Episode #39: Who’s in Control? Building Self-Efficacy in Academia with Kel Weinhold

In today’s episode, Jane is joined by Kel Weinhold, co-owner of the Professor Is In. Kel is a queer, non-conforming academic productivity coach who is dedicated to anti-racist practice and supporting Black women in and out of the academy. During this conversation, Jane and Kel discuss self-efficacy in academia. Tune in to learn:

➡️ How they define self-efficacy in academia

➡️ The structural constraints in academia that make it difficult to practice self-efficacy.

➡️ The relationship between white supremacy, racism, and self-efficacy

➡️  Why building self-efficacy is essential but also exhausting

If you’re a junior scholar who is struggling to say no to requests or you feel as if you’re constantly overworking, this episode is for you. 

To learn more about Kel, visit theprofessorisin.com or send an email to tnl@theprofessorisin.com

Further Listening: 

Episode #6: “Boundaries are Values In Action”

💗 Spread the inspiration. Know someone who would benefit from some guidance on their book-writing journey? Share this episode with them!

✉️ Want even MORE bookish advice, right in your inbox? Sign up for Shelf Help, the newsletter with actionable tips for scholarly writers. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 0:01

Welcome to Academic Book Writing Simplified. I'm your host, Jane Joanne Jones, a writing coach and developmental editor who's here to give you some tough love about the way you write. This podcast is for women and non-binary scholars in academia who are writing academic books, but feel as if the process is a little or a lot like a mystery. If you're ready to trade your confusion and frustration for ease, clarity, and purpose, you're in the right place. Let's head into today's episode. Hello, hello. I hope you're all doing well today. I am so excited because we have a guest on the podcast today. We are going to be joined by Kel Weinhold. She is a friend of mine for many, many years now. She's also the co-owner of the Professor Is In. Kel is a queer, nonconforming academic productivity coach. And she's also a former university professor in the fields of journalism, communication, and literary nonfiction. And now she spends her time working with academics, helping them to get unstuck in their writing and learn a way of productivity that actually works for them and not just for the demands of the university. Cal is a dedicated advocate of work-life balance. And she is there to help you write on your terms, not the terms of any institution that's trying to tell you what to do. And speaking of doing things on your terms, the topic of our podcast today is self-efficacy for academics. And we are going to get into what we mean by self-efficacy, how you can build it for yourself, and also things to be aware of in your work environment that might be trying to impede your sense of self-efficacy. So I'm really excited for this episode, and I am going to get right into it. Kel, welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to have you here. So for all listeners, Kel and I go way back.

SPEAKER_02: 2:08

We have known each other before, oh my goodness, how long? Like eight years now, seven? Yeah, I guess so.

SPEAKER_03: 2:14

Yeah, we did the art of the article together, where we teach you how to write articles. And we have had so many endless conversations about academia and especially about, especially about junior faculty's place in academia. And that's kind of what we're going to focus on today because we're going to talk about self-efficacy in academia. And I think a lot of where that conversation happens is in juniors who perhaps have, not perhaps, but you know, have a harder time practicing self-efficacy. So Cal, let's first define like what we mean when we're saying self-efficacy. What do you think of?

SPEAKER_01: 2:56

For me, I think of it really as, and I think this is what becomes challenging for junior faculty, is I really think of it as the belief in yourself, in your own capacity to do what's asked of you, that you internally have a sense that if given a situation, that you can succeed and that you can accomplish whatever the task is that's given to you. And I think that that is a challenging thing for junior faculty for all the reasons we can talk about.

SPEAKER_03: 3:26

And we will we will talk about them. We have a lot to say today, in case you're wondering how long to set aside for this podcast. Yeah, I agree. I think, you know, fundamentally, like it's about agency. Like, do I have the ability to like govern my own affairs in academia and you know, also resist things that I don't want, you know, like do I have the ability to say no to things? And I think that that, you know, in addition to everything you said, Cal, you know, like that's really important. And a lot of people feel that they don't have that ability to say no, to advocate for themselves. And, you know, that's problematic, especially now.

SPEAKER_01: 4:09

Yeah. And I think that that comes, I mean, there's a lot of things that comes from, but I think one of the more toxic forces is the whole structure of the tenure system. That's so much of it is secretive, that's so much of it is, you know, if you were to go into your department chair and say, how many articles do I need? In what place, at what pace? It's really hard to get that answer. Most places will give you a really mushy answer. And because of that, it's really easy to start to build up fear of I can't say no, I can't push back. And then you know that people are going to be voting on your tenure, and you know that people are gonna be writing your letters, and it becomes this fear-based, I'm not sure I can't. I'm not sure I can safely say that. And I think that there are plenty of people in the academy who's experienced that forever of like, can I safely set my boundaries without a consequence? But I think it breeds a whole system of I don't know. I don't know if I can say no, I don't know if it's safe. I don't know.

