Can you find God in your career?

I talk to people who are seeking a more fulfilling career path every. single. week.

They’ve “made it” on the outside: they have fancy titles, cushy compensation packages, and work with impressive brands. But despite how shiny their situation appears on the outside, on the inside, it feels soulless.

We want to feel like our work is more than clocking in, sitting in a cubicle watching the hands on the clock, checking email on our laptops during meetings, and making decent money for the rest of our lives.

We’re secretly looking for God. Searching for purpose. Listening for a calling.

When you spend more waking hours at work than with friends or family, it makes sense you’d want your work to be meaningful. You want to make the time and energy you’re investing count for something. And because how you live your days is how you live your life, it means that 40 years working on projects you don’t care about leaves a pretty empty legacy. (Those will be some seriously boring stories to tell the grandkids.)

On the road to meaningful work, there are a few common options: teaching, joining Doctors Without Borders, or becoming part of the clergy. But those options can feel like huge sacrifices and drastic career changes. Incredible nonprofits are out there, too, but most nonprofits get a bad rap of being dramatically affected by changes in cash flow, managed by people with big hearts but less extensive business acumen, and salaries that aren’t as market competitive.

So the tricky question becomes: is there meaningful work out there that’s actually a good fit for your soul AND your bank account?

I believe that if you get clear on identifying work that feels deep and juicy, you can absolutely find it in the marketplace.

Whether you believe in big “G” God, little “g” god, the universe, intuition, love, quantum physics, or something else that anchors your spirituality, you can allow a deeper sense of purpose to lead your vocational pursuits.

Here are the steps to find a career path that fits your pocketbook and your soul.

Identify how you want to be of service.

Rather than starting with what you value, I think the more important question is how you like to be useful.

Every different form the economy’s taken over the years has relied upon being useful, because useful work is valuable work.

Thousands of years before today, spiritual leaders started their lives working. Abraham was a rancher and shepherd before starting his covenant with God. Prior to deciding to start his ministry, Jesus spent most of his life as a carpenter. Before Muhammad received his revelations, he was a caravan manager. The Báb was a Persian merchant before he started writing and teaching his spiritual philosophy.

Almost no spiritual leader lived a life where they renounced working and commerce. They worked and served their communities using their natural gifts. And the diversity of their work reminds us that there are lots of ways to serve that are equally as valid.

So on your personal pilgrimage to spiritual work, identify what your particular gifts are.

They don’t have to be unique — they just have to be yours. How do you make yourself of use? Do you love to write? Or are you an ace at diffusing tense social situations? Maybe you have a soft spot for organizing big events.

You don’t have to quit your current life and start all over to get more spiritual (although I suppose you could). Throughout your life, you’ve been leaving yourself breadcrumbs about the ways you like to serve, and you can build upon those to do your work in a way that’s more soulful and fulfilling.

Define what’s personally meaningful to you.

Just like how people across the globe celebrate Lent together, but “give up” wildly different things (from chocolate to alcohol to Netflix to Facebook), your spirituality and values come in a flavor that’s specific to your heart and your own lived experience.

So figure out what flavor feels right to you.

In the story of Buddha, (before becoming an ascetic and then finding a path of balance) Siddhartha saw aging, sickness, and death for the first time as a young adult, and the suffering he witnessed impacted him so powerfully that it changed the course of his life.

What kinds of things in your life light a fire under you or bring tears to your eyes? What struggles have you overcome that shaped you? What are the important parts of leading a “good” life to you?

You often don’t have to look very far to see what’s meaningful for you. You tend to fill your life with it: books, friends, podcasts, classes, side hustles.

And if you can’t find the data points of what’s meaningful in your life today, it might be hiding in a passion when you were young, like taking care of animals, creating customized thank you cards, or writing your own neighborhood newspaper.

Notice that the Buddha’s story doesn’t talk about him seeing instances of sexual abuse, war crimes, or child illiteracy being the catalyst that changed his path. Like the Buddha, you don’t have to solve every single social justice issue out there to have a meaningful life. (And goodness knows there are more than enough equality and access issues to get you a good start, no matter what career path you choose.)

In his book Called to Create, Jordan Raynor talks about the idea of vocational impact with a Biblical slant. He explores how your daily work activities represent you living out your faith. It’s a good question to ponder: how can the actions and behaviors that you exhibit in your daily work represent your bigger worldview?

Pick the specific topic areas or actions that resonate with you, even if they feel small. Creating support systems for single moms so they can have the energy and patience for their children after work is great. Doing stand-up comedy to bring joyfulness, laughter, and levity back into our lives is meaningful. Helping businesses market their services online can be in alignment with your vision if the companies’ work represents your values.

Once you claim these meaning makers, you’ll have a bunch of ideas for roles and sectors that might fit you.

Connect with the bigger impact of your actions.

If your work doesn’t feel like it’s making a difference to anybody else, it probably won’t feel spiritual.

At some level, you want work to feel bigger than you. You want to feel connected to the mission in a visible, tangible way. Sometimes ending up as a cog inside a corporate machine can make the intersection point between your effort and client outcomes reeeally fuzzy.

High performance coach Brandon Burchard talks about the idea of “raising necessity” in his book High Performance Habits. He posits that if you feel disconnected from a sense of impact in your work, you’re more likely to be bored, burn out, or give up. He offers specific counsel on how to connect your daily actions to greater purpose, like asking yourself who needs your A-game today or focusing on intentionally connecting your activities to the people they serve.

If you’re in a job where these ideas make your realize that it doesn’t matter if you do quality work or not, your soul probably needs you to move to a role where your gifts make a bigger, tangible difference.

Don’t expect every day to be perfect.

My partner is a middle school music teacher, and he feels like he’s living his calling. But not every day is a good day. Sometimes kids are disrespectful. Sometimes parents get upset with him about something their student did (or didn’t do). Sometimes the patience he draws upon to teach hundreds of pre-teens every single day runs low. And last month, he found out a former student committed suicide. (Which is apparently a far more common tragedy that teachers experience in their line of work than I’d realized.)

You can be in a great fit job, and still have very, very hard days.

And knowing days can be hard, he also isn’t putting pressure on himself to have found the one, right, perfect job for the rest of his life. He’s open to letting his path evolve: maybe one day he’ll work in school administration, district curriculum development, or in government shaping national education policy. A truly aligned career path still allows space for growth and expansion.

Making the courageous decision to work in a career that aligns with your soul-level values isn’t always easy or fun. But ask anybody who does it, and they’ll tell you it’s worth it.

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Lisa Lewis is a career change coach who helps unfulfilled individuals create lucrative, soulful, and joyful new career paths. Don’t love your job? We should talk. Learn more at GetCareerClarity.com or check out The Career Clarity Show podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and Google Play.