The moment you sit down to work on “the whole thing,” you’ve already lost.

I have been an editor and/or writing teacher for going on 35 years now, so I can say with absolute confidence that countless writers stop before a single word hits the page for one reason: They frighten their brains into a freeze. And they do it with one sentence.

“I am going to work on <insert title of whole effort>.”

The problem isn’t your talent (though your lack of progress with make you question it). It isn’t discipline (though white supremacy will have you chasing it). It isn’t even time (that’s a whole other problem). The problem is the word after the preposition:  book, article, dissertation or any fully formed outcome.

No one writes a book. Not Robin Wall Kimmerer. Not Tressie McMillan Cottom. Not the “leading scholar” in your field whose work leaves you feeling inadequate to the task. Not a single one of them sat down and wrote the whole thing.

They wrote a word. Then another word. They drafted a section and left the ending messy. They rearranged a chapter once or twice or more. They edited a methodology section … then another section … then went back rewrote their abstract entirely. And somewhere in all of those parts a final project materialized.

When you sit down to write “the whole thing,” your brain does what our brains are designed to do when confronted with an enormous, shapeless, intimidating mass of work: it goes to find a small problem it can solve. It scrolls. It reorganizes your desktop. It decides this is actually a great time to research the history of the Oxford comma.

You haven’t failed at writing. You’ve failed at scoping. And that’s a completely fixable problem.

Think about the language we use. “I’m writing an article.” “I need to work on my book.” “I should really get back to my manuscript.”

These phrases feel productive. They feel like intention. But they’re actually just very convincing ways of not committing to anything specific.

Because “working on your book” can mean anything, and when something can mean anything, it tends to mean nothing. You can sit for two hours, move three sentences around, and technically tell yourself you worked on your book. And you did. But you didn’t finish a part. You didn’t cross a clear line. You didn’t give yourself the satisfaction of completion that makes you actually want to come back tomorrow.

Write it on a sticky note. Set it as your phone wallpaper. Tattoo it on your forearm if that’s what it takes (not really):

“Only a Part. That is all I have to do right now.”

Not the book. Not the article. Not the whole thing. A part.

Today’s part might be:

• Write the opening paragraph of section two.
• Edit the results section for clarity around x.
• Get 300 words down on why my argument in chapter three actually holds up.

See how different that feels? You can see the edge of it from where you’re sitting. There’s a finish line. And each time you cross it, you’re building something. Parts accumulate. They become drafts and drafts become manuscripts and manuscripts, eventually, with enough parts and enough time, become the thing you’ve been telling people you’re working on.

Before I wrap up, let me tell you how you are going to push back on this:  Doing one part is too small. I have so much ground to cover.

First I would ask you if you have actually been covering ground?

Second, I would say, “Yep. It’s small. But trust me, small and steady is better than stalled and spinning out.”

The writers I work with finish drafts, publish the articles, and hold the physical books in their hands. And they do it by getting ruthlessly, almost embarrassingly, specific about what they were going to do in a given sitting.

They didn’t write a book. They wrote Tuesday’s part. Then Wednesday’s. Then they took a day off because they’d earned it. Then they came back and wrote Thursday’s.

The next time you sit down to write, don’t open the whole document and stare into the abyss of everything you still have to do. Open it to the specific page, the specific section, the specific problem you’re solving today.

This is actually one of the first hard truths of the academic career – grad students have to confront the fact that no matter how “brilliant” their dissertation is, if it’s not published and presented at conferences, it doesn’t “do” anything in the world or in their careers.

But this truth matters much much more when you are seeking to leave academia. Because as we’ve said frequently in these posts, you have a deficit of knowledge about the world “out there,” and just as important, the world has a deficit of knowledge about you!

So, this week’s task is (deceptively) simple: join one professional group online.

If you are transitioning out of academia, this may be:

• A LinkedIn group for UX researchers, policy analysts, or nonprofit program managers
• A Slack community for data science, tech writing, or consulting
• A discipline-adjacent professional association that includes non-academic careers

Choose the group strategically. You are not joining a group because it feels vaguely relevant, you are joining a group that aligns with your actual career trajectory—not your aspirational identity or not your past training, but where you are going next.

Also–here is what this is not: scrolling endlessly through LinkedIn, clicking “like” on posts, or lurking silently in a Slack channel. That is not networking, it’s avoidance dressed up as engagement. This week is about entering a professional space with intention.

Your criterion is simple: Are these people doing jobs I want to understand or access? If the answer is no, move on.

Once you’ve decided which group to join, look at your profile. If your LinkedIn headline still reads like a dissertation abstract, fix it. If your bio is a list of publications with no clear narrative related to goals and impacts in the wider world, then it needs attention. It doesn’t need to be perfect! You’ll redo this regularly as you get your footing in this new context. Just do your best for now. Just make sure you have answered the following questions:  Who are you? What do you do? What are you moving toward? What problems (in the world! Not in an obscure scholarly community) do you work on solving?

People cannot engage with you if they cannot place you.

Then, write a confident introduction; do not be timid or, apologetic, or “I’m just a PhD student hoping to learn.” No hedging. Instead state your expertise, your current focus, what you’re interested in contributing or learning.

For example:

“I’m a historian with a focus on migration and policy, currently transitioning into public sector analysis. I’m particularly interested in data-informed policy design and would love to connect with others working at that intersection.”

This signals seriousness and it tells people how to respond to you.

Your assignment is not complete when you just join, however. It is complete when you participate.

So, although we said the task this week is just to join, it’s actually “join and start participating.” So, please commit to contributing once a week, minimum. That means commenting thoughtfully on a discussion, sharing a relevant resource (with context) or asking a specific, informed question.

What this demonstrates is that you can think in public in a professional space.

The next step is to reach out to someone personally in or from this professional group. Identify one individual in the group whose work resonates with your goals and write to them briefly. The purpose of this is not to look for a job or a favor. Right now, it is to just establish a  connection. Something like:

“I appreciated your comments on X topic in the group. I’m exploring similar questions as I transition into Y field and would value staying in touch.”

The reason I include this career action is that I’ve noticed many of you seem to be waiting for permission to enter non-academic professional communities. You are waiting to feel “ready,” “qualified,”  but that moment does not arrive on its own. Remember that for PhDs “qualified” means completing XX years of graduate school, passing comprehensive exams, completing a PhD, and publishing and present extensively! This is NOT a normal or accurate benchmark for “qualified,” however, in ANY other professional sphere. Your internal standards are skewed! In the rest of the world, you become legible as a professional by participating as one.

This week is about crossing that threshold.

