8 Ways to Start Listening for Your Calling
Your calling isn't hiding from you. It's been trying to get your attention.
Calling is one of those words that gets thrown around a lot in conversations about work and yet most people have never stopped to think about what it actually means.
I define it as the intersection of what you’re naturally good at and what you genuinely enjoy doing. It’s not one or the other. Talent without joy becomes a grind. Joy without talent becomes frustration. But when the two meet—when you are doing something you’re wired for and something that lights you up at the same time—it’s magic. Work stops feeling like work and starts feeling like something you want to do.
That alignment between who you are and what you do every day creates something most people spend their entire careers searching for: a sense of purpose. A feeling of happiness that doesn’t depend on the weekend arriving or your next vacation. The kind of deep satisfaction that comes from knowing your work matters—not just to your employer’s bottom line, but to you, in the most personal and fundamental way.
I know what it feels like to work without that alignment. I spent years in a job that looked successful from the outside and felt hollow on the inside. And I know what it feels like to find it—to wake up to work you love, work that gives back more than it takes.
Most people spend years waiting for their calling to find them. They imagine it arriving like a lightning bolt—sudden, unmistakable, impossible to ignore. They wait for the moment everything clicks into place, for the path to reveal itself clearly.
That’s not how it works. At least it wasn’t for me.
My calling didn’t announce itself loudly. In fact, it whispered for years—so quietly I barely paid attention. But there were clues. During my years of travel entrepreneurship, I often found myself meeting local authors at networking events. Each time, I’d buy their books, collect their signatures, and save them like the treasure they were. And every time, I’d tell that author the same thing: “I’d love to write a book someday. I think I’ve got one in me.”
Then I’d go back to my life and forget all about it. Because writing a book seemed so far-fetched, so out of reach, so firmly in the category of things other people did.
Until the day I stumbled onto a story I simply couldn’t resist telling. And I finally started. You can read more about my calling in the following article:
If you’re in that in-between space—knowing something isn’t right but not yet sure what is—this is where you begin. You don’t need perfect clarity. You just need to start paying attention. Here are eight ways to stop waiting and start listening.
1. Look backward before you look forward.
Before you try to figure out what comes next, look back at your past. Reflect on the moments in your life when you felt most alive in your work—not most successful, not most impressive, most alive. What were you doing? Who were you with? What did those moments have in common?
Your calling often has roots in your past that you haven’t connected yet. The thread is usually there if you’re willing to follow it.
2. Pay attention to what energizes you versus what drains you.
For one week, notice how you feel after different activities—not during, but after. During is unreliable. During, we can push through almost anything. After is where the truth lives.
Energy is one of the most honest signals you have. Your calling will leave you feeling more alive, not less. Your job right now is simply to notice which activities send you in which direction.
3. Notice what you’d do even if no one was watching.
Not what you think you should want. Not what looks impressive on paper or makes sense to the people in your life. What do you find yourself drawn to quietly and consistently, with no audience and no applause?
That pull—the one that doesn’t need external validation to keep showing up—is worth paying very close attention to.
4. Give yourself permission to experiment.
You don’t have to commit to anything yet. You don’t have to have a plan or a business model or a five-year vision. Try something you’ve been curious about for thirty days with zero pressure to turn it into anything.
Your only job is to notice how it feels. The experiments that want more of your attention will tell you so.
5. Take your “hobby” more seriously.
This one stops a lot of people in their tracks, because it’s often where the answer has been hiding all along.
Many people are already living their calling in their spare time but have dismissed it as not serious enough, not practical enough, not a real career. If something consistently brings you joy outside of work—if it’s the thing you turn to when you finally have a free hour—it deserves a much closer look than you’ve been giving it.
Joy is not a trivial signal. It’s one of the most important ones.
6. Stop waiting for a lightning bolt.
Callings rarely arrive as dramatic revelations. They tend to emerge quietly, through doing. The clarity you’re waiting for is more likely to come after you start than before.
Start somewhere small. Take one step in the direction of something that feels right, even if you can’t yet see where it leads. Let the path reveal itself through movement rather than waiting for certainty before you begin. Certainty, for most people, never comes first. Courage does.
7. Talk to people who are doing work that excites you.
Not to copy their path—your path will look different, and that’s exactly as it should be. But to ask questions. To sit across from someone who has found work that genuinely matters to them and let their enthusiasm be contagious.
A single honest conversation can reveal something in you that months of solo reflection never quite reached.
8. Ask yourself the uncomfortable question.
If fear and money weren’t factors—if you knew you couldn’t fail and you knew you’d be okay—what would you be doing?
You don’t have to act on the answer today. But you do need to hear it. Sit with it. Write it down somewhere you’ll actually see it. Most people already know more than they’re admitting to themselves, and the answer to this question is usually living just below the surface of all the very reasonable explanations for why it isn’t possible.
It’s possible. That’s what I want you to take away from this.
Your calling isn’t hiding from you. It’s been trying to get your attention for a long time—through the activities that light you up, through the work you do for free, through the quiet pull toward something you keep dismissing as impractical or unrealistic or not the right time.
You don’t have to have all the answers before you start. You just have to be willing to listen.
If this resonated with you, my book You Don't Have to Stay goes deeper into the journey from work that drains you to work that lights you up. You can find more information on it here.