4.11 Balancing Ambition and Well-being: Conversations with Michelle Thompson, Esquire

In this episode of the Mindful Academy, host Jennifer Askey interviews Michelle Thompson, Esquire, a coach who assists both academics and lawyers in achieving their professional goals without compromising their personal well-being. They discuss the similarities between the challenges faced by academics and lawyers, particularly concerning overwork and the need to please others. Michelle shares her personal journey from practicing law to becoming a coach, emphasizing the importance of building systems to maintain a healthy work-life balance. The conversation covers tools like EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) and planning strategies to manage stress and improve productivity. Additionally, Michelle talks about her passion for woo practices like tarot reading and pendulums, and how they help reduce decision fatigue. The episode provides insights into maintaining a fulfilling professional life while staying connected to one's body and emotional health.

00:00 Welcome to the Mindful Academy

00:06 Introducing Michelle Thompson, Esquire

01:06 Michelle's Dual Coaching Roles

02:17 Challenges Faced by Lawyers and Scholars

04:45 The Pressure to Earn Your Keep

13:10 Michelle's Journey from Law to Academia

19:55 Discovering Coaching and EFT

36:17 The Importance of Embodiment in High-Pressure Jobs

41:14 The Systemic Pressures in Academia and Law

43:13 The Grind of Academic Work

44:00 The Role of Systems in Academic Writing

45:20 The Importance of Community in Academia

48:41 Yoga and Mindfulness for Academics

51:57 Balancing Work and Personal Life

52:41 The Power of Planning and Organization

56:14 Embracing Woo and Alternative Modalities

58:23 Promoting Your Work and Finding Community

23:03 The Reluctance of Lawyers to Embrace Wellness

25:09 Introduction to EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques)

25:48 The Science Behind Stress and Cortisol

28:44 Practical Applications of EFT

34:24 The Importance of Embodiment in High-Pressure Professions

44:02 The Role of Systems in Academic and Professional Success

46:58 The Power of Community and Vulnerability

51:57 Balancing Woo and Practicality in Entrepreneurship

58:23 Conclusion and Contact Information

Resources referenced in the episode: 

Tapping In: A Step-by Step Guide to Activating Your Healing Resources Through Bilateral Stimulation, by Laurel Parnell

My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, by Resmaa Menakem

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel van der Kolk

Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success, by Wendy Belcher

To get in touch with Michelle: 

info@resistantvision.com

Insta: @resistant_vision 

Upcoming Writing Retreat: https://resistantvision.com/academics/

Transcript

Balancing Wellbeing & Ambition: Conversation with Michelle Thompson

[00:00:00] Hello everybody and welcome back to the Mindful Academy. I am Jennifer Askey, your coach, and today I am here with my colleague Michelle Thompson, Esquire. There are two titles there. We'll get into that. Michelle is a coach who helps academics publish for tenure and promotion, put all of those things together, but she does all sorts of other things too.

She's based in New York, right? I didn't make that up. And and I'm in Edmonton, so it's hot and muggy where she is and it's raining buckets where I am. But we're gonna let her tell us a little bit about what she does and then I will begin grilling her in the way that my interviews are hard nosed, grilling of.

Professionals who help academics. Michelle first of all, hello and thank you so much for being here. Thank you. And hello. And thank you for having me. Thank I I'm honored to be here. This [00:01:00] is gonna be a fun conversation. When you introduce yourself and your work to people, what do you say? I tell them I am a coach who I do two things.

And it depends on the audience, right? For many people, I tell them I help lawyers, I help women lawyers build a book of business and their billable hours without abandoning their friends, family, and their health. That's one version. And then when I'm talking to scholars I tell them and I hate the way I'm saying this.

It's like I tell them this, but I don't really just know I really do these things. I help women's scholars publish for tenure promotion grants and raises without abandoning their health sanity. And the people they love. Yeah. Health sanity and the people you love. Life should come first and in academia we're certainly, yeah.

I think it's very context dependent, whether you're in an environment where people acknowledge that you might have commitments other [00:02:00] than the life of the mind. And although my familiarity with law is limited but growing and I can tell you a bit about that. Yeah. The stories about, the billable hours and the crazy weeks and all of that are certainly a part of culture.

What do you see as the connection between your two audiences when it comes to the way they approach work or the challenges that they come to you with? 'cause they're obviously very connected. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think. Part, I'm both of those people, right? I am, I practice law. I'm still licensed and I am a scholar, right?

However, they are now, aside from literally being in my body, the same person, they're actually the same person They are, they are. And it's and we don't think of ourselves, lawyers don't think of themselves as having similar interests to academics. And academics don't think of themselves as having similar interests in lawyers, primarily because of the revenue the income that lawyers bring in, right?

[00:03:00] Like scholars don't make anywhere near as much. However the ways in which both people are driven, absolutely driven. The ways in which both professions, both sets of professionals, particularly if you are assigned female birth or female identifying are trained to please, and I don't mean that in the demeaning way that people say that.

About people pleasing, but we are trained to be on this earth to make other people happy. We do that and I think that drives the overwork. I, it's a combination of that and the and again, this is across both professions, the ways that we feel like we shouldn't be there or we're lucky.

Wow. Geez. That, that worked out. We can't adopt oh my goodness. Got a job. Holy cow. How dare I appreciate, how dare I push back? How dare I ask for? Exactly. All of those things are the ball of mess that we both, both lawyers and scholars bring to their work. [00:04:00] Yeah. And. It becomes, it makes it really challenging to do the things that we wanna do.

And that's the kind of, that's where we sacrifice ourselves at the alter productivity. And that's actually where we don't build the systems that we need to do the things that we need to do to make things happen in both of those fascists. Because we don't, we think it's we have to do what they tell us.

And it's you have to create a system to do the things that are necessary for the work so you can get out of the office, tend to your health, have a baby, I don't know, have a good night of sex, whatever it is. You actually have to have the systems that allow you to do that.

Yeah. I have a former client who is an academic administrator, so former professor now working in administration. And we were talking about this phenomenon and the language that we hit upon in our conversation is this notion of having to earn your keep. Yes. Oh, do I like, may like they let me in, but I have to keep [00:05:00] proving that I deserve to be here by earning my keep.

Yeah, no, you have the degree, you have the license. You're done. You're done. You have, you may have to learn, there might be a learning curve that, but you're right. But that's the other thing is that if you've made it through the JD or the PhD, or in your case both, like you obviously can learn.

Exactly. Just like here's, there's not, I have no other skill. It's that, okay, here's a pile of paper. Read it, ingest it, do something. Produce something new. That's essentially what we've been trained. So yeah, the learning curve might be there, but that is well within everybody's capabilities once they've made it.

To this point and hopefully too yeah, earning your keep pleasing. Being amenable, right? Yes. I don't wanna be difficult. [00:06:00] Exactly. You need that. Okay. Now, okay, sure. No, no problem.

What were your priorities for the day? Was that on that list? Yeah. Yeah. Your email inbox is generally other people's to-do lists that have been dropped on your doorstep. Exactly. Yeah, when I think about the number of stories I have heard, and also stories I have experienced myself, where women in an academic department, they look around at, there's a call for volunteers for committee work.

Or annual committee assignments, however your institution does it, and or for mentoring students or being open for student advising, if that's part of the way your university does advising and there is a certain breed of white male professor who will just not do [00:07:00] it. And I, and this is also a self-selecting audience, but like the people I come into contact with are, and I work with women and men, but I come into contact with a lot of women who do the work because they look around to see that nobody else is doing it and care enough that it gets done.

That they'll be like shit, I guess I get to do this too. Exactly. And actually women actually hold those expectations of other women's scholars to do the work. I one of my scholars just been working with her for years and she just earned tenure. I, but so proud of her. Yeah, no, it's a it's huge and important, but the new department chair said, Hey, I would could you be Doug's, the director of undergraduate studies?

And she said, and she thought about it. She wanted to say no, but she said, okay, this is what I'm gonna do. And I am so proud of her for coming with this. I will do it under these conditions. I need this, and this. I was like, [00:08:00] yes, get it. All of those things. Yes. Who asked her? Yeah.

No. The woman who asked her said she didn't actually read the response and she said, you know that you need to do things like this for promotion. And so my my, my client started on a spiral and then I wrote, and I said, you said yes. You said yes with conditions. And she was like, oh Zach.

But here we have a superior trying to force people to be amenable because we expect it for you like you have with us. If you want what you want. Yeah. And the notion of pushing back or saying Sure. Under these conditions, instead of taking it on and doing a subpar job or taking it on and having your scholarship suffer, which is also something you need to do for promotion and Exactly.

And the notion that in order to succeed, you not only have to check all the boxes, but you also have to maybe check more of them [00:09:00] than somebody down the hall. Whether that's a certain kind of academic generalizing frequently a white male of a certain age, but not always. Or in, I remember in maybe more so I had a couple like visiting assistant professor jobs before I got my tenure track job.

And in, in all of those places, I think at each place I at least had one conversation. I. Where a senior scholar in my department, flat out said they would not have either gotten hired nor gotten tenure according to the standards that I was being held to. And so that was, I think that all the time with people like, with the people who are partners would never have become partners, but people who are tenured and full would never have been tenured for full based on what people are doing now.

And so what I was being held to 20 years ago also might it probably would've gotten me tenure, but would it have gotten me hired? Did I have enough? Because I only had, I think, one publication before I went on the [00:10:00] job market, but like a generation before me, there was no expectation of publishing before you got on the job market.

And now that one probably wouldn't have been enough. And so like we keep expecting more. And yeah. That burden, and as this is a whole other thing, right? As professions like lawyering, like professing have become more open to women, or in the case of a lot of academic disciplines become feminized.

It's oh, we'll just ratchet up these expectations with no awareness. That infinite growth is actually not a thing. Exactly. Infinite expansion of productivity and potential and publication like that just doesn't, that's not a thing. Not a thing. Not a thing at all. No, exactly. Systems tend to expect it.

Our organization. Exactly. And I think, it's the, I guess it's the stage of capitalism that we're in that we expect infinite growth with everything all the time. And our planet's actually telling us you don't get to infinitely grow. I can't [00:11:00] infinitely grow. So you chill. But we refuse to listen to it. We absolutely refuse to listen to it. And that's and that pressure for. Infinite growth and continual improvement on like the hockey stick graph, right? Where we're just going up up, up all the time. It's wow. That's, if we wanna talk about like why people are stressed beyond belief or why mental health problems abound in Exactly.

Faculty, staff, students. It's this notion that whatever was good in 2020 is no longer good enough in 2025. We have to do more, better, faster, cooler. Yeah, no, I wanna go take a nap just thinking about it. Exactly. An AI is not gonna fix it, right? Like a AI is not gonna get, I was at a at a wellness day for lawyers sponsored by the DC Women's Bar Association and they were talking about how there's a lot of conversations about this actually, both in law and academia, like how AI's gonna.

Help all the things. [00:12:00] It's either gonna help or it's gonna destroy. And there's exactly, there's nobody in between. Those are bizarre conversation. But they were saying, this woman was saying, I use AI to put together shopping packing list for every one of my family. And I'm sitting here in the audience thinking, but you're still the one doing the packing list.

No one else said, I don't know what to pack. Let me go to ai. They said no one else ever it was you. Like pack that allows us to continue to over overperform. Exactly. Exactly. And exponential growth, it's no. Ugh. Yuck. So lawyers and scholars come with this, the same pressures, right?

Productivity. Productivity. Now, man, exactly. And make the people who have or appear to have control over your career see you as [00:13:00] a good colleague, good contributor, and excellent scholar, excellent researcher, excellent lawyer, excellent, whatever. So they come with the same pressures. How did you, as first a lawyer and then a scholar, how did you come to this work?

Like in my case, I moved countries career, had to take a pivot and. I tried a, I tried Path B, I tried Path, and I was like, none of these feel good. I ended up working with a coach and I was like, oh wow. This is magic. This is what I need to do. What was it like for you to go from like being in it to helping people be in it?

The good question. A long path. I I practiced law. It was law. Being a lawyer was the first job out of it was the first job out of out of grad school, out of any professional school that I'd done. So I made an option. I realized that I got a text in, we need to be on Do Not disturb.

