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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If you’ve been wondering how to bring some semblance of productivity back to your life, this episode is for you. Karen and Kel introduce Kel’s Unstuck: The Art of Productivity, a 12-module program that combines daily emails, coaching videos, awareness exercises like time-maps, and writing techniques, as well as a community support page, to help you discover what is blocking you from getting your writing (and submitting) done, and learn how to overcome it. And at the end, we give you a way to get a major (and shareable!) discount to join the new May cohort. We talk through the three pillars of the program – telling the truth, realistic expectations, and small measurable goals — and why and how they work to interrupt self-defeating habits, and help you recover a writing life, all with evenings and weekends free. Unstuck is about getting your writing done, and it’s about reclaiming your confidence and trust in yourself and your work. [Become a subscribing member for just $3.99 a month and get access to our subscriber only goodies like free webinar recordings, AMAs, the chance to suggest topics, early access to the podcast video that we record in our house in Oregon, and — new from this week – live videos with Karen and Kel on Friday mornings, all on our dedicated podcast member page on Mighty Networks! Not ready to subscribe? Donate here to send along some support. ...
Dr. Samira Rajabi, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at U of Colorado Boulder, joins us for a discussion of navigating ambiguous grief and trauma in the pandemic academy and the rest of life. Drawing from her research for her new book, All My Friends Live in the Computer: Tactical Media, Trauma, and Meaning Making, as well as her own personal stories, Samira talks with us about the importance of social media communities in navigating suffering, and ways to interrupt capitalist narratives of productivity and success/failure, in order to reconnect with genuine loss, and move through and past it to what comes next. Sometimes all it takes is a kazoo! [Become a supporting member for just $3.99 a month and get access to our subscriber only goodies like a permanent 50% off code for almost all webinars and courses, free monthly webinar recordings ($50 value), AMAs, the chance to suggest topics, and early access to the podcast video that we record in our house in Oregon, all on our dedicated podcast member page on Mighty Networks! Not ready to support monthly? Donate here to send along some one-time support. ...
The trouble with academia is, you set out to master a field but you end up demanding perfection of yourself, forgetting that perfection is not possible. Real mastery is not an outcome but a process, ie, embracing continual curiosity and being unafraid to confront what you don’t know to open the door to learning more. Karen and Kel talk about recovering this beginner’s curiosity by asking: Who is the inner/outer critic telling you you’re not good enough, and remembering that no external validation will make you achieve “perfection” -especially when the systems of validation are racist, sexist, classist, and exclusionary. As Toni Morrison says: the goal of racism is distraction. In the end, you can say this: I don’t have prove it to you I just have to deliver it. ...
