Faculty, are your actions and goals in alignment? Check-in with yourself in this interview with mindfulness coach, Dr. Jennifer Askey.

What does it mean to be a mindful academic? Jennifer Askey, PhD asked me about mindful practices when I was a guest on her podcast. While I went to a graduate program for creative writing where that was a focus, the mindful practices I’ve kept are simple. The one I shared with Jennifer? My favorite room spray, a ritual spritz I use just before meetings. Lavender, apple blossom, clover.

It got me thinking how just talking about mindfulness can help us be more intentional with the care we give to ourselves. And, the spaces we create for other people. Not just mindfulness for self-care. When academics are more intentional about their thoughts and actions it makes a difference for all areas of your life.

Join me and executive leadership and mindfulness coach, Dr. Jennifer Askey in this live conversation.

Meet Dr. Jennifer Askey

JvA: Hello there. I am Jennifer van Alstyne and I have another Jennifer here on The Social Academic with me today. I’m very excited about this particular call because I’ve been trying to be more intentional with how I show up online, and a lot of that has to do with how I think about my business and how I interact with people, and how I work with faculty. It takes this intentionality and mindfulness in order to make better decisions.

Dr. Jennifer Askey is my friend and she is a coach who helps people really bring mindfulness into their leadership practices as academics. Jennifer, would you introduce yourself to folks?

[Dr. Jennifer Askey:] I would love to, and as from one Jennifer to another, we are legion and should probably just be in charge. I, I’m a former faculty member. I did all of the faculty things. So visiting, adjunct/sessional is what we call it in Canada. I was a tenured professor and a part of the two body problem in higher ed where you have two people who meet in grad school and fall in love and get married and can never get jobs in the same place. After our third or fourth attempt to have fulfilling jobs in the same place, relocated to Canada to follow the better paying of those jobs, which happened to be my partner’s.

I’m giving this backstory because part of what I am is I’m an academic and I’m guided by curiosity and wanting to understand things and get to the bottom of it. And as my own career did, this 180, half-gainer pretzel dive off a cliff, I had to figure out what I was going to be if I wasn’t going to be a faculty member ’cause that was a huge part of my identity.

I retrained as a coach about, not quite 10 years ago. And since 2017 I have been working more or less full-time either in institutions or on my own working one-on-one with faculty and with groups, teams, departments in colleges, and universities on self-leadership and how that provides the foundation for institutional leadership. And I do not miss teaching German grammar. I occasionally miss some of the other parts of my teaching and research role, but I have found that I’m far happier being a coach and solopreneur than I was as a tenured faculty member. And I never in a million, million years would have guessed that.

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Why self-leadership?

JvA: Yeah, I feel when I first met you, you seemed very academic in how you think and how you’re curious and how you approach problem solving. It’s really interesting how many folks like us have just left the academy, but still work so closely with people who are on university campuses who are making decisions. And I’m curious about one thing you mentioned, which is self-leadership. Like, why is that?

Jennifer Askey: Yeah, thank you for asking that question. Self-leadership is at the core of, if you were to go to a business school and take courses in leadership or if you’re university through HR offers some sort of leadership thing, they would tell you about this. This is part of the literature on leadership, which is in order to stand in front of or beside a group of people and help guide them and motivate them and lead them, you have to know yourself on a pretty profound level.

You have to know what your values are. You have to know what your non-negotiables are. You have to know where your skills truly lie and where they very much don’t, right? You have to acknowledge that you don’t know and see it all. And you may think like, “Oh, I got myself figured out.” But you have to acknowledge there might be blind spots that you don’t see.

And you have to be able to communicate that your self knowledge and value system to the people around you because that’s part of building trust. And when I started my coach training, the, the modality of training that I did was five intensive weekends, once a month for half a year. The very first three day weekend intensive part of our coaching work as a cohort was going through values exercises and talking about peak experiences and all of these things. I realized that, here, I was in my forties, I had a pretty successful career. I was married, I was a parent, published author of books and articles.

