Finding Presence with Liz Norell

Hi, Professors! This is Karen Gonzalez Rice, art historian, professor and life coach for academics.  You are listening to “The Good Enough Professor,” the show that reimagines academic life for overwhelmed professors.  Let's create a more supportive, more humane academia, one small, intentional choice at a time. Listen on for how we can do this together.

Karen:  Today, I'm talking with Liz Norell about presence and authenticity in academic life. Liz is a faculty developer at the University of Mississippi with a background in political science, she's the author of The Present Professor:  Authenticity and Transformational Teaching, which is coming out very soon from the University of Oklahoma Press.

Liz, you and I met last year at the POD Network Conference, which is a conference for educational developers, people who work in supporting faculty with teaching, and increasingly in recent years, with faculty wellbeing. And I think you attended a session on coaching in higher education that I co-organized. And then we got to talking, and here we are! 

I'm so delighted to talk with you abo/ut your book and about the idea of presence, why it's so important for us to do the inner work of presence, and also how we might find a way into this work given the realities of academic grind culture. Welcome, Liz!

Liz:  Thank you for having me, Karen. I'm so delighted to be here with you.

Karen: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Liz:  You mentioned that I have a PhD in political science. It was kind of a circuitous route to that PhD, but I've always been interested in how people form their political beliefs, and especially people who have extreme political beliefs, because I am interested in discerning whether there are ways to soften some of those really extreme beliefs.  So a lot of my graduate work was in political psychology, thinking about attitude formation and social identity and those sorts of things. And I think that that has made all of the work that I've done make sense in a way that it might not when you hear that I'm a political scientist who cares about presence and connection and coaching, because those two things just don't naturally go together, right?

But for me, the political science interest was always just wanting to understand how they got where they are, and then perhaps reframing some of the stories they're telling themselves in a way that's pro-democracy, so it really translates very well into the topic of the book.

Let's see. So a little bit about myself. I grew up in northern Arkansas. No, I don't sound like it. That's because I went to college in Washington, DC as an undergraduate, and I actually got a degree in journalism, and spent about seven or eight years doing web development, web communication, before deciding to get a PhD in political science. So it's been a fun journey.

Karen:  this word softening seems really relevant when I'm thinking about your book.  There's something about academic culture right now that seems to call out for softening, for faculty to do that work, and yet it's so challenging.

Liz:  When I say soften, and I use that word very intentionally, it's more about the way that we're characterizing other people.  And so politically and pedagogically, I think that softening is a humanization, right? It's recognizing the humanity of the people we're in conversation with. So when we retreat into these really strong political beliefs, we stop recognizing the humanity of our political adversaries. And in the same way, we're in a classroom and we are kind of being very judgy about students who may not perform being a student in the way that we did, right, that decreases our ability to see the humanity of our students. And so, yes, they're very aligned.

Karen:  So how would you describe a present professor? What are we doing, who are we being when we are present professors?

Liz:  I really love this idea of presence as a professor, because to me, the two are all about…I'm closing my eyes right now because I'm just thinking about grounding who we are in the moment, and being very intellectually and emotionally curious about what is unfolding before us. And so a present professor is someone who can do that.  It's almost like the ego disappears when we're being present, but that's really hard for us, because academia, I think, trains us to kind of supercharge our ego. It really reinforces the ego, and that takes us away from our ability to, as I was saying before, see the humanity of the people in front of us and respond to them in a very humane way.

Karen:  What kinds of possibilities open up to us when we can practice that presence?

Liz:  I know we'll talk about this more in a little bit, but what about the first day of a class, right? We walk into the room and as professors, we have lots of ideas, lots of questions in our mind.  Like, will people show up? Will they be engaged? Will they talk? Will they learn? Will they participate? Will they care? Will they be excited? Do they want to be here?

And our students are also coming in with a whole lot of questions that are:  Do I belong here? Can I do okay in this class? Will anyone like me? Do I fit in? Am I going to be able to make it to my next class in time? Am I in the right place? Am I in the right class? What am I doing with my life? What happens if I, you know, don't have the money to buy dinner tonight, or, you know, whatever? There's lots of questions.

