Leslie:
Today, I am honored to welcome Dr. Cathy Mazak onto Your Words Unleashed podcast! Cathy was a tenured full professor when she founded Scholars Voice, a professional development company that helps women and non-binary professors write and publish to the level in line with their expertise. She’s the author of the book, Making Time to Write: How to Resist the Patriarchy and Take Control of Your Academic Career Through Writing. Such an amazing title, by the way. Cathy is dedicated to helping 1,000 scholars dramatically change their relationship to academia by 2030. And her popular podcast, Academic Writing Amplified, teaches listeners how to take control of their careers by centering their writing, publishing their backlog of papers, and participating in the culture of academia on their own terms.
Cathy and I first connected a couple of years ago when we did a webinar together with Michelle Boyd called How Writing Coaches Get Unstuck for Methodspace, which is produced by Sage Publications. And we had a great conversation. If you haven’t watched it yet, you should. It’s full of really great tips and tricks for academic authors, and I will link to it on the episode page.
But probably like you, I had admired Cathy’s work as an academic writing coach for a really long time. And I’ve heard her speak about the unique challenges that mid-career academics face. So I have invited her on to flesh these things out. So Cathy, so great to see you.
Cathy:
Thank you so much! And I’m really happy to be here today.
Leslie:
I’m really excited to pick your brain about all things related to being a mid-career academic. But before we jump into all that, do you mind first telling listeners about your journey through academia and how you became an academic writing coach?
Cathy:
Yes, of course. So I graduated from Michigan State with a PhD in Critical Studies in the Teaching of English, which is a program that doesn’t exist anymore. So if you try to look it up, I’m sorry, you won’t find it, but it was a great program and it really allowed me to shape my trajectory. And I knew because I had met my dear soon-to-be husband at the time, I knew that I wanted to work at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez.
I had done a lot of investigation into their department and I was able to really shape my PhD to prepare me to get that tenure-track job. And I did right out of the gate, which is amazing. And then about a year later, my husband got his job. So we had the dual tenure-track going. Right at the beginning, and by accident, she knows this, I got pregnant with my first baby.
And so it wasn’t my original plan to be a mom so early on the tenure track, but it really shaped the way that I approached my career. I think because I had to contain the career within the time that the baby was in daycare and that really shaped the kind of choices I made and my ability to manage my career.
And that great little girl who’s now a senior in high school, being born, the way that I had to deal with also wanting to grow my academic career while I was a mom, that was the birth of Navigate too. That was the birth of my program and my philosophies and led to all of these other things. That’s where I really developed my methods. It was all because I had to. I had to make this career fit between 8-4 because that’s when that girl was in daycare and she wasn’t letting me work outside of that time. And I loved to write. I always wanted to do more research and writing than was required for the type of university that I was at and managed to do that.
Got tenured, got full, had three kids in the end. And by the time I had my third child, I had really reached the top of my career at that institution. There was like no place else really for me to go. I could go into admin. I tried it but didn’t like it. I founded a research center. I was trying to make these international research connections and stuff, but meanwhile, the university was really in a financially terrible place as all of Puerto Rico was at the time, and there were deep, deep cuts, and we started getting the message like, “just shut up and teach.”
And so all the research and writing that I love to do, I wasn’t really able to do to the level that I wanted to. And I started blogging. And that’s how I started developing what later became the Scholar’s Voice Company. And I was able to create programs and tools for people that outperformed my academic career. So I left and I’ve been doing the writing and career coaching really full-time since 2019.
Leslie:
Got it. So ultimately, how long were you in that tenured position?
Cathy:
It was like 14 years, so I went all the way through. I had done all the promotions and everything by the time I left. And when this work started to outpace my academic career, it was more exciting.
It was more fun. It allowed for more flexibility. And I love being in the room with professors. Teaching professors, like people who are professors, will often say they love teaching grad students because just the level of conversation is higher. Yeah. Teaching professors is like the best, the best.
Leslie:
They’re the best students!