Join one group, show up once,  reach out to one person, and then repeat the behavior next week. Careers are not built on solitary excellence,  they are built on visible, credible presence over time. And, I’d be thrilled if you shared your experiences in comments below!

Bio: Tamara Yakaboski, PhD, spent almost 20 years as a professor and administrator before confronting the reality that academia, for many, is no longer sustainable. Whether due to burnout, institutional dysfunction, or forced career pivots, she knows that leaving can feel like a loss of identity and purpose. Integrating her expertise as a scholar of higher education, she serves as a resilience Mentorship Coach and leadership consultant, to help academics and professionals bridge the gap between what was and what’s next, individually and within teams or organizations. Whether you’re reimagining your career, rebuilding after burnout, or struggling with identity loss, Tamara provides practical tools and guidance to help you navigate the transition with confidence and clarity. Discover more about her work at www.tamarayakaboski.com.

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Sign up for Tamara’s workshop: Career Grief in a Collapsing Academy

NEXT WEEK! May 19 at 6 PM EST

You get the recording even if you can’t attend live.

The difficulty concentrating, the cynicism, and existential exhaustion are back. You assume it’s burnout again. You try the “usual” fixes: a long weekend, saying no to committees, canceling meetings, and telling yourself you just need to rest and build better boundaries until summer. When you try to pause, you feel heavier, more hopeless, and less motivated than the last time you burned out, which is confusing and a tad concerning, if you’re honest.

If it’s not burnout, why the resentment, the rage, the instability, and the constant anxiety about what’s next?

Looking around, you realize how much feels off: the institution is dysfunctional and hollowed out of its purpose. The mission you believed in has been swapped for “innovate at all costs.” The Dean keeps asking for another budget scenario from a department that’s already dry, and politicians now call your field “evil” which has quietly eroded how you see yourself as a professional.

Who am I now? 

What does this mean for a career I’ve poured into? 

Can I stay and will there even be anything to stay in, with layoffs, early retirement pressure, or closures looming? 

Should I pivot? (To what, when alt-ac roles and funding have dried up too.)

How do I keep doing meaningful work and still pay the bills? 

What is Career Grief?

Career grief is the natural response to disruptions that occur when you experience a significant shift, setback, or ending in your career, whether by choice, change, or circumstance. This is especially disruptive for academics, who have been in institutions and professionalized roles that once provided meaning, purpose, structure, or identity. The grieving process can feel confusing because it may hit at cognitive, emotional, physical, and deeply existential levels with both internal and external catalysts.

Career grief emerges when your relationship to your work changes in ways that are difficult to name. This internal shift can come from shifts that impact your interest in or capacities to work at the levels you’re used to, such as injuries, illnesses, or menopause, parenting responsibilities, or other caregiving expectations. Sometimes it comes when your priorities and values change, which can be common in midcareer. You can be grieving both positive or negative experiences, including lost dreams and nostalgia. At times, grief unfolds over time, and for others, it is an acute experience of grieving.

When grief hits after a career shock or job loss, it feels fairly acute and disruptive to life. It may show up in physical stress symptoms, feelings of anger and betrayal, and lowered motivation for tasks that may have once been enjoyed or tolerable. It doesn’t “go away” with burnout, job change, or therapy/coaching work only; one must intervene. Without intervention, career grief becomes prolonged, compounded, and interferes with growth, keeping you from the clarity and courage to move forward.

As a coach and consultant focused on supporting professionals with their career grief, I see a wide range of experiences that are deeply human and often quite painful until folks experience a deep, resonating validation and develop strategies for processing the wisdom that comes from grief. It’s difficult to make aligned career decisions if you’re disconnected from the grief and its embodied and felt sensations. You can read more about how to cope with the shifts to your professional identity from career grief at https://www.tamarayakaboski.com/career-grief

Collapse is in the Design, and It’s Greedy

The academic path you were trained for, encouraged to pursue, and dreamed of is no longer predictable or coherent. Whether named as decline, disruption, or collapse, the impact on humans is the same: GRIEF.  There are versions of the same issues across myriad institutions, geographical regions, levels of tenure, students, mid-level leaders, and administrative professionals. For some, grief is compounded with a sense of betrayal when they learn that the Golden Age of US higher education has been in decline since the 1970s, with the help of rampant academic capitalism and drastic funding shifts through the 1980-90s. All to say, even before the 2016 election, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and AI, the system was in trouble and outsourcing that trouble onto its humans to make you believe it was personal.

Graduate students (and those interested in grad school) navigate the economic precarity of these times while hearing well-intentioned advice from mentors who want long-term stability for their future career trajectory, while proselytizing outdated advice built for the 1970-90s. Faculty and department chairs grapple with the complicity of administration demanding increased graduate level enrollment versus their own integrity– knowing the jobs aren’t there, the debt will be astronomical, and also not wanting to crush dreams.

My years spent consulting, coaching, and facilitating climate and career grief work reveal how humans handle (or more typically, do not) collapsing systems. Most academics are conditioned into a problematic normalcy within their systems when faced with one crisis after another, never able or willing to rebuild. Which is layered with the power, control, and abuse that creates a harmful relational paradigm between academia and its employees, as shared in last month’s blog on “The Higher Education Power and Control Wheel,” by Dr. Jennifer Preston and colleagues on their new research. While all the facts, data, and direct experience can be right there in front of us, massive physical disconnection and cognitive dissonance allow many academics to work from a place of denial and avoidance in order to maintain a business-as-usual composure. There is an attempt to reckon with the ways institutions create harm by “trying to keep its doors open.” That reckoning is often where the sense of betrayal comes in.

Maybe you ARE chronically burned out. AND ALSO, you’re most likely grieving the loss of the idea, the career potential, and the institution as a whole. Higher education is changing by design, and the old maps of career building no longer apply.

Grief Work is Future Proofing Your Resilience

What you have lost (or stand to lose) is more than a job. There is some version of a purpose-filled impact and way of working that no longer exists. The work landscape has changed, and the continued denial of these structural and systemic collapses is exacerbating the collective grieving process.

Most career advice is missing the critical work of grief and identity integration and reorientation, because it is scary to face fear. Career grief in a time of a collapsing academy can’t be solved by overthinking and carrying around unprocessed losses. Should I stay or leave academia? This is no longer the right or only question to ask, but it may be the entrance point for you.

Grief is an embodied response that does not disappear or “get solved.” It must be integrated. It informs our future decisions, and alchemizes us into the depth of ever-evolving identities so we must allow it the space and shape to become–to shift who we are. Integrating career grief is an active process of reconstructing identity and creating space for new roles and perspectives through experimentation, exploration, and building community with others.

