Vitality vs. Flourishing - A Reflection

In this between-isode I share my thoughts on the concepts of vitality and flourishing in your work life and share excerpts from a blog post and from Agile Faculty on the subject.

Transcript

 Hi, listeners, welcome to this between-isode of the agile academic. As I record, it’s a few days after Christmas and for whatever reason, I just feel like writing. Part of that is a natural inclination to reflect this time of year, part of it being unable to visit family this holiday so I’m distracting myself. I’m also baking. A lot. Any way

I was browsing through my currently inactive blog thinking about ways to reboot and reengage, when I came across a post titled, “It’s Not about Productivity, It’s about Vitality,” written in April 2018. I’m fuzzy on the timeline but this is around the time I couldn’t hide my depression, anxiety, and ultimately burnout anymore. I see hints of the me I am now, trying to figure out the me I was then. I would go through a lot of therapy to work through my burnout and the challenges to my identity that it caused.

But this vitality post is interesting because I also see hints of work I’ve just begun to do, work on flourishing and resilience. So I thought I’d do a couple of things in this between-isode. First, I’m going to share with you the post I wrote in 2018. Then I’m going to talk a little about how my work on burnout has helped me answer some of the questions raised in the post as well as why I’m interested in the idea of flourishing now as a concept instead of vitality. 

A few quick notes before I share the post to help you understand some of the language if you are not a Scrum person. Scrum is a project management framework from software development that I share and adapt for work in higher ed in my book, Agile Faculty: Practical Strategies for Managing Research, Service, and Teaching. Scrum is part of a constellation of project management practices known as Agile, which values transparency, adaptability, and people. This is where I get the Agile in the name of the podcast and my side gig. I also mention a Scrum board which is a visual system for managing work.

So now on to the post:

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I’m not always Agile. Sometimes my Scrum board becomes the place I fear the most (shout-out to Dashboard Confessional). I will sometimes leave projects off the board even though they are taking up much of my time. Even though I’m committed to the idea that vitality is more important that productivity, I don’t always take my own advice.

This comes from a few places, I think. First, I’m a natural workaholic. I come by it genetically. I don’t know how to not work all the time, whether I like it or not. I do enjoy the academic writing process when I have interesting data or a compelling theory to chase down. I like giving faculty workshops and helping people feel productive and engaged through my Agile Faculty work. I like creating new things, innovative classes, programs, proposals. But I struggle with getting overly excited about an idea, working it out and proposing it…but then ultimately having to follow through.

I’m not very patient, so when I have an idea, I dive in and make it happen, often without thinking about whether I have the time or energy to dedicate to the new project or what it will cost in terms of splitting my focus on other things I’ve committed to or created. Six or seven conferences in one year? Sure, I need to promote the book! Co-edit a special issue of a journal and an edited collection at the same time? No problem; can’t be that much extra work. Try to write at least five articles about the Studio program in one year? Absolutely, don’t want the data to get cold. You can see where this is going.

But even more importantly, I think, is that no one ever taught me how to be content, how to decide when I have enough going on to maintain a level of work that is sustainable rather than stressful and overwhelming. I don’t know when to stop working, when to stop adding new ideas to the Scrum board, when to relax. Like many of our students, my life has been about building first the transcript and then the CV, looking smart and capable and respectable. I’m not sure how much of this ethic is about my own drive or something else.

Is this drive part of imposter syndrome? An advanced version in which I keep turning up my productivity and output in order to continually prove I belong in academia and deserve respect? Or is it just part of who I am, this drive to do more and more? I suspect I’m not alone in this feeling.

But, at this point, I’m more often than not running on stress hormones, even about the projects I’m genuinely excited about. So, I need to start taking my own advice. In the first chapter of Agile Faculty, I talk about the narrative of stress many faculty labor under but also that we can turn that narrative into one of vitality and engagement when we find ways to balance productivity, engagement, creativity, and personal pursuits. Productivity can lead to vitality, but vitality should be the goal all along. Chasing productivity isn’t Agile; it’s a fast way to burn out, which is documented in the Agile and Scrum values. Making time for self-care and self-honesty helps with vitality and, ultimately, productivity too.

