What Is Your Call to Adventure?

Getting Clear Will Boost Your Conviction and Potentially Your Impact

In today’s wacky world, it’s easy to feel spun about – by the steady drumbeat of striking headlines, the pressures of navigating work and family, and the many challenges of leading teams, families, or even classrooms when everything around us changes. 

That’s why it helps to know your call to adventure at work and in your family. 

A “call to adventure” is what Joseph Campbell famously described as the first step in the hero’s journey, and what Maria Tartar, author of The Heroine of 1001 Faces, revealed is far from limited to the swashbuckling stories of yore. 

We see this moment in both fiction and real life, from when Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her sister Prim’s place as a tribute in The Hunger Games to when Malala Yousafzai responded to the Taliban’s assassination attempt on her life by doubling down on her fight for gender equality. 

For most of us, the call to adventure is likely not as dramatic, but it is most assuredly as significant. 

This is as true for individuals as it is for organizations, which continue to struggle with record-low levels of engagement. (Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2023 Report put the cost at $8.8 trillion in lost productivity globally.)

The call to adventure delineates a line in the sand—between the life we knew before and the uncertain new adventure we are invited to engage in.  

It can arise from recognizing a need, receiving an explicit request, or simply feeling that you must do something to make a difference. Or all three. 

For me, it happened when I was racing from work to pick up my son from school one day. A young man on the street stopped me and asked, “Excuse me, do you care about the environment?” 

“I’m sorry, I don’t have the time,” I answered without giving him a second thought. The next day, the same thing happened. The turning point came on day three.

As I once again said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have the time,” I heard the irony of my words. I don’t have the time to care about the environment despite the obvious implications it could have for the future of the boy I was rushing to pick up.

It was a call to adventure, though I found plenty of reasons to resist it and plenty of uncertainty about how to respond. Calls to adventure are like that.

Why and How It Helps to Clarify Your Call to Adventure

A call to adventure is not like an invitation to dinner. It’s much more significant. So, it’s not uncommon to resist. To say, consciously or not, some version of, “I’m sorry I don’t have the time.”

And yet, when we give a call to adventure its due, it propels us onto our heroic journey. Or, more simply, it helps us truly engage in the world.

The benefits are great.

• For individuals, it can boost clarity, conviction, well-being, and potential impact.

• For organizations, it can help close the engagement gap by helping people align their sense of purpose with a larger, collective mission.

A 2023 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found, for example, that it increases one's sense of meaning in life, which has numerous advantages.

Here, then, are three questions you might consider as you think about yours:  

1. What feels important to you to do in your most reflective, truthful moments in this life?

2. What do you resist doing—not because it’s wrong or you don’t care but because it is right and you do care? 

3. How would you feel about yourself if you fully took on the call? 

To learn about my B-Heroic leadership coaching and workshops, please see What Is Your Hero’s Journey? Or book a free discovery call. I’d love to connect.