Leslie:
All right! So I am beyond excited to have Dr. Chinasa Elue on Your Words Unleashed podcast. Dr. Elue is a professor, speaker, grief coach, and CEO and founder of True Titans Consulting Group. She provides strategic coaching and consulting to organizations moving forward to make impactful changes in the midst of uncertainty with empathy and care.
She’s also an associate professor of educational leadership and higher education at Kennesaw State University. Dr. Elue’s research focuses on grief leadership, trauma-informed leadership practices in organizational settings, and the health and well-being of historically marginalized and underrepresented populations.
Dr. Elue is also the host of the amazing Grieving in Color podcast, which explores the various ways we navigate our experiences with grief and loss and a place where we find the courage to intentionally heal in our daily lives.
Welcome Chinasa!
Chinasa
Hello, hello.
Leslie:
Let me give you all a bit of background first. So Chinasa and I actually met through LinkedIn. When I left the academy roughly two years ago, I had a huge amount of challenging emotions to navigate. I felt angry. I felt very sad. I was deeply afraid of what would come next in my life and in my new business. And in some ways I was surprised by the depth of these emotions because I had been working diligently towards leaving my faculty position for several years.
And I felt like I had been coached on every aspect of this transition. So I wasn’t prepared for the level of grief that I experienced once I closed my office door on campus for the very last time. And I didn’t know anyone on LinkedIn. But I wanted to be witnessed in this journey. So I posted my reflections very openly and frequently.
And Chinasa was one of the people who reached out to me to express how much my posts resonated with her. And since I’ve listened to her wonderful podcast, Grieving in Color, it was clear that I had to have her on because she’s a scholar of grief and a grief coach, and she’s the perfect person to talk about career transitions.
This episode is the fourth in my series on Leaving Academia. If you want to listen to the other ones, they are Episode 45: Assess Your Situation, Episode 50: Question Your Beliefs, and Episode 51: What Keeps People Stuck.
So, Chinasa again, welcome! You have so much knowledge, you wear so many different hats, and so I really want my audience to learn more about you. So I ask everybody this, but can you say a bit about your background and journey through academia?
Chinasa
Absolutely. And Leslie, thank you so much for the opportunity to be here and to share more with your amazing audience. I’ll share that my journey through academia has been rather interesting. I think, when we go into graduate school, when we are finishing up our programs, we are oftentimes being primed to take on academic positions, particularly faculty roles.
And I knew right out the gate that as I was moving through my graduate program, I wasn’t exactly sure if I wanted to do faculty life. I saw myself more on the higher ed admin side, but as I was finishing out, I had two amazing mentors who really encouraged me to consider faculty roles in addition to the administrative route.
And faculty roles hit first. So I took my first tenure track job right out of graduate school, which is an anomaly given the nature of the field at large right now and how difficult it is at times to obtain a tenure track role, but I took one at a research based institution. And I think that began my deep exploration around this topic we’re talking around today because oftentimes when we get into graduate school, we’re primed to share our expertise.
We know that we are experts in our own right with our research area. But the thing that graduate school did not prepare me for was the unique experiences I was going to have as a woman of color in academia. And I think that really primed me to begin to think about “is this a place that I want to stay at long term?”, particularly that institution at the time, and the field at large. And I found that it was more so for me, institutional type and location, and so I transitioned.
But there was grief, even in the midst of that transition, given the various experiences I had had. My journey has been one that’s been rather interesting in ways that are really relevant to me, but I look forward to unpacking that a little bit more with you today.
Leslie:
Great. And so can you talk a little bit about the kinds of research you’ve done on grief?
Chinasa:
Absolutely. First and foremost, I think it’s important for me to share how I entered into grief work because honestly, one does not necessarily wake up and say, “Hey, I want to be a grief researcher, right?” I’m finishing grad school, right? Initially, when I was doing my graduate work in the first couple of years of my career, I was looking at issues of access and equity to higher education for historically underrepresented populations.
