Leslie:
Today, I’m happy to welcome Dr. Brandy Simula onto Your Words Unleashed podcast!
Here’s a bit about her. Dr. Brandy L. Simula (She/Her) is an award-winning consultant and executive coach with expertise in leadership and executive development, women’s leadership, and workplace wellbeing. She’s a former professor of sociology and social psychology and leverages her background in behavioral science to develop flourishing, transformational, purpose-driven leaders.
Her thought leadership and research has been published in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Newsweek, Inside Higher Ed, Women in Higher Education, and numerous academic journals and edited volumes. Dr. Simula was named a 2024 Emerging Culture Creator in recognition of her contributions to workplace wellbeing and a 2020 to 2022 University System of Georgia Leadership Fellow for her work developing academic leaders.
Brandy and I know each other from our shared network of academic coaches, as well as through LinkedIn, and she recently co-authored an excellent three-part series of op-eds for Inside Higher Ed on navigating grief in higher ed career transformations. Grief coach Dr. Chinasa Elue, who you might remember, appeared on Episode 66 of this podcast.
I highly recommend you all go and read those, and I will link to them on the show page. But since it’s still relatively early in the semester, for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, I wanted to have Brandy on today to talk about things like avoiding burnout, setting boundaries, and connecting with purpose when you are an overworked academic.
So let’s get into it. Welcome, Brandy!
Brandy:
Hi, Leslie. Thanks for having me.
Leslie:
Thanks so much for being here.
So, I always like asking people to tell listeners a bit about your journey through academia and some of your research.
Brandy:
Yeah. So, I was the first in my family to go to college, did a quadruple major in undergrad, was just super excited to be in a place where I got to be curious all the time and learn about how the world works.
That took me on to my PhD, and like many of us when I was doing my PhD, never envisioned doing anything other than having sort of a traditional faculty career, research, and teaching, or how I originally intended to spend my life and how I started out. So I started out as a faculty member in sociology and social psychology.
My research – when I was still research active – looked at how culture and structure shape our identities and experiences. And even though I am not still actively doing research, I’m still bringing that lens into my work now. So really, in my coaching work, helping people understand how is the organization, how is the culture shaping my day-to-day experiences, and where is my agency in that piece.
Leslie:
Awesome. So you are an executive and leadership coach and we hear so much about different kinds of coaches. There are life coaches, career coaches, executive coaches.
First of all, what drew you to executive coaching, and what are the major issues that you help people deal with?
Brandy:
Yeah. So I’ve been coaching for 20 years.
I actually started coaching in undergrad in work-study.
Leslie:
Wow.
Brandy:
So coaching has been as important to my life as social psychology and sociology are. I think there’s a lot of investment in distinguishing different kinds of coaching practices, and I am not a super fan of that. As a quadruple major and interdisciplinarian by design, I really like working across different areas.
I would say the first half of my coaching career focused primarily on career coaching, helping people get clear on what they wanted to do in their careers and how to get there. Now, I really focus on working with leaders and executives. on all of the different challenges they’re facing, whether that is wanting to develop as leaders, figuring out what’s next in their career, preventing and recovering from burnout, etc.
So as an executive coach, I focus primarily on coaching executives and leaders. But the specific areas and challenges we focus on are extremely broad-ranging. I would say I tend to work with folks who are in transitions of a variety of different kinds. So recognizing they’re stuck and don’t want to be, recognizing they’re burned out and need to move forward.
Recognizing they want to make a shift in their careers or lives. So some moment of transition is where folks tend to connect with me around coaching.
Leslie:
Yeah. I think the transition piece is often where people reach out to folks outside of themselves, right? And speaking of transitions, you and I connected a lot on LinkedIn around the topic of leaving academia.
There’s a really thriving community of folks that are openly sharing their experiences and sharing information and resources, which I highly encourage people to go take a look at if they’re starting to consider this kind of transition for themselves.
Why did you decide to leave academia and feel free to share whatever you’re comfortable with?
Brandy:
Yeah, I, as I mentioned, up until a few years ago, never envisioned anything other than retiring happily from a career in academia. And I think a number of folks that I have worked with, both when I was still in higher ed and now after, experienced really profound burnout that led me to rethink what I wanted to do with my life.