Okay, here we [00:14:00] go. I I practiced law for two years with a not-for-profit organization that was helping people with aids, and then I worked for a labor union and I love, like in this country, the United States labor is needed now more than ever, and. The ways in which we work in labor are brutal.

It's a work hard, play hard segment of the economy. And 'cause you're doing it for the workers. And that's, and it's important and we are important too, right? So I found myself working 70 to 90 hours per week. This is, 20 some years ago for 40 grand a year, and I was drink.

So my body doesn't, I learned over time I genetically don't digest caffeine well for example, if I drink caffeine, if I drink it very early in the morning for it to clear my system so I can go to sleep at night. I, I mean by early 6:00 AM so yeah, if I drink coffee at nine, forget it.

Oh wow. So I was drinking coffee to wake [00:15:00] up. I was doing. Smoke. I was smoking for social anxiety with my colleagues in the middle, in the middle of the day and just fear of oh my God, I have to do the thing, right? And I was drinking alcohol to put myself to sleep. And what I'm telling you is it's a very typical, unfortunately it's a very typical lawyer story, but actually I suspect it's fairly typical for scholars as well, right?

Lots of coffee, maybe not as much smoking, maybe more, I don't know. But and then the alcohol was settling you down. And I'm like, and I wanted to show a mom and I'm like, this is kinda a heart attack before I have a child. The rate I'm going right. So I was, I had started to think about, I was like maybe I should go to school for public health.

Or maybe I was thinking about going back to the, good earning another, as you're taking your mid-afternoon drag. Maybe I should go that's a great idea. It's much easier to study it than to handle it. Anyway, so I had that thought about, I thought I was, it was in the back of my head I had asked my mom, should I become a nurse?

My mom was a nurse. She was like, no. Alright then whatcha trying to say in retrospect [00:16:00] such good advice, very good idea. I'm like, alright, I'm not mad. I knew I wasn't gonna be an md. I was like that. Just take that one off the table. That's not gonna happen. And then I met the person I eventually married who suggested, Hey, why don't you get, why don't you go get a PhD?

And I'm like. It wasn't on my list of things to do, but why not? And I actually had, I had things I was interested in. I was like, okay, I could study, I could do some work in Jamaican history. So I followed her. We, I followed her to New York and I was doing my graduate work and she was professor, she was a full professor at different, and we went to, we were in the same school, but different schools within the same school.

So it's like never the plain chel me kind of thing. Yeah. And I graduated after 2008. The US that was, rough until mayhem, rough time, and, and. Yeah. Academic institutions are really good at going, oh, financially hard. We're gonna pay it back now. So all of the job offers all the positions that were out where they pulled them back and, four years later [00:17:00] they still didn't come back online.

And and we know that we don't do DEI related stuff as we call it now, but we're not gonna study diverse people when times are tough. We're gonna go back to foundations and fundamentals. Thank you so much for saying that. When I left, when I, and so you're, you did Jamaican history.

I studied 19th century German literature, but I didn't do canonical stuff. I did things that were written specifically for girls. I did like trashy trade literature and and I used some digital humanities tools as they were just developing very slowly at that point in time. And. I said, when, as you pair back departments, as you decrease course offerings, we're just gonna go back to the curriculum of the fifties.

Anything fun, exciting, new, like it's all gonna go back to what we consider canonical. So yeah, your research gone My research totally tangent. Exactly. And language is in general tangential. We don't do like a ish English. All of that [00:18:00] becomes a nice to have as opposed to like foundational, critical thinking and knowing skills.

So thank you for saying that, yeah. Which is madness, right? So here I am like, great. Now what? So I actually I was an adjunct professor for years and I saw that I was starting to do the same thing because in part because I was I live in New York City, I commuted to one of the boroughs, Staten Island, which is actually, I.

I may as well be going to Connecticut. If I'm gonna to Staten Island. It's really that intense commute and New Jersey. And so I'm sitting here, I'm teaching like three or four courses all over the map. I'm not, I'm like, if I'm getting 20 grand a year, I'm doing well, and now, and I have the child and I'm like and I was, yes, I was married, but I'm like, if something happened to my spouse, like what am I gonna do?

I was like, this is not workable. And I actually got to the point where I contemplated ending my life. I, it was really, it was a very low point. And I opened my and so I was start, I was like, okay that's an option. [00:19:00] We're gonna put that to the side right now. We put that the side, thank you.

Yeah. Why do that? And I had a peer counseling group that helped me really ke keep my head in the game. But I was starting to do what color is your parachute? And trying to figure out like, what are my options? I started to think about journalism, except that was going down the, oh, thank God I didn't become a journalist.

That's all I can say. All of these things that are so interesting don't pay. Oh, they don't. I was like, we're not gonna do that. But then I opened my email box and there was, and I, but I've been part of this peer counseling group for at that point, 20, 20 years, I don't know, 15 to 20 years. And I had watched how I had changed people's lives and how they changed mind, especially in that moment.

Yeah. It was like, wow. This is great and it's volunteer. It would be nice to, I have a set of skills that would be great to use, but it would be nice if we could pay for them, wouldn't it? Something. Oh, something. So I actually, I had that thought and I opened my email box and there [00:20:00] was an email saying, we're giving away scholarships to learn how to become a coach.

And I was like, I don't know what that is exactly, but I think that's what I'm looking for. And yes, I will apply. And it turns out that person who ran that program had been in this peer counseling community before. So he like immediately approved the application for, because he knew what you were coming in with.

Yes, exactly. He knew the skill, skillset. And I was like, and I never looked back. I taught for, I still taught for a while, but it wasn't just the only thing I had going on. And that, that's, that, that was the huge pivot that, that was like the huge pivot where I'm like, okay, that this is what I'm doing.

This is, yeah, this is what I'm called to do and this feels good. And. I don't have to write for, publish a book for tenure, and I don't have to become a partner. This is great. This is, I'm here for this and it, but it means I can still write, I can still publish, I can still, I can do the things I wanna do on my own time and yeah, it might be damn [00:21:00] slow.

And who cares? It's my time. And again, you're not ha, the only person now you need to please is hopefully yourself and hopefully you're a great boss. I find that sometimes I'm not the world's greatest boss for me. Every once in a while I look at my calendar, I was like, who's responsible for this?

Who stick this nonsense? Like I need to have a word with, I need to have word with management. Oh shit, I'm management. For a little inside baseball. Where did you do your coach training? Because I'm nosy. Mentor coach is what I called. Okay. Yeah. I think that's where Jen Polk did hers too. I think you're right.

Yeah. They're really good with connecting with scholars. Like they had, I actually, I came to them because they had one of their coaches helped people finish their dissertations and so they would send emails and so I was getting those emails all the time. And so I was on with, when they were rolling out their new cohort of coaches.

[00:22:00] Isn't it interesting how whether it's the peer counseling or having gotten the, let me help you finish your dissertation, things like all of these little pebbles that were maybe Yes. Laying out part of a path that pointed you in a certain direction. Absolutely. And you don't know it, you don't know at the time.

That was, that was way more helpful than I thought. Yeah. Yeah. And being primed to hear the call when it shows up, oh, this is my work. Oh, for me. Thank you. Okay. So when lawyers and scholars come to you what's a typical, I need help, this is what's going on. Story that you hear.

I'll start with scholars on the Scholar, and it's I'm on the tenured track teaching a bazillion i'm teaching I'm often the clients I work with, they're being pulled every which way because they're often women of the global majority, so they're being pulled in every [00:23:00] direction about service.

Trying to get the scholarship done. They are trying really hard to get the scholarship done and they do it, but it often comes at a high cost for themselves. Yep. And so that so it's that trifecta of that people show up to me with lawyers. It's really interesting. I, I have a coach and I don't work with coaches who don't have coaches trust.

They're not trustworthy. She was noticing, she's I don't think lawyers are buying wellness. And much to my chagrin, I had to say, I think you're right. And it's true, they won't buy wellness. They understand the importance of it, but they won't buy it. So when I start talking about how to make sure that you're hitting your billable hours or building a book of business, they're like, huh, that's interesting.

Let's talk. I'm like, you're not buying wellness. But they don't buy the wellness. But if you ask them how they're doing, I'm really anxious all the [00:24:00] time. I can't focus, I do think way more people are neuro spicy than we top two and I. Like the ways that the profession has us being like, of course we're super anxious and of course we can't figure out how to see no to people like it's us, all the things.

So those are the, that it's actually, it's the same, I don't know, can I say cluster Fuck here. It's the same of things for both groups that they're showing up with, right? One with one with, I have to publish to get tenure. The other one with, I have to get enough hours to make my firm survive, to hit partner.

It's the same thing. And how do I do this without, I don't know that they know it, but it's and you could hear the. And how do I not throw myself, how do I do this without falling apart? But they're not, but so the language that the lawyer uses isn't I need to be well in order to do my work.

No, not at all. Though. You and I might agree that what they're saying is I need to be well in order to, it's I'm like, I [00:25:00] know sweetheart, we're gonna calm you nervous system first. That's cute. Okay. We're gonna call, oh, and you said call your nervous system. You do tapping, right? I do tapping.

Yes. Yes. It's a, so I don't think ever on this podcast I've talked much about EFT. I'm gonna give you a few minutes to just teach us what EFT is. 'cause I know it. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Oh, it's like, all right, so this is what was my, what was I doing with my life before this tool? It's one of those tools, but it literally is tapping on acupuncture points around the face, the hands, and the torso while saying the thing you don't like.

So that you can actually pull yourself out of fight, flight or freeze. And to say more. And so the bottom line is when let's before we lived in the concrete jungle of New York City, for example, that I live in you would, we would hunt and gather our food. Okay? We're talking way back, right?

And you would see, oh, wild [00:26:00] boar good. That could serve that could feed us for months, right? You see the boar, see what's happening is your bo your the amygdala, which is a small pea size part of your brain, is making sure that you have enough cortisol and adrenaline flowing through your system so you can get up and get the boar.

And you're also scared, right? Grab the spear tusks and he's gonna get you. Exactly. So you grab the spear, you're running to get the boar, and you're hiding, you're dishing, and then you're like, then you kill the thing, right? And then you dress the boar, right? It's a big thing. I've never seen one in person, but I'm sure it's a hundred, it's a couple hundred pounds.

300, yeah. At a minimum, right? So you dress the boar, you get the meat you do the things and you come back and you go, here's dinner. But what has happened in that time, right? You got the adrenaline in the cortisol and you physically burned that off. You physically ran it through, you ran it through your body, right?

When dogs get stressed, they shake, right? Yeah. And they run that stress through their body. We don't do that. We get an email and [00:27:00] we go, and I promise, and, look, email me at info@resistantvision.com if I am wrong about this. But I promise you do not run around the block when you get that email.

I, I will guarantee a hundred percent. That's not what you do. Because that would actually, and it's, I'm not, that's not a judgment, right? It's just how we, it's we don't work that way. Don't work that way. Don't work out. You, if you ran around the block after you got that email, you come back and you go, okay, I got this.

But what's happening does, oh, and all that running off just lowers the adrenaline, it lowers the cortisol and what's hap and the prob and the challenge for human beings is if we're not burning it off in that way it on the good end of it, it upsets our sleep cycles. We and I talked about this in my story, right?

You can't wake up in the morning and you can't go to sleep at night, so you're really backwards. But that's one possibility. You get that tire in the middle of your body because that's because your body's collecting fat because it's expensive. You that's cortisol, right?

All those, that's corti. [00:28:00] This is all cortisol. Cortisol out in your system. Exactly. We have to be ready to fight the tiger. Exactly. Exactly. Tiger. Tiger's right there all the time. You're inflamed. So like you might experience that with pain. And pain in your joints are all over the place. And there are many, and I could go on and on about cortisol is actually very useful, but it can't be, it can't be coursing through your veins all the time.

It's useful in that we spike, it spikes in our bodies when we need it for something. Exactly. Exactly. And it gets up in the morning, right? Yeah. But the need should help us then regulate it back to its baseline level as opposed to staying spike, keeping it really high. Which is the phenomenon that I think we're so much more attuned to now, but back to EFT in the magic, right?

So you do, so what EFT does, instead of running around the block, you talk about, okay, even though I hate this person I'm open to possibility that yeah, I can get this done hate the person or hate the person. Hate the person, hate the right. Like it, and yeah, [00:29:00] notice you like it, it might take a few rounds, but, oh.