And I did that for several years, but in 2019, I lost my mom and it was nine months before the pandemic kicked off. And when 2020 hit and we were thrust into the pandemic, and I was still grieving my mom, and we were kind of in this space of collective grief, given the social political climate, we’re navigating COVID, we’re seeing how it’s ravishing lives left and right. I recognized that there was a unique opportunity for me to lean into the grief experiences that I was having. And I began to actually ask much larger questions, particularly around how are institutional leaders responding to the large amounts of grief that we’re seeing unfold in all sectors of life?
Because as a professor, I think one piece that I saw was that my students were doing their best to show up, but they were navigating grief in their everyday lives, like griefs of all kinds, in addition to like losing loved ones, just navigating their respective roles. And so, I began to research this topic.
My first research project around this area really focused on interviewing institutional leaders across the country to ask them how or to what extent they’re being responsive to the grief needs of their faculty, staff, and students, and what skill sets perhaps had they utilized to really support others on that campus through navigating this unique context.
And in a lot of ways, that was very eye opening for me because I recognized that that was the opportunity of growth for leaders. And it kind of spurred me down this trajectory of really pivoting my research to focus around topics around grief, and particularly looking at not grief from just only a leadership standpoint, but now looking at faculty and students and how they’ve been able to navigate grief as students in their respective context and how that’s began to unfold in their own personal professional lives as well.
Leslie:
It’s so great and so necessary too! So I’m really gratified that you’re doing this research. Like I said, the reason that I thought you’d be an amazing guest today is to talk about career transitions because that is an area that I think is very underexplored when it comes to emotions and grief in particular.
And loss, right? Because we tend to just frame things in terms of “I’m moving towards something new, how exciting, I’m gaining all this stuff, hopefully better everything from quality of life to income to whatever.”
So I really want to explore, what would you say are like the different kinds of grief that people tend to undergo when they transition a career?
Chinasa:
It’s so nuanced, right, depending on your lived experiences when you’re, especially within higher ed. I’ve had the opportunity to support faculty and coach them in a variety of different ways, particularly around this topic around career transitions.
I think one of the biggest aspects that I’ve noticed in regards to grief and loss in the midst of career transitions is this loss of professional identity. And I see it in a variety of ways, whether it’s from faculty who have poured their all into their institutions, and they are now in a space where they’re facing some institutional betrayal. Maybe they were promised certain resources or promotions and things of that nature, but those things are no longer available for them, and they’re asking themselves, “well, I gave my time, my effort, and my energy into this space, and this institution is not upholding the very things that they promised me in order to be successful here.”
Or we’re noticing, even in this regard, the current social political climate that is really impacting, particularly faculty and staff’s abilities to do their work. And I say this given the fact that if you look throughout, especially some recent articles, really highlighting the tumultuous times in higher ed, people are being fired left and right.
Tenure is under attack, and we’re seeing it left and right. So once we thought we had lifelong employment through the protection of tenure, those freedoms are now being eroded. And so this vision of what we may have had for our professional careers no longer exists in some states, right? And I think there’s this piece around this erosion of this dream that we’ve been socializing to thinking this would be forever, it’s coming to the realization that things must shift given the current times.
And it’s in that shifting that we have to begin to grieve what we thought would be a forever career. And so I find that at times, colleagues are coming to that realization, and there’s just a deep level of sadness, recognizing that it’s time to depart and go. And then also dealing with the loss of the professional networks you’ve cultivated over time, all the research that you’ve produced over time that you hoped would take you to the next level, but recognizing that that next level may not be your next best step.
And so it’s grieving, “what do I do with my future?” “What is this going to look like for me”? And it’s all the emotions that come with that.
Leslie:
Yeah. Yeah, and I definitely want to explore a lot of those losses with you in a minute, but I’m wondering how the experiences of grieving, you know, losing a job or transitioning careers differ depending on whether you’re the one who’s proactively making that choice to leave like I did, or you’re let go involuntarily.