Cathy:
Yes, they’re so good. Especially the ones that we get, they really want to make themselves better. They’re dedicated too, they’re coachable. It’s lovely.
Leslie:
Great. So we were talking briefly before we started recording about how we define mid-career scholars. So maybe you tell me how you define it so listeners know where they are.
Cathy:
So basically the easy answer, I guess, is that I define mid-career scholar as if you’ve gone through that first big promotion. So in the US and Canada system, not all schools, but most, that first big promotion also has tenure with it. But if you’re in other places in the world, it might be called something different, but it’s basically that promotion that means that the university is keeping you.
That is a very pivotal moment in the career. When most people perceive that then they can really do what they want to do after they get that big promotion or after they get tenured, it’s not as easy as that, which is actually one of my favorite things about working with people who have just recently gotten tenured or just recently gotten that promotion. Because it is not a light switch that all of a sudden you’re then, “I can do everything I want.” It certainly does not work that way.
And in fact, I have on my podcast series where I really talk about the real stages of the academic career and just getting tenure doesn’t describe everything that’s involved in that real stage of that real stage shift.
It really is about coming into your own and making a pivot in your career and we can get into more details about what that pivot looks like, but yeah, that’s how I define it. And so it also means that it’s like the longest time because if your early career ends, then most of your 30 years or whatever, however long you’re going to work as a professor happens in quote unquote mid-career.
Leslie:
Yeah. So what are the kinds of unique challenges you think that women in particular face once they hit that mid-career period?
Cathy:
I think that I’m gonna use tenure as a shortcut, but what I mean is that promotion or that permanency, right? So pre-tenure, when you first get the tenure track job, you are finding your way in a new institution.
As a scholar on your own and the real work pre-tenure involves you stepping out from under the wing of your advisor and becoming your own scholar and then planting your flag and saying, “this is who I am and this is what I’m going to do.” Which is potentially, probably, hopefully different from what your advisor did. It’s like this stepping out from under the wing that’s fraught in different ways for different people. It can be wonderful, it can be horrible, but it is that becoming your own professor. And the work of tenure, of getting tenure, is convincing the university that you are indispensable, that you should stay.
Once you’re tenured, your work is to make yourself dispensable, in my opinion. The work of mid-career is building your legacy so that when you leave, everything you’ve worked for is not erased. So that means mentoring students into their own careers. Maybe building, continuing to build, or starting, or whatever, a research center, or an institute. Instead of that, look at me, I can do everything, and I’m indispensable to you, university. Now, it’s like, “How can I help share my knowledge with more people? How can I be helping others to do what I’ve done? And while they’re doing that, support me in really being able to focus on the unique contribution that I can make in the world, in my field, but also in the world.”
So the transition between early career and mid-career is hard because it’s a complete radical shift of purpose from “let me convince the world I’m indispensable to slowly beginning to almost replicate yourself, make your impact bigger.” So that when you leave, it doesn’t just disappear.
Leslie:
Yeah, I’m so glad you’re talking about that transition because it’s not just a transition in your status. It’s like a huge mental and emotional transition as well that I don’t think anyone is well prepared for. People don’t talk about the fact that there’s an identity crisis that often happens after getting tenure.
So tenure can feel almost like a little deflating because it’s like, “well, for six years I worked so hard to get to this point. And I knew that that carrot was on that stick and now I’ve got it. But who am I now?” So how do you help people through that transition?
Cathy:
Yeah. I mean, I think that asking that question, who am I now? The really key coaching question that I like to work with people on is what do you want? And for women, especially answering the question, what do you want? is hard because you’re kind of not allowed to want anything, right? Even that’s part of the reason that the pre-tenure process is so fraught because you want the tenure, you want the recognition and everything.
And you’re also kind of not allowed to brag, right? And you’re kind of like, at least like “if I talk too much about myself, I’m bragging and all of that,” which is like this really gendered standards are different for different people way of being and thinking and that we are all subject to. It’s not like we can pretend that we don’t feel those really strong social forces.
