Leadership Is Connection To Vocation And Community

Sometimes, knowing the way forward is easy.

I recently heard a politician taking the time to publicly explain the difference between what he was doing and what the Nazis did. Feeling the need to do that is a pretty solid sign you're going down the wrong road.

But often, we're faced with decisions in our life and work that are not obviously good and bad. They're not always easily ranked or sorted. In fact, reasonable people could make strong arguments for any of the options.

This tension becomes even more acute when you're trying to pursue integrity between your values and practices in life and work. What then?

One of the challenges of excitement for your vocation, is that over time it can be difficult to remain centered in the work that is at its heart. When you feel that you've found a calling or deep sense of purpose in what you do, it can be difficult to stay true to your heart's work as ideas become projects that demand flexibility and layers of detail. 

As your core sense of vocation (I like Parker Palmer's definition of vocation as the thing you cannot, not do) has layers of interpretation necessarily added to it, you can lose sight of the clarity you once felt.

My sense of vocation could be described at its core to be "walking with people as they find clarity and courage for the work of social justice". When I write that, it feels very clear. But as I try to turn that into practices or even a job description, it can become muddied. So how do we find clarity that lasts through the messiness of life and work?

For me, their are two basic things I turn to: reflection exercises and my community of fellow practitioners.

Reflection exercises are exactly what they sound like. They're simple sets of questions that I use to draw lines from my deepest set of values to the daily practices that feel like an expression of integrity. I like to write down 3 - 5 values that feel really important now, and that I would say felt really important six months ago, too. 

Then, if I can, I try to write my vocation in simple terms like I did above. After I have those written, I usually draw a rectangle around them (cause I'm slightly OCD) and then write the first question that comes to mind about the clarity I'm seeking. Sometimes it turns into a pro's/con's list, but more often it turns into a running list of questions and answers.

For instance, I might write:

Mutuality, Inclusivity, Vulnerability, Empowerment, Sustainability

"walking with people as they find clarity and courage for the work of social justice"

How do I build programming for LBL that feels true to my own skills and passions but is also bigger than me?

Then I would write whatever comes to mind. If I have a response, I write it, try not to judge it, and then pose another question to it. This process is totally flexible to what I need that day. If it provides immediate clarity, that's great. But often, it doesn't. Often it does help get the back and forth out of my head and allow some peace in the moment. And, at the very least, I have some deeper sense of what I'm wrestling with, which allows some movement, too.

That brings me to part two of finding clarity in how to live out my vocation - my community of practitioners.

Just today I reached out to one of my longtime friends who has a long history with me and understands what LBL is trying to be about. I had been processing some muddiness I had been experiencing about some of our future programming, and needed some perspective.

She did just the right thing. She listened as I laid out the tensions I was feeling without trying to correct me or steer me. She offered words of encouragement, told me to calm down [literally, she said it :)], and affirmed what I had been sensing was the right decision. 

I want to emphasize that I'm in a good place after all this because I did both. I reflected on my own by looking back to my sense of vocation and core values while taking the time to actually write down my thoughts, AND, I reached out to my community of practitioners who could offer perspective from their own experience and words of love and support.

Without my returning to my sense of vocation, I may have chased advice that would separate me from my own wisdom. Without turning to my community of practitioners, I may have been stuck in a circle of self-doubt and shame for my confusion.

Instead, I feel grounded in my decisions, and have a sense of personal integrity and community connectedness. These are feelings from which I can already tell my work will benefit tomorrow. 

Transformative community leadership (TCL) is not about possessing a special talent that no one else can access. It's not about having more insight or influence than others. And it's certainly not about having power over others.

TCL is about being a leader among leaders. It's about stepping out, with a sense of personal and collective purpose and connection to your community, to initiate the work of creating and protecting dignity and wellbeing. It's about finding our power with one another and for one another. And it's about doing it from energy that is grounded in our own, shared dignity and wellbeing. One does not proceed from the other, they exist together or not at all.

To find our integrity between these ideals and our personal sense of vocation takes intentionality. Leadership, as a leader among leaders, is connection to vocation and community.

How are you connected to a community of practitioners? What practices can you initiate to ground your thinking in your most closely held values and sense of vocation?