Gregg Levoy, author of Callings

The Interview

Dr. Paul Dyer: For this Author’s Corner I am talking to Gregg Levoy, author of Callings and I’m very excited about talking to Greg. This book I found personally meaningful and I found it to be incredibly insightful. And so, I am delighted to hear what Gregg has to say about this very important topic. Gregg, thank you for spending some time with us.

Gregg Levoy: My pleasure.

Dr. Paul Dyer: I’m very excited, as I said. I’m really interested in asking you as a journalist, this is is your background, how is it that you were drawn to the topic of finding your calling?

Gregg Levoy: Right. I, years ago, ran across an Italian writer by the name of Alberto Moravia, who said something very interesting. He said, he thought it was important in life to pursue the one problem you were born to understand. And when I read that I thought, “This is one of mine.” This has been a lifelong fascination about how people create a life that actually belongs to them and isn’t a knockoff. That really has some passion, some power, a sense of purpose to it. And maybe it traces back to growing up in a family where neither one of my parents did what they wanted to do with their lives.

Dr. Paul Dyer: There is a lot that has been written about this idea of callings, but what is it? How would you define, if, you know, people say, “I’m looking for my calling.” What is that?

Gregg Levoy: Yeah. Now I’m defining this very broadly, secularly, pluralistically...The urgings, the promptings, that come from deep inside our life. They tell us what it’s going to take to stay true to True North. Alright? So, dreams, they come from a lot of different channels… symptoms, intuitions, passions, books that mysteriously make their way onto your night table, the way events unfold, the language of the body. Callings I think come in a lot of different forms. And my bias is to encourage people not to be looking up there for the burning bushes and chariots streaking across the sky approach to following callings, so much as the scrawny cries approach. You know what I’m saying? I’m thinking of a poem by Wallace Stevens. He says, “I don’t ask for the full ringing of the bell. I don’t ask for a clap of thunder. A scrawny cry will do.” And that to me is where the discernment arts really come in, is looking for the subtle clues, the ones that are right here in your own backyard.

Dr. Paul Dyer: Yeah, that’s very interesting. Say more about the discernment arts. It’s a very interesting phrase. What is that?

Gregg Levoy: Well it’s the work, I think, of figuring out what your life is calling for…for you. And I think it’s really just in the small steps approach… is to just turn on the receiver, just for starters, turn on the receiver. Which is a high art in itself for some people. This requires that you are willing to hear what you hear when you turn on the receiver. And I think at some level, people know that if they turn on the receiver and begin to listen to what their life is really calling for, from them, it’s going to short them out…it’s going to frighten them…Because at some level I think that people have an intuition about what their calls are.

Dr. Paul Dyer: Do you think everyone has a calling?

Gregg Levoy: Many, in my opinion. My take is, there are work-related calls, but there’s also lifestyle calls, service calls, moral calls, relationship calls, spiritual calls. The ones you got when you were twenty. Aren’t they really different than the ones you’re getting at fifty…different than the ones we get at seventy? You know, there’s a developmental aspect. So, I think, (in multiples, I think in multiples) when it comes to callings. There’s not just one. There are many of them and there are momentary calls of, and intuition, of whether to pick up the phone when it rings or not, whether to make a left or a right here at the corner. You know what I’m saying? Whether to say “yes” or “no” to an offer.

Dr. Paul Dyer: Learning to listen to our dreams… I’d like to ask you to share a bit more about that in a moment… the idea of (keeping) a dream journal, that I believe you’ve brought up. Or the idea of capturing your dreams and writing them down, and then sort of asking, “What am I being taught here?” I also would really appreciate if you would spend just a moment talking about pilgrimaging. Making pilgrimages.

Gregg Levoy: Yeah, I think there’s lots of ways of knowing and to the degree of what we’re after and ascertaining, passions and a sense of purpose and calls… is about needing to know something. There’s lots of ways of knowing. If you are one of those people who has good dream recall and you’re inclined that way...I would say keep a dream log by the bed. But practices such a journaling, if that’s more your style, going on retreats, like you did, if that’s your style. There’s lots of ways of knowing. There’s intuitive skills, there’s contemplative reading, like Joseph Campbell, you mentioned him…he locked himself in a cabin for five years and did nothing but read for five years. So, there’s lots of ways of knowing. And I just think it’s about finding the one that really speaks to you. Some people, their way of knowing happens best in a group… who’s members get together to wake up in some fashion…so they join a men’s group, or a women’s group, or a spiritual group, or a twelve step group… you know, any group whose members are looking for awakening. For some people, that’s their style but any tool that strikes up a dialogue with the deep self, is really what I’m suggesting people do. Any kind of practice like that.

