How to Find Your Calling: Here are 5 Clues to Recognizing It and 5 Things Your Calling is Not

How do we identify the callings in our lives? What I mean by a “calling” is a purpose so personally meaningful that committing to it—in spite of the difficulty, in spite of the oddness of going a different way—is the way for your best self to live. How do we identify the purposes and the people in our lives worth saying yes to at the cost of saying no to many others and many other things?

Clues to Your Calling

Your own calling might be something vocational found within your career. It might be something personal found almost entirely outside of your work. Since you likely have more than one calling (see below), both statements might be true. Whatever the case, “hearing” your calling is only the first challenge, and you might be hearing it already. The next challenge is to respond by choosing to go that way. All of the following addresses the first part—how to hear it. The calling that calls to you might be found in any of the following:

1. The thing only you can do

Or, the thing before you that only you can do in the special way you seem to be doing it. It should be no surprise that your own gifts and your own nature might have already drawn you near the thing worth giving yourself to more fully. (See the next point.)

2. The thing to which your choices seem to have brought you, even if you didn’t know that’s what you were choosing

Stop kicking or congratulating yourself over the choices you made that seem to have gone poorly or well for you. Many of the major choices we make in life are made largely in ignorance, some of them when we are too young to know ourselves or know the implications of what we are choosing. Choices matter, but so does luck!

And yet, there is a current guiding your life along the course it inherently wants to follow. You subconsciously submit to that current in some cases when the best way for you is unclear. I am not referring to something mystical, just suggesting that your ignorant choices might have had an unseen direction to them, even an unseen wisdom. Where have they brought you?

3. The thing that brings you peace

Your “calling” is a role, place, or endeavor that appeals to the best part of yourself, giving that part of you freedom and putting that part of you to use. This role, place, or endeavor will have challenges, but the experience of the self moving in this way is peaceful. What gives you this peace?

To highlight this clue more narrowly: What do you do that gives you the experience of your worries falling quiet?

4. The thing that makes you happy while making someone else happy

Relationships with other people are lopsided more often than we care to admit. We routinely go to lengths out of obligation or concession to someone else. There is nothing wrong with this. However, pay attention to those special cases in which the thing someone appreciates you doing, or even needs you to do, is the very thing to which you are deeply happy to give your energy or your time. 

5. The thing that causes your suffering to relent

For those who carry pain—physical, emotional, spiritual—that pain is often a negative guide. Nearly everything might seem too difficult or too pointless to pursue, except for that thing able to overcome the ache, anger, remorse, or sorrow and allow this pain to recede for a time. That thing able to do this might be unrelated to the pain. Or, it might be something directly related that gives the pain purpose or meaning.

What Your Calling Is Not

All of the above are positive clues. Here are cautions about the false ideas and influences that might keep you from your call:

1. It is not just one thing

With respect to Jack Palance, I depart from the movie City Slickers and the line he delivered in that film. His character Curly offered advice about finding “one thing.” I used that line approvingly in a talk I once gave. But I am here now to contradict that speech of mine, because we do not each have just one calling in this world. Our lives are more complex than this. Also richer. Sometimes one calling will wane because another calling is in season, but even this is not always the case. Our callings can call in unison, and it falls to us to find the harmony. Even Jesus had multiple missions (Matthew 4:23).

2. It is not the thing other people tell you to be about

They mean well! But all another person can offer you in terms of choosing a direction is the safe way, the lucrative way, or the way that appeals to them. The calling is yours, including yours alone to hear. The value of counsel comes after you have heard it. Find a guide or mentor who follows something like the same call as you.

3. It is not the thing you ought to do, or keep doing, to fulfill others’ expectations

Saying yes to something potentially means saying no to many other things. Emerson said, “To be great is to be misunderstood.” I feel like offering a slight rephrasing: “To be great is to disappoint people.”

4. It is not the thing that is easy to give attention to

Your email inbox is not a calling. 

5. It is not the thing that makes perfect sense

Your rich life will include at least one worthy calling that rings out by joy alone, offering little expectation for where that calling might lead you or what it might mean. At least, I hope for you to have this. After all, if there is a calling, then there is something like a “caller,” along with all the mystery that is the caller’s to reveal.

Adapted from peterzelinski.com