We can talk more about that. One of the things that was challenging for me… so, as I was burning out, I was leading burnout recovery support groups. I was writing about burnout. I was collaborating with an expert on academic burnout and did not recognize it in myself because I was not working the longest hours I had ever worked.
And I just, I felt like, even though I know workload is only one part of burnout, I just kept thinking, I can’t be burned out because I’m not working a hundred hours a week. But I was experiencing many of the other factors that are common causes of burnout. I had almost no control of my schedule, of where I worked, of my life.
I was experiencing what’s called feelings of inefficacy. I really felt like what I am doing is not helping. So I was trying to support faculty who were really struggling. This was in the early stages of the pandemic when there were just enormous challenges. especially for women faculty, especially for faculty who are parents.
And I really felt like I can’t make a difference. So I was working a ridiculous amount of time. I felt like my work was not really valued and that what I was doing just didn’t matter. And those are classic sort of symptoms of burnout. And it really led me to rethink where do I want to invest my time and work? And where can I find a culture and a system that let me be a whole human?
And for me, that ended up being outside of higher ed.
Leslie:
And what steps did you take to actually leave the Academy?
Brandy:
Oh, so when I decided to leave, it was relatively abrupt. So it was the weekend of Memorial Day and I had three days off and I got up and I thought I’m just gonna walk down to the pool and sit in the sunshine.
And I was too exhausted to get a water bottle and a towel and put them in a bag and walk. I was just too exhausted to do anything. And it was one of those kind of light switch moments for me where I just was like, okay, like this can’t continue. I have to leave.
And I had already been connecting with folks who were leaving, not because I was planning to leave, but because I was curious about what my friends who had gone on to do other things had done.
And so I knew some of the first steps I should take. And I will say, I think the most important thing that I did, and I was very intentional about this, was I started immediately taking things off my plate to make time to job search.
So, I was like many folks, involved in pretty time and labor-intensive volunteer roles with a number of professional associations.
Even though I had been in a full-time administrative role for a number of years, still had a very active research agenda, I was serving as an editor of a journal, so doing lots of things. I got very clear about if I’m going to leave, I’m going to need time to job search, network, figure out who I am other than a faculty member and faculty developer.
And I started taking things off my plate. And then I spent a lot of time doing informational interviews that helped me get clear on which of my skill sets and expertise. Did I really want to lean into outside of the academy? So I could have done things like DEI roles, instructional design, learning, and development, but I was really passionate about developing leaders because leaders have such a ripple effect.
So if we can develop leaders, who treat people as whole humans, who are inclusive, who help people connect with purpose. That has such a ripple effect. And where I was in my own burnout, I really wanted to be doing work that I felt would have a big impact. So I was really looking for what can I do next where I get away from the sense that no matter how hard I work, I can’t help people.
I can’t make a dent in the challenge. So leadership development was where I focused. I was lucky to go to a Fortune 50 tech organization that brought me in. I was candid about being burned out in the interview process and with my manager, and I landed at a place that really let me both recover and supported me in developing and growing in my leadership work in a way that I had not experienced in higher ed in the lab.
Leslie:
Wow. That’s amazing! And that’s super helpful too for folks that are just starting to dip their toe into the waters of potentially leaving.
So on the topic of burnout, what specific reasons do you see for academics burning out in this moment?
Brandy:
So I’ll start by saying the research shows that there are six drivers of burnout and I’ll name those and then I’ll talk specifically about what I see among faculty, including folks that I’m currently working with.
High workload and that’s the one that I think is the most commonly recognized. So we’re just simply working too much. There’s too much work. A sense that we have a lack of control over what we do and how we do it. A sense that our work is not recognized or rewarded and that can be feeling unappreciated, but it can also be realizing that we are poorly compensated or unfairly compensated.
Feeling that we don’t have strong work relationships or we’re isolated or alone at work or in our work. A sense of lack of fairness or unfair treatment, and that can mean we’re treated unfairly by our colleagues or our institution has policies or norms that are unfair. And then finally, a values or skills mismatch so that we feel that our skills we don’t get to use on a day-to-day basis and/or our own personal values are in conflict with the values of our institution.
