.

As many of you already know, Mr. Obama spoke last week to my daughter’s graduating class at Barnard, one of the colleges making up Columbia University.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

His speech was a different from Mr. Romney’s as his audience.

For the President, the application of your values to your work is similarly self-defining. But while your career may lead to internal changes, his approach to work focused almost exclusively on value-driven engagement in the external world of politics. In other words, it is by transforming the world that you transform yourself.

The graduating women of Barnard have their own commencement as well as a larger ceremony with the other university schools. Until recently, Columbia College graduates received apples with their diplomas to symbolize the “core” curriculum they had studied. That is until someone removed the fruit because year after year Columbia men delighted in pelting Barnard women with their apples. Barnard women understand the politics of gender on their campus, and Mr. Obama connected with this understanding when talking about how values should inform their working lives.

“Remember, making your mark on the world is hard,” the President said. You need “to fight for your seat at the table.” Only by doing so will you be able to “earn equal pay for equal work,” and “fully control decisions about your own health.” Somebody told Labor Secretary Hilda Solis that she wasn’t smart enough to go to college, but she didn’t let others hold her down, and you shouldn’t either. There will always be “those who oppose change, those who benefit from an unjust status quo [and] have always bet on the public’s cynicism or the public’s complacency.” [D]on’t accept somebody else’s construction of how things ought to be.”

In their commencement addresses, Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama offered fundamentally different marching orders to those approaching the work of their lives. In their starkest forms, one approach is about internal transformation, the other, external struggle. Think about these differences as you examine the work you have, and the work you want.

In his Journal column, Mr. Renninger found “less tooth and claw” in the Romney speech than in Obama’s. I think it depends on your worldview, and where the animals that need your taming reside.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Building Your Values into Your Work Tagged With: Barack Obama, conscience-in-action, Mitt Romney, purpose- driven work and life, self-definition, value-centered, vocation

Knowing What to Do

January 10, 2012 By David Griesing 5 Comments

Getting your work-life balance right means becoming the person you want to grow into on-the-job, while getting closer to attaining the goals you most want to realize. That’s what changes a job from little more than a paycheck into a vocation, a calling. When you can see the evidence of what you value the most in the work that you do, a deeper sense of happiness and accomplishment comes into your life—maybe for the first time.

Connecting your values to your working life requires a whole new set of decision-making muscles. Above all, it means living with, and acting on, those values that are most important to you before you are faced with truly difficult choices.

People who have never road-tested their values in their own lives usually don’t know what to do when they are confronted with a situation that calls upon them to act in the most basic human ways. It is when a woman has fallen down in front of you and is bleeding on the sidewalk. Do you stop to help?

For too many of us, the choice is to walk around her and then make up an excuse for not acting: I couldn’t stop, I had to get to work, to school, or the gym. I wouldn’t have known what to do if I did stop. Someone else will probably help her. I’d rather not get involved.

There is a name for this kind of paralysis, this not-knowing-what-to-do and its associated excuses. It’s called “the bystander effect.”

There was a gut wrenching demonstration of this dynamic chronicled in the Philadelphia newspapers just before Christmas. What floored me was the realization that I’d heard all of these kinds of excuses before, indeed had heard them over and over again when I was growing up—although the stakes were never as high as they were for the victims of this story.

Bill Conlin, a Hall of Fame baseball writer for one of the City’s papers, was pushed into early retirement a few weeks ago after a chorus of middle-aged women and men (some of them members of his own family) accused him of molesting them when they were as young as seven years old. This kind of abuse, and another prominent individual’s involvement, are now numbingly familiar. But I broke out in a cold sweat when the story started talking about how many people knew what Conlin was doing 30-odd years ago, and their willingness to talk today about what they did and didn’t do with their knowledge at the time.

Those now talking include the kids who were once abused as well as the parents they told about it. As Kelley Blanchet, Conlin’s niece and one of the children he molested, told the reporter: “People have kept this secret. It’s not just the victims, it’s the victims’ families. There were so many people who knew about this and did nothing.”

Well not exactly nothing. The adults generally found their own private solutions.

Kelley’s parents kept her away from her uncle after the abuse, and her father actually confronted Conlin. But when Conlin denied that he had done anything and then started crying, Kelley’s dad found himself first pitying, and then believing him. Taking his word over their daughter’s, Kelley’s parents never alerted the parents of other children who frequented the Conlin house or even other family members about what had happened.