We're all walking in this, to a greater or lesser extent, defended posture of trying to figure out in this very innately human way:  Do I belong here? And am I safe? If we have learned how to pay attention to what's happening in our minds and our bodies in those moments, we can see that our students have just as much uncertainty as we do, and if we are present, then we can speak to their uncertainty, instead of trying to take care of our own uncertainties.

Presence, to me, is the ability to perceive and be curious about what's happening, what's unfolding in the moment, instead of constantly trying to make sure that we are okay.  When we are worried about whether everything's going to be okay for us, we're not really able to make sure that everything's okay for our students. And that's what the presence can really unlock for us, I think.

Karen:  What a beautiful vision of connection and relationship building. What's coming to my mind is a practice that I observed at Gallaudet University where I was last year, I was taking some graduate classes, and one of the things that the professors that I was working with did at the beginning of class was to look around the room and make eye contact with every single student. It required that you slow down as a student and also as a professor, that you kind of root yourself in that look, that reflection of humanity in the other person. It was partly—well, mostly—it was for accessibility right to make sure that every student had the right sight lines for signing and was able to see. But I experienced it as a deeply grounding practice that did recognize my humanity as a student.

Liz:  Yeah, I think that there are lots of ways that we can do that, but I just want to say, everything that we talk about, everything that I talk about with faculty, I am very resistant to saying like, “You should do X,” right? So for some professors, that example that you just gave, Karen, of looking every student in the eyes, that would be less effective because it would feel—you know, part of the subtitle of the book is authenticity, because anything that we do in our teaching practice needs to be grounded in our authentic being, or students are going to perceive that we're doing something inauthentically, and that will immediately break their trust.

So we have to figure out how to be authentic in the classroom days in ways that are safe for out and are different intersectional identities, so that students will clock that authenticity and trust us.

Karen:  I love what you're saying so much because I think it really goes against a lot of the kind of “tips and tricks” culture that we're in right now. What I hear you saying is that there's not one set of practices or way of being.  In some ways, it makes me a little like, “Oh no. I have to figure it out for myself!”

Liz:  It would be so much easier if I could just say, “Okay, Karen, do these four things and then you're good,” right? But learning doesn't happen like that, and it's unreasonable to think that creating human connections that are in support of learning can be reduced to a simple formula. Sorry, everyone!

Karen:  Well, this puts me in mind of the connection actually with trauma that you talk about as a real floor for what comes later in your book. And I wonder if you might talk a little bit about the relationship between trauma and authenticity and presence in your book.

Liz:   I was so glad that you picked up on that, because when I think about trauma, I think about a very dysregulating force. So what happens when we have trauma, we are hypervigilant, and that means that we are devoting a good bit of our cognitive bandwidth to monitoring the landscape for threats. That's exhausting. So then we start to disassociate, and then we're not being attentive, and it makes building relationships extremely hard.  And all three of those things work against us in learning. So if we, as instructors, have trauma that is impacting our work, then we are going to probably assume the worst of every student behavior in our classroom. We're going to stop trying to monitor what's going on with them. We're going to disassociate from them, and that's going to make them stop trusting us, and we're not going to be able to be attentive in to them in a way that builds the relationships that are learning right?

For students who have trauma, that hypervigilance means that every facial expression you make will be interpreted in the least charitable way, right? So they're going to assume that you don't like them no matter what you do or what you say.  They're not going to have as much attention to do the necessarily hard work of learning, and they're not going to trust you can help them.

