The 5 Stages of Connecting to a Life Calling – Stage 5

By Gina Calvano | Leave a Comment

Stage 5 is Mastery –

In the Mastery stage you feel confident (not necessarily content), with the skills and techniques you’ve developed and you don’t hesitate to offer your expertise to others.

In the Mastery stage you are always listening to others explain their challenges through a filter of what you know so that you can offer your perspective and services as a potential remedy.  You know, that others don’t know, what you know to the degree you know it.  You also know that they don’t need to know everything you know – they just need what they are ready to understand as they face their challenges, get answers to their question, advance their goals, etc.  Understanding what another is ready to absorb to feel satisfied (and not overwhelmed) – that is another sign that you are in the mastery stage of your career development.

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The 5 Stages of Connecting to a Life Calling – Stage 4

By Gina Calvano | Leave a Comment

Stage 4 is the Engage stage.  

Engage is the stage where you get what you do out into the world.  It’s where you pledge or promise to be responsible to regularly serve others the experiences, knowledge, skills and abilities you have acquired.  This can be through paid or volunteer service or just in what you do for others in your day to day life.  There are a few key distinctions to identify with this stage:

1. responsibility to others

2. regularity

3. giving knowledge, expertise and skills that you have acquired (to date)

Being responsible to others means …

…embracing that you make a difference for others.

 

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The 5 Stages of Connecting to a Life Calling – Stage 3

By Gina Calvano | Leave a Comment

In keeping with our blog series on the 5 stages of connecting with a calling, let’s discuss stage 3 – The Prepare stage…

The Prepare stage is where you take responsibility to develop into a professional of the services you decide to provide to others.  Doctors, Lawyers, CPAs and a host of other professions have an exam you must pass in order to practice in these professions.  These exams assure the public that the people performing these jobs acquired the education and knowledgeable necessary to do an effective job for you.  As we know, not every job requires us to attain formal knowledge and skills before we can serve the public.  For most of us, we must take this on ourselves.

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The 5 Stages of Connecting to a Life Calling – Stage 2

By Gina Calvano | Leave a Comment

Continuing in our exploration of the 5 stages of connecting to a sense of calling…

Stage 2 – Alignment

The Alignment stage is where you begin to create congruency in your life.  It’s about putting your thoughts and actions together to ensure your success.  We have all heard the phrase “put your money where your mouth is”.  The Cambridge dictionary defines this phrase to mean “to show by your actions and not just your words that you support or believe in something”.  I couldn’t have said it better myself!

The something that your supporting or believing in is yourself – that vision you discovered about who you are, what you want and what you will give to others and the major, occupation, industry and even leisure activities you decided to pursue because you see that they are a great match to support you in doing what you can easily do for others.  So what’s next is to align your actions – to move towards securing the education or experience you decided to go after.  The 3 best indicators of whether or not you are on track to achieve your goal are:

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1 Thing You Can Do To Prevent Or Recover From Job Burnout

By Gina Calvano | Leave a Comment

I am so excited! Today I sent my first draft of a new ebook I am working on to my editor.  My new book doesn’t yet have a title but it was inspired by blogs that I wrote about factors related to work that can have health implications – so earlier this year I began writing about job burnout.  So my new ebook is about things we unwittingly do that can increase our risk for experiencing job burnout.

This ebook is not about what employers do or can do to help employees recover from job burnout – it’s about what YOU can do to help yourself – to become more aware of subtle behaviors that may diminish your connection with your work and with your confidence to give what you can do for others as fully as you can give it.  This ebook can help you to to understand these subtle behaviors and ways of thinking and therefore nip them in the bud.  It will also offer tips about how you can reduce your risk for experiencing job burnout or to cope with and recover from it if you think you are already experiencing it.

If you think you are burned out, the first and most important thing to do is to consult with a medical professional.  You want to be sure that any serious, physical health threats are under control.