SPEAKER_03: 5:04

Yeah, and that kind of uncertainty is really destabilizing, right? Because you're oh you're second guessing everything you do. Absolutely. You know, is it okay for me to leave this faculty meeting early? You know, is it okay for me to have my door closed? That's something I've heard from a lot of faculty. Like, yeah, is it okay for me to close my door or is it supposed to be open all the time? You know, if there's a job search committee or any type of committee and I'm asked to be on it, I feel compelled to say yes and do all of the events related to the committee. And yeah, especially with the tenure being so like, in my opinion, purposefully obtuse. Like we can, oh yeah. It's not really that hard to come up with a number of articles or a book. You know, like you need a book and it needs to be at this point. Those are pretty objective measures that aren't particularly like out of the ordinary.

SPEAKER_01: 6:04

No, I think it's a way to maintain control over getting rid of people you don't like. But I think you can, if it stays fuzzy like that, you can save people you like and you can get rid of people you don't like. You can say, yeah, you met all those marks, but you didn't hit this mark in service or in this ephemeral collegiality sort of thing. So if you're a difficult in their estimation, and difficult tends to exist, tends to predominantly uh exist outside of cisgendered white men.

SPEAKER_03: 6:33

Yeah, and I think it also gives what do they call it, plausible deniability, right? Well, you know, we said five or six, you know, or like, oh, but B7 has to be in a journal with this ranking. Right. And also those goalposts can move mid-tenure, mid-process. You know, like, yeah, I have worked with clients who are like, I was told in year four, for instance, that I need to write another article in addition to everything I'd already planned out to earn tenure. Like, well, actually, it would probably be better if you have an additional peer-reviewed article on top of what you already have planned for your six years. It's like, that's kind of late. Yeah. And so then there's, you know, like given peer review and everything, it's, you know, just like changing it.

SPEAKER_01: 7:21

And I've seen more and more, and I've certainly I'm sure you've seen it too, the people whose deans have changed in the middle, who you have a working relationship with a dean, and the dean has explained to you what you need to do, and then you have a whole new dean. You met all the marks, but now you have a different person who says, Well, yeah, I know you met the marks, but not in the way that I think you should have met the marks. It is extreme. I mean, all of this to come back to this idea of keeping your sense of I can do this and I individually can accomplish these things, gets undermined repeatedly.

SPEAKER_03: 7:51

Yeah. Like how can you know if you can do something if you don't know what you need to do? Right.

SPEAKER_01: 7:56

And one of the things that I coach pretty consistently is that, and it seems counterintuitive, but that you can't work and motivate yourself based on what you think other people want. That you have to decide for yourself what you want to accomplish, what your standard is and what your output's going to be within the demands of the job. I mean, you can't say I'm gonna, you know, my output is one article and this place requires three. That's not what I mean, but more. This is how I'm going to do this job, this is how I'm gonna do this academic work. And it's not gonna be about pleasing all of you, it's gonna be meeting my standard within, to use a business term, key performance indicators of the job. I'm gonna do that. And that that keeps the motivation with you, and you can motivate yourself if you know it's worth it for you and that you have some control over it. So, because you can't, and I watch people do it all the time, and I'm always holding up like yield signs in the process, like stop overperforming out of fear you're not gonna get tenure. You've met the mark, you're at the mark, you've heard from everybody that you're fine. Stop overperforming. And I think that's still based in that, like, I don't think I can do this on the performance that I'm giving. That's that lack of belief in your individual ability to do it.

SPEAKER_03: 9:11

Yeah, and I think that lack of belief, you know, as I know you agree, Cal, is like so structural, you know, that like we see who overperforms. And it's primarily minoritized women, people who are socialized as women, right? Who feel that, well, I better have two extra articles. I better have, you know, I better be well into my second project. Yep. This for a good reason because the goalposts are always shifting and there is a presumption that you are not as productive or as intellectual or as accomplished as your peers. And that number one can do a, you know, does so much damage mentally, like it's a mental toll. Yes. Always feeling like you have to push back against these assumptions. And it's also a lot of, it's a lot of freaking work.

SPEAKER_01: 10:05

You know, like right. And nobody talks about that. Nobody talks about the exha absolute exhaustion of trying to deal with the systemic issues and not make them an individual issue. And that I think that's one of the things that we have to constantly remember is that these are systemic issues visited on individuals. And when you individualize it and start being about you instead of this system, then that's where that self-efficacy disappears because you're thinking it's you that's not able to do this. You know, you start to believe the propaganda of you're not quite as qualified, you're not quite as smart, you don't really belong here. And those are all systemic. And, you know, I know, Jane, you've heard me rant about this. Everybody who's ever listened to me has heard me rant about this. We need to remember the genesis of the university. We need to remember that this was a system created for male-lanted gentry to sit around and have everybody do all their work for them while they sat around and thought great thoughts and wrote letters and ideas back and forth and wrote one article in a lifetime or something. So we have this whole system that's grounded in both a lack of any other kind of pressure in your life, of wealth and ease and the ivory tower idea of intellect above all else. And what we have now is a deeply capitalist, deeply racialized, gendered institution that keeps acting like it's the place of equality and ease without ever paying attention to its roots, its deep roots in white supremacy. And like I said, anybody who's listened to me for very long has heard that rant. It's a running joke among the people I coach. I do writing sessions and do little coaching in between. And it's a joke about like landed gentry. Somebody will make in the comments because it's always popping up in my comment.