So those are the six main drivers of burnout that are documented in the research. And I would say I think all of those matter for faculty, but I think there are a couple that are particularly driving burnout among faculty as well as staff and academic leaders in this moment. Workload for sure.
Workloads are extremely high and have been increasing. The last research project that I did actually before I left higher ed and retired from active research documented increasing workload, so administrative workload among faculty and the impact that that had on faculty research and teaching. So the sense of I’m working more and more, less and less on the things that matter to me, the things that I’m here for.
Lots of faculty feel isolated in their work and that is also a structural problem. And I think the lack of reward or recognition, some of that is tied to compensation, especially for faculty who are adjunct faculty who are on temporary contracts, et cetera.
But also just feeling that our work goes unrecognized, that the people around us don’t see or care about what we’re doing.
Leslie:
And I feel like we throw the word burnout around a lot without getting that specific about it.
So how does someone know that they’re actually burnt out versus more overwhelmed by just the craziness of the semester? Are there certain things they should be on the lookout for? How do they know?
Brandy:
Yeah, that’s a great question. Burnout, overwhelm, and stress are all very distinct things. So burnout is distinct from overwhelm.
Burnout is a persistent feeling across weeks or even months that does not let up. When we feel overwhelmed but we aren’t burned out, we may feel like there’s more work than I can possibly do or feel really stressed, but we still enjoy and want to do our work.
So it’s like, “Oh, I really want to do this, but there’s too much to do.” And we still really feel like our work matters. Like we feel a lot of pressure to get it done because we feel like it really matters. When we’re burned out, we may also feel like we have way more to do than we can possibly do, but we often start to feel like, I actually don’t even want to do this, or I don’t enjoy the work, or what is the point of doing the work, or even if I could get it all done, it wouldn’t matter.
So that is one of the primary distinctions. And I would say as well, feelings of overwhelm and stress typically come in waves. And even if we experience moments of overwhelm on a weekly basis, or even at multiple brief points throughout the day, those waves often also sort of ebb, so that even if we feel that we have so much to do and there’s kind of this crushing stress and worry, so that there are points in the day or the week that we feel like, yeah, I’ve got a lot to do, but it’s possible that I can get it done.
Or yeah, I’ve got a lot to do, but I’m really excited about my research or I’m really enjoying my students this semester. When we’re burned out, the enjoyment goes away and the feeling that it matters goes away and there’s just a huge amount of work that we don’t want to do and don’t care about.
Leslie:
I think that’s a really great distinction to make.
And you know, I work with a lot of folks who are very burnt out, but there’s no way out of the semester. There’s no way out of, some of them are on the job market or they’re postdocs. And they’ve been burnt out for a while and they have a sense that why am I doing all of this work? I personally don’t feel like it matters.
And yet if they want to keep going in this career, they have to keep doing this stuff. So how do people move forward in academia if they feel really burnt out?
Brandy:
Yeah, I think that is a really important question and one that lots of folks are wrestling with. I think the most important thing is starting by recognizing that we are burned out.
So if that is true for you, recognizing that I’m not just stressed, I’m not just overwhelmed, I’m burned out, because how we respond matters if we’re feeling stressed or if we’re burned out. So I think that piece is really important. Really understanding the factors of burnout and if you’re burned out. I think the other piece that’s really important is recognizing which of those six drivers or factors of burnout are driving your burnout.
And being really intentional about addressing those factors. And again, like I think we often have this sense that workload is the primary or only driver of burnout. It’s not. Other factors matter too. So it might be the case that we’re doing a lot of work, but we don’t feel overworked. We feel like our work doesn’t matter or we don’t enjoy our work anymore.
And really figuring out, do I need to connect or reconnect with my sense of purpose? Do I need to build relationships that help me feel like I’m part of a broader community? Trying to figure out which of the pieces are most important for us. And then actually making the changes. And I think it’s really important to know burnout does not go away on its own.