Dr. Paul Dyer: Would you say something about, I know you have a viewpoint around the power of dialogue between people for discovery of their calling and…can you say some more about that?

Gregg Levoy: I think that you alone are called. But that doesn’t mean that you have to do it all by yourself and I’m a really big believer in drawing on the power of community to help discern what your calls are. This is why I borrowed the Quaker tradition of the “Clearness Committees.” (It’s a ) group of people you pull together…maybe ten people…to help clarify…and this is the whole purpose of the “Clearness Committee,” to clarify a person’s calling. So, you get in the middle and you explain to people, “This is what I need clarity about.” And then all people do for an hour or two is ask you questions. No advice, no storytelling, no “let me tell you about the time this happened to me”, no fixing, no problem solving, and no devil’s advocacy questions. Questions only in the service of evoking what people already know, you know. So I think this is…this isn’t even really dialogue in the traditional sense, but the power of asking questions and putting yourself in the position. Another way to draw on community is brainstorming, right? You tell people what you need lots of ideas on, and a group just brainstorms and all you do is write. All you do is receive…but not to do it all by yourself.

Dr. Paul Dyer: Let me throw out a hypothesis and you respond. The hypothesis is this: that all callings are meant to serve the community and to serve others…even in ways that you might not understand. And that when you act upon, surrender to, execute, move toward that calling…you’ll find a lot of happiness in that. But that’s not what is was about originally. It was about serving that community. What do you think about that notion?

Gregg Levoy: I love that notion. I think that’s a wonderful notion. I did a Callings weekend retreat at a non-profit called Earth Stewards Network in Massachusetts a couple of years ago and I’m standing out in the parking lot on the Friday that this thing begins unpacking my car, and this guy pulls into the parking lot and gets out of his car, and motions me over. (He) tells me that he had taken one of my other workshops (at) some other place a few years before…and he wanted to share with me the Calling that had emerged for him as a result of that prior workshop. And the way he phrased it was, “I’m going to get in my car and start it up… I want you to bend down and smell the exhaust.” Ha, one of the stranger requests I’ve had in my time. And so I bent down and the exhaust that came out of the back of the car smelled, to me, like a McDonalds…like a fast food place. And he explained that he had recently invented a process that could turn used French fry oil into nonpolluting fuel for automobiles, okay? In fact, he was calling it “McFuel.” And he was about to embark on a one-year pilgrimage in that car…driving it around America to drum up media support for this breakthrough.

And now, what went through my mind when he told me this was, first of all, people are amazing…their initiative, their passion, their compassion when they are sufficiently fired up and in line with their calls is remarkable to me, consistently. And the other thing that had struck me was you never know who’s watching. One person, in this case it happened to be me…one person, following my own passion, to teach had a profound effect on another person’s unfolding of another person’s calling in the world…and without the first person even being aware of it. You know what I’m saying? So that’s why I say that just you doing your own good works in the world can have a tremendous impact. And that is service.

Dr. Paul Dyer: If I say no to my calling, what occurs?

Gregg Levoy: Here is my belief about callings: They don’t go away because we ignore them. This is a search party. They aren’t going to retire just because we give up. The longer we ignore them, the more we turn up the volume on them. And they continue, and they continue to come and try to pop into consciousness until the last possible moment of life, I think. So ignore them is not only something I don’t think you can do with impunity, you know? But I think that the calls don’t go away.

Dr. Paul Dyer: But we can ignore them. And say something about how the clock can run out.

Gregg Levoy: Sure. Ah, yes. Sure, you can simply run out of time. Unfortunately, my father was a very good example of that. And late in his life he actually said to me, “When the brass ring comes along in life, kiddo, (Kiddo was only a phrase he used when he was imparting parental advice), when the brass ring comes around in life, Kiddo, you better grab it, cause it may not come around again.” And I understood at that point what he was saying is that he blew it. He was a businessman who should have been a scientist. And he went into the business that my family has been into for a hundred years. And left his science in the laboratory in the basement where it, literally, never saw the light of day for all the time that he was doing it. And he simply ran out of time. So I’ve got a strong role model in the back of my mind that says, “You can run out of time…and then it becomes too late.”

Dr. Paul Dyer: That reminds me of the famous Thoreau quote, “Men live lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with a song still in them.”

Gregg Levoy: Right. Right. That’s really tragic and true.

Dr. Paul Dyer: Very Tragic. So…

Gregg Levoy: He also said, “The massive men live lives of quiet desperation, but it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” That’s the other half of that quote. “It is the characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” Or to get yourself into a position where you’re so terribly desperate.

Dr. Paul Dyer: Now in 1997 you wrote Callings. What have you learned since 1997 that has really added significantly to the understanding of the kinds of issues we are talking about now?

