Radical Hope #11: How Is Life Calling You?
From Generative Practice to Radical Hope #11
You are nature.
You are the field of awareness in which everything happens.
You witness the world and flock with coherent patterns.
But how is life calling you personally?
In Newsletter 10 we watched a flock move and could not find anyone leading it. We traced the cycle it moves by: we witness, we notice the patterns, we flock towards coherence, we regenerate, and we witness again.
Before you read on, take a breath.
Follow it in. Notice the place where the in-breath stops being an in-breath. Nothing decides it. The body simply turns, and what came in begins to go out.
Today we explore where the breath turns.
We have spent six newsletters breathing in. The body. Nature. Awareness. Coherence. Listening. Flocking. All of it receptive — not-knowing, attending, letting the pattern show itself before we move.
Now the out-breath.
And as we pause on the cusp of the out-breath, we can ask ourselves
What is mine to do?
This is the eleventh newsletter in a series called From Generative Practice to Radical Hope. I am exploring why deep personal development — somatic, psychological, contemplative — is not a retreat from the polycrisis but the very ground from which genuine engagement becomes possible.
In a single newsletter, we are going to explore topics that will take three chapters in the forthcoming book Standing at the Edge of Hope.
1. How is life calling me?
2. How do I follow this calling with my skills and strengths
3. With the world at the edge of chaos, what is the mastery that supports me staying centred in myself — coherent in the field around me?
Knowing what is yours to do,
and being good enough at it,
is what lets you walk into a disturbed field
without becoming lost in its disturbance.
The rainmaker did not fix anything. The rainmaker was disturbed at first, then he relaxed into embodied systems awareness. He became sufficiently coherent that the field reorganised around him. The rainmaker’s hut was on the edge of the village. He was neither in the centre of the chaos, nor outside it. He was on the edge.
How can we be the kind of presence that supports coherence in the flock?
How can we be someone who joins with others to organise around a small, well-timed perturbation, rather than create a bigger disturbance added to the one already there?
How Is Life Calling You?
My own Life-Calling, helping people blossom, starting with myself, comes out of my childhood.
I took this path, and my twin brother Stephen took the path of heroin addiction.
He died, and I lived.
As a child I didn’t know my family was messed up — I had never known anything else. I knew I was lonely though. My mother had post-traumatic stress from the second world war and was distant, and my father was alcoholic, absorbed in his own inner world and hardly around.
In the early years we had a nanny, and in the evening we would have our hair brushed, shirts straightened and be taken to see our parents for half an hour as they were having drinks before dinner.
There wasn’t much love for us as children, and Stephen and I competed for this limited resource, so there wasn’t much love between us either.
I was lonely and dysfunctional at school. When I was about sixteen a rather miserable and world-weary teacher tried to persuade me, with the best of intentions, that if only I cooperated a bit more, “pulled my socks up”, and worked a bit harder I could have a good life. I remember looking at him and thinking “I don’t want to be like you with your sad life, there must be another way”.
Fortunately it was the beginning of the 1970s and we believed it was the dawning of a new age of possibility for humanity, and I began to explore psychology and spirituality from both Western and Eastern points of view.
“Helping people blossom, starting with myself” has saved my life.
I once asked a psychotherapist (1) what I could do to help my brother Stephen and he said “Julian, you are so enmeshed in the family system that you can’t see the wood from the trees — it’s going to be very difficult for you to help your brother. The best you can do is sort yourself out, and that may influence him.”
So I vowed that if I could not help him, I would help other people, with the poetic hope that if I helped others, others would help him.
Stephen died of an overdose at the age of 43 in 1998.
Twenty years later I was standing in a training room in a resort hotel in China teaching my 18-day personal development programme, the Life Talent Programme. I was watching a group of 80 or so people doing an exercise in groups of three, and in my imagination, my brother appeared next to me in the room. He was smiling and was happy with what I was doing. He said, “you have kept your promise to help other people, and since you did this for me, this is also my gift to the world”, and then he smiled.
Life-Calling isn’t just about giving to other people, it is for yourself as well.
It is what you most need. I believe that if I hadn’t started studying psychological and spiritual development at the age of sixteen, and continued on this path all of my life, I might have ended up as a failed investment banker, alcoholic, divorced, lonely and depressed. (2)
The basic method of discovering your life-calling is to tune into your own heart by asking “What am I most passionate about. What makes my heart sing?”
