On this episode, I talk to Dr. Caitlin Faas about side gigs, leaving academia, and the value of self-care and self-knowledge.
On this episode, I talk to Dr. Caitlin Faas about side gigs, leaving academia, and the value of self-care and self-knowledge.
Rebecca Pope-Ruark: Hello listeners. Welcome to the agile academic, a podcast for women in and around higher education. This season, I talked with my special guests from all over academia, about a wide range of topics from teaching and research to coaching and mental health, to vitality and burnout and everything in between.
I'm your host, Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark. This season is brought to you by my summer monthly sprint weeks. Learn the basics of scrum project management to organize your work. Spend a week focused on a project with the encouragement and support of a group of other faculty, and take time to reflect on your accomplishments. And next steps, learn more at Rebecca Pope ruark.com/sprintweeks.
Welcome to the podcast, Caitlin!
Caitlin Faas: So glad to be here, Rebecca. Thanks for having me.
RPR: So why don't you just take a minute and introduce yourself to the audience?
CF: Yeah, Caitlin Faas. I'm a certified life coach. I help experts get out of the hamster wheel. I got out of the hamster wheel myself in particular. When I left academia, I was a tenured psychology professor and department chair. And then I left right during the pandemic. I made the decision right before and stuck with it, took the big leap and I work for myself full-time.
RPR: That's great. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what coaching is in general?
CF: Yeah, I view coaching as, because I'm a life coach, I focus on all domains of life. And for me it's asking questions and helping people take their next steps by asking those questions. I don't have an agenda. I don't have an a so-called interest in your personal life. I'm not like a friend who might be interested in what you're up to. Uh, at a personal level are invested and I often help people get unstuck on something that they have a decision or they're spinning in their own thoughts. And I can help them with that bird's eye perspective to show them, Hey, look, what's going on here. Look how you're telling your brain this story. Let's step back.
RPR: The “story you're telling yourself” part always resonates with me with the Brene Brown. I always stop and think myself, what story am I telling myself right now about this? When I start catastrophizing or something, it's really, it's really helpful to think about that to step back. And it's also helpful to have someone help you do that, help you take those steps back.
CF: For sure. We do processing emotions and working towards results, whatever client needs to bring to me, I'm I'm in, I'm ready for it.
RPR: How does that align or separate from your background in psychology?
CF: Yeah, for a long time, I thought they were very separate. So I've been coaching for the past five years, which overlapped with my being a professor job. And I treated them very separately, but now I recognize how much they overlap and because my PhD's in human development and family sciences, I do a lot of developmental work with my clients. So we're cleaning up, growing up, showing up and the overlap, you know, everything I did for the past 12, 15 years has prepared me to be a better coach. That's how I view it now. But in the beginning it felt like too distinctive.
RPR: That was one of the things as a new coach, a coach in training, that we spent some time with thinking about what's the difference between therapy and coaching and mentoring. And I actually took a long time ago. I took a training for agile coaches. So in my Scrum domain project management donate, and it was, we talked about very similar things, even though that was in the context of business, coaching, coaching, and organizations, thinking about where those, those overlaps and where the differences are and how far a coach goes and how far a coach might need to refer as well. But understanding kind of the boundaries of that becomes, I think really important for coaches.
CF: Yeah. It's interesting for me, I actually get a lot of therapists or people that have psychology backgrounds, of course, or people who have been to a lot of therapy and up in coaching with me because they've done a lot of that work and coaching looks slightly different and it builds on maybe some of the reframing work they did or they, they processed grief or they went through some traumatic events and process that with a therapist and now they're ready for coaching. So to me, especially with a psychology background, I know the nuances of that and can help refer, or I have many clinical psychologists who are my clients. So they know even better themselves. The difference between therapy and coaching.
RPR: Yeah. How did you find coaching? What was it about coaching that appealed to you?
CF: Yeah, it was, I was having a career crisis in 2016 and I knew I just, I felt stuck myself and coaching really seemed like, wow, what is this over here? It seemed new and hard to find people at the time. And, but in a sense, coaching was a new label for a facilitation process that people had been doing for decades or hundreds and hundreds of years, if you want to argue that. So I found it and realized this is so much of what I like to do with my students and they call it coaching. Wonderful. How do I dive into this? How do I get trained on it? So through my own crisis and healing that with a coach and then taking the next steps to get certified so I could help others. That was my journey.
RPR: So you recently made the transition from academic into coaching full-time so how's that been?
