So let’s say you’ve made the decision to leave academia, and now you need to start poking around for a whole new career. Or you’ve realized you love academia, you just hate this particular university, and you need to look for other jobs to apply to. Or you love your institution, but you’d like to move into administration.
In other words, for whatever reason, you now have to gird your loins and put together … a job application package.
Here’s what happens next for most of us (and yes, I happen to resemble these remarks).
“Oh my god, I have to explain to someone else why I want this job.”
“Why do I want this job again? This is too much work. Where I am isn’t that bad.”
“Who am I to think I could get a better job?”
“No one’s going to hire me anyway — I’m both overqualified and underqualified and this is just doomed.”
“Am I really qualified for this? I’m not qualified for this. Why would someone hire me for this when they could hire X?”
And the next thing that happens is that we’re somewhere — anywhere! — other than sitting in front of that particular computer file or piece of paper.
It’s not you
Putting together a job application package, especially when you’re trying to change careers, is not just a simple, concrete, measurable task, however neat and precise the @nextsteps are in your GTD planner.
Tasks like this have enormous, weighty, complicated emotional tasks attached to them, and those emotional tasks get in the way of the practical next steps.
There’s grief attached. Fear. Confusion. The stumbles of being new and learning a new language, even enough to apply to something. And most of all, the shift of identity.
It’s really fucking hard to portray yourself as the perfect museum curator / frog handler / graphic novel editor when, inside, a little voice is saying, “but really, we’re a historian / biologist / literary scholar.”
And getting from point A (academic identity) to point B (shiny new identity) is also really difficult.
And the combination of hard — the fear, the grief, the identity work — just sits there in the way, putting lie to any attempt to tell yourself that “it’s just not that hard, dammit,” or “just do it.”
Let’s experiment
If it were your best friend in this situation, what would you do? You’d probably give him a hug, make her a cup of tea, fold yourself into the corner of the coffee shop and let him vent and rage and stomp his feet, tell her of COURSE this is hard! Look what you’re doing!
In other words, let’s try being compassionate. To you. Right now.
What do you need in order to feel centered about this shift in your life? What do you need in order to feel secure and comforted even though this is scary and hard and intimidating? What do you need to express about this whole mess so that you aren’t exploding from all of the held-in emotions? What do you need to hear in order to move through the fear and the anticipation and the uncertainty?
Get a hug from someone who loves you. Spend fifteen minutes visualizing success. Play desperately sad music and cry along. Go for a long run. Turn the music up and dance like a fool. Write a nasty letter to academia. Write a love letter to the life you’re walking towards. Make yourself a cup of tea. Hell, make yourself a chocolate cake!
But however you do it, acknowledge that this is hard. Acknowledge that telling yourself to just get a grip and do it isn’t likely to work. Acknowledge that there’s emotional stuff that needs attention, and then give it some compassionate attention.
And then notice how much easier (not easy, just easier) it is to sit down and work on that application that has the potential to jump start the next phase of your fabulous life.
(And in case you missed it, I’m doing a free teleclass on Wednesday about how to work through the issues specific to leaving academia in job applications. You can read more and sign up here.)
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