Hi there scholars!
Welcome to the 50th episode of this podcast, which is also the second installment of my series about leaving academia.
The first one I recorded on this topic, which was Episode 45, helped people assess their situations.
In it, I shared my own story of why I decided to leave a tenured faculty position.
I also offered some useful questions to help people figure out whether it’s their specific job that’s the problem or whether it’s the profession itself that needs to change.
On today’s episode I talk about the top beliefs people must question and unlearn if they want to be happier in academia OR they want to leave it in an emotionally healthier place.
For those of you who know my coaching philosophy, everything starts with your beliefs.
We often don’t question our assumptions, which tend to be based on externally agreed-upon notions that we internalize over time.
Anyone who’s been in academia for a few years will be very familiar with the list I provide below.
What’s different is that I’m going to ask you to really question whether these things are true and helpful to YOU, rather than to your institution or the profession at large.
There’s a famous quote that’s widely attributed to Mahatma Ghandi that goes:
“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”
I’m not sure I fully agree with the order of these because I think our values are more inherent and come earlier in this list.
But I take his point that your beliefs ultimately create your destiny, as in, your daily reality.
And if you’re struggling in your daily life, as many academics are, it’s imperative to take a deeper look at what you believe to be true about your situation.
Once you know which underlying beliefs are operating, you can choose to reframe them or to take action to change things for the better.
I’ve noticed that scholars in career crisis typically try to act their way out of problems.
They often jump too quickly into trying to learn new skills or turning their CVs into professional resumes.
And there are tons of really great job strategies out there that you should definitely pursue.
But I assure you they will be far more effective once you’ve taken a closer look at your beliefs about your work.
A lot of people leave bad situations in academia just to find themselves in similar scenarios outside of it.
Therefore, I believe you need to recenter yourself and your priorities.
You must instill strict boundaries with work now so you don’t take bad habits into the next stage of your career.
There are so many beliefs that need to be challenged that I’m going to split them into two episodes.
This episode will cover the top 4 beliefs you need to question and unlearn in order to create more sustainability at work.
And the next episode will cover the 5 main misconceptions about leaving academia that keep folks stuck and afraid to seriously consider a different path.
4 Beliefs Academics Need to Unlearn
So let’s get into the beliefs that I think academics need to unlearn.
Now that I’ve been out of the academy for a year-and-a-half, I have a much broader perspective on the whole enterprise.
But when I was in the midst of questioning whether academia was right for me, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
I knew that something was off because I was desperately unhappy and unfulfilled.
Yet everyone else around me also seemed overworked and unsatisfied, but they weren’t looking to leave.
So I felt very isolated and alone.
I used LinkedIn to engage with other folks who have gone through the same thing.
Previous to that time, I rarely used social media for anything.
But when it came to processing my emotions about leaving academia, engaging with strangers on social media ironically felt safer than my daily work context.
The beliefs I’m going to talk about came up repeatedly in my conversations with other transitioning academics.
I’m not presenting them in any particular order.
But I do think that taken together, they contribute to a powerfully oppressive work culture that makes many academics miserable and unhealthy.
They also keep many people from exploring their options beyond higher education.
So Step 2 of leaving academia is to start questioning and unlearning these 4 beliefs.
#1: Your personal identity and your work are one and the same.
This first one is, I think, the most insidious of them all.
And it is that your personal identity and your work are one and the same.
When there is no separation between these two things, your sense of self-worth derives directly from your academic accomplishments.
When you put all of your life’s meaning into your work, everything else needs to take a back seat, including personal relationships and your mental and emotional health.
Now, I know that many folks don’t believe this and they actively and intentionally invest in other areas of their lives.
But these people are in the minority and also tend to be tenured or more experienced.
I would argue that nearly ALL junior scholars believe this in some form.
A lot of my work as a coach is to help people start creating more objective distance between themselves as a whole, 3-dimensional person and their work.
Because if you don’t separate these two things, then how you feel about yourself is entirely determined by external standards of success and other peoples’ validation.
What I’ve seen happen when people allow their academic identity to swamp everything else is:
- They allow work to come before their health.
- They allow work to come before their relationships.