When I was sort of at the peak of experiencing burnout, my healthcare providers were really pushing me to take medical leave and described my burnout as essentially my brain having a repetitive stress injury. And the more I tried to power through it, the worse I was making the injury. So really thinking about when you’re burned out, you have overtaxed your brain beyond its capacity and just trying to push through, not only is not going to work, but it’s actually going to make the injury more severe.
Leslie:
Mm-hmm.
So, are there any tangible things people can do during the semester once they know they are burnt out, but they still have to get through, like, another couple of months?
Brandy:
So I think a couple of really concrete things that can help, making time each day to connect with why am I doing this and what matters.
And that could be even just three minutes at the beginning or the end of the day. I’m helping this student. My research will help X community. We often lose sight of the purpose of our work in the day-to-day weeds in the grind. So that’s one piece.
I would also say really taking a hard look at workload. Not just how much you’re working, but what you’re working on. And be really clear about your priorities. If you are working to finish a book or get out a manuscript, how can you create time for the things that matter most to you? And deprioritizing the things that take you away from the work that is most important to you or that you most need to get done.
And really, I think getting clear on what are my priorities, what is important to me, and I want to name… we can’t just stop doing things that are required of us to keep our jobs. So it’s not just get clear on what I want to do and forget everything else, but we can be intentional about where we put our time and energy first and most importantly.
Leslie:
I think those are brilliant strategies, right? So maybe like a daily reconnection with your why, because I think purpose is such a big, sometimes very heavy concept and you could have smaller sort of daily kinds of purpose as well, right? That connect into the bigger, but maybe you don’t have time right now to think about the existential bigger purpose of your life and your work, right?
So connecting to those smaller things. Also, I think what I’ve found with a lot of my coaching clients and particularly those who identify as female is that priorities often get set according to other people’s priorities, right? So oftentimes there’s a triage kind of thing happening where people are like, “I’ve got a deadline, someone’s waiting for me. I don’t want to disappoint them. Therefore, I’m going to do that first.”
As opposed to, I have certain things that are going to take a lot of time and energy, like my own work, my own writing, but that means I have to maybe have a hard conversation with somebody else about taking something off my plate or giving myself an extra month to do something because reviewing a book for a journal is not as important as writing my own book right now.
So how do you advise people on being okay with putting their priorities first?
Brandy:
That is a challenge that a lot of my coaching clients are working on. So, I feel like I would not be a former academic and lifelong learned if I was not about to drop some references, but Linda Babcock and colleagues have a book called The No Club that is written specifically for women leaders and written primarily out of experience as academic faculty and academic leaders that talks about how to get clear on your priorities, and then how to communicate your boundaries around those priorities in ways that preserve relationships.
And I think that is one of the big challenges we can feel like saying, “I need to prioritize writing my book means I don’t care about you, or I’m potentially risking the relationship.” So having practices, I think the first and most important thing is the pause before we just default to yes.
So many of us want to help care about our colleagues, care about our discipline, and default to saying yes, I can make time for that without actually really looking at where is that time going to come from. So I think that is one piece. And second, we can be really intentional about the pieces we can say yes to.
So maybe I can’t take on editing a new journal, but I could serve as a guest reviewer. So what is the piece that I can say yes to? It may be a smaller piece, it may be on a different timeline, but being more intentional about those decisions. And in fact, my own coach is amazing about helping me do this.
Anytime I say yes to anything, what am I saying no to? So what am I turning down? And sometimes that looks like I don’t yet know what else I might do with that time, but I know that what I’m being asked to do is not the highest, best possible use of my time. So I’m going to say no to hold open space to do something that will be higher impact and higher priority for me later.
I would say two other things. One, it takes practice. Two, having an accountability partner, whether that is a coach, a colleague, an accountability group, that you get very clear on what is most important to you when you are regularly connecting with people who care about what you are prioritizing. So we are all constantly surrounded, as you said, Leslie, by other people’s priorities.
Having people sort of in our corner who hold us supportively, warmly, kindly, but who hold us accountable for the priorities that we have set is really important. So knowing, for example, I ran accountability and support groups for a long time where a handful of us would meet each month and say, what progress have you made toward writing your book or redesigning your course or whatever the goal was?