SPEAKER_03: 11:58

If it's true, it's true.

SPEAKER_01: 11:59

Yes. I mean, and how many of you listening today are out there on your estates with your people doing all of the work for you and taking care of your food and your laundry and you delivering everything to everyone, none of you, I'm assuming. And yet the system still expects you to perform at that idea of there is nothing more important than this.

SPEAKER_03: 12:20

And perform at, by the way, like be 10 times more productive than those dudes who are writing one article with all of their help. You know, they were just sitting in salons chit-chatting all day, which you know, that sounds great. But now the expectation is that you're creating so much more scholarship independently, and that you should be doing this in addition to all of the service work, which by the way did not exist when the university first started. There were committees.

SPEAKER_01: 12:53

When I first started in the university, my very first year as a faculty member, we still had administration, like secretaries at that time, but office administration people who like copied your tests or went and got your blue book. I mean, they did all that stuff that you eventually became more and more and more responsible. So all the old guys that I worked with were like, I don't know how to work the copy machine because they've never.

unknown: 13:20

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 13:21

Do you think they were doing their own expense reports after a conference? No, of course not.

SPEAKER_01: 13:26

And I just wanted to put that little aside, too, of all those, you know, let's not forget all those guys whose wives were in the background actually doing a bunch of their work, who were doing their research, who were doing their typing, who never got any credit for what these guys put out. So I just want to give those women a shout out because they're the unnamed geniuses behind so much of that success.

SPEAKER_03: 13:46

Yeah, the unnamed authors. Right. Yeah. So to expect this level of productivity given just general circumstances, right? Like people have children they take care of, people have family members to take care of, people live in a world that is very oppressive and scary right now. And, you know, when you think of, when you really think of cognitive labor and the time and space you need to do it well, that's not afforded many, many people in yet in the academy. And we can do all of them. And I coach on them too, like how to make the most of your writing sessions and how to work with the time you have. And that's important because, you know, as we mentioned, it is a business and you have to perform. But it's also pretty wild. I'll use that word. That we expect this level of cognitive labor with the level of constraint people face. Yeah. Yeah. And that somehow, if you can't work within those constraints, there's something wrong with you and not something wrong with the constraints.

SPEAKER_01: 14:54

Right, exactly. And I think that's the message that's constantly, you know, maybe you don't belong here, maybe this isn't the place for you, if you can't figure out how to do this. And I had a conversation with a math or you know, full professor about a year ago. And I was at a dinner party with him. And his statement was, you know, if you don't want to work 60 hours a week, then why are you in this field? And it was like, what are you talking about? I mean, what it's either a business or you're saying, I'm gonna work these hours and do these things, or it's some kind of calling, and then you need to start paying me a lot more money to be at that level of devotion. But he was perfectly content. He said that's what I love, and that's I'd rather be doing that. I'd rather have a more fully developed life. But I think just to sort of jump off that, I think that so many people in the academy, because the academy has changed so dramatically, because we have more people who were never intended to be there. It weren't, you know, all of the impostors really are imposters in the sense that they were never supposed to be there. You're not supposed to be here. Those folks have much more complex lives and they come from much more, they have much more external demand, or they come from systems and cultures that are not as individualized as white culture is. And there's an expectation and a belief that you're going to be more widely involved than your job, and that your job is also going to be like, you know, a collective or or communal experience, not a let's sit in my little garret and write my article. So I think that we haven't adjusted labor demands for that. Academy has increased labor demands without recognizing the complexity of I'm a caretaker, I have, like you said, I have children, I have autoimmune, I have health issues, I have mental health issues, I have any of those things. I don't operate in this system. I cannot operate in this system to that level. And still I should be in this system. And it has not adjusted for that.

SPEAKER_03: 16:45

No, it has not adjusted. And it's also bonkers to me. I have a very good friend who's a labor attorney, and I will tell her, you know, some things I just hear or observe in academia. And she's like, that's equal. Right. You know, but no one seems to really understand that HR is a thing in academia.

SPEAKER_01: 17:02

I'm like, it's there for the benefit of the university. Let's never forget that.

