4.04 Designing Your Academic Online Presence with Jennifer Van Alstyne

In this episode of the Mindful Academy podcast, Jennifer Askey chats with Jennifer Van Alstyne, an expert who helps academics enhance their online presence. They discuss moving beyond the typical, bland faculty website to create dynamic and authentic online spaces that reflect individual research and personalities. 

Jennifer Van Alstyne shares her entrepreneurial journey, emphasizing mindful self-promotion and effective social media strategies without feeling overwhelmed. The conversation also touches on the personal journeys of academics, including themes of healing, self-authorship, and balancing professional demands with personal well-being. 

Jennifer Van Alstyne provides valuable resources and advice, including her website, The Academic Designer, and information about an upcoming website contest, to help academics improve their online visibility and share their stories effectively.

Resources:

• The Social Academic blog https://theacademicdesigner.com/blog/
• Free online presence course https://higheredpr.teachable.com/p/free-online-presence-course

Episode Details

Transcript

  Welcome to the Mindful Academy. On today's episode, I have a conversation between me, one Jennifer, and another Jennifer Jennifer Van Alstyne, and we are both in the West, but I am in the cold North Mountain West, and you are in the warm Southern Pacific West. But we met through a group of people who all have academic backgrounds of one kind or another, and who are invested now in running usually like solopreneur businesses supporting Other academics who are doing interesting things in the world.

So previous conversations I've had with Carol Shabrias, who runs workshops for universities and also does retreats for leaders. And I've talked with Rebecca Pope Rourke about agile faculty and burnout in faculty. And today I'm going to talk with Jennifer. So Jennifer, I'm going to turn it over to you to provide.

Your favorite introduction to the kind of work that you do. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast Hi, everyone. I am Jennifer van Alstyne and I help professors and researchers share more of what you do in online spaces and your online presence isn't gonna look the same as someone else's and So when we're working together one on one, it's really about finding what's going to work for your life, what's going to work for your research or teaching or the things that you value in your academic life, in terms of sharing that online.

I really love what I do. I've been doing it Since 2018 as I mentioned to Jennifer just a moment ago, I started this business right out of grad school. I knew that I was going to be opening my LLC and had my paperwork in hand ready to submit after graduation. There is. Gosh, so many ups and downs in my journey as like an entrepreneur, but I've always known working with academics is exactly what I want to be doing.

So it's interesting to be in this space and working with amazing faculty members and scientists around the world, but also get to do it from my home here in San Diego. I love being able to work with people virtually. Because unlike people who, you know, like in my past. You apply for the jobs, you get the job you get, you move to where you move to, and maybe you love it, maybe you don't, maybe it has community for you, maybe it doesn't, so being able to pick where you live kudos to you.

I would not say that I have picked. Edmonton, Alberta. My husband's job picked Edmonton, Alberta. But I have come to appreciate Edmonton. There are lots of things I like about Edmonton. The fact that it is minus five Celsius today and snowing. And don't even tell me how deliriously warm it is where you are.

I will begin to weep. Like just break down and cry. Because, March we're okay. If it's, when it's like this in April, I'm like, no, we're done. We're so done. Because winter is six months here. So I, there, there are days when I wonder, like, Why? How did I wind up here? But I read something, I think you put this on LinkedIn in the last day or two, where you said that most faculty web pages are the same and boring.

I think it's just that when people think of their online presence, they think it has to look like their CV. A lot of the times they think about it has to be in that kind of professional, simple Black and white kind of mode. And if that's your personality, that's great. If you want that kind of minimalist look, I'm happy for you.

But there's so many dynamic ways to share visual links, media, like all sorts of storytelling. That's what I get excited about, but just. I hope people open their minds about what their academic website can look like because there's many more options than people typically expect. Actually when professors come in, like they book that kind of no pressure sales call with me so we could talk about working together.

They're like, okay, I want a three page or a five page website. These are the pages. This is what I want to have on them. And that's great. If they already have content plans, like we can totally work together. But oftentimes we get into this conversation about, what is your research?

Who are the people you want to reach? How can we use some more of these kind of resources or elements of your academic life that you've already created? And. Share them more online. How can we engage these people even more with things that you already have or could create easily? So yeah, people get stuck in the kind of box of what you think an academic website might look like and That's why we host a contest.

We're hosting a new contest This year about showcasing more academic websites. So people can see there's much more diversity in what it could look like than you might think. We did one in 2022, 2023 but last year I got married. And so we took a year off and we're back this year. Excellent. So who's the we behind this?

Yeah, it is Brittany Trinh. She's a website designer for scientists. Also now back in a PhD program. And she's a frequent collaborator of mine. We team up for VIP days. And then Dr. Ian Lee, who is the creator of Owlstown, which is a free academic website builder that I recommend to a lot of people.