You can actually feel, and when I'm actually working with clients, I can feel their energy level just, yeah, like down, downgrade downshifts. And then they're like, oh, I, there one woman I was working with and she was saying, I have five contracts to review today. I'm going to a con, I'm going to a com.

A board meeting in Canada, and there was something else. It was so stressful listening to her and we just tapped. I was like, okay, I got five contracts, five contracts, five. And I could actually feel her downshift. And she was like, oh, I have time to do this afternoon. That's the beauty of it.

And it doesn't seem, it may not seem like a lot to people, but when you can actually go, oh wait, there's a different way. Yeah, there's another way to do this. That's the gold, that's why we need this tool, right? And it lowers those cortisol levels in our body. So you can go, okay, what's actually necessary right now?

What do I, we can prioritize things for ourselves instead of letting other people do it. Yeah. And [00:30:00] that is the magic of it, actually. And it helps get, it helps, it can help with many aches and pains. If I wake up in the morning with a headache, I tap for a few times, it's gone. I can use it to take myself out of a move myself to a different gear before I go to sleep at night.

Like I do that. So it's really, I, like I said, I don't know what I've been doing all my life without Lunchable. My, my go-to tool is meditation, which has a lot of the same effects. Yes. I have a local colleague, co coach colleague here in Edmonton, who's, who does tapping and teaches tapping and, she's, we were talking about it once and she said it is one of the only things I know of that can change your mindset and outlook like in the moment. Like you can interrupt while it's happening and you can use meditation too. But that seems to be for a lot of people a steeper learning curve because it's stop and we think of meditation as [00:31:00] concentrating, even though it doesn't have to be right.

But stop and do the thing where, because the spots are it's, I like browse sides of the eye underneath the eye, above the lip, above the chin collar, bones under the arm. Top of the head. Top of your head. And the side of hand too. Right above the hand. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So it's a pattern and. And so if you, and do you, anyway, I know people anyway, who, when they're stressed, like they'll put our hands are drawn to our faces in moments of stress.

And so Exactly like if your head hurts and you're doing this oh, there's a cue to go. There's an ac, there's an Accu case sucks, this sucks. This really sucks. This super sucks. I'm feeling shitty here all the time. And just doing that. And the bilateral stimulation, there's a book called Tapping In that I read not too long ago.

That is it spends a little bit of time on EFT, but it makes it even simpler. Like [00:32:00] just, anything where you are working, both sides of your body's meridian can be regulated. Exactly. And we are better problem solvers when we are regulated. Exactly. Exactly. And that's the key. And maybe the, and the solution, the problem might be like.

Damn, I'm tired. I need to go to sleep. Good. That was, that's what you, that's what we got out of that. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it's my love. Okay. It's my love. And I use, and I use it to help people. The other thing is that I love coaching. I love helping people strategize and plan. I am all over that.

The problem is when people won't do the plan, and it's not, again, this is not 'cause people are bad or stupid or something. No. We all have places of resistance. Then I whip out, we aft. It's like, all right, so we're resistant. I don't wanna write, I don't wanna write when we're just gonna tap on it.

And then you're gonna, oh, you know what I remember when I was working with a woman and she talked about how her, she talked about the, like a specific incident was [00:33:00] her graduation party and her advisor said to her, it's amazing you got through this. I might not wanna tap. I might not wanna it might be hard for me to write if I have that in my head and fuck you to that advisor that I got, I'm gonna get that in on, on her behalf.

But we tapped on that. We we went through it and we tapped through the whole incident. She's oh, get on with writing. You can work through that resistance with things in the moment. Like you don't have to set aside time to do it. Exactly. It's an in the moment. In the moment. I have a new lawyer who he's trying to figure out how to become partner and I'm just like, first we're still get you in your body.

You have a bo we're just gonna tap on whatever's going on in your body and you have a body. Oh. And that is a major learning point for a lot of people in, for those of us who have these intellect, highly intellectual. [00:34:00] Jobs. We have I, I had a client, an academic client who was just a wreck.

She came to me, she was sobbing. 'cause she's trying, trying to do all the things. I'm like, I'm just gonna touch the points and breathe. I, we didn't tap on a single, but I was like, we didn't like tap. Wait. I was like, we're just gonna touch and breathe. And she's this is the first time I could feel my feet on the ground in days.

Yeah. Whole body, right? We'll just start there. Yeah. And I will say like my own journey as a coach started from a very sort of intellectual problem solving sort of place. I. Like I was at a career pivot. I worked with co two different coaches at one point. Both each of them told me, you should really look at coaching.

It fits the way you work. Your personality. So I dove into it. But in my coach training, we did one of our immersive weekends involved a lot of sort of body work. And I was sitting on the perimeter of the group with another woman very similar to me. And we were literally [00:35:00] both sitting with our arms crossed, our shoulders hunched, our brows furrowed I don't know what the fuck this is, but I don't think it's me like you.

Like you Hold on a second. You are telling me that I'm gonna sit back to back with somebody and we're gonna sense one another's movements. What sort of woowoo mumbo jumbo weirdo abs of freaking No. I was just not having it at all and, and it was certainly when I entered the coaching space that I heard all of these things about like, where do you feel that in your body?

I'm like, what are you talking about? It is here, up here between my eyebrows. I don't feel crap in my body. Literally, I remember the day it was, I hate to say this, it was like five years ago. Yeah. When all of a sudden it all clicked. I was like, oh, that's where I feel that in my body. So like the journey to being a fully embodied [00:36:00] adult.

Mine might have been rockier than some others, but I think that's actually fairly typical. That's, I think that in these professions where your body is just the meat sack that takes you to meetings and your critical thinking apparatus is all anybody wants. And all you feel valued for becoming embodied is hard work and your body is where the emotions are stored.

Oh gosh. It has data and if you work with that data, you will make better decisions. There's actually, I was, you said that, and there are a couple things. In law firms the really big law firms here in the states, the women who are like mid-level, they often call them ATMs because they're the people who bill the hours that it's disgusting.

Like I'm not, I'm like, it is disgusting, but they're the women who bill the hours that bring in the revenue for the firm. And they don't really want them to move to partner. They want them to keep billing the hours. So that says something about how like determine they are to keep a goal in their heads without flowing their bodies.

But the other thing is there are a couple books that [00:37:00] are really amazing. One of them is My Grandmother's Hands, which actually talks about how racism. He's writing actually to a white audience, although there's lots of really useful stuff. But how racism lodges itself as hurts in your body.

It's not just a, it's not an intellectual pursuit, it's in your body. But I think a lot of that work it pairs really well with a book called Your Body Keeps the Score. Yes. Yeah. All your, like all of these histories, all of these really hard things. Find places to to really, to again, lodge themselves in your body.

And it's hard. It's hard. It's, it can be very hard to go, they're the obvious things. I've done workshops, I'm like, we're just gonna do, when I'm introducing EFT to people, I often will do we're just gonna figure out how much rotation we have in our neck. And we'll tap on that.

And people are like, okay, that is crazy. Like that actually. And people feel, they feel things that they didn't really, there's oh, there's that pain. It's gone. But like this stuff lodges, [00:38:00] it finds places in our bodies to lodge themselves. Yeah. And once you know that, you know where the, it will make perfect sense to you.

I know my partner is under stress. I know which part of his body hurts. When he starts talking about back pain. I'm like, okay. He's stressed. For me, it is it's my throat. I get my adjustments tight. Yeah. From like my cheek bones to my clavicles. All of that gets really tight.

And I will have dreams where I wake myself up because I'm trying to scream. Now, this is not comforting, but like those are signs. Oh, okay. Something's going on. But connecting that to how do I work with my body exactly. To get myself into a place where I can do the work that's important to me. That is intellectual work.

But you are not actually just a meat sack with a brain attached. You're not a stick. Exactly. [00:39:00] Exactly. And I, and it doesn't, I don't care what the modalities, I actually, I meditate too. I do transcendental meditation. Yeah. And, but like I don't really care what it is. Whatever time we can actually get to yeah.

Oh, look at that. You can do the thing that gets you back to your body. Your mind doesn't work without the rest of your body. It just doesn't. Yeah. Which, and there is increasing research to show, like there are neurons. In your cardiac system and in your gut that send more information to your brain than the other way around.

Exactly. Oh, the gut's off. And it's the heart and the gut that exactly. There is intelligence there. The same kinds of cells that are in our brain and they communicate information back. So like to cut them off and say, no, I'm just working with my rational mind and my emotions and my aches and pains and my fears and my joys.

All of those things are like not [00:40:00] have no bearing on the work I'm doing. That's. Please continue to try that. Your body will at some point. It'll give out. It'll completely give out. Yeah. It's not gonna be pretty. It's a, it's, yeah. Yeah. It will. You will pay for it. And I think we are paying for it.

You and I are roughly, I would imagine the same sort of gen XY kind of age. Yeah, exactly. Looking around at women our age going, oh yeah, we're all paying for something right now. Exactly. Exactly. For the body image that you can have it all the gifted and talented programs of the seventies and eighties that just took autistic and A DHD kids and That's right.

Isn't no weird. It's true. The bigger messes, we're all, and it's, and again, the stuff isn't our fault. Like I don't want we are not to blame in any way, shape, or form for that. And it's wrecking havoc. Yeah. It's fucking on us. Absolutely, it is definitely [00:41:00] wrecking habit.

You have said twice something about systems. Yes. And so I wanna talk to you about systems coaching, but also there's something else you said about like those ATM mid-tier lawyers. Yes. Yes. Global hours. I just wanna draw a connection. I have a fair number of clients who are in the sciences and I was just at university of Pittsburgh School of Medicine at a wellness convening for their research scientists where they're actually talking about wellbeing and trying to figure out and define what wellbeing looks like and right to track and support, to support researcher wellbeing.

This notion of literally earning your keep through, in the case of lawyers billable hours. But in the case of scientists through grants. Grants, yes. And now what is happening to the grants environment in the United States?

I'm gonna take a deep breath and not go there because that will derail this conversation and I will begin [00:42:00] frothing at the mouth. But the expectation, because I have yet to see at least announced anywhere publicly that a research institution has said, given the uncertainty, given this current climate around, especially NIH grants being pulled back, being delayed, not being funded, we are taking measures to address things like promotion and tenure, things like salary expectations and covering salary.

No, we haven't said, did we? So everything's incredibly uncertain. You may not be able to cover 80% of your salary Exactly, but we are not going to adjust our expectations. Of you Asem, because it's that, it's the what are they called? The secondaries. The, oh, the second tertiary and secondary and tertiary institutions.

No the fees that are at the core of this argument can't remember what they're called. I don't know what, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, we'll just call that [00:43:00] menopause bog, like zap. There goes that idea, that word outta my head. The fee, the fees that the research office collects in addition to the grant money in order to keep the university running.

That's what this is all about, right? So we're talking about populations of people whose intellectual work is actually building the institutions and organizations they work for maybe without direct benefit to them. Exactly. Gosh, this feels so good. I feel so fulfilled. I am getting to do my best work and being recognized in the best way for it.

Like it, it can get into that sort of grind of grant applications much in the way that a lawyer can get into the grind of Bill blah. Of Bill. Exactly. So where's the joy? Where's the fulfillment? Where's like publications on the humanity side, right? It's the same. The same, and it was fun the first couple times and after a decade you're like this is what I do.

I'm a grant machine. Oh, huh. Maybe I'm not quite as thrilled with that as I used [00:44:00] to be. Talk, so maybe this is where systems come in. Maybe systems aren't the magic bullet, but tell me what, when you talk to people about systems, what does that look like? So when I talk to scholars about systems I'm, I have Fallen Madly in Love with Wendy Belcher's book 12 Weeks.

Yes. It's a system for writing. So you don't have to sit there and go write five paragraphs, delete six of 'em. You don't have to do, you don't have to be in that process. It's do this. Okay. And you actually, and you can figure out where you are in the process. And you can actually, and I wouldn't have published post Postgraduation without that book because I was just copy editing the article over and over again. I wasn't, I was like, I wasn't clear about the argument. I was like, all of the things that, that she goes through, like that's the system that I work with scholars on. And they'll say, but I can't. It's so Bel chapter five, they're like, oh, oh, Offy pop. But and again, it's I think, I think we go through these programs and with writing and these professors we work with, they're like, you have it in [00:45:00] your, dont let me get my fortune ball and see if you have it. You don't. Alright. And that's not writing, you're actually not teaching writing, you're not teaching how to do this writing. And it's a learned skill. It's something else like it. This is a learned skill. You don't come in the world knowing how to do it. You learn the skill. Yeah. And you a community around you to write and that's why you need community to write.

