4.12 Reflections on Resilience: Insights from the Interviews

In this solo episode of Mindful Academy, Jennifer recaps a series of nine interviews with professionals who have transitioned from traditional academic roles to various supportive and entrepreneurial positions. She discusses the common themes and valuable lessons drawn from these conversations, emphasizing the importance of community, available resources, and the potential for academics to successfully pivot their careers. She also highlights the significance of understanding one's zone of control and making mindful choices to manage challenges in both professional and personal contexts. Special attention is given to practicing acceptance and conversion of adversity into growth opportunities.

Timestamps:

00:00 Welcome and Introduction

00:19 Recap of Past Interviews

04:47 Key Takeaways from Interviews

06:22 Navigating Career Stages

09:56 Exploring Alternative Career Paths

16:07 Current Challenges in Academia

19:35 Zone of Control and Making Choices

38:02 Final Thoughts and Upcoming Topics

Transcript

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Mindful Academy and thank you so much for letting me keep you company while you commute or walk the dog or do the dishes or go on a hike. Whatever it is you're doing while you listen. Today I'm doing a solo episode and I'm thinking of it as a bit of a recap of the series of interviews that I have conducted and I will continue to have these conversations.

I see they're getting a lot of traction and I have really appreciated the opportunity to talk to people who work in ways similar to the way I work people with academic backgrounds. Who, for whatever reason, have now pivoted and provide services and assistance to academics. And so if you haven't listened to the whole series, I will invite you to do going back to my first interview with Carol Chabra, where we talked about what leaders need to know [00:01:00] and how we're working to work with academic leaders. Around leadership and change and things like that. And then I talked with Rebecca Pope, who wrote Unraveling Faculty Burnout. And then together with Lee Bassett, co-edited a volume on neuro divergence in the academy and is now working on her third book.

More than that working on her next project, which is about women in higher education leadership, and we talked about burnout. And all sorts of other things. Oh, and if I wanna rewind actually, so in my conversations with Carol Chabra, she used to be an academic administrator, so a PhD in English, intentionally chose the administrative route through teaching and learning centers and all of that, and built her career that way.

And then pivoted a few years ago to start consulting. Rebecca Pope Roque, an English professor. Who suffered massive [00:02:00] burnout and pivoted to do different kinds of work, has continued to write and publish, but in a way that sort of is a meta study of working in the academy. And then worked by Lynn interviewed Anna Clements who lives in Prague originally.

German scientist. And she has a whole program to help scientists get published in journals. Again, got the PhD. Chose to do other things with it. Lisa Monroe, a historian, originally American now based in Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, has a program for humanists and social scientists to help them with their writing and publication.

I then spoke with Chris Mitchell, who is a coach for artists and creatives, and we talked about how. Academic work is creative work and the practices and mindsets that we need in order to support [00:03:00] our creativity. Through a coaching lens. Then I interviewed Raquel Wright May, who is a professor of higher education leadership and is a yoga teacher.

And she and I talked about race and trauma and taking care of yourself and coming back to your body through practices like yoga when you work in higher education. I then spoke with Jennifer Polk from PhD to Life who after her PhD in history knew that a faculty route wasn't gonna make her happy, and got certified as a coach and has been working for 15 years or more helping people pivot from academic pathways to other types of work.

Then I interviewed Joe Van Evry. Joe and I had a super long chat about all the things that she does with the Academic Writers Studio to support scholars in their writing practice. [00:04:00] And then my most recent conversation was with Michelle Thompson. First a lawyer. A historian and now a coach who works with both lawyers and scholars to help them confront sort of the ways they're working and overperforming and people pleasing and develop better, more embodied habits so that they can be well and get the work done that's important to them while still having a life.

And I encourage you to go listen to all of these because they, to me. I'm gonna and I've been doing this for a couple months, so if I reach way back and try to piece all together, what am I pulling out of these interviews as some high level learning? And some of that is. What follows?

First of all, isolation is not mandatory. I know that a lot of scientists work in a lab context or with co-PIs and with the whole team, and there is more [00:05:00] collaboration in the sciences than traditionally in the humanities. Or even social sciences. And so if you come from the humanities and social sciences, you may be used to just being a lone agent and doing your own thing and that can feel isolating.

