When Two Worlds Collide: Living Between Vocation and Vocation-Dr Paulet Brown-Wilsher

There are moments often unremarkable on the surface when I feel the full weight and grace of inhabiting two worlds. A conversation with a doctoral student about their imposter syndrome, followed by preparing a sermon on grace. A meeting with senior university leaders about an academic review, immediately followed by offering pastoral counsel to someone facing a loss. It is in these crossings that I recognise the quiet collision of my two vocations as an academic leader and ordained priest.

Collision is perhaps too dramatic a word, yet it captures something essential. These worlds do not simply coexist. They press against one another. They ask different things of me. One values critical thinking, performance, and productivity. The other values presence, contemplation, and an inner attentiveness. And yet, I am not split between them. I am formed by both.

For a long time, I believed I had to keep these worlds separate. The university has little space for overt spiritual language, and the Church does not always understand the procedural logic of institutional governance. There was safety, I thought, in compartmentalisation.

But coaching, and the space it affords, has taught me otherwise.

Coaching invites integration. It allows for paradox. It enables a person to bring their full self into the conversation to speak of strategic planning and spiritual discernment in the same breath. In my practice, I have found that the truest insights often emerge in that liminal space where complexity is not denied, but explored with curiosity and compassion.

My academic self is structured, focused, and attuned to systems. My priestly self listens more deeply, notices the silences between words, and dares to sit with discomfort. These selves are not at odds. They are interdependent.

When these vocations converge in coaching, something quietly yet profound happens. I bring the capacity to hold space and structure, insight and intuition, systems-thinking and soul-thinking. I offer presence, but not passivity. Challenge, but never judgement. Curiosity, without assumption.

This is not always easy. The university is not a neutral terrain, nor is the Church immune to complexity. Each space comes with its own politics, pressures, and unspoken rules. Yet in both, I see people yearning to be heard, to be whole, to live with purpose and coherence. And so, I return, again and again, to the space in-between.

To live between two worlds does not mean I am torn, but called.

It is a calling to integration. To find language that bridges rather than divides. To walk alongside others who also feel caught between roles, identities, expectations. To honour the wisdom that emerges not in spite of tension, but because of it.