Gregg Levoy: I think more than ever, since I took the book out on the road and became a teacher, really…I have a much deeper appreciation than I have ever had for what people are up against in making it happen… in following calls. I did interview sixty or seventy people for the book. I have lived out my own calls in excruciating detail, you know, and taken copious field notes about what’s involved in it…and in a sense it’s almost academic compared to what I have learned sense the book came out. Actually taking it on the road and hearing so many people’s stories…really working with them…really flying in under the radar and exploring what’s involved in bringing these things to (fruition) and mortal life, and I am deeply humbled compared to when I started. I have a deeper appreciation for what it is I am… and we, with the work that I do in the world, you and I…what we’re asking people to do by following their passions. It is deep, juicy, challenging, in some sense life threatening…you know what I’m saying? Not in a physical sense, but the life to which people have become accustomed is threatened by deeper calls (often).

Dr. Paul Dyer: It is extraordinarily disruptive.

Gregg Levoy: Yes, good word.

Dr. Paul Dyer: And in fact, you can see a great deal of discomfort at times. It’s easier to leave it alone at times, isn’t it?

Gregg Levoy: Yes, in some ways.

Dr. Paul Dyer: Even though it keeps, as you say, it will never go away. It continues to nag and tug at your heart.

Gregg Levoy: Soul, spirit…

Dr. Paul Dyer: But it’s very fearful to look it in the face.

Gregg Levoy: Yes, it is. And it’s fearful to…and this may be one of the reasons (that) people love that Marianne Williamson quote about not hiding your light under a bushel. You know, who are we to hide our power? I think this is one of the reasons that quote speaks to so many people is this notion that we were put here on this earth, in part, to express ourselves as fully as possible. And I think people are terrified of being judged for it, failing at it, being rejected for it. The whole kind of upbringing…the messages a lot of us got from parents, teachers, and ministers, pastors…society at large that says you are rewarded for conformity, you are punished for nonconformity. So sit still, sit up straight, straighten your tie, get to work, be a good boy, be a good girl, behave yourself. So all these forces that constrict our power and our beauty and our love and compassion are constricted. And I think a part of us just wants to blow the top off.

Dr. Paul Dyer: Gregg, I think that’s a very natural question to ask someone to respond…are you walking the walk, the very simple way of saying it. Have you found your calling and what is it like?

Gregg Levoy: What is it like? Well, again, I have multiple calls. So if we’re talking about the work arena, I have absolutely found mine in a sense of finding, and this is…I’m quoting a theologian by the name of Frederick Buechner who said, “The place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.” So where your deep passion and joy intersects with where the world is in need of service. In that sense, I have definitely found my calling as well as a sense of a match between who I am and what I do. You know what I’m saying? This is perfect work for somebody with my personality and my set of skills… to be doing writing and to be doing teaching, to be asking a million questions. I mean... I came from a family that tended to keep a lot of secrets so I majored in communications, right? It’s perfect. I get to pay the rent by asking the questions that no one would answer when I was growing up. So yes, there’s a great match vocationally. I have also answered many lifestyle callings…to move from the city to the country some years back, that was a big one for me, as well as some service calls and a few moral calls. I’m not perfect at it.

Dr. Paul Dyer: How important is this topic?

Gregg Levoy: Of callings? Well, you’re asking me! I think it’s profoundly important. But I also, obviously, more humbly speaking, I think it’s critical. I think it is one of the things that keeps people up at night in their lives. That makes them wonder if they’re living right. Am I expressing here? Am I acting on the gifts I was given or am I going to, as you put it earlier, take it to my grave? You know? And I think it’s important just in the sense that this is one of the deepest motivating forces for people…is “Am I doing what I feel I was put here to do?” That question.

Dr. Paul Dyer: I couldn’t agree more. That’s wonderfully said. Now Gregg you obviously have lot’s of interesting things to say. I’m sure there are going to be people that watch this who would like to get in touch with you. You do lots of speaking, you do teaching seminars and so forth. If they want to get in touch with you, what is the best way to do that?

Gregg Levoy: Well I suppose world headquarters for me anymore is the website. So, gregglevoy.com That’s the simplest.

Dr. Paul Dyer: Great. That’s great. Well, I want to say thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation…our dialogue this afternoon.

Gregg Levoy: Yeah, me too.

Dr. Paul Dyer: I want to tell folks, if they want to buy your book, of course you can get it in any bookstore…you can get it at Amazon and so forth…there’s a link right below this video if they want to click on that and purchase the book, they’ll go right to Amazon and be able to purchase it there.

Gregg Levoy: Wonderful.

Dr. Paul Dyer: And again, I appreciate it very much.

Gregg Levoy: My pleasure. Thank you, Paul. Thank you so much.