And a lot of the people I interviewed offer retreats or programs or workshops where you get together with people who don't work down the hall from you. And have a, have an experience together where you're working on something that everybody cares about. So everybody's working on something like their writing or their leadership or their yoga practice, and you get to create new bonds, meet new people, find new shared experiences, while also doing things that kind of push your career forward or push your wellbeing forward.

That so that you can be productive in your career. So you don't actually have to go it alone. And if your [00:06:00] university isn't a place with a really vibrant faculty life where people read each other's work and support each other, there are external resources for that. So that's one thing I want you to take away.

You do not have to do everything alone. The second thing I want you to take away is the fact that help is out there. So if regardless of where you are in your career, early, mid, late, each of these phases has its challenges. We all, we can think of early career scholars who are on the tenure track and that's, that's grabbing the brass ring as they go around the carousel and sometimes the carousel spinning really fast and it seems really hard to grab that ring.

And there are writing groups and writing processes and one-on-one coaching and group coaching to address problems, issues at that career stage. I work a ton with mid-career folks. The sort of, [00:07:00] okay, what now? Conversations around, okay, I jumped through all the hoops, I grabbed all the rings, and now I have tenure and.

Supposedly the world is my oyster. What do I wanna do with it? What does fulfillment mean to me? Do I want to move into administration? Do I want to change institutions? What does it even mean to change my research trajectory? All of those conversations are really common at mid-career. And then, although in the interviews we haven't talked about this a lot, I think I'm going to.

Find some people to have this discussion with what does retiring from the life of the mind look like? Depending on where you work and live. Mandatory retirement may not be a thing. It certainly is not a thing where I live and work. And there are different kinds of people, right? Some people want to stay at work in their office until they draw their very last breath.

Others are pretty eager to [00:08:00] retire. Anecdotally, I see a lot of faculty members falling into the, I'm going to work well past when I financially have to because it is my calling. But then whether for family or for health or for whatever reason, I. Or for, finally wanting to be able to travel and not teach.

And they come to a retirement point, the questions around, okay, if I am not doing this thing full time, who am I? And how do I wanna gra gracefully wrap up the outward facing. Paycheck earning professorship. What? While I'm retaining something about that, that still means something to me. So regardless of what stage of career you are at, there are resources out there for you.

There are groups, there are coaches, there are books. And if you don't think that these podcast [00:09:00] episodes have. Shown you where to find help and resources, let me knows. Send me an email, jennifer@jenniferaskey.com, and I will find that out for you in part because I love like, Ooh, let's go find a thing.

And sure you could Google that, but maybe I know a person or have experienced a program, right? I spend my time in this space and it is so rich, and I hope that conducting interviews with these women. Has shown you that there is a rich world sort of running parallel to universities that has tons of resources for you at whatever career stage you're at.

I have a puppy who's down here at my feet. She's growling. She wants to come up. Come on, you gonna come join us? Come on.

Maybe not. She's a dachshund. She has opinions. So the third thing. I want you to take away from this is [00:10:00] that being a professor is not the only gig out there for you. And before you turn this off in outrage, let me say that. Yes, I know it's what you worked really hard for. And it's what you want it to be.

It's all that you can imagine. It's the only model you've ever followed, and how dare I suggest that You could just toss it overboard, and I'm not going to suggest that you just toss it overboard. But I just want to point out that all of these people that I talk to and I've just joined a professional group that is an association of higher education coaches and consultants where there's like a, another gazillion people for me to talk to about what they do, why they do it, what their background is that brought them to this work, whether it is.

Whether it's a background in student services or as faculty or registrar and enrollment, people come from all over the place to, to help and they all come with some sort of [00:11:00] college or university work experience. But in, in these first nine interviews, I hope you notice that like academics tend to make pretty good entrepreneurs, that if you've been trained as a scholar, the notion of.

Creating something out of nothing. Building on the shoulders of giants so that you can create a new thing. Setting the parameters of a project, doing the research and digging into it and, managing your time when you could. Always be working because there's always more to do. Like a lot of the same challenges that faculty face are faced by entrepreneurs and a lot of the same skills that faculty members draw on to create the new course or even the whole new curriculum to.