Thank you so much for saying that. Like community is, and I think Okay, we need community. You just said that, what I tell myself, like the story I've been working with for a while, and I'd be really interested to see if this resonates with you at all, is that for academics in particular, and I come from the humanities, you come from the humanities.

And so this where we don't have labs, we don't have big groups of people who are co-creating a project. Exactly. We're solo. Guys, often our [00:46:00] libraries doing our thing. That coupled with sort of the general academic armoring, if we wanna use Brene Brown's word, like the Absolutely.

I need to make sure that not only my arguments, but I as a person and like bulletproof, there are no holes, there are no weaknesses in my argument, in my presentation, in my professionalism. Like I'm just bulletproof. That, that breeds a kind of isolation that we can again, wake up one day and go, wow. I feel very alone in my work.

But it also then makes finding community hard. 'cause community demands a little bit of vulnerability, a little bit of openness that I just, I feel that too vulnerable to do. Yeah. A certain version of academia just doesn't. Recognize vulnerability as in any way, shape, or form useful. And I know that law's gotta be very much the same.

Very much like that. I will say this, I think this is why scholars [00:47:00] are hungry for things like writing retreats, right? It's a, it gives you a chance to, and I don't think they know this, but when scholars get together, they go, oh, you too. Yeah. Oh, you too, right? Oh, you don't? Yeah, I'm not myself.

We're all miserable. Exactly. Oh, you don't know how to pop an argument outta here. Okay. I don't either. We'll gonna do this together. Yes. I've been doing some like department retreats and planning sessions and whatnot. And so I'll meet with a small group of people. We'll come up with the agenda.

And they an and I asked them, what sort of pushback are you anticipating? Are there, things we need to keep in mind or that I need to be prepared for as a facilitator? And the last couple I've held, I've had co-organizers come up to me afterwards going that went so much better than I expected.

Yeah. [00:48:00] Because fundamentally, like everybody wants to be seen as a person. Everybody wants to be heard. If we give people opportunities to be heard and seen, we will see so much commonality. But when we walk around armored up, we can't see it. All tense. No, you're not gonna notice that other people might also be absolutely struggling.

I've been doing lots of presentations of bar associations and can see lawyers are like when someone else works in front of the room I tap with them. They're like, oh, I feel different now too. Oh, I had that in my head too, you did because we're have to be stuck with it by yourself. Yeah. Before we got on the call, I was telling you about my yoga retreat in Costa Rica with Dr.

Raquel Reitmeyer, who I have a episode of the podcast with several weeks back. We talked about yoga and resistance and transformation and wow, it was magical. But [00:49:00] that retreat was almost exclusively academics, which was the interesting thing. And there was a doctor, there's an engineer, and then, scientist in a lab sociologist administrator, me doing my thing.

Sociologist who then became a grants like nonprofit grants person. So all with current or past really deep academic backgrounds. And it was, we did not talk about work. It was manageable, right? But to have this space where we could do things that we knew would send us back into the real world, a little bit more resourced in a place where even though everybody had a PhD or an md, we're just like, oh yeah.

So today we're gonna work on down dog,

But here's what yoga does, right? Because I actually, I, I worked, a friend of mine is a yoga instructor and I was like, let's do one-on-one work for a month. But here's, so here's the thing with [00:50:00] yoga, you cannot be in your head and do it uhuh. It is unforgiving. It is completely unforgiving that way.

And down dog looks simple. If you're not paying attention to what? Shoulders back, get the hips up. Then Yeah, I have the tension between the hips and then the heels trying to touch the ground. It's it like the pulling, pulling the banda, right? Like it's just it's what are your ribs doing?

When was the last time you thought about what your ribs were doing? It's like ribs. I, I remember doing this and I, it's like my my, but it's not like I hadn't been doing yoga for years with my body aches when I was just working with him. I was in good, in a good way, right? Yeah. I joked with him.

I said, I have too many muscles, and they all hurt, right? And the instruction to like, what is your pinky finger doing? What is your pinky toe doing? Where are your ribs? I remember the very first time I went to a yoga class, I came home and I was like, oh my gosh, the whole house could burn down and I wouldn't care.

And it was be, and I was in grad school and I think it was because it was the first time in forever, my brain had to [00:51:00] shut up because it was busy figuring out like how to hold that hip in that spot. And that was all I could focus on. And what a relief to like. Exactly. Not have to be your intellectual processes for a hot second, right?

No. That is one practice that'll short circuit that stuff like this. Yep. Yeah. If there's an area pose you can access up here. Yeah, you can. Or as, as I, when I talk with my clients about embodiment, I'm like, I have some books in the basement on yoga postures and I could do one of those little yoga stick figure drawings of the crow.

I cannot, however drop into the crow right now because it's not about what I know. It's about what my body can do and those different thing. Exactly. Very different things. But we have, but again, it's like back to the body. Back to the body, back to the body. I love that. In a okay meditation, EFT [00:52:00] yoga, what else do you do as a solopreneur to, to keep yourself.

Okay. If anybody's watching on the video, Sadie has joined the chat. My 1-year-old miniature dachshund puppy has decided that she needs cuddles and so she has jumped up on my lap. Oh. And now she's given a big yawn and some gross little puppy kisses. Okay. So this is one of the things I do to keep me sane, is I have to walk her every day.

Yes. So I have to get outside into the real world, even when it is raining buckets to give her some exercise. Looks like we're about to get a dose of rain here too. So you, what else do I do as a entrepreneur? I planning is, this can be the, all right I'll do the not boring and then I'll do the boring.

The not boring is tarot reading. Ooh. Yeah. I like to, I pull cards every day just to see I see, okay, that's what the cards say. I do my day and then I come back and see how much of a rhyme there is. And there often is a really oatmeal rhyme, so that's [00:53:00] fun. But I also, but planning is such a huge part of it.

Like I do Sunday, Sundays, I sit down plan. I always think this is so basic. Don't people know this? And then you're like, you start talking to people. I'm like. Lawyers. I'm like, you don't plan. I have worked with people who don't have practice without planning your work. I don't understand this. I've worked with people who don't use a calendar.

Michelle, I don't even, I just first, like you expect your brain to hold. That i's we can do that, but why? We have all these this is a good thing for the gadgets. Let them do the work. Okay. But but planning's a huge, so Sundays I sit down and go, what can I do given my calendar?

So I don't put 30 things on my calendar 'cause I don't have time for 30 things. Yeah. I have the top three priorities and I plan that and then each would, within my day, I will schedule the, I will block the time and the day when I'm gonna do that. And that. I don't know how one would entrepreneur without that.

It was very I have a talk on Saturday. I sat down today and I was like, you're gonna work on that talk at this [00:54:00] time? Yeah. That's what you're doing. And it's great. And I know what's gonna get done and now it's done and I can practice it with somebody. That's it. Yeah.

So planning is planning is everything for me. I started a really I don't wanna say rigid 'cause that implies unfun, but a very in-depth planning process. A couple years ago when I began work working with Rachel Cook, who's a business coach for female entrepreneurs. And she has a planner system that's part of her 90 day planning cycle.

And I. I dove in, I was like, okay, we're gonna do this. And it made a huge difference in my ability to set goals of the right size and then map out when I was gonna do them. But I'd been doing it for a couple years. I was like, okay, I got this down. Like I don't need to sit. You're gonna laugh. I don't need to sit down and do the process because I have it up here.

Exactly that. And then all of a sudden we were several months into 2025, and I'm like, where's my brain? [00:55:00] Oh. Oh, it's in the empty planner. I'm not using. Oh just things that I wasn't paying attention to or didn't know. And I was relying on like mountains of little scraps of paper and an ongoing list in Google.

I'm like, oh, you know better, Jennifer. So yes, back to my calendar, has appointments in it. I have other commitments. Where do they get put? How far in advance can I generally map and then week by week nail that down? Yeah, I actually my coach is Monica Shaad. She has her own planner too. And yeah, I sit down like every day.

I've been doing it for years 'cause my brain likes it, likes that kind of structure and it's get the stuff in there, put it, it's like that. And I just, it's and I feel like I'm, I think I'm getting more realistic about what I can do and what I can't do. Something. And this is another thing where I think that our lives as entrepreneurs map onto a lot of [00:56:00] scholars lives that I know just 'cause you can't do it doesn't mean you have to.

Once you're at a level of success, can you also stop working all the time? Just because it's a nice thing to do to yourself. Exactly. I actually, so the other I, there's, I'm a very, I'm actually quite woo. I I work with these populations for all their head, but there's a real oo for me, and I am in love with pendulums, right?

So I take the pendulum and it like, and it's should I do X, Y, or Z? It'll tell me an answer. And it's okay, we're not gonna do that. Should I do this? Yes. Okay. And I and so I actually don't have to do sip, I don't have decision fatigue because the pendulum's enough of touch with me that I can actually go, oh, no.

Yes. No. Yes. Okay, good. I love the woo and I really, I wanna appreciate our millennial sisters who have Yes. Come out really loud and open with witchy woo stuff because I was raised an evangelical Christian as I was too. Oh [00:57:00] my god. Wish. That's all trauma bonding. And so when I turned my back on that, it was just all academics all the time.

And, whether it is yoga and medi and meditation and sort of eastern spirituality or different sorts of alternative modalities or witch or whatever you wanna call it, or even like earth and cycle based things like these are all systems that humanity has had forever for helping us.

Do what we wanna do in the world or see what we need to see in the world. Exactly. And so thank you for bringing the woowoo into it because I

I love it. And my tendency is still to want to intellectualize everything and I have to just let myself play with other modalities that are like, oh, this, what if it could be fun? What if it didn't have to be sadly curious. Exactly. Exactly. And like I said, what I love about the woo part of it is that [00:58:00] it takes away the decision fatigue.

'cause that's what happens with us. You have, we make any number of decisions in any period of time. And for someone, something to go. No. It's thank you. Thank you. I'll run with that. I feel a little bit more space in my brain. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. And at the end of the day, you will have still gotten done what you needed to get done.

Exactly. I love that. Yeah. You have the exact amount of thing you need to get done. Beautiful. So if people are interested in following your work, following you, getting on your newsletter, figuring out what you do in the world, first of all, I love the name of your business, resistant Vision. Thank you.

Thank you. That says a great deal to people who are paying attention. So Michelle Thompson, resistant vision, but how would they find you? What do you want people to look at? What do you want them to know? Oh I have, I think you guys sent the Rain way. I'm just gonna let you know it's raining. May you pull the air down.

Go to resistant vision.com. I have a blog there. And and it there's the standard stuff that you'd expect. And my last one was about the Beyonce concert that I saw, [00:59:00] and which has to do with black radical. But because I that's how I chew on things. So you'll find all sorts of things in the blog.

You can follow me on Blue Sky. It's Misti, M-I-C-H-D-I-O-N-N-E is my handle on Blue Sky. You can find me on YouTube Resistant Vision. And if you're a scholar who needs to get something written, I'm writing a writing retreat. You can find, if you go to, if you take two you go ahead and email me at info@resistantvision.com, I'd be happy to send you information about it.

It's at the end of July and it's gonna be an Adirondacks in New York. Yeah, and once you get there, what you're paying is gonna cover all the thoughts. Spilled water there. Okay. It's gonna cover all the things, your accommodation, your food. Nice. Yeah it's like all of it and like real.

And we're gonna implement the we're gonna implement the Belcher system and we'll use EFT because y'all gonna be worked [01:00:00] up by the time you get there. We're going to get you to write, we bring you back down from the travel headache. Oh, that's such a good step. Yeah, I have to go to Florida in July.

I'm gonna, that's, I need to remember tapping. 'cause I do it, I just don't do it enough. Exactly. And the other part is this, I'm doing it at the very end of July because I know what happens. You go, the summer's gone. I didn't get anything done. And then, you know what's gonna happen in August, you're gonna start class prepping and you're gonna forget that you had a writing project.

