The terms career and vocation are often used as if they were synonyms. This is a mistake that causes confusion in the lives of many people. In creating the Center for Life Calling and Leadership, Dr. Bill Millard described vocation as follows.

Our society urgently needs citizens who enter all of society's arenas with purpose and moral conviction. However, too many people initially focus on making life choices based only on earning money and supporting a materialistic lifestyle. Then they end up dissatisfied, working at

a job they dislike, rather than pursuing a career that allows them to fulfill what they see as their purpose in life.


People need to realize that quality of life is enhanced when a sense of purpose is clear in their lives. That is what the word vocation really means. The Latin word from which vocation derives means to be called.

We believe this sense of purpose and calling can be explored by making four important discoveries as represented in the illustration below.


LIFE CALLING MODEL

 

Copyright ©2004, 2008 Bill Millard. All rights reserved.

 

 
  1. Discover your foundational values.
    There exists at the core of your life a set of foundational values that you hold about reality, yourself, and others.

      

  2. Discover your unique design.
    Foundational values have individual expression as they are conveyed through your unique design that can be found in the distinct characteristics that combine to make you who you are, the things you deeply care about, and how all of these are shaped by what you encounter throughout life.

     

  3.  Discover your personal mission.
    Your foundational values and unique design enable you to discover a personal mission in life as you interact with all that goes on around you, begin to visualize how things could be better, and then engage in personal leadership to bring about positive change.

      

  4. Discover your unique life calling.
    When each of the previous three discoveries come together in an intersection of your values, your design and your mission, you will have discovered an overriding purpose for your life that is larger than a job, position, or occupation.  It is more profound than a profession or life’s work.  It is truly a unique life calling.

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Six factors function as important tools to help you make the discoveries just described. These tools can be identified and remembered by the acronym CREATE. They are not necessarily sequential in this order. One person may start their discovery with one tool. Another may start with a different tool.

    The advice and confirmation of others helps to provide outside, objective input into discovering who and what we are.

    Listening to our inner conscience and spirit helps to insure that our discovery is more than just processing data and facts.

    Mentors who model life for us, who speak words of encouragement to us based on their own experiences, and who support our efforts often have the greatest impact on our discovery of a life calling.

    Observations made by others using tools designed to help measure our unique life features can help us to see the design in our lives that makes each of us an individual, distinct from all others.

    We need a solid theoretical understanding about who we are in order to fully understand and appreciate our life calling. To develop this theory, we need to ask four important questions:
  • What does universal truth reveal to us about who we are, why we are here and the nature of our life calling?
  • Is our understanding reasonable and logical, and do we have an intuitive sense that it is right?
  • How does our understanding of life calling match with what the wisdom of history reveals to us about our life calling?
  • Are the conclusions we come to consistent with what has been observed in human experience?

    The life experiences we pass through can reveal a great deal to us about ourselves. The spiritual experiences we encounter allow input into our discovery from a higher dimension.


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