SPEAKER_03: 17:07

But just the idea that you would be able to have some type of, and I know there's a long literature on complaint in academia, so I'm not going to dismiss that at all, but like the idea that you would be able to identify it as a workplace issue. It's like even that is so beyond what academics envision when they complain about rightfully complaining, like I have to go to these nighttime dinners, you know, or the expectation is that I'm going to answer my phone at eight o'clock at night, or a faculty member calls me, you know, or that I'm going to be forced to say, miss a medical appointment because there's a mandatory meeting. And I'm going to be in trouble if I miss it. But I'm I have a medical condition, like I need to go to a medical appointment. But and none of that is construed as like this is actually a workplace issue that is sort of like protected by law.

SPEAKER_01: 18:03

Yep, it's shown as your problem. But I think that we could like offered me the clearest illustration, and I use it often, is what happened in COVID. So COVID happens in March. There's a shutdown. The faculty across the country spent their spring and summer moving all of their courses online. Universities did a whole thing, they made contracts with Zoom, which is why you don't see Skype anymore. And they said, because they could meet the privacy thing. But basically, they said, hey, you got to make your classes available online. So faculty rewrote things, they recorded things, they did all of those things. They burned their summers to get this thing taken care of. Not, I have yet to find one person. And if you listen to this podcast and you did this, please reach out to me. One person who requested additional pay. One person who said, This is an overload. How much are you going to pay me? Because the system said this is some kind of collective shared effort. And we have to do this instead of saying, sure, I'll do it. But how am I going to get paid? How are you going to and you're going to give me a COVID year for my tenure? Maybe okay. But we're going to look a little askance that you took that COVID year. The level of indoctrination into this is not labor. This is like a collective effort.

SPEAKER_03: 19:27

That we're doing students.

unknown: 19:29

Right.

SPEAKER_03: 19:29

Which is where a lot of this comes from. The students need it. We're doing it for the students.

SPEAKER_01: 20:11

And there's still that belief in like this higher purpose, higher good, higher whatever, which I believe in the university. I critique the university like I do because I think it has the potential to be something amazing did. I don't know now, but it once had the potential to be amazing.

SPEAKER_03: 20:25

Yeah. And then taking on all of this extra work without any, practically not even any recognition. Yeah. And compensation. Yeah. Yeah. Just, oh, everyone's going to do it, right? And then the idea of as soon as COVID was over, then suddenly all of those things that were possible, like it's possible for me to teach a course on Zoom. It's possible for me to go to a conference virtually, which was in some ways very helpful for people who are caretakers or who are disabled. And suddenly it was easy for us to do it then, not easy, but you know, we made it happen, but now it can't happen anymore. It's over.

SPEAKER_01: 21:00

Now you can't work remotely. Now you can't do this. Now we need you here. You know, and I think of course more workplaces.

SPEAKER_03: 21:08

Right. Building back the idea that it is a workplace. Like it's doing the same thing all other workplaces are doing, which is trying to get everyone back in the office. Yeah. You know, and that way academia is not unique. You know, and I think that's part of where this comes from, right? Kyle, people think academia is this unique place where you are not subjected to the same indignities or pressures as other workers. And it's like you're a worker. Like I really want people to internalize that. Like you are a worker. That's what you are. We can get Marxists about it if you want to. We don't have to. But this is a labor relation.

SPEAKER_01: 21:46

Yeah. And I think that's really hard. I think a whole bunch of people, I mean, I just want to acknowledge that that is a something that I know that the hundreds and hundreds of people I've worked with, a bunch of them, I mean, they don't say out loud they want to push back about it, but a bunch of them went into the academy to escape capitalism, to go in and be able to think and be able to work on these things and to be able to do it in an idea that we were doing it for the greater good, which is true. I mean, that was the even let's say two or three years ago, it was still you're trying to manage the labor demands, but there was a respect for what you were doing. Let's make that five to when was 2016? Let's say 10 years ago. There was a respect for what you were doing. And so I understand why there's that sense of I was escaping that stream. But the minute you get into it, if you don't begin to understand that you are in a labor equation, then you will overwork. And I I know that people don't want to hear it, but people say be like, well, I have to work this weekend because so and so asked. And I'm like, if you were working at Walmart and somebody said, could you come in and work for free? Would you go in and work for free? Why are you working for free? And nobody wants to see themselves as equal to a wage worker. But I think we'd be a lot more powerful if we I mean, I think that's why unions are so great in the university at this point is people started to see themselves as laborers in need of a union. So it's a labor job. You may not be the frontline clerk, but you are not management.

SPEAKER_03: 23:17

No, and I think that there is the idea of you know escaping a workplace. And I think, you know, I'm gonna say it, everyone can be mad at me. There's also some elitism there. Oh, god, yeah. You know, like I'm not a worker, like I don't punch a clock, I don't have a time card. You know, I'm doing this because ultimately it is for some type of higher reason. You know, I'm not just here for the money.