So asking the question, “what do you want?”, which is a question that before the answer was tenure, there’s probably other things, but before the answer was tenure. And then the other question is, “what do you need in order to get that?” And what I mean by need is in terms of support.
What is the kind of support that I need if I’m really going to get what I want? In terms of emotional support, financial support, like through funding and that kind of thing, support from your institution, your partner, what do I really need to be able to create in the world that thing that I really want? And asking those questions helps then re-center academics, I think. They’re not easy to answer and you don’t answer them right away, usually. So it really is something that takes some introspection and thought and time.
Also recognizing that the career has seasons. And that the season right after you get that tenure, you get that first promotion is a season of rediscovery and potentially reinvention and hopefully a season of power, although it doesn’t always feel that way, but it could be potentially.
Leslie:
Yeah, which I think is so inspiring for especially associate professors to hear because studies show that they are the least happy. For a lot of different structural reasons, one of them being that the service load just gets really crazy, really heavy, depending on your institution. But I think across the board, everyone stops being protected and they have to demonstrate leadership skills. So that means heading things up, heading up committees, heading up institutes and things like that.
How do you center your writing when you’re also running an institute or you’re a graduate chair or X, Y, and Z, all the things that people face mid-career?
Cathy:
Yeah, I mean, this is exactly what we talk about in the Navigate program, and I think it’s why… so I’ll just give you a little history of the program because I think it’s interesting. When I first developed it, I really thought this is going to be really attractive to early career people. That’s why it’s called Navigate because I was like, “well, it’s like in the first few years of your career, you have to figure out how you are I don’t like the word balance because I don’t feel like there’s ever a balance balance, more like management.” But yeah, the metaphor is navigate.
So how are you going to navigate all the competing pulls on your time and stuff like that? How are you going to navigate this new career? But the longer that I offer the program, the more we have gotten a mix of people at all stages of the career, including rather late-career. Because of exactly what you’re talking about, as an early career scholar, you have to navigate the newness of things, and who am I supposed to be, and how do I get the publications off my dissertation, and also set up my own research trajectory.
But, as a mid-career professor, you are also exactly in these leadership positions. So how do you navigate being the dean, the associate dean, the director of research, the whatever your position is, department chair? How do you not let your own desires for keeping your research alive, how do you not let that just get eaten by your admin role? And so we often get people in the program who are in an admin role or have just come off of one and they’re also trying to figure out their way back to their own research.
So how do you do that? I mean, it really is about deciding, again, the question, what you want. The way we talk about that inside the Navigate program is creating an academic mission statement. And I have a template for that and all that, but creating an academic mission statement and then really organizing your time and your efforts to support that mission statement.
That is hard to do when you have an admin role that has maybe nothing to do with your research. So that’s something we also work on is like, “well, how do we want to think about the admin role versus your researcher role?” But you have to know and be able to articulate what your work is about and then work kind of ruthlessly to align your time behind that mission.
It’s more complicated for people who also have admin roles, but it’s not impossible. It’s a decision that you don’t want to let your writing go during the time that you’re an admin, which also I’ll just say, you could.
Leslie:
And many do.
Cathy:
And many do. But if you have decided that you’re not going to, that you want to keep writing your book or publishing your articles or whatever during your admin role, you have to get really, really good at time and project management.
And the core of time and project management is deciding how you’re going to use your time, drawing the boundaries and holding the boundaries. And it is not easy.
Leslie:
No, I mean, I think the folks I work with who are department chairs or they head institutes or they’re heading up professional organizations that take up a huge amount of their time, but they’re also making progress on their books is that they have a long-range vision. They’re not trying to hammer it out in a semester. They recognize that it’s a long game now. It’s not about a lot of people finish their dissertations in like three months and then maybe they even finish their books in a shorter period of time because they just have to get tenure.
Then I think when they reach this sort of more open expanse of being mid-career, it’s like, okay. The commitment looks different and it feels different and it’s more spread out and it’s a little thinner, but it’s still there. And it is like you say, like a decision that you have to make on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.