And so trauma is just this thing that exists in the classroom and that we have to be aware of.  Now, we can't heal our students’ trauma, just as they can't heal ours.  That's not our job, but to be aware of it…you don't even have to talk about trauma as an instructor, but just your awareness of how that shows up and how you can try to indirectly…to your students about this being a safe space for them to be themselves.  And that takes a lot of repeated conversation, a lot of repeated messaging, consistent behaviors, but, I think that the first step is our authenticity.  If we can be who we are at our least defensive, with the caveat that we have to do this in ways that feel safe.  There's some identities where you can't be fully authentic. And authenticity doesn't mean I'm going to talk to my students about every single thing that's going wrong in my life right now, but if I can find alignment between my teaching practices and who I am at my more authentic way of being, then students are going to clock that and trust us. And so that's the important thing.

So trauma…I know that a lot of people are doing trauma-informed teaching workshops and thinking.  And it's complicated, it's messy, it's individual. I came into my current role at the University of Mississippi with a good bit of workplace trauma from my last role, and I can tell you that it's been over a year that I've been in this role, and still I have a hair trigger, I immediately just go zero to 60 on the fear scale, and I have to really tell myself to calm down. Having an awareness of this, so that you can see it happening in close-to-real time, is what I hope people will be able to do with some of the tools in this book. 

Karen:  I’m brought back to that word softening, and that awareness of trauma in ourselves and in our students, our colleagues, might really allow us to soften towards them.

Liz:  Yeah, wouldn't it be great if we could give people the benefit of the doubt?  Just fabulous, but we can't do that if we're walking around in a really defensive posture. And one of the things that I think academia does really well is teach us to be defensive. Because, you know, graduate school is just all about making really critical arguments about really smart people's thoughts. You know, critical thinking is important, but it often—at least to me, and I suspect for others—feels very personal.  In the book, I use the metaphor of the kill shot in a firing squad.  Like, if you can manage to deliver that kill shot in someone else's argument, then that's currency. That means that you're really good at what you're doing.  What a terrible lesson to learn about how we treat one another.  And to have that ingrained in graduate school, and then to be sent out into the wilds of academia thinking that this is how we do things…that's just a terrible way of being. It's a miserable existence, because you always are just afraid that someone else is going to level the kill shot at you. And what will that mean? It's horrible. And so we have to figure out how to put down that defensiveness in ways that are probably very scary, but necessary if we want to do the important work of teaching and learning.

Karen:  Why do you think this work is so important right now?

Liz:  Well, I mean, the firing squad is coming from all directions, isn't it? I should stop using gun metaphors. I don't like them, but it does kind of feel like we're under attack in higher ed. And, you know, it's happening from the political world:  the aftermath of the beginning of COVID, the trauma that many of us carry from those early weeks and months of being isolated, being quarantined, whatever you want to call it.  We have a lot of barriers to authentic communication, authentic relationship in the world and in higher ed right now.  I think it's just really, really important that we try to do some of the work of unpacking what those traumas and uncertainties and defensiveness are.  Because our students need us to be whole people more than I think maybe they've ever needed us to be.

So one of the things that I like to talk about, and this is more often, I think, talked about in the context of K through 12, especially early education, is this idea of emotional co-regulation. So emotional co-regulation happens when we don't have the resources within ourselves to kind of manage our emotions, and we can start to kind of spiral a bit, right? And so we look to someone else who's kind of nicely regulated to help us kind of bring on more resources.

For example, this semester, I'm teaching a math class.  Lots of students who have a lot of math anxiety are in there, and if I can be calm or even kind of excited about the math, then those who have a lot of math anxiety can kind of co-regulate with me. I can help co-regulate their anxiety by being a reassuring presence saying, “No, I know this is hard, but I know you can do it, and we're going to keep working on it until you get it.” Like that. That kind of work is so important. And so why is this work so important right now? Because we have a lot of students who feel even less secure about their ability to be successful in college that manifests for us in students who appear to be disengaged or apathetic or absent.  And it's not because they don't want to learn.  They're in college. They're doing the hard work.  They showed up, but they just don't quite know how to connect with us.  And we can genuinely help those students get in the game of learning if we can help them feel safe enough to be in a classroom in an authentic way. But we can only do that if we're doing it ourselves.