If you just need something simple, quick, it's really easy to set up. You could do it in 15 to minutes to an hour. So I love that. And it comes on and we get to judge all these websites together from around the world and really celebrate the diversity of how your website could be. There's so many options.

Okay. So I'm taking a couple notes so that I can make sure that we provide links to all of this in the show notes, because as Jennifer and I were talking to to each other before I hit record. So in a lot of the work that I do whether it's people who are thinking. And I think this is some of your clients too, Jennifer when I retire, I want to shift in this direction.

So I have a few clients like that. Or I do have some clients who are like, this is good for now, but I know this is not where I'm staying. And I want to feel like I have options. I go through a, it's not necessarily a checklist, but it's a list of ideas for how to approach feeling like you have more choices and developing a broader palette of choices for your career, as opposed to saying I have this job and I have the golden handcuffs and now I have to stay here until I die, whether I want to or not, cause that's not fun.

Building a network is part of that, but also building a network of. Maybe not the usual suspects, right? If everybody you know is from that one conference that does that one thing you're building one facet of your experience. And so thinking about who are you in all of those facets and where you might build a network, where you might, whose publications are you reading, who are you, where are you contributing, where are you part of a conversation, and so when you talk about webpages, I hear that sort of what conversations are you a part of, and if it's all about your research, maybe you're leading those conversations, but if it is about sort of your flexibility,

flexibility.

It might be where you're leading and where you're learning right and so the web page as a way to show this is more facets of me than you might just see in my list of publications.

It is. And the faculty that I work with who are just very firmly in academia and they've created their own paths in terms of research. One of my professor clients said, I have an intentionally broad research agenda. And he really meant that the three kind of almost, it seems disparate research areas do make sense when it comes together under Like how he's talking about himself, but it also sometimes takes work to get there because we sometimes get there because we're exploring new paths at a time and we forget to then bring it all in into a rephrasing and rethinking about how we talk about ourselves.

And so I really like that my work gives us that introspective space. To do that thinking in a way that feels comfortable. Sometimes if you're just thinking about it yourself, it's Oh, like it's hard to sit with. But if it's a conversation with someone that can make such a difference. Yeah. Yeah. Just to what you said about intentionally broad research what all of those things have in common is him, right?

They intersect in him. And it is his story. And so when you meet with people and have this kind of conversation, What is, what are the keys to those conversations for you? I would say one key is setting the expectation that they will not have something to prepare for that meeting. I want people to come and feel like, okay, I can be in my comfortable clothes if I want to.

I can have my pet, I can have my kid in the room. If that's something that is going to make this space possible for me to do. But I also, It's a really that and I think it's important to get into that mindset of yes, we're having this conversation like this isn't being recorded so that being recorded so that Jennifer can so that Jennifer can think deeply about what about and synthesize it into something that's going to communicate it with the world. This isn't always something that is. public too. There are insights that we sometimes get to that are internal, that are about decision making and how we see the future.

But when those decisions affect how we create pages for your website or how we approach training for social media in some areas and let go of some others that many have been like curious about, but aren't ideal for you. It's really a good use of your time and I also think that those conversations don't have to happen with me.

A lot of professors are like, oh, this question, I'm so glad you asked it because I was just having this conversation with a colleague or I just had this conversation with a coach or someone that I'm working with in the research office. And it really helped me start to think about how this impacts my life and my research.

Now that you're asking me, I can go even deeper. So I love that, questions and conversations can help us think more about ourselves and help each other kind of get to places maybe we wouldn't get to on our own. That I really appreciate as a coach, of course, I really appreciate that insight, right?

Because we often get caught up in loops, right? Of, of our own thinking and having. an external sounding board a sort of a champion or potential champion who also doesn't have a lot of skin in the game. That puts you in a great position to ask really interesting and powerful questions, but you're asking them from the perspective of how can I help you tell your story?

Yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned social media training. And when I hear that, I think of the mark com office. Telling you not to put that crap out on Twitter or whatever. When I hear social media training, I think I hear some sort of University voice who's incredibly risk averse saying, I don't know if our professors should have Twitter.

And just full disclosure, no, you should not have Twitter because it's not Twitter and it's owned by a Nazi. So if you're on there, get off. Go to Blue Sky. We're building a new thing over there. Jen Polk and I, mutual friend of the Jennifers, here we are. Jen Polk and I both built our businesses initially on Twitter and then Elon took it away, we can rebuild.