How is life calling you?
We can also approach this from outside in: “How is life calling me?”
In my journey of helping people blossom I became a personal development trainer and a group leader, and a psychotherapist. Then on one occasion in the early 1990s I was running a workshop called Discover Your Life-Calling and a quiet man asked me at the end of the weekend, “Do you do coaching?” Executive coaching had just begun to become a distinct field in business, but at that time there was no recognised training for it other than psychological training. I said “yes” and he turned out to be Charles Matthews, the Managing Director of Manufacturing at Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, and through working at Rolls-Royce, my work spread into a large executive coaching practise across many industries.
Life called me.
In recent years I have felt increasingly concerned about global warming, loss of biodiversity and the mass extinction of species, as well as the breakdown of the international rule-based order. I have increasingly felt that I could not just focus on individual development, but needed to attend to how we can be generative citizens of the world. This culminated in this newsletter series and book.
Life called me.
Life summoned me.
Your Life-Calling and how life is summoning you
A Life-Calling is the passion that developed early in life and is the trajectory of your life but doesn’t tell you what to do next.
How life summons you is the invitation from the field.
There are so many invitations from life, but the ones that are meant for you are the ones that intersect with your Life-Calling.
This recognition steadies you in a disturbed field: you do not have to respond to every crisis, only the ones that invite your Life-Calling to act through you.
Neither of those summonses to me would have meant anything to someone else. The calling formed in childhood is what let me recognise them as mine
Meditating, witnessing and flocking isn’t enough!
The spirit of these times wants the best of you — not just your Life-Calling, but the skills and strengths you bring to it.
What Are You Great At?
My own strengths include feeling a connection to all of life, the ability to connect with a wide range of people and (on a good day) empathy. I am not an academic — I love working directly and intimately with people.
I love to chat to people on the street and having quirky moments with people. Recently a six-year-old girl on the underground (subway) started staring at me and naturally I looked back. We started chatting, and I made a few smiling glances to her parents to reassure them. After a while the little girl put her head on my shoulder and fell asleep. When she woke she invited me to her birthday party and I had to mournfully explain I couldn’t come before waving at her and her parents as they left the train.
This strength was formed in my childhood. My mother went back to work as a journalist two weeks after I was born. There were always new carers throughout my childhood. As a small baby and then as a child, it was very important to connect with the next nanny or au pair girl on the scene.
Talents get formed in the early part of life, and later, if developed, become strengths.
You need to know your Life-Calling and express it through your strengths. (3)
So how do you find out what you are great at? There are a number of ways. (4)
Tom Rath’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 is user-friendly and easy.
Your calling, your strengths, your personal history, ancestral history and the inner resources you have built — nobody else has that combination.
You have a unique gift to give to the world, and you are the only person who can give it.
Your Life-Calling is the first thing that steadies you. Your strengths are the second. Knowing not only what your calling is, but what you are great at, means you can meet the disturbance with skill rather than with willingness alone.
Mastery in a chaotic world
I first became interested in mastery in 1985, while studying Neurolinguistic Programming. John Grinder, one of its founders, suggested I take up Aikido to become more grounded in my body and have more aura as a trainer. I studied with Sensei Andy Hathaway for twenty years, and what began as a wish for personal presence became an education in excellence, struggle and human potential.
I was not a natural student. Andy showed almost saintly patience, telling me hundreds of times to bend my knees and lower my centre of gravity. He never gave up on us. It was precisely that persistence that became my greatest teacher.
“I used to think that if I only learnt one thing in a class, that was enough” he told me once. “Later I realised that even if I didn’t learn anything at all, but simply continued to show up, I would eventually improve”. And later: “Some people achieve black belt easily, through natural ability. You’re looking deeper into yourself. You are gaining more wisdom than those who found it easier.” Martial arts grades, he said, “are just flowers by the wayside.” The prize was never the belt. It was the person I was becoming.
That apprenticeship taught me mastery has three levels.
Level one: Learning the skill itself
The first is technical — clumsy effort becomes competence, which, after years, becomes unconscious competence, so your attention is free to witness the field.