And nobody had ever asked me,

• What is important to you about this work?
• Why do you do it?
• What are your key values?

Because why, why had that never been a question? Because think about all the places you have worked or been a student. When people are just managing and checking boxes and getting deliverables and whatnot, but there’s no, there’s no heart, there’s no humanity, there’s no value. Like, people don’t buy into your leadership. People do not trust you. Self-leadership is first, know thyself.

JvA: I am always surprised when I’m doing these interviews before I work with faculty for their websites. How many people have said, “Oh, no one’s ever asked me that.” When I say, “What got you into this work? Why do you do it? Like, what keeps you here? What keeps you choosing this for yourself?” And it’s not like they don’t know, everyone I ask tends to have an answer pretty quickly. It’s something that they feel that they know is part of that, but voicing it out loud and taking time to be intentional isn’t something we gift ourselves very often. I don’t do it for myself as often as I know would be valuable.

I’m curious for folks who are listening, is there, I should have sent you this question in advance, but is there something that you have to suggest for them if they’re like, “Oh, what can I do today to be more self-aware, maybe take a step towards more self-leadership?”

Jennifer Askey: I have a couple answers to that in terms of easy-to-access resources that if you’ve never taken the time or had a listening ear, ’cause sometimes you need both to articulate these sorts of things. Easy ways to dip your toes in the water with Google as your guide. You can find Brene Brown’s values exercise. It is a little hair raising ’cause it’s an eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper with a hundred values on it. Community, collaboration, assertiveness, autonomy, faith, sincerity, like those sorts of things in alphabetical order. And then it has fill, fill in your own space for your own words too. And you circle the 10 that excite you the most or the 15 that excite you the most and feel like, “Oh yeah, that’s me.”

And then her process, and if you’ve read her book, Dare to Lead or gone through the Dare to Lead Program when it still existed before she [partnered with BetterUp]. And now all of her Dare to Lead stuff I think is being offered through BetterUp. But the exercise is like to keep winnowing that down until you get to the one core value. That makes me break out in hives. Like, one ring to rule them all.

I don’t want, give me a short list. Can I have three to five? I can work with five, right? One is, “Oh no,” but it’s a really good way to think about, to spark your thinking about, “Okay, what do I value?”

When I go into rooms with other people, students, colleagues, collaborators, family members, what values am I leading with? What values am I putting on my coat? What are the values that I walk into the room with? Because being aware of the fact that how you show up in a room is going to be informed by the values that you’re leading with, whether you’re intending that or not, might also allow you to say, “Okay, with my students do I want to lead with collaboration and community or do I wanna lead with rigor and autonomy?” Those would be, even with the same content material, potentially two very different pedagogical experiences for students, ditto for collaborators, right? So giving yourself language around, that is one way to do it.

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Mindfulness as a practice for success

Jennifer Askey: And then to go deeper, I always suggest developing a contemplative practice. For me it’s meditation, mindfulness. Some people prayer, journaling, forest walks, whatever it is where you take time to check in with yourself on a body mind axis and say like, “How, how am I, am I acting in alignment with my values and goals when I try to, shut down thinking for a little bit and focus on my breath? What do I notice happens?” ‘Cause we’re all, you’re going keep thinking, thinking am I worried about something? Am I planning for something? Just giving yourself time to get to know yourself in ways that are not just the front of the room performance that most faculty tend to experience their professional identity through.

JvA: I like that mindfulness can be a practice as well as something that informs decision making and thinking about where to spend time and energy and focus. What does it mean to have, be mindful as an academic? What does that look like when you have been intentional about that?

