Finding Purpose At Work: Your Guide To A Meaningful Career

Finding purpose at work is possible through a process of understanding what meaningful work looks like to you, thinking carefully about your life’s priorities, and taking steady action towards what is most important. There’s no shortcut to purposeful work; you can’t pluck it off the shelf like a can of beans. You’ve got to know who you are, what’s meaningful to you, and then take action to change things.

I know because I’ve done it - not only for myself but for my success coaching clients and everyone who comes to our personal development events. I decided early on in life that if I was going to spend so much time at work, I wanted it to mean something. After a major breakdown spiritual awakening at 30, that desire became even stronger. Since then I’ve spent over 10,000 hours studying what purposeful, meaningful lives - and careers - actually look like so I can guide others into theirs.

In this article I’m going to answer some common questions about finding purpose at work, plus give you a step-by-step guide to discovering your own based on my book, Finding Your Professional Purpose. Ready? Let’s go!

Can You Really Find Purpose At Work?

Yes, you can find purpose at work, and it doesn’t have to be as complicated or as difficult as you think. 

I know that might sound unlikely based on how you feel right now. And the state of the world. And the economy (arrrrgh 🤦🏻‍♀️). But as someone who has spent the last decade investigating purpose, meaning and the human condition, trust me when I say it is possible to find purpose at work, wherever you are in your career.

In fact, I’ve discovered that once people have a solid grasp of the key principles around purpose, meaning and success, they don’t have to try too hard to find purpose in their jobs; it just sort of starts to happen naturally. You don’t have to force it or throw everything you’ve worked for out the window - it’s more like reorienting yourself in the right direction. More on that later.

Finding purpose at work is a process of understanding why you work (e.g. not just for the paycheck), what work truly means to you, and what you would like your time and labour to contribute to the world. The fact you’ve started questioning your career and what you’re giving your precious hours to is something most people will never do. You’re already ahead!

So yes, you really can find purpose at work. Just don’t assume it’ll look like anything you expect.

What Does Meaningful Work Look Like?

Meaningful work can look like working for an organisation with similar values to you, that’s positively contributing to the world, or doing work that satisfies your deepest aims in life.

In my opinion, meaningful work is unique for every single person. Your values, desires, interests and strengths all combine in you as an individual, the result being what looks like meaningful work to you might look totally different to someone else - and shouldn’t be judged on the same set of criteria.

For example, a parent with young children is going to want a very different type of work to someone in their 20s, 50s, someone with a chronic illness, or someone who is very creative. Someone raised in a particular religion, culture, or political environment is going to have a specific view of what ‘meaningful work’ looks like - and it might be really different to yours. 

However, from my success coaching and teaching experiences, I’ve found that these three elements of meaningful work are fairly common across everyone:

1. We want to work for an organisation, community or group that aligns with our values - or at least isn’t completely contrary to our values e.g. a vegan working for McDonalds 😬

2. We want to know what we’re doing is positively contributing to the world, rather than making the world worse - so we’re not actively hurting people, harming the environment, etc.

3. We want work that satisfies our deeper aims in life - not our material aims, but our deeper needs and values, such as security, freedom, pleasure, or excitement.

When you get to a point of career stagnation or you’re stuck in a career rut, it’s normally because at least one of these things is ‘off’. For example, when I left teaching, it was because the university I worked for - and the sector as a whole - no longer aligned with my values. I was positively contributing to the world; the work was satisfying my deeper need to guide others; but me and teaching weren’t vibing any more, and it was time for me to go.

Should I Care About Finding Purpose At Work?

Yes, you should care about finding purpose at work because it’s a place you likely spend a lot of time, and you don’t want to feel like those hours are being wasted - but it isn’t something to stress about in the short term.

It’s important as humans that our lives have a sense of meaning: it can help us live longer, feel happier, and reduce the effects of stress on our nervous system. And because we now spend so many of our hours at work, it’s in some ways inevitable that we want those hours to mean something, and not feel like a pointless waste of time, energy and capability.

When you’re committed to a particular career path or profession (or even just interested in it), finding purpose at work is definitely something to care about. You might spend the next 20 years working in this field, and without some sense of meaning to your work you’ll find it hard to sustain yourself through challenges and rough patches. If you’re only in it for money or glory (or the fear of what will happen if you stop), you’re going to work more than you live and eventually burn out because there’s nothing nourishing you; that’s something that only purpose can do.

