Your Personalized User's Guide

Goal: To create a unique and helpful guide for the operation of your calling.

Time Required: 1-2 hours.

This experiment is a truly integrative step. If you balk at the time commitment, trust that it is well worth the time. When you’re done, you’ll have a personalized manual to help you move forward on your true path in the days, weeks, and years ahead. It won’t be perfect, and it will need updating from time to time, but that’s fine. Even if you were to never look at it again, creating it does the same work as model-building does for scientists – it gives you the satisfaction that you have really understood a process. In this case, how your calling works. Get ready to reveal to yourself the deep discoveries you have already made about your calling.

  1. Get your lab notebook and go into your inner lab.
    You’ll need your lab notebook to have access to all your notes from your work with The Calling. Enter your inner lab and make yourself comfortable. Try to be in the full authority of your authentic self, and access trust, love, and discernment while you sift through your notes and complete these steps.
  2. Record what you have learned.
    Record your calling, your currently active calling circle members, your deal-makers and deal-breakers, your major shortcomings and their related allies, your operating requirements, and your gifts – all copied directly from your lab notebook. As you copy these words, notice if anything feels off or needs changing. If so, sit with your changes, say them out loud, and feel if you have your truth reaction. Once you do, make the change and move on.
  3. Anticipate the path of your calling. This step puts you in prediction mode. While you can’t necessarily predict how external forces will influence the progress of your calling, you can predict how you are likely to react to any arrows of misfortune or feathers of fortune. Make sure you are centered in your authentic self and claiming your own authority – still in your inner lab – as you answer these fill-in-the-blank questions.
  4. Choose a title for your guide

    5. Click here to print this title page:


  5. Create a page in your guide by filling in the following blanks:
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    Wonderful work! Click here to print this page:

  6. Create more pages! Once your page has printed, refresh this page to clear the blanks so you can add another situation. Add as many as you like, it's your guide!
The recommended minimum situations to include in your user's guide are:

As you contemplate each situation, imagine yourself a year in the future having that experience. Ask yourself what tools you used to help move yourself forward and fill in the blanks with the tools that you tell yourself were most important. You can use any of the tools explored in this program or others that you've learned elsewhere. The idea is to select ones that are likely to work for you in each situation. Be honest, choose tools that you think work best – it can be the same tool every time, or you can use new tools for each situation. Remember that this user’s guide is meant to provide both a model of the mechanics of your calling as well as a place to go in the future to troubleshoot – so be as honest as you can be with yourself, while avoiding the tendency to try to get it exactly right. Few people follow their user’s guide to the letter when troubleshooting a process ‐ but it's handy to have around because it does teach you something every so often.

Example:
When I feel lonely, the tool that works best to get me back on my path is to go into my inner lab and talk with myself. The most clarifying insight for me at these times is: A useful way to manage any uncomfortable feeling is to first feel it fully, then observe it, record it, and get curious about it. My fear about taking action to shift my experience is it won’t work – I will always feel lonely, with the mirror fear of if I become un-lonely I will have to be with myself and other people. My helpful gifts during this time are doing art and enjoying music with other people and my most useful calling circle supports in this situation are calling Joan and taking a weekly class with other people. What needs more love and trust is probably the child part of myself, who feels alone a lot. And what is within my authority to change is how much time I spend shaming and judging the lonely part of myself. With my whole self, I pledge that in this situation, I choose to actively love the child part of myself and give it a gift every day, and do something regularly that requires me to be with other people.