Senior Life Rejuvenation and Generativity

John Schuster, author of Answering Your Call: A Guide for Living Your Deepest Purpose (2003), is an executive coach, trainer, and speaker with a lifetime of learning and experience devoted to helping people achieve their best and become fulfilled. 

Schuster explains how successful people negotiate their lives and careers in the pursuit of their "calling," and why that pursuit, conducted in a mindful manner, yields meaningful long-term results. For purposes of this learnership discussion, six topics have been created within which a few of Schuster’s developmental recommendations are summarized and presented for reflection in the following section.
 
1. Recognize Your Calling – A call is an influential awareness, part intellectual and part emotional, that motivates us to go beyond the surface level of an issue or topic in order to accomplish something of lasting purpose. A call may be heard as an inner voice, visually recognized as a mental picture, or a learning experience that commands our attention and stimulates us to action. Open-minded, lifelong learners experience many more calls due to their diversity of experience, accumulated knowledge, and interpersonal contacts. Calls are particularly notable as influencing factors affecting peoples’ mid-life and/or career transitions and personal crises. Schuster says: "Calls command that you attach yourself to something infinite and lasting so you can escape the life you thought you deserved and replace it with the life you were meant for." (p.14)

2. Outlast Your Saboteurs – Saboteurs are those occasional people you meet and need to work with whose self-importance and need for authority and control cause them to overlook, dismiss, ridicule or steal your ideas, contributions, and value. Saboteurs have narrow visions of others, withhold support and encouragement, and see the world as a small place dominated by competitive practices. The antidote is to acknowledge your situation; network and connect with open-minded and collaborative colleagues; develop greater tolerance by understanding the others’ limitations and stop exposing your weaknesses to them; build courage and endurance as you pull away from their influence; and commit to benefiting others with your newfound insight concerning saboteurs. (pp.61-70)

3. Hear Your Evocateurs – Evocateurs evoke out of other people and their circumstances the skills, gifts, and potential they did not know they had. They understand the innate human longing to be more than we are, and help motivate us in ways that build direction and confidence. Evocateurs see more than others see in us and share their insights as "teachable moments" from which we can draw knowledge and energy. They work on the level of personal "identity" in that they coach us to understand our purpose and abilities so we can grow into an identity of our choosing. (pp.76-84)

4. Become a Provocateur – Provocateurs recognize unfairness, injustice, or other situations that restrain human growth and development, and they speak out in ways to draw attention to these matters. Sometimes they provoke others into action, sometimes they lead the action as provocateurs themselves, but always they work within the larger social system to create significant change for the betterment of humankind. To be successful requires a commitment to long-run, sometimes subtle activism because important change is often incremental. A compelling future vision, a sense of humor, a willingness for controversy, and a strong circle of likeminded friends helps maintain the energy and commitment for long-term change. (pp.97-102)

5. Constrain Your Ego – Our personality is the outer shell for our "egos" and "selves." Self may be understood as our higher will or essence striving for authenticity and meaning – the transcendent part of our connection to others and the universe. The ego is the operative part of our self in action, it is what we show to others as we create roles for ourselves and go about making life work for us. Schuster says: "Even the best-inclined egos pose challenges and can taint even our most noble thoughts with their own concerns." We must be alert for our ego’s tendency toward dominance, and work to temper its potentially negative impact. (pp.112-114)

6. Pursue Your Purpose – "Answering a series of calls over our lifetimes will sanctify our lives and exalt our existence. A life is to be lived, a job is to be worked, a role is to be fulfilled. But a calling is something to become worthy of, to make a commitment to, to go on an extended journey for. A calling is like the bugle sound at a great coronation – the Notes ring out above the crowd and draw our attention to the highest of intentions and human possibilities." (pp.138-139)

Everyone can expect a "call" to occur a number of times in our lives. If we are alert to our own emerging capabilities within the context of our life and career interests and experiences we will have opportunity and choice. Being open to change and prepared for action are keys to our success.