If identities are tree rings of a trunk sliced across, the new growth is another layer of expansion, protection, and nourishment. Career grief integration feeds that growth. We may still grow without integration, but that growth will be thin; whereas, when we learn how to practice with our grief, that year’s growth is wider, stronger, and richer in color. The non-capitalist definition of resilience isn’t bounce back. Career resilience is a learned capacity to adapt and transform in response to and relationship with your environment.

If this resonates, it’s likely you’re not just facing a career decision but are actually at the cusp of a deeper transition. In the upcoming workshop, Career Grief in a Collapsing Academy, we slow this process down on May 19 at 6 PM EST. We look at how institutional changes impact your identity, work, and wellbeing, and I’ll share a structured, 4-step process to help you move out of overwhelm and overthinking towards clarity.

Sign up for Tamara’s workshop: Career Grief in a Collapsing Academy

NEXT WEEK! May 19 at 6 PM EST

You get the recording even if you can’t attend live.

This week we move from the basics of getting unstuck to thinking about scope, scale and time.

And as with all things capitalism, the stall is often in the lies we are told and tell.

Lie of the week: our to-do lists. Thanks to years of conditioning we call everything a task. Write an introduction, plan a lecture, design an experiment, answer email, work on my book, apply for jobs. Those aren’t tasks. Those are projects wearing a fake mustache, and every time we pretend they’re small, we set ourselves up to fail before we even begin.

A project isn’t a task, a goal isn’t a task and an idea definitely isn’t a task. When you stop pretending they are, something shifts: you stop feeling behind,  you stop avoiding your own list, and crucially, you start finishing things.

So here’s the constraint I keep coming back to in my own work and I coach: If it takes more than 15 minutes, it’s not a task. It’s something bigger that needs to be broken down, clarified, and made real.  Another way to think of it is that a real task has edges. It has a clear start and a visible finish so you can sit down, do it, and be done.

Here are some tasks: Outline paragraph one of the introduction. Choose three teaching outcomes for lecture. Identify experiment method. Answer x emails in 15 minutes, etc. You can feel the difference immediately.

The upshot is that if everything on your list is oversized, your brain doesn’t know where to start, so it stalls. If you don’t end up starting at the wall or a screen, you might find yourself playing a game, or reorganizing your workspace. (Because they are discrete activities)

Believe me when I say that avoiding almost always stems from undefined. Ambiguity causes friction, which in turn kills momentum. But when something is small, and I mean actually small, your brain relaxes. There’s no mystery or hidden complexity, it’s just a single step forward. And that’s all momentum really is: one clear step, taken repeatedly.

You don’t need a perfect system for this. Just ask one simple question:

“What’s the next 15-minute action?”

If you can’t answer that question, the thing you’re looking at is too big and you need to shrink it. You might have to shrink it again and again. This isn’t about productivity hacks or squeezing more into your day, it’s about calling something what it actually is.

So this week, try it. Take one thing you’ve been avoiding and force it through the filter: if it takes more than 15 minutes, it’s not a task. Break it down until it is and then do just one.

That’s enough.

— Kel

PS: Most of the work of creating something isn’t the doing, it’s defining, taking something vague and giving it enough shape that action becomes obvious. That’s the real discipline and once you build it, everything else gets easier.

By Week 11, the initial glow of “I’m getting organized” has worn off, which is good because now we get to the part that actually changes outcomes. This week is not about polishing what you already do well,  it’s about identifying, clearly and specifically, where you are not competitive. Because make no mistake: you are in a competitive market.

Academics (and aspiring academics) love to narrate themselves through claims that hinge on adjectives. And because academia is so hostile to disclosure of weakness, only strength claims can be aired. So, we tell ourselves things like “I’m a strong writer,” “I’m very passionate about my topic,” and “I’m a dedicated teacher.”

If you’ve worked with me on editing, you know just how much I hate an adjective. And the reason applies here as well. None of these statements are actionable. Adjectives are subjective, and they are “filler.”

Worse, in this particular case they are operating in the context of “academia-approved claims” (ie, strength-based claims) that function as shields that allow you to avoid confronting the places where you are weak, undertrained, or simply inexperienced.

(I know that in your heart of hearts you constantly grapple with the Imposter Syndrome etc that tells you you are weak, undertrained and inexperienced in EVERYTHING, but for our purposes today, I am sticking with what is permitted language in academia – the strength claim.)

So, this week, we tackle this head on, and look directly at the gaps in our skills. A gap is not a vague insecurity or or generalized sense of inadequacy!  Again, I know you have these, and they also need confronting. But here we are focused on a demonstrable absence or underdevelopment of a skill, experience, or output that your target field expects.

Here are some examples:

• You want a teaching-focused role, but you’ve never been instructor of record.
• You want alt-ac project management work, but you have no evidence of managing timelines, budgets, or teams.
• You want policy work, but you’ve never written for a non-academic audience.
• You want a supervisory role, but you have no experience supervising people
• You want to go into coaching, but have no concrete coaching experience or credential.

Notice how specific these are. “I feel behind” is not a gap. “I have zero first-author publications” is a gap.

So here’s what you are going to do. Take your current CV (or resume). Now pull 5–10 job ads that represent your actual target.

Not your fantasy job, but the positions that contain some modicum of appeal, and that look reasonably viable. And a reminder: NO non-ac jobs may look viable to you at first glance, but having made it to 11 weeks of this work,  you know that they ARE or CAN BE viable, with the kinds of preparation and translation work that we are working on in the 52 weeks series.

Now study them line by line, and ask yourself where do I consistently fall short?

You are looking for patterns, not one-offs. If five postings require:

• evidence of grant funding
• quantitative methods
• public-facing writing

…and you have none of these, then you have identified three clear gaps.  Remember that SOME gaps are fine; nobody is expected to meet every single listed qualification of a job. But you need to cover a solid majority, and those are what we’re focused on today.

Let’s call this process a gap audit. I like the term audit here, because it takes us out of the realm of aspirations and hopes, and lands us directly into tangible substance.

Write the gaps down.

Now, this is where many of you might derail, because when you encounter a gap you spiral into things like “I should have done this earlier, everyone else already has this, it’s too late.”

This exercise is not about self-recrimination. First of all, you are not being judged here. You’re gathering  data. Continue with the work. And second, academics routinely OVER-estimate others and UNDER-estimate themselves. Other people who have spent years in an industry may indeed have more obvious qualifications for a job, but that doesn’t mean those qualifications are BETTER, or that they have all of them, or even that they know how to articulate them well.

You have a chance. Hold your nerve!

Now, sort gaps into three categories:

1. Critical and Immediate
These are deal-breakers, without them, you will not be seriously considered.

• Example: No publications for a government research job.

