Have you found your 'true calling'?

When you’ve found the right line of work for you, you’ll probably know it. You’ll feel a deep compatibility with your role. Your emotional and personal connection to your vocation will be strong and your career inherently more satisfying. You can work longer without feeling significantly depleted, your sense of purpose and vision will be clear and robust, and your natural enthusiasm will percolate simply from carrying out your work. This passion indicates that you have found - and are actively pursuing - your calling.

Your calling usually aligns with the values and ambitions that you hold deepest. Most of the time, it’s something inherent and immutable. Consider, for example, someone who cares deeply about the environment and climate change: this person may find their calling in work that aids large organisations in reducing their carbon footprint. It's fulfilling, purposeful work that stimulates your very core.

The double-edged sword of callings

For some, callings may even develop a little earlier in life thereby informing the direction of one’s future studies and/or career. In a study in 2015, researchers Shoshana Dobrow Riza and Daniel Heller followed adolescents who each expressed a passion for music and the desire to pursue a career as a musician. This calling bolstered them against setbacks on their career path, translated into perseverance and grit to achieve their goals, and even numbed any negative effects of the economic hardships and struggles that amateur musicians often face.

As is usually the case, having and achieving one’s calling can also have its perils. Those with a strong calling may not only be resistant to setbacks, but can be consumed so much by their passion to the point of being oblivious to dangers and warning signs around them. Let’s return to our adolescent musicians and their career pursuit. The researchers observed that many of the musicians had overestimated their own ability as a result of their unabating passion, impelling them to persist despite evidence suggesting that it would be either an unattainable or unstable and hazardous career. In other words, having a strong calling can greatly distort our perspective on what is realistic and what isn’t.

Can you find fulfilment without a calling?

So, having a calling comes with advantages and disadvantages, but what happens if we don’t have a calling at all? Is there something wrong? Absolutely not. There are two reasons as to why some of us may not have experienced this; either we haven’t explored and identified our calling that has been laying dormant, waiting to be found, or we simply don’t have a strong enough passion for something to qualify it as a calling. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either way. In fact, those having no calling at all in life are actually better off than those who haven’t answered their calling. Those with unanswered callings reported lower life fulfilment, work engagement, career commitment and life satisfaction, while also being prone to more physical and psychological stress.

Injecting passion where you can

While not a full-blown calling, we can still craft passion in the things that we do: for example, a job that's become a little stagnant, an industry to which we feel little attachment, or tasks that might feel a little meaningless. To claim that passion and motivation can be crafted by ourselves may seem outlandish, but it's very much possible by following a few simple principles.

1. Sense of choice

In what we do, there must exist an element of free choice for passion to flourish. In other words, a person must feel that they are able to choose their own path in which they can dedicate their time and effort. It might be an unregulated sandbox where ideas can be tested without negative consequence, and it might be a simple choice between process A or process B. In either case, autonomy is granted to that person, and they can feel ownership over their choice. Indeed, autonomy has been researched time and time again in various contexts and cultures, and has been firmly as one of the most effective conditions by which to instil motivation and passion.

2. Being good at something

By investing time in something, we tend to get better at it. Having a sense of mastery and competence over the thing we're doing enhances the enjoyment we get out of it. Continuing with the musical analogy, anyone who plays a musical instrument may recognise a U-shaped graph in enjoyment; in learning or writing a piece of music, we'll first be driven by novelty and excitement. After some time of repetitive practice, however, that drive likely starts to dwindle - the novelty evaporates and the practice has become more mechanical. But then, as we realise it's all coming together - our playing is smooth, uninterrupted, and caressing all the right notes - the drive has returned! This is the effect of competence.

3. Identifying significance and purpose

Finally, when we don't feel particularly passionate about something, it sometimes helps to connect it to the bigger picture. This is because as we go about our daily tasks, over time, we may sink into a state of autopilot. We may even be able to get the job done without much thinking. But let's refresh ourselves: why are we doing this? What effect does it have? And more importantly, how does that task, no matter how big or small, contribute to our sense of purpose? Identifying the significance of our work boosts our motivation, passion, and output.

So, to bring it all together, it’s evident that those with a clear calling in life are gifted with a direction in which they ought to be headed. Pursuing one’s calling can be motivating, fulfilling, and hugely satisfying. Having a calling that is unanswered, on the other hand, can be harmful for wellbeing and life satisfaction in the long-run. And for those without a calling, fret not: it may develop one day. Until then, working in a vocation that gives you autonomy, a sense of competence and purpose can be just as advantageous, with an added splash of realism and pragmatism to keep on track.