Like you mentioned, there’s sudden closures of universities happening all the time. You know, I’m in a number of different academic parents, Facebook groups, and people are posting, “well, I found out that my school didn’t get accreditation and next week we are closed. Right, they’re going to develop a plan for the students, but as faculty and staff, we’re out of jobs”. What do I do now? So, I’m just curious what your thoughts are on that.
Chinasa:
Yeah. I think that’s the biggest piece in thinking about grief in essence is the natural human reaction that we have when something of personal significance to us is lost. And so whether it’s an involuntary letting go of your job, where if you’re laid off or your institution closes or you lose your accreditation and you’re kind of left out here to fend for yourself, you’re grieving in essence what you thought would be a lifelong career, right?
You’re grieving the fact that all of the time you have spent in that space, you don’t even have time to get any closure. So you don’t have the opportunities to say goodbye, to wrap things up. You don’t know what’s next. And so you’re grieving the potential loss of financial revenue that could support and sustain your family and your livelihood.
And then given the tumultuous nature of even securing jobs within higher ed, particularly if you’re a faculty member, you’re grieving the fact that this could be the end of a professional era for you. You may never be able to return back to this role that you may have held in high regard. And so it’s all of those different aspects that we have to begin to tease through and really unpack in a variety of different ways.
I think if it’s a voluntary choice to your point where you have seen the writing on the wall and you were like, “I am unsubscribing to this, I no longer want any parts because what I am seeing is not what I signed up for. And I refuse to stay in this place where my expertise, my skill sets, and who I am as a person is not valued or appreciated.”
You make the choice to leave. And it’s in making that choice that, yes, there’s excitement at the possibilities of what lies ahead, but it’s when we take that leap, and the dust finally settles, that’s when we begin to think about all of the abysmal treatment, all the experiences that we’ve had, all the things that we had promised ourselves we would never do, and maybe some even personal betrayal to ourselves that we have to begin to contend with.
And I think what we end up grieving from a voluntary standpoint is this notion around, “okay, I allowed myself to be treated like this for so long. I allowed myself to lose out on precious time with family and loved ones.” So we may be grieving the loss of time that we can never get back because we poured it into a space that we thought would love us back in return. And we see no returns on that investment.
So it really is grieving all of the efforts and energy we put into that space, recognizing that it will never be returned back to us. It’s grieving all the professional opportunities that we hope to have garnered over time. But when you recognize that we must switch and pivot, knowing that these dreams have to go towards something else.
This energy has to be rerouted towards something else. And even when we take that new opportunity, there are no guarantees. And so it’s kind of in this emotional state of limbo. And so things kind of finally settle. We process the emotions and give ourselves the grace to just see what will this actually look like?
And I don’t have a crystal ball here to predict the future, but what I will say to this point is this. That we owe it to ourselves, whether it’s involuntary or voluntary transition to explore how do we get to a place of full alignment with our personal professional values. And I think at times we may find ourselves in spaces where we have known for a long time we have been out of alignment, but because of our socialization into the academy, we have stayed. And so how do you get to that place of alignment? It really does require sitting down and to do this deep reflective work as well.
Leslie:
Absolutely. I mean, coach to coach, it’s all about values. It’s all about values. And I think in my case, like I talk about all the time, I basically took three to four years, right?
And over time I developed a plan. I created a business. I launched a podcast. I was still in the academy. And then even as I sent off that email saying I’m resigning my position, I still didn’t feel 100 percent sure. But so much of it was like this mad rush to finish everything and get to that point where I’m done. I’m done with this job. I’m done with the academy. And I think even though I felt like I had processed all the emotions, there’s a lot of emotions you can’t get to until that it’s over. You just can’t.
