Understanding Vocation, Purpose, and Meaningful Career Transitions

Someone asked me recently what question came up most often during my years as a coach.

While people came to me with a wide range of decisions during pivotal moments in life and business, one question kept surfacing: an existential one, often about their vocation.

"Is this what I'm supposed to be doing?"

This question often emerges during periods of burnout, career change, major life transitions, or even in the midst of outward success that somehow feels empty. It can bring with it frustration, anxiety, and a quiet inner conflict, especially for those who have been circling the same uncertainty for years.

The uncomfortable feeling underneath it all is usually:

"This can't be all that there is."

While there is much to discuss about life as a whole, for this article I want to focus on the vocation side of the question and unpack why this has become such a defining question for so many.

The Difference Between a Career and a Vocation

One of the biggest obstacles that creates confusion around this question is not recognizing the difference between a career and a vocation.

A career is an occupation or profession—something you do with the skills you've developed.

A vocation is your life's work—part of your broader life purpose. It's how you naturally perceive, contribute, and create value in the world. It often remains consistent, even as your career evolves.

Career and vocation can exist separately, or they can become beautifully aligned. When a client comes to me with, "Is this what I should be doing with my life?" they are usually asking about the latter: How do I discover my purpose and turn it into a career that I love and can sustain?

It's an understandable aspiration, but also a misleading one. It can create an unrealistic ideal and place unnecessary pressure on us. We often assume that our vocation leads to a single profession, when it can instead be expressed through many different careers over a lifetime.

Looking back, my own career has taken many forms. I've worked as a designer, creative director, coach, and now advisor. On paper, they appear to be very different professions. Yet there is a consistent thread beneath those roles.

I have always been drawn to identifying underlying patterns, bringing order to complexity, uncovering hidden misalignments, and helping people find coherent direction. As a graphic designer, that meant creating visual cohesiveness and consistency. As a creative director, it meant developing communication strategies that aligned messages with marketing goals. As a coach, it meant recognizing patterns, blind spots, and competing priorities. Today, as an advisor, it means defining the core tensions within a situation, expanding strategic possibilities, and helping leaders recognize the path forward that is most aligned.

Although my career has changed a few times, I have never felt that I abandoned my vocation. If anything, each transition has brought me closer to a more precise and mature expression of it.

Finding Purpose Isn't Always a Lightning Bolt

Many people wait for certainty before they're willing to pursue meaningful work.

There is a sense of being chosen for a special purpose that many of us idealize. Yet unlike the superhero movies we grew up watching, a meaningful vocation doesn't always appear when we're struck by lightning. It can simply be a subtle but consistent tug throughout your life that pulls you toward the same underlying vocation.

For example, you might have a consistent impulse to entertain others. The expression of that might show up in many different careers. You may become a writer, a comedian, an actor, a producer, or an event planner, but the underlying thread remains the same—bringing joy and laughter into people's lives. Each of those careers could become a meaningful expression of the same vocation.

We often don't recognize our vocation until we've lived it for a while. Sometimes all that draws us forward is a quiet curiosity or attraction to a particular career, only to discover later how deeply fulfilling it feels.

Another way to look at it is this: your vocation is part of your nature; a career is its chosen expression. Your vocation may come naturally to you, but expressing it well still requires years of practice, discipline, and experience.

When a Career Transition Is Necessary

Even the most successful professionals sometimes make career transitions. It doesn't mean their work has been wrong for them. It could simply mean that they have outgrown their current way of expressing it. When that happens, a career transition may be necessary, and sometimes natural.

Every career has limitations that may not allow for the full expression of your vocation. There may come a time when, after many years in the same career, you become increasingly aware of those limitations and desire a new way of expression.

For some, a career that feels genuinely unfulfilling can exist for years, despite its external success. Many people live with the internal misalignment between their existing career and their true vocation until it becomes too loud to ignore.

If that's the case, a career transition may also become necessary, not because your vocation has changed, but because the way you've been expressing doesn’t fit. This is a meaningful shift that can feel deeply existential in many aspects.

If you're currently in this transition and looking to align your next career with your vocation, here are some helpful questions to ask yourself. Asking these simple questions is often more revealing than searching for one perfect answer.

• What kind of work gives me energy rather than drains it?

• What themes have followed me throughout my life?

• What do people consistently come to me for?
  

If aligning your career and vocation is something you have been struggling with for a long time, know that just because you haven't found a fulfilling career yet, or succeeded in one, doesn't mean you have failed in life.

For many people, a vocation doesn't turn out to be something you search for and find, but something you gradually uncover through experience. You may call it alignment. You may call it discovery. You may even call it remembering. When it comes to your vocation, you don't have to wait to be chosen. You can choose how you express it—sometimes again and again throughout your lifetime.