It is fine. So get off Twitter. But talk to me about social media training because I'm interested in Because I do right now, like for my own, as a business person who's trying to communicate with a willing audience, I'm focused on LinkedIn because it, to me, it looks and feels like the only viable alternative to what I had when I started out on Twitter.

And they're very different things, but it's, it fits where I'm at right now. Facebook is, yeah, it has never really worked for my business and I'm not going to spend ad money with Meta. Instagram, I love the notion of marketing through Instagram, but I think that my ideal client Might be on Instagram to look at pictures of puppies and kittens, and maybe not to find a solution for whatever pressing organizational issue at the university that is getting under their skin.

LinkedIn is where I hang out, so I'm really curious how you talk to faculty members about social media, because I noticed that academic participation on LinkedIn is pretty high. Totally spotty. Yes. Like it's discipline dependent, and yeah, so I'd love to hear what you're, what you tell people and what your experience is there.

Yeah, things have changed, I would say. Significantly, even since I started doing social media training with faculty members, but you probably got that idea and I think I got the idea of working with faculty because I was someone who did professional writing for my academic department. And that also meant doing like things like website audit, social media audit, getting the social media channels active and talking again which meant getting a lot of MarCom training.

So I ended up. in this role where I realized so many faculty are waiting for someone else to share their good news because they're too anxious to celebrate themselves. I realized that if I shared news on the department website, people were excited to retweet that. They were excited to re share that on whatever social media platform that they were on, but really anxious to have the agency in posting about that thing that they do care about.

When I talked with faculty one on one, they were like, I love that you're posting it. Cause then I don't have to do it myself. I didn't expect to work with faculty on social media. When I started my business, I was just going to do academic websites. It was something that I felt was easy for me, but also really meaningful and lasting for people.

I. I'm someone who got out of a domestic abuse marriage when I was quite young and because of that I ended up going totally private on all of my social media. What got me back into social media was being more active as a poet and writer in the writing community and wanting to stay connected with the faculty that I worked with and got chances to meet at events and at conferences.

Especially ones when I was working the event and so feeling like I could start reaching out and making connections with people that I was meeting in my academic life really enabled me to get that social media muscle going again. Again, it wasn't something that I was expecting to work with with my faculty clients.

Because I had so much training in it kind of the first time a faculty member that I did a website for Asked me for help with social media. I was like, yeah, of course Like let's work together. Like I know I can help you with this. I've done a ton of social media training And my focus is really social media strategy.

Like I don't want to manage accounts. Like I don't want to have access to any of your accounts, really, unless I'm creating your LinkedIn profile for you. What I do want to do is help you find what is going to work for your social media lifestyle. You don't have to be a dancer on TikTok unless you want to.

You don't have to be on video at all unless you want to. Most of my clients are like, I have time for text based posts, and only when I need to. And so sometimes social media training is about figuring out what is the best practice for what I can actually fit, what actually makes sense for my audience, and how I can have the connections that I'm hoping to without I'll changing who I am without changing what my voice is or what I care about in order to reach audiences.

In fact, most of my professor clients don't have time for conversations. They're not looking for likes or engagement the way that a business or entrepreneur like myself want, like I need to reach people in order to have those conversations. Oftentimes professors are like, please, this is the information people need.

And now it's out there in the world because they feel more comfortable after working together. Yeah. I think that what you said at the beginning there about like people being too nervous. Yeah, or wrapped up in some sort of maladaptive narrative, perhaps to toot their own horn. And I hear that from a lot of faculty members

who were like yeah, that happened, but I, I'm not going to put that. On my CV or I'm not going to I'm not going to let the chair or tell the chair so that they put it in the colleges monthly, whatever. And

yeah, when you encounter that narrative that like I'm going to hold back because I don't want to toot my own horn or whatever. What do you. What do you say, what do you hear first, and then what do you say to those things, because I think that is a, like we're supposed, when you're trained in academia, excellence is like the low bar, right?

Like everybody has to be excellent. So when you do something excellent, it's like no biggie, move on, go do the next excellent thing. And so I'm curious what that looks like when you're working with people and you hear that story come out. That's a good question. I think because I have that perspective of being the person in the department Who needed things for the newsletter and who needed things for social media?

I really approach it as oh let them decide let them decide if it's something that they're going to share or not And at least knowing the process At least knowing who to share it with and who's making that decision so that you can at least send the email is great I Struggled with the inability to help people at scale with that for a long time.

And so when Dr. Julia Barczyk WISE Investigator asked me, can we collaborate on this event for the NORDP National Organization of Research Development Professionals can we talk about online presence? I really wanted to help people understand that they, at research offices, at institutions, as leaders whether it's in a department, a school, or at the university, you can create a process or infrastructure for helping your community celebrate good news.