Karen:  It's so compelling when you describe it like that, when you describe that relationship that we can cultivate with students.  I really appreciate that when you talk about trauma and its impact on learning, you're very clear that when we're experiencing distress, we cannot learn. And I think that is something that is very easy to ignore as a faculty member.  But when it is so starkly presented—when we're experiencing distress, we cannot learn—it really gets to the root of who we are as teachers. How can we simply go on with our lecture or continue with an activity when learning is not happening?

Liz:  And it's that tired phrase of “I have so much to cover.”  I think a lot of faculty members feel they don't have enough time to give everything adequate attention.  So we don't have time to take a pause and address what's happening, because then we won't cover [everything].  But coverage means nothing if students aren't learning.  You cannot continue to plow forward when something is unfolding, right?

I know that you didn't ask this question, but it's very much on my mind as a political scientist teaching in 2024 there are a lot of things happening in the world, and not all of them are relevant to what we're teaching in class. But if our students are feeling activated by the world around us for whatever reason—it might be the election, but it could also be hurricanes, natural disasters, wars, conflicts—there's so many things that could potentially have an impact on our students’ wellbeing and level of openness to learning.  If we just pretend they don't exist in the name of plowing through and covering, then we are doing no one any service.  We're actually telling our students, I don't really care about what's happening in your life, because the content is more important than who you are as a human being.  Aand that doesn't serve us in any way. It actually fundamentally hurts the enterprise of learning.

Karen:  What comes to my mind is our training in being experts, and how this pushes up against our sense of comfort:  “Well, this is my area of expertise, and this is what I do.”  I talk about this right? It has clear boundaries, but when we start talking about being really perceptive of what's happening in the classroom at a given moment, or responding to our own trauma, or students’ trauma, I think that there's a sense of, “Oh, but I'm not an expert. How do I do this?”

And I think the second part of your book is really kind of about how, how we start to make these shifts. And I'm curious about, in particular, your use of yoga in this book and the way that yoga shows up. And I'd love to know more about what yoga has meant for you in your life and how it shows up in the book.

Liz:  The second half of the book has a variety of different tools that you can use to try to cultivate greater authenticity, greater self-knowledge, so that you can be more present in the classroom. And one of the tools is yoga.

So I am a yoga teacher. I don't teach a lot, but I'm really grateful that at the University of Mississippi, I have the opportunity to teach classes every once in a while for faculty and staff, for fun.  It's just like a very gentle, supportive yoga. And what yoga for me means…because, like a lot of people, when they hear the word yoga, they think, “I'm going to get a great workout in,” or “I'm going to really stretch a lot and do a lot of downward-facing dogs.”  And I remember when I was going through my yoga teacher training, I had this moment where I was like, “I don't know if I can be a yoga teacher, because I hate downward-facing dog.” And my yoga my yoga trainer was like, “Actually, you don't have to do that to be a yogi. It's not a requirement.”

But what yoga has taught me is that yoga is really just about staying in the moment and listening to what's happening in your body. So if you can think about the practice of yoga as different movements or postures or practices that help you send to what's happening in your body, then it's really clear how yoga helps us develop presence, right?

And let me just kind of take a side step here, because one of the things that I'm fascinated with—and I know Sarah Rose Cavanaugh is too, she talks about this on social media a lot—is this notion of emotional contagion. If somebody who's sitting next to you is really angry, you know it, and it can infect how you're feeling. If someone next to you is like, super excited, they don't have to say anything, you just clock it, right? So there's so much communication that happens among us without us realizing it.  It's unconscious, and it has an impact on how we're experiencing the world.

So the yoga practice, for me, is helpful as a tool for knowledge and presence, because it teaches us how to listen to what our body is noticing and responding to in the moment, and the body often knows things before our mind does. I love yoga as a tool for understanding what's happening in my body. But yoga doesn't have to be movement. Yoga can also just be sometimes…if I love restorative yoga, does that just mean I'm laying around on blankets all day?  I think that sounds kind of amazing, right?

