Reframing your calling

Shifting identity without losing your values

My friend Mara (not her real name) stood in the emergency department for what she knew would be her last shift.

After nearly a quarter century of treating cardiac arrests, traffic accidents, overdoses, and everything in between, she tells me that, that day, she felt nothing. Numb.

The week leading up to that last shift, though…that was a different story. She’d been flooded by a complex mix of emotions, a miasma of sadness, elation, freedom, and loss. All at once.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Mara and I trained together. We weren’t in the same program (I was on the surgical track, she in emergency medicine), but surgeons and ER docs intersect frequently. And Mara was—and still is—very good at what she does.

She has a preternatural calm in the face of chaos. Her mind is astonishingly agile—she can sort through a firehose of information to get to the diagnosis underneath stupid fast. And, she cares.

A lot.

Which is why, when her colleague asked her on her last day, “You’re really leaving? But you’re so good at this!” she finally broke.

The words stung, she told me later, even if they were intended as a compliment. And that’s because she’d been stuck in a quandary for at least three years: Yes, she was very good at what she did.

And also, she was done with it.

What did that say about her? Was she betraying her calling?

Two years after her last shift, two years into Mara’s new job as the chief information officer for a fledgling health tech company, she’d built both a clinical prediction algorithm and a team who deployed it across dozens of hospitals.

As the post-implementation data started coming in, Mara realized that her prediction algorithm had been able to decrease unexpected cardiac arrests in the ED by a statistically significant amount.

And that, she told me, is when she could finally be sure that her move out of clinical work wasn’t a betrayal of her calling.

It was simply her calling dressed in different clothes. With different daily rhythms, different KPIs—and a lot fewer overnight shifts.

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After years of working with clients in big career transitions, I’ve learned that the people for whom the transition is the hardest are those in what I’ve started calling the “identity professions.” These are the professions that demand so much of someone that what they do becomes who they are.

In these professions, the concept of a “calling” runs deep. In medicine, for example, we even have rituals to mark that calling: a “white coat ceremony” to induct incoming medical students into the guild of professional healers. A (largely symbolic) Hippocratic oath. And heck, even continuing medical education or the torture that is our oral boards.

The mechanics, the how of a job turning into an identity, involve years of very specific practice, completely remodeled mental structures, and a status quo bias. I dug into these mechanics a couple of weeks ago on the blog, so I won’t rehash them here.

Suffice it to say that Mara wasn’t alone. Anyone who thinks of leaving an identity will face the same confusion, the same uncertainty, the same “I’m good at this, and I hate it” imbalance.

And it doesn’t have to be this way.

The fluidity of identity

In 2018, Ryan Duffy and his colleagues published their Work as a Calling theory, as a way to synergize decades of research on the interplay of work and “calling.” Here’s their model:

From Duffy, et al, 2018

It’s complex—and really, really fascinating.

Some of what they found is pretty unsurprising: people who work in their callings, for example, experience both increased job satisfaction and workaholism, burnout, and exploitation.

For anyone who’s worked in an identity profession—or in the charity, religious, or non-governmental space—that last part resonates. I’ve lost count of the number of times in my career I’ve been asked to do something for free, simply because it’s what “good people” do.

But that’s not what I’m most interested in.

It’s that subtle, two-headed arrow linking the “Perceiving a calling” box and the “Work meaning and commitment” one.

That bidirectionality is super fascinating.

Duffy and his colleagues write:

Initial studies examining the links among these variables positioned work meaning as an outcome of living a calling. However, in the first study to explore how these variables related longitudinally across three time points, [we] found that although these two variables each affected each other over time, work meaning was much stronger as a predictor than as an outcome of living a calling…. We propose that work meaning mediates the relation of perceiving a calling with living a calling.

(emphases mine)

In other words, they found that, for people who do perceive a calling on their lives, “living it out” is a very malleable thing, deeply influenced by the work that you do.

So it’s not always that you perceive your calling, then you find the work necessary to fit the calling. Sometimes, the work that you do itself alters your calling.

It’s mind-bending stuff.

And it’s also really freeing stuff.

Transitions and identity

Because transitions don’t have to change our calling—or our identity.

If Duffy and his colleagues are right, then we can decouple the path that we’re currently on with what it looks like to live out our calling.

To make that more concrete, imagine a doctor who always wanted to be a doctor. She’s known it since she was six.

Imagine also that she’s now a doctor, and the reality of the path of doctoring doesn’t necessarily match with what she perceived as her calling. The path doesn’t match the purpose for her.

Duffy’s research means she can be as satisfied—and likely more so—by finding a job where “work meaning and commitment” improve, and that doing so will, in turn, help shape her calling.

When people in identiy professions face big transition moments, we feel a particular stress, one that stems from perceiving that transition as an existential threat to our very self-integrity. It’s the “Am I still me if I don’t do this?” question.

Duffy’s research suggests that there’s a way to get around that.

Photo by Christopher Windus on Unsplash

Back in 2005, J. David Creswell and his colleagues tested one way to do so.

They wanted to know whether what they called “affirmations of personal values” could blunt a person’s stress response.

Spoiler: It can. By a lot.

Their research took it one level deeper than the simple “affirmations are good for you” truism. They dissected what kinds of affirmations had the most benefit. To quote:

Trait self-esteem and optimism moderated the relation between value affirmation and psychological stress responses, such that participants who had high self-resources and had affirmed personal values reported the least stress. These findings suggest that reflecting on personal values can keep neuroendocrine and psychological responses to stress at low levels.

In non-research talk, that means that people who experienced the lowest stress affirmed both themselves and their values.

There’s a huge takeaway there: Connecting with why your values matter (like, “Why is fairness important to me?”) will ground you best when navigating a change.

Your values aren’t tied to a single role, a single job, a single career path, a single relationship, or anything else. They’re your psychological compass.

Your calling isn’t a cage — it’s a compass. If you let it, it can guide you to new ways for your values to find even fuller expression.

And the research suggests that people who are able to frame their calling as evolving through transition (rather being erased) make the inevitable shifts that life throws at us better, more smoothly, and with greater joy.

Identity isn’t static. It’s a river. Values flow through different contexts.

A surgeon’s precision might find new expression in process optimization. Mara’s quick decision-making found new life in a successful algorithm.

These aren’t departures—they’re expansions, evolutions.

They’re a river.

And so are you.

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