So we're gonna actually just get that last Yeah. Rah in for your project. So yeah. I, those are the ways that, those are it. That's it. I've actually social media and I have. I got kicked off on LinkedIn, but that's a whole other conversation. You can find that story on my blog. Nosy problem. Yeah.

Yeah, please do. But yeah, like those are the places. Okay, great. I will make sure that all of those are linked in the resources for this podcast, which will come out. I don't know. Before your retreat though, I'm almost positive, excellent. [01:01:00] Okay. Thank you so much for spending time with me today, Michelle.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. It was lovely. And what a beautiful dog. My sister has dachshund, so I just I just love that. Yeah, there she's 10 pounds of sass and attitude and snuggles. That was like a of, yeah, depending on like right now, very snugly. If she wanted me to play with her or feed her, she would be out at my feet going, ha.

Oh yeah. That's amazing. You make and yes, kisses. Thank you so much. Lots of kisses. Yeah. Dos and kisses. So for those of you who have tuned in, either on YouTube or on the podcast, thank you so much for being with us. I will put in the notes how to reach out to Michelle, but it's at resistant vision.com.

That'll probably send you lots of places. And again, thank you so much for letting us be in your ears. And Michelle, thank you so much for spending time with us. Thanks for having me.

Hello everybody and welcome back to the [01:02:00] Mindful Academy. I am Jennifer Askey, your coach, and today I am here with my colleague Michelle Thompson, Esquire. There are two titles there. We'll get into that. Michelle is a coach who helps academics publish for tenure and promotion, put all of those things together, but she does all sorts of other things too.

She's based in New York, right? I didn't make that up. And and I'm in Edmonton, so it's hot and muggy where she is and it's raining buckets where I am. But we're gonna let her tell us a little bit about what she does and then I will begin grilling her in the way that my interviews are hard nosed, grilling of.

Professionals who help academics. Michelle first of all, hello and thank you so much for being here. Thank you. And hello. And thank you for having me. Thank I I'm honored to be here. This is gonna be a fun conversation. When you introduce yourself and your work to people, what do you say? [01:03:00] I tell them I am a coach who I do two things.

And it depends on the audience, right? For many people, I tell them I help lawyers, I help women lawyers build a book of business and their billable hours without abandoning their friends, family, and their health. That's one version. And then when I'm talking to scholars I tell them and I hate the way I'm saying this.

It's like I tell them this, but I don't really just know I really do these things. I help women's scholars publish for tenure promotion grants and raises without abandoning their health sanity. And the people they love. Yeah. Health sanity and the people you love. Life should come first and in academia we're certainly, yeah.

I think it's very context dependent, whether you're in an environment where people acknowledge that you might have commitments other than the life of the mind. And although my familiarity with [01:04:00] law is limited but growing and I can tell you a bit about that. Yeah. The stories about, the billable hours and the crazy weeks and all of that are certainly a part of culture.

What do you see as the connection between your two audiences when it comes to the way they approach work or the challenges that they come to you with? 'cause they're obviously very connected. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think. Part, I'm both of those people, right? I am, I practice law. I'm still licensed and I am a scholar, right?

However, they are now, aside from literally being in my body, the same person, they're actually the same person They are, they are. And it's and we don't think of ourselves, lawyers don't think of themselves as having similar interests to academics. And academics don't think of themselves as having similar interests in lawyers, primarily because of the revenue the income that lawyers bring in, right?

Like scholars don't make anywhere near as much. However the ways in which [01:05:00] both people are driven, absolutely driven. The ways in which both professions, both sets of professionals, particularly if you are assigned female birth or female identifying are trained to please, and I don't mean that in the demeaning way that people say that.

About people pleasing, but we are trained to be on this earth to make other people happy. We do that and I think that drives the overwork. I, it's a combination of that and the and again, this is across both professions, the ways that we feel like we shouldn't be there or we're lucky.

Wow. Geez. That, that worked out. We can't adopt oh my goodness. Got a job. Holy cow. How dare I appreciate, how dare I push back? How dare I ask for? Exactly. All of those things are the ball of mess that we both, both lawyers and scholars bring to their work. Yeah. And. It becomes, it makes it really challenging to do the things that we wanna do.

And [01:06:00] that's the kind of, that's where we sacrifice ourselves at the alter productivity. And that's actually where we don't build the systems that we need to do the things that we need to do to make things happen in both of those fascists. Because we don't, we think it's we have to do what they tell us.

And it's you have to create a system to do the things that are necessary for the work so you can get out of the office, tend to your health, have a baby, I don't know, have a good night of sex, whatever it is. You actually have to have the systems that allow you to do that.

Yeah. I have a former client who is an academic administrator, so former professor now working in administration. And we were talking about this phenomenon and the language that we hit upon in our conversation is this notion of having to earn your keep. Yes. Oh, do I like, may like they let me in, but I have to keep proving that I deserve to be here by earning my keep.

Yeah, no, you have the degree, you have the license. You're [01:07:00] done. You're done. You have, you may have to learn, there might be a learning curve that, but you're right. But that's the other thing is that if you've made it through the JD or the PhD, or in your case both, like you obviously can learn.

Exactly. Just like here's, there's not, I have no other skill. It's that, okay, here's a pile of paper. Read it, ingest it, do something. Produce something new. That's essentially what we've been trained. So yeah, the learning curve might be there, but that is well within everybody's capabilities once they've made it.

To this point and hopefully too yeah, earning your keep pleasing. Being amenable, right? Yes. I don't wanna be difficult. Exactly. You need that. Okay. Now, okay, sure. No, no [01:08:00] problem.

What were your priorities for the day? Was that on that list? Yeah. Yeah. Your email inbox is generally other people's to-do lists that have been dropped on your doorstep. Exactly. Yeah, when I think about the number of stories I have heard, and also stories I have experienced myself, where women in an academic department, they look around at, there's a call for volunteers for committee work.

Or annual committee assignments, however your institution does it, and or for mentoring students or being open for student advising, if that's part of the way your university does advising and there is a certain breed of white male professor who will just not do it. And I, and this is also a self-selecting audience, but like the people I come into contact with [01:09:00] are, and I work with women and men, but I come into contact with a lot of women who do the work because they look around to see that nobody else is doing it and care enough that it gets done.

That they'll be like shit, I guess I get to do this too. Exactly. And actually women actually hold those expectations of other women's scholars to do the work. I one of my scholars just been working with her for years and she just earned tenure. I, but so proud of her. Yeah, no, it's a it's huge and important, but the new department chair said, Hey, I would could you be Doug's, the director of undergraduate studies?

And she said, and she thought about it. She wanted to say no, but she said, okay, this is what I'm gonna do. And I am so proud of her for coming with this. I will do it under these conditions. I need this, and this. I was like, yes, get it. All of those things. Yes. Who asked her? Yeah.

No. The woman who asked her [01:10:00] said she didn't actually read the response and she said, you know that you need to do things like this for promotion. And so my my, my client started on a spiral and then I wrote, and I said, you said yes. You said yes with conditions. And she was like, oh Zach.

But here we have a superior trying to force people to be amenable because we expect it for you like you have with us. If you want what you want. Yeah. And the notion of pushing back or saying Sure. Under these conditions, instead of taking it on and doing a subpar job or taking it on and having your scholarship suffer, which is also something you need to do for promotion and Exactly.

And the notion that in order to succeed, you not only have to check all the boxes, but you also have to maybe check more of them than somebody down the hall. Whether that's a certain kind of academic generalizing [01:11:00] frequently a white male of a certain age, but not always. Or in, I remember in maybe more so I had a couple like visiting assistant professor jobs before I got my tenure track job.

And in, in all of those places, I think at each place I at least had one conversation. I. Where a senior scholar in my department, flat out said they would not have either gotten hired nor gotten tenure according to the standards that I was being held to. And so that was, I think that all the time with people like, with the people who are partners would never have become partners, but people who are tenured and full would never have been tenured for full based on what people are doing now.

And so what I was being held to 20 years ago also might it probably would've gotten me tenure, but would it have gotten me hired? Did I have enough? Because I only had, I think, one publication before I went on the job market, but like a generation before me, there was no expectation of publishing before [01:12:00] you got on the job market.

And now that one probably wouldn't have been enough. And so like we keep expecting more. And yeah. That burden, and as this is a whole other thing, right? As professions like lawyering, like professing have become more open to women, or in the case of a lot of academic disciplines become feminized.

It's oh, we'll just ratchet up these expectations with no awareness. That infinite growth is actually not a thing. Exactly. Infinite expansion of productivity and potential and publication like that just doesn't, that's not a thing. Not a thing. Not a thing at all. No, exactly. Systems tend to expect it.

Our organization. Exactly. And I think, it's the, I guess it's the stage of capitalism that we're in that we expect infinite growth with everything all the time. And our planet's actually telling us you don't get to infinitely grow. I can't infinitely grow. So you chill. But we refuse to listen to it. We absolutely refuse to listen to it. And that's and that [01:13:00] pressure for. Infinite growth and continual improvement on like the hockey stick graph, right? Where we're just going up up, up all the time. It's wow. That's, if we wanna talk about like why people are stressed beyond belief or why mental health problems abound in Exactly.

Faculty, staff, students. It's this notion that whatever was good in 2020 is no longer good enough in 2025. We have to do more, better, faster, cooler. Yeah, no, I wanna go take a nap just thinking about it. Exactly. An AI is not gonna fix it, right? Like a AI is not gonna get, I was at a at a wellness day for lawyers sponsored by the DC Women's Bar Association and they were talking about how there's a lot of conversations about this actually, both in law and academia, like how AI's gonna.

Help all the things. It's either gonna help or it's gonna destroy. And there's exactly, there's nobody in between. Those are [01:14:00] bizarre conversation. But they were saying, this woman was saying, I use AI to put together shopping packing list for every one of my family. And I'm sitting here in the audience thinking, but you're still the one doing the packing list.

No one else said, I don't know what to pack. Let me go to ai. They said no one else ever it was you. Like pack that allows us to continue to over overperform. Exactly. Exactly. And exponential growth, it's no. Ugh. Yuck. So lawyers and scholars come with this, the same pressures, right?

Productivity. Productivity. Now, man, exactly. And make the people who have or appear to have control over your career see you as a good colleague, good contributor, and excellent scholar, excellent researcher, excellent lawyer, [01:15:00] excellent, whatever. So they come with the same pressures. How did you, as first a lawyer and then a scholar, how did you come to this work?

Like in my case, I moved countries career, had to take a pivot and. I tried a, I tried Path B, I tried Path, and I was like, none of these feel good. I ended up working with a coach and I was like, oh wow. This is magic. This is what I need to do. What was it like for you to go from like being in it to helping people be in it?

The good question. A long path. I I practiced law. It was law. Being a lawyer was the first job out of it was the first job out of out of grad school, out of any professional school that I'd done. So I made an option. I realized that I got a text in, we need to be on Do Not disturb.

Okay, here we go. I I practiced law for two years with a not-for-profit organization that was helping people with aids, and then I [01:16:00] worked for a labor union and I love, like in this country, the United States labor is needed now more than ever, and. The ways in which we work in labor are brutal.

It's a work hard, play hard segment of the economy. And 'cause you're doing it for the workers. And that's, and it's important and we are important too, right? So I found myself working 70 to 90 hours per week. This is, 20 some years ago for 40 grand a year, and I was drink.

So my body doesn't, I learned over time I genetically don't digest caffeine well for example, if I drink caffeine, if I drink it very early in the morning for it to clear my system so I can go to sleep at night. I, I mean by early 6:00 AM so yeah, if I drink coffee at nine, forget it.

Oh wow. So I was drinking coffee to wake up. I was doing. Smoke. I was smoking for social anxiety with my colleagues in the [01:17:00] middle, in the middle of the day and just fear of oh my God, I have to do the thing, right? And I was drinking alcohol to put myself to sleep. And what I'm telling you is it's a very typical, unfortunately it's a very typical lawyer story, but actually I suspect it's fairly typical for scholars as well, right?

Lots of coffee, maybe not as much smoking, maybe more, I don't know. But and then the alcohol was settling you down. And I'm like, and I wanted to show a mom and I'm like, this is kinda a heart attack before I have a child. The rate I'm going right. So I was, I had started to think about, I was like maybe I should go to school for public health.

