Fighting the Need to Maximize

By most accounts, discovering your vocation is a critical component to living a happy life. Working in a field you care about provides a sense of purpose that enables you to contribute to something much larger than yourself. I love my vocation, but as I grow older I am more acutely aware of the shadow side of my vocation and the dangers of giving too much to a job that never ends.

I've always been driven by ideas and discovering ways to implement new ways of improve the college student experience. Applying theory to practice to create new initiatives is part of what drives my practice and has contributed to my development as a professional. I also think ambition is good and we should challenge ourselves to be innovative and relevant to the current needs of our students.

Despite all of these things, the reality is that we may not always have the human or financial resources to make all of our dreams for our jobs come true. Decreasing budgets is just one aspect to consider. Our capacity to live lives outside of work and avoid potential burn out requires us to establish boundaries for ourselves and a sense of balance to our lives. This is certainly easier said the done, but I think many of us get to a point where the idea of defining what balance in your life means to you becomes more than just a professional development session and a real necessity for your life.

A couple of weeks ago, the professional staff in my department took a retreat we dubbed the "back to basics" retreat. We started by reviewing our mission, vision, and learning outcomes and then moved into an exercise that enabled us to define what our financial and human resources where. Based on this information, we asked ourselves one key question. What are the core student experiences our office should support? We defined one or two initiatives per area and included commitments we made to collaborative efforts with others and tasks associated with keeping our office running.

When we finished, I think each of us still felt very good about the array of initiatives we identified as core to our mission. I think we also identified that the most significant challenge in this exercise was letting go of initiatives we care about, but simply cannot be done given the time, money, and other resources at our disposal. Our own desire to maximize the learning opportunities we can offer is a significant part of creating an unhealthy sense of balance which threatens individual happiness, productivity, and passion at work.

For many of us, our work is more than just a job. Our work gives our lives purpose and passion, but I think it is ok to recognize that there are limits to what we can accomplish and that we shouldn't feel guilty when resources simply won't enable us to do as much as we would like. Finding a positive middle ground that works for you is the key and recognizing that not every initiative will be as big or as broad or as deep as we would like it to be.

Today, I was tragically late picking up my 6 year old daughter from school. I felt like the worst father in the world and apologized profusely to her when I finally arrived. My daughter said, "you know what daddy....sometimes that happens. You just do the best you can and that's ok". I wish we adopted this mindset more at work and let ourselves off the hook more often. We should reach for the possible and never stop dreaming, but also recognize and stay true to our core mission and let yourself know that doing your best with what you have is ok.