Speak publicly to talk about their work, to instruct. And like all of those things [00:12:00] come in so handy in entrepreneurship. And so I think as I continue talking to people I will continue to find folks with. PhDs and academic experience who have pivoted for a myriad reasons and are drawing on all of these professorial skills to do something maybe related or maybe entirely different in the world.

So if you are, if you find yourself feeling stuck and at wit's end and saying, I can't just start over. You might not have to. And also like pivots are possible and pivots that take the rich experience that you currently have and use it in new contexts are. They're out there. We have models for them.

You can see them and it might be out there for you too if you are at the point where you're not feeling like your current role is fulfilling or [00:13:00] tenable or whatever's going on around you that might have you feeling it. Wits end. And so this is just an offer to you to say, wow, there are things out there that you can do even after years as a faculty member, years as a university leader.

You can pivot. And build on what you have already done to create something new in the world, if that excites you. And so if you, I don't know if you're familiar with the Gallup strengths, used to be called Clifton Strengths. It's an assessment and you can do it online. There's like a mini version where I think you get your top five strengths.

And then there's the full banana where, I can't remember how many it is. I think it's 30 some odd. And they rank them. So of the ways you see the world and the ways you operate, but one of these strengths is learner. If you just always want new stuff to learn and explore. [00:14:00] There are a lot of people in academia who fall into that category and then maybe you're like me.

And the thought of teaching dad d does as a German professor for the rest of my career, made me wanna sob a little bit because there was only so much. Newness. I could pump into that every year. And so I always redid my literature syllabi and my film syllabi so that I always had new stuff to do.

That made my job as a professor a little harder 'cause I was always creating new things for my students. As an entrepreneur, that's an asset. To always want the new to always want to reach for the next thing can be an asset. So I, a lot of the people I have talked to are really good examples of that.

That thing over there, being a professor wasn't scratching my itch or I knew that it wouldn't, or I was adjuncting and it was a nightmare or. I thought it was super successful, but I was at a place that didn't [00:15:00] recognize my contribution. Like all of these stories about working in higher ed that leave people feeling misaligned, misunderstood, underpaid, and appreciated you can take the things that made you good at that.

And apply them to something else. And I think that a lot of the people I've interviewed are, they're generous enough with their time. They may be completely open to having somebody say, Hey, how did you do that? What worked? What was easy for you? What was hard for you? So if you're interested in the entrepreneurial path, like there are also resources out there too.

The dog is trying to climb me like I'm a jungle gym. That's fun. So those are the three big lessons, right? You don't have to go it alone. There are resources and academics tend to make pretty good entrepreneurs, right? So just [00:16:00] when things seem dire, know that there are alternatives. And I am talking about when things seem dire because it's June, 2025, and even though I live in Canada, I'm keenly aware and my clients are very much affected by the grant funding environment in the United States and the.

Delays, reversals and overall uncertainty in federal funding for research in the sciences, also in the arts and humanities, although that's such a much smaller budget that it maybe doesn't even bear talking about. But the NEA, the NEH, the NIH, all of these things are. On hold on pause. Maybe the your grant application will get reviewed.

Maybe it won't. [00:17:00] Maybe it was funded and then pulled back. Maybe the secondary fees collected by your institution are going to be clawed back and down to 15%, which has both individuals and institutions in a bit of a tizzy. And I don't say that lightly at all. I entered graduate school in the nineties.

I became a professor first as visiting and then full-time in the two thousands. And as somebody in the humanities, I feel like my entire academic career starting in graduate school was a series of fear. Series of waves of fear and worry about the sky falling, foreign languages are no longer mandatory at most places.

Enrollment down, enrollment across the humanities, down the [00:18:00] humanities being undervalued. I don't know, since Sputnik since we decided we were in a technology arms race where. Science, technology, engineering, math, like that's been the path that we've told our best and brightest to go on because it was the path of significance and of money.

Now that path is also under assault, and so again, narratives about the sky is falling. I think that the way universities are funded through the grant process might mean that the sky actually is falling. So I'm, I don't wanna exaggerate or fear monger, but it's pretty darn dire out there. And as somebody who comes from a discipline that's been undervalued for ages.

