Thinking about Values Between-isode

In this between-isode, Rebecca picks up the thread about values from the previous episode on vitality vs. flourishing and shares an except from her upcoming book, Unraveling Faculty Burnout (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022).

Transcript

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Hi Agile Academic listeners, I hope you are doing well. As I’m recording this, it’s the first week of 2022. It’s already been a little bumpy for me, but I’m holding on to hope for a better year for us all. This is the second between-isode that came out of my writing binge over the winter break. Hope you enjoy!

In my earlier between-isode about vitality and flourishing, I mentioned values but said I wasn’t going to go into the subject. As I thought about it, though, articulating our values and living by them is crucial to success and well-being. So in this episode, I’m going to read you an excerpt of my new book, Unraveling Faculty Burnout, coming this year from Johns Hopkins University Press. It comes from chapter 4 on the burnout resilience pillar, purpose, and talks about values, external motivation, and thinking of higher ed as a calling rather than a job. Then I’ll offer some reflection questions you can consider when thinking about your own values as we move into a new year. I’ll link to the references I mention in the transcript, including a few values activities you can do yourself after listening.

On to the excerpt:

Let’s first consider and articulate values, which isn’t an activity many of us might spend much time on, if any. I think about values a lot since my burnout experience. I’ve been rethinking and rearticulating those values almost methodically in different ways, but it’s hard work when you do it intentionally. Many of my values were formed long before graduate school competition or the pressure of the first tenure-track job; they formed in elementary school where I, like many “smart kids,” was trained to see my value in the things faculty now lament our students over-emphasize: grades, leadership, number of extra-curriculars, and other activities like service that round out a successful college application (Hallett, 2018, 15).

During my burnout, I was often asked in therapy or groups to complete a value-identifying exercise, which frustrated me to no end. They made me confront the fact that my values were associated with productivity, success, excellence, being the best, and achievement, etc.; if you’d like to take a similar assessment, simply do an internet search for “values activity.” 

As much as I wanted to be able to say things like integrity and happiness and community were my core values, that would have been a stretch, even a lie. There was so much of what I’d now identify as shame associated with that for me, to be so externally motivated, that I publicly mocked the exercise to not look deeply at myself and where those achievement-oriented values were really coming from. But I wouldn’t be surprised to find that other academics feel the same way. It’s trained into us, even if it wasn’t part of our natural disposition pre-academy.

On one hand, higher ed as a culture espouses the values of lifelong learning, discovery, contribution to a better world, and striving for excellence. They’re all wrapped up in a view that the academy is a calling to change the world through research and teaching. I love these ideal values. In a sense, I gave myself completely over to them, to the cultural imperative that the vaunted halls of higher education only call a few and that fewer still can belong successfully. For me and many faculty members I’ve spoken with, it was an overcommitment to the idea of being “called” that opened the door for our work to be all-encompassing, which sets us up for burnout. 

When you consider your job in higher ed a calling, no matter how great the job is, it’s much easier to slowly give more and more of yourself as you buy into the competitive achievement orientation and culture that will continue to pull more from you in service of that calling. Without a check and balance system, success becomes bound in higher ed’s other values: productivity, achievement, (over)work, and your ability to keep up with the expectation escalation and ladder-climbing to the holy grail of tenure-track positions demanded by the academic career trajectory.

I interviewed Dr. Katie Linder, a coach who works with academics, and she argued,

"some people come to higher ed because they have a deep value of personal and professional growth or lifelong learning, and what they’re finding in higher ed is not aligned with that. For many people, higher ed is a great fit for their personal values. But in graduate school, you also experience the breakdown of your own personal sense of what are you supposed to be doing. You need to get constant approval from your peers, from your blind reviewers, from your advisor, or from your department chair and whatever board to get promotion and tenure. There’s always someone else who’s deciding your value. So, what does that do for own decision making? "

Katie’s summary reminds me that there is great irony in my choosing academia after I considered my time in industry such a failure. Success in academia requires constant approval-seeking, externalized motivations, and rejection, with so many decisions completely out of your hands, including article acceptances, book contracts, promotion and tenure, even landing a full-time position. So, the move certainly wasn’t into a culture with less stress, but it was a stress I understood.

When we depend on external validation, we see competition at every corner: “We only look at those ahead of us—and of course, there is no shortage of more productive, better cited and more well-known scholars than ourselves” (Bothello & Roulet, 2019, p. 6). I deeply internalized competition and productivity as core values pre-burnout, partially because in the US education system, we were trained to judge ourselves on “doing well rather than living well” (Hallett, 2018, p. 15) and “based on how efficient they are, not how fulfilling” (Headlee, 2020, p. xii). As Brene Brown (2017) says of her own perfectionism, “I got sucked into proving I could, rather than stepping back and asking if I should—or if I even really wanted to” (p. 194).

As I came out of burnout, I started to realize I could grow into other values and reenergize my purpose in different ways. Nagoski and Nagoski argue that, “Our culture treats you as if ‘being productive’ is the most important measure of your worth, as if you are consumable good…You are not here to be ‘productive.’ You are here to be you, to engage with your Something Larger, to move through the world with confidence and joy” (p.  184). 

If I could define excellence and success for myself, instead of looking for outside validation, I could finally revisit my purpose and how I make meaning of my life and work with a greater sense of who I am and who I wanted to be post-burnout.  

So, there is a sneak peek at the book chapter on using your purpose to handle burnout. As I mentioned, the four pillars of burnout resilience I cover in the book are purpose, compassion, connection, and balance, and after years of having values associated with achievement, I can honestly say that these are currently the four values that help me make decisions about my life and work. Values change intentionally or just naturally over time. I worked hard to excavate what my actual values are rather than what higher ed told me they should be. It means a lot to know I have mine now; it’s actually comforting as I grow into the person I want to be rather than the one that higher ed made me.

I mentioned in the excerpt that you can easily find a values “test” just by googling “values words” or “values test.” What you’ll find are any number of list of value words that you comb through, circling the ones that are meaningful to you. I like Brene Brown’s version as a place to start, the longer lists can be really intimidating. I’ll link in the transcript. 

Once you have the list to use, I ask my coaching clients to do a couple of things. First, I ask them to go through the list and circle the words that are meaningful to them or those that just resonate. Then I ask them to put a star next to words on the big list that are values higher ed holds. And then I might also have them underline words that they wish were values. Having these multiple ways of looking at the values on the list helps you sort out what you truly value. You might do other passes through with family values or some other meaningful pattern for you. Whatever helps you think through values.

Once you have the words that resonate with you most, see if you can put them into groupings of categories or themes. These groups of value words will often bring those core values to the surface for you. 

Here are some reflection questions to consider once you have that list of core values:

·      What patterns do you see, and what do they mean to you?

·      What surprises you about your list, and why?

·      What are you learning about yourself through this values activity?

·      How are these values showing up in your life and work? Where would you like them to show up more?

Hopefully working through the values exercise and exploring these reflection questions leads you to some self-knowledge that might inform your goals for the year. 

Be on the look-out for a between-isodes and for the new season of the agile academic coming in the spring! As always, take care, and stay well.