2. Important but Buildable
These strengthen your candidacy but can be developed over time.

• Example: Limited teaching diversity.

3. Nice-to-Have Enhancements
These differentiate you but are not required.

• Example: Additional certifications, secondary competencies.

This categorization matters because it determines how you allocate your time. Not everything deserves or merits equal urgency.

Now it’s time to develop an actionable plan. Why? Because we know by now that a gap that remains abstract will stay permanent.

Convert each gap into a concrete action plan. So, for example, if your gap is “lack of publications”  the action plan would be to submit one article within 3 months, and put that deadline into the calendar. Also put in the deadline to identify target journals this week.

For “no teaching experience” the action is to seek adjunct or guest lecturing opportunities with a deadline of next term. (And related to this, make sure you have an accurate grasp of adjunct hiring cycles so that you don’t miss any by either being premature, or too late).

If it’s “No non-academic writing samples”, the action is publish 3 short pieces on a public platform with a deadline – say, within 6 weeks.

Take the deadlines as sacrosanct. Without them, this becomes another aspirational list. And we know by now that allowing such lists to languish is not neutral–it saps your momentum and your confidence. It prevents you from being able to say, to yourself and others, “I’m a person who is actively gaining skills for xxx” (if necessary, go back to the earlier post where I talked about this at length, and shared my lap swimming story).

To repeat: you do not need to eliminate every gap. You need to reduce the most consequential ones enough that you are no longer filtered out at the first pass.

Some gaps cannot be closed quickly. If your target path requires years of accumulated experience you do not have, then you face a choice: extend your timeline, or adjust your target. Neither option is failure! This is simply strategizing. Everyone has to strategize choices within finite limits of time/space/resources.

By contrast, pretending the gap doesn’t exist really is a failure, in my view. And I don’t use that word lightly. But since 2010 I’ve been doing battle with the impulse to pretend, and it’s my sworn enemy. And it’s just too widespread among academics.

So, in sum, the task for this week is as follows:

1. Gather 5–10 real job ads.
2. Audit your materials against them.
3. Identify 3–5 concrete gaps.
4. Categorize them.
5. Create a 30–90 day action plan for at least two.

Do not overcomplicate this, just do the work. Getting clarity, especially uncomfortable clarity, is what allows you to move forward with purpose instead of anxiety.

And that is the entire point of this series.

Well, here we are 10 steps into our 52 step journey! And no matter where we go we keep coming back to feeling stuck.

I don’t mean that you aren’t moving forward. I can pretty much guarantee that one of these hacks has gotten you a bit Unstuck (See what I did there?) AND the reality of work in the current hellscape is that we are going to keep getting stuck. Because we are FUCKING TIRED!  But reality exhaustion aside, I want take up a particular flavor of stuck this week. It doesn’t come from laziness or lack of ideas. It’s not the “I don’t feel like writing today” kind of resistance. It’s more intractable than that. You show up, you try, and the work just… won’t move.

If you’ve hit that wall this week, I want to offer a re-frame along the lines of last week’s advice that not all friction is meant to be pushed through: Sometimes stuck is nothing more than feedback. In other words, your stuckness is pointing to a strategy problem, not a motivation problem.

In the early weeks of a project, especially a long-haul work-in-progress, we aim for consistency, and tie our definitions of success to it. And yes, there’s non-perfectionist truth hiding in there somewhere, but consistency without responsiveness will ultimately become sticky icky stuck. Here’s the problem with the whole consistency or fail model. Your project is alive. It changes as you work on it and you change as you work on it. What felt clear in Week 2 might feel misaligned in Week 10, not because you’ve failed, but because you’ve learned something new. So when the words won’t come, or the direction feels muddy, or you find yourself circling the same paragraph for the third session in a row, do yourself a favor and step away from the quicksand. Seriously, PAUSE.

Like I said last week, this isn’t about quitting. You are pausing to listen, and to be clear, to find a better question than “Why can’t I finish this?” (Pretty hard to ask or answer without shaming yourself.)

Try one of these instead

• What part of what I am doing right now feels unclear?
• What problem am I solving right in this moment?
• Is there a smaller piece I can work on instead?
• What would make this easier to start?

One of the most important skills you can build in a long-term creative practice is adaptability; the ability to notice when something isn’t working and to adjust without spiraling into self-doubt. Maybe you’ve been trying to write linearly when the piece actually wants to be assembled out of order. Perhaps you’re drafting too polished, too early, and so you’re strangling the messy middle. Maybe you need to step away from producing and spend a week collecting, observing, or outlining instead. Changing strategy isn’t cheating the process, it is part of the process. That doesn’t mean abandoning the work every time it gets hard. It means distinguishing between productive difficulty and misdirected effort. Productive difficulty feels challenging, but there’s movement and even slow movement counts. Misdirected effort feels like spinning your wheels with the same inputs and same outputs but no shift. If you’re in the second camp this week, give yourself permission to pivot.

Here are a few strategies I offer in Unstuck:

• Try a constraint: Write for 15 minutes and stop.
• Try a different entry point: Start in the middle. Start with a question. Start with an image.
• Try changing the medium: Sketch it. Voice-note it. Map it out.
• Try changing the scale: Zoom way in on a single moment, or zoom out to the big picture.

Sometimes, that’s all you need to get unstuck—not more effort, but a different angle.

Some fun pics of our new Outliers Books in Eugene!  We’ve been open 3 weeks and it’s going really well, although hugely steep learning curve for Kel (the main person). But our community has really shown up for us!

OK, that’s enough fun for today! Now to the hard stuff.

This week we have to look at an uncomfortable truth: you are not the best judge of your own career trajectory.

I know—you’ve been told to “trust your gut,” to “follow your passion,” to “listen to your inner voice.” But the academic job market (and frankly, most professional paths) is not a place where intuition alone will carry you. It is structured, hierarchical, and, whether we like it or not, interpreted by other people. Which means your future depends, in part, on how others see you.

So this week’s task is simple, but not easy: ask three mentors for honest feedback on your career direction.

Not one. Not your favorite. Not the one who already agrees with you. Not the “nice advisor”  who tells you what you want to hear because they are conflict averse or invested in toxic positivity.

Three, because one mentor gives you a perspective but three give you a pattern.

Of course everyone is biased—toward their field, their generation, their own regrets, or their investment in you. But when you ask three different people, you start to see convergence:

• Are they all subtly steering you away from academia?
• Are they all emphasizing a gap in your record?
• Are they all surprised by the path you say you want?

That’s data. That’s usable.

You might ask who counts as a mentor.

