“We’ll leave the TV and the radio behind. Don’t you wonder what we’ll find?”
Joe Jackson
Decades before smartphones and tablets, Joe Jackson’s lyrics about an upcoming date night anticipates an evening without the media distractions of that time.
Although media platforms have changed, such distractions are still plentiful and time consuming. Most college students spend more than four hours per day on their smartphones, and nearly half of teenagers say they’re online “almost constantly.” At any time, we can escape our present circumstances and explore unlimited opportunities for stimulation. No longer forced to make small talk or sit with our thoughts, we can explore colorful, scintillating messages from anywhere.
While these platforms can connect us, they also compete for our limited attention. Attentiveness is essential to vocational discernment, so much so that Scott Mattingly describes it as the “foundation of every vocational journey.” In Living Vocationally: The Journey of the Called Life, Paul Wadell and Charles Pinches describe attentiveness as a virtue that helps us to be fully present. “We cannot be responsible,” they write, “without an accurate perception of reality, and we cannot accurately perceive reality without growing in attentiveness.”
Of course, a million other things can also interfere with our ability to pay attention: too many commitments, lack of sleep, and strained relationships all come to mind. In the classical communication model, such distractions are considered “noise,” which interfere with what’s essential in this model: a message sender, the message itself, the channel through which it is sent, and the receiver. Noise refers to anything that interferes with the transmission of a message from one person to another. Such noise can alter the message’s meaning—if you’ve ever attempted a conversation in a crowded restaurant, you’ve experienced this interference quite literally—or it can prevent the intended recipient from ever hearing it.
One way to mitigate noise is active listening, which we can think of as the act of being fully present in a conversation. To listen actively, you might need to control the environment for a meeting place (e.g., by putting away your phone), to give visual cues that you’re listening (e.g. by making eye contact or using receptive body language), or to respond intentionally (e.g., by showing you understand the speaker and engaging what they’ve said). Listening actively greatly improves the likelihood that messages are sent, received, and understood as intended.
If attentiveness can be cultivated in conversation (through active listening or other practices), it can also be used to spark vocational exploration. For example, an advisor can use active listening to guide a student’s plan for their future. When we meet with advisees, we might turn away from our screens and use open-ended questions to prompt them, such as, “What do you hope to do with your degree?” or “Where do you hope to be five years after graduation?” This thoughtful process helps both student and advisor avoid the temptation of simply plugging holes in their schedule. Making eye contact, being aware of our body language, and asking clarifying questions shows them that we’re prioritizing not just their schedule, but their larger hopes and aspirations.
Advising is also an excellent time to help students avoid one of their greatest distractions—overplanning. No doubt our students should enjoy the freedom of exploring and trying out all the new opportunities that college offers them, but participating in every club can spread them too thin and distract them from what might be most important for them to focus on. Overcommitting reduces both time for attention and meaningful engagement.
Ideally, reducing noise and other distractions in our lives can open the possibility of silence—a period in which we can focus on listening to what is in front of us and to the people who encourage us along our vocational journeys. Many of our spiritual traditions emphasize the importance of silence; for example, the Bible tells the story of Elijah, a prophet who had fled for his life to a remote area in Israel. On top of a mountain, he waited for God to speak (1 Kings 19). As he did so, he experienced dramatic, noisy events—a great wind, an earthquake, and a fire—but heard nothing from God. Instead, he heard God’s voice after the commotion, in what some translations describe as a “gentle whisper.” Within this moment of silence, the divine encounter provided specific directions that helped the frightened and exhausted prophet continue his mission and connect with his eventual successor.
Silence helps us listen more effectively, and attention is a gift that helps us love others more deliberately. In Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis, Norman Wirzba links attentiveness to human connection and dignity. To pay attention to someone is to honor their humanity: “Why, after all, would you make the effort to listen attentively to, wait patiently for, and move gently with others unless you recognize their goodness and beauty?” While endless ads and short videos compete for our attention, choosing to give our full attention to someone shows that we value them. When we pay attention to those we trust, we share one of our most valuable assets.
As we continue to partner with students, let’s look for ways to help them pay attention to cues that reflect their vocational journeys. Because a student’s time is valuable, I prefer to integrate vocational questions into required assignments. These tend to be low-stakes reflections that ask a student to pause and think about their priorities or their callings. Some of the responses that I’ve received to these assignments are quite candid, such as the sophomore who wrote, “It’s hard not to feel smothered and pressured to become a certain type of person. I want the space to figure out who I actually am.” As the student’s response suggests, this assignment provided both time and space to think about big questions; it also gave the student a chance to be heard and attended to by me.
In addition to these kinds of reflective assignments, I also find value in connecting current students to alumni. When our current students learn that previous students have made similar decisions regarding their majors and future direction, they often experience a new sense of freedom. Finally, when appropriate, we (as faculty and staff members) can also share some of our own successes and failures. Our students might think we’ve figured it all out, but if we’re honest, we know that our personal and professional histories include some turns we didn’t ask or plan for. Opening up about our own vocational exploration and discernment—and helping our students listen to another set of stories—offers yet another model of a lifelong process of introspection and change.
Brian Bowman is an assistant professor of communication studies at Campbell University and a NetVUE Faculty Fellow and consultant. He co-facilitates a faculty cohort at Campbell that explores questions of vocation and calling. His areas of academic interest include media messages and media literacy. He was a member of the 2022 cohort of NetVUE’s Teaching Vocation Exploration seminar. For more posts by Brian, click here.