CF: I love it. I knew I wanted to leave for several years, but the timing wasn't right. And I needed to clean up a lot of things at work. I really wanted to love my job before I left it. I did not wanna leave angry. I did not want to leave upset. So I knew in 2020 or in 2019, that fall semester, it was like, is this the year? Is this my last year? I was like, no, not yet. Not yet. And taking that leap, you know, when I knew it was time in February, I was like, this is the last year let's go. The hardest part was then telling everyone and leaving some of my colleagues that I was really going to miss. But also part of that was an assumption that everything was going to be the same in the fall. And I thought I'm really going to miss being in the hallways. And I'm going to miss standing in this colleague's office.
COVID hit then none of that happened, actually. So all the stories I had made up about what it was going to be like on the other end, weren't true. And then I didn't know all of the benefits like, wow, this is amazing that I get to decide more of my schedule, you know, even more so than I could as a department chair. And sometimes I can do things spontaneously. I don't have to have the next six months in my life planned out. I get to write what I want when I want, I can explore creative writing. I've been doing a lot more creative projects that I didn't feel like I had the freedom to in academia. I met a lot of new people on Zoom, of course, but met a lot of new people, new connections outside of the ivory tower.
And then also a lot of healing work on. Now that I'm out, I can see what was happening on the inside. That felt like it was holding me back, right? Like I felt, oh, here, now that I'm out, I can look back on that experience and slow down, observe it from a different angle through the help of my own coach and really take the time to put that, put an end to that chapter of my life. That was a chapter that was a great seven years and had its ups and downs. And now I'm ready for the next stage. So that's part of what these past nine months almost a year have felt like.
RPR: I think there's the stigma attached to leaving higher ed. I know we see in the last couple of years we see a lot of quit lit quote unquote, quit lit, right? People telling the stories about why they're leaving. And some of it seems like misery porn, but some of it is it's also this really compelling story of the way higher ed impacts us culturally and how that impacts our personal wellbeing. I know for me with my burnout, I wasn't able to go back to my previous institution and I had been there for 12 years, but it wasn't that that wasn't a wonderful place. It just, I couldn't go back to the same place, I had to do something different. I had to be different because I was different after going through the burnout experience and, and all the therapy that was associated with that. Thankfully. So the idea that you can actually leave and be perfectly happy with that, or be good with that and not feel any shame about that, I think is, is worth mentioning and worth celebrating for a lot of folks.
CF: For sure. Yeah. For me, it only has felt like, oh yes, this was right in line with who I am and my Coleen and what I want to do for my next steps. And it felt like a lid had been lifted. Uh, almost like my wings had been clipped. Like I kept trying to make the university work or the university system. And it, I kept running into enough roadblocks that it felt like, oh, where do I get to apply my drive? And where do I get to apply my creativity? And now that I get to do all of that, it's, you know, the sky's the limit I can fly and I can be free. So it's part of it like a new appreciation for systems to academia. Isn't the only one like this. I coach a lot of doctors. I see what the medical systems like, they're all of these systems that we can get sucked into and pulled to the bottom of and higher education is one of them. I, and like you're saying with the burnout, it's like, I felt like I was at the bottom of a cesspool. I couldn't pull myself out until I did and then recognized, oh, okay, this isn't just my university. This is part of a system. And then there are a lot of systems that are like, this it's all constructed. It's okay. If I want to reenter a system, now I feel like I have the power to do that willingly rather than be the victim of a system.
RPR: That's really interesting. I remember feeling like when I was trying to make the decision, I remember feeling one of the fears or the story I was telling myself was if I leave, I can never get back in. And that's really that's that slows you down a lot. When you think about that. Right. But it is such a strange kind of job market compared to so many other systems that I think we, we get into this mindset of this is the way things work. This is what happens when you want a new job, you have to wait for the market and you have to see what's there and where you can possibly go, because it's not necessarily going to be where you would like to geographically go. It's where the jobs are. And that can be so traumatic in and of itself. I think for folks who, who follow that market and then lose their support systems, you know, my husband and I are in Atlanta and we don't have family here. We only have a few friends here. So we like it, but it's not necessarily a place that we would have thought of if the market hadn't kind of driven us in this direction.
CF: Right. And that power, it feels like a loss of power, even though you like it, I would say it's still. And we like where we live is still feels like, oh, I didn't a hundred percent choose this. Now, one of the beauties for my family and I is we are actually going home, quote unquote, for where my husband and I originally grew up in the middle of the state of Ohio. And we're so excited to be able to have that option. I didn't even consider that when I was in academia, I've thought I was committed to the next 30 years. I thought we were going to live in that house forever. We were going to stay there forever. I was committed. So the idea that I was leaving, and then now that we're moving is like, wow, this isn't following the plan. I thought it was going to, and look, it's even better than I expected.