SPEAKER_01: 23:43

And like you said in your introduction, I am one of the things that I do is all the post ac work for the professors in. I meet with people who are ready to get out of academia. I want to show them how that they can use their PhDs for a lot of things. And it's the thing that I run into the most is people feeling like the jobs that they might go into are less than. Like they're they are not as elite, that they're somehow a failure of their PhD. Instead of saying, wow, I learned all these skills and I can actually very effectively go be the coordinator for a development company that builds grocery stores across the country. I'd be really good at that. It's like, oh, but that's like, I don't want to do that kind of work. But it uses all your skills. You may not be able to do the research on the thing that you do, but it uses all your skills. So I see the classism, and as a working class kid, I am way more sort of hypersensitive to it, undoubtedly, but I see it over and over and over again. Like this is a more valuable job than this job.

SPEAKER_03: 24:45

And yeah, value being like it's it's not a more lucrative job.

SPEAKER_01: 24:52

Right. My neighbor was a social worker in child protective services for years, and this last year he left and he got a job as a janitor in working in the public school system, and he absolutely loves it, and he makes just as much money, and people thank him. He said, At the end of my day, people thank me. When I do stuff with them, they thank me. Nobody's yelling, and it's like, you know, I was like, Good for you, Bob. Way to go. But I'm sure he had people saying, You're being a janitor. Anyway, yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 25:20

No, I mean, I remember when I left my job to start my business, and people are like, Well, what are you gonna do? Right. I'm like, I'm gonna start a business. And they're like, Why? Right. Like, why would you want to leave this? Let me count the ways. And it's like, well, you know, like I have my reasons, you know, they don't have to be your reasons, but you know, they're mine, and I think that's fine. But it was a real, real ink. It was hard to believe of like I cannot pronounce that word that I'm not going to pronounce. It was hard for people to believe. Incredulity. Yeah, exactly. I get that wrong all the time. I get it wrong all the time. I'm like, I have to spell it out in my brain, but I'm not gonna make everyone listen to that. Yeah, a disbelief. A disbelief. Yeah, you would want to do something different, but you know, to bring this back to self-efficacy, I think that is also one of the problems, right? Like because you can't imagine doing something different, you become more committed to following the quote unquote rules in academia because you're so scared of what will happen if you choose to leave or if you're forced out.

SPEAKER_01: 26:26

Yeah. And I also think that academia, the part of the whole discipline of disciplining you in academia is to consistently tell you what you can't do. It's consistently tells you what you don't have enough knowledge in, what you haven't studied enough, what you haven't built enough expertise in. So you spend year after year after year being told you're not, you can't call yourself an expert, you can't call yourself a leader, you can't call yourself these things. So by the time it's time to think about maybe I don't want to stay here, your whole brain is full of what you can't do. And you get told for eight years, six years, twenty years, depending how long you're doing it, you're an anthropologist, you're a sociologist, you're a literature scholar. So you're defined by your title rather than your skills. So that self-efficacy disappears because you can't name your skills. You can only name your discipline. Like I'm an anthropologist. Okay, what do you do? So one of the challenges that I put out to people often is start naming your skills. Start defining yourself by your skills instead of the title, the discipline title. And you can start to reclaim that self-advocacy. You can start to say, even if you stay in the academy, you can start to be like, oh, I'm a writer, I'm a researcher, I'm a thinker, I'm an organizer, I'm all those things that will give you that belief that I can do this article. Instead of, you know, I'm a medical anthropologist. These guys have all been medical anthropologists longer than I have in this field. They know more than I do. So I can't do that. And so that as usual went off on some tangent. You and I are well versed in the land of tangents.

SPEAKER_03: 28:10

Yes, we are. We are, because we have self-efficacy to talk about anything we feel like talking about at any given time. Right. No, thinking that, you know, right now is when you need even more self-efficacy because I think we have seen not only will institutions not protect you, but some will actively try to harm you. Right. You know, so you know, there's a lot of dissonance, I would say cognitive dissonance, and the idea of like building up your own self-belief while also recognizing that there are things happening that are threatening my job. Right. Like I am good at my job and also my job is under threat. Like those two things at the same time is very disorienting. Yeah. Because the belief is that, well, if I'm good at my job, there should be some security here. And there's not. So I think that that we just I just want to acknowledge like how hard that is to wrap your head around for everybody, because we're in a moment where you have to wrap your head around it, but it's very hard to do. And it's not going to be a one and done. You're not gonna be like, okay, well, I accept that my job is under threat because there are gonna be new ways it's under threat because there's some creativity we are seeing in terms of the increasing threats.

