Self-Compassionate Professor

Dr. Nicole Papaioannou discusses her journey from academia, to full-time work in instructional design, and finally, to freelancing/consulting work in instructional design. She discusses the wellness gap in her life when she was an academic and how, in her first full-time post-ac job, she was able to finally not only meet her needs for meaningful and challenging work, but also satisfy her needs for financially secure and stable work. Nicole offers interesting tidbits about instructional design as a career and describes what she misses about academia. She also explains how today, her entrepreneurial work offers her freedom to strike a work-life balance--a type of freedom she believes she would not have had in academia. 

Dr. Kemi Doll explains that we need to clear our own compasses so that we know how to navigate our academic careers with meaning and purpose. She describes how she keeps her own compass clear with self-care, self-examination, taking time with herself, as well as planning and prioritizing her academic work according to her own true north. Kemi notes that many academics lose themselves to academic culture and institutional expectations, allowing external pressures to cloud their purposeful reasons for wanting to be academics in the first place. In this way, as they settle and allow the things that were once personally meaningful to them to be stripped away, Kemi explains that they experience burnout in slow motion. She also offers rich and focused advice about how academics can find and dust off their internal compasses. In addition to her academic work, Dr. Kemi Doll also coaches women of color faculty in academic medicine and is the creator of the weekly podcast, Your Unapologetic Career. Find her at https://kemidoll.com. 

Dr. Emily Crookston describes her reasons for becoming an academic and her realization, in a yoga class, that her life as an academic was one of suffering. In this episode, Emily describes the joys and challenges of pursuing an entrepreneurial path, including the freedom she has to create anything she wants and live wherever she wants as well as the uncertainty that characterizes such a path. She describes the important role self-examination plays in building and sustaining a business, how her work day is freeing and usually very focused on the present moment, and how she is working toward securing for herself more time and space to create more of what she wants in her life and career. Find Dr. Emily Crookston on LinkedIn or at https://www.thepocketphd.com. 

Dr. Brandy L. Simula explains how pandemic burnout is still very much with us and that it's important for us to give ourselves space to be human as opposed to expecting ourselves to show up fully--with 100% effort and totally on top of it--in everything we do. She explains how to make choices about what we put full effort into and what we don't, how to acknowledge to ourselves and others that life is often messy and hard, and to connect to people that can support us as we navigate the challenges of being human in the midst of a pandemic. Brandy also discusses her own career pivot and the moment she realized academia did not offer her the life she wanted--that it was too much of a sacrifice to continue down that path. Find Dr. Brandy Simula at https://www.brandysimula.com. 

Dr. Suchitra Shenoy Packer left her tenure-track job in order to relocate for her husband's new job. She did not want to give up her academic job, but she was committed to her family and marriage. Although she describes her exit from academia as emotionally difficult, she was comforted by her research about the diversity of meanings people attribute to their work and as she grappled with her changing identity, she started a blog for multicultural families, became an artist, and began working toward elementary teaching. She is now grateful for all the opportunities for self-discovery she has had since leaving academia and explains that had she not left, she would never have known all that she was capable of. You may reach Dr. Suchitra Shenoy Packer at suchitraspacker@outlook.com. 

Dr. Özgün Ünver explains how academics may be at greater risk of burnout compared to the rest of the population. She also describes how burnout manifests differently for different people, types of support one might want to seek when in burnout, as well as her own experience with burnout. Özgün also discusses the necessity of turning into difficult emotions as well as practicing self-acceptance and self-compassion when healing from burnout. Registration for her 4-week free course on burnout closes August 1, 2021. Sign up at https://www.mindyourownrevisions.com. 

Dr. Carol Parker Walsh explains the importance of listening to the inner voice that is telling you to do something else in your career. If you do not listen, she explains, you will not only continue an unmotivated and uninspired existence in your current career, but you will likely experience a spiritual-emotional-intellectual death. Carol explains that we regret not what we have done, but what we haven't done in our lives. Her coaching work addresses these issues, helping high-achieving (mostly) women to develop deeper relationships with themselves so they not only hear their inner voices, but listen to them, and take action on their behalf. Find Dr. Carol Parker Walsh at https://www.carolparkerwalsh.com.   

Dr. James Hedges, Director of Professional and Continuing Education at Westminster College, is devoted to understanding, negotiating, and managing the relationship his institution has to the chaotic and shifting environment within which it now finds itself. James describes his work, compares it to the work he did as a faculty member, and offers lessons learned from his current role: chaos can create opportunities, negotiation and confidence is key, discussing workplace issues with colleagues is important and therapeutic, and opening to and accepting ambiguity and failure is necessary, among others.  

In this solo episode, I continue what I started in Episode 62: I walk you through how to answer the questions on the decision guide about whether or not to leave academia for tenure-track faculty (Find the decision guide at https://selfcompassionateprofessor.com). I discuss how to create enough space for yourself so that you can answer the second set of questions as fully as possible. And drawing on research in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Mindful Self-Compassion, and Organizational Behavior, I show you how to create space for your career vision by clearing space in your mind, identity, emotions, and present experience as well as explain how to make space for your values and inspired career actions. Creating such space will help you to answer the second set of questions in the guide and help you to begin building a vision infused with integrity. 

Randy Olson left his tenured professorship twenty-five years ago to attend film school in California. There, he learned how to use narrative to improve science communication and now, as he puts it, he runs "Randy Olson University," where he teaches scientists and others to communicate using the framework he has poured many years of work into, writing five books on the subject. The career transition he made was long and difficult, but as he explains, having fun and accepting "slow periods" when they emerge are key to resilience.