vocate: [verb], to seek and find one’s calling in life; to engage in meaningful work (as in vocation)

Work better: I help people work better. In particular, if you are a leader of a social purpose organisation who wants not only an effective organisation but a healthy one, I will work with you to help cultivate clarity around why you exist, what you do and how you do it.

Do better work: As important as it is to figure out how to work better, in the scheme of things it is a bar too low. It’s not about doing things better, it is about doing better things. So as committed as I am to helping people work better, the real game is to do better work. By that I mean work that:

1. is genuinely enjoyable, (pleasure)
2. engages my best skills, helps me become better at what I do well, (betterness) and
3. enables me to make a positive contribution to the world in which I live. (meaning)

We too regularly settle for less. We set the bar too low, then suffer the agony of regret. We are impoverished because we do work that doesn’t engage our best skills and energy. And we live mundane lives because we think that we will have more opportunities, time and capacity for unbridled recreation in the future.

‘Vocate’ is about encouraging each other to harmonise pleasure, betterness and meaning; to find ways to do work that touches our deep desires to make a positive contribution to society and to realise that our best opportunity to live life to the full is today, not tomorrow.

Vocate is about two things that matter. Firstly to live life to the full, integrating the best of what we experience in recreative holidays or weekends, where we intentionally seek out beauty and goodness in the world, into everyday life. The second is for organisations in all sectors to recapture a sense of calling, and to facilitate people living out a vocation. These two overlap in questions and conversations about our working life. To what extent are we doing the things we are best at in our work? Are we able to bring ourselves fully to our workplaces and be treated as whole people? Can we do ‘good’ through our work?

Workplaces where these things can be called vocational communities. Before Vocate, I helped design and lead a vocational community called Ergo.