RPR: A colleague said to me a long time ago, when I was going through something different, this was a while ago. She said, you're more mobile than you think you are. And that always stuck with me for some reason. Cause I was the same way at my previous institution. I was prepared to be a lifer because it was a wonderful place with wonderful students and you know, amazing colleagues, you do so much good work. And after a while, it just wasn't for me anymore. And there's a shame associated with that. Particularly thinking I have a job, I have a great job and I'm lucky to have that job. What's wrong with me that I don't want it anymore. There's shame associated with that because someone else could have this job that I don't love anymore. That was almost a piece of the consideration and leaving too. Yes, it was really about me, but why am I hanging on when I'm not going to be doing anything productive or supporting people in the way that I had been pre-burnout?
CF: A hundred percent. And I call that, that my shame blanket, when I get wrapped up in the questions of why am I doing this? Or how could I be like this? And I, now I just throw off my shame blanket. Like those questions are not helpful. And before I left, I kept thinking, there's somebody who's taking this job and they're going to love it. I can't wait to meet them. Like I can't wait for them to be so excited about this job just like I was on day one. So keeping them in mind was also helpful for me.
RPR: I think a lot of academics now, switching gears a teeny bit, I think a lot of academics now or are thinking about or developing side gigs more than ever before. So how did that work when you were still a faculty member? How did the side gig piece of it kind of work in your life?
CF: Oh yeah. That's how I started. I mean, I would say even in, so if I started in 2016 and I was coaching on the side and it side hustle, like this is part of what I do on the side, it gives me an avenue to do things I want, in addition to being a faculty member, I would say it also made me a better faculty member because then I wasn't obsessed with my job and student evaluations and all the things I had more outlets to express myself. Then in 2018, it was this time at three years ago that I was like, okay, I don't know what I'm doing this side hustle for. Like, it's cool to earn more money and I've helped a lot of people, but you know, maybe it's just time to go back to being a faculty member only and like great, great side project, Caitlin, let's just give up.
And it felt like a big surrender moment. And I had students in Greece and I was just like, yeah, I think we're done with that. And of course that's how the universe works. Right? Like give up on whatever plans I had. And then in stepped, uh, the opportunity to train at the Life Coach School, which had not really been on my radar until it became an online program. And I was like, and then it was just an immediate I'm all in. Yes. And then also we started the foster care process. We had our first child that summer three years ago and that's been part of my journey in the past three years, being a foster mom with my husband and then adopting out of the system, talking about another system. But the idea of, okay, now look what trajectory we've been on for the past three years that came from the surrender process of giving up my expectations of what a side hustle was going to turn into and thinking that it had to look a particular way or that I, and you know, I don't think we talk enough about maybe your side hustle comes and goes, it has waves.
It doesn't always have to be building at the same rate. There were some months where I didn't do very much coaching and then until I got serious, really serious about it three years ago, it just kept building into, I do think I want to do more coaching than being a faculty member. I do want to do help more clients and teach them. That's what I do now. I teach new coaches instead of continuing to teach lifespan development to 20 year olds at 8:00 AM, three days a week. That kind of thing.
RPR: Was it about the Life Coach School? I'm in a program that's with the coach training program, that's with the International Coaching Federation. So what was it that attracted you to the Life School?
CF: Yeah, the Life Coach School by Brooke Castillo. I had been listening to her podcast and I really appreciated how she broke down concepts built by all the research. You know, I knew it from my psychology research, but she was making it so accessible to people. And her model is so concrete, being able to use the model with clients and now training the new coaches over there on how to use it. For me, it was one of these, oh, I really want to use that tool set. But then the six months, and then a year into the program, I realized how much it was transforming my own life. Like, oh, wow, look at how I'm changing and all of these domains across my life. Wow. This is powerful. So then I was just really hooked and really amazed at the transformation I could see with both myself and clients. So for me, because we're always at the thought level and my other training that I had done and with ICF had more action-based items that it was part of where I started with my coaching. And that was great. But a lot of the action-based items my clients were not doing. And I didn't know why until I got my Life Coach School training and dove into the thoughts and feelings with them.
RPR: How do academics respond to something called “life coaching”?
CF: Yeah. I mean, some of them think it's not for them and that's fine. And others recognize the idea of, oh, I do need help across domains or they'll come to me with something to start with. Like, let's work on my schedule, Caitlin, let's work on this career decision, but it quickly turns into how is this showing up in other areas of your life. And so, because I can talk about any domain, my thousands and thousands of hours of coaching have been from people all over the world with all kinds of situations. So it is difficult to surprise me with this situation at this point. And with that background, it's like, oh, everything that's going on in your life applies to what's happening with you as an academic. So the overlap, it just becomes very apparent that we can talk about anything in a session.
