Coaching for academics
"I want to succeed on tenure track, but I don't want to lose myself in the process." “My contract expires in two years and I want to figure out what’s next for me.” “Feels like I’m slipping with my writing, how can I get back on track?” “I have this dream for the future but I’m not sure if pursuing it is foolish.”
These are examples of questions that make excellent starting points for coaching. In each, there is a desire, a want. Coming to coaching means you’re making the choice to stay with that desire, rather than to shelve it.
This is a process of stepping into the unknown. If you already knew how to proceed, if it was a matter of ‘just doing’, you would have done it already. If your coaching question didn’t have existential depth, if it wasn’t a true meeting point of longing and fear, it wouldn’t call you into transformative personal work.
Academia is an awesome arena for personal growth.
Precisely because of its demands, surprises and discontents, academia is great terrain for a hero’s journey. You may not have planned on such a journey, but nevertheless find yourself in one. What you need to do, learn, and leave behind, to walk an inspired path is your work.
Mine is to be completely on your side. This means championing you. Helping you find resources within and around you. Not colluding with stories that don’t ring true anymore. Holding a bigger vision for you, even and especially when times are tough.
You’ll find in being coached an experience of coming home to yourself, a little bit more at every turn. In everyday life and in choices you make, a recognition: ‘this is me!‘ And pride: ‘I’m fighting my fight. I’m answering my call.’ A new level of personal power to create the results that you want and to live with integrity and joy.
The packages I offer
The next stage of your life and work is already here. Time to meet it head on. (18 weeks)
Finally use the long break between academic years well, to arrive at the start of a new semester recharged and content. (whole summer)
Learn to work skilfully and effectively with perfectionism, procrastination and other forms of self-sabotage – at root level. (6 weeks)
Transformative change, sustainable results
Combination of coaching and training
For faster and deeper results, I combine coaching with ‘mental fitness’ training through the app-based program from Positive Intelligence.
It takes practice to lessen the grip of perfectionism, procrastination, ‘always working’ and other habitual patterns that frustrate academics. Where coaching unlocks insight and possibility, training has you practise intercepting such patterns and accessing your most resourced states of being – several times a day.
The body as resource
Structured and unstructured explorations of movement, posture and physical sensation allow us to harness information and wisdom from the whole of you.
Our bodies hold the key to moving forward with integrity and joy. This is underexplored territory for many academics. Simply by virtue of having a body, you have an amazing resource for deepening your self-awareness and enhancing your capacity to meet important moments, relationships, and challenges in life.
A different way
I hold strongly to skillful, self-compassionate ways of working with
ourselves as the route to greater wellbeing and sustainable productivity.
This turns on its head the assumption that it’s always more discipline, more effort and more ‘push’ we need to get to where we want to go. Looking for ease, comfort, humour and pleasure can release energy and creativity you’d forgotten you have. I see this as entirely integral to approaching deeply-held goals with fierce commitment.
LET´S TALK
About You
What is the question you’ve been sitting with? What’s so important that you are ready to commit, despite not knowing how you’ll get there? What’s the next stage of your journey?
Whether your answers are fully articulated or subtly emerging, I would love to hear where you are at and explore with you how I can help.
