This episode, recorded prior to the pandemic, delves into coping with the inevitable disappointments of the academic life, whether it’s the job, or the grant, or the publication… or the whole career that just didn’t pan out. The first of a two-part series, it introduces six tools for managing disappointment in ways that academia never teaches us. The tools: 1) Face the facts, feel the feelings; 2) You are not a failure and you are not your job; 3) Learn from this experience (ie, process not outcome); 4) Give yourself credit for trying; 5) Refocus on what you DO have and what DOES work; 6) Sharing the experience with (genuine) supporters. Along the way Karen and Kel also talk about white entitlement, concrete ways to ask for feedback, negativity bias, saber-tooth tigers; the scarcity mentality of academia, and Buddhist and Jewish inspirations.
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So many PhDs who didn’t get the job you dreamed of struggle with regret about past decisions, especially the one to do the PhD...
Part three in our three-part series about getting Unstuck. So much of the academic experience is about feelings of failure. It’s central to normally...
Karen and Kel talk about the things that make a problematic advisor: 1) poor boundaries; 2) excessive molding; 3) forgetting humanity, and 4) not...