Objectives This study was conducted to identify the essential elements of experience by understanding the experience of professional counselors' perception of calling and clarifying the structure of the experience.
 Methods Interviews were conducted with professional counselors who recognized their job as a calling and analyzed using Colaizzi's phenomenological study. The participants were six people; all of them were expert counselors with 7 to 23 years of counselling credentials and the age group ranged from in their late 30’s to the early 50’s. The period for collecting the data was from January to March 2020, and interviews were conducted once to twice for each participant.
 Results As a result of the analysis, 32 themes, 16 themes clusters, and 4 categories were derived. The results of each study result can be presented as follows. First, the origin of calling was ‘guidance of transcendental being’ and ‘occurrence of an individual's inner self’. Second, the process of forming a calling appeared to be ‘positive prior experience’, ‘altruistic motivation as a wounded healer’, ‘strong interest, curiosity, and talent’, ‘the desire to master and passionate immersion’ and ‘arduous process to find the meaning of life in work’. Third, the results of the calling were ‘peak experience in the counseling scene’, ‘healing and growing for interaction with the client’, ‘exercising a good influence on the world’, ‘changing the client is the top goal’ and ‘finding the meaning of life in work’. Finally, the change of the calling were ‘change and expansion of the subject’, ‘repeating acceleration and degradation’, ‘promotion and reinforcement through the management of counselor tools’ and ‘exhaustion and deterioration due to the limitation of time and physical strength’.
 Conclusions Through the results of the study, the counselor's experience of calling was confirmed, and based on this, basic data for future related research and intervention were provided.
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