But the thing about restorative yoga is not that you're just relaxing and zoning out.  It's that you're really paying attention to what's happening in your body. And restorative yoga, for many people, is the hardest kind of yoga, because your mind doesn't have the like, “Oh my gosh, this is so hard, Oh my gosh. I'm working so hard” to fixate on.  So you just have to be really quiet with your mind. And that is so hard. We are not good at that. I don't know, Karen, how much I've answered your actual question, but that's what yoga is for me.  It's just this tool to develop greater interoception about what's happening in my body so that I can take advantage of those less conscious ways of knowing, as opposed to just what people are saying or what their face looks like right now.

Karen:  You mentioned yoga in your acknowledgements.  So I may have been crying a little by the end of your acknowledgements…It's a very beautiful section.  I really appreciate the intimacy of your acknowledgements. It's like this little window into who you are, and there's just something so joyful and kind and also filled with heartbreak in the acknowledgements. I'm really grateful for those acknowledgements. I was really struck by the variety and the depth of the communities that you are part of:  your yoga community, writing communities, POD Network, your carb COVID squad, and so many more. How have you created such a loving and supportive community?

Liz:  I'm really grateful for all of those communities.  I'm an Enneagram 2? I just like, love people. I am a people pleaser. I love being of service to other people. And I really, just really love deep connection. It's what is most valuable to me in this world. And so everywhere I go, I feel like I'm just seeking out people with whom I can experience that kind of deep connection. And you know, being 47 means and being in academia and having lots of different kinds of jobs, I found lots of people. But I also think this is something of a joke on my current team at Mississippi, I will always send an email to someone who I admire. I have no guile about it. I'm just like, “Hey, you're amazing. Can we talk?” or “Hi, I love your work. Can we work on something together?” And I will just do it. And you know, they may ignore me, but they're already ignoring me, so that's not a change. And maybe they'll say yes.

And so I think that that kind of authentic interest, starting to know someone, is what has allowed me to create these really strong communities. Because especially as I've gotten older, I just don't care if people…I don't feel like I need to mediate my image. I'm just going to be like, “Look, this is who I am.”  So I think that's where that community comes from, is just an eagerness to know cool people and a willingness to not be cool about that.

Karen:  I'm wondering about this connection between community, community building, and presence. It comes to me that, you know, academics often have very thin networks of support.  But one of the most important actions we can take towards wellbeing towards “good enough” in academia, which I like to talk about, is really creating these robust networks and communities. So what do you think might be connected about community and presence and authenticity?

Liz:  Well, we are a social species. We need to feel accepted and like we belong, and if we don't, if you think about Maslow's kind of hierarchy of needs, which I talk about in the book, if we don't feel that kind of sense of safety by feeling like we belong, then we can't do anything else, right? We can't thrive until we can survive. And survival in humankind is having support.  I think that that is really critical to understand.

Academia, as you said, often, not always, but often leads us to distrust our instincts and to question every single thing that we think. So, in a way, I think academic culture leads us away from knowing ourselves, and that makes it really hard to have relationships that are meaningful, because we don't trust ourselves, and that means that other people can't trust us as well.

We have to, I think, [do] this work of getting to know ourselves, understanding where our insecurities are, finding ways to get comfortable with ourselves. You know, all of that inner work that we do with therapists or coaches or in self-reflection that work is so critical.  So that we could come into relationships open and willing to trust, as opposed to afraid that they're going to hurt us. So again, I don't know if I've really answered your question, but those are the thoughts that I have.

Karen:   This is such a strident and loving call to do this work.  What do you hope this book will do in the world?

Liz:  Well, first of all, I would really love it if we existed in an academic culture that treated people kindly, if we just gave each other the benefit of the doubt, if we didn't automatically assume the worst.  My life,  my career trajectory would be very different if people had been willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, and I take that lesson, that is an incredibly important lesson for me.

And what I hope this book will do is start conversations that allow people to see that defensiveness is counterproductive to learning.  That would be lovely. I don't imagine that this book is going to change the world, but if it can start some of those conversations, it can lead us in a really productive place.

