Kaleidoscope Shift

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.

In this episode, we're talking about tiny shifts for more spaciousness in your academic life, more satisfaction. I've noticed in working with faculty over the years that often the most meaningful changes, the most meaningful and impactful interventions that people make in their academic lives, are tiny. They're small shifts that help you think differently about yourself and your role, tiny things that are pretty easy to remember and implement and that are really focused on a particular area of your academic life.

It takes some intention and some work to figure out:  first, the parts of your life where you're craving a tiny shift, and then, what kind of tiny change could make the most impact for you.  December and January are really great times of the semester to think about tiny shifts. The semester's ending, the year's ending, and we're transitioning into the spring semester, and you're still very aware of what went well and what were the challenges of the fall. So you kind of have all the pieces in place for looking through that kaleidoscope and just making a little turn, a little shift to create a new perspective and a new experience.

So in this episode, we are going to explore how to create your own tiny Kaleidoscope shifts to make a big impact in your academic life. You can do this on your own with this episode and with the download that's linked in the show notes. And if you want more support, if you want to really dig into this with my help, I really like to make space in my coaching schedule at this time of the year for standalone, one-on-one coaching sessions for folks who really want to be intentional and have some guidance in this process. So you can schedule a kaleidoscope shift session with me. This is also a good, low stakes way to try out working with me if you've been curious.

So in this episode, we're going to work through a streamlined version of the process that I invite my clients into for the kaleidoscope shift session.  I want to share some examples of tiny shifts and ways to think about tiny shifts. So the first thing to do is really set aside some time to consider the sweep of your academic life. This might sound daunting, but this tool, the Wheel of Academic Life, that I've created for you, is a way of assessing a particular moment in time by thinking about different aspects of your academic life.  You can use this wheel of academic life to start putting together a bird's eye view of what you're going through right now, how things are going.

So what is the academic wheel of life? It's a visual map. It's a circle of eight different parts of your academic life, including your on-campus life and beyond. And you can download a PDF of this Academic Wheel of Life via the link in the show notes. So the Wheel of Academic Life is a circle divided into eight parts. And here are the parts:

• Research and ideas. This is really your intellectual life, right? It might be what you're writing or choreographing, or it might be the kind of visionary part of curriculum development, or something that you're creating or collaborating on in your leadership life.

• Another section is family and friends. So this is really the broad set of relationships; you could also think about this as connection.

• The third part is teaching and grading. You also could think about mentoring and advising, you could think about it in terms of relationships with your students, in terms of how you are feeling about grading, your satisfaction with your teaching, the time you're spending teaching. There's a lot of ways to think about that, right?

• The next part is hobbies and fun. You might think about what are the things that you enjoy doing? How do you spend your free time? What is fun for you, and how fulfilling and how accessible are those moments of fun?

• Physical environment is one that I think about a lot. This is your surroundings. It might be the your surroundings in your home, it might be your surroundings in your office on campus, or it might be your home office. You know, just really think, think big about that physical environment.

• Leadership and service:  what's going well in your leadership and service life. You know, how are you working with colleagues in that setting? Are you serving your profession or your institution in ways that fit with what's important to you?

• And then finances and security:  how stable are you feeling? You could think about this as well in terms of abundance or scarcity. Where on that spectrum are you feeling?

• Health and well being:  so this includes, of course, physical health. You could think about accessibility in this context as well. How accessible is your workplace on various measures that are important to you?  How well are accommodations in your workplace meeting your needs, for example. Your emotional wellbeing, your mental wellbeing, right? This is quite, quite broad as well.

These are meant to be broad categories.  If you envision this divided circle, this circle with these eight parts, within the circle you'll see a series of concentric circles.  These are really for helping you rank how you're feeling about each part of your life. How are you going to use this tool to create your Kaleidoscope shift? First, you're going to consider each of these eight sections one by one.  And then, using the concentric circles that you'll see are labeled between one and 10, thinking of the center of the wheel as a one and the outer edges as 10, rank your level of satisfaction with each life area. So you want to give this some thought, but you really want to avoid overthinking this. I know it's so silly to say that to an academic, but really, what are your first impressions?