And there were lots of little boys and girls who flocked to Conlin’s house to play with his little boys, Billy and Peter, 30 years ago: like Barbara Healy’s children Kevin and Karen.

When Kevin came home one day complaining about Conlin’s touching him, Barbara told him to stay away from the Conlin house, but not to tell his father (“who had a terrible temper”) about what had happened. However Barbara never stopped her daughter Karen from going over to play with Conlin’s youngest son Peter because “I thought [Conlin] was just interested in boys.”

Years later, Karen and one of her girl friends told her mother that each of them, along with a third girl, had been repeatedly molested by Conlin in his home and elsewhere. Shocked, Barbara Healey picked up the phone and called the mothers of the other two girls. Collectively they agreed that one of their husbands should confront Conlin, but that the other two husbands should never even be told “fearing that in their anger they might harm him.”

This time when Conlin was confronted, he neither admitted nor denied the reported abuse, merely acknowledging that he heard what the father had come to say. These parents didn’t consider calling the police at the time, in part, as they recalled, out of loyalty to Conlin’s wife (“We didn’t want to hurt her,” they said).

Around the same time, another girl also told her parents that Conlin had repeatedly molested her, whereupon her father sought him out and challenged him angrily. “I just remember my mom holding my dad back and the two of them screaming at each other,” she reported. But again, her parents never alerted other parents, and the authorities were never told. Like the others, they chose to mind their own business.

These parents all kept their children away from Conlin after the reported abuse, but never considered the lasting consequences the abuse would have on the children themselves. As they now readily admit, there was a strong desire to just put the unpleasantness “behind us.” As Kelley Blanchet recalls: “no one ever talked about it. No one got therapy. Everyone just went on with their lives” as if nothing had happened.

These parents also never worried (or never worried enough) about the other little children being drawn into Conlin’s orbit to sound a wider alarm. (As I write this, other victims have already come forward.) On the other hand, even though Conlin plainly used his own little boys as bait to lure children like Kelley, Karen and Kevin into his home, their parents recall worrying at the time not only about Conlin himself (and whether certain fathers would hurt him) but also about Conlin’s wife (because she would presumably be either shocked or embarrassed to learn what had been going on).

It is laudable that these parents have come forward today to recount what happened and to express remorse (as many of them have) that they didn’t do more at the time. Unlike classic bystanders, these parents responded—they just didn’t do nearly enough.

What may be fairest to say about them is that they didn’t know what to do in an era when adults were often believed over children, an adult’s feelings were thought to be more important than a child’s, men were often too angry to be of help, and prominent adults (particularly sports figures) were given too much latitude.

But is it being too hard on them to say that these excuses are all unworthy of adults, when it comes right down to it?

What do you think?

Think of how different it might have been if these parents had taken the time beforehand to understand that because, in a sense, your child is every child, no parent can protect only their own children when they are reasonably certain that other unsuspecting children are likely to be violated in the same way.

How different might it have been if these parents had taken the time beforehand to understand the importance of speaking truth to power until the harm that the powerful are causing is stopped, and not merely re-directed?

These aren’t realizations that just “bubble to the surface” when a seven year old is looking up at you through her tears to tell you that someone has just molested her. In the heat of such moments, no one can think straight. You have to have done your thinking beforehand. Then the processing will already have been done, available to be summoned up at those difficult times when it is needed the most.

That’s how you know the right thing to do.

In an extraordinary observation made a couple of months before his own demons came home to roost, Bill Conlin-celebrated sports columnist wrote about the sex abuse scandal then engulfing former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. At the time, Conlin questioned whether those people, who were now saying that they would have intervened if they had witnessed Sandusky’s abuse, would actually have done so.

“Everybody says he will do the right thing, get involved, put his own ass on the line before or after the fact,” wrote Conlin. “But the moment itself has a cruel way of suspending our fearless intentions.” As he wrote these words, he clearly was recalling how the parents of his own victims had done so much less than their moment required.

Evil always depends on good men and women doing nothing, or not nearly enough.

In fact, it’s counting on it.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Building Your Values into Your Work Tagged With: A Calling, bystanders, duty, fully engaged, grounded, moral decision-making, potent, principles, purpose- driven work and life, responsibility, rootless, value awareness, values, visualize, vocation

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