Level two: learning to learn
The second level is about persistence and continuous improvement, and the understanding that plateaus and setbacks are natural rather than signs of failure. This is mastery in giving your gift: becoming good enough at the combination of your calling and your strengths that you can give it effectively to the world.
On the path of mastery, you discover that there is no such thing as an absolute competence. Refinements and improvements are always possible. Practitioners with many years of study apply the 1% rule. If you make small improvements to ten elements of your practise, that is a ten per cent improvement. Make a hundred such improvements across the years and you have not doubled your competence — you have nearly tripled it.
A sign of a master is someone humble enough to keep learning forever. (5)
Having studied technique in infinite detail over a long period of time, mastery is when you can respond to the person or situation spontaneously, beyond the conscious use of technique. (6)
Level three: learning about life
The third level was an eye-opener for me, when I realised that the path of mastery eventually became a spiritual practise.
Here the technical pursuit becomes a doorway to presence. Not only mastery in what you do, how you learn, but mastery in how you are. Reinhold Messner, who climbed Mount Everest solo and without oxygen, quoted the Indian poet Tagore: “The true goal is not to reach the utmost limits, but to know the completeness that has no boundaries.” (7)
Mastery in embodied awareness is returning, again and again, to the space in which everything arises — and, at its furthest reach, never leaving it at all. (8)
Mastery in witnessing is taking in the whole and the precise detail at once, staying present to the people whose politics disturb you most without losing your own ground.
Mastery in flocking is knowing the difference between a coherence worth joining and a crowd worth avoiding — and knowing when to step forward, and when to drop back and let someone else take the front.
Mastery is the third thing, the one that unleashes the expression of your Life-Calling and strengths. Caring is not the scarce resource. Being able to stay coherent while the field around you is not — that is what has to be built, and it takes years.
Taking your turn as a leader
Each autumn a flock of northern bald ibises leaves Austria and crosses the Alps for Italy. They fly in a V formation, each carrying a small tracker strapped to its back.
Watch and you can see them swop positions: a bird pulls ahead into the naked wind, wings working harder — then, with no visible signal, drops back, and the bird behind lifts forward to take its place. Nobody signalled. Nobody was in charge. (9)
The more readily the birds reciprocated in leading, the larger and more cohesive the formation. Where leadership would not rotate, the formation frayed.
Human systems echo this. Movements, communities, organisations — even families — need a leading edge at times. Someone steps forward to hold the line, to absorb the headwind. But if leadership stays fixed, fatigue sets in and coherence thins. Healthy systems let leadership move through them. They allow many bodies to step forward, and just as many to step back. This is flocking.
Leadership is not a heroic identity. It is a function, performed in service of the whole. In a flock, it arises — and rotates — exactly when the system needs it.
Sometimes it starts with you
Sometimes there is no formation to join, and life is calling for something, and you lead.
Denmark hid its Jews in a night. (10) The abolitionists took sixty years.
In 1785, a young man on horseback stopped at the side of the road near the village of Wadesmill. Thomas Clarkson had been riding home, thinking about an essay he had just written on whether it is lawful to enslave others against their will.
Somewhere on that road, the argument stopped being an exercise.
He got down. He sat in the grass. And a truth became a task.
Dutch philosopher Rutger Bregman describes the abolitionists as a small band of renegades, Quakers and evangelicals, whose aim was never only the slave trade. Their aim was something larger: to make goodness fashionable, to make a different kind of ambition contagious.11
But Bregman tells us something harder too.
Of the twelve founders of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, only one lived long enough to see slavery abolished across the British Empire. (12)
That is not a flock forming overnight. That is grinding, organised work by people who mostly died before the change came.
And yet — look again at the road to Wadesmill. Nobody appointed Clarkson. He was riding home, and something registered in him that he could not put down. The moment of joining was wu wei. Everything after was fidelity to the task.
Sometimes the coherence you sense is not a flock already moving, waiting to be joined. Sometimes it exists nowhere yet but in you.
Then the work is not to move with the field, but to hold your shape until the field catches up. That can take longer than a life.
Why Does This Matter Now?
Newsletter 5 asked you to trust your body. Six asked you to feel yourself as nature, and seven as awareness. Eight showed how your own coherence changes the field. Nine asked you to witness before acting.
Ten asked you to move when the field moves.
