Tag: limitations

You Are Not Enough: Limitations Are Essential for a Healthy Vocation

This post discusses the importance of recognizing and embracing personal limitations in professional and academic life. It emphasizes that acknowledging these limits can lead to healthier work-life balance, reduced burnout, and greater vocational fulfillment. The authors advocate for strategic decision-making regarding commitments to enhance well-being and productivity.

A co-authored series on what faculty members need to thrive vocationally.

If we’re being honest, most of us hesitate to admit to our limitations. Instead, we overpromise, overcommit, and sometimes even burn out. We often attempt to skirt our limitations, power through them, or ignore them and hope they won’t trip us again. Yet doing so can lead to a downward spiral of feeling inadequate, hoping that accomplishing something might raise our spirits, but then we reach our limits and feel inadequate once more.

scrabble letter tiles spelling limits
Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com

What if, instead of dodging our limitations or carefully hiding them from others, we accepted them openly and graciously—and considered them as central to a healthy vocation?

Continue reading “You Are Not Enough: Limitations Are Essential for a Healthy Vocation”

Back to the Future I: The Prolepsis of Vocational Discernment

“Prolepsis” is not a commonly used term, but it is helpful when talking to students about vocation. After all, what is college if it is not an opportunity to learn new vocabulary words?

Prolepsis connotes a present and active anticipation of a future reality. Said otherwise, to live proleptically is to live in the present in a way that reflects or is oriented toward an assumed future.

The DeLorean Time Machine in “Back to the Future” (1985).

To illustrate this, I ask students to take an imaginary journey back in time in my own life. While my parents’ generation might picture such an exercise through an H.G. Wells time machine, and I see myself jumping in a DeLorean equipped with a flux capacitor (at least if I can obtain some uranium or time things well during a thunderstorm), my students often choose to imagine a time-traveling drone equipped with a GoPro that can be controlled from the comfort of home. Any apparatus will do as I invite them to visit my fifteen year-old self at home in the suburbs of Philadelphia on any evening in August or September of 1982. I then tell them what they are nearly guaranteed to see. They will see my tall, lanky frame outside dribbling and shooting a basketball in the driveway until it is too dark to do so. (The full picture of my teen-self includes pre-Jordan tight shorts, socks pulled up to the knees, a headband, and Chuck Taylors.) Continue reading “Back to the Future I: The Prolepsis of Vocational Discernment”