Karen Swallow Prior helps us Mode/Switchers engage career shock and organizational change with the wisdom of some permanent things.

In the 90s, I thought that a career was a decently stable reality. In the 2020s, I no longer think that way. And I bet you don’t either. That vocational skepticism prompted our intergenerational team to ask Dr. Karen Swallow Prior, author of the new book You Have a Calling, to help us cope with the crazy-fast changeableness of career and life today.

We Mode/Switchers want to know: What if we’re not working at our current job for the next ten years? Heck, what if we’re out of work tomorrow? Our guest speaks to these questions with (to use her own Thomistic term) luminosity.

But I felt a tension in this podcast episode, a tension so great I couldn’t even name it during the conversation. Frankly, we were having too much fun. Professor Prior’s a very funny person, even when she’s talking about seriously unstable ground.

But if our conversation with Prior was enjoyable, the tension I was feeling wasn't.

One pole of the tension is this: we need to be creatively playful with our own lives. Our experience is way too dynamic for us to adopt the dull seriousness of boiled potatoes. Dr. Prior knows this first hand: she has just left a job and changed the career she thought she’d always be in. She’s had to mentor herself into being curious about her calling in an evolving set of work conditions.

Prior’s recommendations remind me of Anne Laure Le Cunff’s excellent new book Tiny Experiments, which says, in effecti: Don’t settle for what’s always been. Don’t listen to what others have always told you. Instead, try short, bold, playful pilots in your life and work—and see what comes! (I’m reading this book after hearing Lee C. Camp interview the author on No Small Endeavors.)

But the tension pulls the other way, too: we have to make very serious choices. When things go dark—when we lose our job, when the boss we loved leaves the org, when we feel bored by what we used to love—we need what the author James Williams calls “starlight,” the values that we navigate by. We need something more than an experimental mindset, in other words.

And here’s where Karen Swallow Prior offers light. She offers the wisdom of permanent (and she would say, universal) values: truth, goodness, beauty. Do you find yourself hesitating at that word “permanent”? Does anything hold still in a world whose changeableness accelerates every few weeks?

Good question. Let’s let it hang with it, while you press play on the pod.

But wait, let me say one more thing. The question, What if I lose my job next month? is a very focused question. But it also invites creative and far-ranging exploration about the biggest questions that come with being a person. That’s our Mode/Switch sweet spot. We look for tight practical pivots that orient us within bigger questions.

This is our 89th episode of making that move—from tight pivot to big questions. And it’s starting to feel like, well, a calling. I’m so grateful for how this podcast’s explorations of workplace culture. I’m just as grateful to be listening for callings in company with you.

-craig