In his collection of essays titled “On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Growing Old, Parker Palmer recalls his grandfather, Jesse Palmer, who spent much of his life machining parts for John Deere tractors in Iowa. This was his job, Palmer writes, but his vocation was something more ambitious: “a love of turning raw material into things of use or beauty.” It was a passion his grandfather continued to pursue long after he stopped working for Deere at the mandatory retirement age of 65. 

In the Middle Ages, the word vocation – literally “a calling,” – meant a divine summons to enter the religious life. Today, post-Enlightenment, we usually talk about vocation as work that expresses some unique constellation of our individual talents, interests, and values.

But our limited understanding of what constitutes vocation ignores what distinguishes a true calling from a job or even a career.

Some years ago, I attended a Q&A session between a group of MBA students and the CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation. One of the students asked the CEO how he had managed to maintain work-life balance, given the long hours he’d invested in his career.

The CEO replied, “There’s no such thing as work-life balance. If you don’t believe me, ask my ex-wife.” I could sense an uneasy chill course through the crowd as the students began to absorb the significance of what they had just heard. Underlying the student’s question – and the CEO’s response – was the assumption that “work” and “life” are two parallel lines of human experience that never intersect. Work is about earning a living, and life is about living itself.

As technology continues to blur the boundaries between work and home, especially during the ongoing pandemic, we’re beginning to realize the limitations of drawing such artificial distinctions between life and work – which has led to what’s perhaps the most notable consequence of the pandemic: a reevaluation of personal priorities that’s been called “the great resignation.” 

Many of us are introduced to the idea of vocation in college, since college is the first time most of us are asked to think for ourselves. A lot has been written in recent years on the importance of encouraging college students to approach their undergraduate education as more than just a way to get a job after graduation, and instead to think about college in broader terms, as an exploration of what the idea of a personal vocation might possibly mean for us.  

If we don’t start exploring the meaning of vocation in college, we might start thinking about vocation as the result of some later life-changing event. Nobel Prize-winner Malala Yousafzai discovered her vocation – advocating for girls’ education worldwide – at 15 after being severely wounded by the Taliban in an assassination attempt in 2012.

Far less inspiring was the discovery of my own vocation, which started as a conversation I had with my wife some years ago about how the next chapter of my life might take shape. I confided that after spending most of my career in marketing, I no longer found the work as meaningful as I had in the past. These days, I told her, I find greater significance in helping individuals and teams achieve goals they never believed they could accomplish. So began my transition from marketing executive to executive coach. 

As a student, I’ve always loved school. Today, as a mentor and volunteer, I devote some of my time to advising young professionals and coaching community college students, and I teach graduate students at a local university. And even while I worked for most of my life as a marketer, I did so most recently (and meaningfully) within a university community. Taken together, these different activities point to a single root of inspiration: a love of learning and helping others learn, which I now feel confident defines the core of my life’s vocation.

Any sense of vocation usually includes, at its foundation, the promise of creating some kind of change, large or small, in the world. Jesse Palmer’s vocation celebrated the alchemy of transforming raw materials into something useful or beautiful. The Malala Fund, according to the Nobel website, “empowers girls to achieve their potential and become confident and strong leaders in their own countries.”

So how can you discover what your vocation might be? One piece of advice: don’t limit your investigation to parsing your work history in search of patterns that might emerge. Expand your search to include the totality of your life experience. Start by asking yourself three questions: What activities (including my work) do I find most meaningful and inspiring? What qualities and values do these activities have in common? And finally, what – or whom – do I hope to transform through the sum total of my life’s activities?

Don’t be in a hurry to answer these questions – “live the questions,” as Rainer Maria Rilke encourages us to do with all the great questions in life, until you feel an answer begin to reverberate deeply within your bones. That’s when you can be sure you’re on the path to discovering your true vocation.