And if you take the first step to create a form or an email or a process that is shareable that people can use, not just now, but year after year, that's going to make lasting change for everyone. Not just for your students, your faculty member, but also your alumni will know that you do care about their good news and want to be celebrated too.

It just fosters connections on so many levels. when we facilitate that invitation that I wanted to help people make that change more lasting than one professor at a time. That's yeah and going the research office route is a good one, right? Because when that's working well, there's just a little steady stream of awesome things to celebrate.

Yeah, I've also shared that with people in the MarCom office, those people who are struggling already to find great collaborators. Just know if you have Students in your class that you want to celebrate. If there's some other group or entity on campus that you're involved in, that deserves to be seen you can help facilitate that connection.

If you reach out to someone in the MarCom office and just see, Hey, if you ever need anything on this, like I would love to collaborate, they would love you. Because they don't want to have to scramble for good stories and higher education, whether you're in the U S or Canada. There are always bad stories, right?

There are always funding cuts, demographic cliffs, outright threats. More so now than ever. So where do we get, where do we get good news? Yeah. That's, I like that. And creating a process. I was talking to a client earlier today who was running into a sticky situation with getting behind in grading and it sounds super prosaic, right?

But when you're in a text based field, you know this from doing English and creative writing, right? There's no check boxes, multiple choice. It's all like intense textual feedback and oh yeah, she was getting bogged down. Once we talked about. What's important here and what's maybe a nice to have versus a must have.

And she's Oh, I, as we're talking, I can see a way to create a system and make this a little easier, but creating the system is work. And creating a system for people to follow is super valuable because even if somebody sees the need for here's a system that might help me get that thing out into the world or get that thing finished.

All of those things, they're just little lifts that we do over and over again. And I think the job of a faculty member or university administrator, there's always more work to do. So having, here's a process you can follow and it's a little bit lather, rinse, repeat, like that's a. That's a real thing for everyone, right?

Not just the people who are giving the news, but the people who might be sharing it and who are going to send a congratulations. Hopefully either way. Absolutely. So so your graduate work was in creative writing and English. Okay, that's correct. Are you still writing poetry? I do still write poetry, but I don't publish the way that I used to care about it.

Actually, I used to chase rejections, like every year I would go for 200 rejections. If I get 200 rejections, that means that I'm actually publishing quite a bit, and that the publications that get through, like those are really meaningful. And there was a moment when I had a big stack of poems that was ready to be published again, and I had all these packets, you got to send them out.

Oftentimes, you have to invest your own money in submission processes for journals, too. And contests to publish your book, they all cost money. And I thought, Is this how I want to share my poetry with the world anymore? Is this the kind of writing that matters most to me in terms of sharing it? Or is the process of writing it what's important to me for now?

Do these have to see the world now? And the answer was no. I thought that I would get that itch again in the years since. It's been probably like four years now since I even thought about it. I don't. think that there is a time in the next couple of years that I'll be ready to publish. And part of that is my own thinking about visibility.

Once I publish a book, like I have to go market and to go do book talks and be involved in different kinds of communities. And it ends up being a lot more. Social communication that I'm willing to do and I think my writing deserves more like I think my writing deserves that of me And so I feel like I need to wait until My heart is ready for that because i've had so much growth in my business And the amazing people that I get to meet because mostly because of social media actually it's just Yeah, it's okay that there's not space in my life for that right now.

I haven't stopped writing, it's still there and it'll be ready to share with the world one day. And decoupling the writing from the publication of the writing. I, that sounds like a really useful framework. I, so you said that you submitted your LLC documents, the month you graduated.

And you had, so what I hear there is you had clarity. Pretty early on, this is how I want to have an impact in the world right now. And I will say that for, if I were just reading your story on a bio someplace, I'm like, wow, creative writing to webpage development for academics. That's an interesting leap.

But it's obviously not a leap because it made perfect sense for you. So what you did professional communication for your department, but what, okay, if we go by the assumption that none of our experience is wasted the PhD, the poetry, the writing, like none of that is. was, is useless to what you're doing now.

How are they connected for you?

Poetry for me wasn't something that I grew up loving. I really like the romantics and so that's mostly what was taught in classrooms in schools that I was at. And so when I got to college and ended up in like a contemporary poetry class, it really opened my world to what the written form could do for storytelling.

The emotion that I could get in a shorter amount of time the image focus that I could get in the experience of another writer, it was almost pointed because it was in this form. I also really liked playing with words, and so when that poetry professor said, Hey, why don't you take my creative writing class?

