Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation,   ISBN:9780787947354

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`Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.' The theme of listening to yourself to find your vocation resonates throughout Parker Palmer's book. Although rooted in Quaker beliefs, Palmer weaves his way through many religions and philosophies to illustrate support for listening to your calling - your vocation - your voice. He shares his own journey through childhood, high school, college and careers, and intertwines the wonder, depression, enlightenment and discovery he was enveloped in along the way.

Too many hungry job searchers ignore their natural strengths and value system for a paycheck. Recognizing your innate strengths and applying them in ways that feed your mind and balance your life and work is the true calling of vocation. This short 109-page book is a gift for all career searchers who are struggling with which way to turn and which priority to address first. Spiritual as well as secular readers will find comfort within the pages as they learn that the passions for money, happiness, life and work can all converge in one lasting vocation if you listen to your voice within.

Customer Rating: 

This book falls in the category of my top ten favorite books. For such a small book it is packed with wisdom. I have read it twice and continue to refer back to. It is an essential book for anyone struggling with finding their vocational path or giving themselves permission to follow their dream. Reading this book unleased my power to pursue my calling. Highly recommended!

Customer Rating: 

This is an excellent book for those wishing to examine what life holds in store for them. By that I mean if you have been questioning what you should do in life or asking what am I missing in my life. This short book may offer part of the answer for you. I recommend this book to anyone wanting to explore what am I good at.

Customer Rating: 

"Let Your Life Speak" is a brilliant, yet accessible, little book of wisdom on finding your true calling in life. He advocates listening to the voice within, one of the basic Quaker tenets, as a means of self-discovery, leading to a life lived with meaning and purpose. I love the image he paints of a person's inner life as a frozen river, with a layer of solid ice on the surface, but a flowing current underneath. Palmer advocates holding a dynamic tension between our limits and potentials, and not moralizing as to what we should be doing, but finding and doing that which is our unique gift to the world. Highly recommended.

Customer Rating: 

I found myself fininshing this book and thinking it's title could be edited to omit "of Vocation" as I found it's insights more a compass to my inner voice as a guide for so many avenues in my life. Once I tap into my voice, I have tapped into a guiding compass.

Mr. Palmer's account of finding a therapist who saw his rescue from depression as being possible through a spiritual journey struck very close to home. In early 2000 I was fortunate to find a therapist who guided me from a challenging time by reconnectiong me with spirituality and God and recommended the Left Behind series. It was a true time of clarity for me. Let your Life Speak, at about it's half way point when Mr. Parker reveals this time in his life, finally drew me in.

Chapters 5 and 6 would have sufficed for me in (re)opening my mind to looking within myself and hearing my voice, though without Chapter 4 I would have been missing that connection I felt with the writer and would have missed reflecting on a very pivotal point in my life...thus furthering Palmer's points of a journey within: of going down, before you go up.

This book renewed for me many lessons I had already been fortunate enough to learn and reminded me of their importance and ease of their existence within my life.