Or maybe I was thinking about going back to the, good earning another, as you're taking your mid-afternoon drag. Maybe I should go that's a great idea. It's much easier to study it than to handle it. Anyway, so I had that thought about, I thought I was, it was in the back of my head I had asked my mom, should I become a nurse?

My mom was a nurse. She was like, no. Alright then whatcha trying to say in retrospect such good advice, very good idea. I'm like, alright, I'm not mad. I knew I wasn't gonna be an md. I was like [01:18:00] that. Just take that one off the table. That's not gonna happen. And then I met the person I eventually married who suggested, Hey, why don't you get, why don't you go get a PhD?

And I'm like. It wasn't on my list of things to do, but why not? And I actually had, I had things I was interested in. I was like, okay, I could study, I could do some work in Jamaican history. So I followed her. We, I followed her to New York and I was doing my graduate work and she was professor, she was a full professor at different, and we went to, we were in the same school, but different schools within the same school.

So it's like never the plain chel me kind of thing. Yeah. And I graduated after 2008. The US that was, rough until mayhem, rough time, and, and. Yeah. Academic institutions are really good at going, oh, financially hard. We're gonna pay it back now. So all of the job offers all the positions that were out where they pulled them back and, four years later they still didn't come back online.

And and we know that we don't do DEI related stuff as we call it now, but we're not gonna study [01:19:00] diverse people when times are tough. We're gonna go back to foundations and fundamentals. Thank you so much for saying that. When I left, when I, and so you're, you did Jamaican history.

I studied 19th century German literature, but I didn't do canonical stuff. I did things that were written specifically for girls. I did like trashy trade literature and and I used some digital humanities tools as they were just developing very slowly at that point in time. And. I said, when, as you pair back departments, as you decrease course offerings, we're just gonna go back to the curriculum of the fifties.

Anything fun, exciting, new, like it's all gonna go back to what we consider canonical. So yeah, your research gone My research totally tangent. Exactly. And language is in general tangential. We don't do like a ish English. All of that becomes a nice to have as opposed to like foundational, critical thinking and knowing skills.

[01:20:00] So thank you for saying that, yeah. Which is madness, right? So here I am like, great. Now what? So I actually I was an adjunct professor for years and I saw that I was starting to do the same thing because in part because I was I live in New York City, I commuted to one of the boroughs, Staten Island, which is actually, I.

I may as well be going to Connecticut. If I'm gonna to Staten Island. It's really that intense commute and New Jersey. And so I'm sitting here, I'm teaching like three or four courses all over the map. I'm not, I'm like, if I'm getting 20 grand a year, I'm doing well, and now, and I have the child and I'm like and I was, yes, I was married, but I'm like, if something happened to my spouse, like what am I gonna do?

I was like, this is not workable. And I actually got to the point where I contemplated ending my life. I, it was really, it was a very low point. And I opened my and so I was start, I was like, okay that's an option. We're gonna put that to the side right now. We put that the side, thank you.

Yeah. Why do that? And I had a peer counseling group [01:21:00] that helped me really ke keep my head in the game. But I was starting to do what color is your parachute? And trying to figure out like, what are my options? I started to think about journalism, except that was going down the, oh, thank God I didn't become a journalist.

That's all I can say. All of these things that are so interesting don't pay. Oh, they don't. I was like, we're not gonna do that. But then I opened my email box and there was, and I, but I've been part of this peer counseling group for at that point, 20, 20 years, I don't know, 15 to 20 years. And I had watched how I had changed people's lives and how they changed mind, especially in that moment.

Yeah. It was like, wow. This is great and it's volunteer. It would be nice to, I have a set of skills that would be great to use, but it would be nice if we could pay for them, wouldn't it? Something. Oh, something. So I actually, I had that thought and I opened my email box and there was an email saying, we're giving away scholarships to learn how to become a coach.

And I was like, I don't know what that is [01:22:00] exactly, but I think that's what I'm looking for. And yes, I will apply. And it turns out that person who ran that program had been in this peer counseling community before. So he like immediately approved the application for, because he knew what you were coming in with.

Yes, exactly. He knew the skill, skillset. And I was like, and I never looked back. I taught for, I still taught for a while, but it wasn't just the only thing I had going on. And that, that's, that, that was the huge pivot that, that was like the huge pivot where I'm like, okay, that this is what I'm doing.

This is, yeah, this is what I'm called to do and this feels good. And. I don't have to write for, publish a book for tenure, and I don't have to become a partner. This is great. This is, I'm here for this and it, but it means I can still write, I can still publish, I can still, I can do the things I wanna do on my own time and yeah, it might be damn slow.

And who cares? It's my time. And again, you're not ha, the only person now you need to [01:23:00] please is hopefully yourself and hopefully you're a great boss. I find that sometimes I'm not the world's greatest boss for me. Every once in a while I look at my calendar, I was like, who's responsible for this?

Who stick this nonsense? Like I need to have a word with, I need to have word with management. Oh shit, I'm management. For a little inside baseball. Where did you do your coach training? Because I'm nosy. Mentor coach is what I called. Okay. Yeah. I think that's where Jen Polk did hers too. I think you're right.

Yeah. They're really good with connecting with scholars. Like they had, I actually, I came to them because they had one of their coaches helped people finish their dissertations and so they would send emails and so I was getting those emails all the time. And so I was on with, when they were rolling out their new cohort of coaches.

Isn't it interesting how whether it's the peer counseling or having gotten the, let me help you finish your [01:24:00] dissertation, things like all of these little pebbles that were maybe Yes. Laying out part of a path that pointed you in a certain direction. Absolutely. And you don't know it, you don't know at the time.

That was, that was way more helpful than I thought. Yeah. Yeah. And being primed to hear the call when it shows up, oh, this is my work. Oh, for me. Thank you. Okay. So when lawyers and scholars come to you what's a typical, I need help, this is what's going on. Story that you hear.

I'll start with scholars on the Scholar, and it's I'm on the tenured track teaching a bazillion i'm teaching I'm often the clients I work with, they're being pulled every which way because they're often women of the global majority, so they're being pulled in every direction about service.

Trying to get the scholarship done. They are trying really hard to get the scholarship done and [01:25:00] they do it, but it often comes at a high cost for themselves. Yep. And so that so it's that trifecta of that people show up to me with lawyers. It's really interesting. I, I have a coach and I don't work with coaches who don't have coaches trust.

They're not trustworthy. She was noticing, she's I don't think lawyers are buying wellness. And much to my chagrin, I had to say, I think you're right. And it's true, they won't buy wellness. They understand the importance of it, but they won't buy it. So when I start talking about how to make sure that you're hitting your billable hours or building a book of business, they're like, huh, that's interesting.

Let's talk. I'm like, you're not buying wellness. But they don't buy the wellness. But if you ask them how they're doing, I'm really anxious all the time. I can't focus, I do think way more people are neuro spicy than we top two and [01:26:00] I. Like the ways that the profession has us being like, of course we're super anxious and of course we can't figure out how to see no to people like it's us, all the things.

So those are the, that it's actually, it's the same, I don't know, can I say cluster Fuck here. It's the same of things for both groups that they're showing up with, right? One with one with, I have to publish to get tenure. The other one with, I have to get enough hours to make my firm survive, to hit partner.

It's the same thing. And how do I do this without, I don't know that they know it, but it's and you could hear the. And how do I not throw myself, how do I do this without falling apart? But they're not, but so the language that the lawyer uses isn't I need to be well in order to do my work.

No, not at all. Though. You and I might agree that what they're saying is I need to be well in order to, it's I'm like, I know sweetheart, we're gonna calm you nervous system first. That's cute. Okay. We're gonna call, oh, and you said call your nervous system. [01:27:00] You do tapping, right? I do tapping.

Yes. Yes. It's a, so I don't think ever on this podcast I've talked much about EFT. I'm gonna give you a few minutes to just teach us what EFT is. 'cause I know it. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Oh, it's like, all right, so this is what was my, what was I doing with my life before this tool? It's one of those tools, but it literally is tapping on acupuncture points around the face, the hands, and the torso while saying the thing you don't like.

So that you can actually pull yourself out of fight, flight or freeze. And to say more. And so the bottom line is when let's before we lived in the concrete jungle of New York City, for example, that I live in you would, we would hunt and gather our food. Okay? We're talking way back, right?

And you would see, oh, wild boar good. That could serve that could feed us for months, right? You see the boar, see what's happening is your bo [01:28:00] your the amygdala, which is a small pea size part of your brain, is making sure that you have enough cortisol and adrenaline flowing through your system so you can get up and get the boar.

And you're also scared, right? Grab the spear tusks and he's gonna get you. Exactly. So you grab the spear, you're running to get the boar, and you're hiding, you're dishing, and then you're like, then you kill the thing, right? And then you dress the boar, right? It's a big thing. I've never seen one in person, but I'm sure it's a hundred, it's a couple hundred pounds.

300, yeah. At a minimum, right? So you dress the boar, you get the meat you do the things and you come back and you go, here's dinner. But what has happened in that time, right? You got the adrenaline in the cortisol and you physically burned that off. You physically ran it through, you ran it through your body, right?

When dogs get stressed, they shake, right? Yeah. And they run that stress through their body. We don't do that. We get an email and we go, and I promise, and, look, email me at info@resistantvision.com [01:29:00] if I am wrong about this. But I promise you do not run around the block when you get that email.

I, I will guarantee a hundred percent. That's not what you do. Because that would actually, and it's, I'm not, that's not a judgment, right? It's just how we, it's we don't work that way. Don't work that way. Don't work out. You, if you ran around the block after you got that email, you come back and you go, okay, I got this.

But what's happening does, oh, and all that running off just lowers the adrenaline, it lowers the cortisol and what's hap and the prob and the challenge for human beings is if we're not burning it off in that way it on the good end of it, it upsets our sleep cycles. We and I talked about this in my story, right?

You can't wake up in the morning and you can't go to sleep at night, so you're really backwards. But that's one possibility. You get that tire in the middle of your body because that's because your body's collecting fat because it's expensive. You that's cortisol, right?

All those, that's corti. This is all cortisol. Cortisol out in your system. Exactly. We have to be ready to fight the tiger. Exactly. [01:30:00] Exactly. Tiger. Tiger's right there all the time. You're inflamed. So like you might experience that with pain. And pain in your joints are all over the place. And there are many, and I could go on and on about cortisol is actually very useful, but it can't be, it can't be coursing through your veins all the time.

It's useful in that we spike, it spikes in our bodies when we need it for something. Exactly. Exactly. And it gets up in the morning, right? Yeah. But the need should help us then regulate it back to its baseline level as opposed to staying spike, keeping it really high. Which is the phenomenon that I think we're so much more attuned to now, but back to EFT in the magic, right?

So you do, so what EFT does, instead of running around the block, you talk about, okay, even though I hate this person I'm open to possibility that yeah, I can get this done hate the person or hate the person. Hate the person, hate the right. Like it, and yeah, notice you like it, it might take a few rounds, but, oh.

You can actually feel, and when I'm actually [01:31:00] working with clients, I can feel their energy level just, yeah, like down, downgrade downshifts. And then they're like, oh, I, there one woman I was working with and she was saying, I have five contracts to review today. I'm going to a con, I'm going to a com.

A board meeting in Canada, and there was something else. It was so stressful listening to her and we just tapped. I was like, okay, I got five contracts, five contracts, five. And I could actually feel her downshift. And she was like, oh, I have time to do this afternoon. That's the beauty of it.

And it doesn't seem, it may not seem like a lot to people, but when you can actually go, oh wait, there's a different way. Yeah, there's another way to do this. That's the gold, that's why we need this tool, right? And it lowers those cortisol levels in our body. So you can go, okay, what's actually necessary right now?

What do I, we can prioritize things for ourselves instead of letting other people do it. Yeah. And that is the magic of it, actually. And it helps get, it helps, it can help with many aches and pains. If I wake up in the morning with a headache, [01:32:00] I tap for a few times, it's gone. I can use it to take myself out of a move myself to a different gear before I go to sleep at night.