Let's go write some poetry. It was something I was really good at. It was something that my mentor said you could be like, you could be like a great, one of the greats, do you want this? And at the time I really thought I did. I remember applying to graduate programs thinking okay, I'm applying to some of the top programs this is gonna be great, and I literally didn't finish my application to some of them because I realized it wasn't what I wanted to do.

It wasn't that poetry wasn't what I wanted to do, but I wanted more healing in my life. I wanted more mindfulness in my life than some of those experiences I thought could get me. Sure, creative writing growth, great networking growth, amazing. But I ended up choosing a little school in Boulder, Colorado, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.

They had a different approach and philosophy toward learning that involved mindfulness that I thought was It was something that I could do to finally feel like I could sleep again. After getting out of the domestic abuse situation, I moved onto campus, like I became an RA in undergrad. And so I had all these responsibilities and I kept going and I kept pushing forward and I really excelled in a lot of areas.

Yeah. But I don't think that emotionally, I felt safe until I was in another state. Like it literally took me moving halfway across the country to breathe. And so when I encountered this program, that was like totally different than what I was expecting. And maybe even like I was too traditional for like their experimentalism.

It didn't, deter me from this growth experience. And I ended up really loving leaning into the parts of myself outside of the traditional classroom. Not that I didn't get great experiences there, but working on the Poetics Journal, working in like editorial spaces, working as a faculty liaison for all the visiting writers both of my years there.

Gosh, those were such good experiences. Like when I think back on them, I feel sad that like some people may not get to experience some of that in the future because they're selling that initial space for their campus. But I also know that the growth that I had there was quite meaningful for how I interact with people, how I feel connection can be more lasting than expected.

And how websites and online presence can help me get to know people before I meet them. Having to go meet a ton of different writers at events, like it's wonderful, but I would like to know a little bit about who they are, like where they're from, like what their book is just like if I'm going to meet panelists at a conference, like those are the people that I'm going to be presenting with, let me go read their bios.

And so online presence was a big part of that. And. Everything grew from there. Once I gained skills in it, I thought, yeah, this is what I want to do. I want to help more people share their research, share what they care about and really get their story out there. Wow. I really want to honor what you said about like space for mindfulness and healing.

I occasionally, and you can tell me, cause I don't think you and I have ever had a client overlap. So we, we have two big circles of clients and lived experience in higher education. I have a theory, and I don't, and it might be cynical, I guess I'm testing this with you, I have a theory that so many people, especially women maybe, I don't know, again, I'm hedging, I'm not entirely sure, I've never voiced this out loud, but I think so many people who wind up in graduate school are bringing a suitcase of trauma with them,

and When I think of myself and when I think of some of my closest friends in graduate school, some were there because mom and dad or mom or dad is an academic and so this is just my path and I have to do it and there wasn't much examination and a lot of us are there because I was really good at school and that's where I got my gold stars so I'm just gonna keep going to school until I've done all the school that I can school and the collecting of gold stars and the performing.

For some kind of accolades is, maybe a little bandaid over some wounds that you don't want to look at. And so for you to be coming out of undergrad and out of a traumatic relationship experience to say, yeah, I could go to this high flight poetry program, but what would it mean for me to heal as a human and have that as a foundation for writing and for work.

That, that seems like the road not taken by a lot of people, right? So I'll just toss that my, my somewhat cynical observation, I'll just toss it at you and tell me how that lands because I don't think I've ever told anybody that except maybe my husband. That's certainly true for me. Even aside from my relationship, what you were saying about gold stars really resonated because my mom was a good person.

She was a good person, but she was Whip smart, but she also had mental health problems and physical problems that resulted in an addiction to pain pills. Living with her bipolarness and her health problems really ended up being quite traumatic. She was someone who also was beloved by the community and really made a meaningful difference in the world and was an entrepreneur and successful businesswoman herself.

And It was almost a contrast from what I experienced at home to what the real world saw when it came to who she was as a person. And this isn't, as an adult, I really look back and I have sympathy and empathy for the experience that she was going through. But she never, Praise me like it was great when other people praised me because that gave her validation but if I came home with straight A's she'd be like yeah that's expected.

Right, what else are you supposed to do? When I had praise from teachers, when Professors told me this is something that you're great at, do more of this. Like when people kept opening up my pathways to more exploration, it was very easy to continue to go down them. I felt like I had choices for what to go down.

And that's not to toot my own horn. It's just to say that some people are offered choices and validation when you are in an academic path that maybe you don't experience in your home life. I think it was really. Healing for me to choose different paths at different places, but getting out was maybe the hardest choice because I had a lot of people that were like, you got to do the PhD.

You got to go on to all of these things. You got to make a difference in the world in these areas. And I just felt myself say no, I'm not going to work for anyone else anymore. I'm going to create my own path and I'm going to let it and so I'm not sure what that's going to look like, but here's where I'm going to start because I know that this is something that I'm good at.

