Tag: self-awareness

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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Called to an “A”: Vocation and Alternative Grading

This post reflects on how best to support students’ learning and vocational exploration even as we evaluate their work. At the NetVUE conference, the author of this post reflected on the similarities between the values that guide vocation and alternative grading and explored diverse strategies for fostering student growth through alternative grading methods. Emphasizing flexibility, self-awareness, and outward orientation, these approaches aim to create a supportive learning environment. By shifting from traditional grading, professors encourage students to connect their efforts to meaningful outcomes and vocational discernment.

At the 2026 NetVUE Conference this past March, I couldn’t stop thinking about how to meet learning outcomes while at the same time cherishing students and lingering with them along their educational journeys. At the post-keynote roundtable discussions, faculty colleagues shared how they do so: Some are more lenient with grades early in the semester to boost feelings of self-efficacy, while others are less lenient to help students realize they’re still worthy of being cherished even in moments when their effort isn’t their best.

This discussion reminded me that we share similar goals but have strikingly different ways to work toward them. Yet we all think about this in terms of giving letter grades.

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