The Key To Finding Your Professional Calling

It's not enough to go through the motions of our daily activities.

It's not enough to meet our monthly goals and our targets.

It's also not enough to work hard and do our best.

All those things are absolutely essential but simply not enough.

See, because if they were - if working hard and meeting our goals and our targets and checking off our daily action items were enough - then we'd all be bursting with passion and we would wake up with joy and excitement every single morning.

But we're not. 

There's so much depression and unhappiness and unfulfilled potential plaguing our corporate cultures.

Any good executive would sell their right arm for a slight increase in employee engagement.

So what's missing? 

Why are the majority of professionals not engaged at work? Why are they depressed? Why do they dread work? 

If that's you right now, I hear you, I was there too.

It all comes down to our Professional Calling

If you're not living out your Professional Calling every day at work, then no matter how hard you try, you'll always feel something's missing and even worse, like you might be in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing.

The first thing about finding your Professional Calling is to get clarity about what a calling is.

A calling by definition involves two parties, one that speaks and one that listens. The speaking party, the one calling, calls out to the one listening.

The biggest mistake we make when trying to find our calling is to look at our strengths and our talents and so on, and the problem with that is we're trying to find our calling in our own personal vacuum.

That's just not how a calling works.

You need to find the calling party first. The ones who will call you. The ones waiting to call you. The ones who are waiting for you to transform their lives.

Put yourself aside to start with and starting thinking of someone, one person, for whom you feel a lot of empathy.

Let me put it this way.

If you were to help one person this year, who would it be? Who do you really care about? It could be one of your family members. It could be your mom, your wife, your child. Or it could be someone you've never met. 

Whoever it is, if you see yourself wake up in the morning excited about adding value to this person's life, if you see yourself passionate about helping this person succeed in life, then that's your hero.

Who's The Hero Of Your Story

Not Superman. No, this is not someone with super human heroic abilities. This is the little guy who you want to help become a hero. This is someone who is not a hero in the superhero sense of the word, but someone quite the opposite. 

This person is losing at life somehow right now. They're hurting. They're in pain. They have a big problem they can't fix by themselves. They stay up at night worrying about that problem and they feel desperate, ready to give up.

You need to talk to this person. You need to find this person. Reach out and strike up a conversation. 

Then listen. Hear this person out. Feel their problem. Feel their pain.

Hear this person call out to you for help.

Calling you to help them become a hero.

Can you hear it? Can you hear that? 

That's the calling. That's your calling.

"Help me", they say.

"Will you help me?"

"When will you help me?"

If you hear that, that's your calling right there.

A group of people, a community of people, experiencing a similar problem, calling on you to help them go from their current situation to a glorious new version of themselves. Calling you to help them become heroes.

Living Out Your Calling

Once you hear it, you hear that plea for help, and if you really care, if you really feel their pain, that plea for help, that calling, will never ever be silenced inside of you.

It will act as your guiding light in the midst of confusion. It will keep you up at night. 

"How do I help them?", you'll wonder at 3am.

"What can I do to help them grow?"

"How can I add value to their life?"

These are all amazing questions.

And the rest of your Professional Life will be all about finding satisfying answers to those questions.

Whatever you do to answer that plea for help, that calling for help - that will be you living out your calling.

That will be your career. That will be you living out your Professional Calling.

It matters not if you mess up along the way and make mistakes as you go along.

No, what matters is that you keep that plea for help deep inside your heart and never let that go. The "How" is less important that the calling. If you hear the calling and if you're all in, then you will figure out the "How".

Just keep listening.

And never - ever - settle for less.