How to Find Your Calling in Life

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The Activist for Activists. Author of Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism and The Happy Activist: Journey the 5-Step Activism Path to Focus Your Passion and Change the World. Teacher, Psychologist, Environmental Activist, Animal Lover.

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Find Your Calling in Desires and Duties

Remember, Abraham Maslow, the hierarchy of needs fellow? The top of his pyramid of needs is self-actualization, which he likened to a calling. He thought callings came from two sources.

The first source is inner requiredness—things that fascinate, needs, obsessions, and self-indulgences. An example of an inner requirement is knowing that you love painting.

The second source is external requiredness—duty, obligation, and responsibility. An example of an external requirement is worrying about potential wildlife extinction.

A calling may be a match between the inner and external requirements, as described by Jeffery A. Thompson and J. Stuart Bunderson in Research on Work as a Calling…and How to Make It Matter:

“In other words, a conviction that one’s work is more than just a job or career may result not solely from a sense of inner requiredness…or from a sense of outer requiredness…but from a compelling personal narrative that sensibly marries the two. And the discovery of that narrative results in the sense of rightness, harmony, or destiny that we see in many formulations of work as a calling.”

How To Find Your Calling

For those of you who don’t feel that strong sense—that longing, drive, or vision—how do you decide on your calling?

Point Yourself in the Right Direction

The study of callings has led to a better understanding of how it operates in your life. Are you focused on a search for your calling, or is a purpose or duty leading you in a particular direction? People vary in the ways they come to a calling. One person may experience it as a summons based on a faith tradition. Another may find it through living a purposeful life. Others may get help from outside sources.

A Summons

In Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work, a pastor describes how a funeral home asked for a favor. A church was refusing to give a person who died from AIDs a funeral. Would he consider providing a funeral service to give the family closure? At first he declined, not wanting to interfere with another professional’s decision. But it weighed on him, and out of that burden came his calling. He spent the rest of his ministry helping people with AIDs.

Do you feel a moral duty to make a difference in the world? You may be motivated by a transcendent summons.

A Purposeful Life

In another story from Callings, a man with various disabilities that make it difficult to stay in a job found his calling as a sidewalk astronomer. When the sky is clear, he sets out his telescope and lets people take a look. He’s been doing this for decades and believes he has made a difference in people’s lives.

Consider what makes sense for you. Do you have a personal identification with your work that makes you feel pride? That may mean you live a purposeful life.

A Sense of Duty

Do you feel a sense of duty in your community? You know what problems need to be solved and work to do so? A forensic scientist found her calling identifying the remains of people who tried to cross the Mexico-U.S. border. It is heartbreaking work, but when she can give closure to a family, she finds some peace.

“I would love not to do this anymore, but I don’t have it in me to stop.” – forensic scientist Lori Baker, in Callings

Be Aware of Things That Tug at Your Heart, Even Fleeting Ones

Author Tara Mohr has a chapter in her book Playing Big on your calling and how to recognize it. She defines calling as “…a longing to address a particular need or problem in the world.” Here are her ways to understand a calling:

“You feel an unusually vivid pain or frustration around the status quo of a particular issue. You see a powerful vision – vague or clear – about what could be around some aspect of the status quo. That vision keeps coming back into your mind and keeps tugging at your heart. You feel huge resistance. A part of you wants to run in the other direction. You feel a sense of “this work is mine to do” or of having received an assignment to do a particular piece of work in the world.”

In this passage from Parker Palmer in A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life, he speaks of the ‘shy soul’ that

“…like a wild animal, we seek safety in the dense underbrush, especially when people are around. If we want to see a wild animal, we know the last things we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out. But if we walk quietly into the woods, sit patiently at the base of a tree, breathe with the Earth, the wild creature we seek might put in an appearance.”

For those of us who don’t feel a strong calling, recognizing that it might be ‘shy’ means listening to ourselves more thoughtfully. In the sense that Parker Palmer speaks of patience and breathing, you can take quiet, meditative time to listen to what tugs at your heart.

Find the Core Mission of Your Life, That Weaves Its Strands Through All You Do

Look for themes in your life. For example, perhaps you see a thread throughout your visioning – you tend to focus on those unhoused. When you were a child, you did chores to earn money and donated to the local shelter. Now you knit scarves and hats for the firefighter’s campaign to give to the community. Care for the unhoused is a theme and a passion.

This theme may be so ingrained in what you do that you don’t realize it is there until you take time to consider how you are living your life. Parker Palmer reflects:

“We can move toward such homecomings by seeking clues to vocation in childhood memories. When I was a boy, I spent hours putting together little books on how airplanes fly. For a long time I thought that meant I wanted to be a pilot. But a few years ago, I saw that what I’d really wanted all along was to write books.”

So, what’s calling you?

How to Find Your Calling in Life

Find Your Calling in Desires and Duties