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Why looking for your calling is a waste of time

By Kris Verlé · ICF PCC Credentialled Career Coach · Last updated August 2026

If you've worked with me before, you'll know I've banned terms like 'happiness' or 'passion' from my coaching sessions. I do that because they can easily become catch-all concepts for all the things we think we want in life but are too hazy (or lazy) to define.

Another word I banned is 'calling'. It's one of those terms clients often reach for when they're unhappy about the direction their career has taken, and they're looking for a way out. But by clinging to this quest for divine inspiration about their professional lives, they're very much keeping themselves stuck.

So when that moment of inspiration doesn't come, and it usually doesn't, they assume something's wrong with them.

The fallacy behind the career calling

As you can tell, I don't believe in the existence of an individual career calling, just like I don't believe in the idea of destiny. Both beliefs hand responsibility for our lives over to some higher authority, which, regardless of your religious beliefs, just isn't a sensible career strategy.

Say you subscribe to the idea of finding your calling. If you've then spent the past 15 years of your working life trying to figure out what that calling is, that's potentially a decade and a half you've wasted living the wrong life. What a depressing thought. Not to mention that you're setting the bar so high that very few jobs in the real world could possibly clear it.

You don't even have to be religious to run your own version of this. Plenty of people would never say some deity had a plan for them. But they still assume they were born with a particular temperament and set of talents, and that somewhere out there is the job those things were made for. Same idea and the same problem, which is that a particular temperament and set of talents don't necessarily point at a single career.

I often tell my clients their problem isn't that they haven't found their calling. It's believing they're supposed to have a calling in the first place. And that belief has a history, which explains why it still carries so much weight. A vocation was originally a 'call from God', so the point was that someone external (He/She/They) did the calling.

And that made sense, given that for most of history, there was very little social mobility. Your station in life was mostly decided by your father's, so the word 'calling' was never an invitation to search, but rather a reason to accept the position you already had.

It was the Protestant reformer Martin Luther who extended that logic beyond the priesthood, arguing that a farmhand's work was as holy as a monk's. Sounds noble until you notice what he actually meant: accept the hand you've been dealt rather than trying to negotiate a better one.

Once social mobility increased and work became something people could choose rather than inherit, that instruction flipped. And a term that once told people to accept the hand they were dealt now sends them out searching for a better hand.

What people really want when they say they're looking for their career calling

When people say they want to find their calling, what are they really chasing? In my coaching experience, it comes down to four things.

The first is that they want their work to matter. That usually means they're looking for: 1) purpose, being clear on what they do and what it's for; 2) meaning, the sense that the hours they put in connect to something they care about; and 3) impact, evidence that something or somebody is better off for what they did. Achieve all three and, Yahtzee, you feel fulfilled.

The second thing they're chasing is a guarantee that they've chosen right. Some kind of certainty that they won't reach retirement age only to find out they backed the wrong career horse. Of course, no career decision can ever offer that guarantee, and even those who say they've found their calling can't be sure they won't lose interest one day.

The third thing people are after relates to one of the words I banned earlier: passion. When people say they're looking to find their calling, they're not just looking to find enthusiasm about the work in front of them. They're looking for a job or career that will feel enjoyable and exciting more or less permanently. The idea is that, once they've found their calling, the engagement won't wear off. And that's just not realistic.

The fourth thing people want is for the work to stop feeling like work. Ask someone to describe their calling and what you often get back is a description of a hobby. Something they'd happily do on a Sunday afternoon, for free, with nobody waiting on the result.

That sounds like the flow I just described, but it's a different animal, because flow is about the task. A hobby is about everything surrounding the task. What makes a hobby a hobby is that you picked it, you can stop whenever you like, nobody is depending on it, and there's no cost to doing it badly. You can be a mediocre potter for thirty years and it costs you nothing.

That's similar to the flow I just mentioned but not quite the same. You can be completely absorbed in a problem you resent, at eleven at night, for a deadline somebody else set. Conversely, you can spend a whole Sunday in the garden doing nothing that stretches you, and still not want to be anywhere else. What people are looking for is a sense of enjoyment in their work but without obligation.

So, if these are the four things people are looking for, none of them is unreasonable, but they're all outcomes and often they don't show up in the first year.

Build career capital instead of chasing a calling

So, if looking for your calling won't get you there, how do you end up feeling fulfilled, satisfied in your career choice, and often in flow?

Talk to anyone who feels they've found their calling and you'll find the same thing underneath it: years of accumulated career capital. That doesn't mean capital guarantees the feeling, because plenty of people get very good at their jobs and still feel unfulfilled. But I've never met anyone who got there without it.

Often, they've been doing what they do for so long that they've become very good at it. As a result, people started trusting them and giving them more interesting problems to work on, as well as more autonomy over how they do their work.

You get into flow when a task is slightly harder than what you can comfortably do, and that can happen at any stage of a career, even in your first month. But what career capital changes is what you're absorbed in. The problems that stretch you now matter to somebody, and you have enough control over your own diary to get a long run at them.

Five signs you're on the right career path

So how do you know you're building capital for the right career? By looking out for five signals.

You'll notice that certainty and flow aren't among them. That's because certainty arrives at the end, which is exactly what makes it useless for deciding anything now, whereas flow can be found almost anywhere.

The first three signals tell you the capital is building. The fourth asks whether you're building it in a direction you want. The fifth asks whether the work is worth doing at all.

1. The problems you solve are becoming more complicated. Every job has problems, and last year's problems are the yardstick for this year's. So, write down what was occupying you twelve months ago and then compare that with what's occupying you right now. If you're on the right path, you'll notice that the problems you're dealing with have become harder to solve. And you don't mind that.
2. People come to you for a particular kind of problem. Notice what colleagues come to you for, especially the ones who don't have to. When people start bringing the same sort of questions or problems to you, that's a sign you're becoming known for something specific rather than generally competent.
3. People leave you to get on with your work. Fewer check-ins, less sign-off, and nobody asking you to justify your approach. Being trusted to decide how the work gets done is a clear sign that your career capital has been building.
4. You'd gladly take the job of the person two promotions ahead of you. I don't necessarily mean their title, but their working week. The activities they spend their days doing, who they answer to, what they gave up to get there. If the idea of doing their job turns you off, you're probably building capital in the wrong direction.
5. You can name the person who's better off because of the work you do. Not the company, but a person who's better off this month because of something you did. And you have to think that difference was worth making. Plenty of people can name someone and feel nothing about it, which means they're probably solving a problem that doesn't really matter to them.

Notice that three of these five you can work on without going anywhere. Harder problems, being known for something, more autonomy: all of that is available in the job you already have.

The other two are the ones that might tell you to leave. Indeed, if you don't want the working week of the person two promotions ahead of you, or you can't bring yourself to care about the problem you're solving, no amount of capital built in that direction will fix it.

So should you stay or go?

If you feel you're in the wrong career, searching for your calling won't tell you whether you are.

Changing job might well be the right move. The test isn't whether the work feels like a calling yet; it's the last two signals: whether you want where this path leads, and whether the problem is worth solving. If both are no, go, and quitting strategically beats drifting out. If both are yes, you're closer than you think and what's missing is time.

And next time somebody tells you they found their calling, remember how they probably got there. They chose a direction, worked hard, got very good at it, and now they love what they do. It looks like a calling from where they're standing, but only with hindsight.

If you're trying to work out which of those two you're in, book a free consultation call.