Speaker guides students, staff to true calling

Thanks to a partnership between Creative Campus Initiative and the Career Center, author and speaker Gregg Levoy spent two days on the UA campus helping students, faculty, and community members find their true calling.

The author of Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life, Levoy is a fulltime lecturer and seminar-leader in the business, educational, and human-potential arenas. He conducted two workshops at the university: an open session geared toward students on January 28, and a faculty and community-professional workshop on January 29.

The primary objective of these workshops was to connect students and faculty to creative and critical thinking activities in order to initiate innovative thinking regarding career planning. According to a release from the Career Center, this training is necessary because employers are seeking creative employees who can bring passion and value to their organizations.

Creative Campus intern Greg Taylor said that exercises during the student workshop, entitled “Don’t Just Declare a Major, Follow a Calling,” got participants thinking about their inner selves. “He was a really powerful motivator,” Taylor said.

The purpose of the exercises, according to Creative Campus director Scott Bridges, was to help students discover who they really are.

"Sometimes who students think they are is being overwhelmed by other things; for instance, they might not want to disappoint their parents,” Bridges said. “This was a really good exercise to go through to achieve clarity.”

Bridges said Levoy led similar exercises with faculty at the January 29 workshop, entilted “Callings: The Power of Passionate Work.” Both sessions also featured a dynamic and humorous lecture.

“He told good anecdotes and asked good questions,” said Associate Provost Hank Lazer. “Overall, it was really powerful stuff.”

Whereas the student session was intended to inspire students to create a match between what they are and what they do, the faculty session had the dual goals of instilling faculty with a sense of purpose about their own work and helping them to counsel students to become impassioned about their lives.

Creative Campus and Career Center staff intended for Levoy’s visit to continue promoting the paradigm introduced to campus through other theorists and writers such as Bill Millard and Daniel Pink. The overall goal is to keep these ideas at the forefront of the minds of students and faculty in order to create a culture that fosters the search for meaning and purpose.