And knowing that we were going to have to go and say to other people, “Oh, I let other people’s priorities get in the way and I actually didn’t make any progress felt bad.” And we know from the psychology that, that kind of sort of friendly peer pressure. Knowing that someone else will know that we did not uphold our agreements to ourselves helps us be better at holding our own agreements with ourselves.
Leslie:
Totally. That’s why, I mean, sometimes I see this advice out there of like if you have a big goal, don’t tell anyone. And I’m like, that is totally backwards. I feel like, how are you going to accomplish it if you don’t have accountability? Right? You need to be accountable to yourself somehow and it usually comes through external means.
So folks that are there to support you and walk with you through this journey, but also the accountability is sometimes like, it’s just a reality check too of someone being like, “you know, you said you wanted these things and you’re doing everything not to do those things. So really, maybe you need to take a look at, do you want that thing, right?”
I think that’s where a coach can really come in. And so priorities and boundaries are very clearly connected. Boundaries we talk about a lot in academia, and yet there are still very porous boundaries for most folks, I think, between themselves and their work.
And so, how would you guide academics in, like, deciding on and holding boundaries during the semester?
Brandy:
So I think when we think about boundaries, we often think about sort of like this hard and fast rule that I will use to, like, shock people away from me or really hold people apart from us. I think having boundaries that are clearly connected to our priorities is really important.
So that the idea is not we set boundaries for the sake of setting boundaries, but I really believe in this book and I want to get it done. What are the boundaries that will help me do that?
And we can use flexibility around our boundaries. So it might be, you know, my boundary is I protect Monday, Wednesday, Fridays from 9 to 11 for writing time. If we come across that boundary, we might say, my colleague is having a book launch and I really want to be there and it’s at 10 am on a Wednesday. Where do I buy back that time?
So that we’re very clear on what the boundary is helping us do and we’re prioritizing what the boundary help us do rather than feeling like we rigidly have to stick to it at all times.
I think one of the other important things about boundaries is we often set boundaries but don’t communicate them and then feel frustrated or angry when someone comes across a boundary that they actually did not know was there.
So it’s often the case that people will be supportive of, “yeah, your book matters. Thanks for letting me know that’s your writing time. When else can we meet?” But if you’re just saying, no, I’m not available at X time. You can reframe that as “I’m working on a book that will help us better understand XYZ. This is my writing time that helps me make the most progress. When else might we meet?”
So that you’re leading with this is what’s important, and I want to make what you’re asking for happen. Or it might be this semester is my get-my-book-over-the-line semester. I’d be happy to help next semester. So again, sort of with our boundaries.
Lead with what you can say yes to, rather than just no. No, I’m not going to meet. No, I can’t help, etc. Yes, I’d be happy to do this next semester. Yes, I can connect you with a colleague who might be able to help. Leading with the yes, I think, helps us feel more comfortable holding our boundaries.
Leslie:
Yeah, I think that’s such a great point.
And I know so many folks where they do block out time on their schedule for writing and they don’t use it for writing. Right? And so it’s sort of like, initially they feel good. They’ve got this time. Then they see that they filled it with emails and meetings and urgent things, and then they feel bad. And so I think part of it also is getting comfortable with saying, “This is what I want.”
Writing my book is what I want because I think there’s a commitment thing in there too. Once you announce it to other people, there’s also an expectation of follow-through.
And I think that can make some folks a little uncomfortable like, what if I can’t do it? Does that resonate at all with what you’ve seen?
Brandy:
Yeah. And I think putting the goal out there, like we want to write our book, having other people, I think we often feel like if I put the goal out there and I fail, other people will think poorly of me. I think that is very unlikely to happen.
What often happens is when we put the goal out there, people want to help.”That book sounds amazing. Here’s a reference. That book sounds amazing. Can I connect you with my editor? How can I help protect your writing time?”
That doesn’t mean everyone does that all of the time, but I think we are often afraid of sharing a goal and what we experience when we actually share that goal is a lot of support and excitement that can actually help us sustain momentum.
Leslie:
Yeah, I think all kinds of opportunities can open up when you do share the things that you want. And so you authored a really cool opinion piece called “Instead of Work-Life Balance, Cultivate Work-Life Alignment.”
So can you talk about alignment versus balance? What’s the difference between the two?
