Season Reflections: Cultivating a Good Academic Life (CAL127, S6, E21)

Welcome to Changing Academic Life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick, and this is a podcast series where academics and others share their stories, provide ideas, and provoke discussions about what we can do individually and collectively to change academic life for the better. Welcome. I'm so glad you can join me here for some reflections across the season that we are just coming to the end of. And this final episode is a little bit late in coming because I've had travels and talks and running workshops, and so I just didn't have the head space to do this. So in, uh, trying to walk the talk, I gave myself some grace and took the pressure off to be on a fortnightly cycle. And finally getting to this. We started this season about 10 months or so ago, and first episode was on 4th of September last year, and we are now well into July 25. During that time, we've had 20 episodes. Seven of them were me talking or reflecting on a particular topic, and there was also one compilation episode. And all the others were interviews and discussions with really interesting people. And I just want to remind us all that everyone is interesting. Everyone is has a story to tell or experiences to share. And it's interesting that even though I don't more systematically plan my guest schedule, it's rather more opportunistic. It's really amazing to reflect on the themes that have come out across many of the different conversations. And that's what I want to do now is just walk through some of those themes. So just to give an overview of what I think they've been, there's one that's been around creating supportive and inclusive cultures of care in academia. And related to that is the role of good leaders. There's another theme that's sort of reflected in a lot of the career stories that we heard about career transitions. And I want to reflect on that in terms of making choices and also the importance of reflection in supporting how we make those choices. And there was another theme around wellbeing, mental health and self care that we can reflect on. And finally, I want to finish with the importance of community. So to the first theme around creating supportive and inclusive collaborative cultures. We heard so much about the importance of the role that every one of us can play and the way that we can all contribute to the co-creation of supportive, inclusive cultures, and I think we heard about that very strongly from Line and Nicklas when they reflected on their particular research context that got the Danish Young Science Academy Prize for research environment, and they talked really compellingly about how we all contribute to shaping and sustaining these cultures. And that key aspects of these cultures were things like, fostering trust and open communication. You know, the importance of psychological safety, the focus on really caring about people's long-term development and how to support that. And in the process valuing health and wellbeing so that science isn't done at the cost of wellbeing and what could be done to support wellbeing as part of these environments. And we saw these themes repeated in different people's discussions of cultures. You know, so most recently Johanna talked about, their mission at Graz around creating or her mission around creating a fun and kind academia and that we can do impactful research and look after our wellbeing. And, and she shared some of the initiatives they're taking more at sort of an organizational systemic level to promote and support that. And we also heard, for example, from Matt and Oana at Glasgow and Özge at Koč Univers University in Turkey about their every day on the ground initiatives to support and create cultures of care. Matt and Oana talked about micro actions, which fits nicely with the ways that we don't have to have the grand gestures. It, we can all contribute. And towards that, the compilation episode that I did provided lots of examples from previous episodes that also pointed to the productive engagement in creating cultures of care and respecting differences and how we can create a culture where learning is encouraged and recognizing learning is often learning from mistakes. And related to this, I also did a solo episode just to unpack the notion of psychological safety a bit more because it's such a prominent concept and topic at the moment, and actually so important about how do we create environments where people can feel that it's okay to speak up, to have an opinion, to contribute without, personal risks. And towards this, we also heard about the really important role that leaders can play in setting the direction for this sort of culture and role modeling the sort of behaviors, whether that's the micro actions of care and connection. Matt particularly talked about the importance of empathy and being really intentional in the way that you show up recognizing the humanity of yourself and everyone else. So, you know, the way he sought feedback as well. And Özge also talked about initiatives to create the care and the open communication being really important. Another interesting theme that emerged was around, a number of people who were reflecting on different career transitions and whether that was Evan peck making a decision to move from one particular type of university with one particular emphasis to a different sort of university. Or whether it was people like Vikki and Tina who both eventually chose to move out of academia into different career paths that still connected them with academia, but more in coaching and support roles. And also we heard about Johanna who made different career choices that were around trying to protect her wellbeing and manage her boundaries that took her into some different sector work. And then again, moving back to quite a different role than a traditional research oriented role in a university. And we have Graham who talked about moving from, PhD to industry, to academia and research to, to start up to being sort of more entrepreneurial and then moving on yet again to go back to learn based on the experiences that he had. So all of these career stories were interesting, weren't they, because no one had planned those paths from the beginning. And I think that's something that's worth reflecting on. And through their discussions, we could also hear the journey of growing self-awareness and discovery about what was really important to people. You know, Vikki talked about strengths and aspirations and Tina talked about getting more familiar with your natural talents and Liam also talked about choices that were really aligned with values and goals. Özge talked about the importance of values, understanding your core values as a guide for behaviors, as did both Evan and Johanna. So this theme of getting clearer over