For each section, you want to draw a line at that number. So if you chose an eight for teaching, trace the concentric circle labeled eight for that piece of the pie. Then if you put, say, a three for hobbies and fun, drop down to the level three concentric circle and trace that line. So if you kind of trace your finger over that whole circle, the new outline that you've created, the new edge, going from an eight to a three to a five, maybe all the way up to a 10 at some areas, this is visualizing your experience of your academic life right now. 

You probably already know which areas of your life are not going well and which ones might be disappointing or not working so great right now, or the ones that you're feeling a lot of fulfillment with. But I think to see them all together like this, and to see the cliffs and the valleys, the contrast among different areas can be very illuminating.  Once you've taken the time to do this, look at the whole picture, the whole circle. Are there any patterns? What do you notice? Does anything seem familiar or anything surprising that comes up for you?  Reflecting on this Wheel of Academic Life is one strategy for getting some perspective on the current moment for you, and it can really help you think about where to focus your energy toward a tiny shift.

Looking at your wheel, consider:  in which area would an improvement really make a difference? If you could get to a 10 or even move your number up in just one category, which would it be? This is not always simply the section where you have the lowest number. You know, maybe leadership is lower this semester, but that's okay with you.  But your finances are a five, and it would be such a relief to feel like an eight there. This is where you can start to think about what kind of tiny shift you'd like to try in this area of your life. I want to note that even if this is all you do, just to sort of think about the peaks and valleys, the bumpiness or smoothness of your ride based on your rankings of every part of your life on the wheel, this is a really valuable exercise. So even if you stop here, this can be really illuminating.

I want to give you a couple of examples of tiny shifts, one from my own life and another from a faculty client, to give you a sense of how this process can work the kinds of tiny shifts that are possible, and the possibilities that making tiny shifts really create in your life.

So I'll start with myself. The tiniest shift that I made recently that made the biggest impact for me was straightening out my home office. Actually, I can't even call it that. It's just a little corner upstairs where I have my computer.

I started with this observation earlier this semester that I was getting really distracted and I was having a hard time with focus and getting into any kind of flow in my work anytime I was using my computer at home. So the starting point here on the Wheel of Academic Life is physical environment. I decided to sit in that space and just really pay attention to what was happening. What became clear is that it is just a really, really cluttered space, very messy. It had the basic necessities, but the rest of the stuff…You know, there's an old piece of exercise equipment that I just can't seem to part with, these really large toys of my sons that don't fit anywhere else in the house, things like that.

I do have a nice vision for what that space could be like, but I just don't have the time or the energy, or really even the willingness to put money into that right now.  I knew that I didn't really have a lot of time to address it, but what I realized was that the clutter made me not want to work there. It made me really distracted when I tried to do anything in that space.

So I decided to take two tiny actions. First, I set the timer for 30 minutes, and I cleared the clutter. What does that mean? In this case, it means I put it in a couple of bins, and then I put those bins in the closet. I did not organize. Really honestly, I just shoved.  I put everything in the bins. I really did very, very little. I made no decisions, but it cleared the clutter really, really fast.

And the second thing I did was I bought a folding screen, and I put the screen up over the things to hide, the things that were really ugly and messy in the room. And I have to credit my coach, the amazing Natalie M. Houston, with that suggestion of the screen. So thank you, Natalie!   You know, lo and behold, I now want to spend more time in that space, and don't have that feeling of cringe every time I go upstairs into that corner, right? And this was a good enough solution for me. It was not perfect, right? I did not make any decisions. None of that clutter left the house. It just got pushed into the closet. It's fairly temporary, but it made a big impact on the quality of the work time I have at home, and really improved my semester.