Well first of all, not just your advisor or PI. In fact, if your advisor/PI is your only mentor, that’s already a problem. I am always writing about how you need a team behind you (here’s one post that covers some of that ground), because different faculty members and admins and friends and colleagues have access to widely divergent resources and capacities to share. No one person can cover everything you need.

In this case, you’re looking for variation:

• Someone in your discipline who knows the field intimately
• Someone outside your discipline who is job hunt savvy/can assess broader skills
• Someone in a role you might want (academic, alt-ac, industry, nonprofit, etc.)

Finding these three will probably require you to be proactive. You have to reach out with a carefully worded email. I am a fan of carefully worded emails. I spent a consultation appointment yesterday with a fairly new graduate student who needed explaining in how to reach out to a potential mentor outside their own institution. I dictated an email right on the spot!

Anyway, the key is to ask and precisely, and courteously, without being vague or annoying.  As I explained to my grad student client yesterday, never send an email that says something like:

“Can I get your thoughts on X?”

That is lazy, and in demonstrating no effort on your part, will likely, in these pressed times, garner no response at all.

Instead, you need to proactively provide the framing and parameters, while also articulating your own status and goals. In short, briefly state your current position, outline the direction you are considering, ask specific questions

For example:

“I’d like to ask for a moment of your time for some career advice. As you know, I’m currently a postdoc in X, and I’ve been working on XX with the goal of XX. Right now though, with the contraction of academic hiring, and defunding of federal agencies that support X (KK: this is just an example of the kind of context you want to provide) I’m at the point of trying to decide whether to continue pursuing tenure-track positions or pivot toward policy work. Because I really value your opinion, and I know you’ve advised many postdocs in both directions, I’d like to request some time with you for a conversation about how competitive I seem for TT roles? And do you see skills I should be building if I move into policy? Do you see any gaps I should prioritize filling, for one or both roles?”  I’ve attached my CV to this email. I can meet at your convenience.”

You’ve made it easy for them to help you because you’ve narrowed the parameters to a manageable size.

And by the way, the email is just to set up a live meeting (zoom is ok if necessary). Because this needs back and forth, and unpacking, and followup questions!

The next stage is to listen, really listen, to their answers. Remember, you are not listening for validation. You are listening for truth.

Pay attention to:

• Hesitations (“Well… it’s a tough market…”)
• Redirections (“Have you thought about…?”)
• Emphases (“You really need more X”)
• Surprises (“Oh—I didn’t realize you wanted that”)

And most importantly, pay attention to what repeats across all three conversations because that repetition is your signal.

Now, there’s a high chance you won’t like what you hear. If all three mentors tell you your current trajectory is unrealistic, or misaligned, or underdeveloped, your first instinct will be to dismiss them: “They don’t get my work.”, “They’re out of touch.” “They’re too negative.”

But please do recall that the entire Professor Is In enterprise has been based on confronting the denial that (until recently at least) has permeated academia, and facing the hard truths of our imploding economy, your own record, and steps actually required to have any hope of attaining secure employment.

So… claiming that three independent people are all wrong in exactly the same way is most likely a flavor of denial.

It is less likely than your self-assessment/grasp of conditions of hiring being inaccurate

No matter what you hear in this exercise, of course, it doesn’t mean you abandon your goals. It means you get a strategy: strengthen weak areas, broaden your options, reframe your timeline, and yes—sometimes, reconsider your path. If you already had a strategy, then check that it aligns with the feedback you’re getting.

The exercise is not about permission, but rather calibration. You are aligning your self-perception with external reality, because careers are not built in isolation. They are negotiated—through hiring committees, collaborators, institutions, and networks.

Learning how you are seen is not a betrayal of your authenticity; it is a prerequisite for making informed decisions.

Your Task This Week:

1. Identify three mentors (not all from the same context)
2. Reach out with a courteous and respectful but direct, focused, and specific request
3. Have the conversations (reminder: actually talk—don’t just email)
4. Write down what you hear immediately afterward
5. Look for patterns across all three
6. Create/adjust your strategy

No overthinking. No delaying. No waiting until you “feel ready.”

You are ready.

You just need to ask.

Nicola M. Imbracsio, Ph.D.

Nicola Imbracsio is from Boston, MA. A first-generation college student, she attended Clark University before collecting degrees from UMass Boston (MA in English), Emerson College (MFA in Applied Theatre), and the University of New Hampshire (PhD in English)—along with the expected amount of student debt.

She has worked at small liberal arts colleges, large public research institutions, and everything in between, teaching British literature, Shakespeare, the plague, and women and witchcraft. Her intellectual and aesthetic interests include puppets, Harry Houdini, Hammer Horror films, vinyl LPs, Victorian photographs of cats in fancy dress, and vintage View-Master reels.

When she is not engaged in these pursuits, she writes grant proposals, enters short story competitions, and is currently returning to her scholarship—specifically, her long-standing fascination with bodies in early modern performance. She currently lives in Rhinebeck, NY—a development that still surprises her.

I trained as a Shakespearean.

I spent over a decade working in academic leadership at Big Ten institutions.

Now, I’m the Director of Faculty at the Culinary Institute of America—an accredited, degree-granting college that offers associate, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees in Culinary Arts, Food Science, Food Business, and Hospitality Management.

Although it is often perceived as a “professional” or “industry” school, the CIA operates within the same structures as other institutions of higher education: accreditation, shared governance, faculty ranks, curriculum oversight, and assessment. At the same time, it differs in important ways—most notably in its integration of industry expertise into faculty identity, and in its emphasis on experiential, practice-based pedagogy.

You may wonder how one goes from professor of Shakespeare at several small regional schools, to academic administrative leader at some of the nation’s largest and most decentralized research institutions, to director of approximately 150 faculty—including the largest staff of Certified Master Chefs. I keep saying: “it’s not my first rodeo—it’s just a different horse.” And honestly, having that attitude is what has helped me be successful at each iteration of my career.

I went on the academic job market in 2009 as an ABD in English at precisely the moment when the market was collapsing. I left New England for a two-year VAP at a Midwestern regional state school, followed by a one-year VAP at a satellite campus of a large Midwestern public R1. Neither converted to a tenure-track line.

But in those contingent roles, I made a deliberate choice: I treated each position as if I were already on the tenure track. I published, I sustained a research agenda, and—crucially—I said yes to service work (despite all advice not to). I served on General Education and Assessment committees, not because I knew where that would lead, but because I was curious about how the university actually functioned.

That curiosity became the pivot point of my career.

Eventually, I became the Director of Assessment for the interdisciplinary Arts and Humanities general education program at Michigan State University. Over my five years at MSU, I moved from assessment to program leadership, while teaching in the program. From there, I was recruited into a university-wide leadership role at a small Catholic college in Minnesota, and then into an Assistant Dean position at the University of Minnesota in the College of Liberal Arts– the state’s largest college of liberal arts–  where I also continued to teach occasionally. I now serve as Director of Faculty at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY.