Chinasa:
I agree. I agree. I think there’s so many emotions to parse out because, to your point, I feel like academic work never ends. There’s always something to do while you’re in it, and on the back end, to your point, if you’ve been doing research for some time, you want to finish publishing the work. People spent their time doing the interviews with you or you’ve worked with students. You want it to do some kind of common good, which is why at times I feel like when I’m working with faculty who have chosen to pivot, A big piece of this is like, how do I put the bow and wrap up all my projects?
Knowing that if you’ve ever done any kind of research project, it takes time. It takes months, if not years, to really fully like run the full circle of getting the work disseminated properly.
But I think on that emotional component, I don’t want to say that there’s a lot of shame perhaps, but I definitely know there’s a lot of anger and resentment that’s present when people transition. Because I think to this point around alignment and values, I think when we know that we have betrayed ourselves to keep a job, or when we have given so much time and effort to a job, again, that has shown no appreciation or value to us, or sometimes I even hear this fact where faculty will transition, and then colleagues will feel like they no longer are worthy to even be connected to them anymore.
So they lose access. To those professional relationships as well. So I think it’s this piece too, like we were colleagues, we were buddies for five, six, 10, 15, 20 years, right? And the minute I choose to pivot, you automatically cut me off. Like I’m a bad habit. And it’s like, is there no room for a relationship even beyond this space?
And so I think it’s a lot of different things that we tend to grieve on the back end when we actually take that leap and leave.
Leslie:
Yeah. You just don’t know where all the dust is going to settle. Right. And it is interesting now that I’m a couple of years out of the academy, because there’s a shocking amount of clarity around how much most of your professional ties were really based around academia and being an academic.
And at a certain point, if you’re faculty, being a faculty member. And being a certain kind of faculty member who publishes a lot and gets awards. And I came out of that world and I’ve been surprised to see like how weak some of the ties actually were when you thought they were very, very strong. And that’s something to grieve as well, right?
It does create sort of a vacuum for a while.
Chinasa:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes.
Leslie:
So can you talk a bit about this loss of professional identity? So this is one of the biggest things that I think keeps people from pivoting out, if they have the choice, is like this question of, if I’m not an academic, then what am I? Who am I? I’m a professor. That’s who I am. Like, that’s the same as me. So how could I not be that? So what do you kind of advise people or how do you coach them around that topic?
Chinasa:
Yeah, I think that’s such a good question, you know, because to your point, being an academic or professor is such a huge part of who we are as professionals, right?
We wear it like a badge of honor. And when we find that we are in a space where we must take this badge off and lay it down, there’s a shaking of sorts when it comes to our identities where, if I’m not a professor, if I’m not an academic, then who am I? You are still a qualified individual who is highly skilled and trained in particular areas of research. You have a specialized set of skills that can be leveraged in adjacent industries. And I think a big piece of this is untethering ourselves to this notion of what it means to be a professional in general and recognize that we are so much more than these titles that we wear every day.
We oftentimes hear this common notion that we are renting these titles, like these are not lifelong things that we will behold. And I think we have to adopt that same piece when it comes to our academic titles and how we see ourselves as professors. Because at the end of the day, it really is a mindset that we need to take to approach how do we untie ourselves to this academic identity if you’re at the place right now where you want to move on.
I think a big piece of that is recognizing that there’s so much more. There’s so much more if we would be willing to explore all of those different aspects. And I think our graduate programs do a pretty decent job of convincing us that this is the only way. But when you get, take back your agency and say there is another way to exist, with this degree in hand and these credentials and to apply it to work that is more meaningful, perhaps better pay, better work life harmony.
Like there’s so many other things, if we would be willing to allow ourselves to explore outside of this professional identity, I’ve held down for so long. What alternatives might exist that would provide me a better life outcome? And I think if we are willing to explore that, I think we would be in a place or position where we would have so much more power over how we envision and shape our careers overall.
Leslie:
I mean, I think that’s a great thought exercise for for people in the academy to do, right? Is like, what is the title of academic or professor actually giving you? Right? Is it, is it a sense of like validation, you know, feeling successful, competent, confidence, and then where can you get that outside of your work?