RPR: Okay. So What are some of the reasons that a faculty member might choose coaching? Um, especially women faculty, what are some of the, what are some of the things that you're seeing in your clients that might be patterns?
CF: Yeah. The feeling stuck or feeling burnout, feeling alone. Like they're the only ones that are going through this. Your podcast is definitely helping with that. They don't feel alone if they're listening to this or as alone wanting to move up in leadership and not knowing how, and also perhaps struggling with the idea of how do I talk to somebody about this? Who's not in my institution. You know, we in academia, we get into that, well, this person could write me a letter of recommendation. And so if I reveal too much, I might be not, you know, I don't want them to see everything about me. We have a very lack of transparency in academia. I would argue. And so getting coaching can help remove those barriers of, Hey, remember, I'm not writing your paycheck. I'm not going to write you a letter of recommendation for your institution or for tenure promotion.
So this is a safe space. Those can definitely be reasons. And then for a lot of women, this idea of how do I do this while raising children? What if I want to raise my children and also, you know, move up in leadership? Like how does that work? And because I've coached so many other academic women to being able to say, I've S here's how I've seen other people do it, or here are the patterns are here. So you could be connected with really resonates for a lot of my clients are like, oh, wait, I'm not the only one again. What do you mean?
RPR: Yeah. On the podcast, I like to talk about and shape our conversations, according to four kind of pillars, purpose, compassion, connection, and balance, and the connection piece, if connecting with a therapist or connecting with a coach so that you can connect to yourself, really, um, it really changed the way that I thought about myself and what I was doing and how I was doing it, having that connection and realizing you're not alone. That is, was such a huge turning points. Being able to start saying it out loud to people, and then eventually seeing it on social media and finding how many people really are struggling with burnout specifically, among other things. We know that depression and anxiety are probably skyrocketing right now, given everything that's going on. So is burnout. So having that ability to connect to others or just feel like you're connected can be so important to wellbeing.
CF: Absolutely. I love, yeah. I love your pillars, how they all connect and it's so tied to life coaching, right. With the balance and talking about purpose, having compassion, that's probably the most common thing. I see a lack of self-compassion. So a lot of my women are coming to me with self-judgment, criticism, shame. And so if we can work through those pretty quickly, they start to see, oh, I do have power. I do have clarity. I do know what I want to do next. Hmm.
RPR: One of the first things my therapist did was have me read Brene Brown and I had been resisting Brene Brown for a long time. I'm not really sure what it was. It felt kind of Oprah to me, I guess. And I wasn't reading it. So she asked me to read one of the books and I read it in a week because she gave me homework. Of course, I'm going to read it immediately. She was, she was hilariously surprised that I had finished it, but I remember feeling kind of these twin pains of I'm not alone, but also I'm not even unique in my pain right now. That's common sense of humanity took a while for me to appreciate, but once, once a lot of her work and the ideas of shame and the way I was talking to myself really helped me, I think, transform and, and was a huge part of overcoming the burnout.
CF: Oh, I am a Brene Brown fan to the T. Like I've seen her speak in person. I have all the books, you know, I want to, you know, I used to say, I wanted to be like Brene Brown, but then Rob Bell in a conversation who I also love was like, Caitlin, we don't need another Brene Brown. We need Caitlin Faas to be Caitlin Faas. So I was like, okay, I got it. I got it. But I love her work for sure. And everything about vulnerability that she's saying that makes it so relatable. But I think like you're saying, and in academia, we can get trained that the ivory towers different that so few people have their PhD. That must make us unique in a different way. And it does have different terminology and it is different. However, it's also pretty similar to every other human brain, Right?
RPR: We're, we're trained in a culture to think that we are special and we are unique and it's just, it's a privilege to be there. And of course it is, it's a privilege to work with students and to help people, um, grow into themselves or, um, spread their wings in different ways. But to the extent that we get so pigeonholed in it and our identities become so tied up in it. And that's, that's absolutely where I was when I hit burnout. And it was it was a sense of, I don't know how to be me without this. So that was a lot of hard work that I had to do to figure that out. And I'll probably still be figuring it out for, for the rest of my life. Cause it's, it's going to change and grow with me, but it was, that was a really hard piece to kind of get through.
CF: Yeah, I hear you saying, how do I transcend and include my identities? How do I drop some of those old identities?
