Today the next installment in “Outside Higher Ed” appears in Inside Higher Ed, focusing on career discernment:
As the title promises, this piece shares seven steps for career discernment. These include:
- Talking with confidants.
- Making lists, and writing to learn.
- Pairing downside with upside risks.
- Finding my “strong yes.”
- Taking steps toward a new career.
- Seeking a reality check.
- Processing grief and other emotions.
For each, I describe how the strategy played a role in my decision to leave academia, a discernment process that stretched over multiple years.
Whether or not you’ve been following along as I’ve shared my decision to transition into public writing and entrepreneurship, I hope this piece offers useful discernment practices.
Through career discernment, I continue to learn the importance of slowing down, listening to embodied wisdom, and building emotional literacies. Decision-making involves more than well-reasoned answers, and it holds potential for healing when prioritizing commitments and alignment with our better/best selves.
I continue to wish for personal and collective healing and believe our working lives play a role in this process. How might our careers—and ongoing career discernment—contribute to grieving and growing? To greater acknowledgement of both/and? To the willingness to tread alternative paths?
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This post is written by Beth Godbee for Heart-Head-Hands.com. For more posts like this one, you might try “Announcing ‘Outside Higher Ed’ in Inside Higher Ed,” “In the Midst of Big Changes,” or “Listening for/to the ‘Strong YES.’” You might also like the e-course “Career Discernment for Academics: Aligning Career with Commitments.”
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![Updates to the new offering “Pathways Through Burnout: A Cohort Experience”:
For the past year, Candace and I have been listening to requests for an offering around burnout (or, more precisely, being burned up), and we launched a new cohort experience August 1st. We are deeply grateful for the range of responses we’ve received since then, and we’ve been prioritizing time to listen and discern what people want and need.
Through a lot of conversation and reflection, we’ve decided to slow down further and to reshape the offering.
We’ll continue offering interactive workshops on practices for navigating burnout—with new dates announced for November 3rd and December 15th (and more to come in 2024).
Starting in January, we’ll hold a few one-day retreats with time for art, play, contemplative practice, conversation, and coaching. We hope the retreat will feel like something that’s possible now (with so many pushes and pulls on time and attention).
All of this is leading to a 12-week version of the cohort experience: a season of connection to match a season in life. We’ll reopen applications in the spring and hope that a small group forms well ahead of our start date in September 2024.
The details of all of these experiences—and an invitation to join the workshops in Nov and Dec—are shared online here: https://heart-head-hands.com/pathways-through-burnout/
✨✨link in bio✨✨
And we continue to appreciate all sorts of feedback (questions, suggestions, affirmations), so please reach out anytime. <3
[Image says: “Pathways Through Burnout / Practice Workshops / One-Day Retreats / Cohort Forming for Fall 2024” and shows photos of the two of us—Candace and Beth—side by side.]
With @dr._candace_epps_robertson_ #burnout #update #practice #contemplative #meditation #writing #art #retreat](https://heart-head-hands.com/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)
Loved every bit of this article, esp. useful as I’m exploring my own fears, trauma, and grief; finding my “both/ and” life and “strong yeses; and observing my emotions throughout the process. Thanks for such reflective writing and advice!
Tiffany, thanks for sharing what resonates, and thanks for sharing your research journal via blogging. I’m so glad to connect here (online) and in-person (yeah for ATL and DC). May we keep learning about how to live in alignment with “both/and” and “strong yeses.” Hugs.