It’s The Great Resignation, and people are departing their shitty jobs in droves. This includes academics, and not just adjuncts. Tenured and tenure track faculty are proactively departing to a degree never before seen. (Find many of them on the Professor Is Out private FB group!) Karen and Kel talk about ways that perfectionism–always the bugbear of academia–can hamper your transition out of the academy just as much as it might hamper your process of finishing that paper, dissertation, or book project. It’s all kind of the same thing: you feel like you have to know EXACTLY where you’re going and EXACTLY what you have to do, before you take a step. But, you don’t. You only need to take the first step. And that first step may well feel like a “misstep” but that is not a mistake, it’s just more information! Opening yourself to process – through Kel’s method of always asking, “….and…?” relieves you from the outcome-centrism of academic thinking, and frees you to move forward.
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