RPR: Yeah, that was, and that was a big part of it. I, and I mentioned this in the book I have, um, my students called me RPR of just by my initials because I signed my emails with my initials and it was almost like that became the armor. Right. You know, I have these Facebook posts, um, at the end of semesters that say, RPR is taking a vacation. Rebecca's here now, as if they were really separate personalities. So figuring out ways to blend those again was really important to my own, my own growth.
CF: Oh, I love how you say that because it reminds me of the boundary conversation and people who know this well are celebrities in a lot of ways or they don't know it well. And then we're reading about it on people.com. Uh, and this idea, like I view myself as Dr. Caitlin Faas when I'm professionally speaking or when I'm on camera or when I would work with students. And then my married name is different and that's how I sign things out and about, it's a much easier, last name, but I don't mix the two very often. And in the past year, thinking about, do I want to blend these identities? Or these names have helped me keep kind of a fake boundary, but also something concrete for me to remember. It's like, here I am putting on my hat for the professional version of me. It will be interesting to see how this evolves with time, because I have always kept it separate.
And now I do see more of that merging. Like I didn't tell as many personal stories before publicly and now I do. And I've always viewed it as no people don't want to hear that it'd be more clinical or clinical or more clean about it. Right. When think that, that was the way to talk about things, I'll be very academic about it almost. So let me give information. And now that I do more embodiment work and the role modeling of my own coach of like, wait a minute, if I'm being a life coach, I also need to share much about my own life to be on honest and vulnerable with other people about that. So how to blend identities. I think for a lot of us, women is ongoing conversation.
RPR: Yeah. That's a really great point. I think most women are multi-hyphenates in some way or another. We have multiple roles. Those can be different across folks, of course, but those identities can be so sometimes at odds with each other and how do we blend them or why are we keeping them separate? Why, why do they feel like they're separate? And is that really necessary with your background in psychology and with coaching? What would you say that vitality in an academic career means?
CF: Vitality and an academic career has been a theme of my month commitment and vitality. So especially working on not being a brain on a stick, so vitality and an academic career for me, I always treated it as my body is separate from my brain and my brain is valued in my academic life. And that was very much to my detriment. My body was numb. I did not know how to process emotions. I, you know, part of it, that was part of what contributed to wanting to leave feeling so numb. Even though I, it was like, I've made peace with this. I love this job. But finding that balance with compassion and empathic distress with students of like, I want to be there for you. And I also need to be able to go home at the end of the day and not take your stories with me. Vitality is coming from that compassionate place for me, and then embodying mind, body, and spirit together rather than treating them as distinct and only the mind being valuable.
RPR: Yeah. I tend to think about this and do with my clients kind of the head, heart, hands activity, thinking about how those things are working together or how they might be working at odds. So how do you use that activity with clients or that, that mindset?
CF: Yeah, it's an integrated into the framework that I use. So I call it establish, embrace, and envision. And so we're doing a lot of that work. Now, my sessions are very flowing in the moment. So we're often I have my clients bring whatever they want to the session and we start there, but we see where it evolves. And so we're not on a strict agenda of, we have to have this answer in any given session. I trust that they're getting what they need. They have the answers inside of them. And so as we're going through that process, if we can trust the heart piece of it or the spirit part of it and fuse the session, then what emerges needs to emerge. And it becomes clear often we have to kind of clean up or get some dust off of the shelves to have that piece of an emerge for it to be clear about what the next steps are.
RPR: I'm thinking about the vitality with the, kind of the sense of flourishing. Did you see Adam Grant's article in the New York Times about languishing?
CF: Didn’t see it. I don't think I've read that one yet though. Tell me about it.
RPR: So Adam Grant is a psychologist at Columbia, I think,
CF: Uh, Wharton I'm also, I follow Adam Grant pretty closely. So it's funny. I haven't read this one. Yeah, well I do really.
RPR: I love him too. He talks about the idea that in this season of pandemic kind of nearing the end of the pandemic, we're not flourishing because we're still in this, in this trauma, but we're also not all completely depressed, right? It's, it's not those either ors. Many of us are in this state of languishing where we're just kind of incubating and kind of waiting to see what happens and not really feeling like we have a lot of choices because we're still, we're still in fight mode or flight mode in a lot of different ways. Maybe freeze might even be more closer to the languishing piece of that, that validated. I think a lot of what I was feeling during this time and thinking about, oh no, am I going back into burnout? But no, I'm not. It's just kind of this natural reaction to what we're going through.
