It's summer time and either you're feeling pressure to do research and publish or you're embracing downtime ... or you're like me and feeling the pressure of both. In this week's episode, I talk about the importance of downtime for our brain to consolidate information, make long-term memories, and encourage creativity. So if you think you need to go, go, go--like many of us in academia do--you actually need time to go slow, slow, slow. I include some ideas for how you might practice downtime, especially if your inner critic is yelling at you to not take downtime. 

Check out this Scientific American article "Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime" and this Psychology Today article "The Scientific Case for Downtime." 

It's graduation time, which always makes me think about new beginnings. But graduation time is also a moment to remember two critical points: (1) we are so much more than our degrees and content areas and (2) let's not put all of our (career) eggs in one basket. In this episode, I encourage all listeners--including myself because I need to hear it just as much--to celebrate our skills beyond content knowledge, to embrace new ideas about the work landscape, and to think big about the lives we want to have. 

If this topic resonates with you, I encourage you to also check out Bill Burnett and Bob Evans' Designing Your Life, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber's The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, and Elizabeth Perle McKenna's When Work Doesn't Work Anymore: Women, Work, and Identity. 

Happy listening! 

In this week's episode, I explore what I've learned about having imposter syndrome and how it has affected my perception of self and possibility. I draw from Drs. Lisa and Richard Lisa Orbé-Austin's and their book Own Your Greatness: Overcome Imposter Syndrome, Beat Self-Doubt, and Succeed in Life, which has helped me better understand the experiential and psychological underpinnings of imposter syndrome and why high-achieving folks like me are more likely to have imposter syndrome. Listen along to learn more about imposter syndrome, what it is, why people have it, and how to stop feeling like an imposter. 

Coming from a background where making money was considered greedy, I grew-up thinking my career needed to be service-focused and money didn't really matter. Now that I've gotten older (and have more bills), I am questioning the (often) implicit and explicit negativity associated with faculty who want to make money ... or who leave academia to make more money. In this episode, I question why so many academics stay in low-paying academic jobs and/or eschew looking for better paying work. What if academics, even for the short term, took better paying jobs to get financially stable, so they can have the financial means to do the work they love? 

In this episode, I use Dr. Bill Plotkin's book Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche to talk about the importance of living an authentic self with integrity in academia. Bill has a PhD in psychology from the University of Colorado--Boulder but now is the founder of Animas Valley Institute in Southwest Colorado. I have found his book helpful at uncovering the layers of my own psyche, so I want to share some of his wisdom with you. 

Many of us feel like we cannot be authentic in academia because of the pressures of social acceptance--the pressure to be well-liked, to get funding, to get optimal teaching times, to sail through annual evaluations, etc. However, if we want to live in alignment with our true selves, we must find ways to be authentic within our programs, departments, and classes. I share some of my own experiences grappling with authenticity and end the episode with recommendations you may want to try in your home institutions. 

As always, I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn and welcome your topic ideas. Happy listening!

In this episode, I draw from the psychology concept "differentiation of self," as defined by The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, to share the ways in which we might struggle with differentiation in academia. According to The Bowen Center, "People with a poorly differentiated 'self' depend so heavily on the acceptance and approval of others that they either quickly adjust what they think, say, and do to please others or they dogmatically proclaim what others should be like and pressure them to conform." Many of us, through upbringing and/or academic training, struggle with differentiation of self in academia because we don't want to rock the boat,  make waves, draw attention to ourselves, etc., for fear of losing funding, not getting hired, not getting promoted, etc. I close the episode with strategies I have learned to develop a well-differentiated self in the workplace to help me with living out my own integrity, feeling comfortable with my personality, and (trying not to) give undue power to annual evaluations and promotion processes.  (Also, in talking to my therapist about my own differentiation of self, she says I am well-differentiated .... but I don't feel like I am. haha.)  

As always, I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn, so feel free to connect over there. 

Happy listening! 

Academia is really great at training grad students and faculty to silo themselves into disciplines that don't get much crossover or exposure to other disciplines. (If you're in a field with a lot of disciplinary crossover, that's awesome.) Many hiring and promotion guidelines, disciplinary journals, hiring committees, etc., prioritize/privilege those who have stuck with the field and not branched out. (Of course, your mileage may vary.) For those of us who have been trained to not branch out or for those of us who think it would be a waste of professional time to branch out, this episode is about the benefits of being adventurous. 

This episode was recorded in Austin, Texas, where I was attending a regional conference facilitated by the edtech company TopHat and their (mostly) STEM educators. I am neither a STEM person nor an edtech person, but I decided this conference was my opportunity to be adventurous. And, needless to say, I had a fantastic time and learned a lot that I can apply to my own teaching and administrative role. 

As always, I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn and feel free to drop me a line about topics you're interested in me exploring for future episodes. 

This week's episode draws from Bill Burnett and Dave Evans' Designing Your Life book. Burnett and Evans are design professors at Stanford University; their book has helped me get more clear about what I want from work and life, and I've assigned chapters (with positive feedback from students) in my undergraduate and graduate courses. In this episode, I read chapter 2, "Building a Compass," which is a reflection-based chapter in the book about one's workview and lifeview. Pull up a chair, grab a notebook, and get ready to write (or just mull over ideas). I sprinkle in my own thoughts and feelings as I read the chapter again. 

I would love to hear your topical requests, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.

This week's episode is about my PhD life at the request of a current PhD-student via LinkedIn. This isn't the whole story or even half of the story, but it does cover the fun, the inspiring, the frustrating, and the annoying--with a healthy dose of how my imposter syndrome, identity deconstruction, inner critic, and nervous system impacted my PhD life. I close the episode with some metacognitive and mindfulness recommendations for those of you in similar situations.

I would love to hear more of your topical requests, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.

I get a bit more vulnerable this week as I recount how my evangelical upbringing shaped/s my view of academic work. Ultimately, I thought it was critical to pick a career where I was doing good and I thought that service-through-career would sustain me. Now I'm not so sure. Ever the academic, I draw connections between my upbringing and Wang, van Witteloostuijn, and Heine's (2020)'s article "A Moral Theory of Public Service Motivation" published in Hypothesis and Theory.