What makes a job a calling?

Increase your creative capacity with cross-training and flow states

Life is full of Boosters and Zappers. Boosters inject your life with energy, purpose, clarity, and joy. Zappers drain your life with dread, anxiety, stress, and burnout. If you are clear about what your Boosters are and diligently follow them like they’re your favorite Instagram influencer, the faster you will learn and the more effective and fulfilling your work will become.

The problem is, our brains love to trick us. We can very easily end up mummifying ourselves into a life that is so out of alignment with what we truly want by trapping ourselves with “shoulds” and rationalizations. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we’re constantly navigating between deliberate strategies and unanticipated new options, with “shoulds” lording over us like Netflix “skip intro” buttons.

If we’re unclear about our values and don’t take the time to intimately understand ourselves, it becomes frighteningly easy to end up on autopilot, like a couch potato that accidentally binged the entire season of Stranger Things in 24 hours. You could either remain stuck in a poorly chosen deliberate path or fall prey to following whatever new options arise without a strategy.

The trick is to remain fluid and open to what arises while staying true to your unique strengths and values. Easier said than done, of course. But the path exists so long as you choose wisely every day, for each small choice takes you either closer to your calling or further from it.

Choose what brings you joy.

Choose what makes you lose sense of time.

Choose what feels effortless and meaningful.

Choose what is your truth.

Choose yourself.

Read on for the science, exercises, and tools that will help you access your flow state, practice creative cross-training, and choose yourself in the face of seductive cash-outs, short-cuts, and ego lures.

Flow States Come From Engaging Your Strengths

According to Chase Jarvis in Creative Calling, Boosters of creativity are habits that feed and nurture our creative capacity. To expand upon this, let’s define Boosters as not just habits but pretty much anything that you do or encounter in your life that energizes and inspires you.

As you’ve probably personally experienced, after a certain threshold of income, each extra bonus or promotion won’t meaningfully provide additional fulfillment or meaning to your life. This is where many of us end up stuck and confused. You’ve hit your goal of having a multi-six or seven figure career. You’ve got the spouse and the house. You’ve achieved the status you’ve always wanted. And you’re still not feeling how you thought you would feel. F*ck.

Chances are, you haven’t clearly identified what your Creative Boosters and Signature Strengths are. Research by psychologist Dr. Seligman found that people’s happiness scores increased and depressive symptoms decreased when they used their unique strengths in new ways every day. Doing so helped to minimize hedonic adaptation, a psychological tendency that we have as humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness no matter if we had a major positive or negative event in our life.

We experience true, authentic enjoyment and happiness when we are activating our strengths. Using our strengths is what allow us to unlock a flow state: feeling challenged and competent, experiencing strong, focused concentration, losing your sense of self-consciousness and time, and tapping into a feeling of serenity. Sounds blissful right?

Well, good news. You can access this state if you take the time to understand your signature strengths and design a life that engages them. Take this free Yale-endorsed VIA Strengths Building Survey to get a customized report of your personal strengths.

Do you use your character strengths at work? Which ones? How many? How satisified are you (really) with your job? Do you lose track of time? (In a positive way, not in a had back-to-back-meetings-and-feel-burnt-out way). When you use your strengths, you experience more positive emotions, which in turn makes you more productive, which ultimately makes you more successful.

Sure, you could just brute force your soul into working hard and achieve results. But why wouldn’t you rather let the force be with you, find a jetstream, and let effortless dedication drive your results?

In a study done by Hauser and Rouch, they found that if we have the courage to invest our time in doing what activates at least four of our signature strengths, we are more likely to be living out our true calling. When you’re living your calling, it becomes part of your identity and provides meaning — in a positive way. By finding ways to use multiple of your signature strengths at once, you are essentially living your calling because you will be activating a flow state.

Creative Cross-Training Leads To Greater Creative Capacity, Higher Creative Fitness

There’s a lot of merit to focus. Focus helps sharpen specific skills. Focus helps you go further in one direction. Focus helps you become a master of one domain. To become an Olympic level skater, focusing on skating is critical, but athletes engage in a variety of physical activities as well beyond just one sport. Similarly, by training your creative muscles in different ways, you strengthen your overall creative fitness and increase your open mindedness.

Cross-training keeps you supple, flexible, adaptable, and inspired. Try to engage in alternative creative activities as frequently as possible, knowing that the act of doing itself is what will help unlock new ideas and insights. If you’re a photographer, try to learn a new dance routine. If you’re a writer, give it a go at shooting a video. If you’re a cook, experiment with learning how to code. Cross-pollination is powerful. In creative cross-training, the point is not to be good, the point is to activate new and different muscles in your mind.