If my mom wasn't an entrepreneur, I don't know that I would have chosen something like that. But I was confident that I could figure, figure, figure it out. I could figure it out. And I did. It just took longer than I expected. But, I will say that is such, from where I sit, that is such an impressive and empowering story, and such a story of self authorship.

As I said to you before we started recording, so when I Like, I, I think of myself, or I used to think of myself as a very reluctant entrepreneur because it was never what I wanted to do. This was never on my horizon, right? Distinguished Professor was on my horizon, not this. And I have made conscious choices along the way that have felt really good for me in all sorts of ways, but have caused like professional turmoil.

I love moving to Canada. I love prioritizing, being in the same area code as my husband and children, but what that meant for my career just caused me angst because only ever had this one notion of what success looked like, what safety felt like what praise and accolades.

looked like. And whereas I hear you saying, oh, I felt myself saying no, the inner no, like it took me a long time to find the inner no. Yeah. I just, I read a little, I think it was probably on Instagram and a little quote thing attributed to Dame Helen Mirren, who said, if I'd had daughters, I would have taught them from a very early age to use the phrase fuck off more.

That's what I needed. Little me needed I needed that phrase in my life. And I did not get that phrase for a very long time. I was not willing to say yes and no. For me, it was very much a well what is what's the path look like? Yeah, it might be a steep path, academic success, but it is well marked.

Take that left turn there, it's going to be really hard, but that's where the path goes. And so to rappel down off the path is requires a lot of inner knowing that I will just say from me to you, I admire that because that's.

Yeah, most people I say don't have that if you're in academia, like you've almost been conditioned not to. In fact, when my friend Brittany said, I'm really struggling right now. Like it's something she's open about in her podcast beyond your science. Like she's.

Like things are hard. Oh my God, like her PhD is so hard. And she doesn't know why, like maybe like parts of her mental health feel like they weren't as stable as they used to be in the sense that it feels like a roller coaster. Sometimes academia puts you on that path where you don't always notice it anymore.

Like you don't always notice it. And so the trauma. It sits with you. Because everybody's going gray and losing their hair and clenching their teeth at night. And right, everybody's doing the same thing. I actually, I don't think it was in the Chronicle. I'm almost sure it wasn't and I'd have to look for it.

But I'll make a note to find it because I know I downloaded a copy of it. Some studies out of Sweden that basically showed that getting a PhD is really bad for your mental health. And I think there was a cross section of PhDs, but in the article that I read, it very much focused on scientists. At there, there's, there's the nature of experimentation.

Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. There's the nature of grant funding. Maybe you get it, maybe you don't. In 2025, there's an additional complication to the nature. Like I have a cousin who is a neuroscientist and does research on epilepsy and uses functional MRIs to do that. And it's really groundbreaking and really cool.

And she's my grants are now all in danger. Every single one of them. There's that roller coaster to it. But there's also, and you and I both come from sort of text based traditions. You're only as good as the last thing you published. That which you put on paper is not in any way separable from you, right?

There's no disconnect or we're not invited to see a disconnect between this is me and this is what I produce. And. to circle back to what you said about mindfulness and healing. One of the, one of the reasons that I am an enormous proponent of meditation in my own life, and I suggest it to all of my clients at one point or another, is it is the practice of recognizing that I am not my thoughts.

So I sure as shit am not what I wrote on paper. And maybe what I wrote on paper is brilliant. It's still not me. Ooh, I love that. The motto at the Jack Keurig School at Naropa is writing is thinking like thinking is writing. These are transferable things, but that takes it a step further.

My thinking and my writing isn't me. Oh, I love that. I love that. Ooh. Yeah. And, but that is, that's daily, I think that's the daily work of being an adult, right? Recognizing that this too shall pass, or I don't have to follow that train of thought if it is going to make me more miserable, or if it leads to more misery in the world, right?

We get caught up in this is the way it's done. And so that thought becomes who we are. Yes. And that's yeah, that's, I don't, that isn't good for your mental health, right? And without, neither you nor I are mental health professionals, but when you're getting people to tell their own story and own their own story in a new way, I think that can only be healing, right?

Yeah. I also think that sometimes we don't let ourself have thoughts that we Dream about but can't form for example like one time I asked a professor about her next book like what's it gonna be about and she got quiet she got quiet and she said I have one book project in mind It's in progress But the book that I really want to write Is this and it's for a popular audience and it's a lot different from, what I do in my academic life, but it's an extension of this research in ways that's going to help more people.

