>> I would say the challenge is really, you know, you can't do this work if you don't feel
and if you don't have compassion or some level of empathy, right?
So I am hearing stories of people saying, "I really want to finish my dissertation.
I'm close, but my committee members won't release me to be done.
I've been writing for years and they're saying I'm not finished yet.
I know that I don't want to be a faculty member, so they're thinking about my dissertation
as if it's going to be a book or a draft of a book.
But I know that it's not, but I can't tell them that," right?
And so it's helping them to figure out how do we work with --
how can I help you talk to your committee to still maintain their respect with you
as a graduate student and as someone who has gone through their program but also helping them
to understand that your career path has changed a bit and that you're going
to be doing something else, and then to help them make that transition.
So you can imagine in scenarios like that I'm working with people who really are feeling like,
"How can I make it into this next area
when I can't really properly kind of leave the graduate program?"
or "What's going to happen with my relationships with my advisor, with my committee member.
These are longstanding relationships.
I want them to continue to respect me as a scholar, but I need to do something else."
Or the student or recent graduate who comes and says, "I thought I was going
to get a job as a faculty member.
I've been on the job market for a year or two years
and there have been no invitations to be a member of a faculty.
So as much as I have thought of myself, and I still think of myself as a scholar,
I need a job because I have to take care of my expenses and support my family."
These are heavy burdens for one who is a coach to really hear.
And often I feel like I carry those things on me,
but my job is to really find the strategies, right?
So it's the difference, I guess, between empathizing and sympathizing.
So I empathize, but I have to be able to push past feeling that same level
of sometimes despair; or confusion that people will feel;
or identity crisis that people will feel.
It's "Yes, I understand it, but now my job is to help you kind of push past it, give you tools
and strategies to help you push past so that you can go to this next level in your career."
Right? So the challenge there for me is how not to feel so deeply with them that it hinders me
from doing my work, or quite frankly, that once I'm done,
I'm still worried about the client, right?
Or maybe they've only signed up for three sessions and I know that there's some more work
to be done, but that's where they've decided to stop because they feel like that's sufficient.
I have to kind of, you know, step back and let them go if that's their choice, right?
So those are the challenges.
It's so funny, some of the greatest rewards are when I publish an article in the Chronicle
of Higher Ed and it just gets shared, and shared, and shared, and retweeted,
and I get people signing up on LinkedIn saying, "Hey, that really resonated with me."
Or, you know, maybe it's a chair of a department saying, "I'm going to use this,
what you set out in this article, in our next faculty meeting to have faculty think
about when they're advising their students about career options."
Right? It's something about -- you know, because you put out a lot when you're an entrepreneur,
and you're just trying to make sure that what you're putting
out really is helping people, right?
And so it's that when I put out things that I know it's gotten some traction
because it's helped someone and they've come back and told me.