CF: I love that. Yeah. And for me, my COVID experience has been so different because it was the time when I got to be free. I felt a lot of that pre-COVID or right when it was happening at the end of the spring semester of 2020, and then being able to have space to do my own work, gave me the opportunity to like, be ready. Like, I feel like I'm in a time of flourishing right now because I did my personal work. And now I'm able to get back on those front lines and like be there for clients and help them come out of maybe this freeze that they've been in or the pause or however, this languishing, like he's saying, it's like, oh, I'm ready for you. Cause I was doing work back here when it still felt like, uh, people were, people were numbing, right? A lot of my clients were overeating and watching a lot of Netflix and just trying to survive. Understandably so. And that was my time to do my work while I prepared myself to coach even more.
RPR: That's awesome. I think we all use this time in very different ways and we've, we've all learned a lot about ourselves and about our structures and about the systems that we work in. Um, and those are going to be, especially in academia. Those are going to be really, really interesting in the next six months when most institutions are telling, going back back to not saying back to normal, but essentially sending everyone back with that kind of mentality, that it is going to be the same. And there's, I think there's a lot of, I know colleagues all over the country that I know are struggling with that a little bit. How do we just go back and pretend things didn't happen? Can we do that? Should we do that? What advice might you give to folks who are preparing to go back to the campus?
CF: Yeah. Is no going back to how it was the sooner. We all recognize that the better I think of, we went through a traumatic experience globally and now we're different on the other side, what parts of this do I want to keep? And what parts do I want to change? What has changed about me? I think the advice is you have more power than you think. So I think it's going to be a really crucial time. Some people are going to sink into like now I have even less power, like look at my university, cutting funds, even more look at them. You know, my job is even more precious. I can't leave this now. And I think the opposite is actually true. Like you have more power to be able to say, oh, I want this to be different. On the other side of this pandemic, here's what I want. What would happen if I asked for it, what's the worst that could happen. And that's part of where I'm in session with clients what’s worst that could happen, feeling the fear and taking the leap anyways into, I can make this request. I can stand up for what I believe in. I can still request what I want, even if I don't get it, I get to have my power.
RPR: That's not necessarily a thing that we think about when we are so embedded in the higher ed system. We're, we're used to the ladder that's laid out before us. We're used to the, our expectations continually growing in different ways. Um, as you walk up that ladder, but we aren't necessarily used to kind of claiming that power.
CF: Yeah. Maybe the latter has more flexibility than you think.
RPR: that's a very deep thought. So I'm curious what your self-care practices look like.
CF: Yeah, I've done a lot of self-care work, especially in the last year after leaving academia. So I had lost weight about over 10 years ago and worked through that process. I all, throughout academia, I had IBS. And so that's part of what I help people with. And so in the sense of, if you're having chronic health issues, it's often ignored in academia and that was an underlying source of stress and shame. And I worked through a lot of that. So then I had started running over the years, and I've been doing CrossFit for four years now. My, so that had already been in place when I was a faculty member. And I was very adamant about only working a certain amount of hours each week.
And this was when I was department chair, raising a teenager, you know, running my business, only working a certain amount of hours, only checking email one like once a day, setting parameters and boundaries around things that was very self-care-oriented. And then in the past year, I've added a lot of that embodiment work. So breathwork has absolutely changed my life and being able to process emotions meditation. I'm completing my meditation training right now because I love that so much. And it's, uh, an instinctive meditation that I do instead of a dry or more like, just transcend your thoughts type of meditation. I had dabbled in that for years and never felt really connected to it. And this instinctive meditation was very clearly meant for me. And what else? A lot of slowing down. And that's why I talk about getting out of the hamster wheel. So do I have space where I'm not trying to be productive? I'm not trying to do anything. I'm not checking anything off my list. That was a hard ask even a year ago. And now it feels so much more natural. Like when can I get an hour just to myself to do nothing? Like I barely recognize myself when I say that. So that's been a lot of my self care work. What have you been doing?
RPR: I've been working on the do nothing for probably three years now and it's still, it's still a struggle cause, um, and I realized that I just like to push myself. So I had pushed myself off a cliff in higher ed, but I do like to have projects. So doing the podcast is fulfilling for me. It's not just like extra work or something. I feel like I have to do working on the burnout book. I don't, I'm not tenured anymore. I don't need it for promotion. It's just something I feel really powerfully that's powerfully needed in the world. So I working on that book, which is finally drafted and, um, it's going through some peer reviews right now. So I'm looking forward to getting that out into the world, but that's a project I didn't quote unquote need for anything. It's a project that I believed in.
So having those things to do has been important. I also have had to really come to terms with the fact that around three or four o'clock, I kind of just shut down and there's nothing I can do about that. It hasn't changed for most of my entire life. When I complain about it to my husband, he's like, that's your entire life just admitted and just be okay with it. So having that kind of four o'clock hour to, to not have the, I need to be working on this, or I want to be working on this, you know, and if I want to play solitaire for an hour, I'm going to play solitaire for an hour. I'm gonna watch a home show for an hour. I'm gonna watch a home show. And those are filling me up in different ways. Um, so that I have the brain space or the back brain space to process some of the other stuff that I've been thinking about or working on.
I haven't been doing really good with the, with the, um, with the taking care of my health during the pandemic. So that's something that I need to get on top of.
CF: Yeah, it's hard. And I worked a lot on no sugar, no sugar, no flour in particular. I had been gluten free and dairy free already, but really dialing in on some of my health concerns during the pandemic actually ended up being easier because no one was asking me to go to a restaurant I wasn't traveling. And so I could dial a lot of that in work on my supplements. And I'm very grateful on the other end now that we are starting to go to restaurants and we are starting to travel that, okay. I really know my body a lot better than I did even a year ago.
RPR: Yeah. Going back to that, we're not heads on sticks. Right. I think that's, that's an image that I think can stick in a lot of people's minds because we do, our brains are the way we make our living. Right. And if there's something going on with your body, that's impacting your brain, it's very easy to get frustrated or angry with your, with your physical self. Can you tell me a little bit more about the embodied coaching that you're doing or that perspective?
CF: Yeah. So through the breathwork through meditation, the other thing I track is my heart rate variability. And so now that I've been tracking that for almost a year, I realized, oh wow, you really can run your body into the ground pretty quickly on any given day, if you're not taking care of it. So the deep breathing activities really helping people slow down in that way has it's helped me so much. So a really great book about that, uh, Breath by James Nester, if you're scientifically oriented and thinking, what do you mean breath is super important. What's going on over here. I might need a little convincing. His book will lay it out for you and convince you, like, I need to be paying attention to how I'm breathing. Why have we all been ignoring this? So that's part of the embodiment and then guiding people through meditations.
RPR: I think some ways we're back to connection, again, connecting with yourself as an important piece of your wellbeing so that you can decide what it actually takes for you to reach vitality or flourishing and not necessarily reach it, but to be on the practice toward those things, having the, having the space and the process to help you reach toward those, those ultimate goals.
CF: Absolutely. And anytime you're getting sick or working through something else, health wise, like being able to track it and pay attention to it and listen to your body. Because even this morning I woke up, my brain was trying to tell me, like, you don't feel that great. And I checked my bracelet that I use for heart rate variability. And it was like, wow, you had a great night asleep. Caitlin basically is kind of what it says, you know, like, wow, great job on the breathing yesterday. And I was like, wow, look at that there. My brain goes again, trying to tell me a different story than my body is. Let me connect them again together. So that we're integrated.
RPR: Nice. What'd you have for folks and women specifically who are trying to work on balance, you know, you talked about your own boundaries and I think some folks would have been like, well, I can never do that. I can never, you know, work certain hours or not check my email or things like that. So what advice might you have for women to work on that level?
CF: Yeah. If you're telling yourself I could never do that. I would first reframe that into maybe it's possible for me to, if Caitlin was able to do that as a department chair, maybe there's some hope here, instead of looking for all the examples of where people aren't doing this, I'm not the only one. Right. So there are other people who are able to find that balance, let me pay attention to what they're saying and what they're doing. And so some of that was like looking for new techniques, something like outsourcing, what did that mean for me and my family? And how did I want to integrate that? Some of it was maybe I can test this. Like, would the Dean really notice if I didn't answer an email? And is he going to say anything if I don't answer an email within three hours and it turns out he wouldn't, you know, there was one time I had a meeting, it was something like a Wednesday.
The, an email requests came in at 5:00 PM for a 7:00 PM meeting, I think. And I had already checked my email for the day. And so I didn't see it until the next morning. And it was no problem. There was no issue. It was actually like, okay, that was fine. There was no judgment. Or like the things that we think are going to happen if we don't attend that kind of meeting and the best part was, I didn't even see any of it or give myself drama because I don't ha I didn't check my email at night, which I find a lot of my clients will do. And then they would maybe guilt themselves all night into this story of, I should go to that meeting, but know I had to put the kids to bed or whatever's coming up. And it was like, well, I just avoided all of that drama because I had set parameters in place. So I think there's techniques about it. And then there's the reframing of getting curious about what is possible here. And maybe me answering emails as quickly as I think, like, that's not actually a super skill for me. I could do it quickly, but maybe they actually more value the words I say in the meeting or how I show up for my colleagues. Like that carries much more weight than me answering within two hours. So I think it's an experimentation testing process.
