Notes on vocation (calling), giftedness, and high-mode individuals

This entry started as a place to collect some related links on the topic of vocation and how to find it, which can be a great challenge for individuals whose capabilities and potential put them well outside the norm. It has been sitting in unpublished limbo since April 9, 2008. On January 29, 2020, I fixed broken links, added some descriptive text, and published it.

Theologian Os Guinness, in a Q&A on Christians and vocation, offers a Biblical approach to divine career guidance very different from putting out a fleece or waiting on a prophetic word:

Q: I can relate to what you said about having too many choices. I feel paralyzed. I don't know which job to choose. I have several career options and I want God to make clear which I should choose, but He is silent. So am I really free to pick the job that seems best to me? I would feel better if there was some sense of divine confirmation.

Dr. Guinness: It is very important not to confuse calling with guidance. We need to remember the entrepreneurial part of calling. In the parable of the talents and pounds, the master never told them what to do. There was no micromanagement. They were simply given gifts, talents, and praised or blamed at the end according to what they had done. When we confuse calling with guidance, we get paralyzed wondering if this is truly God's will and then we do nothing. Whereas calling is a venture and there is always risk. So I would not wait until you hear "it" from the Lord, but rather weigh up the talents of gifts and opportunities and figure out how best you can add fruit or value to the world. And recognize that there is always a process of trial and error.

Guinness mentions A Treatise of the Vocations or Callings of Men, written in 1602 by William Perkins. In 2015, Ben Rochester, pastor of an OPC congregation, published a lengthy exposition of Perkins's book.

The Lilly Project at Transylvania U.:

One of the difficulties in fostering education for Christian Vocation at the dawn of the 21st century is that there are very few resources at present that have been written specifically for use in constructing curricula for use in church-related universities. On the other hand, there are quite a few resources that we have found that are adaptable or can be modified for specific uses in the context of classroom and co-curricular activities.

Students, faculty and church leaders who are interested in reading more about these issues should consider the following resources. Items listed have been found to be useful in curricular programs and faculty discussion groups initiated by the Lantz Center for Christian Vocations at the University of Indianapolis, a United Methodist-related comprehensive university. Persons in other university or church-related contexts may find this list of materials more or less useful.

Guinness also mentioned in his interview the work of Ralph Mattson, who along with Art Miller, Jr., developed the idea of analyzing the pattern of a person's motivated abilities, as revealed in moves over the course of a person's life which provided satisfaction in one's self and affirmation from others. The Giftedness Center is a Dallas-based firm that uses analysis of motivated abilities to help individuals and companies find the best fit by understanding their unique capabilities. This page, no longer on their site, provides some background on the development of the analysis of motivated abilities as a guide to vocation:

The Giftedness Center^SM (formerly known as The Hendricks Group) was founded in 1985 by Bill Hendricks, an author, business consultant, and graduate of St. Mark's School of Texas, Harvard University (B.A.), Boston University School of Public Communication (M.S.), and Dallas Theological Seminary (M.A.B.S.).

The phenomenon of giftedness was first recognized and studied in a formal way shortly after World War II by Bernard Haldane, a British doctor who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s.

In the late 1950s, Art Miller, Jr., director of personnel at Argonne National Labs, encountered Haldane's work and collaborated with him to learn what he had discovered about job fit. In 1961, Miller formed People Management International (PMI) and began to refine a systematic approach to identifying giftedness, called the System for Identifying Motivated Abilities (SIMA®)....

In 1982, Bill Hendricks was introduced to the ideas of Bernard Haldane, and used Haldane's process of Success Factor Analysis in making the decision to start his own consulting practice. Then in 1985, Bill met Ralph Mattson, a colleague of Art Miller's at PMI, who took him through the SIMA process. The information gained confirmed Bill's career choice, and Bill incorporated The Hendricks Group, now known as The Giftedness Center^SM.

Over the next decade, Bill collaborated on a number of SIMA-related projects with PMI and its clients. In 1996, he began co-writing a book with Art Miller on the subject of giftedness, now published under the title, The Power of Uniqueness (Zondervan, 1999). Today, The Giftedness Center^SM is an Affiliate of PMI. We use the best of SIMA research and expertise to help individuals make meaningful choices for their life and work, and to help companies work with people's natural motivation to maximize their value to the enterprise.