That it does not all and really shouldn’t all come from your work. And it also has me thinking about like, these are things that people really need to think about when they retire as well, right? That there’s sort of a death happening as you move into a new phase. And so these are the kinds of things that I think people should be exploring no matter what.
Chinasa:
I agree. And funny enough, to your point, when people retire, oftentimes they do mention this notion of grief during retirement. Because again, it’s that loss of professional identity. You’ve done the same thing for several years. And when you finally have to vacate that role, or when you choose to retire, the same professional community, the same accolades you’ve been running after, the same work you’ve been doing is no longer available, and it’s really grieving an aspect of your life that you held onto for so long.
And so I think at any phase of a transition, especially when you do choose, voluntarily or involuntarily, to leave academia, there will be grief. We don’t name it as grief, right? We just think, “oh, I’m in a rut. I might be depressed or having these really strong emotions.” But when we begin to tease out how we’re experiencing the loss of identity, the loss of titles we would no longer hold, the community and all of it, there is grief that’s present in these experiences.
Leslie:
Yeah, and I’m so glad that you are opening up many more conversations about grief in professional spheres. Because I do think also retirement as held as this time of like “now you’re free and you can do whatever you want and all the things you’ve been putting off.” It doesn’t really work like that when you invested so much in your professional career and identity that that’s where you got most of your sense of meaning and purpose.
Chinasa:
Yes, that part. Yeah.
Leslie:
So I imagine that some of this coaching would be kind of similar, right? When people are starting to detach from one phase of life and move into another. So, you’re a grief coach as well, and I’m wondering, like, how do you work with folks who are, I know you work with people that are like actually dealing with all different kinds of grief, but maybe you can talk about how you work with folks that are doing the career transition.
Chinasa:
Yeah. And I think people at times, it’s very easy just to think about grief in terms of the loss of a loved one. And I think even in some of the work recently, particularly as I’ve pivoted into grief coaching, one thing that has struck me is oftentimes people don’t realize that grief is present here in the transition.
Although we may be excited for the new opportunity of taking some agency and ownership of the next phase of our careers, a piece of the success that we may have going forward is to really pause and reflect on what happened and how am I feeling as I’m leaving this and looking forward to the next best thing.
And so I do walk with clients to do a lot of that mental work to really think about what have you learned from this current professional experience? How are you processing the ins and outs of the transition, whether it’s leaving behind the networks you’ve cultivated, the work you’ve done, the students you’ve taught for so long.
Even the expectations that mentors may have placed on you, thinking that you were going to be the next best thing in the field at large, right? How do you release these expectations that you may have held on to for so long and give yourself the grace to understand what looks good for you as you transition on?
So a lot of it is doing the deep legwork to see what are they still holding on to that may be showing up for them in their next role. Because I think a piece of transitioning is the simple fact that if we don’t take the time to process the emotions, people will be surprised in how this manifests in the next season.
And I think that’s the most important thing is to really provide that space to pause and to reflect and to ask those really, really deep and meaningful questions. And oftentimes what I do find is that I do have to refer out to a mental health clinician because I think there is a level of trauma at times that is intertwined with some of our professional experiences that go beyond the realm of grief coaching. I think it’s a great partnership with a clinician to help support in that aspect of their transition.
And I just say that transparently recognizing that you probably will need both and because there’s so many unprocessed experiences that we may have held on to or have never gotten a chance to confide or share with anyone that is impacting us for how we view ourselves as professionals. Our lens may be colored a little bit from all of the abysmal treatment, all the trauma that we’ve carried for so long that requires you to walk in partnership with two professionals to support you.
Doesn’t mean anything’s wrong with you. It means that you are aware that I need to do a lot of work to get to a place where I feel whole, to get to a place where I know that I can operate at my highest self. And sometimes it also requires us to think about that negative chatter that exists at times when we feel like we had to give up something that we thought we would be in for some time.