I, I have insight into what it feels like to wake up and say, oh, nobody cares about [00:19:00] what I do. Nobody cares if I succeed or fail if this grant doesn't get funded, like my career's over, or, what am I gonna do about this? And I hear the panic and the assault on identity that comes with the uncertainty around.

Specifically grant funding and the future of how universities are gonna fund that kind of work. And so I am invested in helping my clients see that. Like you don't have to just wr your hands. With your colleagues and hope for the best or run around like chicken little saying the sky is falling, even if it might be because there are resources out there that allow you, and here's my final point that allow you to work on recognizing what's in your zone of control and making choices in your zone [00:20:00] of control.

That are in alignment with your values, in alignment with what is reasonable and what you can do and are in alignment with, like helping you do the work that is important, staying well mentally and emotionally so that you can. Continue to keep a roof over your head so that you can continue to do the necessary work to take advantage of what is there for you in the funding environment or in the university environment, or so that you can be well and resourced to push back and to disrupt and to lead and to really make a stand and a statement like all of those things require.

That you focus on what is within your zone of control that you can make decisions and choices about. And I think I've talked about zone of control before on the podcast, but just for a little recap, if you think of three concentric [00:21:00] circles, so a simplified dartboard, the center, smallest circle is your zone of control.

So this is where you have the levers yes, no, up, down left, and you can make decisions and make things happen because you're you. The second ring is your zone of influence. You maybe can't make the changes and decisions alone, but you can influence them, right? So if you're a tenured faculty member, university policy might be in your zone of influence.

Especially if you're on a council or a Senate or some sort of governing body. Maybe it's in your zone of influence, maybe not. The outermost circle is your zone of concern. So this is like what's going the NE? The NI H's funding is under attack, under review, under reconsideration. You don't have any [00:22:00] levers there.

It impacts you greatly. It is a zone of concern, but you individually cannot change that. It's a bigger social phenomenon. All of the changes since Trump's second inauguration are. Representative of sort of a wave phenomenon where people came in and said, oh, we wanna completely redesign the way this works with other values and agendas in mind.

And so maybe you can impact that wave. Being part of political organizations, being part of protest organizations, writing to people, communicating, giving expert testimony, like maybe, but for most of us, that's just in our zone of concern. It impacts us, but we can't influence it directly and we certainly can't control it.

So my invitation is to think about what is in my [00:23:00] zone of control. Whether I stay in this job that's in my zone of control. You could quit, you could apply to other jobs and quit. You could create a job for yourself and move on, right? Nobody said that would be easy, but there are options. That is something that you have you have the power to choose there.

You also have the power to choose. How do I wanna feel about what's happening here? How do I wanna feel about my grants? How do I wanna feel about the work I'm being asked to do? How do I wanna feel about the work that I'm not being allowed to do? How do I wanna feel about what's happening at the federal level and how it impacts me?

Because you could allow yourself to feel absolutely horrible all the time. Or you could say this is a challenge and it's really hard, and [00:24:00] pain in life is inevitable. We know that from the Buddha and we know that from the Dread Pirate Roberts in the Princess Bride, right? Life is pain Highness. What Wesley doesn't follow up with what the dread private Roberts doesn't follow up with, but the Buddha does.

Is okay. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is not. So we can choose to suffer or we can choose. And here's here's a bit of a challenge around this. It's, this is one that I am continually working on. So if in my zone of control is my body, where I take it, where I put it. What it wears my mind, right? I can choose my thoughts, I can steer my thoughts through mindfulness, through intention.

I can choose my emotions. [00:25:00] I can work with my emotions. So of course we can be triggered and automatically emote, but we can also over time recognize, okay, when that happens and I go into sorrow or I go into rage, are there other alternatives for me? How might I cultivate? A series of choices where frustration doesn't leave me feeling powerless and weepy.

It leaves me feeling maybe resigned, but calm, right? So we do have choices there that require a little bit of work, but so working with the body as the first zone of choice, then data and decision making gives us more choices. The more data we have, the more choices we can make with that. And the more we can s steer our choices through responsibility, responsiveness, and like mindful attention to things instead of just knee jerk I'm being triggered to think and behave and decide this way, [00:26:00] or everybody around me is being triggered to think and behave and decide this way.