Like I do that. So it's really, I, like I said, I don't know what I've been doing all my life without Lunchable. My, my go-to tool is meditation, which has a lot of the same effects. Yes. I have a local colleague, co coach colleague here in Edmonton, who's, who does tapping and teaches tapping and, she's, we were talking about it once and she said it is one of the only things I know of that can change your mindset and outlook like in the moment. Like you can interrupt while it's happening and you can use meditation too. But that seems to be for a lot of people a steeper learning curve because it's stop and we think of meditation as concentrating, even though it doesn't have to be right.

But stop and do the thing where, because the spots [01:33:00] are it's, I like browse sides of the eye underneath the eye, above the lip, above the chin collar, bones under the arm. Top of the head. Top of your head. And the side of hand too. Right above the hand. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So it's a pattern and. And so if you, and do you, anyway, I know people anyway, who, when they're stressed, like they'll put our hands are drawn to our faces in moments of stress.

And so Exactly like if your head hurts and you're doing this oh, there's a cue to go. There's an ac, there's an Accu case sucks, this sucks. This really sucks. This super sucks. I'm feeling shitty here all the time. And just doing that. And the bilateral stimulation, there's a book called Tapping In that I read not too long ago.

That is it spends a little bit of time on EFT, but it makes it even simpler. Like just, anything where you are working, both sides of your body's meridian can be regulated. [01:34:00] Exactly. And we are better problem solvers when we are regulated. Exactly. Exactly. And that's the key. And maybe the, and the solution, the problem might be like.

Damn, I'm tired. I need to go to sleep. Good. That was, that's what you, that's what we got out of that. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it's my love. Okay. It's my love. And I use, and I use it to help people. The other thing is that I love coaching. I love helping people strategize and plan. I am all over that.

The problem is when people won't do the plan, and it's not, again, this is not 'cause people are bad or stupid or something. No. We all have places of resistance. Then I whip out, we aft. It's like, all right, so we're resistant. I don't wanna write, I don't wanna write when we're just gonna tap on it.

And then you're gonna, oh, you know what I remember when I was working with a woman and she talked about how her, she talked about the, like a specific incident was her graduation party and her advisor said to her, it's amazing you got through [01:35:00] this. I might not wanna tap. I might not wanna it might be hard for me to write if I have that in my head and fuck you to that advisor that I got, I'm gonna get that in on, on her behalf.

But we tapped on that. We we went through it and we tapped through the whole incident. She's oh, get on with writing. You can work through that resistance with things in the moment. Like you don't have to set aside time to do it. Exactly. It's an in the moment. In the moment. I have a new lawyer who he's trying to figure out how to become partner and I'm just like, first we're still get you in your body.

You have a bo we're just gonna tap on whatever's going on in your body and you have a body. Oh. And that is a major learning point for a lot of people in, for those of us who have these intellect, highly intellectual. Jobs. We have I, I had a client, an academic client who was just a wreck.

She came to me, she was sobbing. 'cause [01:36:00] she's trying, trying to do all the things. I'm like, I'm just gonna touch the points and breathe. I, we didn't tap on a single, but I was like, we didn't like tap. Wait. I was like, we're just gonna touch and breathe. And she's this is the first time I could feel my feet on the ground in days.

Yeah. Whole body, right? We'll just start there. Yeah. And I will say like my own journey as a coach started from a very sort of intellectual problem solving sort of place. I. Like I was at a career pivot. I worked with co two different coaches at one point. Both each of them told me, you should really look at coaching.

It fits the way you work. Your personality. So I dove into it. But in my coach training, we did one of our immersive weekends involved a lot of sort of body work. And I was sitting on the perimeter of the group with another woman very similar to me. And we were literally both sitting with our arms crossed, our shoulders hunched, our brows furrowed I don't know what the fuck this is, but I [01:37:00] don't think it's me like you.

Like you Hold on a second. You are telling me that I'm gonna sit back to back with somebody and we're gonna sense one another's movements. What sort of woowoo mumbo jumbo weirdo abs of freaking No. I was just not having it at all and, and it was certainly when I entered the coaching space that I heard all of these things about like, where do you feel that in your body?

I'm like, what are you talking about? It is here, up here between my eyebrows. I don't feel crap in my body. Literally, I remember the day it was, I hate to say this, it was like five years ago. Yeah. When all of a sudden it all clicked. I was like, oh, that's where I feel that in my body. So like the journey to being a fully embodied adult.

Mine might have been rockier than some others, but I think that's actually fairly typical. That's, I [01:38:00] think that in these professions where your body is just the meat sack that takes you to meetings and your critical thinking apparatus is all anybody wants. And all you feel valued for becoming embodied is hard work and your body is where the emotions are stored.

Oh gosh. It has data and if you work with that data, you will make better decisions. There's actually, I was, you said that, and there are a couple things. In law firms the really big law firms here in the states, the women who are like mid-level, they often call them ATMs because they're the people who bill the hours that it's disgusting.

Like I'm not, I'm like, it is disgusting, but they're the women who bill the hours that bring in the revenue for the firm. And they don't really want them to move to partner. They want them to keep billing the hours. So that says something about how like determine they are to keep a goal in their heads without flowing their bodies.

But the other thing is there are a couple books that are really amazing. One of them is My Grandmother's Hands, which actually talks about how racism. [01:39:00] He's writing actually to a white audience, although there's lots of really useful stuff. But how racism lodges itself as hurts in your body.

It's not just a, it's not an intellectual pursuit, it's in your body. But I think a lot of that work it pairs really well with a book called Your Body Keeps the Score. Yes. Yeah. All your, like all of these histories, all of these really hard things. Find places to to really, to again, lodge themselves in your body.

And it's hard. It's hard. It's, it can be very hard to go, they're the obvious things. I've done workshops, I'm like, we're just gonna do, when I'm introducing EFT to people, I often will do we're just gonna figure out how much rotation we have in our neck. And we'll tap on that.

And people are like, okay, that is crazy. Like that actually. And people feel, they feel things that they didn't really, there's oh, there's that pain. It's gone. But like this stuff lodges, it finds places in our bodies to lodge themselves. Yeah. And once you know [01:40:00] that, you know where the, it will make perfect sense to you.

I know my partner is under stress. I know which part of his body hurts. When he starts talking about back pain. I'm like, okay. He's stressed. For me, it is it's my throat. I get my adjustments tight. Yeah. From like my cheek bones to my clavicles. All of that gets really tight.

And I will have dreams where I wake myself up because I'm trying to scream. Now, this is not comforting, but like those are signs. Oh, okay. Something's going on. But connecting that to how do I work with my body exactly. To get myself into a place where I can do the work that's important to me. That is intellectual work.

But you are not actually just a meat sack with a brain attached. You're not a stick. Exactly. Exactly. And I, and it doesn't, I don't care what the modalities, I actually, I meditate too. I do transcendental meditation. Yeah. And, [01:41:00] but like I don't really care what it is. Whatever time we can actually get to yeah.

Oh, look at that. You can do the thing that gets you back to your body. Your mind doesn't work without the rest of your body. It just doesn't. Yeah. Which, and there is increasing research to show, like there are neurons. In your cardiac system and in your gut that send more information to your brain than the other way around.

Exactly. Oh, the gut's off. And it's the heart and the gut that exactly. There is intelligence there. The same kinds of cells that are in our brain and they communicate information back. So like to cut them off and say, no, I'm just working with my rational mind and my emotions and my aches and pains and my fears and my joys.

All of those things are like not have no bearing on the work I'm doing. That's. Please continue to try [01:42:00] that. Your body will at some point. It'll give out. It'll completely give out. Yeah. It's not gonna be pretty. It's a, it's, yeah. Yeah. It will. You will pay for it. And I think we are paying for it.

You and I are roughly, I would imagine the same sort of gen XY kind of age. Yeah, exactly. Looking around at women our age going, oh yeah, we're all paying for something right now. Exactly. Exactly. For the body image that you can have it all the gifted and talented programs of the seventies and eighties that just took autistic and A DHD kids and That's right.

Isn't no weird. It's true. The bigger messes, we're all, and it's, and again, the stuff isn't our fault. Like I don't want we are not to blame in any way, shape, or form for that. And it's wrecking havoc. Yeah. It's fucking on us. Absolutely, it is definitely wrecking habit.

You have said twice something about systems. Yes. And so I wanna talk to you about [01:43:00] systems coaching, but also there's something else you said about like those ATM mid-tier lawyers. Yes. Yes. Global hours. I just wanna draw a connection. I have a fair number of clients who are in the sciences and I was just at university of Pittsburgh School of Medicine at a wellness convening for their research scientists where they're actually talking about wellbeing and trying to figure out and define what wellbeing looks like and right to track and support, to support researcher wellbeing.

This notion of literally earning your keep through, in the case of lawyers billable hours. But in the case of scientists through grants. Grants, yes. And now what is happening to the grants environment in the United States?

I'm gonna take a deep breath and not go there because that will derail this conversation and I will begin frothing at the mouth. But the expectation, because I have yet to see at least [01:44:00] announced anywhere publicly that a research institution has said, given the uncertainty, given this current climate around, especially NIH grants being pulled back, being delayed, not being funded, we are taking measures to address things like promotion and tenure, things like salary expectations and covering salary.

No, we haven't said, did we? So everything's incredibly uncertain. You may not be able to cover 80% of your salary Exactly, but we are not going to adjust our expectations. Of you Asem, because it's that, it's the what are they called? The secondaries. The, oh, the second tertiary and secondary and tertiary institutions.

No the fees that are at the core of this argument can't remember what they're called. I don't know what, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, we'll just call that menopause bog, like zap. There goes that idea, that word outta my head. The fee, the fees that the research [01:45:00] office collects in addition to the grant money in order to keep the university running.

That's what this is all about, right? So we're talking about populations of people whose intellectual work is actually building the institutions and organizations they work for maybe without direct benefit to them. Exactly. Gosh, this feels so good. I feel so fulfilled. I am getting to do my best work and being recognized in the best way for it.

Like it, it can get into that sort of grind of grant applications much in the way that a lawyer can get into the grind of Bill blah. Of Bill. Exactly. So where's the joy? Where's the fulfillment? Where's like publications on the humanity side, right? It's the same. The same, and it was fun the first couple times and after a decade you're like this is what I do.

I'm a grant machine. Oh, huh. Maybe I'm not quite as thrilled with that as I used to be. Talk, so maybe this is where systems come in. Maybe systems aren't the magic bullet, but tell me what, [01:46:00] when you talk to people about systems, what does that look like? So when I talk to scholars about systems I'm, I have Fallen Madly in Love with Wendy Belcher's book 12 Weeks.

Yes. It's a system for writing. So you don't have to sit there and go write five paragraphs, delete six of 'em. You don't have to do, you don't have to be in that process. It's do this. Okay. And you actually, and you can figure out where you are in the process. And you can actually, and I wouldn't have published post Postgraduation without that book because I was just copy editing the article over and over again. I wasn't, I was like, I wasn't clear about the argument. I was like, all of the things that, that she goes through, like that's the system that I work with scholars on. And they'll say, but I can't. It's so Bel chapter five, they're like, oh, oh, Offy pop. But and again, it's I think, I think we go through these programs and with writing and these professors we work with, they're like, you have it in your, dont let me get my fortune ball and see if you have it. You don't. Alright. [01:47:00] And that's not writing, you're actually not teaching writing, you're not teaching how to do this writing. And it's a learned skill. It's something else like it. This is a learned skill. You don't come in the world knowing how to do it. You learn the skill. Yeah. And you a community around you to write and that's why you need community to write.

Thank you so much for saying that. Like community is, and I think Okay, we need community. You just said that, what I tell myself, like the story I've been working with for a while, and I'd be really interested to see if this resonates with you at all, is that for academics in particular, and I come from the humanities, you come from the humanities.

And so this where we don't have labs, we don't have big groups of people who are co-creating a project. Exactly. We're solo. Guys, often our libraries doing our thing. That coupled with sort of the general academic [01:48:00] armoring, if we wanna use Brene Brown's word, like the Absolutely.

I need to make sure that not only my arguments, but I as a person and like bulletproof, there are no holes, there are no weaknesses in my argument, in my presentation, in my professionalism. Like I'm just bulletproof. That, that breeds a kind of isolation that we can again, wake up one day and go, wow. I feel very alone in my work.

