Leadership and Change

The basic theory he presents is nothing new. As Hillman himself points out, it was Plato who first told the myth. Romans, Greeks, Christians, Neoplatonists, Egyptians, and Eskimos all have their own terminology to explain the same basic idea.

So, what does Hillman bring to the table? One of Hillman’s unique and prevalent notions is that psychologists can use the Acorn Theory to revisit psychotherapy as it is implemented today. Today’s mainstream psychotherapy involves the examination two things to explain our behavior, 1) genetics and 2) the past. In modern psychotherapy we are victims of our own genetics and of the mistakes our parents made in raising us. Hillman argues that it is our own daimon that chose those very parents who provided us with both genetics and parental failures. He asserts that patients of psychotherapy fall victim to theories and methods that ignore the calling and that how pshyotherapy causes us to remember childhood traumas is more damaging than the traumatic events themselves. (In an interview with Scott London that I will mention later, Hillman seems to contradict himself by saying that it’s often the society that is broken and not the person, that a person’s problems are often a result of a bigger societal problem. If anyone has more experience with Hillman and could clarify what he means by this, I’d be happy to hear more. The interview is found here: www.scottlondon.com/interviews/hillman.html).

Hillman also suggests that parents can better understand their children by being mindful of the Acorn Theory when observing their children’s behavior. Parents can use the Acorn Theory to “make sense of children’s dysfunctions before taking these disorders by their literal labels and sending the child off for therapy. “ (13). A child’s behavior is a manifestation of their destiny and if parent’s recognize this, they can nurture and feed it, helping children to recognize their own calling.

But psychotherapy is not what we are here to talk about, is it? And, I’m quite certain that parents in the class could share plenty of experiences about their children and relate them to the Acorn Theory. But I don’t have children. So I’d like to go back to Becky Roloff and her experience with the calling and personal change.

One of the things I found difficult when reading Hillman was his constant use of famous, or “extraordinary” people as examples to illustrate the calling. He writes about writers, artists, musicians, whose callings were made quite obvious. I have to admit that I read his piece with a slight feeling of panic in my heart. “What about me?” I kept thinking. “Have I found my calling? What if I never find it? Will I be deprived of happiness?”

That’s what made Roloff’s speech so helpful and refreshing. While she is no doubt an extraordinary person, her calling was not so obvious as music or art. She is, for our purposes, a normal person.
She describes how she felt when she read the job description for the first time. “It just…grabbed me,” she said. It was clear to Roloff that this was the job she was meant to take. “My new voice is speaking out for justice,” she said.

But Roloff was not so oblivious to the “reality check” or the difficulties of finding that voice, which is another thing that was frustrating me to about the Hillman reading. Roloff talked about the struggles she encountered while making the change from corporate to nonprofit; how she had to deal with the strange looks, the questions of why from colleagues who would never give up the luxury suites, personal drivers, and expensive suits. Most relative to me personally was her emphasis on understanding how her personal change would affect others, namely her family, which is always my first consideration when considering a personal change.

In the end, Roloff knew she had to take the YWCA position because she knew she had to grow. While her company, her schedule, and her workload were all growing around her, she, herself, was not growing. The decision was obvious to her and she could not be happier or more successful in her new role.

What keeps nagging at me, even as I retell Roloff’s story as an example of Hillman’s Acorn Theory, is still the question of knowing how to recognize our calling. Or does the Acorn Theory tell us that we don’t have to recognize it because it’s inside us and will eventually show itself? Does that mean we just live our lives knowing that our daimon is guiding us in the right direction? Or are we responsible for our own decisions?

Roloff also told us that she loved working in the corporate world. She was happy there, just like she is happy working for justice at the YWCA. Does that mean that we are allowed more than one calling? Can our calling change as we move through life? Isn’t that why people make career changes? Does finding our calling mean happiness or does the calling have nothing to do with happiness and is rather simply a map that tells us which way to turn at the fork and happiness is our own responsibility?

In an interview with Scott London (www.scottlondon.com/interviews/hillman.html), London asks Hillman if we are a miserable society because we are so out of touch with our souls’ codes. To this he responds by saying that we are slaves to economics and we have no time for leisure, which is why we are miserable. He adds “Also, I see happiness as a by-product, not something you pursue directly. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made. Maybe they meant something a little different from what we mean today — happiness as one's well-being on earth.”

The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling was a bestseller. Is that because we are a miserable culture who is constantly searching for an easy answer to happiness, as London suggests in the interview? Is Hillman’s book an easy answer? Could his theory be interpreted as the “easy way out” for those who can’t seem to get along with the “self made man” theory? Does happiness have nothing to do with vocation and everything to do with leisure? Hillman’s first chapter gave me a taste of his theory. It left me with a hunger for more on the realm of personal change but I’m not so sure it’s his answers that I’m craving.