Gregg Levoy

How do we know if we're following our true callings? How do we sharpen our senses to cut through the distractions of everyday reality and hear the calls that are beckoning us?is the first book to examine the many kinds of calls we receive and the great variety of channels through which they come to us. A calling may be to do something (change careers, go back to school, have a child) or to be something (more creative, less judgmental, more loving). While honoring a calling's essential mystery, this book also guides readers to ask and answer the fundamental questions that arise from any How do we recognize it? How do we distinguish the true call from the siren song? How do we handle our resistance to a call? What happens when we say yes? What happens when we say no?Drawing on the hard-won wisdom and powerful stories of people who have followed their own calls, Gregg Levoy shows us the many ways to translate a calling into action. In a style that is poetic, exuberant, and keenly insightful, he presents an illuminating and ultimately practical inquiry into how we listen and respond to our calls, whether at work or at home, in our relationships or in service. Callings is a compassionate guide to discovering your own callings and negotiating the tight passages to personal power and authenticity.

Discover—or rediscover—your passion for life. What inspires passion in your life? And what defeats it? How do you lose it and how do you get it back? In this exuberant and compelling book, Gregg Levoy, best-selling author of Callings , explores how you can cultivate not just a specific passion, but passion as a mindset---a stance ---that helps bring vitality to all your engagements, from work and relationships to creativity and spiritual life. Vital Signs examines the endless, yet endlessly fruitful, tug-of-war between passion and security in our lives, the wild in us and the tame, our natural selves and our conditioned selves, and shows us how to stay engaged with the world and resist the downward-pulling forces that can drain our aliveness. Vital Signs also encourages courageous inquiry into our dis -passion---where we’re numb, depressed, stuck and bored in our lives---so that we can rework these tendencies in ourselves and claim our rightful inheritance of vitality. What you’ll learn: • Passion can be cultivated. Turned on as well as turned off. And this happens most readily at the level of the gesture and the moment, not the five-year plan. • Passion is in the risk. In the willingness to step from the sidelines onto the playing field. • Passion breeds passion and disinterest breeds disinterest. If you lack passion in your life, your other relationships---your partnerships, friendships, communities, classrooms, corporations and congregations---will be denied that energy. • Passion is more than exuberance; it's endurance . It's sometimes shoulder-to-the-wheel stamina and patience on the order of years. • Passion is intimately related to health. To the degree that passion is vitality, honoring your passions enhances your vitality. Drawing from centuries of history, art, science, psychology and philosophy, as well as in-depth interviews with people who rediscovered and reignited passion in their own lives, Vital Signs offers an expansive menu of possibilities for how to claim and reclaim your passion, and will help you maintain a keen awareness of where the pulse is and a determination to plug into that place.

A guide to succeeding as a writer draws on the experiences of notable writers to offer practical advice on adjusting to life as a freelance writer, setting goals, promoting and selling work, and negotiating pay