But it also then makes finding community hard. 'cause community demands a little bit of vulnerability, a little bit of openness that I just, I feel that too vulnerable to do. Yeah. A certain version of academia just doesn't. Recognize vulnerability as in any way, shape, or form useful. And I know that law's gotta be very much the same.

Very much like that. I will say this, I think this is why scholars are hungry for things like writing retreats, right? It's a, it gives you a chance to, and I don't think they know [01:49:00] this, but when scholars get together, they go, oh, you too. Yeah. Oh, you too, right? Oh, you don't? Yeah, I'm not myself.

We're all miserable. Exactly. Oh, you don't know how to pop an argument outta here. Okay. I don't either. We'll gonna do this together. Yes. I've been doing some like department retreats and planning sessions and whatnot. And so I'll meet with a small group of people. We'll come up with the agenda.

And they an and I asked them, what sort of pushback are you anticipating? Are there, things we need to keep in mind or that I need to be prepared for as a facilitator? And the last couple I've held, I've had co-organizers come up to me afterwards going that went so much better than I expected.

Yeah. Because fundamentally, like everybody wants to be seen as a person. Everybody wants to be heard. If we [01:50:00] give people opportunities to be heard and seen, we will see so much commonality. But when we walk around armored up, we can't see it. All tense. No, you're not gonna notice that other people might also be absolutely struggling.

I've been doing lots of presentations of bar associations and can see lawyers are like when someone else works in front of the room I tap with them. They're like, oh, I feel different now too. Oh, I had that in my head too, you did because we're have to be stuck with it by yourself. Yeah. Before we got on the call, I was telling you about my yoga retreat in Costa Rica with Dr.

Raquel Reitmeyer, who I have a episode of the podcast with several weeks back. We talked about yoga and resistance and transformation and wow, it was magical. But that retreat was almost exclusively academics, which was the interesting [01:51:00] thing. And there was a doctor, there's an engineer, and then, scientist in a lab sociologist administrator, me doing my thing.

Sociologist who then became a grants like nonprofit grants person. So all with current or past really deep academic backgrounds. And it was, we did not talk about work. It was manageable, right? But to have this space where we could do things that we knew would send us back into the real world, a little bit more resourced in a place where even though everybody had a PhD or an md, we're just like, oh yeah.

So today we're gonna work on down dog,

But here's what yoga does, right? Because I actually, I, I worked, a friend of mine is a yoga instructor and I was like, let's do one-on-one work for a month. But here's, so here's the thing with yoga, you cannot be in your head and do it uhuh. It is unforgiving. It is [01:52:00] completely unforgiving that way.

And down dog looks simple. If you're not paying attention to what? Shoulders back, get the hips up. Then Yeah, I have the tension between the hips and then the heels trying to touch the ground. It's it like the pulling, pulling the banda, right? Like it's just it's what are your ribs doing?

When was the last time you thought about what your ribs were doing? It's like ribs. I, I remember doing this and I, it's like my my, but it's not like I hadn't been doing yoga for years with my body aches when I was just working with him. I was in good, in a good way, right? Yeah. I joked with him.

I said, I have too many muscles, and they all hurt, right? And the instruction to like, what is your pinky finger doing? What is your pinky toe doing? Where are your ribs? I remember the very first time I went to a yoga class, I came home and I was like, oh my gosh, the whole house could burn down and I wouldn't care.

And it was be, and I was in grad school and I think it was because it was the first time in forever, my brain had to shut up because it was busy figuring out like how to hold that hip in that spot. And that was all I [01:53:00] could focus on. And what a relief to like. Exactly. Not have to be your intellectual processes for a hot second, right?

No. That is one practice that'll short circuit that stuff like this. Yep. Yeah. If there's an area pose you can access up here. Yeah, you can. Or as, as I, when I talk with my clients about embodiment, I'm like, I have some books in the basement on yoga postures and I could do one of those little yoga stick figure drawings of the crow.

I cannot, however drop into the crow right now because it's not about what I know. It's about what my body can do and those different thing. Exactly. Very different things. But we have, but again, it's like back to the body. Back to the body, back to the body. I love that. In a okay meditation, EFT yoga, what else do you do as a solopreneur to, to keep [01:54:00] yourself.

Okay. If anybody's watching on the video, Sadie has joined the chat. My 1-year-old miniature dachshund puppy has decided that she needs cuddles and so she has jumped up on my lap. Oh. And now she's given a big yawn and some gross little puppy kisses. Okay. So this is one of the things I do to keep me sane, is I have to walk her every day.

Yes. So I have to get outside into the real world, even when it is raining buckets to give her some exercise. Looks like we're about to get a dose of rain here too. So you, what else do I do as a entrepreneur? I planning is, this can be the, all right I'll do the not boring and then I'll do the boring.

The not boring is tarot reading. Ooh. Yeah. I like to, I pull cards every day just to see I see, okay, that's what the cards say. I do my day and then I come back and see how much of a rhyme there is. And there often is a really oatmeal rhyme, so that's fun. But I also, but planning is such a huge part of it.

Like I do Sunday, Sundays, I sit down plan. [01:55:00] I always think this is so basic. Don't people know this? And then you're like, you start talking to people. I'm like. Lawyers. I'm like, you don't plan. I have worked with people who don't have practice without planning your work. I don't understand this. I've worked with people who don't use a calendar.

Michelle, I don't even, I just first, like you expect your brain to hold. That i's we can do that, but why? We have all these this is a good thing for the gadgets. Let them do the work. Okay. But but planning's a huge, so Sundays I sit down and go, what can I do given my calendar?

So I don't put 30 things on my calendar 'cause I don't have time for 30 things. Yeah. I have the top three priorities and I plan that and then each would, within my day, I will schedule the, I will block the time and the day when I'm gonna do that. And that. I don't know how one would entrepreneur without that.

It was very I have a talk on Saturday. I sat down today and I was like, you're gonna work on that talk at this time? Yeah. That's what you're doing. And it's great. And I know what's gonna get done and now it's done and I can practice it with somebody. That's it. Yeah.

So [01:56:00] planning is planning is everything for me. I started a really I don't wanna say rigid 'cause that implies unfun, but a very in-depth planning process. A couple years ago when I began work working with Rachel Cook, who's a business coach for female entrepreneurs. And she has a planner system that's part of her 90 day planning cycle.

And I. I dove in, I was like, okay, we're gonna do this. And it made a huge difference in my ability to set goals of the right size and then map out when I was gonna do them. But I'd been doing it for a couple years. I was like, okay, I got this down. Like I don't need to sit. You're gonna laugh. I don't need to sit down and do the process because I have it up here.

Exactly that. And then all of a sudden we were several months into 2025, and I'm like, where's my brain? Oh. Oh, it's in the empty planner. I'm not using. [01:57:00] Oh just things that I wasn't paying attention to or didn't know. And I was relying on like mountains of little scraps of paper and an ongoing list in Google.

I'm like, oh, you know better, Jennifer. So yes, back to my calendar, has appointments in it. I have other commitments. Where do they get put? How far in advance can I generally map and then week by week nail that down? Yeah, I actually my coach is Monica Shaad. She has her own planner too. And yeah, I sit down like every day.

I've been doing it for years 'cause my brain likes it, likes that kind of structure and it's get the stuff in there, put it, it's like that. And I just, it's and I feel like I'm, I think I'm getting more realistic about what I can do and what I can't do. Something. And this is another thing where I think that our lives as entrepreneurs map onto a lot of scholars lives that I know just 'cause you can't do it doesn't mean you have [01:58:00] to.

Once you're at a level of success, can you also stop working all the time? Just because it's a nice thing to do to yourself. Exactly. I actually, so the other I, there's, I'm a very, I'm actually quite woo. I I work with these populations for all their head, but there's a real oo for me, and I am in love with pendulums, right?

So I take the pendulum and it like, and it's should I do X, Y, or Z? It'll tell me an answer. And it's okay, we're not gonna do that. Should I do this? Yes. Okay. And I and so I actually don't have to do sip, I don't have decision fatigue because the pendulum's enough of touch with me that I can actually go, oh, no.

Yes. No. Yes. Okay, good. I love the woo and I really, I wanna appreciate our millennial sisters who have Yes. Come out really loud and open with witchy woo stuff because I was raised an evangelical Christian as I was too. Oh my god. Wish. That's all trauma bonding. And so when I [01:59:00] turned my back on that, it was just all academics all the time.

And, whether it is yoga and medi and meditation and sort of eastern spirituality or different sorts of alternative modalities or witch or whatever you wanna call it, or even like earth and cycle based things like these are all systems that humanity has had forever for helping us.

Do what we wanna do in the world or see what we need to see in the world. Exactly. And so thank you for bringing the woowoo into it because I

I love it. And my tendency is still to want to intellectualize everything and I have to just let myself play with other modalities that are like, oh, this, what if it could be fun? What if it didn't have to be sadly curious. Exactly. Exactly. And like I said, what I love about the woo part of it is that it takes away the decision fatigue.

'cause that's what happens with us. You have, we make any number of decisions in any [02:00:00] period of time. And for someone, something to go. No. It's thank you. Thank you. I'll run with that. I feel a little bit more space in my brain. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. And at the end of the day, you will have still gotten done what you needed to get done.

Exactly. I love that. Yeah. You have the exact amount of thing you need to get done. Beautiful. So if people are interested in following your work, following you, getting on your newsletter, figuring out what you do in the world, first of all, I love the name of your business, resistant Vision. Thank you.

Thank you. That says a great deal to people who are paying attention. So Michelle Thompson, resistant vision, but how would they find you? What do you want people to look at? What do you want them to know? Oh I have, I think you guys sent the Rain way. I'm just gonna let you know it's raining. May you pull the air down.

Go to resistant vision.com. I have a blog there. And and it there's the standard stuff that you'd expect. And my last one was about the Beyonce concert that I saw, and which has to do with black radical. But because I that's how I chew on things. [02:01:00] So you'll find all sorts of things in the blog.

You can follow me on Blue Sky. It's Misti, M-I-C-H-D-I-O-N-N-E is my handle on Blue Sky. You can find me on YouTube Resistant Vision. And if you're a scholar who needs to get something written, I'm writing a writing retreat. You can find, if you go to, if you take two you go ahead and email me at info@resistantvision.com, I'd be happy to send you information about it.

It's at the end of July and it's gonna be an Adirondacks in New York. Yeah, and once you get there, what you're paying is gonna cover all the thoughts. Spilled water there. Okay. It's gonna cover all the things, your accommodation, your food. Nice. Yeah it's like all of it and like real.

And we're gonna implement the we're gonna implement the Belcher system and we'll use EFT because y'all gonna be worked up by the time you get there. We're going to get you to write, we bring you back down from the travel headache. Oh, that's such a good step. Yeah, [02:02:00] I have to go to Florida in July.

I'm gonna, that's, I need to remember tapping. 'cause I do it, I just don't do it enough. Exactly. And the other part is this, I'm doing it at the very end of July because I know what happens. You go, the summer's gone. I didn't get anything done. And then, you know what's gonna happen in August, you're gonna start class prepping and you're gonna forget that you had a writing project.

So we're gonna actually just get that last Yeah. Rah in for your project. So yeah. I, those are the ways that, those are it. That's it. I've actually social media and I have. I got kicked off on LinkedIn, but that's a whole other conversation. You can find that story on my blog. Nosy problem. Yeah.

Yeah, please do. But yeah, like those are the places. Okay, great. I will make sure that all of those are linked in the resources for this podcast, which will come out. I don't know. Before your retreat though, I'm almost positive, excellent. Okay. Thank you so much for spending time with me today, Michelle.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. It was lovely. And what a beautiful [02:03:00] dog. My sister has dachshund, so I just I just love that. Yeah, there she's 10 pounds of sass and attitude and snuggles. That was like a of, yeah, depending on like right now, very snugly. If she wanted me to play with her or feed her, she would be out at my feet going, ha.

Oh yeah. That's amazing. You make and yes, kisses. Thank you so much. Lots of kisses. Yeah. Dos and kisses. So for those of you who have tuned in, either on YouTube or on the podcast, thank you so much for being with us. I will put in the notes how to reach out to Michelle, but it's at resistant vision.com.

That'll probably send you lots of places. And again, thank you so much for letting us be in your ears. And Michelle, thank you so much for spending time with us. Thanks for having me.