At 43, Chuck was struggling. Even though he was a highly successful dentist and his income bracket was at the top 3 percent for all Americans, he dreaded going to work.

 

The mounting stress was taking its toll on him. He had been on antidepressants, but they had not stemmed the waves of discouragement that kept him feeling like his life was off-track.

 

At first glance, he had no reason to be depressed. He lived in a stunning house in an upscale neighborhood. He drove a top-of-the-line, high-performance BMW. He was consistently recruited to serve on prominent committees in his church and community.

 

But as Chuck and I talked, the layers of his situation unfolded, and a clearer understanding of his frustration emerged. Chuck's parents were blue-collar workers who had labored long and hard to make ends meet. Chuck was their only child, and they had decided early in his life that he would have all the advantages they had missed.

 

He went to the best schools, drove the finest cars and wore brand-name clothes. After Chuck finished college, his parents helped him choose from career options that could give him the level of success they never had experienced. He was to become a professional with a high income, and his wonderful lifestyle would exemplify the American Dream.

 

Chuck and I discovered while talking, however, that he was not fulfilling the American Dream. And he certainly wasn't fulfilling his own dream. He was confronted with the realization that he was living out his parents' dream.

 

Chuck badly needed what I call a Strategic Life Plan—a course-correction to take him from the dissatisfaction he was experiencing to a life anchored in authentic success and fulfillment. When I develop a Strategic Life Plan with individuals, we look at three key components of their makeup. We delve into their:

 

· skills and abilities

 

· personality traits

 

· values, dreams and passions

 

See the accompanying article on this page to learn more about how these components influence your life choices and direction.

 

Knowing yourself in these key areas will help guide you into a sense of continuity in your life. You will gain a clearer picture of the broad role work plays in your life to create purpose, and you'll better see what your vocation, career and job should be.

 

Vocation, career, job: These three words tend to be used interchangeably, but they shouldn't be. Each is distinct, conveying a different meaning and affecting a separate area of your life.

 

Vocation. This is the most profound of the three. It must incorporate calling, purpose, mission and destiny. Vocation is the so-called bigger picture that many people often never identify in their lives.

 

"Vocation" comes from the Latin verb vocare, which means "to call." It suggests that you are listening for something that is calling out to you, something that is particular to you. A calling is something you have to listen for.

 

Your vocation represents what you do that makes a difference to you, that builds meaning for you, that you can look back on later in life when you want to see the impact you made on the world. It is what creates your legacy. As author Stephen R. Covey points out in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Free Press), we all want "to live, to love, to learn and to leave a legacy."

 

Career. Look at the derivations of the words "vocation" and "career" and you will immediately get a feel for the difference between them. Career comes originally from the Latin word for "cart" and later from the Middle French word for "racetrack."

 

Webster's dictionary partly defines career as "to run or move at full speed, rush wildly," implying that you can go around and around really fast for a long time but never get anywhere. This is why in today's volatile work environment, even professionals with careers in medicine, law, accounting and engineering may decide to get off the track expected of them and choose another career.

 

A career is a line of work, but it's not necessarily the only way to fulfill your calling. You could have different careers at different times in your life.

 

Job. This is the most specific and immediate of the three terms. It is what you do as an activity to produce income or a paycheck: "a lump portion, a task, chore or duty," as Webster's defines it.

 

On the average, a person works at a job for 3.2 years. Someone just entering the workforce will have 14 to 16 different jobs in his working lifetime. Therefore, a job surely cannot be the critical, defining component of your vocation or calling.

 

Vocation comprises both career and job. Ideally, your career will be a subset of your vocation, and your job will be a subset of your career.

 

For example, if your vocation is to help reduce pain and suffering in the world, you may choose nursing as your career. In nursing, as in most other careers, jobs are available. Thus, losing a job should never change your calling. If you are off track in your job, simply go back to your vocation to get ideas for a new way to apply your calling to your current situation.

 

People often assume that if they move toward what they love to do, they will: (1) miss God's calling and (2) struggle financially. Actually, the opposite is true.

 

Thousands of people have discovered that as they move toward the calling they sense in their hearts, they experience not only fulfillment and purpose but also unexpected financial abundance.

 

I grew up in the church—and I learned a lot about vocation in that setting. Part of what I saw was that fulfilling God's will seemed to mean that people should respond to something external, to the voices of other people, instead of listening for their own callings. Because of moral and religious demands, people were expected to be who they weren't and often were directed toward an elusive goal they could never reach.

 

I had a startling conversation with my dad about this recently. Now 92, Dad lives in a retirement center in Ohio. When I was growing up, he was the pastor of our local church, but to keep food on the table, he worked as a farmer.

 

I had always assumed Dad received a mystical and glorious call from God about his role as a pastor. When I asked him how he heard God's call, he responded immediately: "Oh, that wasn't me. That was what other people wanted."

 

He explained that others had viewed him as a teacher and then told him he should take that first position as a pastor. He said he never enjoyed the role but felt obligated to do what others wanted him to do.

 

How sad—trying to do something godly that isn't an authentic vocation at all. Perhaps that helps to explain his frustrations that I saw along the way.

 

If early in life, at say, age 18, we had insight into God's perfect plan and understood our own hearts, then all would be well. However, His plan and an understanding of ourselves seem to come to us as a result of our living out our lives. It often takes years for our hearts to speak to us. When they do, we are often too busy with our self-made daily lives to hear them.

 

An old Hasidic tale addresses this point. It speaks of the tendency by many well-meaning people to want to be someone else, while underscoring the responsibility each of us has to find our true, unique and worthy self:

 

"Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said: 'In the coming world, they will not ask me, "Why were you not Moses?" Rather, they will ask me, "Why were you not Zusya?"'"

God will not hide our purpose from us or try to keep us in the dark about it. He shows it to us in the unique gifts, qualities and traits He has created each of us with. Our responsibility is to pay attention to what He has already revealed to us about ourselves.

 

For most of us, our best opportunity for fulfilling our purpose is in doing what we do Monday through Friday. Purpose, once defined, can be translated into meaningful daily work, as it has been in Chuck's life.

 

After Chuck and I started to clarify his unique purpose, a much different life came into view for him. With the full support of his wife, he sold his dental practice (paid off his mortgage and invested for retirement) and went back to school to get a degree in finance.

Today, he spends much of his time outdoors, enjoying nature and exploring with his Jeep.

 

His financial practice is thriving, flowing naturally from his desire to manage numbers and guide others in doing the same.

 

What about you? Are you living out someone else's expectation for your life? If so, it's time to follow your own calling and allow God to lead you into His unique purpose for you.

 

By Dan Miller, who specializes in creative thinking for personal and business development, helping individuals redirect careers, evaluate new income sources and achieve balanced living. Miller’s principles have been clarified in his book, 48 Days to the Work You Love, as well as in his popular workbook and audio sets. For free newsletters, reports and other tools visit 48Days.com.