And just having that conversation out loud. Helped her feel like at the end of our work together she was like Jennifer like this is going to happen like my book. It's good. It's gonna end like. It wasn't until voicing it out loud that she felt like it could be real. And I'm not saying you have to go out and write your book.

It's okay if you're not, but if you can at least say it, if you can at least think it or write it or have that potential for yourself, that makes such a difference. Oh, I love hearing that, right? That resonates so much. The that quiet voice that yeah, the next grants about this, or I'm in conversation with the people from this panel to put together an edited volume, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But what I really want. Yeah. That's what I want to know. What do you really want? And I love that. Like my work gets to do that. Even though we're talking about websites, even though we're talking about social media, I also get to learn about the inner lives of the people that I am collaborating with on this.

I love that. Yeah. As a storyteller. That's what it's about, right? Yeah I'm gonna ask you one more question and then we can move towards wrapping up in. The work of talking to people and getting to hear their story and help and helping translate that into a dynamic visual presence.

You're drawing on a lot of your skills and you're also giving. A lot of your time and emotional attention to other people's stories. I'm curious how you take care of yourself. What are, and you and I and a lot of our colleagues who are solopreneurs in this kind of space, we work at home and most of the time it's me and the dog because my partner works outside of the house.

And like today, because I thought I was leaving the house later, I have on real pants, but that's not normal. I don't have to wear real pants. I can wear sweatpants because my face sees those, but it can also be super isolating. And you don't have water cooler conversations with people.

So whether it's, internal or external, what are your practices for keeping your own balance and your own wellness? Yeah, I say, I would say there's a few things, the thing that's made the biggest impact on my life is really thinking about how I can adapt my business and my services to be better for my clients, but also better for me for the lifestyle that I want to live for the time that I want to spend for my energy and capacity and being able to recognize like what my energy and capacity is wasn't something that I had as a student.

When I was starting my business, coming from academia, you don't always pay attention to that. You're like, fuck the energy. My capacity is if I'm awake, I can work. That's it. Yeah. And I'm not saying that I was like that for all of my time in academia, but for much of my life, I felt like that was a go when I.

Got to my last year of grad school. I said, I need to reprioritize my time for relaxation. And I did, I was able to set more boundaries and constraints on different things in my life, but I realized what I wanted in my business is not to have boundaries or constraints, but like flexibility to have the space for the people that I need and to protect myself and my energy levels.

So I. talk with people mostly online. All my client interactions are online, but all my friend groups are online too. I don't know a lot of people in the San Diego area that have flexibility to meet often even. So even if I wanted to see my friends all the time, like it just isn't possible.

They're all around the world. So some people I keep in touch with sporadically, but also I've joined Slack groups and different almost. private online spaces where I can still almost have those water cooler conversations and have community and participate in not being alone while working alone. Yeah, that's made a really big difference for me in terms of mindfulness.

I have a room spray that I will, I spray it before I like most of my meetings. I try to set my mood and my colors in my office as a place where I feel comfortable when I'm working or not. And I really make sure that. The clients that I want to work with are people that I care about actually seeing a transformation.

If you're someone who just needs a website and you don't actually care about it that's great! I maybe we can work together, but oftentimes the people that I'm working with they Give me energy. Like they give me energy because I want to help them. And so I really like Getting to know people like getting to have these conversations But as an introvert Doing it virtually from my home office is what allows that to happen if I had to meet with this many people and have this Many conversations in real life a day.

I would be burned out after five days like literally Dead. It would not happen. I can't do it anymore. And that was a big part of choosing my own lifestyle. Got to, yeah, spray. I held up my own room spray. It's so nice. And I don't work in an office with other people with chemical sensitivities. And this is organic anyway.

And so here I am. Love it. Sniffling my mini linen and rose room spray. Beautiful. This one is Lavender and Apple Blossom. Ooh, that sounds fresh and lovely. What you were saying about, working with clients you really care about and really are willing to invest your energy in because that in turn fills your bucket reminded me of one of the frameworks that I talk about with my clients.

Thank you so much. And with organizations, there's a resilience framework that comes from an organizational development company in Australia that's headed by a Ph. D. organizational psychologist, and it's called Resilience at Work, and it looks at individuals and leaders and teams, and the individual framework for resilience, it's focused on the workplace, but it acknowledges Like we're not just talking about work.

Resilience is a whole person phenomenon. It's not just a buckle up buttercup phenomenon. And the first two elements of this I keep making a hand motion of a circle because they, it's a spiral design, is living authentically so being able to have and articulate your values and do work that is supportive of your values or reflects your values.

