Tag: being-role

Good Enough Faithfulness

This post highlights the pressure to achieve in higher education and offers an alternative to this mindset. It emphasizes the importance of embracing life’s messiness and acknowledging conflicting callings. Instead of striving for perfection, it suggests fostering gratitude and recognizing “good enough” actions to cultivate a meaningful vocation in different life seasons.

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

Humble callings upon an early rise, easy to cast aside.
The glory in a student’s struggle—how to uniquely guide?
A thoughtful intellectual, with time and curiosity to give,
An ideal image that often collides with how most of us actually live.
The simple truth is our lives are full, with care and needs each day.
How easy to critique, dismiss, and belittle the impact of our way.
The calling is not perfection and meeting every need,
The calling is rhythm, reflection, and goodness of the deed.

—Carrie Caudill

Achievement and optimization mindsets have become deeply ingrained in the culture of higher education. My own internal script often demands, “Go, go, go! Grade those papers. Make this class content more interactive. Don’t forget about applying for that grant proposal. Oh, and look on Amazon—your son needs a new lunch box. Don’t forget to respond to the Meal Train request, and the committee meeting is in 15 minutes, so you can do something in the 13 minutes before you log on to Teams. Go!”

scattered papers and broken pencils
Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com
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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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