- Their fixation on their scholarly productivity and how they are perceived by other scholars renders them unable to appreciate other aspects of their lives.
I’ve known many people like this, but one in particular stands out to me.
This person found their life partner at a young age, got a good job right out of grad school, and had two healthy children.
They were also able to purchase a home in a desirable area only a few minutes away from grandparents who provided a lot of childcare and support.
But this person only ever talked about academia, and not in a good way.
They spent a lot of time complaining about their job and envying other people who seemed to have better positions.
To me, as someone who uprooted my life many times for work and deeply yearned for a partner and children and to live near my family, I thought this was bonkers.
It made no sense to me that this person couldn’t appreciate how well everything had worked out for them in their life as a whole.
But this individual had fully conflated their identity and most of their life’s meaning with their career.
So when the career wasn’t going the way they wanted, everything felt terrible to them.
Don’t let this be you!
#2: Success is only defined in terms of measurable outcomes.
This leads into the second belief academics need to unlearn, which is that success is only defined in terms of measurable outcomes.
This obviously includes publications, but also grants and fellowships, jobs, disciplinary awards, getting tenure and moving up the academic hierarchy.
What this means in practice is that the focus is entirely on outcomes, never on process.
When success is defined externally, your self-worth hinges on hitting or surpassing standards that you may or may not actually agree with or even value on an internal level.
For example, I have a core value of accessibility and transparency.
Therefore, I’ve always believed in making academic research available to the general public.
I mean, why do years of intensive research and writing, only for it to be kept behind prohibitively expensive paywalls that only benefit exploitative publishing companies?
I was an early adopter of Academia.edu and put all of my published work there for public consumption.
The fascinating thing is that my most professionally well-regarded article, which appeared in a top-tier journal in 2013, has only ever been downloaded 134 times.
Meanwhile, a small study I co-authored with a friend on Chinese adoptees who found their birthparents that we published in a specialized journal has been downloaded nearly 14,000 times!
The difference between them was intent:
I wrote the first article to solidify my own career and meet external standards of achievement, while the latter was meant to HELP other people.
Although it was published in 2010, I still receive gratifying messages of thanks from readers.
I’m relieved to be out of a system that ranks contributions by impact factor rather than by things like public engagement.
But the larger issue here is that academics are pretty much never asked to create their own definitions of success.
So if it you centered your own values and priorities rather than socially constructed standards, what would you consider to be success?
And if you have a hard time answering this question, you know that there’s some work to do.
#3: The work of research and teaching is a calling.
The third belief I encourage people to question and unlearn is that the work of research and teaching is a calling.
Those in higher education hear this message all the time.
When work is considered a higher calling, then this means that money does not need to be a primary consideration.
Instead, people see the reward as being able to do the work you love.
Sociologist Erin Cech wrote a book I highly recommend called The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality.
She uses the term “passion principle” to describe people who use personal fulfillment “as the central guiding principal for [their] career decisions” (4).
Academics clearly fall into this category.
I mean, how many times have you heard other scholars say things like, “I didn’t get into this for the money”?
There’s nothing inherently wrong with following your passion.
However, Cech shows that it can lead to exploitation as people often end up prioritizing meaningful work over earning a living wage.
Think about how little adjunct lecturers are paid!
Many folks are overworked yet barely making ends meet on a monthly basis. It’s a travesty.
I think part of the reason why it’s hard for academics to openly discuss their desire to earn more money is because they’re scared of being labeled a sell-out.
I know of someone who was hospitalized from burnout from her academic position.
When she decided to take a role in the private sector, her academic supervisor actually called her a sell-out!
I am here to say that prioritizing your financial well-being and your quality of life are good things to do.
Also, doing meaningful work and making more money aren’t mutually exclusive.
There are many fulfilling jobs out there that also provide higher salaries and more stability.
In my case, it was incredibly scary for me to give up the security of a tenured position.
But in each of the first two years of my business, I earned more than I ever did in my faculty job while working 1/3 less time.
And the mental freedom that comes from leaving behind a toxic, dysfunctional, highly politicized, overly workaholic environment has been priceless.
So if you strongly identify with the belief that work is a calling, start investigating where else in your life you’ve been sacrificing to fulfill this mission and commit to recentering your own needs.