Cathy:
Yeah. And that there has to be some motivating factor behind that. And there has to be systems and processes that support that or else it’s just very easy to get pulled in a thousand directions and blown in the wind, responding to other people’s needs all the time. So for me, for people who come in to Navigate, which we’re really looking for people who have a backlog of papers that they want to get out because that is the symptom of the deeper problem that they need to decide that this is what they want to do.
And they need to get the systems and processes in place to take control of their career. So it’s a writing and publishing program, but it’s really a career program because it makes you look at like your whole career and decide what you want to do. and make choices based on that. So again, it’s hard, but it is so worth it.
It’s so worth it. If you want to maintain your writing and publishing and your leadership position, you absolutely can do it. And you can even build a team around you so that they are supporting your writing and research as well.
Leslie:
Yeah, I definitely want to get back to this eliminating your backlog question in a second.
But first, I’m wondering about those folks who got tenure based on pretty unhealthy habits that are not sustainable. They know that they’re actually harmful to their relationships, to their well-being, to their health, and then they get tenure and then they want to change, but they don’t know how to change. How do you help them figure a new way?
Cathy:
Yeah, this is really good because again, it’s hard and the reason it’s hard is because, well, there’s many reasons it’s hard. One thing I noticed is that, and I see myself doing this too, you might have this desire for spaciousness. Because let’s say the way that you got to tenure was just like run, run, run, push, push, push, right?
You got the tenure and so now you’re like, “great, I’m going to create some spaciousness in my career.” And maybe even for a hot minute, you say no to a bunch of stuff because you feel newly empowered by having tenure to say no because everybody thinks once they get tenure, they’ll say no. Most people don’t.
But let’s just say you do and you make some space. You’re so used to being overworked that you make a little space and boom, you fill it right back up again. So what we actually have to do is reset what we believe is the default amount of work and maybe in terms of hours, but also in terms of energy that we are putting into this career.
And so if you know that you overworked and that that’s your default is like, “Oh, if I don’t get to it, I’ll just do it tonight. I’ll just do it on the weekend. I’ll just keep, keep, keep doing.” Here’s a method. It’s not a method, but this is what ends up happening, right? People pre-tenure are binging and busting with writing.
They have a deadline, or they have something they’re writing towards, and they write, write, write, write, write, and collapse. Or they think, “I’ll just wait until the Christmas break, or the summer break, or whatever, because I’ll have some big blocks of time, and then I’ll write,” but they actually collapse before they can even start because they’re looking to binge write, but they can’t even because they’re so exhausted.
You’re working with just a default level of overwork that is really high. So we have to actually change that default. We have to design what your week looks like instead of just accepting what people put on your calendar. It’s a very agentic place to work from and it’s also a process that takes semesters, maybe years, to create the amount of space that is actually conducive to your scholarly work and what feels good to you.
It takes developing systems and processes and intentionally creating space in the week, and that process takes time. It takes a lot of time. I have a client who, I’ve used to have more than one program, now I just have Navigate, but she had done a bunch of my programs and she was already tenured. It really took her three or four years of doggedly working towards making her calendar what she wanted it to be. But she is one of the few people that I’ve kept in touch with her through the whole process and that I actually see her holding on to that spacious calendar that allows for thinking and reading and writing and all of the things that she really wants to do. And that is her design. Not mine or whatever, she decided this is what I want my ideal week to be. This is what I want my semesters to look like. And she created that for herself through a lot of work. And it took three or four years.
Leslie:
I think that makes perfect sense. I still find myself overworking all the time and I’m constantly trying to help people not do that. And I feel like I’ve developed a lot of methods and practices and philosophies and yet I still get caught up in it because part of it is maybe an internal drive, right?
Part of it is just, I think, the nature of academia and maybe just capitalist society in general. Just, it’s always push, push, push, next thing, next thing, next thing. We’re not allowed to rest and come back to presence unless we’re on vacation. You know what I mean? It’s not seen as part of your work, right?
And so, it is so much a practice. And so I appreciate hearing that it takes a long time and it takes a lot of intention and decisions and commitment and backing yourself up and probably also angering other people around you, I would guess.
