How to Find Your Calling

What’s your passion?

What do you want to do with your life?

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Do these questions make you shudder? If you are at a total loss for how to even begin to answer the dreaded ‘passion’ question, you are not alone.

Let’s kick off this post with a quote from the novel The 5^th Wave by Rick Yancey.

God doesn’t call the equipped.

God equips the called.

And you have been called.

So, with this post, I call on you. I want to help you find your calling, your purpose, what you were born to do.

This is the book that can change the rest of your life. In my opinion, it is the only book that really helps you tackle the questions that we listed at the top of this post:

• What’s your passion?
• What do you want to do with your life?
• What do you want to be when you grow up?

Everyone’s an expert at something is a good principle to keep in mind, and often the “something” comes as a surprise.

Chris Guillebeau, Born for This

I wanted to highlight just one of Chris’s tips for us to use right now. Chris advises people to be a master problem solver and look for the specific problems that people come to us for. Is there a problem or topic people constantly ask you about?

I want you to identify specific skills you have that you can use to find out what you are called to do.

We are going to play a game I created based on Chris’s book called: “What’s your calling?” Ready? Let’s get started!

Let’s Play:

In the grid below (feel free to download and print it) I have a list of skills. I have put them into a Skill Bingo Chart.

• Print out this chart or copy it onto a piece of paper.
• Give each skill a rating 1, 2 or 3. Give it a 1 if it feels a lot like you, give it a 2 if it only sometimes feels like you and give it a 3 if it doesn’t feel like you at all.
• In the last column, add three skills or activities you do on a daily basis and give them ratings as well.

Here is a list of each skill:

• Solving Problems
• Building Relationships
• Working on Teams
• Creating New things
• Strategizing Big ideas
• Resolving Disputes
• Facilitating Change
• Setting Up Systems
• Teaching People
• Something you do every day: _____________
• Something you do every day: _____________
• Something you do every day: _____________

Now, circle all the 1’s. These are all of the skills that you feel sound like you. These are your top capabilities.

My Challenges:

1. Think of one thing you can do every day that makes you feel capable.
2. Make sure that you are exercising at least one of your “1 rated” capabilities from the chart above. Your capabilities are what call you out of bed in the morning and that is what should drive your decisions.
3. Go buy Born for This and find what you are born to do—then let me know.

This post was inspired by the amazing book:

Born for This by Chris Guillebeau