Over the years I have spoken with many corporate professionals who unwittingly treat their jobs as their “calling” in the sense that, on some level, they hope and expect their jobs to be a primary source of satisfaction and fulfilment and end up becoming deeply frustrated when that does not turn out to be the case.
Often these corporate professionals give inordinate amounts of personal energy, time and resource (not to mention personal sacrifice) in the hope or expectation that their job will somehow give back to them everything that they have given to their job – only to be left feeling disillusioned or burnt out and unable to pinpoint why.
Often what then happens is that they then start the cycle over again with a new employer or organisation, thinking that if they just land the “right” job then this need for fulfilment will be satisfied. And again, almost invariably, after a certain period of time they find that the “new” role does not fill their cup either.
One possible explanation for this is that the expectation itself may be misguided, since it is unlikely that any task or mission that is external to us – including the pursuit of a company’s vision, no matter how noble – can truly fulfil us, since we are all unique and each have our own innate purpose and passions that we are meant to pursue, once we identify what they are.
I would suggest that it’s for that reason that, while at times a job can provide us with growth and engagement, it generally cannot provide the sustained meaning or fulfilment that we seek – and it is perhaps the conscious or unconscious belief or expectation that it can that inevitably leads to suffering and disillusionment when such expectation goes unmet.
So does that necessarily mean that having a job is a bad thing? Far from it. In fact, for the vast majority of people, a job is a necessity for a secure livelihood. And, rather than take them for granted, we can have gratitude that our jobs generally satisfy our lower order needs (for example, income, stabilityand security). After all, these needs need to be met before we are at liberty to turn our attention to higher order “actualisation” needs like meaning and purpose.
But what it may mean is that for many people a healthy exercise could be to recalibrate and reduce their expectations around what their job can in fact give them, while simultaneously seeking to identify or nurture their calling since this can give them what they seek.
For a start, this might be achieved by removing the “emotional burden” that one places on their job and instead approach it from a place of detachment – almost as if they are a third party contractor or consultant, rather than an employee in the traditional sense of the word (which tends to have a certain degree of emotional “baggage” and “belonging” attached to it).
This doesn’t mean to be indifferent to one’s work, but rather to approach the job as a place to dispassionately exercise competence rather than as a place to extract a sense of emotional fulfilment or gratification (or, at least, to see any emotional fulfilment that may arise from the job as a pleasant “nice to have” rather than an absolute “must have”).
Somewhat counterintuitively, this can actually lead to doing better work, as the individual pours their energy into the task at hand rather than into garnering something from the job that it is unlikely to be able to give them (not dissimilar to someone continuing to pour energy into a relationship that is no longer working for them).
With this renewed approach to their job, one can then re-channel this emotional energy into finding or creating work that is aligned to who they are and which aligns with their own mission and purpose.
Not only may they find that this brings them the sense of meaning and fulfilment that they had previously been seeking, but they may also find that their calling becomes a renewing source of energy as opposed to being a drain on their energy, which at times they may have found their job to be.