Explore Your Vocation To complement the search for your calling and vocation, order the one hour audiotape "Find your Calling: Explore Your Vocation" in our on-line catalog. The tape includes exercises, examples and detailed explanations of the questions, which follow here, in order to help you live your life with more satisfaction and the fulfillment, which comes from making a contribution. The search for your calling or vocation (different from an occupation, which has more to do with earning money or satisfying one's ego) involves asking three sets of questions outlined below. Set A will help you explore the uniqueness of your gifts, skills or talents. Set B will help you brainstorm about what changes you can institute with relative ease in order to work in a more satisfying way. Set C will take the quest for your calling to the next level by identifying what constitutes a vocation: gifts, joy, discipline, and needs. (Questions #1 and 4 in Set A are similar to questions #1 and 2 in Set C)

Remember there are no right or wrong answers. While it is good to be realistic in your assessment of yourself, this is still a completely subjective questionnaire geared to clarify your perceptions and thinking.

Feel free to download this page and use as much space as you need to answer the questions. (This document is copyrighted, but you do have the authorization to download it for your personal use only. You are not authorized to alter, make multiple copies or use it for any other educational or commercial purposes or in any other way.)

Set A: Evaluate the quality and range of your gifts, talents and abilities. These can be inborn, innate gifts or abilities acquired and learned during one's life.

Level 1: Identify areas (skills/talents/gifts) at which you excel, are better than most people or are much above average:

 

 
Level 2: Identify areas (skills/talents/gifts) which you are good at. While you are somewhat above average, still many other people are as good as you in these areas:

 

 
Level 3: Identify areas in which you are average or below and many people are more talented or more effective than you:

 

 
Level 4: Identify areas in which you are pretty lousy and much below average:

 

 
Evaluate the percentage of time that you spend at each level in your life at the present time:

Level: 1       2       3       4

%:

 

Set B: Take some time to figure out how you can make changes so that you spend more time and energy at the higher levels and as little as possible at the lower ones. While spending some time even at level #4 is inevitable in most situations, spending most of your life at level #4 can breed in one deep dissatisfaction, bitterness and a sense of a wasted life. The changes may take the form of transforming how you work or the way you spend your free time or they may require you to reshuffle your priorities or allocate time differently for different aspects of your life. Some changes may even require quitting or changing your job or relocating.

Set C: This set explores the most pertinent questions in regard to calling.

1a: What are you very good at? Identify your gifts, talents and abilities at which you excel. These may be inborn gifts or abilities acquired during your life. (This is a similar question to set A question #1)

 

 
1b. What are you not at all good at? Identify that at which you do not excel and in general are not your gifts. (This is a similar question to Set A question #4)

 

 
2a: What kinds of tasks or activities gives you joy, delight, or pleasure? What do you like to do a lot? It is related to the question of what you would do if you had all the money, time, health, and love you need.

 

 
2b: What kinds of tasks or activities deplete or bore you? What do you hate to do?

 

 
3a: In which areas are you very disciplined? With what type of activities are you consistent and methodical and do not procrastinate or regularly avoid?

 

 
3b: What activities do you regularly avoid, delay or procrastinate doing? In what areas are you not disciplined?

 

 
4a: What, in your opinion, does the world, the region, the state, or your community need? What type of contributions is needed by the world, the environment, people, children or animals in these times?

 

 
4b: What in your opinion, does the world need less of these days?

 

 

To further complement your search for your calling and vocation, you may wish to order the one hour audiotape Find your Calling: Explore Your Vocation in the on-line catalog. The tape includes exercises, examples, definitions and detailed explanations of the above questions in order to help you live your life with greater satisfaction arising out of making a contribution.

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