In How Will You Measure Your Life?, Clay Christensen discusses the important of fluidity in navigating between what he deems “emergent” and “deliberate” strategies of life:

“As you go through your career, you will begin to find the areas of work you love and in which you will shine. But it’s rarely a case of sitting in an ivory tower and thinking through the problem until the answer pops into your head. Strategy almost always emerges from a combination of deliberate and unanticipated opportunities. What’s important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off. When you find out what really works for you, then it’s time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one. How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward.” -Clay Christensen

Creative cross-training helps keep you open to the unanticipated by helping you see beyond the scope of what you had pigeon holed yourself into in your mind. Continue to focus on what you’ve found to be your flow state and leave space in your life to remain curious about what might be a pleasant and exciting surprise out of left field.

“Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” — Albert Einstein

The hard-working neurons in your mind are receiving and transmitting signals along neural pathways. As Harvard professor of psychiatry John Ratey writes in A User’s Guide to the Brain, many of these pathways can be sparked and established through learning new things that force your brain out of its own neural pathway rut. Spend at least as much time nurturing your neuroplasticity as you would your social media following by engaging in new creative activities every week.

You Doing You Is The Only Truth In This World

Stop hiding. Seriously. In the long-run, it takes way more energy to hide from yourself than it does to be courageous and own your truth. In the beginning, standing out and being truly yourself feels tremendously risky. You’re opening up your thoughts, your identity, your personal truth to the judgment of others.

What if you’re ridiculed? What if people think you’re a loser? What if your friends decide they don’t want to be your friend anymore? Good.

That means you’ve exercised your courage and commitment to yourself instead of to a house of cards built on false identities and other people’s perceptions. Even if you are courageous and committed, most of us have spent so long hiding from ourselves that we no longer even remember who our authentic selves truly are. We’ve spent too long playing the role of “Successful C-Level Executive Who Takes Tropical Vacations” or “Brilliant Creative Who Never Smiles In Photos But Wears Fresh Kicks”.

Find whatever labels you’ve associated with yourself that make you feel like a mummy and burn them. (Literally — if you’re feeling super committed.) Because labels don’t own you, only you truly define who you are and what matters. And you can change it at any time. To rediscover your authentic self, think back on what made you unique or weird as a kid. Was it that you couldn’t stop throwing garage sales? Or maybe you’d end up losing yourself in making music for hours.

For me, I was an incorrigible book worm and writer. I couldn’t stop reading. I was addicted to stories and ideas, consuming them at record rates (yes I won book reading contests in elementary school) and then remixing what I read in my writing (yes I won essay writing contests too). Words are like little bits of magic to me, dancing around on a page just waiting to take someone into a whole new world. So, what was it for you? Start there.

When people talk about “following your intuition” or “knowing in your gut”, really what that boils down to is being honest with yourself. Break out of the dusty ol’ mummy sarcophagus you’re in! Feel, experience, and get to know what truly fulfills you by experimenting and reflecting on your personal truths. We spend so much time doing in-depth analyses about business and politics, and such little time doing in-depth analyses about ourselves.

In the Growth Toolkit, I include a section dedicated to helping the many people I work with that feel stuck at a crossroads and unsure of where to go next or which path to dedicate themselves to. Your mind needs to not just know what is important, but why it’s important to you. And what it’s giving up or what the consequences are if you don’t do what’s important to you. This clarity can only come from thorough, in-depth reflection. This understanding will then translate into effective action. Start with the worksheets in the Toolkit, and soon you’ll be on your way.

Living Your Calling

Aligning your strengths with your work, practicing creative cross-training to remain open to possibilities, and choosing your truth over and over again is ultimately what will help you live in flow. Will it be easy? No. But it will be effortless.

Here, I will leave you with a beautiful poem:

If I had my life to live over again,

I’d dare to make more mistakes next time.

I’d relax.

I’d limber up.

I would take fewer things seriously.

I would take more chances,I would eat more ice cream and less beans.

I would, perhaps, have more actual troubles but fewer imaginary ones.

You see, I’m one of those people who was sensible and sane, hour after hour, day after day.

Oh, I’ve had my moments.

If I had to do it over again, I’d have more of them.

In fact, I’d try to have nothing else — just moments,one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day.

I’ve been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot-water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute.

If I could do it again, I would travel lighter than I have.

If I had to live my life over,I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall.

I would go to more dances,

I would ride more merry-go-rounds,

I would pick more daisies.

- Nadine Stair, 85 years old

Feeling ready to commit to living your calling and need some help? Let’s chat at hello@victoria-young.com. Choose yourself, starting today.