However, I’ve done plenty of jobs that haven’t had purpose: they weren’t for a company I felt aligned with, they weren’t really positively contributing to the world, and they weren’t satisfying any of my deeper desires in life. That doesn’t mean they were bad jobs, or that I had a bad time. It means that if I had done that job for years and years, I would’ve eventually become very dissatisfied, frustrated and probably gone a bit bananas. Finding purpose at work is a method of sustaining yourself in the long term, because most of us can cope with a boring job in the short term. You just need to get really clear what the difference is between those two.

How Can I Find Purpose At Work? A Step-By-Step Guide

You can find purpose at work through working out what is most important to you when it comes to your career, thinking about the work-life balance you would like to have, considering your strengths and talents, and coming up with a personal ‘mission statement’ to guide your actions.

In this next section, I’m going to give you a step-by-step guide on finding purpose at work. This is based on my book, Finding Your Professional Purpose, which I wrote under my birth name. The guide below is an updated, concise, practical version which you can follow.

Understand your career priorities

The first step in finding purpose at work is to understand your career priorities: what’s actually most important to you, personally, when it comes to your work and professional future.

Most people go to school, graduate, start their career, and ten years down the line realise they never actually chose their professional path; they just sort of stumbled into it. When you know your career priorities, you avoid this abrupt wake up call because you’ve made conscious choices about your future work options based on your own priorities. It even changes how you act day-to-day.

For example, if one of your career priorities is earning a high salary, then you’ll be interested in how you can progress through your organisation or field to get promoted and secure a raise each time. To be able to do that as quickly as possible, you’ll need to demonstrate your leadership qualities on a regular basis. This fundamentally changes how you act at work every day, compared to someone whose career priority is e.g. becoming technically expert at their craft.

If you do this one step - identify what is actually important to you in your career - it will change how you approach work entirely. You’ll feel more purposeful and your plan of action will become so much easier. Intention is everything, which is why it is the primary element of my Wild Success methodology. At our two-day career workshops I literally teach you how to work out what you want, more than anything else in the world. 

Because once you have that, you’re unstoppable. 🚀

Choose your work-life balance

The next step to help you find purpose in work is to choose what work-life balance you want to have, and make a mindset shift with this balance in mind.

Work-life balance is a hugely overused term, so I totally forgive your eye rolling. To me, it means a very specific thing: how much time I spend working vs how much I spend not working. That’s it. Nothing more complicated.

But as a business owner, this is actually quite a hard number to quantify. I’m often thinking about work e.g. at the gym, making dinner, etc. Does that count as ‘working’? What about commuting? Or having ideas? Or lunch breaks? You get the picture.

Plus, every industry has its own version of work-life balance. Start-up culture is about being ‘on’ 24/7, but you don’t have to be working all that time. Professional services work 50+ hours a week, minimum. Bar staff do bizarre hours and spend most of their social time in their workplace - just on the other side of the counter. 

Combine that with government-set standards of what constitutes a part time or full time job, and your cultural assumptions about how much you should be working, and it becomes clear: there’s no right or wrong answer to the elusive work-life balance!

That’s why figuring out what you want your work-life balance to be is so important, even if you can’t physically change the hours you work right now. It gives you a criteria against which to make choices and take action. 

If you’ve decided that you only want to spend 40 of your 112 waking hours a week working, then that choice is made and you stick to it. Sticking to this decision will then train you to ‘clock out’ and stop thinking about work, which can be very difficult for some people (ahem), as well as help you set stronger boundaries around your leisure time. Because the aim is not just purposeful work, but a purposeful life, right? That’s what having a clear idea of your work-life balance is truly about.

Remember what you enjoy

One step which is often ignored in the process of finding purpose at work is to remember what you enjoy doing, even if those things don’t seem to currently be part of your daily professional life. 

After several years (or decades) in your profession, it can be easy to forget what you actually enjoy and what brought you to that role in the first place. Instead, we end up focusing heavily on what our day-to-day looks like; understandable really, since it’s right there in our face. We forget the feeling of satisfaction, pleasure or contribution that we first felt in our work, and instead get bogged down in how everything feels boring or tedious.

The thing is whatever you think about, you tend to see more of it. It’s a cognitive bias called the frequency illusion: how once you’ve become aware of a phenomenon, you’re more likely to notice it in the future. It can work ‘randomly’ i.e. you were reading about red pandas and now you keep seeing red pandas; it can happen thanks to our heavily curated social media algorithms; or you can choose to ‘make’ it happen by focusing on something you’d like to see more of.

So what do you enjoy about your work? What brought you to it in the first place? Thinking about this and spotting these occurrences helps you find a sense of purpose at work in the here-and-now as well as for the future. Your daily work routines will start to feel more enjoyable once you actually remember what you enjoy about the job - and once you know what you truly enjoy you’ll start to make decisions aligned with that.

