Author: Carrie Caudill

Why Vocation is Never Solitary

This explores the relationship between self-awareness, vocational exploration, and community feedback. It emphasizes the importance of balancing individual and collective identities, suggesting that insights from trusted others can reveal strengths and blind spots. The Johari window tool is recommended for deeper self-understanding and growth in vocational contexts.

A series drawing on a therapist’s insights into play, wandering, and presence in relation to vocational exploration and discernment.

In the first post of my series, I offered a method of reviewing your childhood self at play as a way to provide insight into your being-role, an aspect of yourself that is necessary to cultivate to flourish vocationally. This approach could suggest incorrectly that vocational exploration is primarily inward focused and solitary. But vocational understanding requires more than introspection. From our earliest moments, self-understanding emerges in relationships with others whom we trust and who can clarify strengths or needs that develop latent attributes within us. Exploring vocation requires both inward and “other-ward” attention.

collage photo of woman
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

In this post, I offer a reminder that we are never simply an “I” unto ourselves. U.S. culture—especially in academic contexts—heavily skews toward individualistic notions of the self, yet there is always a “we” in any “me.” Many of our collective networks speak powerfully to our identities and the manifest forms of our vocations if given the opportunity. Social psychology posits that in any one individual there are many varied selves dependent on the social environment. The self that you reveal to your family at home around the dinner table is notably different from the one you present at a professional conference. Both are authentically you, but specific aspects of the self are more dominant in each environment. Often different aspects of ourselves may be more visible in a particular social context and therefore may be witnessed more directly by those in our life and somewhat obscure from our own recognition.

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Re-discovering Life’s Purposes through Childhood Play

This post discusses the importance of understanding one’s vocational identity through the exploration of “being-roles,” which are modes of existence reflecting innate attributes. The author emphasizes the value of childhood experiences and play in revealing these roles, suggesting that vocational discernment is a continuous process of self-discovery and narrative evolution.

The first post in a series drawing on a therapist’s insights into play, wandering, and presence in relation to vocational exploration and discernment.

happy children in mantles playing outdoors
Photo by Antonius Ferret on Pexels.com

As a therapist for almost two decades, I’ve listened many times to clients voice their vocational confusion as they ask, with a gnawing ache, “Who am I?” and “What is my life for?” and “Is this all there is?”

The ages of my clients have varied widely, but their quest for meaning and the identity distress they’ve experienced are similar. In his work on psychosocial development over the course of our lives, Erik Erickson recognized identity, relationships, and service as innate human crises to be resolved during different ages. He noted that, in adolescence, we struggle with identity vs. role confusion; in middle adulthood, generativity vs. stagnation; and in late adulthood, integrity vs. despair. Identity formation and meaning making are not single developmental tasks but recurring psychological negotiations across the lifespan.

As we negotiate these phases, psychologists Dan McAdams and Kate McLean theorize that people develop a “narrative,” an evolving life story, that helps them make sense of transitions, challenges, and their place in the world. As a result, questions of meaning may re-emerge during young adulthood, midlife, and retirement, when individuals are often revising the stories that they tell about themselves. These theories about our developmental stages and narrative identity suggest that vocational angst is not a failure of direction, but a recurring process of meaning reconstruction throughout one’s life.

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