Or nobody is saying this thing, but we're all really stressed, so we're all thinking and behaving certain ways, but we're not talking about it. You have choices in all of those areas to either change, remain the same, disrupt, right? There are things that we can do there and what's one of the. Most powerful concepts that I work with as a coach is this notion of choice, because often when we feel stuck and overwhelmed and disempowered, we feel like we don't have choice.

This is just the way it is and it stinks. And so stepping back a bit and taking in the broader picture and saying, okay, at what level do I have choices? If I start from [00:27:00] there, where do I get to act in ways that are more aligned with who I wanna be and how I wanna be in the world? So while all of this uncertainty is, it's so heavy and it's so enraging.

That staying in a heavy, enraged space that isn't going to help you either resist what's going on in a formal or informal way, nor is it gonna help you do the work that you want to continue to do as a scholar. So thinking about, again, zone of control. The other thing about zone of control and choice is.

This notion, and I learned this from Shiza Shain in the Positive Intelligence Mindfulness program. He has a lesson in [00:28:00] there called Accept or Convert. And this it's a very Buddhist lesson and it's basically the lesson of, something happens that upsets me, something happens that irritates me, right?

Whether it's being stuck in traffic or having my grant funding pulled, or getting a negative review or an argument with my partner or my kid, right? All of those, anything like that upsetting setting.

The mindful person, if you're watching this on YouTube and you're watching my dog mall, me, this is like her mid-afternoon. She wants attention and she wants full body contact. She's a year old, but she's my baby. But she is, she also wants to see out the window, so she has this whole routine where she climbs on me until she gets the perfect view.

So I encourage you to watch this on YouTube if you need a [00:29:00] little 10 pound puppy love in your life. But back to she's notion of accept or convert. So I'm stuck in traffic. I've had an argument with my. Partner, I've gotten a negative review from reader two, my grant funding is now under question. I'm irritated as all heck, and I want to lash out.

I want to rage, I want to scream, I want to cry. I want to pull into a little tiny shell. I never be heard or seen from again. All of those are emotional reactions, and he challenges us in this, again, as Buddhist, to either accept it, in which case. Just stop. Just stop thinking about it. Okay.

Shitty review from reviewer number two suggests a million changes and actually writing a whole different thing so I could fuss and fme about reviewer two. I could or about the granting councils right. I could [00:30:00] call up my colleagues and fuss and fum, call my old buddy and just gripe. Which keeps you in that heavy, sad, frustrated space, right?

Just spewing more of that into the world. It solidifies that in your mind. You keep telling yourself the story of how hard done by you are, and a lot, most of us love a good story where we are hard done by. But me too love a good, oh, woe is me. I am hard done by story. But you if we follow this advice, we can either accept it.

It is that way. It is not in my zone of control, so I am going to walk away from ruminating on it and cogitating and chewing on it. That's the one choice. The other choice in shed's language is convert. And th this is challenging when it comes to things like [00:31:00] trauma. So let's not go there. That's not where we start with this practice, but something challenging and negative has happened to me.

How do I convert this into my teacher? What do I need to learn for this to no longer trigger me? And the answer isn't. I need to learn to tune it out and be numb. We're not talking about numbing emotions, we're talking about continuing to develop our personal sovereignty, our personal authority and choice making and our emotional intelligence.

So if, for example, reviewer number two gets underneath my skin. I can either accept it and say, actually reviewer two has a point. I'll go make those changes or accept that it exists and use that as a reason to not submit for publication to [00:32:00] withdraw. There are all sorts of maladaptive ways I could potentially accept that as well as a couple adaptive ways to accept that negative feedback.

But the convert is reviewer. Two gets under my skin and I don't like. Reviewer two under my skin. What do I need to believe or do or feel differently so that reviewer two no longer gets to me? In the context of the current grant climate in the United States, for example, right? All of this, all of these changes to the NIH and other federal granting agencies en rage me.

I could, with every client who brings it up, we could just rage for a few minutes and get it off our chests, [00:33:00] right? That might feel good, but if we accept it, that is currently reality. So not accepting it, I don't know what that's gonna do for us because I could not accept gravity and it's still a thing.