SPEAKER_01: 29:29

Yeah, things that like you can't. I mean, I rarely say that surprises me, but lately I feel like I could not have even seen that. Or I don't, okay. I mean, I I guess I never want to lose my ability to be shocked by any of it. I want to keep being shocked. But I actually have had some moments of like, what the hell? Like surprise. Like I would not have imagined this. But I do want to tell everybody that, you know, one of the things that we know about self-efficacy that the research shows us is that sense of I can do this, I can sort this problem. Is that, and it's one of the things I coach to a lot is this is gonna sound really trite. But if you see challenges as opportunities, if you can make your brain, and I think it's hard because of the way the academy is set up, it's hard to see a challenge as an opportunity. It feels like a threat because challenges are thrown out a little bit like throwing you into the lion's den. Like, here, you know, go do your first like even writing a dissertation, nobody tells you how to write it, they just say write it. So challenges are it can feel extremely threatening because you're critiqued without. Assistance. But the more you can see that, the more resilient you are. So that you're brainwiring when you can shift from threat to challenge and say, huh, this is a problem I can solve. That means as these wild ass things are happening within the academy, you will have more of a sense that you can navigate it, you can surf it. You might not stay in the same job, you might lose your job, but that sense of I can surf this wave instead of I can stand right in front of it and have it hit me very hard in the face and knock me underwater. And so I do think that like building that belief that you can do things that that you can fulfill, you can meet your goals, has a longer benefit than just meeting the goal.

SPEAKER_03: 31:25

Yeah, for sure. It's so funny that you say surfing, Kyle, because I have this visualization idea. It's like you're in a boat. Well, do you have oars? Like, can you steer this boat? Or is the boat just kind of going up and down, like down a white water? You're like your whitewater rafting or something. It's like, are you just being thrown around or are you kind of directing yourself? And you know, part of self-advocacy is thinking, like, what can I do to direct myself? Like reminding yourself of the resources you already have because you are resourceful. No one gets this far in academia, especially as a minoritized person, like without being resourceful.

SPEAKER_01: 32:03

And you forget that it's like you have a PhD. You or you are in a PhD program working on a dissertation. Do you know how adaptable and resilient you've had to be to get there? And you forget, that's what I mean about like defining yourself by your skills rather than by your title. Because ABD is a lot different than, you know, I've spent the last 17 years doing all these things and adjusting to things. And I and I use the surfing metaphor all the time in coaching, is that, you know, when you're dealing with the ocean and you're surfing, you you have a multitude of ways that you can deal with an oncoming wave, right? You can dive under the wave, you can leap over the wave if it's not too big, you can turn and surf the wave, or you can stand right in front of it and just let it smack you. And if you've ever been in the ocean and been smacked by a wave, you know how unpleasant that is. Really, really, what you can do is learn to paddle out beyond the break and watch the waves and choose which one you take. And that's where you can that to me is that self-efficacy is I don't have to sit here and respond to every damn wave. I need to get out here and watch it and go, okay, I'll take that one. That one works for me.

SPEAKER_03: 33:13

Yeah, I need to stop being so reactive and observe for a minute. Like take a beat. Take a beat. Yep. Don't have to react to every single thing in real time. Sometimes it's best to take a moment and really think it through.

SPEAKER_01: 33:30

And it's hard to do if you don't believe you can do it. If you're sitting there with that, I'm not sure I can do this, I'm not sure I have the actual ability, I don't not sure I have the capacity, then you are gonna just be reacting to like, oh no, don't get hit by it. Go with it, dive under it, ah, instead of like, I'm perfectly capable of handling this water. And it's like the boat. Even if you don't have, well, first of all, you'd have oars, you have the skills, you've been on this river for a lot of years, you know where to go on the river and how to run the river. And if you end up in a situation where you don't have oars or flip the boat, you've been on the river a long time. You know how to get out. Yeah, you haven't just shown up on this river yesterday. I always wonder, Jane, when we're using all these outdoor metaphors for all the people who've never been on water and are just like, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

SPEAKER_03: 34:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 34:22

Oh, I was gonna be so good and not swear on your podcast, but oh well. It's okay. That was the end of that one.

SPEAKER_03: 34:28

I think I've I think I've sworn on the podcast.

SPEAKER_01: 34:30

I try really hard so you don't have to get that E thing, but it happens.

SPEAKER_03: 34:35

It's funny that I use all these water metaphors because I my idea of you know, the water is like laying on the beach and getting a tan, but you know, some stuff. I'm definitely not surfing, but you know.

SPEAKER_01: 34:49

I'm always trying to come up with non-outdoor metaphors, non-sports metaphors, but that's my whole, you know, I know how to be in the ocean or be in the river or you know, swing a club, so or a bat. Someday somebody's gonna have to sell me something I can use.

SPEAKER_03: 35:04

Not it's not that I think we we all know what a wave is, so we do.

SPEAKER_01: 35:12

Well, you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'll switch it to another example, which is another thing that I do. But I am a former chef, and so I have tremendous confidence in my cooking. I don't I don't worry about whether I have the right ingredients. I don't I mean, obviously if I'm gonna make something, I want the ingredients, but I don't follow recipes particularly closely. I adjust things I don't like. My sister is the exact opposite. She's constantly asking me how I made something, and I just laugh. But she follows a recipe, and that's what she does, and and she is a very good cook and she follows a recipe. I can pretty much guarantee you that she would not think of herself as a like I know how to cook and I'm a good cook because she's comparing herself to someone who cooks like chaos. And so the truth is she's got the skill, she's very good at it. She can do those things because she follows a system, and I can do something different. But that person should not think of themselves as not having the ability to do the thing or meet the goal. So you may have a whole bunch of systems in place for you to be successful in the academy, and you may be feeling insecure or inadequate about that because you see somebody else over here whose brain works in an entirely different way. And that one is given more, what's the word? Like that one's seen as more whatever, like you're better.

