More Than a Job
Spirituality, Meaning, and the Search for Purpose
This summer LeaderWise’s staff are sharing a framework developed by psychologist and career counseling researcher, Dr. Sunny Hansen, and her colleagues that takes a holistic approach to "planning one's life course." While career counseling often focuses on choosing a job or advancing one's career, Hansen’s book Integrative Life Planning identifies six critical life tasks that help people think more broadly about building a meaningful life. Originally published in 1996, it’s guidance for the ages.
By Dale Korogi.
When people seek career counseling, they rarely arrive with only career concerns.
The questions sound practical enough: Should I retire? Is it time to look for another job? Should I go back to school? Am I in the right profession? But there’s a different question underneath: Who am I becoming?
That’s not simply a career question. It’s a human question—a life question.
Sunny Hansen recognized this thirty years ago when she identified the exploration of spirituality and life purpose as a critical and essential task of life planning and career development. Spirituality, of course, may include religious practice, but in Hansen’s consideration, it is a larger framework through which people make sense of their lives, including personal values and preferences, what gives them joy, what makes life feel worthwhile. Career decisions don’t happen in isolation. To use Hansen’s quilt metaphor, career interventions are not simply about employment but about weaving our lives into a meaningful whole. Spiritual considerations are woven together with all the parts of who we are.
This understanding is increasingly relevant as people change careers and move into new professions more frequently, are employed well into their 60s and 70s and beyond, and as they rethink what they want from work. Midlife often brings questions that promotions can’t answer. Younger adults want work that aligns with their values rather than simply paying the bills. Retirement isn’t THE END. The consideration of career counseling has become something deeper than choosing between Jobs A and B.
Parker Palmer suggests that vocation is not something we manufacture but something we discover. Before deciding what we want to do with our lives, he writes, we must first learn to “listen to our lives.” Our deepest calling isn’t something imposed from the outside. It grows from paying attention to our gifts, our limitations, our experiences and our longings: our spiritual core. A career counselor is not the expert who leads clients to the inevitable right answer, but a companion who can help others hear themselves more clearly. For Palmer, a career is not merely what we do, but an expression of who we are. Therefore, before one can decide what to do with their life, they must first listen for who they are.
This perspective resonates with other contemporary career theorists. Mark Savickas’s Career Construction Theory understands career not as climbing a predetermined ladder but as constructing a meaningful life story. Career decisions become chapters in a larger narrative through which individuals integrate their experiences, values, relationships, and hopes into a coherent sense of identity. That sounds a lot like Hansen’s Integrative Life Planning Theory.
When it comes to career counseling and interventions, the fundamentals of good psychotherapy apply. Carl Rogers, the founder of person-centered therapy, believed that people grow when they experience empathy, authenticity, and unconditional positive regard. When individuals feel genuinely heard rather than judged or directed, they begin to trust their own experience. Questions that once seemed overwhelming gradually become clearer—not because someone solved them, but because they had the space to explore them honestly. One of the quiet but indispensable gifts of a good counselor is creating the relational safety where deeper questions and meaning can emerge. Sometimes the conversation begins with work and ends with relationships. Sometimes it begins with burnout and ends with grief. Sometimes a discussion about retirement becomes a conversation about identity. What looked like a career problem or job issue turns out to be a question about purpose.
Not every career conversation needs to be a discussion about spirituality. But Hansen reminds us that careers are never isolated from the rest of life. People are more than résumés. They are stories, hopes, disappointments, values, and beliefs. If those deeper, spiritual dimensions are ignored, someone may find a job but miss the life they hope to build. The question to ask isn’t simply: What should I do next? But rather: What kind of life is waiting to be lived through me?