In the meantime, I’d like to give you all a sneak peak into the #1 thing you can do to recover from or safeguard yourself from job burnout…

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The 5 Stages of Connecting to a Life Calling – Stage 1

By Gina Calvano | Leave a Comment

At indigoforce, we believe that everyone will encounter 5 stages in their life-long journey to connect to a sense of working from a life calling.  Over the next several weeks, I will discuss each of the 5 stages.  I’m sure you will relate to being at each of these stages at some time in your life – especially stage 1.

Stage 1 – Discovery

The Discovery stage is where you first notice that you are unsatisfied with your work or your life.  You may begin to question how you’re being utilized and judged for your contributions.  You might project your feelings of being unfulfilled externally – such as onto a boss (“My boss is so unfair, incompetent, uncaring, lazy, unethical, unapproachable, has no clue what it takes to get things done, … fill in the blank.”), or onto your work environment (“This place sucks, is a mess, does things backwards, is so political, is so fill in the blank.”), or onto your actual work (“I hate this job.”  “This is a thankless job.”  “This job is beneath me.”  “A monkey could do this job.”).

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How to have a great week at work – even if things aren’t quite going your way.

By Gina Calvano | Leave a Comment

Do you feel that things just aren’t “going your way” at work?

If you are in a pattern (at least once a week) of coming home from work and then talking about all the bad things that happened that day with some innocent and gracious soul who loves you enough to listen to you – then you just may be in a rut of seeing things as “not going your way”.

“Not going your way” may also look like the following:

  • you don’t think you’re paid enough
  • you’re not getting the results you want from the people around you
  • you’re not getting the credit you think you deserve
  • you’re not getting the “sexy” projects
  • you think you work too many hours
  • you don’t have enough happy customers

Instead of accepting any of these scenarios as evidence that things are in fact “not going your way”, could it instead be an opportunity to…

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One Simple Way To Align With The 26% of Engaged Workers In The US

By Gina Calvano | Leave a Comment

By now you may have heard that there was a recent Gallup study that revealed that more than 70% of workers are disengaged in US companies.  Amazing – right?  But if you work in America, you may not find it surprising at all.  In fact, you might even relate.

The report shows that feedback, recognition and friendship are among the drivers that can help employees engage.  Is it any surprise that what these 3 things have in common is  they provide possible “evidence” that our unique contributions have a positive impact for others.  Of course feedback may include the negatives as well as the positives, but more and more evidence is tilting the scales in favor of focus on strengths vs. weaknesses – and employers are responding to this perspective.

You can read the full report here.

As a former head of HR and an HR professional for 20 years I have noticed for years that a commonality among engaged, valued employees is that they have a internal sense of confidence that what they offer to others has a positive impact.  Beyond a confidence of what they can do, they also have an innate interest in giving their best to others – no matter what they are up against, with or without a dangling “carrot” promising a company reward.

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How to have it all – NOW!

By Gina Calvano | Leave a Comment

I would often read and hear professionals of universal laws or transformational thinking say “the second you decide to have anything, you already have it”.  This concept always confused me.  It wasn’t until a few years ago that I really began to understand and live the logic behind this concept.  This concept matters greatly in shifting your energy and it can often be the catalyst between truly feeling good about a situation we are in and “faking it” (although I do believe “faking it” has its merits and it is a path to achievement – but that is another story for another day).

Since I love process, let’s first take a look at 4 vital steps in the process of becoming present to already having what we decide to have (even before it is actually materialized in our hot little hands).

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Purpose vs. Calling – What’s the difference?

By Gina Calvano | 14 Comments

People often ask me the difference between a “purpose” and a ”calling”.

The dictionary defines “purpose” as:  something set up as an object or end to be attained; a subject under discussion; an action in course of execution; by intent

and

“calling” as:  a strong inner impulse toward a particular course of action especially when accompanied by conviction of divine influence; the vocation or profession in which one customarily engages

In the context of career, we can think of a purpose as an intentional act to attain a common end.  In my experience, that act, that common end we all share is to serve others.  We can think of a calling as a unique contribution (service) we each are passionate to contribute to others.

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