#4: Boundaries with work are bad.
This is actually a good segue way to the fourth, and final, belief I’m going to talk about on this episode, which is that boundaries with work are bad.
Okay, so no one will actually come out and say it that way, but this is the underlying message academics receive from day one in grad school.
And, I’m not saying that this is an issue that only plagues higher education.
Many, if not most, fields have ratcheted up their expectations of workers so that there’s always more to do.
Many workers must deal with pressure-cooker environments.
That said, I don’t think I ever saw true work-life boundaries modeled by anyone when I was in the academy.
When I was a grad student, I met with an assistant professor in office hours at 5pm one day.
She told me guiltily that it was her 15th wedding anniversary and she hadn’t even thought of what to get her husband.
I remember thinking, “then why are you sitting here with me talking about social theory? Go home!”
But she was part of the R-1 productivity machine and compelled to make those kinds of sacrifices.
When I was a faculty member, I was surrounded by workaholics who conveyed that I should always be doing more.
In fact, the summer BEFORE I began my job, I was put on a highly politicized job search committee.
I was asked to meet with job candidates at our annual conference and was trying to answer questions about a department I hadn’t even joined yet!
Looking back on it, that was so ridiculous.
In academia, the goalposts keep moving so that you’re never confident you’ve done enough.
And who does this ultimately benefit? The system!
Additionally, inherent in the idea that boundaries are bad is that your own mental and physical well-being should be a secondary consideration.
In other words, self-care should come last and rest should be a reward that is earned.
I’ve talked about how we need to view rest as an essential component of productivity.
If we don’t treat it this way, we will easily burnout because people invariably end up neglecting their basic personal needs.
I’m not just talking about eating well, sleeping enough, and getting enough exercise.
I know many people who have suffered from on-going, sometimes debilitating, stress-based illnesses because they have never instituted any boundaries with work.
They have often put off attending to their own mental, physical, and emotional needs until crisis hits.
Scholars today labor under increasingly grueling, competitive conditions.
Any desire for a less stressful life is subsumed under the constant struggle to meet the next deadline, publish the next paper, or obtain the next position.
As one person commented on one of my LinkedIn posts,
“[Academics believe] you have to work 80 hours a week if you want to be successful. And if you don’t, you don’t want this job enough and don’t deserve it!”
Meanwhile, a sense of lasting happiness or stability becomes a destination that gets pushed further and further out into the future.
If this is you, then at the very least, you need to set some hard limits on your work hours and challenge yourself to stick to them.
You’re never going to get everything done, so prioritize the things that make you happier, which will make the work more sustainable.
I would recommend you do a taking stock exercise where you systematically list out everything you are involved in and calculate how much time you spend on each of these tasks per week.
Then rank order everything on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the most amount of satisfaction you derive from the task.
Anything that ranks 6 or below you should figure out a way to delay, delegate, or delete from your list.
And if you find that most of what’s on your list ranks 6 or below in satisfaction, you should start questioning whether this is the right line of work for you to be in anymore.
Summing It All Up
I’ve given you four major beliefs that undergird academia and the higher education system.
These are:
- Your personal identity and your work are one and the same.
- Success is only defined in terms of measurable, externally defined outcomes.
- The work of research and teaching is a higher calling.
- Having boundaries with your work is bad.
Many people start down the academic path when they’re quite young and impressionable.
Therefore, it’s even harder to unlearn ideas that have defined your life for decades.
I, for one, initially found it really hard to challenge these beliefs because they felt fundamental to who I was.
Doing this kind of self-investigation is uncomfortable because you might come face-to-face with some hard truths about what’s not working.
But unless you question these socially constructed norms, you won’t be able to figure out a better, more sustainable path.
So I commend anyone who is willing to look inside for answers.
One thing that helped me was to remember that your institution, and the academic machine in general, will never love you back.
Therefore, you don’t need to sacrifice your own well-being for the sake of work.
Ultimately, I want to validate your experience and challenge you to dream bigger.
Now go ahead and start envisioning new possibilities for yourself!
I’ll be back soon with the next episode in this series.
Reach out if you need more support!