The Giftedness Center website offers an online exercise for discovering your giftedness by analyzing your stories about things you enjoyed doing and felt you did well.

Forrest Christian writes about giftedness from the perspective of Requisite Organization, as developed by Elliott Jaques, Wilfred Brown, Warren Kinston, and others. Requisite Organization is interested in levels of complexity at which different people operate, and how to place them within an organization for maximum fit and benefit. "Mode" here refers, roughly speaking, to the slope of the curve at which a person's level of capability increases over time: a low-mode individual's level of capability hardly advances over the course of his life; a high-mode individual's level of capability increases on a high trajectory. Here is the first in a series of posts introducing many of the concepts of Requisite Organization with a focus on high-mode individuals that aren't in jobs that make full use of their abilities.

In this piece, Forrest Christian describes The Growth Trajectory of the Underachiever:

This is something that Jaques does not seem to deal with in his discussion of modes. And why I think that Kinston may be right when he implied in that GO Society exchange that there are several hierachies. The high mode individual may pursue something that others fail to understand because his mental life is outside of their experience. Kinston's published materials on inquiry have a lot to say here, that the highest level of inquiry is really contemplative. That level may only find usefulness as it is worked out into details further below, but it is in this pure thinking realm that major breakthroughs.

I note that our world could go for some major breakthroughs. I do not believe that the leaders we have are capable of imagining the new world order. It turned out to be very similar to the old world order that the stuffed shirts thought up back with Rhodes.

Our companies are likewise in need of new thinking. The markets are changing, the original dust of the Information Revolution is settling, leaving us to the real transformations that are coming. We have a mother lode of high-capability lying in our bottom ranks. It's an almost instant solution to the Succession Crisis. Right now, most people who could use their talents don't want the work that comes with it to get them into usable shape. And, yes, many of them are truly playing a much higher game than the simple one of business. (In this I think that Kinston is right, and there are different hierarchies that play out differently.) But many of them can be groomed for upper management or executive staff positions, if we are willing to take the time.

Forrest links to this essay, Stephanie S. Tolan: Discovering the Gifted Ex-Child:

The experience of the gifted adult is the experience of an unusual consciousness, an extraordinary mind whose perceptions and judgments may be different enough to require an extraordinary courage. Large numbers of gifted adults, aware not only of their mental capacities but of the degree to which those capacities set them apart, understand this.

For many, however, a complete honoring of the self must begin with discovering what sort of consciousness, what sort of mind they possess. That their own perceptions and judgments are unusual may have been obvious since childhood, but they may have spent their lives assuming that this difference was a deficit, a fault, even a defect of character or a sign of mental illness (Lovecky, 1986; Alvarado, 1989). Thinking independently may seem foolhardy or antisocial.

Who am I? is a question they may need to ask themselves all over again because the answers devised in childhood and adolescence were inaccurate or incomplete (Silverman & Kearney, 1989; Tolan, 1992; Wallach, 1994)....

Recently a definition of childhood giftedness as "asynchronous development" (Columbus Group, 1991) was advanced to look at giftedness from a phenomenological viewpoint, considering what it is like from the inside. Throughout childhood asynchronous individuals reach noticeable and clearly defined developmental milestones and acquire various skills earlier than other children. But the difference is not mere precocity, not just "getting there sooner." The child who deals with abstract concepts early brings those concepts to bear on all later experience. This different, more complex way of processing experience creates essentially different experience. The result is that the differences, far from shrinking as the child develops, are likely to grow larger. A child whose cognitive development is within the normal rather than the gifted range will not "catch up" with the gifted child any more than a younger sibling will catch up in age with an older sibling. The developmental trajectory diverges early and does not come back to norms....

Some of the cognitive characteristics of gifted children that are differences in kind rather than in precocious acquisition are: extraordinary quantity of information, unusual retentiveness; advanced comprehension; unusually varied interests; curiosity; unusual capacity for processing information; accelerated pace of thought processes; comprehensive synthesis; heightened capacity for seeing unusual and diverse relationships; ability to generate original ideas and solutions; evaluation of self and others; persistent, goal-directed behavior (Clark, 1988). These characteristics not only persist into adulthood, but interact through time to create a geometric progression of significant differences from the norm (Wallach, 1994; Roeper, 1991).