That's actually one of the ingredients in being resilient. And so for people who for people who experience betrayal at work. Who get disappointed on a moral or ethical level at work that values conflict is, it is foundational to like not being resilient anymore. If you get, if you have to live in values conflict every day when you go to work because you have been or experienced some sort of betrayal, you're you've stepped onto the slide and it's probably downhill from there.

The second element is finding your purpose. And purpose is, and I think our purpose can shift and change as we grow. But this notion that I know what some of my key skills are. I know what feels good to use in terms of my toolkit. I get to use those things fully. So I don't have to pretend that I'm not a thing that I am, right?

I get to be myself in terms of my talents and my abilities and I get to use a chunk of those in a really thorough kind of way. So just in like your tiny little story about working with clients virtually and what that does for you, you hit on two of these amazing foundational bits of resilience and having a network and getting honest feedback.

Like those are also parts of it as well but just the we have energy for things that are aligned with our purpose and that are aligned with our values and and you picked a way that you got to create that for yourself. I can sense it too, in terms of how it's changed since I maybe the middle of three years ago.

It was about the time I decided to shut down my online courses. I used to have courses where you could go and make your own personal academic website by doing these kind of pre recorded lessons and activities. And people loved it. People really got a lot out of it. But what I realized is that my energy from having so many more stories in my head and so many more touch points overwhelmed me, even though my focus was one on one clients.

And I thought, I really need to change something because what makes me so happy is getting to work on part of that transformation with you. Making the decision to shut those down financially, like scary. And also. So leaned into the things that I needed for myself as an entrepreneur, totally different thinking about where I'd be going.

I've heard other people talk about that and in this entrepreneurial space, and I don't know if anybody listening is thinking along those lines. But once you open the door and start peek, peeking into entrepreneurship in the digital age, all you hear about is scaling, right? So having, self paced recorded classes, that's scaling 101, right?

You're on the beach in Tahiti, sipping your umbrella drink, making millions of dollars because a gazillion people are downloading your courses. And to recognize like, Oh, that actually doesn't overlap with. How I want to work. Yeah. And I think that's true in like the academics that I work with that are leading teams, there's so many things that they could create and focus their time and energy on, but what actually works for their team, what actually is going to make a difference for the people that they're trying to help.

I love getting into those conversations when I'm working with teams because it involves so many people. You're right. When you were saying like all those different levels of people that need to be part of that resilience. Yeah. I love it. Absolutely. Okay, so I want, before we wrap up I've taken a couple notes.

So I will find a link to this article about why PhD is really bad for your mental health, just in case anybody was needed further convincing. I will put a link. To Naropa because that when you said that I was like, oh, that's right. That's there too. It's like one of those places that like tickles the margins of my brain every once in a while.

And the website challenge that you're doing, I want to link to that, but I also want you to tell people how they can find you and see examples of what you do. And if they're looking at like, how do I put myself out there? on the interwebs in a way that both reflects who I am doesn't create a ton of extra work for me but gives me that platform to own my story in a certain way.

Where do people find you? Yeah, so I'm on social media at Higher Ed PR, but when you're looking for transformation, I really recommend going to theacademicdesigner. com. That's where I host over a hundred resources on online presence and interviews with academics like you. And it's all organized on the Social Academic Blog.

So you can search by category, you can search by name. There's so many ways for you to have a stronger online presence. In the way that you want it's okay if it doesn't look like, your colleagues or your friends. You can have your own thing and focus your time and energy on what you want.

And if you're interested in working together because you really don't want to do it yourself or you want a partner along the way yeah, there's a booking link on my website. Let's set up a no pressure call and actually chat one on one so we can see if we're a good fit. Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing that and for assembling all of those resources for people.

Because I think that the, oh gosh, I need a website thing like that can seem like just another task that people have to do. And then, if it's just a check box, it might not be something you love. And if maybe with a couple conversations or a couple resources, you could have something closer to an authentic message that you love.

That sounds like a good deal. Yeah, exactly. Now, if you're someone who knows all the ideas and you really want to figure out what to focus your time and energy on, there is a free course on there that you can sign up for. That is the focus, that is the purpose. What am I gonna do next?

But honestly, most people just need the list and they're like, okay, I have a, I have an idea of what I want. And yeah, there's options for you. Very cool. I will make sure there are links to all of that in the notes. And thank you, Jennifer, so much for spending some of your time this afternoon with me.

And Thank you for everybody who tuned in to listen. I am enjoying so, this is also for me, my version of, because I'm an extrovert, and this is my version of getting to have conversations with amazing people and sharing them with with a wider audience. Thank you so much. Thank you. This was such a fun conversation.

All right. Take care. And for the podcast listeners, I will be back in your ears hopefully with somebody else or maybe just my own thoughts in a couple of weeks.