Jennifer Askey: Yeah. When I, when I started thinking about my own mindfulness and how I might incorporate that into the work I do with faculty and administrators, I was like, “Okay, what’s the opposite of mindfulness,” was a question I asked myself and I came up with reactivity is the polar opposite of mindfulness. So I would invite you, if you’re listening, whether you are an academic or a solopreneur like Jen and me, how much of your work is fueled by, not work, work is a vague word. How much of your day-to-day activity and productivity is seeded and fueled by things landing in your inbox on the one hand, because that is to my mind almost entirely reactive work. Frequently, whether it’s colleagues, collaborators, students, family members, they want something, they’re missing something, they’re asking for something, they’re handing you a problem, they’re making a request. You didn’t ask for it and now it’s in your email inbox and it is, becomes a to-do item that is going through your week, your month, your year in a completely reactive mode.

And the opposite of that, being mindful is doing things like, “Okay, what’s important to me in a grand scheme?” And then let’s look at the semester. So you and I are recording. Oh we’re, we’re live. It’s the end of August. I’m used to saying, “Yeah, we’re recording this. Who knows when it will come out?” Okay. But it’s the end of August, so if your semester hasn’t started, it’s going to, right, in a week or so. And you’re shifting from one mode to another mode. And a great way to bring mindfulness into your upcoming semester is to say, “Okay, what’s my vision for this semester? How do I wanna feel by the time the end of the semester rolls around?” If so, if I know that I want to feel, I’ll make something up here.

Let’s say I want to feel super accomplished and on top of things and not totally burned out, okay. That seems like a great goal. Do I know enough to say, “If I want to feel accomplished and not completely burned out, what are the main kinds of things I need to have completed or under control?” So if it’s a teaching semester, I need to have teaching under control. Do I have research obligations? Do I have service obligations? Do I have personal life obligations? Am I sleeping enough? Do I have an exercise routine? What do I need to do that on a daily and weekly basis I feel like, “Oh, I’m working on, I feel the way I want to feel.” I don’t feel like I open my inbox and it’s a tsunami of other people’s stuff that just comes rushing over my head, putting me in whack-a-mole mode. But I am setting a course and following it.

And if you’ve set, if you’ve set the goals, this is how I want to feel and these are the activities that help me feel that way, then we have to look at our calendars and our commitments and say, “Does what I’ve already said yes to, the things that are already in my calendar? Do they match in any way, shape or form what I just said about my goals and how I want to feel?” Because I find a lot that when you, when I ask clients or groups of people to, to talk about, what does success feel like to you? Whether we’re talking your five-year plan or your semester plan, what does success feel like to you? They love answering that question.

And then when we get down to does your week contain the building blocks of that success? Like, “Oh no, no! It has nothing to do with what I just wrote over here as my intention.” This is why you’re feeling burned out because you have two jobs in your mind. You have, oh here’s the job that’s going to make me feel successful and here’s the job that my email inbox tells me I have and they’re not the same job. And then you’re, you feel like a crazy person, and that’s no fun. So bringing mindfulness into your career is saying like, “Well, if I know what’s important to me and hopefully what’s important to my institution for success and feeling successful. Then am I lining up my daily activities with opportunities to work towards that?” As opposed to, “Well, I will feel great when I get that grant but there’s no time to do that because I’m just answering emails.” There is room for mindful intervention there.

JvA: I notice some of the principal investigators that I work with have been more intentional and mindful about their work when they’ve just done strategic planning or put together maybe an annual report. I’m curious like when, what are some of the clues that would help someone know, “Oh okay, I need to be intentional about this,” or “being intentional about this now will help me really for years to come. I need to move forward.”

Intentional career planning for faculty

Jennifer Askey: So, I have a workshop and I used to teach it through Academic, I developed it for Academic Impressions and taught it for them for a while. And I’m not, they’ve changed how they partner with institutions and I’m not doing much work with them right now. And I keep thinking about resuscitating it. If anybody out there is interested, let me know because having an opportunity as a group ideally, because then you get to sort of watch other people go through the same process, to do some really intentional career planning. And I have a mindful career action planning pyramid that I use with people and like really set that up.

And I set this up for myself as a business owner.

• What’s gonna make me feel successful?
• What kinds of projects does that mean I should be taking on?
• And what kinds of projects shouldn’t I be?
• What are my goals for this quarter or this semester?
• And then what does that mean my week should look like?

It sounds like this beautifully organized, cascading pyramid of intention and mindful action. But because we’re all human, we set this, we can set this up. If we never check-in with it, it’s just this beautiful plan. And this is also for me where mindfulness comes in because the mindfulness, which is, I’ll be a little sloppy here and say it’s this, a slight westernization of eastern meditation traditions, but it isn’t. Mindfulness practices are an invitation to be aware of what is happening in the present moment and to actually live in the present moment, which is a recognition of our human tendency to either live in the past and ruminate and regret and fret or live in the present and plan or catastrophize or worry or whatever, but not actually make a habit of checking in with today and now and this moment. And setting aside time, probably on a yearly basis at least, if not a semester basis.

I think of it as like three times during the year, right? There’s the fall chunk, there’s the winter chunk, some spring chunk, and the middle of the year time off chunk. Like if you think of your year in those sorts of chunks, doing some intentional planning then. But following that up with at, at least on a weekly basis. I have this great plan, isn’t it pretty, perhaps color coded? Have I looked at it again? What did past me say was really important for today and is today’s me on board with that? It’s that accordion process of big picture planning and then daily attention, big picture planning and daily attention that for me anyway in running my business keeps me aligned with, “Oh that’s right, this is important.” I don’t have to take on everything that’s in that tsunami of stuff that comes at me, whether it’s in my inbox or LinkedIn or social media. I don’t need to click on every opportunity, Just keep focused on what I’ve decided is important.

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The benefits of group work

JvA: When you brought that up, you mentioned that doing it in a group is helpful. Why is that?

Jennifer Askey: I, that’s a great question and I’m going see if I can articulate a good answer for it. Because I think that, when I started doing some intentional planning like this, I did it in a group and I was super frustrated by it because it felt slow and I wanted to do it really quickly. And it felt like maybe not special enough for me because I am very special and I should be able to focus entirely on my special thing. Halfway through this group thing I was like, “Oh, oh wait, I, I’m actually learning something.” I’m learning that where I bump up against resistance is not unique to me. It’s pretty common. I’m learning that the struggle that I have in moving from, well here’s my ideal vision of success to the prioritization of what can, what am I focusing on this semester to move in that direction that intellectually, like if you just hand it, I have a planner actually, the Rocket[Book] planner sort of works along these principles. The Panda planner works along these principles. I have a planner that works along these principles. We could pass out planners and say go fill ’em out. Call me if you have any questions and you wouldn’t do it. But when you have the atmosphere where we’re all kind of struggling with articulating these things together, you have a little bit of accountability, you have some reinforcement and the group dynamic keeps you a little bit energized around, “Oh, okay, this isn’t just me alone in my office accountable to nobody and no one. This is a process that if more and more people do it, maybe we feel a little bit more in control of our academic lives.”

JvA: Hmm. I really like that and I really relate to that in terms of resistance to being in a group setting and feeling like I wasn’t going to get as much out of it and then being pleasantly surprised that actually it allowed me to go deeper in some ways.

Jennifer Askey: And I find that our faculty friends are maybe more hesitant than many to to dive into group experiences where they are not in the expert chair because the potential for vulnerability seems so risky when you’re a scholar, teacher, academic that like, “Oh I’m gonna go do this thing where I might have to talk about a concern I have or, or where maybe I have missed the mark on something or somebody might be able to see, even if I don’t talk about it that I need help.” Acknowledging that you can’t do it alone feels really vulnerable for people. And I think maybe especially for faculty. And I too am always pleasantly surprised at how much I get out of being in a group and when I have faculty who are willing to commit to a group process, they are also always very surprised, pleasantly about how good it is for them. But very few people are gonna put up their hands and say, “Oh please, let me go be vulnerable with a bunch of other folks.”

JvA: I was really lucky to attend a goal setting workshop that you hosted and I found that I wouldn’t have created that time for myself. But also that time in a group setting really helped me think about the intentional goals that other people in that group, other people who were there could relate to and be interested in engaging in conversation with. It actually changed what I wrote down in better ways. And I have found that because I have this document and one of my tasks on my little, to be mindful, I have like a little agenda of these are the things that I want to try and do every day. And on that is, go read your goals. Like, go read them. Even if I just read one thing on that page, that’s going to be helpful for me and livestreaming, being here on camera and reimagining my podcast, this is a goal that I have seen through and found so exciting because it’s more in alignment with my life.

Tips for faculty approaching a new semester

And I’m curious Jennifer, if you would be open to sharing what tips do you have for faculty who are approaching a new semester and they’re like, “I need to maybe set some goals. I haven’t been as mindful as I might want to be. What can I do?”

Jennifer Askey: Ooh, I would love to share some tips. Okay, I’m gonna work with my imaginary, maybe not ideal, but my imaginary Jane and Joe Doe faculty member whose goals are, they might say totally self-evident, right? Get the grant, write the book, write the article. It’s the things and I would say that, so I come from the humanities and our yardstick was the single authored monograph. And if I were to be in a coaching relationship with, with a humanities scholar, I was like, “Well this semester my goal is to write the book.” I’m like, “Oh you’re so funny. No it’s not.”

Hopefully the outcome is to write the book or make significant progress on the book. But your goal is to set up your, because unless you’re on sabbatical, you have more than just writing to do. And even if you’re on sabbatical, you’re not just at a computer writing. Maybe you’re researching, maybe you’re rereading, maybe you’re revising, right? There’s a whole bunch of, and are colleagues who are writing coaches can speak more to that, but there’s a lot going on.

So giving yourself these goals of, “Well I don’t need to set them for myself ’cause it’s super obvious that to get tenure I need an R1 grant,” or “to get tenure I need a book,” or “I’m chair and my goal is just to keep things from actually blowing up.” Those aren’t great goals or priorities. And so starting from this notion of what makes you feel successful, saying in the course of a, whether you have a 13 week semester like we do in Canada or a 15 or 16 week semester or 10 week quarters or whatever you got going on, think about in the time period that you wanna plan for what would make you feel successful? And achievement is probably part of that, but it’s not the sum total of what’s gonna make you feel successful and what is in alignment with your values and your life commitments. And then pick, okay, let’s say that making progress on the big thing: the book, the grant project, maybe that is your big priority. Okay, let’s take everything that you might need to do around writing the book or working on the grant and break it down.

This is goal setting 101 and because we are smart and stuff, we skip over the baby steps and yet it is in doing the baby steps that the work actually happens. I can’t just say, “I understand smart goals and so all my goals are smart.” No they’re not. Unless you actually break them down and say, “Okay, if I’m gonna write this book, here are the 87 things that need to happen this semester.” And then map them out. So, and if you make it even a sloppy contract with yourself and say, “You know, X number of hours a week and I’ll take, I’ve chunked it down into it’s component parts and every week I take a chunk and I work on it.” That’s not a super tight, write it up in a journal plan. But it keeps the guardrails up where you’re like, “Okay, write the book.” If that’s your goal every day when you sit down, you might not want to do anything ’cause it’s huge. That’s eat the elephant. I’m not gonna eat elephants. So, if write the book [is your goal], but you’ve spent the time to break it down into chunks and then during your research time each week you take one of those chunks and you work on it and when it’s done you set it aside and then you go do the next one. So that you trust, “I’ve created this container, I’ve created a contract with myself and if I fulfill my contract with myself, I will be just about this far along at the end of this term.”