In addition to these cognitive characteristics, many researchers have found in gifted children heightened emotional sensitivity and intensity (Morelock, 1992), (a characteristic that is likely to go underground in adulthood, especially in males) (Kline & Meckstroth, 1985; Roeper, 1991), a keen sense of humor (that may be gentle or hostile, sophisticated or bizarre) (Webb, Meckstroth & Tolan, 1982), an early and heightened concern for justice and morality (Roeper, 1991) and the desire to make certain that actions are consistent with values (Hollingworth, 1942).

Socially, gifted children may have difficulty placing themselves with chronological peers, as their interests are likely to be different. In addition, their emotional sensitivity and intensity may make social interactions, particularly in settings where emotions are distrusted, devalued or directly censured, especially complicated (Kline & Meckstroth, 1985). Where their abilities cause jealousy in others there may be a powerful incentive to hide or disguise those abilities in order to "get along" more successfully. Sometimes this effort becomes powerful and long term denial of their differences. This is particularly true for girls during adolescence (Kerr, 1985; Noble, 1989; Silverman, 1993)....

All of these characteristics, continuing into adulthood, create a different experience of life for the gifted adult, just as they do for the gifted child, whether or not the individual is achieving and being recognized as gifted, whether or not the individual understands and accepts his differences, (Lovecky, 1986). Sometimes the different life experience is a positive, but not always. Sometimes it is painful or even destructive (Alvarado, 1989).

The cognitive differences can lead to high levels of career success in many fields. These are the specific abilities that so often produce the recognized gifted adult, the ground-breaking physicist, the great philosopher, the peace-making diplomat, the successful entrepreneur. But for the adult whose life circumstances do not readily provide an arena for the positive use of these abilities the result may be a feeling of frustration, lack of fulfillment, a nagging sense of being tied down, imprisoned, thwarted (Roeper, 1991; Smith, 1992)....

None of these individuals may fully understand the reasons for their dissatisfactions. They may not see a way or even a need to give themselves an outlet for their abilities, because they do not recognize the source of the problem. Having bought into society's achievement-bound definition of giftedness, they are unlikely to think of themselves as gifted adults. Few adults today were identified as gifted in childhood and they may never have understood their own differences from the norm. Because it is hard to be different, those who were identified may have protected themselves with denial.

The gifted frequently take their own capacities for granted, believing that it is people with different abilities who are the really bright ones (Alvarado, 1989; Tolan, 1992). Not understanding the source of their frustration or ways to alleviate it, they may opt to relieve the pain through the use of alcohol, drugs, food or other addictive substances or behaviors. Or they may simply hunker down and live their lives in survival mode....

Socially, the experience of gifted adults can be diverse. Those who have chosen a career path that puts them into contact with other gifted adults may regularly experience the joy and excitement of the intellectual synergy that occurs in such a group. In person or on computer networks these people build on each other's ideas, moving with great, exhilarating leaps through complex intellectual realms. There can be a sense of almost magical connection as the ideas flow from one to another, seeming to take on a life of their own. When unusually capable minds are working together there is a powerful sense of community and belonging.

For others, or for these people outside the work place or off the networks, social interaction can be both problematic and difficult to understand. A gifted adult may find herself in the workplace and/or outside associating with many individuals who do not share the complexity and depth of her perceptions. She may find it difficult to share important aspects of herself with others. She may have to weigh her words, simplify her conceptions, hold herself back in conversation. This experience is both tiring and frustrating.

Particularly if she does not understand or accept her giftedness, she (and others) may interpret her difficulty as social ineptitude. Even if she is able to match her interactions to her companions' level of interest or understanding, she may leave a social event feeling isolated, "weird," dissatisfied, unhappy. Others may clearly enjoy activities that the gifted adult finds stultifying and repetitious or prefer entertainment that lacks the depth and intellectual nourishment she craves. The hunger for intellectual companionship is felt even when it is not recognized or understood. Lacking companions with similar interests, the gifted adult may withdraw from interaction with others and resign herself to a solitary life.