Cathy:
Right. I mean, I think that women and non-binary scholars, especially those of color, have the extra burden of figuring out how to manage that because you are going to make some people angry. Now, I think for many people, when you say no, because saying no is a kindness, like here’s something that academics do all the time, that I wish I could wave a magic wand and it would be eradicated, but it’s like part of academic culture. Everybody does it, which is to say yes to things when there is absolutely no room for one more thing on your schedule.
So you’re saying yes, “Yes, I’ll co-author that paper with you,” but in your mind you know that it might get to that someday, but it’s not. The top priority is not going to bump other things. You’d have no plan for when it’s actually going to fit into your work. It doesn’t make it onto the work plan since your work plan might really be put out this fire, put out that fire, meet this deadline, meet that deadline.
Right? Like there isn’t a calm work plan potentially. But we say yes to these things as if we’re going to invent more hours in a day. Slow down and make a decision. If you could tell that person, “I would love to co-author this with you, but I’m not really seeing time on my calendar to spend on that project until fall of 2020, whatever, is that a good timeline for you?” You’re going to make more people happier with honesty, even when the honest answer is no.
And so you might disappoint somebody. But you would disappoint them more when you say yes with no real plan for doing the work or no real plan for being able to make that happen. So yes, you’re going to disappoint people. You might make people angry. You always have to navigate those things and make decisions on whether that is something you want to do or not, depending on many factors, including your identity. The way to having a career that’s sustainable is really making it yours and having you be in the driver’s seat of the career and feeling like you are the agent instead of that you are passively responding.
A lot more action and a lot less reaction to make the career sustainable.
Leslie:
Yeah, and I think a lot of it is about taking responsibility for your own choices and recognizing that you do have a choice. ‘Cause I think a lot of times it doesn’t feel like that. So, I think for the folks who have more people-pleasing tendencies, they’re very conflict-averse.
It’s easier for them to say yes than to say no. Then maybe just not thinking of it as a binary of yes or no, but it’s more like “no for now.” Right? Like, we can have this conversation in six months, we can have it in a year, and it doesn’t close off doors if it was something that maybe they did want to do if they had more time.
And if they didn’t want to do it, it’s okay, you can have the same conversation in six months and say no for now again.
Cathy:
Yeah, absolutely. And I just think that that’s like a more honest, but it’s also sometimes I think we think we’re people pleasing saying yes. And what we’re doing is just replicating the worst of academia. Like this kind of basing our writing practice on hopes and dreams, not on what the actual number of hours you have scheduled on your calendar for writing in the week or like that kind of thing. It’s not based on any kind of data. It’s based on what you hope. I just think that that’s going to backfire in a bad way.
And that that backfiring is worse than just saying no and disappointing the person to begin with. But also modeling, we really have to think about, when you say “no, I do not have time in the next six months for that, it wouldn’t be my priority until this moment.” You are showing people that you have priorities.
You’re showing people that you have a plan. And I think that’s something that we don’t see and that would be cool if more people could show, like what is their actual process and plan and system? Because, one of the reasons that I can fill my programs is that people want to make their process or system better or they don’t have one, right?
But then there are people who have processes and systems that are working for them, like showing that a little bit more. So when you say no, and here’s the reason– you don’t always have to give reasons for saying no, but let’s say, you know, you say no. And it’s like, “Oh, because I know what my schedule is for the next three semesters.”
And if that won’t float to the top until semester four, the person might be thinking, “Oh, she’s got a plan.” You know what I mean? And then that might actually be impressive.
Leslie:
Instead of disappointing. Totally. No, I think that sounds impressive just as a hypothetical. So yeah, in reality, it would be very impressive.
So maybe you can just talk a little bit about how people deal with unfinished papers. So folks that have half-finished paper or 75 percent just hanging around, but they’re not close to the research anymore. How do you help people get those off their plates?