Here we ask you
What is calling you now?
What is asking for your calling, your strengths, your particular competence, built over years? How is this being summoned by the world?
Mastery is what turns willingness into action.
The world does not need more people who care; it is full of people who care. It needs people who care and can act.
And it needs us for a long time. Clarkson worked for the rest of his life after that morning at Wadesmill. This is what the polycrisis asks of us too — not a surge of feeling but a life’s worth of competent, patient work, done by people who have found what is theirs to do and got good at it.
You are not asked to save everything.
You are invited to find your part and become equal to it.
There is much more to say about all of this than a fortnightly newsletter can hold. I am writing that longer version now.
A Practice
Take some reflection time
Settle into your embodied awareness for a few minutes.
Follow a few breaths in and out. Find the turn again — the place where the in-breath becomes the out-breath without anyone deciding. Rest there for a moment.
Then, from that place rather than from your thinking mind, ask three questions. Give each one time. Do not reach for answers — let them arrive, or not.
From the inside out
What am I most passionate about. What makes my heart sing?
If words come, hold them lightly and check them:
• Is it what I truly love?
• Is it a direction rather than a goal — something I would still be in the middle of on the day I die?
• Is it the motivation for a job rather than the job itself?
• Is it what I most want for myself, and also my gift to the world?
Try the sentence out loud: my Life-Calling is _______, starting with myself.
Then sit with it. Say the words, feel how that feels, and see yourself as someone fulfilling this purpose. Can you imagine doing it with total commitment for the rest of your life?
The feeling matters more than the words. Most of us were educated to trust the mind over the body, and this is one of the places where that training does not serve us.
From the outside in
What in the world keeps registering with me — the thing I notice again and again, and cannot quite let go of?
Not what should concern you. What actually does.
Where inside and outside meet
Where do these two touch?
A calling on its own can stay private for a lifetime.
A summons on its own is just the news.
But your calling is what lets you recognise a particular summons as yours.
It is the difference that makes the difference, for you and no one else. That meeting place is where life is calling you.
As the poet David Whyte says, “start with the first thing close in, the step you don’t want to take.” (13)
Next Newsletter
A Different Way to Think About Justice.
When your coherence and morality are evoked about an issue of justice, you may walk straight into the world’s arguments about who is to blame. Blame is quick, satisfying, and it changes almost nothing. There is another way to hold it — one that can differentiate between a whole people, country or religion and individuals responsible for causing harm.
So, what is yours to do?
If something has resonated, or troubled you, do write to me: julian.russell@lifetalent.com. Also write to me if you want to join our WhatsApp and participate in the discussion.
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In hope and love
Julian
Julian Russell is a psychotherapist, executive coach, writer, and committed fellow traveller through the territories of inner work and public life. Drawing on decades of somatic and contemplative practice, he helps people access the capacities they already carry. He is a co-founder of the Generative Citizen community — a gathering of people who understand that how we are matters as much as what we do. His forthcoming book, Standing at the Edge of Hope, explores why personal and spiritual development is not a retreat from the world’s crises, but the very ground from which transformative engagement becomes possible.
Notes
1. Harvey Karman was a lovely eccentric and maverick California psychologist who worked with feminist activists during the 1950s and early 1960s to provide free abortions while the procedure remained illegal in the United States. He was imprisoned for two and a half years in 1955 for performing an illegal abortion and later invented the Karman cannula, still used worldwide today for nurse-assisted early-term abortion. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Karman.
2. There are also deeper and more rigorous ways of discovering your life-calling, which I teach in three-day workshops and also on the Life Talent Programme.
3. Using your strengths at work has much greater benefits than just high performance. Research from Gallup suggests that people who use their strengths at work are three times more likely to report excellent quality of life and are six times more likely to be engaged in their work: Tom Rath, StrengthsFinder 2.0 (New York: Gallup Press, 2007). Engagement is a key term in organisational development, describing the factors that lead to performance and retention: people who are engaged work 25 per cent harder, provide 25 per cent more profit, and are 87 per cent more likely to stay in their job rather than leave: Corporate Leadership Council, Driving Performance and Retention Through Employee Engagement (2004).
