The Challenge of Coming to Terms With Evolving Priorities

• growth
• development
• faculty development

Among the many lessons and ongoing challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic has been its effect on the relationship between our home and work lives. The ideas of “work-life balance” or “work-life blend,” both of which were popular topics in the years leading up to 2020, entered an entirely new and uncharted level of complexity when the personal and professional worlds of many suddenly collided, without adequate warning or preparation.^1,2 In many cases, years of careful planning or concerted effort to separate or otherwise partition work and home evaporated, and the multitude of challenges inherent in complete integration of work and home became readily apparent.

Despite the numerous negative aspects of the pandemic, one potential silver lining (if it can be called that) is that many communities of individuals who, traditionally, may have been living disparate existences, focused on their own goals, priorities, and problems, were suddenly faced with a communal, nearly existential challenge. Communal challenges can foster a shared sense of ownership and activate many positive attributes in individuals that can lead to greater individual and group well-being.³ At an individual level, however, separate from the direct physical or health-related complications of the pandemic, the communal challenges of COVID-19 served as a massive disruption to our own plans and goals for our lives and careers that had and continues to have both immediate and sustained, long-term consequences. Whether that meant a long-planned vacation had to be canceled or even a dossier submission for promotion or tenure was put on hold, the pandemic inserted itself as an uncontrollable and uncertain external roadblock to both individual and collective goal setting and achievement.

As a department chair, my ongoing regular conversations with faculty members stretch the full spectrum of events, emotions, and situations running through their personal and professional lives. As might be expected given the circumstances of the global pandemic, many of the more serious conversations with faculty members have been focused on the intersection of the expectations and goals they had for themselves with the realities of the world around them and the resulting emotional impact. I have found that many faculty members have felt a profound sense of personal and professional disappointment with themselves for having not made what they believed to be adequate progress toward their goals over the past year. Disappointment has been characterized as stemming from unmet expectations, just as pride and accomplishment derives from meeting or exceeding expectations.⁴ As a normal part of life and work, there are regular formal and informal points in time that serve as progress markers, both personally and professionally. Some are compulsory, such as a 30^th, 40^th, or 50^th birthday, while other points are levied by others or by employers (eg, annual evaluation). What ties these moments together is that they can each set us up to feel a sense of pride in what we have achieved or disappointment in our lack of progress. Put another way, these moments that allow reflection and evaluation of our relative progress toward our pre-specified goals also can essentially force us to feel either a sense of relative accomplishment or disappointment. In that way, our perspective and perception of ourselves and our place in life can become the lenses through which we view our progress overall and direct us toward either pride or disappointment.

In this discussion, I am reminded of experiences in my own life and how my perspective was unknowingly affected by circumstances in the broader world. For most of my early life, I dreamed of becoming a broadcast journalist and anchoring the network evening news like my heroes Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather. As early as elementary and middle school, I regularly set up a bulky home VHS video camera to make my own “studio” and film myself delivering the news with hand-drawn logos and homemade graphics based on those I saw on our local television news broadcasts. I even brought family members in to “interview” about local or national events on my broadcasts. As I grew older, I made decisions about which classes and extracurricular activities to pursue based on this goal, joining the high school newspaper staff, and advancing from reporter to features editor and eventually to assistant editor.

As time passed and college approached, circumstances in life changed and my priorities shifted. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, occurred during my senior year of high school, just as I was readying my applications to various colleges and making my on-site campus visits to programs in New York City and Washington, DC. I am unable to pinpoint the exact moment, but at some point, the goal of becoming a broadcast journalist that I had been building toward for so long became less important and my thoughts and plans moved to different concerns about finding a fulfilling career and ensuring financial stability within the new world that emerged after 9/11. Eventually, I found pharmacy as a career. In retrospect, however, it is difficult to reconcile my younger self with the one I became after that shift. Up to that point in life, I had a very clear dream to become a broadcast journalist, with specific goals and a detailed, stepwise plan to accomplish those goals. The philosophical question that emerges, then, is why am I not living in a state of disappointment with myself for not achieving those early goals and fulfilling that dream? How could I have abandoned nearly 10 years of dreams within just a few months prior to college? Objectively, it would be understandable if I felt subtle or even prominent disappointment. While I certainly feel disappointment about other aspects of my life, I do not feel that I missed out on my lifelong dream. On the contrary, I feel fulfilled in my chosen career path of pharmacy education and leadership.

Many of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the United States have been compared to those of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, including the collective grief and trauma felt by people across demographic groups and locations.⁵ Most relevant to this discussion, goals and plans (both personal and professional) were disrupted for many Americans and others from around the world. In the period immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the disruptions were tangible and prominent, such as the complete grounding of US commercial air travel and the shock to the US financial system after entire companies based in the World Trade Centers in New York City were destroyed. As time passed, however, the disruptions became less prominent (or we simply got used to them) and a type of “new normal” emerged, resetting the equilibrium, and forever codifying “pre-9/11” and “post-9/11” as common terms to distinguish periods of time.

Systematically reevaluating our priorities based on new and evolving events and circumstances in our lives is a natural part of growth and development. Yet that nagging feeling of disappointment can remain present despite our ever-present positive self-talk and even external objective sources (such as our direct supervisors or family members) reassuring us that we are making the right decisions. Deep in the middle of a crisis, it can be difficult to evaluate our perspective and understand that our goals are never static objects that are unmovable and immune to the whims and effects of intervening circumstances. Recently, I was reminded of the effect of circumstances on my own goals in a small-scale but tangible way when one of the tires on my vehicle went flat while I was driving to work. All of the goals, hopes, and ambitions I had for the day seemed to evaporate in an instant as I realized that the flat tire would have to be fixed before I could accomplish any of my other tasks. Later in the day, as I paid the mechanic at the auto shop for fixing the tire, I noticed I did not feel a sense of disappointment about not accomplishing the goals I had set out for the day. Instead, I felt a small sense of pride in having successfully dealt with and overcome this unexpected challenge with time left in the day. This “micro experience” was representative for me of the powerful effect that resetting or reevaluating expectations can have on overall emotional well-being, a sentiment supported by other leaders in academia and beyond.^6,7

We must take a collective pause and resist the temptation to judge and overly criticize ourselves for failing to meet goals we set in a “pre-pandemic” world.⁸ A helpful question to ask yourself is if the “you” at 14, 16, or 18 years of age would feel a sense of pride or one of disappointment in the individual that you have become and what you have accomplished? I believe it is unlikely that our younger selves would see what we have managed to achieve with anything other than pride. The world around us has changed and is continuing to evolve to meet the challenges we face, and it is critical for us to view the act of goal setting and the systematic evaluation of progress toward those goals through the lens of circumstances.

• Received March 29, 2021.
• Accepted March 31, 2021.

• © 2022 American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy