Did I Shave My Legs for This?

This is the first of a handful of posts I’m writing to accompany the launch of my new coaching business, which focuses on helping mid-career faculty. I’ll be saying a bit about what being coached has meant for me as well as what I’ve learned from being on the other side of the relationship.

Deana Carter’s country song is about a woman whose husband done her wrong:

“Flowers and wine is what I thought I would find

When I came home from working tonight

Well now here I stand, over this frying pan

And you want a cold one again”

It’s pretty peak country.

“Did I shave my legs for this?” also happens to be a perfect encapsulation of the feeling of achieving something and then learning it doesn’t bring about the transformation you had hoped.

As it turns out, this feeling comes around pretty often in an academic career.

Drawing from my own experience, “Did I shave my legs for this?” moments can include completing a PhD, finishing a book, acquiring a tenure-track job, getting tenure, receiving a promotion.

I’m not necessarily on the everything-is-rotten-in-the-state-of-Academia train (certainly, some things are), but there’s something about the way an academic career is structured that produces a cycle of achievement followed by disappointment.

As academics, we work hard, for long periods of time, in pursuit of external measures of our value. This works for a very long time, particularly for the “good students” who tend to pursue academic careers.

There are multiple downsides to such an extrinsically motivated path. Here are a few:

• Typically, we are still the same people tomorrow that we were yesterday, feeling much the same about ourselves and our lives.

• Often the material benefits pegged to these achievements don’t feel as though they match the years of labor that went into them. To wit, the precarious state of many with PhDs.

• Finally, there’s not a clear point of completion: we either pin our hopes to a next milestone (going up for full, writing the next book) or enter a period of career uncertainty because that next goal isn’t clear at mid-career.

Of course, the irony to this immiserating goal-chasing is that it was likely an intrinsic interest in a subject matter or love for teaching that brought us to academia in the first place. However, the structure of an academic career tends to turn our attention outward to external markers and away from the questions and excitements that brought us here.

This is why I think coaching is so valuable for mid-career academics. With coaching, there’s a focus on moving from external motivation to back toward internal motivation. Or perhaps to discovering new motivations.

For example, through my experience as a coaching client, I’ve discovered that there are certain external markers that no longer feel meaningful in their own right. At this point, publishing another journal article or presenting another conference paper feels this way.

This doesn’t mean, however, that I’m done writing. Or even that I’m done with academic writing. However, it does mean that I’m framing my writing in terms of nagging issues I want to work through or juicy topics I want to spend time with. This summer, for instance, I’m embarking on a significant research project about the screenwriter Anita Loos.  I want to use my research and writing to address some questions about gender, work, career and aging that feel important to me right now.

I’m also not done going to conferences, but the value I’m placing on them has changed: it’s less about performance and more about being in community with smart people whose work I find enlivening.

Certainly, this is a privilege of having tenure. But it is also an insight about alignment that I suspect might have helped me work more pleasurably had I held it earlier in my career.

Early on, my performance of intellectual work was done very much to clear benchmarks and to demonstrate my worth to others.  So much impostor syndrome, young one! There was a whole lot of leg-shaving going on.

And, my god, let me acknowledge that I am writing this post following the news about Roe.  If ever there were a time for women and other historically marginalized groups to do work for themselves and not solely to meet the expectations of others, this is it.

 Frankly, it’s always that time.

Some questions for you, dear ones:

• What matters to you about your work? How has what matters changed?

• What external markers of success are past their sell-by date for you and your career stage?