Great Work (Part 1): Finding Your Great Work

By Darcy Hitchcock

This is the first in three part series called GREAT WORK: 12 Principles for Your Work Life and Life's Work.

Part 1: Find you Great Work shows you how to find your calling in life, your unique life's purpose: work that will feed your soul, use your gifts/talents and make a real difference in the world. Includes 6 powerful exercises to help you find your Great Work.

About the Author: Award-winning sustainability and management consultant, author and speaker.

Audience: Anyone who is still trying to figure out what they were put on the planet to do, or managers/counselors who guide others to find their 'right path.'

NOTE: Parts 2 and 3 sold as separate ebooks.

Part 2: Design organizations for Great Work covers principles around ethics, purpose, empowerment, etc.

Part 3: Leading others to Great Work covers team and organizational practices that foster job satisfaction and productivity.

(The entire collection is available as a print book on Lulu.com.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329000520

Book preview

Great Work (Part 1): Finding Your Great Work

Great Work (Part 1):

Finding your Great Work

By Darcy Hitchcock

Copyright

© Copyright 2015 Darcy Hitchcock. All rights reserved.

This is an excerpt from GREAT WORK: 12 Principles for Your Work Life and Life’s Work

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2015

ISBN: 978-1-329-00052-0

Dragonfly Publishing

Sedona, Arizona 86351

www.DarcyHitchcock.wordpress.com

www.HowTheWorldCouldBe.blogspot.com

Current work: www.SustainabilityAllianceAZ.blogspot.com

Former business: www.AXISPerformanceAdvisors.wordpress.com

Cover Image: Lush Life © Copyright 2011 Cheryl Waale.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to dedicate this book to Marsha Willard, my former business partner and dear friend, without whose support I wouldn’t have had many of these experiences. I’m also grateful to all my clients, colleagues and former team members who helped me hone these ideas.

In particular, I’d like to thank Hannah Gant, Bruce Hazen and Rosemary Anderson for their input on early drafts and Cheryl Waale for letting me use her painting as the basis of the cover.

Unless otherwise footnoted, quotations are from BrainyQuotes.com.

Introduction

How many people do you know who…

…love what they do,

…think their boss and coworkers are great,

…believe they are making a meaningful difference

in the world and

…feel like they are they are deeply valued for their talents?

Not too many?

What a waste! A waste of time, of life’s energy, of talent, and of missed opportunities to solve the problems of the world. We spend most of our life on this earth working—whether in a paid position or not. Unfortunately:

Many people struggle to discover their GREAT WORK, their calling or life’s work that brings meaning and joy to their life.

Many people work in organizations that haven’t been designed for GREAT WORK. Instead, they are soul-sapping and disempowering.

Many people work under managers who don’t know how to lead people to GREAT WORK.

GREAT WORK is

where you love what you do and

are making a meaningful difference in the world,

while your organization is designed and managed

to support these two goals.

This book is organized around 12 principles you can use to guide your life and your workplace. Don’t waste another minute of your life doing soul-sapping work!

What do you want to do with your life?

It’s a shame that some people haven’t found their calling, that special fit between who they are, what they care about and what the world needs.

Too often, working is soul-sapping, not soul-giving. Sometimes, people take jobs just for the money and find that it depletes their energy for life. I’ve had a job, a career and a calling and they are all quite different. When I had a job, I wanted to minimize the amount of energy I expended there so I could go home and live my life. What a waste of 8+ hours a day.

Then I had a career. I had a sense of where I was going and was using some of my skills. But still there was a big gap between some of my values and the industries I worked for. I was a divided-self.

Then I got a calling and suddenly my life, almost the entirety of it made sense. I was working on issues I cared deeply about and my skills and gifts were a unique asset to carrying out that mission. It felt as if everything I was—my values, my passions, my skills, my interests—wove together into a rope that drew me forward.

Part 1: Find Your GREAT WORK should help you find your calling.  In Chapter 1, I’ll review the research on happiness and give you a way to examine your interests and skills so you can reach out to others who may be able to help you find a way to contribute. In Chapter 2, we’ll examine how you can to make a real difference in the world.

Why are many organizations soul-sapping instead of soul-giving?

Too often,