And the mindfulness there is not just running with the big picture and assuming that because I know that the end goal is the book or the grant or whatever or the X number of publications that I’m just working towards that until I’m done. That actually is an anxiety producing framework because work until you’re done. Well, do I get to sleep? What does that mean, work until I’m done? No, this week I’m spending this much time and I’ve spent the time mapping out the semester so that I trust if I follow the plan I will make progress. There’s a lot of building self-trust and if I set goals and I complete them, things happen.

Then when you do it again, you have a greater degree of trust in your ability to set a goal and reach it and lather, rinse, repeat. And I think of that as a very mindful process ’cause as you do it, you’ll run into yourself in various ways. You will find your points of resistance, you will find what’s hard, you will find where you would just rather not, and this is where working on your academic priorities can be, if you choose, also working on yourself. Like, “Oh if I do, if I have a process and I learn to trust myself and I commit to it in this way, if I complete it, what qualities, characteristics have I now adopted that kind of make me Jennifer 2.0 or 2.1, 0.1, 0.3 or something like that?

We get to work on ourselves in the process of working on our work as opposed to just like, “I got shit to do!” Because I have to say if I knew half of this, if I knew half of what I knew now when I was a faculty member with young children on the tenure track, oh my gosh, I would have slept more, drunk less, felt better. I would’ve been a much happier person. I’m a little bummed that I didn’t learn a lot of it until I left the academy and went out on my own.

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How to work with Dr. Jennifer Askey

JvA: Now you offer a suite of services. You help people with coaching skills for academic leaders. I would love for people who are listening to this to know just a little bit more about the different ways that they could maybe work with you. I know it’s personalized to each person.

Jennifer Askey: Yeah, that’s the fun thing talking about coaching is that, man, if I sold a widget, I could tell you the widget, but in coaching, the client is the widget, you’re the product. So I do one-on-one executive coaching for faculty and administrative leaders. Faculty, chair, dean, all of it. And that is around success, goal setting, emotional self-management, managing yourself, leading your people, managing yourself and managing your research, your TAs. Like, that’s just coaching. It’s what do you need? And we create, we create a plan and then we coach around what you’ve identified as your goals. And a lot of that is I think a combination of internal work and external work. There’s some goal setting and some concrete deliverables, but then there’s also hopefully some shifts in the way that you approach yourself and approach your work.

And then on an institutional or group level, I do workshops and facilitations. I have a Coaching Skills for Leaders, small series of workshops that I’ve taught at universities that are introducing peer coaching models for their faculty and staff where they maybe have a couple certified coaches on campus, but then they also have a bunch of, a number of faculty and staff who’ve opted in to become peer coaches. And I’ve provided some of the training for those peer coaches and I really enjoy that work because there are so many things that we learn in coach certification that apply so easily to navigating the personnel and emotional landscape of Higher Ed where people are, where especially faculty are incredibly self-identified with the product of their work. And then I do things like department retreats and strategic planning and things like that. And for me it all has in common, can we be values led and intentional and mindful about how we come to academic work so that colleges and universities can be the best places to work on the planet because they have the potential to be that and frequently aren’t. And some of that is a us problem.

JvA: Yeah, there are things we can do, we have agency in changing how we approach things, how we think about things, how we work together, how we care for each other. We have options.

Jennifer Askey: Yes. Yeah, that is precisely correct.

JvA: Dr. Jennifer Askey, how can people get in touch with you after this? If they wanna work with you, if they wanna connect with you, if they wanna check out your podcast.

Jennifer Askey: Absolutely. My podcast is The Mindful Academy and I’m in the middle of a bit of a lull because my vacation schedule and my production person’s vacation schedule, oh man, we’ve been apart for a while.

This year’s episodes are mostly interviews with you and others. People who come from the academy and now do other things or who are in the academy and are bringing interesting mindfulness and coaching insights to academic work. So The Mindful Academy is there, I am on LinkedIn and Instagram most actively, probably LinkedIn where I’m Jennifer Askey Coach. And if you can see my name on the screen here, I’m jennifer@jenniferaskey.com I’m @jennifer_askey on on Instagram.