Some of these moves were driven by opportunity; others by necessity. Like many academic leaders in recent years, I have worked within systems shaped by budget constraints, political pressures, and rapidly shifting expectations around higher education. My most recent move was, in part, a response to burnout—and a desire to return to the Northeast– but also a recognition that I wanted to engage the institution differently, as someone shaping the conditions under which faculty work.

It has also, somewhat unexpectedly, returned me to my own scholarship. With greater flexibility and a new institutional context, I’ve begun to approach questions of embodiment, death, ingestion, and pedagogy in ways that feel like a natural extension of my earlier work—just through a different lens.

But here is the thing no one tells you: as a faculty member turned administrator, you don’t leave academia—you move into a part of it no one trains you for. That has remained true across every institutional context I’ve worked in—including specialized colleges like the CIA, where the disciplines and faculty profiles differ, but the underlying structures of academic life remain fundamentally the same.

The skills that make you a successful scholar—deep expertise, individual achievement, disciplinary authority—are not the same ones that make you effective inside an institution. What’s required instead is a shift in perspective: you are no longer working within a single discipline or department, but across a complex system with its own logic, constraints, and forms of power.

Across institutions—large publics, small privates, specialized colleges—I’ve been asked to mentor faculty stepping into administrative roles: chairs, program directors, associate deans. And what I tell them, consistently, is this:

You are not just changing roles– you are learning to see the university differently.

Here are the “guiding principles” that I have developed, and I share with those faculty who wish to move in academic administration:

1. Service is not a burden– it’s the training ground.

The work that many faculty are told to minimize—committee work, assessment, curriculum review—is actually where you learn how the university functions.

It’s where you:

•         see how decisions impact students’ lives
•         understand the constraints under which institutions operate
•         build relationships across units—and across institutions

Even if you are not considering administration, service should not be seen as a distraction from your career; but central to it.

When I was at Michigan State, I regularly collaborated on committees with colleagues across Big Ten institutions. Those relationships became critical when I transitioned to the University of Minnesota—I already understood the institutional landscape, the challenges, and the opportunities.

The connections you build through service—whether across your campus or across your conference—are not peripheral. They are what make movement, opportunity, and leadership possible.

2. Pretend the university is 16th-century Europe. Because it is.

If you move into administration thinking your research, publications, or disciplinary expertise will carry authority—you will be disabused of that notion quickly.

Your prior work will not matter. What matters is whether you understand how the university actually functions: where decisions are made, who holds influence, and which levers move resources.

Higher education is not a unified system. It is a network of semi-autonomous units—departments, programs, colleges—each with their own priorities, alliances, quirks, and internal politics. Think: small city-states that engage in trade, not a unified nation.

My training in Early Modern literature turned out to be unexpectedly useful. I had already spent years studying court politics, patronage systems, and institutional power in Renaissance England and Europe. Universities operate in much the same way: influence is negotiated, not declared; alliances matter; and yes—there is occasionally (often) some “cloak and dagger” activity.

If you stay at the level of your department, you will misunderstand the institution. You have to zoom out.

3. It has almost certainly been thought of before.

Your first instinct will be to fix things. Resist it.

While your disciplinary expertise likely got you here, it is no longer what makes you effective. In administration, credibility comes from how well you understand other people’s work—not how quickly you explain your own.

The most important skill in administration is not proposing solutions—it’s listening long enough to understand why things are the way they are. If you are the one doing most of the talking in a meeting, you are probably missing something.

In order to learn what you don’t know (which is a lot), start with staff—and listen to them carefully. Listen to people who have been there for three years. Listen differently to those who have been there for ten years. Learn who actually does what. And above all: Talk to the Registrar.

The Registrar is one of the few people who sees the entire academic ecosystem—curriculum, policy, scheduling, compliance. If you understand how their world works, you will understand the institution (especially the one that students are navigating).

At Michigan State University, I was tasked with revising a diversity requirement that had been in place since the mid-1990s. It needed updating—both in language, to reflect current scholarship, and in structure, to account for a student body increasingly shaped by transfer credits and non-linear pathways.

While faculty spent hours debating the use of the word “empathy” in the learning outcomes, I went to the Registrar—whose office, fittingly, was in the basement of the administrative building—to understand the implications of removing the requirement’s sequential structure.

It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. From that point on, before I proposed a pilot, a reform, or a policy, I ran it by her first.

Before you propose anything, assume:

•         it has been tried before
•         it failed for a reason
•         and someone knows why

Your job is to find that person (PS: it’s probably the Registrar).

This doesn’t mean don’t try something new. It means don’t start from zero. The strongest ideas are rarely the newest—they’re the ones that build on what’s already been attempted, with a clearer understanding of why it didn’t work the first time.

Innovation in universities is rarely invention; it’s iteration—with memory.

4. We’re all eating the same sandwich– shop accordingly.

Everyone in a university is working under deficit conditions: too little time, resources, and recognition. What we lack in those areas, we make up for in ego– there is plenty of that to go around.

If you want to get anything done, you need to understand what matters to the people you’re working with—and meet them there.

Years ago, in a graduate seminar on feminist theory, I found myself arguing with a fellow grad student across the table about a particular text. The professor stopped us and said, “You’re saying the same thing from different angles. You both eat peanut butter sandwiches—just with different brands of peanut butter.”

To be effective in academic administration, you have to identify other people’s brand of peanut butter—and then make them a sandwich with it.

“Student success,” for example, means something entirely different to a faculty member in the classroom, to a dean, to the registrar (who is now your best friend), to an advisor, and to the student themselves. Knowing the difference allows you to frame your approach strategically.

It’s not manipulation; it’s translation.

It also means working toward the difficult people, not avoiding them. The colleague everyone warns you about? You will need them eventually, so build the relationship early.

Good questions to ask yourself regularly: what motivates this person? Not today, not even this week– but why did they come here? Why do they do this? You may have to spend some time and energy and curiosity figuring this out. But once you do, connect whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish to their deep sense of purpose.

And don’t take anything personally. Truly. You cannot survive in administration if everything feels like it’s about you.

It also means learning how to say no in a way that doesn’t escalate resistance. The most effective administrators are not the ones who shut ideas down, but the ones who help others see constraints clearly enough to arrive at “no” on their own. When people feel heard—and when the reasoning for the decision is visible—they don’t experience the outcome as obstruction.

5. Faculty have 99 problems, and students aren’t one. 

A surprising amount of faculty conversation centers on things that feel urgent but are not actually central.

