Something in you knows there’s more. Not more success, not more accomplishment, but something deeper — a sense that your life is meant to serve something beyond what you’ve been doing. If you’ve been feeling this kind of call to life purpose, you’re experiencing one of the most powerful signals of personal transformation and spiritual awakening.
Leon VanderPol identifies this as the fifth signal of transformation: the growing desire for a deeper, more meaningful life purpose. But here’s what most self-help advice gets wrong — purpose is not something you find by searching harder. It’s something that’s revealed as you become more of who you actually are.
The Misconception Hidden in “Finding” Your Purpose
The call to life purpose is nearly universal. At some point, most people feel the pull toward something more meaningful. The problem is how our culture frames it: as a quest. Find your passion. Discover your calling. Figure out what you were meant to do.
This framing turns purpose into another achievement — another item on the self-improvement checklist. It keeps the ego in the driver’s seat, scanning the horizon for the right answer, the perfect path, the purpose that will finally make everything feel complete.
Leon challenges this directly. The call to life purpose is real and important, but it cannot be fulfilled through the same seeking, striving energy that drives career ambition. Purpose, in the deeper sense, is not found by the ego. It is revealed as the ego softens — as the layers of conditioning, expectation, and borrowed identity begin to fall away.
When the Corporate Path Stops Making Sense
Leon shares from his own experience: years spent in the corporate world, building a successful career, checking the boxes of conventional achievement — and then a growing, undeniable sense that something essential was missing. Not because the work was bad, but because it wasn’t aligned with something deeper that was trying to come through.
This story resonates because it’s so common. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, the majority of workers worldwide report feeling disengaged from their work. While not all disengagement is a spiritual signal, for many people the restlessness they feel at work is actually a call to life purpose — a sign that their deeper self is asking for a different kind of expression.
The challenge is that most people interpret this disengagement through a practical lens: wrong job, wrong company, wrong industry. They change roles, change careers, change locations — and often find that the emptiness follows them. Because the issue was never the external container. It was the disconnect between what they were doing and who they were becoming.
A Collective Call to Meaning
The call to life purpose is not just an individual phenomenon. Leon observes that we’re living through a collective awakening — a time when millions of people simultaneously feel the pull toward more meaningful engagement with life.
This isn’t a coincidence. As old systems — economic, political, cultural — show their cracks, people naturally begin asking deeper questions. What am I here for? How can I serve something larger? What would it look like to live in alignment with my deepest values?
These questions are the call to life purpose expressing itself through an entire generation. And while the answers will be different for each person, the underlying impulse is the same: the desire to live from something more authentic than the scripts we inherited.
Purpose Is Revealed, Not Achieved
This is perhaps the most important insight Leon offers: the call to life purpose is answered not by doing more, but by being more. Purpose reveals itself as you become more present, more authentic, more connected to your own depth.
This is counterintuitive in a culture that worships productivity. But consider: the most purposeful people you know — the ones whose work feels genuinely alive and aligned — rarely describe having “figured out” their purpose through a strategic process. More often, they describe a gradual unfolding. A series of small alignments. A growing sense of rightness that emerged as they stopped performing and started listening.
The call to life purpose, when honored, leads not to a grand revelation but to a deepening relationship with your own authentic gifts and the particular way life wants to express itself through you.
The Achievement Trap
One of the dangers Leon identifies is the tendency to turn purpose into another achievement — to co-opt the call to life purpose into the ego’s familiar framework of goals, metrics, and validation.
This shows up as: “Once I find my purpose, everything will make sense.” Or: “My purpose needs to be important, visible, impactful.” Or: “If I can just figure this out, I’ll finally feel fulfilled.”
All of these are the ego’s attempts to capture the call to life purpose and run it through the same machinery that drives conventional ambition. But purpose, in the deeper sense, doesn’t work this way. It’s not about importance or scale. It’s about alignment — the quiet sense that what you’re doing arises naturally from who you are, rather than from what you think you should be.
Some people’s purpose expresses itself on a large stage. Others’ express itself in small, intimate, daily ways. The scale doesn’t matter. What matters is the authenticity of the alignment.
Becoming a Channel Rather Than a Seeker
As the call to life purpose matures, a fundamental shift occurs. You stop being a seeker — someone scanning the horizon for the right answer — and begin becoming a channel. A vessel through which your gifts, your presence, and your particular form of service naturally flow.
This shift is marked by a quality of ease. Not the absence of effort, but the presence of alignment. You’re no longer pushing yourself toward purpose. You’re allowing purpose to move through you. The doing becomes lighter because it’s no longer driven by anxiety about whether you’re on the right path. It’s sustained by the quiet knowing that you are.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a call to life purpose feel like? It often begins as a restlessness or dissatisfaction with surface-level living — a sense that there’s something more meaningful you’re here to do or become. It may show up as disengagement from work that once felt satisfying, existential questioning, or a growing desire for alignment between your inner life and your outer expression.
How do I find my life purpose? The deeper truth is that purpose is not found through seeking — it is revealed through being. As you do your inner work, soften ego patterns, and become more present and authentic, your purpose naturally begins to clarify. It emerges from who you are, not from what you strategize.
Is the call to life purpose a sign of spiritual awakening? Yes. Leon VanderPol identifies it as the fifth signal of transformation and spiritual awakening — a natural stage in which deeper aspects of yourself begin asking for expression. It often follows earlier signals like emotional surfacing, the desire to heal, and a growing interest in spirituality.
If you’re feeling this call and want to explore it further, the Center for Transformational Coaching offers resources for the journey. You may also find resonance in our articles on feeling called to explore spirituality and what transformation feels like at first.