Like, Jennifer’s are legion. Askey’s are not. So I’m pretty easy to find.

JvA: I love that. Oh, I’m so glad that you came on The Social Academic. Is there anything you’d like to add before we wrap up?

What Jennifer loves about Jennifer

Jennifer Askey: Yeah, I would actually. So, your work as somebody who does external facing communications for academics’ websites and other PR stuff, I know from my work with a lot of faculty one-on-one that especially sort of post-tenure when the first, when the biggest hurdle has been cleared and you sort of settle and say, “Okay, now what do I want my career to be about?”

So many people end up feeling like their true desires are maybe not seen by their colleagues or not seen or acknowledged by their institution and “Oh, can I even do that? Because now I’ve been doing this for so long?” That whole identity thing at mid-career, I think that doing the coaching things around priorities and values and coming up with a vision for your career, how well that meshes with being able to articulate that in visible ways to external parties.

You and I have talked about the fact that we end up asking some of the same questions to people because your CV is not who you are and we have multiple ways of sharing with both a scholarly audience and a coworker audience and a student audience how to read us, how to get us how to work with us, what’s important to us. And I find it really interesting that our, that people who are thinking about how to communicate their value to the institution, I would love if all of my clients who were thinking, “Oh, maybe I want to go into science communication or maybe I want to do this.” Well, why don’t you start with creating a website that is a portfolio of who you are that is both academic but also not?

The big picture issues about life and career that we dig into really deeply in coaching, I love the way that you work with people to help them communicate that. So it doesn’t just stay like, “Oh, here’s my secret special thing that I love that nobody gets to see.” Because ultimately maybe we want people to see our secret special thing.

JvA: I am so glad that you said that. And for anyone who’s listening, you don’t have to work with me to have that space for yourself. I have lots of resources to help you on The Social Academic Blog and working with someone like Dr. Jennifer Askey can help you be more intentional about what you want for yourself in ways that can benefit how you write your academic bio or share on your LinkedIn profile or post on your website. I just want you to know that it has so many amazing benefits for how you think about and share about yourself.

What do you dream about for your online presence, academics?

Jennifer Askey: And getting clear on who you are right now and having opportunities to touch base with that. Because maybe the vision of you as an academic and vision of your career that you established when you were a grad student or a postdoc isn’t who you are now, and that’s okay.

And yet your job, busy as it is doing all the things, might not invite you to carve out that time to be intentional about, let me take a minute, recalibrate who am I now?

• What’s my focus now?
• How do I want to communicate my intentions and my value to the institution now?

And whether it’s using your resources on the blog, working with you. I have on my website, you can download a copy of the Mindful Action Planning Pyramid and a little workbook that walks you through the process that I spoke of. Again, like that’s more fun with a group of people and more likely to help make you feel accountable to actually following through. But spending time thinking about even the levels of, of goal setting and how you’d communicate that is time well spent.

Thank you

JvA: I love it. Dr. Jennifer Askey, thank you so much for joining me here on The Social Academic.

Jennifer Askey: Thank you so much, Jennifer for having me. This has been a delight and it is my first live podcast and I have to say, other than my camera thinking about not participating at the very beginning, once got that sorted out, this has been a delight. And perhaps The Mindful Academy will be coming to you in future via various live mechanisms because again, why make things hard? Let’s make things easy!

JvA: I’m excited! And thank you for sharing that with me. I love when I get to hear something like that. I’m celebrating, first Live podcast recording.

Jennifer Askey: We are old dogs, but we can learn new tricks. 

JvA: Oh, amazing. Thank you everyone.

Jennifer Askey: Thank you so much for having me. Thank you guys for tuning in. Be in touch. I would love to hear from you.

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