Finding Purpose in Your Career: A Guide for Multicultural Women

What Does It Mean to Find Purpose in Your Career?

When I moved to Canada, finding purpose in my career was probably one of the last things I was thinking about.

There were much more immediate questions to answer. Where could I find a job? How did the Canadian workplace actually work? Would my previous experience be recognized here? How was I supposed to explain a career that made perfect sense in Colombia to someone who had no context for it?

Like many immigrants, I became very focused on adapting. I learned how to navigate a different professional culture, moved into a new field, worked hard to build credibility again, and eventually created a career in Canada that I was proud of.

But once I had some stability, I started noticing that the questions I was asking myself were changing.

I was no longer thinking only about what I could do professionally. I was thinking much more about what I actually wanted to do, what kind of work felt meaningful to me, and what place I wanted work to have in my life.

That is when purpose became important to me.

What do we actually mean by purpose?

I think the word purpose can sometimes make this conversation more complicated than it needs to be. We hear so much about “finding your purpose” that it can sound as though each of us has one specific calling and our job is to somehow discover it.

I do not think about it that way.

For me, purpose has much more to do with understanding what matters to you and finding ways to bring more of that into your work and your life. Your values are part of it, but so are your strengths, interests, experiences, relationships, responsibilities, and the contribution you want to make.

And because those things change throughout our lives, our sense of purpose can change too.

This is particularly relevant when we migrate because migration can interrupt the story we had been telling ourselves about our careers.

Before moving to Canada, I had already built a professional identity. I knew what I did, what I was good at and, to a certain extent, where I was going. After migrating, some of those answers became less clear. I was learning a new professional environment while also becoming a slightly different version of myself.

It took me some time to realize that rebuilding my career did not necessarily mean recreating the career I had before.

Paying attention to what matters to you now

When you have spent a long time trying to establish yourself professionally, questions about values and meaning can feel like a luxury.

There may have been very practical reasons behind the decisions you made. Perhaps you needed Canadian experience, financial stability, a job that worked with your immigration status, or something flexible enough for your family. Maybe you accepted an opportunity because it was the opportunity available at the time.

Those decisions are part of the reality of migration.

But circumstances change, and eventually it can be useful to revisit some of the choices we made while we were adapting.

One of the exercises I find valuable in coaching is exploring values, because values give us language for things we often feel before we know how to explain them. Someone may say that she has lost motivation at work, for example, and through the conversation realize that what is missing is autonomy. Someone else may discover that she wants more creativity, connection, learning, stability or contribution in the next stage of her career.

That does not immediately tell you which job to apply for next, but it gives you useful information about what you are looking for.

Looking at your strengths beyond your job title

This is another area where migration can make things confusing.

When we enter a new labour market, we become very aware of what employers are looking for. We read job descriptions, compare our experience against requirements and try to understand which parts of our background will be considered relevant.

Over time, it is easy to start seeing ourselves through that lens too.

I see this often with immigrant women who have years of experience but struggle to describe what they are good at because their attention has been focused for so long on what they are missing.

Your strengths are not limited to the skills listed in your current job description. They also show up in the problems people trust you to solve, the responsibilities you naturally take on, the environments where you tend to do your best work and the things you have learned across different stages of your career.

Migration may also have required you to develop abilities you had never needed to think about before, such as navigating different cultural expectations, building relationships in unfamiliar environments or learning how to communicate your ideas differently.

I am careful when I talk about this because I do not believe we need to turn every difficult part of migration into a positive lesson. Some experiences are simply difficult. But it is still worth asking what you have learned about yourself through them.

Purpose has to exist alongside real life

One of the things that bothers me about some conversations around purpose is how easily they can ignore people’s circumstances.

Knowing what matters to you does not remove financial responsibilities, immigration restrictions, discrimination, credential recognition, family responsibilities or the realities of the job market.

Sometimes the career you want is not immediately available to you.

Sometimes you need a bridge role. Sometimes additional education makes sense. Sometimes the priority for a period of time really is financial stability.

I think purpose becomes useful when it helps us make those decisions with a clearer understanding of where we eventually want to go.

There is a difference between choosing a role because it serves an important purpose in your life right now and staying in a career for years because you have stopped asking yourself whether you still want it.

You may need to experiment before you have an answer

I spent a lot of time trying to think my way into career clarity.

What I know now is that some answers only became available once I started doing things differently.

Studying positive psychology exposed me to ideas I wanted to understand more deeply. Training as a coach gave me an opportunity to experience a completely different way of working with people. Conversations, courses, projects and eventually coaching real clients gave me information that I could never have gained by sitting down and trying to decide what my “purpose” was.

This is something I think about often in my work now.

When someone feels uncertain about her next professional step, the answer does not always have to be another month of thinking about it. Sometimes there is a small experiment available: talking to someone who works in an area you are curious about, taking a course, volunteering, joining a professional community or trying a project that lets you experience the work more closely.

You learn something from each of those experiences, including when you discover that something you thought you wanted is actually not for you.

What purpose means to me now

My relationship with work has changed considerably since I moved to Canada.

I began my career as a lawyer in Colombia. After immigrating, I rebuilt my career in HR and organizational development. Eventually, I became increasingly interested in coaching, positive psychology and the experience of professional identity after migration.

None of those chapters happened independently from the others. My work today draws from all of them.

That is probably why I have become less interested in the idea that we need to find the one career we were meant to have.

I am much more interested in whether our work continues to make sense for who we are, what matters to us and the life we are trying to build.

For some people, exploring that question leads to a career change. For others, it may mean changing roles, setting different boundaries, pursuing something outside of work, returning to an old interest or recognizing that their career does not need to carry all of their sense of meaning.

There is no single answer.

And if you have migrated, there is another layer to consider: the person making these decisions today may have different priorities, strengths and ambitions from the person who originally chose your profession years ago.

It is worth getting to know her.

At Lunova Coaching, these are some of the conversations I have with immigrant and culturally diverse women who are trying to understand what they want from the next stage of their careers. If you are asking similar questions and would like support exploring them, you can learn more about my work on the Lunova website or reach out to me on LinkedIn.