So this is current reality. So if we could we accept it or we convert it into a lesson, what lesson do I need to learn? One of the lessons that I'm pulling out of this is that okay, humanities and the arts were considered. Unfundable, unserious, unc capitalistic, you're never gonna get a job without.

Why would you study that? It's impractical forever. And now we're seeing that science can also fall victim to similar rhetoric. Like we don't have to believe that. [00:34:00] That's just one way. The anti-intellectualism is that exists is common to critiques of all of the work that we do in the knowledge industry.

So con, one way to convert it is to grow my empathy. Like I know what it felt like to feel like as, to be a humanist who was like, ha, you got a degree in German. That's really funny. That felt bad. I didn't like that part of how the academy looked at my work. And now I can have a great deal of empathy for my scientific colleagues who are going through this same pain.

And they too could have empathy for their colleagues who have been struggling with parents and the broader society telling their kids, oh gosh, don't get a history degree. There's no future in that. There's no future in philosophy. There's no future in foreign languages. [00:35:00] AI is gonna take care of all of that.

One thing we could do is grow our empathy. We could grow our social responsibility. Okay, if it isn't gonna happen here, where is it gonna happen? Based on what I already know? What could I be doing? So there are ways, there are social and emotional and internal ways to respond to challenges like this that represent growth.

And that's what means when he says accept or convert. So if we're gonna accept it, it just goes in the fuck it bucket. If we're gonna convert it, we're gonna let us, let it teach us something. It's gonna teach us empathy. Is it gonna teach us about our values? Is it gonna teach us about other people and social connection?

Is it gonna teach us about the action that's needed? So keeping in mind that as we make [00:36:00] choices. We can choose to learn and grow, not in a, oh, this has all been for the good because I don't think that taking funding away from AIDS research is going to be for the good, for example. But in the way that as individuals within our zone of control, we can use these challenges to refine how we respond to all of life's challenges.

Because life's challenges are there, right? Pain is inevitable, but suffering is not, and the suffering for me is the commiserating, ruminating, grinding over and over again are gears over the injustice of it all. So whether you are facing sort of big picture injustice, right? And have had to scrub your websites and your grants and your course [00:37:00] descriptions and your publications of certain triggering words.

And by doing so, have your own legitimacy as a scholar called into question, like that's big picture assault of your. Knowledge work or if it's the day-to-day quotidian frustrations and disappointments of being an academic. In each of these cases, we have the opportunity to accept it. Just drop it in the bucket and continue to do work.

That's meaningful to us. Or say, where is this a pattern? Where is my response a pattern? And is there a way for me to grow with and through this so that even as challenges continue to surface, I become more and more resourced internally to handle those challenges for myself and for my community. As you're [00:38:00] thinking about your own choices.

If you have not listened to the nine episodes where I interviewed just the most amazing women, and it was coincidence that they were all women. The new group I'm in has a whole bunch of men, and so I've started dropping feelers to, to talk to some of them. About their work. But if you haven't listened to these nine episodes, I really encourage you to do so because we talk a lot about the choices that we make as individual sort of solopreneurs, and most of them are coaches in one way or another.

And I think it's just a good series of conversations to remind all of us. That there's community out there, there are resources out there. I'm not stuck here. And I can make choices that work for me and work for my family. It might not be easy, but choices can be made. That's what I'm gonna leave you with today.

Thank you so much for letting me chat with you again. And if you were watching on YouTube [00:39:00] Sadie says Hi. Yeah, kisses. And I will be back in a couple weeks, I think with another solo episode where I'm gonna talk, I'm gonna pick up on this notion of accept or convert and build a little bit around that because it is challenging, because we care about social change.

I care about social change, but that's like zone of influence, zone of concern. Accept or convert happens at the zone of control level. There are things I can choose to work on and there are things I can choose to just park over there. And so I'm gonna build on that a little bit more because I could use the time to think about how to talk about it.

And I hope that you could use the information as well if there are things you wanna hear or people you want me to talk to or feedback in general for me or Sadie. The dog jennifer@jenniferaskey.com or a [00:40:00] comment under this video on YouTube. Please subscribe. Please listen to the interviews and share them with people, and I look forward to being in your ears again soon.

Thanks so much. Bye.