The negative self talk piece I have found to be very pervasive in these transitions, because to an extent, when we’re leaving academic positions, you feel like you failed, like you weren’t good enough. Or that you didn’t stick it out or you weren’t tough enough. And we have to calm all that noise down because the reality is you were brave enough to say enough is enough.
I want something better and I deserve better.
Leslie:
Yeah. I mean, you make so many really, really great points. I mean, I think the first is that there’s that saying like, “wherever you go, there you are,” right? So if you’re not really examining what’s going on internally, you are going to take all of those same patterns, habits, and also trauma into the next phase, right?
It doesn’t just disappear because you switch up your environment. And especially if this was involuntary. But even when it is voluntary, I think for myself, I had this pattern of overwork that we all feel as academics. There’s never enough time. You’re always behind. The to-do list is always getting longer, not shorter.
You’re not really allowed to rest or relax because you should be productive. It took me quite a while to shed that and like some actual work I had to do around it, being really aware of it. I’m like, “I’m no longer in an environment where that’s true, but I’m still overworking. What’s going on?”
And then I think the other thing is working with a mental health professional. I would say with my coaching clients, I’d say two-thirds of them have a therapist. And then hire me as well, right? Because it’s a team. It’s like a support team and you need folks that are going to be able to partner with you on a long term basis. And then also like for me on a shorter term basis where like there’s certain goals you want to achieve and I’m there to help you achieve them. And that’s less of the focus of the therapy, which I think is more around processing. So yeah, I just wanted to say that is true in my work as well.
And maybe just like a last question. So when we think about professional purpose, right, a lot of times that’s so wrapped up in the title. How do you help people kind of find that again outside of the academy?
Chinasa:
I think that’s a big part of the grief coaching component is untethering ourselves to this idea of what it means to be an academic and have our purpose connected to that. Purpose is not a title. Purpose is not a role. Purpose is not your institutional affiliation. Purpose is the very thing that you were designed and created to do, that lifts up your unique skill sets and expertise to really create impact and change in the world.
And I think when we can mobilize that definition of purpose, to really put that energy and intent towards something else, we give ourselves the permission and space to create, what does this next leg of my purposeful journey look like? It could look like going to work with a non profit. It could look like starting your own business to address some systemic issues. You may have noticed that you want to be a catalyst for change. It may mean you’re thinking about perhaps a different organization or organizational type that you would prefer to work in that really will help utilize the best skills that you bring to the table.
But I think we have to be willing to do that deep work to not connect purpose to a position. Because we’re doing ourselves a disservice and selling ourselves short. And we think that we have to stay in a role because this is my purpose. I was created to do this. No, we were created to do so much more than be academics or professional or professors in these spaces in general. Like this is just not purpose. It’s a job. It pays your bills as a means to an end. You can do things that are aligned with your purpose in the role, but it is not the be all end all for purpose.
And I think when we can think of these particular roles like this, It gives us the chance to even dream bigger and expand our vision so that we can continue to engage in purposeful events and activities that really support the work that we’re called to do.
Leslie:
I love that so much. Purpose is not a title. It’s not your professional role. It also leaves open the possibility for purpose to be not related to work. Perfect. Right? I mean, I know this is focused on careers, but like, who are you as a three dimensional holistic person?
Chinasa:
Correct. Having a very much so human experience in this lifetime.
Leslie:
Yeah. Being a purposeful friend and relationship partner and parent and all of the things, plus your career.
Chinasa:
Yes.
Leslie:
It’s just an opening. And I love that you are creating all these openings now in these conversations, in your research, in your coaching. So what is the best way for listeners to connect with you?
Chinasa:
Listeners can connect with me through my website at www.drchinasaelue.com. They can also connect with me on all socials, particularly LinkedIn or Instagram at drchinasaelue as well.
Leslie:
All right. Well, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom today, Chinasa. Everyone, please go out and listen to the Grieving in Color podcast, which is available on all major streaming services.
It really is a fantastic listen. So thanks again!
