John P Schuster - Answering Your Call: A Guide for Living Your Deepest Purpose

A GOOD NUMBER of profound life guides and competent mentors have made themselves available to me in my life. As long as I can remember, I have been motivated to do good and live a meaningful life. Yet I often missed the signals of my calling. I dallied when I should have sprung forward; I lurched ahead when I should have delayed. I went for worldly goals and titles when I should have retreated from things material; I swore off worldly things when it was time to accept and use them.

I enjoyed a happy childhood with loving parents and only the usual traumas to endure. One of the worlds great religions and its heritage absorbed me, giving me rituals to mark the passages of my life from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. I was afforded a well-balanced education in private schools with dedicated teachers setting high standards and taking the time to give me individual attention. I inherited the privileges of my culture. I am white, male, from a stable middle-class family and was bright enough to make the most of those educational opportunities, graduating from university summa cum laude and going on for my M.A. Many of my athletic coaches brought out the best in my team play and built my confidence for achieving difficult goals. My siblings were loving and attentive, and my extended family was a place of joy and acceptance for my life and the place it held in the loose clan of Schusters and Cunninghams that we remain to this day.

But in spite of these gifts and resources, a steady stream of available knowledge, and even wisdom, I blew it on numerous occasions. I did not always heed my calling. At times, life called me and I either refused to hear or created my own false signals so I could avoid the real choices and make more convenient ones. I muted the call entirely on occasion, or having heard it, responded from my ego needs and delusions and their hold on my life.

In my midtwenties, I escaped for a year into an intentional community that, when it was at its worst, played on fear, grandiosity, and apocalyptic views of the world, which made it a cult. Later on, for several years, I avoided telling the truth to myself about a failed marriage as routines, mutual fear, and two wonderful sons kept us bound together. I betrayed the marriage and myself in a series of questionable choices. In my thirties, though called to significant work, I gave seminars about time management and building prioritized to-do lists when the world needed deeper answers to far bigger questions about life and work contributions. In my forties, I refused to see the truth about my relationship with a business partner, colluded in a partial dysfunction for years, and ended this flawed relationship with legal moves because it was too late for the truth to be of any help.

Through it all, life has been rich and I have been blessed. I have given every day my best shot to stay heads-up and alert. I have tapped all the resources I was lucky enough to inherit and sought out more. I have read heaps of self-help and spiritual and leadership books, and gone to more than my share of seminars, workshops, and conventions. Through almost all of these years I have kept a journal, prayed, and meditated. I have thought about the meaning of life continually. I have taken occasional retreats to monasteries.

I have stayed true to my duties in the world and have been largely trustworthy, and when I havent been, I have cleaned up after my messes. I have remained a devoted dad while living six hundred miles away from my two sons. My second marriage partner helps me stay on my path through her accumulated wisdom and love. The business I have created has allowed me considerable travel around the world, ample income, and most importantly, a sense of some contribution in a world that is in much need of better approaches to living our potential as individuals and organizations. I have become devoted to leadership development and increasing social capital inside enterprises and between them in communities. On many occasions I have been called to add value for an enterprise or support leaders in their work, and have done the job in front of me.

I have marched and stumbled ahead in a life of work and fun and sadness, health and joy and sorrow, love and support and conflict, learning and study and illusions. I have kept moving, two steps forward, one step back, always with the intention of pursuing my destiny and hoping I am listening to my life through the best parts of my self, religion, family, and what is true in society. Once I got the insights that a call was providing (although sometimes it was more like an order with no insights attached), I tried to respond to the call as intelligently as I could with enough courage to do what needed to be done.