I concluded the post with a few reader questions:

How do you define career or personal vitality? Are you stuck in a productivity trap too? How can we teach each other and those coming up after us how to be content in our work and when enough is good enough for now?

As I look at it now, I think this post is still about productivity more than vitality because that’s who I was when I wrote this. In the post, I’m trying to understand why my world basically revolves around productivity. I even hint at being on the edge of burnout.

What do I mean by vitality? Here are a few paragraphs from my book Agile Faculty where I tap the research – I’ll add the references in the transcript notes.

This narrative of growth aligns closely with a 30-year tradition of research on faculty vitality, which is exemplified by Gooler (1991) as the faculty member 

who is unremittingly curious, who feels a sincere commitment to both individual and institutional goals, who derives satisfaction from professional endeavors, who manifests behaviors that reflect enthusiasm for intellectual activity, and who looks forward to what the future may bring. (Gooler, 1991, p.8, as cited in Kalivoda, Sorrell, & Simpson, 1994, p. 255)

These vital faculty are “aware of their own career paths and…proactive in determining their goals and acting to achieve them” (Hardre, Cox, & Kollman, 2010, p. 10). Their definition of productivity that is grounded in teaching and research but also in “intrinsically rewarding” and subtler forms of active engagement in the academy (Huston, Norman, & Ambrose, 2007, p. 518; Kalivoda, Sorrell, & Simpson, 1994, p. 260). Further describing vital faculty, DeFillipo and Giles (2015) argue that “challenge seeking, creativity, curiosity, energy, grit, growth mindset, motivation, optimism, and risk taking” [as well as] productivity “are all characteristic of the vital faculty mindset. (p. 2).

In short, vital faculty are always searching for development opportunities to help them grow as professionals, and they can articulate specific projects that they find to be intrinsically motivating. Even stressful contextual challenges do not necessitate a narrative of constraint. This is a narrative of purpose, commitment, clearly articulated goals, growth, and vitality.

You can see from this excerpt from Agile Faculty that my definition of vitality 5 years ago was intimately tied to work and productivity. But after going through burnout, I think vitality is the wrong word, the wrong concept. Striving for vitality in the way I framed it in the last book can lead to stress, overwhelm, and exhaustion because the focus is on relentless professional development and productivity. Which is basically what led to my burnout.

I’m coming around instead to the idea of flourishing instead of vitality. I ran a workshop on flourishing as a teacher for two groups of faculty at my current institution this month. Flourishing is a measure of overall well-being that focuses on cultivating purpose, personal growth, resilience, and values-alignment. Ryan, Curran, and Deci in a 2013 article define it as “pleasure that accompanies activities that fulfill human intellectual, social, and productive potentials in good and admirable ways.” This is close to Aristotle’s definition of the good life. I love some Aristotle. These definitions touch on productivity but only as one measure to a good life.

When you think about flourishing, what do you imagine? How would you define flourishing generally?

There are lots of theories associated with flourishing and well-being that I link to in the transcript, including self-determination theory, Ryff’s psychological well-being theory, the Harvard Flourishing Measure, and the PERMA model from positive psychology. I’ll link to these theories in the transcript for this episode. I used the PERMA model in the workshop I led.  PERMA stands for 

·      Positive emotions

·      Engagement

·      Relationships

·      Meaning and 

·      Accomplishment.

Some versions of the model add a last H for health. 

Let’s take a minute for reflection. When you think about your work and life, however you balance or integrate them, where do your activities or times of flow and of rest fall in the PERMA categories? I’ll give you a minute to reflect. The elements of the model again are positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.

<pause>

After you’ve reflected, do you see any patterns or surprises in your thoughts?

When I reflect on flourishing and how to flourish in the new year, I think about spending more time on relationships and pursuing meaning in my life and work. I think doing that will bring about the other three – positive emotions, engagement and accomplishment. So that’s my goals for 2022 – building (and in some cases rebuilding) relationships and focusing on meaning and purpose which I can definitely see connected to my burnout book launching this year.

So, thanks for listening and thinking about flourishing with me. More episodes of the agile academic podcast are coming soon, including a few more bonus episodes like this one. Season 3 will launch in the Spring with 8 new episodes. I’ve themed the season Advocates and can’t wait for you to meet the women featured. Until then, take care, and stay well.