Your job is to re-anchor the conversation.

The most useful question you can ask in almost any situation is:
“How does this impact students?”
“How does this serve students?”

It doesn’t resolve every issue—but it cuts through a remarkable amount of noise. If a conversation can’t answer that question, it’s worth asking why.

When I interviewed for my current position—at an institution with a strong faculty union and a long history of faculty and administration being seen as adversarial—I was asked in an open forum with faculty who I would ultimately be serving: who are you serving?

I didn’t hesitate.

Students.

We are all here to serve students.

That answer guides how I approach most difficult conversations. It also gives me a way to redirect them. For example, in a recent faculty meeting, colleagues were expressing frustration that students no longer take creative risks in their work.

My question was simple:

When was the last time you took a risk in your classroom—when is the last time that you modeled failure? What would class look like if you were not always the expert controlling the outcome?

Re-centering students doesn’t let us off the hook. It usually puts us on it.

6. People want to feel differently about their work, but they don’t want to do their work differently.

Currently, if you’re in higher education administration, you’re dealing with “institutional change.” You will be facing change, you will be navigating change, you will be responding to change– constantly.

As part of that, faculty and staff will express frustration with systems, processes, or outcomes. They want things to improve.

But meaningful change almost always requires changing habits—how courses are structured, how assessment is done, how time is allocated. And it also means changing our feelings about those habits.

And that is much harder.

Your job is not just to propose better systems. It’s to recognize the gap between aspiration and behavior—and work within it.

Small shifts matter more than sweeping reforms—and peanut butter sandwiches come in handy for this (see #4). Because if you can translate needed change into language that speaks to another’s own agenda or motivation, then you’re more than halfway there.

7. Decide what hill you will die on. Stand your ground.

Academic administration requires constant negotiation. You will be asked to compromise, to adapt, to find middle ground.

But not everything is negotiable.

Early on, you must decide what your “hill” is—the principle you will not compromise. When everything else is in motion, this becomes your North Star.

You cannot have many hills. If everything matters equally, then nothing does.

For me, that hill is faculty governance. It is at the core of how academic institutions function—and it is often the first thing to erode under external pressures. I come from faculty, and I take that responsibility seriously. I also believe firmly that when faculty understand how decisions are made, when their roles are respected, and when processes are transparent, the institution is stronger.

When you find your hill, stand there and be consistent.

You don’t need to win every argument, but you do need to be known for something.

People learn quickly where you will bend—and where you won’t. That clarity is what builds trust.

There is a narrative that moving into administration means “leaving” academia. I don’t think that’s true. You are not leaving intellectual life; you are shifting its scale. Instead of interpreting texts, you are interpreting systems. Instead of making arguments on the page, you are making them in rooms. Instead of analyzing structures, you are working inside them—sometimes trying to change them.

But the work is still, fundamentally, the same: attention, analysis, interpretation, judgment. You’re just doing it where it counts differently. You’re not leaving academia– you are now learning how it actually works.

She graciously agreed to an interview.  I hoped to post it to coincide with the publication of my 2026 update to The Professor Is In, and with a few delays… here it is. 

ANYWAY, Margaret and I ended up talking at such length that I’ve divided the interview into four parts. It’s been very lightly edited for clarity.  This is Part 2 of 4.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

MP: I realized early on that big perk of academia (again, until we get into the land of 4-4, 5-5, 6-6,  which is a very important land to remember is where a lot of people are) which is the flexibility, and the flexibility is one of the things that almost nobody else gets.  My partner has a really hard time just sort of seeing me be so flexible. I mean that’s one of the biggest issues in our relationship that we have to negotiate, is at any moment I could put my work down, but ze has to be on Microsoft Teams all day. And that inflexibility is what most jobs are like.

KK:  So you know what’s interesting though…  and I hope you’re OK with this just being this kind of unfolding conversation as opposed to a totally  scripted set of questions…

MP: yeah absolutely! I’ve done a million interviews where it’s all like
“tell me about your book.”

KK: yeah no I read that interview that you sent me! It was super interesting and recent, so it was really good to read it after these Trump assaults had already started  – although obviously not what we’re dealing with right now right?? But let’s set that aside for a minute or else, you… speaking of things we thought weren’t going to be a part of… capitalism right?

Sorry, my train of thought… the gift of time, partner doesn’t have it; allows me to see what a giant perk that is…

MP: that I think a lot of academics when we talk about “oh we’re working so hard here,” yeah we are and a lot of it is fucked and unfair, but we have a different kind of schedule too.

KK: So actually, though, that thing about flexibility is something that  prompted me when I started doing the new chapter on leaving academia for the updated edition of the Professor Is In book.  This all comes from starting the Professor Is Out Facebook group during COVID.  I started to really get systematic updates from reading people’s accounts of leaving academia, and really getting into the longer narratives that people posted of their journeys, in the Facebook group. And what people consistently say is, they have more freedom and more flexibility after they leave academia, even in corporate jobs!

MP: I have seen that, and I’ve also read those long accounts with interest in the Facebook group. I think you’re absolutely right in some ways.

One thing that I think a lot of corporate jobs will startle people with is where you are filling out a timesheet. Your hours may be billable, you’re going to be doing a ton more collaborative work than you have before, especially if you were in the humanities.  So those kinds of flexibility will not be as abundant as they are in academia, I think that is absolutely true.

What I’m seeing a lot of people being really happy with is leaving academia, and just not being fucked with.

KK: “not being fucked with.” What a great phrase.

MP: yeah, I mean.

KK:  So, I’ve never actually never worked in a corporate job so I have no means to prove or disprove what they’re claiming.  All I’ve ever done I graduated college, I taught English in Japan, then I traveled a bunch in Asia, and then I came home and went to grad school and then I was a professor and then I left and now I’ve been Professor Is In, running this business for 15 years. But, it’s so across the board in peoples’ posts, just this delight in, as you say, not being fucked with.

So conversely then, how are we being fucked with in academia that is so oppressive?

MP: one thing that I think is a problem is there is a kind of scrim pretending that faculty governance exists, and pretending that departmental governance exists.  Maybe in some places it does, but those have been I think pretty questionable for a long time. And then with the enormous bulge in upper administration, like the last I don’t know 10 to 15 years, I think any illusion that there was a powerful faculty governance presence at most schools disappeared. So now there are unilateral decisions made around things like hiring, course caps, research travel…

One thing that I’ve seen a lot on the Professor Is Out is people say [that in non-academic jobs] they are free and in fact encouraged to be either on the clock or off the clock which is one of those things that I think lends that tremendous sense of relief.