Karen:  I really appreciate your perspective on what is motivating and underlying academic grind culture. You know, I do a lot of work in this space, and I think that the ideas that you're sharing in this book and in our conversation are not ones that I've heard before.  It feels very fresh and very important and profound. 

Liz:  That's very kind of you to say, thank you.  They were all forged in a lot of trauma, so I thought I’d turn it into something positive.

Karen:  And maybe that's where the intimacy of this book, the deep compassion and kindness that really comes off of every page, maybe that's where that comes from.

Liz:  One of the readers of the manuscript, before it was accepted, finally said, like “You're putting a lot of yourself in this book. Are you sure you want to do that?”  And I said, “Yes, I'm really sure I want to do that. Yes.”  I think it's important, right? We have to cultivate some empathy. And I don't pretend to think that my path in academia has been any different than anyone else's, especially for women in academia.  We all have these stories of being judged or treated differently or having the worst assumptions about our actions. I think that it's important if you can see yourself in some of the stories that I tell, then perhaps that will help you see that it's not you, it's this system that has made everybody less present, because everybody has been scarred.

Karen?  I'm finding in myself, in this kind of mid-career moment that speaking authentically, saying the things that are embarrassing or awkward, like that's where I want to be.  That's where I want to live, in this space of the messy, the space that has me thinking sometimes, “Wait, is that going to really be published?” Or, “Did I really say that?” Okay? You know, that's the space that is lighting me up right now, because it feels the most authentic. It feels open ended, it feels truly me. It feels like it's reflecting the evolving work of being human.

Liz:  I want to say, Karen, I relate to that so much. And one of the things that I often think about is that if I'm willing to be awkward and uncool and be honest about the messiness of some parts of my experience, that lets other people around me know that I'm not going to judge them if they're the same.  And that reduces shame for everyone.  And so I am pretty open with my students.

I always have been open about [things] that have been hard, times where I have tried to do something academically and failed. Those are not pleasant memories to revisit, but if I can share that with them, then hopefully that makes them feel like they don't have to be perfect, and then I don't have unreasonable expectations, that they can be human. And as people in positions of power, in learning spaces, we can do so much good by just being a little bit vulnerable in those ways, again, with all caveats about identity. And you know, some people can do that more easily than others, but it doesn't have to be a huge thing. It can be a small thing.

Karen:  I teach a class a semester for my senior Museum Studies Capstone students, and it's all project based, so I have them do a check-in the beginning of every class. You know, what's going well, what are your challenges? You know, just little things like that. And a few weeks ago, maybe it was the second or third week of class, the students went around, and I was about to move on to our next thing, and one of the students raised their hand and said, “Wait, Professor, what about you? What's going well for you? What are your challenges?”

And I was so touched in that moment, both that they were interested, and what a great opportunity, pedagogically, right? And so I was able to share what's going well in my research, what challenges am I experiencing, and they could see that they were parallel to the things that the students are experiencing. I mean, these are the challenges of academic work. These are the rewards of academic work, of intellectual labor, and to be able to share in that with them on a weekly basis has been really sustaining and fun for me.

Liz:  I think it's really important to have those conversations where you're seeing the parallels between what you're struggling with and what students are struggling with. So I often tell students that I work with, either in my class or just talk to, and they almost to a person, talk about struggles with procrastination.  We have all of this talk in our environment and our culture about procrastination:  it's a scourge, we have to teach time management, we gotta….And then I look around at myself and my colleagues, and we all procrastinate too.  We don't do things far in advance.

And so I talk to students about how the whole time, I was in school forever, because I collected a few master's degrees on my way to my PhD. And until, I think I was in my comprehensive exam year of my PhD program, I would just beat myself up over how much I was procrastinating, just this constant angsting about my behaviors.  Then I [said,] Liz, you're about to get a PhD. Like, it's clearly working. Okay, maybe this isn't a problem, maybe this is how you work. And I just decided, we're just gonna call this “just in time work,” not procrastination. And I have never failed to meet a goal because I procrastinated, ever, so maybe it's not a problem.