Brandy:
Yeah, so there has been an increasing hard look at the concept of work-life balance coming out of the research in the last several years.
So the idea of work-life balance is that we somehow strike a 50-50 balance of like 50 percent of our time is work, 50 percent of our time is life. It’s unrealistic for almost all of us. So just right out of the gate, we’re setting ourselves up for failure.
Different chapters of our lives and careers require a different balance, and for many of us The lines between our quote-unquote work and our quote-unquote life are blurry, and we like it that way. So when we’re thinking about work-life alignment, the idea is that our work and our life are pointed in the right direction, instead of sort of vying for with one another for our attention and our time.
When we think about work-life balance, the idea that our work is 50 percent and our life is 50 percent is just unrealistic. For most of us, work takes up more time. And I think the question is, if work is taking up more of our time, is that time spent in ways that feel meaningful, rewarding, interesting, et cetera?
And if the answer is yes, even when work is taking up more of our time, if it’s aligned with how we want to be spending our life and our time, then we experience high well-being, high life satisfaction, et cetera. So the goal really is, Do the ways that my work and my life are working lead to overall flourishing in my life rather than do I have an exact 50-50 balance between time I’m spending on work and time I’m spending on quote-unquote life?
And I would say, for example, many academics, faculty, et cetera, are doing work like mentoring and is mentoring our quote-unquote work or is it our quote-unquote life? Those lines can be blurry. And I think the better, more useful question is, does this support how I want to be investing my life, energy, and time, whether it falls into the work bucket or the life bucket?
Leslie:
Yeah. I love taking away that binary, quality of work-life balance, and then also it’s so connected to priorities as well. Right?
So, how do you advise people to figure out what is aligned for them?
Brandy:
Yeah, that’s the big question, right? I think that is actually the big question for all of us, and often the reason why it’s hard to hold boundaries or set priorities, etc., because especially, I think, as academics, we often have never really wrestled with the question, what do I want?
We have often followed the, go get a PhD, get on the tenure track, et cetera, build excellent courses and sitting down with, how do I want to spend my life, is big, hard work and it’s not something we can do in 15 minutes.
Two resources that I have found enormously useful in making those choices for my own life and in working with the clients that I’ve had the privilege to coach. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans run Stanford’s Design Your Life Lab and they have a number of books and workbooks. that really take you through in a very practical way.
So not just sort of this existential crisis, what am I doing with my life? But how do I want to spend my time in life and really practical, concrete reflection exercises? I also read two, maybe three years ago now, life-changing is such an overused cliche term that I hesitate to use it, but I will, Oliver Burkeman’s 4,000 Weeks.
Which essentially says, if you only have 4, 000 weeks, how do you want to spend them? And really takes the reader through a process of thinking deeply about that question. and sharing strategies that help you actually spend your life the way that you’ve decided that you want to. As you named Leslie, we so often say, this is what’s important to me and then do everything but that.
Leslie:
Right, right. I actually, I love those two books, the Design Your Work Life and 4,000 Weeks. I think I’ve mentioned both of them before on this podcast, but super useful recommendations. Thank you, Brandy, so much for your time and wisdom. How can listeners connect with you?
Brandy:
I am very active on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, there is also a vibrant community of post-ac folks who are sharing our very diverse career journeys, really thinking about how do we create a community with and for each other so that we are keeping our vibrant life of the mind across our diverse career paths. So I’m on LinkedIn.
Also, you can connect with me on my website, brandysimula.com. All of my research and writing, both academic and now thought leadership is there. I’m on Inside Higher Ed. I’ve written a lot for Inside Higher Ed, a number of pieces and series.
I also wrote, in addition to the series Leslie mentioned, with Chinasa, who is brilliant, a series a couple of years ago about cultivating and protecting your flourishing in academic context that really looks at that question of what is under my control and how do I lean into that?
Leslie:
Fantastic. So listeners, please connect with Brandy on LinkedIn. Again, you can visit her website at brandysimula.com. She’s always publishing new thought-provoking pieces that are highly useful for academics. So be on the lookout for those.
Thanks so much, Brandy.
Brandy: Thank you.