KK: because you’re never really off the clock. If it’s summer it’s like “why am I not writing that article?”

MP: yeah that’s another thing where I think my low expectations really helped. I’ve always had a pretty tough sense of needing to protect my own time, because I’ve been … I never know what adverb to use, but like very disabled,  severely disabled since I was very young. And the question of pushing myself through things disappeared a long time ago. I realize now that that has kind of freed me from from feeling like I should  push, or have to. It just wasn’t in the realm of possibility.

KK: so the workaholism that’s endemic to academia you just could not participate in.

MP:  …..was not possible, yeah pretty much.  I mean I still certainly do my share of it especially when I was younger and not as debilitated. Like when I was an assistant professor, for example, I would do things like work before I taught and then teach my three classes and then work after and have dinner and work after dinner . But those would be short periods of time.

I’m also thinking about the question of time freedom. Like my experience with folks who work in the for-profit sector – and it’s probably different in other sectors –  is that there’s a lot of accountability to the project team and to clients and to billable hours, so that people are sort of constantly not only chafing with but often sort of being fucked with by their bosses. One thing that happens in workplaces where things run on billable time is people are strongly discouraged from doing things that are not billable time. So you’ll be allotted this tiny number of hours per week that you can do everything that’s not client focused, and that’s when you’re supposed to do all your e-mail, all your back channeling, all your preparation, all your notating, everything. And people have to figure out how to game that in various ways.

So, I don’t know it’s still to some degree a mystery to me. Like I find that even when I was teaching a 3-3 for all those years at Spelman, or teaching a 4-4 when I was an adjunct…  I still felt like, there’s a lot of flexibility here!  Sure I do a lot of grading, but I also know how to set a schedule.

KK:  Well, it seems to me that you’re a person with tremendous clarity and good boundaries! And that is something that a lot of folks don’t have. And it may be that you’re confronting various limitations if you don’t… if I can use that word? So, at an early age you were socialized differently.

MP:  yeah I think so. And then I had to do really a fucking lot of therapy to cope with just various aspects of my upbringing, which also helped with the understanding what a boundary is.

One fun fact about boundaries that I like to share with my grad students is that a boundary is not telling someone else what to do. It doesn’t have anything to do with trying to control your boss, or me, for that matter. The boundary is figuring out in your mind “if they do X, then I will do this.”

KK: right, It’s what you’ll do.

MP: exactly a boundary is figuring out what you’re going to do, not what you want someone else to do. so I think sort of just having baseline stuff like that matters. I’m really fascinated by what you’re learning from the Professor Is Out though.

like I I’m especially thinking about recent posts where people are really struggling in their job searches and that sounds like such a tough transition from academia and translating into the non academic areas.

KK: I don’t monitor it closely every single day because, well to be frank, I mean, trump is hell bent on destroying the Professor Is In, the foundation of my basic business, indirectly, because if people don’t have any grants and they don’t have any jobs and every institution across the land has instituted a hiring freeze, then I have no basis for a business. So that is absolutely consuming me right now.  And Professor Is Out is not a profit-generating part of the business, so…

But anyway, when I do go in I feel that well the posts have had a of more tragic feel to them lately.  But then again, of course they do because who is not sadder and more tragic right now?  I mean it’s a sad tragic time, and it is a terrible time to be looking for a job. It’s rough.

MP: yeah that’s so interesting; I can’t wait for your book

KK:  Oh all of this stuff will go into a new book I’m pitching to Random House right now, a book called The Professor Is Out. But I haven’t written that yet. Just a proposal.

MP:   I apologize, you probably told me that and I probably lost track of the facts. But congratulations that’s such a great idea.

KK: Thanks, I had hoped to have a contract by now but they’re demanding a chapter so I have to take my summer break  – gah, listen to me, I’m acting like an academic!  My vacation is writing a chapter! But anyway, whatever it’s not about me! Let’s move on.

To be continued….

In case you missed it, I bought a bookstore. And come to find out, starting a new business is INTENSE.

I am more than a little frazzled as I search for a routine, BUT it does put me in a good position to speak with insider knowledge on the topic of the week: Powering through.

You have probably heard (or employed) variants of it; “keep your head down,” “push harder,” “don’t stop.”

I have always found this kind of “encouragement” seductive because it feels like being disciplined and committed, AND for brief periods, it works. Note, I said it “feels” like discipline. If you who have worked with me or read my advice over the years, you know I am devoted to helping you dismantle your auto-reply to the demands of capitalism and colonizer thinking. Simply put: Learning to put your well-being before your compliance with demand.

“Just power through” offers plenty to dismantle. It is one of those insidious brands of advice that sounds valid but is ultimately peak colonizer mind: Progress should be continuous and visible. Luckily your experience has shown you that real progress is uneven, it comes it fits and starts and it often requires stepping sideways before moving forward.

If only we trusted our experience as much as the your work is your worth propaganda!

Sadly in working with academics week after week, project after project, I have seen that the culture of overwork in the academy insists that you ignore that experience. You are expected to treat resistance like an obstacle to bulldoze. If something feels slow, unclear, or draining, the expectation is that you will override it, working harder and longer until you “win.” Goodbye experience. Hello “PUSH THROUGH!”

Trust me when I say that your resistance is information. Information that you need to stop and listen long enough to discern whether it is telling you that the scope is off, or the direction is unclear, or that your energy for what you are working on has petered out, or the problem itself might be wrong.

Think about it. When you push through do you notice that things take longer that they should? Does your energy drain along with your clarity?  Are you solving symptoms, not root problems? When you power through, you mute that feedback loop, removing the solution that could actually make the work better. It’s like covering the “check engine” light with tape so you can keep driving!

Worst of all, pushing through creates a habit: When something feels off, push harder instead of pausing to ask why. As with all repeated behaviors, the habit compounds.

Luckily there is a solution; and it is basically the same: Do a behavior over and over, until it becomes a habit. Except this time choose one that serves you: Instead of pushing through, allow yourself to interrupt the cycle. Not with a dramatic reset. Just take a deliberate pause to reassess: Am I solving the right problem? Is this a skill gap, a clarity gap, or an energy gap? What would make the next step obvious instead of forced?

One quick note: We often think of discipline as endurance, but actually it’s more like awareness — knowing when to keep pushing and to change course. If you are just smashing ahead, you have no time to question whether the direction you are going is the right one. Anyone can grind, but not everyone everyone can truly listen, adjust, and then keep moving in a smarter fashion.

So, if you find yourself “powering through,” treat it as a flag, not a badge. Allow yourself the time to pause long enough to understand what’s actually happening. The goal isn’t to prove how much you can endure, it’s to build something that works.  That usually requires less force and more clarity than we think.