4. There are five ways to find out what you are great at. Self-assessment — think about what you are good at and write it down. Feedback from others — ask ten colleagues or friends what you are great at. Psychometric tests — such as Tom Rath’s StrengthsFinder 2.0, one tool among many. 360 interviews — in organisations, a coach speaks to your bosses, customers, peers and direct reports on your behalf. 360 interviews for sole practitioners — the same approach, but speaking to your customers, partners and stakeholders instead.
5. I remember training with Sensei John Cornish, who had studied Aikido in Japan in 1959 under the founder Morihei Ueshiba and later demonstrated Judo at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. When my teacher Andy became a master of semi-secret Aikido sword and staff fighting techniques, his own teacher, in his old age, came to study with his student. I paired with him in training, and despite being an old master paired with a beginner, he wanted to train like any other student.
6. Robert Dilts and Brian Dilts, Strategies of Genius, Volume IV (Capitola, CA: Meta Publications, 2026). Dilts writes that what made Erickson, Bateson, Feldenkrais and Roth extraordinary was “precisely their freedom from technique”. That is what the long practice is for: not to accumulate moves, but to wear them away until what is left is you, responding.
7. Reinhold Messner, The Seventh Grade: Most Extreme Climbing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). Originally published in German as Der siebte Grad: Extremstes Bergsteigen. Technik, Training, Erlebnis (Munich: BLV Verlagsgesellschaft, 1973). The quotation cited here has been transmitted through translation — first into German and then into English — and its precise source has consequently been obscured in translation.
8. There’s an old Zen story about a young monk who was attracting many followers, which made an older monk jealous. One day the young monk was teaching a crowd in the town square, and the older monk challenged him: “How often do you meditate?” The young monk replied, “I never meditate.” “What!” said the older monk. “Then what authority do you have to teach?” The young monk answered, “Tell me — when am I ever distracted?” At which the older monk fell silent.
9. Bernhard Voelkl, Steven J. Portugal, Markus Unsöld, James R. Usherwood, Alan M. Wilson, and Johannes Fritz, “Matching Times of Leading and Following Suggest Cooperation through Direct Reciprocity during V-Formation Flight in Ibis,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 7 (2015): 2115–19. Fourteen juvenile northern bald ibis (Geronticus eremita), hand-reared and following a microlight on a human-guided migration from Salzburg to Orbetello, carried GPS and motion loggers. Birds paired up and matched, on a pairwise basis, the time spent in the costly lead position against the time spent in the energy-saving wake. The authors also found that a bird’s propensity to reciprocate in leading substantially influenced the size and cohesion of the formations — the point drawn on here.
10. On the night of 1 October 1943, the Nazis planned a lightning raid to deport every Jew in Denmark, timed for the eve of the Jewish New Year so they would be at home. But when the soldiers came, the houses stood empty. A warning had leaked, days earlier, from inside the German administration itself. What happened next had no plan behind it. No committee met. No leader gave the order. Fishermen, shopkeepers, doctors and priests — tens of thousands of ordinary Danes, most of whom had never met each other — began hiding their Jewish neighbours and ferrying them across the water to Sweden. Each person acted on what was immediately in front of them: a family who needed a cellar, a boat that could make the crossing tonight. Within days, almost the entire Jewish population of Denmark was gone from under the noses of an occupying army. Almost all of them survived the war. Rutger Bregman calls this a conspiracy of decency. For the fuller story, see Newsletter 10.
11. Rutger Bregman, “How to Start a Moral Revolution,” Reith Lectures 2025: Moral Revolution, lecture 2, BBC Radio 4, broadcast 2025. Bregman closes the lecture at Wadesmill, asking whether today might be our Wadesmill moment.
12. Rutger Bregman, “A Conspiracy of Decency,” Reith Lectures 2025: Moral Revolution, lecture 3, BBC Radio 4, broadcast 2025. Bregman closes the lecture with two figures on the long game: of the twelve founders of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, only one lived to see slavery abolished across the empire; and of the sixty-eight women who gathered at Seneca Falls in 1848 for the first women’s rights convention in the United States, only one was still alive when women won the vote — and she was too ill to go to the polls. This is the same lecture cited in Newsletter 10 for the rescue of the Danish Jews.
13. David Whyte, River Flow: New & Selected Poems (Langley, WA: Many Rivers Press, 2012).