time of what are your values, what's important to you, and what are your strengths. I also talked about them as superpowers or in your natural talents because when we can operate working with our strengths, we do our best work, and we are more engaged. Excited by the work we do and do better work. And that also connects to what's the difference we want to make, tied up with all of that. And we heard that come out as themes, like what's the difference you wanna make was, the difference that. Graham talked about, and Evan talked about in particular, in making the choices to move. We also heard around how people navigated the different trade-offs. You know, because there's never a clean choice where everything's perfect, there's always losses and gains, isn't there? And so I think it was really interesting hearing about lots of people's transitions, the way they arrived at those choices. And as Evan talked about, career decisions are always deeply personal, multifaceted, and take place in a continually evolving professional landscape and an evolving landscape of your own personal priorities. You know, and that trade off, balancing all of those concerns it's is really important. And I think tied up with this, if we're going to have the insights into what our strengths are and our values and what difference do we want to make, we also heard across all of these, we could hear and people being very reflective and like Evan talked about a constant reflection on that negotiation around his own personal values and broader impact. And that it's a lifelong learning thing. And so. Towards that, Matt offered a framework for reflection that he gives to students, but could also be really useful for all of us. And for my end of year podcast, I also offered a framework of questions that might support reflection, to help start to get more insight into what's important and who you are at your best And part of this reflection is, as Vikki talked about, a lot of self-compassion and, the knowing yourself. And she had a lovely way of talking about being your own best boss. People also talked about being realistic about what you can achieve. And then this connects then I think, to the theme of wellbeing and self care. And Johanna, I think was particularly interesting to hear the way, through a process of reflection about what was important to her, became really clear on what were the boundaries that she wanted to hold, and accepting the trade-offs in the choices that she made around what was needed to protect those boundaries. And self-care also figured in lots of people's discussions, whether it's Matt and Oana, or Vikki or Özge or Johanna. It was a really common theme and mental health also figured, you know, so Matt and Oana talked about depression and burnout and shared very honestly and vulnerably about their experiences there as did Özge. So recognizing that we're not alone with a lot of those struggles. And Vikki also talked about experiencing ADHD type behaviors. And managing that as well. So I think that that's really important to think about how do we deliberately cultivate practices of care for ourselves and also extending that as care for others. And that also is, that brings in the self-compassion. And that's not selfish because we need to be able to bring our best selves to our work, to our interactions with our colleagues. And so it's so important that we prioritize our own wellbeing and that, we heard about that in terms of the culture discussions as well, that there are things we can do both at like a bottom up our own everyday practices and then what we can do from a top down in terms of what might be the policies and procedures and exemplars that we'd want to propagate from an organizational perspective as well as what we can do with one another in our interactions to promote wellbeing and to make that a norm that it's okay to care for that. And then I think that connects nicely with the theme of community and the critical importance of community. We don't do academia alone. And we don't need to do it alone. And there's lots of discussion across the episodes about the supports of other people and how valuable that was. And again, in that sense of top down, bottom up, we heard from Johanna about the initiatives at Graz to create collaborative peer support network, support groups. And I had a solo episode after that that gave an overview of things to think about if you wanted to set up your own peer support group and the different types of groups that you could think about, because we can put these in place for ourselves as well. And we also heard it from Liam just about his own reflections. The lovely Liam who very sadly passed away in September last year, who really wanted to share with the community about the importance of thinking about what's important and how to balance between professional ambitions and personal wellbeing, and particular the importance of relationships. And I followed that up with a solo episode, just reflecting on networking and how we might reimagine it not as a strategic career maneuver or something that we have to do and something that we can be really scared of, but as a process of how do we build genuine connections and how do we use those genuine connections to have an impact on others through our everyday micro interactions. So coming back, the full circle culture is created in our local environments, in our institutions, in our professional communities. And I always talk about the top down and the bottom up, and I so believe we need actions from all levels. And I don't want to downplay the importance of the structural constraints and issues and challenges and that are actually increasing at the moment, which makes me really sad. And at the same time, recognize that there are little moments of power and connection that we have, that we have some power. And we have that power to create connection, to contribute to building good cultures, to make some choices and accept the trade offs that may be entailed. And just returning to Liam's call about being true to ourselves and being reflective about how we balance between our professional ambitions, our personal wellbeing, and investing in relationships. So I'll finish here and wish you all a good couple of months. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, it's our summer break time, and I will be back in the autumn with some new stories, new people, and looking forward to it. Take care. Be kind to yourself. It's okay to take a proper break, have a proper holiday, and enjoy it. You can find the summary notes, a transcript and related links for this podcast on www.changingacademiclife.com. You can also subscribe to Changing Academic Life on iTunes, Spotify. And I'm really hoping that we can widen the conversation about how we can do academia differently. 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