So I want to take a moment here to draw out my process. You can see that what I did here was identify that my physical environment was causing distraction. I was getting easily unfocused, and that made me feel really unsettled about my work, and also about my capacity to do my work.  Next, I sat in that space right? I observed how it made me feel. I did this in a very kind of free-floating, sort of daydreamy kind of way, but you could also journal what you're noticing. You could talk to a friend. You could work with a coach to try to get into this space of creating some observations. I intentionally noticed that I was uncomfortable, and I considered how I wanted to feel instead, which was focused and calm.  And then I checked in with my capacity. I knew I didn't have energy or time or money for this task.

So just to kind of recap, the process is using the Wheel of Academic Life to identify an area of your life, start noticing the conditions, and then spend some time bringing to mind what you know already.  For me, this was how I wanted to feel, what was my capacity, and then really start to brainstorm some possibilities for tiny shifts.

Another example, quite different, from a faculty member I worked with who had a very absorbing hobby that she worked on with her partner. She is an avid, avid gardener with her partner. No one in her department or at her institution knew anything about this. There was this whole part of her life that was entirely separate from her work life.  That was a situation that she had deliberately created, and it had felt right for her for a really long time.  Her department had not always been a safe place for her.  But at some point, she started to feel really bifurcated and wanted to bring in more connection. And it started to feel like more connection was less of a risk and more of a necessity at this point in her work and her career and her life.

Starting out from this place on the wheel of academic life, this place of hobbies and fun, she decided to experiment around bringing her hobbies into her campus life in a way that felt both safe and authentic. What she started trying out, her tiny shift was simply to respond differently to innocuous questions from colleagues. When someone asked, “What are you doing this weekend,” she started saying, “Oh, I'll be in my garden. I'm going to be outdoors doing this thing that I love. I'm gonna be planting.”  Slowly over the semester, this tiny, courageous act of adding gardening into the conversation gave her the freedom and the confidence to bring this really crucial activity closer and more present in her daily life, and let her connect with her colleagues around a kind of true part of herself.

And this had some really unexpected consequences for her. Rather than push through grading, for example, on a particularly sunny afternoon, she would notice, “This is a great day for being in the garden. I'm gonna go home at three so I can work outside while I still can, and I'm gonna do this grading later.”  Bringing her gardening identity onto campus not only made this wonderful hobby more present for her, but it allowed her to loosen up her hold on her campus identity, to better enjoy her garden, and that was really what her soul needed, right?

I'm so curious about what tiny shift you want to try. There's really not a wrong decision in what part of the Wheel of Academic Life that you pick. Maybe you choose something and your tiny shift doesn't bring you as much spaciousness or calm or fun as you'd hoped. That work is not wasted. That's important learning. You got to practice noticing, practice observing, practice brainstorming. Next time you have more information to be able to choose where you want to focus and how you go through the process of making a tiny change.

Or maybe in the process of thinking about your Wheel of Academic Life, you might be focused on one area, but the tiny shift that matters for that part of your life is actually in another area. Maybe finding time for your research is really important to you right now, but perhaps you're also really struggling with your health and wellbeing.  So identifying, say, a sleep challenge and trying out a kaleidoscope shift that creates more restful sleep might have a lot more impact than attempting to address research time. 

Whatever you choose, try to carry with you a kind of spirit of experimentation. Your tiny shift may work out right away, or it may take a while to turn out well, or it may be that another tiny change is needed, a different tiny change. This might be just the tiny shift that you need now; and then, in a couple months, there might be another, totally different, tiny change that will serve you better in that moment. And these shifts are beautifully contingent, and that's okay. That's the reality of our lives. We're not looking for some sort of set-in-stone solution. This is all about evolution and experimentation.

I'm convinced that making the smallest of shifts can move us toward a more fulfilling academic life. We can create tiny changes, things that don't require a huge amount of energy, and these small Kaleidoscope shifts can create lasting satisfaction for us as academics. So be sure to download my Wheel of Academic Life to start you on this process, and if you'd like some one-on-one support for this process, I am here for you. I am thinking of 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.