For example, I love writing. I love it. I first went freelance as a copywriter because I was skilled in it and I enjoyed it. Then, after years of writing about paving slabs and pet food, I was absolutely done. I felt like it was the worst job in the world. I hated producing ‘marketing writing’ or ‘SEO writing’. Fast forward a few years and writing high quality, helpful, thoughtful, witty, brilliant (okay that’s enough) articles to help people like you find wild success is something I enjoy immensely and contributes to my purpose at work. I forgot what I loved and took the long way round to remembering - but you don’t have to make my mistake.

Figure out your strengths and talents

Another key step to find purpose at work is to figure out what your natural strengths and talents are, so you can start to use these more intentionally in your career. This is something most of us struggle to do because of the way we are educated, which focuses much more on fixing weaknesses than enhancing strengths.

This continues in the workplace, with your quarterly or annual review and a ‘report card’ that generally focuses on where you need to up your game, rather than where you are already excelling. Combined with an obsessive self-help mindset of constantly trying to ‘fix’ ourselves, we can get into the habit of ignoring our strengths because they’ve just always been there. We almost take them for granted, and we spend all our time trying to get better at something that just isn’t in our wheelhouse.

As a former university lecturer I pushed very hard against feedback which focused on the negatives of a student. Not only is it disheartening to read a long list of all the ways in which you’re not quite good enough, it’s also not feasible to expect every person to be good, or even satisfactory, at everything! Every strength and talent you have has its flip side that you just have to deal with, and trying to shore up your weaknesses is, frankly, a waste of time and energy.

It’s much better to figure out what you’re fantastic at and spend your time enhancing those skills; those are the things you likely enjoy and can be paid for, because you’re a natural at them. My biggest weaknesses are maths (urgh) and time management (yawn). And yet for years I berated myself that I couldn’t read a train timetable properly, found it hard to organise my calendar, and worked best in a spontaneous, fluid manner. But my purpose in work (and on the planet) is not to be a mathematician or a project manager; it’s to be an inspirational speaker and writer. Imagine the heartache I could’ve saved if I’d realised that earlier on! 

Finding purpose at work is about figuring out what you and only you are capable of doing to positively contribute to the world - and that means figuring out your unique strengths and talents.

Come up with a personal ‘mission statement’

One last step in finding purpose at work is to come up with a personal ‘mission statement’ about your career which will guide your actions and mindset for the next few months. Think of it like an advertising slogan that’s going to stick in your brain and remind you of what’s most important.

We hugely underestimate the power of words, forgetting that how we talk about ourselves and our lives shapes our perception of reality. But we can use the human mind’s inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy to find purpose at work by literally telling ourselves a version of what’s happening. Is it delusional? Yes. Will it help? Absolutely.

Just like how the frequency illusion, when used positively, encourages you to see more positive things, repeatedly telling yourself that you are focusing on a key aspect of meaning or purpose will help you do just that. This is your personal ‘mission statement’ or slogan. Nike’s Just Do It or Tesco’s Every Little Helps are memorable phrases that sum up what that brand is about in a few words - so what’s yours? What short phrase sums up your priorities, approach to work, and talents?

I use this process to set myself a phrase of the year, every year - you can read about the one for 2025 here - which focuses my intention and activity over 12 months. But to start with, come up with a slogan for the next 90 days and see how your experience of finding purpose at work changes. If this seems a bit tricky, it is one of the activities I guide you through at our Wild Success events - specifically on day two, where you define your mission statement and then develop a plan to put it into action, starting today. 

Bonus Content: How To Rebuild Career Satisfaction When Feeling Stuck

Some quick and immediate tips you can employ this week to improve how you’re feeling at work.

• Work with a mentor. A hugely underrated resource, mentors are like a career coach who has been there, done that, and can give you excellent advice. You might want to look for sector-specific mentors, or reach out to someone who you just think is pretty awesome and you want to learn from them. Their advice will help you rebuild and help you find some career satisfaction (not to mention direction). Just remember they are sharing only their experience; your path to wild success is going to look very different.
  

• Go on a professional retreat. We spend so much time plugged in to the day-to-day of work that it’s easy to get bogged down and wonder what the heck it’s all for - especially at specific moments of your career when your enthusiasm has waned. A professional retreat (like our personal development events in London) gives you space and time to think through your next steps, and you get the support you need from an experienced facilitator. I’m talking about me, obviously 😉
  

• Collect evidence of results. To get an immediate shot of career satisfaction, review your projects or work from the last 3-6 months and collect data about what you achieved. What specifically improved thanks to your contributions? Because you’re stuck firefighting in the day-to-day, the cumulative impact of your role can get lost. Collecting evidence of your results will not only feel satisfying but also give you data for the next time you want a raise, promotion, or to change roles.
  