RPR: I learned an activity when I was doing design thinking works that I've used with clients and I've used it in workshops before. It's kind of a three column grid and you're supposed to generate what are some easy ways that you could address this thing? What are some exciting ways that you could address this thing? And then what are some bold or scary ways you could address this thing? And those would be the things that, you know, require thousands of dollars, you know, move to Maui or something like that. But it gives you a chance to say, oh, there are some things that I could do quickly. That probably aren't that big of an ask that I can try. And then here's some things that I want to work up to. And even with the bold ideas, there's often a kernel in there. That's something that you can do, even if you can't go all in on something that's particularly bold or extreme, there's usually some piece of, of there's some nugget in there that you can take advantage of and think through More.
CF: Yeah. And it's so related to, I think masculine, feminine energy that gets put out of, I live, I've just always grown up in a very masculine way of here's how we're going to get things done. Here's how we're going to check things off the list. And I think we got fed that to in academia of like, here's how to run the system. And then I would try to take that home. And my family would be driven crazy by it a little bit. So I have several clients that are like, and then I go home and I try to be the CEO, or I try to be the department chair to my husband or to my daughter. And they don't want to put up with that. I was like, oh yes, I have lived that too. And so being able to transition balance back out of like, what does it mean to be a little softer, to slow down? How do I show up in that way versus my, get it done all the time way has been part of my own balancing process.
RPR: And that's certainly been harder in the last 15 months being able to separate. I try very clearly to keep all of my work in my home office so that it doesn't trickle out into my, into my home. So, um, and my husband and I have offices right next door to each other. So we try to keep, keep work in the back of the house so that we can so that we can be those home selves downstairs in our, in our living Space
CF: Yeah. Which is part of that embodiment, like transition piece. Is there even an essential oil or something I can use right now, a color or a note or a music, a little playlist to help me transition into the home version of myself, even though it's just me closing my laptop and walking out the door.
RPR: Yeah. Yeah. That's great advice. I have a specific candle that I'll light to help me transition. So from my, from my reading chair into my, into my reading of something, as opposed to just kind of working in the chair. Yeah. Love that. So if you were going to, if you're talking to a new client, let's say someone's listening and they're considering coaching. They're, they're an academic, they're a woman they're considering going into coaching. What would you want that woman to know?
CF: They want to go, they want to be a client or they want to train to be a coach?
RPR: Ooh, let's do both. Ooh.
CF: So if you're looking for coaching, I think for advice it's who resonates with you the most, there's so many of us and we have that Google sheet directory of so many academic coaches who resonates with you, who seems to be your person, reach out to them and see how it works. I think that's my advice. Like what could it hurt to find out more information from them and see if you're a good fit together. Even if it takes a couple of sessions, I think sometimes people get trapped in the idea of I'm going to have to work with this person forever. And that's part of why I do individual sessions actually like test it out. Let's see if you want to continue to do this, space it out how you want, because I'm going to empower you to make choices and have freedom along the way. So that would be the coaching piece of it. Why not try it, especially if you're listening to this podcast and if you haven't tried it yet, test it out.
And then if you want to become a coach, I think I get a lot of people that reach out about that. Like how do you know which coach training or how do I make that decision? And I think some of that is you probably already know who like where you want to get trained or some ideas behind it. What I actually see most academics do is do too much research into it. Like there's a perfect program and I have to make sure I do the right one. And some of that is, I mean, I started an ICF path and then stopped it and still gained skillsets from it. But then I did the life coach school, and now I do other work and I'm constantly getting trained on new things. So don't view it as you're locked in. Like we tend to view academia, you know, like I, I got to go to the one grad school and that will change my trajectory forever. Bless not true. If you're becoming a coach, there's a lot of flexibility and I've evolved in the past five years with who I help the terminology. I use what my website looks like, the whole thing. So running a business and developing your side hustle, you're not going to get locked in to one thing about it. So get excited about the flexibility.
RPR: Thank you for joining me today. Caitlin, it's always a pleasure to chat with you and learn more about your coaching.
CF: Thanks Rebecca, such a joy to talk with you too.
RPR: Thanks for listening to this episode of the agile academic podcast for women in higher ed. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. To make sure you don't miss an episode, follow the show on Apple, Google, or Spotify podcasting apps and bookmark the show. You'll find each episode, a transcript, and show notes at theagileacademic.buzzsprout.com. Take care, and stay well.