After getting the message that nothing changes when you get tenure in my 4th year annual review, I listened carefully to the recommendations from my dean and my chair about what I needed to deliver over the next year in order to be successful when going up for tenure. But more importantly (to me), I was doing an internal audit to assess what needed the change right away. I didn’t want to put off the idea that rest was for when I had job security, or that I could be more creative or spend less time on the frustrating parts of work once I had tenure.
This, of course, takes a major shift in how I approach things (Freudian slip that I typed “shit” twice before I could get “shift” on the page??). So here’s a simplified version of what I did:
1) Assessed my values (for work and home) and began to notice where these were and weren’t showing up… and how that made me feel.
2) Developed an informal set of standards for how I would prioritize things when I started feeling worn down or burned out.
*The key here—you have to let yourself rest when you need it, and this is SO MUCH HARDER THAN YOU’D THINK FOR AN ACADEMIC. It truly does take repeated practice, and this is something I’ll explore much more in depth in future posts.
3) Began to confront the thought patterns I had around work and home, about what I “should” be doing, and I looked more closely at where these ideas came from and if they were valid (e.g., did I need to uphold them, or could I let some of them go?)
4) Began asking myself, “how can I relax while doing this” and “when will it feel easiest to do this?” With regard to these questions, I don’t mean I now need to do everything from my couch while watching netfilx, though that does sound relaxing. Instead, I take a situation that might feel pressured, or tense, or just not my best, and I think about how I can shift my internal feelings to bring a more relaxed energy to things. When I’m resistant to something, it really ups the amount of energy it requires. When I relax into something—even something difficult—it doesn’t take as big of a toll on my energy.
The question about doing things when they feel easier has to do with prioritizing high-importance and high-focus tasks for when I’m best able to focus on approaching them in a relaxed way. This is in line with a lot of research about writing earlier in the day, etc., and I’ve begun applying this to other things as well. For example, it often feels a lot easier to prep a simple soup for the crockpot the evening before if I’m not feeling exhausted, so that the next day when I get home and I am exhausted, I don’t have to start cooking from scratch.
It’s about prep work, knowing your patterns of energy/rest, knowing when things feel hard to do, and working with this instead of without regard for it.
Interestingly, I also noticed that my values at work and at home were largely aligned: creativity, organization, alignment/calm, non-reactivity, listening, and social justice. When I prioritize these, I tend to feel a lot better, and it’s easier to make decisions about what to do and what to let go of.
On the flip side, knowing what I don’t value helped to let go of thoughts, reactions, and time invested in activities that fed these values. What I worked on letting go of included competition, judgment, self-doubt, and comparison.
The first (and most important) step is in just noticing when these show up. If you can develop this skill, and train it to be like muscle memory, it becomes much easier over time to shift and change the patterns around your time and your values, and to work with your natural patterns of energy and rest instead of trying to override these.