SPEAKER_03: 36:28

Yeah, has more status, like more cultural capital.

SPEAKER_01: 36:30

Right. When, you know, I can guarantee she's never seriously screwed up a meal, and I have seriously screwed up something because I'm like, whoa, that didn't quite work. Now did it. So I think if you find yourself being like, I follow a formula and I do these things and I do that, that is the ability to do it.

SPEAKER_03: 36:51

Yeah. I mean, if you look, I mean, I'm gonna bring in the sports metaphor now. All right, here we go. You know, you look at athletes warm up and they have very specific warm-up routines that they do before every game. They don't improvise it. They're like, well, am I gonna lunge or am I gonna squat? Am I gonna stretch my back or am I gonna stretch my ankle? They're like, no, I stretch my left ankle three times. I do, you know, if it's basketball, like I do this many practice throws from these points on the court. Like I have a very clear system and then I go into what I'm gonna do, right? And nobody says, like, oh, look at them. They're so predictable or whatever. It's like, no, this is the system. And however you choose to build your self-efficacy is up to you. And there's not a wrong way to do it. You know, you might be like, I buy the book that I wrote. Like I've created my own systems, I follow them, and this is how I do it. And some people might be a little more like, you know, like I have some loose, some loose parameters, and that's enough for me. And if they both get you to the same endpoint, then you know, this is not a comparison game. Well, we haven't even we haven't even talked about self-comparison. We're not, that's a whole other episode. And so it's holding those dissonances, like, yes, I am being compared to other people, but I don't have to do that comparison. Like I can focus on my systems and putting my work out into the world. And yes, I have an awareness of my field and what's being published and what's happening in the journals, but I have my own standards for my work and how I get it done. Exactly. Like I stay in my lane.

SPEAKER_01: 38:33

And I think that first of all, we make up stories about how we think other people work. We see them produce stuff and we make up stories about how they do it. We make up stories about how much they're getting done. When we actually looked at the evidence, they're not getting anything more finished than you're getting finished. Because we're taught, and I think you and I both have experience in editing and in reading no small number of pieces of writing and being in the academy, know that academics are being trained by academics, they're not being trained by editors. So they're not being taught how to think, they're being taught how to think like the person they're being trained by. So this is the way I do it, so you should do it that way, instead of this is the kind of thing that you want to accomplish, and these are the ways that you might be able to do that. And so you do kind of continuing to try to do something the way your mentor did it or the people next to you do it. And it undermines that sense of I can do this when if you were freed from that, and I said to you, what way do you work best? Well, like I worked with a client one time who was like, I cannot set, I have such an aversion to authority that I cannot set my work schedule until the morning of the day. Because if I set my work schedule for a week, I will automatically two middle fingers up and I'm not gonna do it. And so that person set their work schedule every morning at eight o'clock. Now, every, and I've certainly said it, and every self-help book written, they're all seem to be written by white men, but all those self-help books will tell you, oh my god, right? Like, let me tell you how I did it with all this support. We'll say, you know, set a schedule and follow this thing and do this thing color code and time block and all of the things. So that person was going to fail if they did it that way. And that person had sort of consistently failed because they kept trying to do it that way. And it was only through our conversation, it was like, Well, why do you do that then? Why do you set it for a week? Well, because that's the way you're supposed to do it.

SPEAKER_03: 40:26

That's the way you're supposed to do it.

SPEAKER_01: 40:28

Don't. It's not so if the system isn't working, it's not you, it's the system.

SPEAKER_03: 40:32

Yeah. No, exactly. I mean, I have clients who are like, I don't want to schedule, you know, a week the same, and I don't want to schedule a week of writing in advance. Okay, well, decide how many writing sessions you want to have this week. And then exactly. That's your goal. Like, and then you do them.

SPEAKER_01: 40:47

And this, like, you're supposed to write first thing in the morning. Well, there are actually people who don't do well in the morning. So why are you insisting that that person writes? Exactly. And I'm so happy to be doing work at 5 a.m. And if you try to make me do work at 3 p.m., I'm just like, I don't actually have language anymore. I can't do three o'clock in the afternoon, it's a nightmare for me. Yeah. But you know, I know writers who work from you know, 11 to 6 a.m., midnight to 6 a.m. Because that's when they work. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_03: 41:21

Yeah. And part of your self-efficacy is figuring out what works for you. And that requires experimentation. And it's going to change over time because you are going to change over time. Like, no. Yeah, like today's Jane cannot do it. Grad student Jane did in terms of work days. I'm like, isn't it time for a nap?