Cathy:
Yeah. So I like to start with the big picture view of… like, something your listeners could do, is make a list of what I call “projects in play.” So everything that is between 50 and 80 percent done or like whatever, you can put a parameter on it. Everything that is taking up space in your brain and then starting to evaluate where you want to enter. I think people usually have multiple papers that are in that stuck stage. So what I suggest people do is choose one and move it all the way to submission as a way to remind yourself that you can and to create some momentum to do the next one.
So the first step would be look at all the possible projects and choose the one that you want to move all the way to submission. In Navigate we give you rubrics to help you figure that out and all of that. Then you want to open the document and maybe you haven’t opened it in a long time.
So set the bar super low. Step one, day one, you open it, you read it, close it, don’t do anything. Re-familiarize yourself with the project. After that, there’s lots of things that need to be in place for you to actually move it all the way to submission. You have to know what the next steps are. I suggest that people like write that down.
Create yourself a work plan. One of the things that I ask my clients to work on is really identifying what is there left to do here and are these things writing problems or writing tasks? So writing problems are like the scholarly problems, the decisions that you have to make and that only you can make.
Writing tasks are things that, not that you’re going to do this, but imagine that you were gonna hire a ghostwriter. Could you hand it to the ghostwriter and the ghostwriter could do it? So, for example, writing an abstract, somebody else could potentially do it. You could outsource it in theory. But deciding, creating the argument, or deciding what data is in and what’s out, what is the scope of the lit review, that’s the decision. And sometimes you have a literal scholarly conundrum that you’ve got to work through. Is that’s what keeping the paper stuck? Or is it that you’ve solved all those problems and you just need to write it? If you’ve solved all those problems, then you can make yourself a task list and list it all out.
If you haven’t solved the writing problems, then you really need to give yourself enough space and time and take an approach to solving the writing problems that has spaciousness in it that isn’t so, “I got to do this in the next hour because there are higher level problems to solve.” So, knowing what has got your paper stuck, that’s the first thing. Once you’ve solved all the writing problems, you can make a task list. This is recursive. You might be writing on the tasks and have to go back and solve the problem. That’s the nature of writing. But then you also have to have a real connection between time on your calendar to write and tasks.
You can’t have just one or the other. You have to have both things in order to move a project all the way to the end. And I would suggest if you’re trying to get an almost done article out the door, you do just that for as long as you can. Don’t try to do a little bit of this one, a little bit of that one, like buffet style, just munching a little bit on each of the papers.
Really try to pick something and move it all the way until you submit it. Submit it before you’re ready, especially if you haven’t submitted something in a long time. I like to tell people early career, you’re going for reps. You’re not going for, let me submit this, and the editors and the reviewers will be like, “this is the most amazing paper. Let’s print it now.” No, that’s not the goal. The goal is you get enough repetitions in that submitting becomes easier and easier and easier just because of repetition. That kind of lowers the bar for the perfection. Like, let me make this so that nobody has any possible criticisms of it. No, you want the criticism that’s going to make you a better writer.
So try to get things out there that way. That’s kind of like a high level– if somebody listening to the podcast wanted to try it, hopefully that’s enough in there that you could try to get those projects submitted. And then in Navigate, we teach you a whole method and like a system to making sure that you keep getting things submitted so that you don’t get a backlog.
And when you have a backlog, you know how to clear it.
Leslie:
Amazing. That is so helpful. And so how can listeners find out more about Navigate and connect with you.
Cathy:
You can go to, well, the best thing is my podcast. So if you’re listening to this podcast, you must like podcasts somewhat. So I invite you to come over to the Academic Writing Amplified podcast and subscribe there because that is where I’m putting out my best content all the time.
If you want to get on, I have a newsletter called In the Pipeline that’s all about this stuff. You can go to scholarsvoice.org and scroll down to the bottom of any page and there’s an opt-in box there where you can put your name and your email and get on my email list. You’ll be getting like a weekly email all about writing and publishing in academia.
Leslie:
Thank you so much, Cathy, for giving the time and also your incredible advice today, which I know is not just going to help mid-career scholars, but really everybody who’s trying to navigate the publishing world and academia in general. So thanks again.
Cathy:
Thanks so much for having me! It was so much fun.
