7 Questions to Help You Discover Your Life’s Calling

“There is no greater gift you can give or receive than to honor your calling. It’s why you were born. And how you become most truly alive.” Oprah

The path to our calling is an evolving process.

The path to my calling has taken years. I started my legal career as a lawyer and believed that was my calling in life but I soon found out it wasn’t.

I’ve transitioned careers from law to policy to politics to community organizing. Each career change has brought me closer to my life’s calling.

Today, I coach others to discover and stay true to their calling.

Why?

Because I believe we are each put here to make an impact and serve in our own way. When we are in alignment with our calling, we are able to make our greatest contribution and find the most success in our work.

Are you ready to discover your life’s calling to do the work you were meant to do?

Here are 7 questions that you can ask yourself to help you discover your life’s calling.

1) What is your message to the world?

Without fail, it is this question that helps many of the people I work with discover their life’s calling.

Each person has a lifetime of experiences, philosophies and thoughts that has guided them in their lives. Each person has a life story and a life message.

When you’re asked to leave a message for others or words of wisdom for others in life, people are able to tap into their inspiration and come up with a strong and insightful message.

Imagine you had to leave your message to the world in a 30 second sound-bite or on a billboard.

Based on your personal story and life experiences, what is your message to the world?

2) What kind of legacy do you want to leave?

No one likes to think about themselves after they’ve lived their lives but taking this larger view helps put everything in perspective.

Let’s say you’ve lived a full and rich life and were able to leave something behind for your family, friends and society.

What would that be? What did you do or change or live in your life that will impact people when you’re no longer here?

What qualities will you have been remembered for? What did you change? What was your life philosophy?

Who did you inspire? How did you touch people in your life?

3) What doesn’t feel like work to you?

There are parts of your work day that feel like pure drudgery: difficult and painstaking tasks that bore you to death.

But there are other parts of the work day when you feel on top of the world. Your project doesn’t feel like work and you love doing it. Not only is it a breeze for you to get done but you get a lot of compliments when doing it.

What tasks don’t feel like work and what work can you do in your sleep?

4) What did you imagine doing when you were a kid?

You’d be surprised how much we were in tune with our intuition and our callings growing up.

Many of our strengths, passions and aspirations go back to our childhood days.

What did you tell people you wanted to do as a kid growing up?

What were you preoccupied with? Which professions fascinated you? What did you dream about doing in your day-dreams?

5) Who is doing your dream job? And what exactly is that job?

Look around you in your everyday life.

What would you want to do if you could do any job out there? Which job or career seems like a blast to you? Whose job would you want to be doing if you could do any job out there?

Once you’ve thought of the person whose job you’d want to be doing, look at that job itself.

What job is it that they are doing? How remote or related is the work you’re doing today compared to the person doing your dream job?

What do you need to do in order to get that job yourself? More skills, more school, more contacts?

6) What are you most passionate about?

All right, this might be an annoying question because you’re trying to figure out what you’re passionate about.

But let’s forget about your workplace for a minute.

What are you passionate about outside work?

What hobbies and activities do you do for fun?

What books and magazines do you read?

What’s the main section of the bookstore you visit?

You can try to tie your passions to your job later but for now, determine what it is you’re passionate about generally in life.

7) What work would you never do again no matter how you much you were paid?

It’s important to discover your calling in life but one way to help you get there is to eliminate those jobs and careers that are definitely NOT your calling.

Once you know what career doesn’t fit or what jobs you can’t stand, you will get clearer on what jobs are left.

You can use the process of elimination and identifying jobs you’re allergic to, to help you get closer to your true calling in life.

Finding your calling can be a life-long process but answering some of these questions will get you just a little bit closer to career purpose and clarity.

Have you found your calling in life? What helped you discover it? Please share in the comments below.

———

Vishnu coaches professionals to discover their life purpose and do more meaningful work. For the ebook, “11 ways to discover your highest purpose and transition out of your profession”, visit www.vishnusvirtues.com

---

GET THE BOOK BY
ERIN FALCONER!

Erin shows overscheduled, overwhelmed women how to do less so that they can achieve more. Traditional productivity books—written by men—barely touch the tangle of cultural pressures that women feel when facing down a to-do list. How to Get Sh*t Done will teach you how to zero in on the three areas of your life where you want to excel, and then it will show you how to off-load, outsource, or just stop giving a damn about the rest.

ORDER YOURS TODAY!