SPEAKER_01: 41:50

Isn't it time for bed?

SPEAKER_03: 41:54

But you know, it's it's different.

SPEAKER_01: 41:57

Yeah, it's different. You're going to be different. My niece was in town this weekend for a football game for the sort of fall game, and she and all of her friends from college all come for a game every year. And they haven't been for a couple of years, but they come. And they're all over 30 now. And they were laughing about how, you know, how they just at nine o'clock were like, okay, I'm ready to go home and go to bed. They and they stayed up because they were, you know, together. But it's like you change, you get older, you get tired, it's less important for you to do things. It's and it's one of the things that I say a lot in coaching is meet your resource, not the demand. Because if you meet your resources, like what am I have resource for right now? Then you will have a sense that you have the capacity and you can do it and you build that self-afficacy. If you keep meeting the demand without analyzing your resource, you'll consistently not meet the demand and again not feel like you have capacity or the ability or skills.

SPEAKER_03: 42:50

Yeah. Or you're gonna you're gonna meet the demand and you're gonna get really sick. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, is another part of this we see with you know sickness and worse for people in academia.

SPEAKER_01: 43:06

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03: 43:06

All right, all right, Kyle, how are we gonna wrap this up?

SPEAKER_01: 43:09

Here's what my TLDR would be. And you said it. You you have to decide what works for you. That requires experimentation, that requires separating yourself from the belief sort of really deep capitalist white supremacy roots of the system, and understand that it's the thing trying to consume everything it can get and doesn't care about you. So you have to care about you. And all of those things will slowly but surely re improve your resilience. That's how I would wrap it. How about you?

SPEAKER_03: 43:42

Yeah, all of that. Ditto. And also, you know, just don't forget about all the skills you already have, right? You know, I feel that people really feel compelled to reinvent the wheel over and over and over again because they forget or are socialized into believing that everything they've done is not enough or is inadequate and that they then need to do more. And of course, you know, academia as as life should be. You should be constantly learning new things. Nobody's saying you shouldn't. But also remind yourself that you already know a lot. You know, we get into this when I book coach and people are like, well, I have to go read, you know, a hundred new things before I start writing this book. And I'm like, but you don't. You are capable of starting to write having not read everything. And it's okay because it's a conversation with yourself at that moment, you know, but you don't have to reach some arbitrary threshold to then be like, okay, well, now I am an expert. Now I have the skill. Now I can advocate for myself. Like you get to all those points through action.

SPEAKER_01: 45:01

Right. Start ugly. Yeah. Like start ugly and clean it up. You don't have to wait until it's perfectly situated before you start gaining, like putting together that belief in yourself that you can do it. Start ugly and clean it up later.

SPEAKER_03: 45:15

Yeah, and trust that you know how to clean up because you have before. Because again, if you're listening to this, you are either knee deep in a dissertation or likely for my audience, you've already written a dissertation and are working on a book. So you know how to revise, you know how to deal with large amounts of information. You know how to summarize, you know how to analyze, you know how to do all of those things already. You're not starting at square zero when negative 10. You enter a tenure track. Yeah. Yes. What you said. So the self-efficacy is already there. It's not something you have to create for yourself, it's just something you have to regularly practice.

SPEAKER_01: 45:54

That is it, right there. Your knowledge that you can meet your goals. There's eight billion tons of evidence of it. You just have to look, turn your eyes toward it and remind yourself and do it over and over.

SPEAKER_03: 46:03

Yeah. In spite of what everyone else is telling you, except me and Cal, listen.

SPEAKER_01: 46:10

Because we know all things. We know we're talking about.

SPEAKER_03: 46:15

Yep. Well, Cal. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01: 46:18

Thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_03: 46:19

Where can people find you to come learn more from you? Where should they go? All places.

SPEAKER_01: 46:24

You can you can I will put it in the show notes too. Yeah, you can email me at TNL as in the next level, TNL at theprofessor is in dot com and ask me anything you want to ask. You can always go to theprofessorasin.com, the blog, and you'll see things I write and how to contact me and all that. But if you just want to chat with me and say, hey, I heard you and I want to ask you a question, feel free.

SPEAKER_03: 46:47

All right then. That's where you can find Kell, but not during the WNBA season because she's busy watching basketball.

SPEAKER_01: 46:54

You just try. See, we were gonna make it through this whole podcast without you bringing up my broken heart over my liberty, but it's all right. I still have Asia, it's all good. Still gonna be, I'm gonna be rooting for the ACEs now. Who are you gonna root for now? The ACEs. Yeah. Yeah. My liberty are gone.

SPEAKER_03: 47:12

But anywho, on that note, thank you all for listening. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Remember, writing an academic book is challenging, but that doesn't mean you have to overcomplicate it. If you liked what you heard in today's episode, please leave a review. This helps get the word out about the podcast so more people will listen and we can continue the conversation. Take care and tune in for our next episode.