And I tell them this not because I want to enable their procrastination, but because I want them to think about whether this is working for them, and they're calling it a problem because it doesn't look like someone else, or if it's preventing them from achieving their goals. And it's the same thing with writing. So, I have tried for years and years and years to force myself to have like a daily writing practice, like “I'm going to write 15 minutes every day.” Can't do it. I just cannot.  Writing is really deep work that requires long periods of focus.

I wrote my master's thesis in three weekends. I wrote my doctoral dissertation in four or five weekends with long gaps, months between those weekends where I was doing the work of reading and writing, reading and thinking and organizing and sifting and synthesizing—which is all work. But it doesn't mean that there are words on the paper.  Even this book I wrote in a series of two-day writing sprints spread out over two years.  It was not that every week I was making progress, writing x number of words a week. It's why NaNoWriMo will never work for me. I just can't.

And so that's my process, and it's clearly working. The book is about to come out, so I was just like, “I will no longer beat myself up for things that are clearly working for me.”  How amazing is it if you can share that with your students in a way that feels empowering instead of judging?

Karen:  This really speaks to the authenticity of process, that part of this self-knowledge, part of what I would say is also releasing white supremacy culture—the urgency and the either/or thinking that lead us to judge ourselves for our process, when really our task is to find what is our process. What is my process? What is authentic to me, what works?

So you may know that my thing is “good enough,” The Good Enough Professor. So I'm curious. I want to know two things:  One, how does doing the work of presence, how could it help us to be good enough, to embrace good enough in our whole lives? That's one. And the other is, where are you experimenting with good enough in your own life?

Liz:  I love this idea. And for me, good enough, like working with presence, helps us clarify what matters to us.  And so good enough is focusing on the things that matter to us without thinking about what matters to someone else.

In the previous example that I gave about covering material, good enough might be “I don't cover everything, but I do it in a way that allows students to learn,” right? And I think that working with presence, working with authenticity, allows us to clarify what are the things that we need to do and what are the nice-to-haves. But if I don't get there, whatever.

So my own experimentation.  I was so glad that you asked this question, because one of the great benefits of working at the University of Mississippi—it's been a wonderful place to work—is that I could take classes for free, and I actually can take them during my work day, and it's incredible.  We're reading a book every week. It's a lot. And so when I decided to take this class, I just sort of told myself, “I don't have to finish everything every week. I don't have to be the best student, because this class is just for fun, and if I'm not enjoying it, then I don't need to do it, because it's just for fun.” So I just keep following myself, like every week. You know, sometimes I finish the book, sometimes I don't. My reading journal is a disaster, and it's okay because it's not serving me. And I can be good enough, right? I can show up. I can talk about these ideas that are interesting and provocative.

And in this way, this is the most authentic experience I've ever had as a student, because I'm doing the things that are facilitating my learning and not doing the things that feel like something that someone else thought might help my learning, you know, and that's really powerful.

Karen:  That is so beautiful.  I think the experience of being a student is something I wish we did regularly as faculty, so that we can remember all of these aspects of being a student:  balancing with other things, having to make these trade-offs and decide what is good enough. What do I want from this class? What do I want from this experience?  Liz, this has been so delightful. I have so much to think about, and I cannot wait to get a copy of your book in my hands.

Liz:  Thank you for the work that you're doing. Karen, I just love the wonderful way that you bring people into conversation and your curiosity and openness and humanity.  It's just beautiful. The work you do is amazing. I'm so glad to know you.

Karen:  I'm so, so grateful for that. Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening to “The Good Enough Professor Podcast.” If you want to release academic grind culture and embrace your own Good Enough Professor within, join my email list. You'll get my reflections, gentle challenges, and simple prompts, all aligned with the rhythms of academic life and designed to disrupt the assumptions that get us over committed and keep us overwhelmed. Because remember, you are already good enough.