• Take pleasure in the small things. When your career feels like it’s stagnating, focus on the tiny wins. Focus hard on the little elements of your work that you enjoy, whether that’s laughing with colleagues, the comfort of WFH in your pyjamas, or writing a spot-on email to a client. When you focus on what’s good, the good compounds, and you’ll also start to notice patterns about what’s most important to you at work - helping you answer some of the questions outlined in the Finding Purpose At Work Step-By-Step Guide above.
  

• Set strong boundaries around work. Real talk: if you’re feeling stuck, disappointed and in a career rut, then thinking and worrying about it constantly is not going to help you feel better. Career satisfaction comes not from making work your whole life but having work that contributes to a good life. If things feel hard right now, strengthen your boundaries: no work after a certain time, allowing yourself 5 minutes of worry and then putting it away, making sure you have positive activities planned for the evening or weekends. Give yourself a break, and live a little.

For more advice on rebuilding career satisfaction, you might be interested in this article: How To Get Out Of A Career Rut In Your 30s

Frequently Asked Questions: Signs Of Career Stagnation In Your 30s

What are the signs of career stagnation?

The signs of career stagnation are frequently feeling bored at work, going through the motions and not giving 100%, not being interested in professional challenges, and feeling like your salary isn’t enough to justify how negative you are feeling.

I’ve written more about how to know when your career is stagnating - and more importantly, what to do about it - in this article: Feeling Stuck? The Signs of Career Stagnation at 35 (UK Edition)

Why do I feel stuck at work in my 30s?

You feel stuck at work in your 30s because after spending your twenties heavily focused on your career, you’re now at a point where you have changed as a person but your work doesn’t reflect that.

Let’s say you graduated when you were 21. You got a good job straight out of uni and put your head down, focusing on career progression. By the time you’re 35, you’ve been in your industry for 10 years with increasingly more senior roles, more responsibility, more money - and a lot more stress.

You start looking at the next decade (or more), wondering “Do I really want to be doing this, and going at this pace, when I’m 40 or 50?”. The impact of your career is catching up with you physically and mentally, and after achieving a certain comfortable level of material success you’re feeling dissatisfied or disappointed that it hasn’t brought you the fulfilment you thought it might. You’ve changed - but your work hasn’t. That’s why you’re feeling stuck.

Why do I feel so bored at work?

You feel bored at work because you’re not intellectually stimulated, you haven’t got enough professional challenges to keep you interested, and you’ve outgrown your current role. It’s not a failing that you feel bored at work - it’s simply a mismatch between your interests, values and capabilities, and the career you’re currently in. 

This can be particularly true if you’re a high achiever who’s been in your role or industry for a while, and feel like you’ve ‘seen it all’. One of the triggers for me leaving teaching was that while I was developing as a person every year, the students I taught were always a fresh new bunch of 20-somethings - with the same problems, year on year, that 20-somethings always face. I eventually got bored of handling the same professional challenges each term and didn’t feel like I was expanding my skills in any way.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve just started a role, you’ve been in the field for years, or just got a promotion; if you’re bored, you’re bored, and it’s totally fine. Boredom is a powerful and useful emotion which signals to you that you should be doing something else; something which will help you expand, grow, and evolve as a person. Boredom is no-one’s ‘fault’ - it’s just the wrong fit.

At some point, you’ll want to act on that boredom. Many people’s default is to seek excitement elsewhere in their life, including creating unnecessary drama or turning to unhealthy habits for that dopamine rush. But finding purpose at work and experiencing the wild success you are absolutely destined for is much more pleasurable and sustainable. What’s important is that you choose consciously; not just for a quick fix, but for the long term.

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About The Author

Astra is an inspirational speaker and writer leading experienced professionals to wild, untamed success. 

Astra's unique insight is based on 10,000+ hours studying purpose, meaning and the human condition. Their study has led to over 2,000 hours teaching, coaching and facilitating, plus published writing, keynotes and conferences, peer-reviewed research, digital content and working with 60+ brands as a communication professional - as well as living on a commune, in a warehouse, and with the Hare Krishna monks.

Through their Wild Success methodology, Astra teaches talented professionals how to find their purpose, take consistent action, and finally start experiencing the wild success they are destined for: not 'next year', not 'some day', but now.

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