In this episode, I lead you in a few different reflection activities to wrap up the year and think deeply about your purpose and identity going into 2022.
In this episode, I lead you in a few different reflection activities to wrap up the year and think deeply about your purpose and identity going into 2022.
Hi listeners, thanks for joining me for this last episode of the podcast for 2021. This episode is different than the others from both seasons. Instead of doing an interview, I want to take the opportunity to encourage some reflection at the end of this trying year. I don’t tend to think that the New Year is some magical, mystical reboot, but it is a recognized point in time when we go through a transition, even if it’s only one on the calendar.
I also resisting goal setting at this time of the year in favor of reflection. Some of you probably relish the opportunity to set goals, determine metrics and targets, and create the plan for the year. Good for you, that’s awesome! But honestly, that stresses me and my anxiety brain out. I can do it in small bursts but reflecting lets me remember my life isn’t all about productivity or “doing.”
So in this episode, we’re focusing on reflection – agile academics reflect and adapt, so that’s the plan. I’m going to walk you through a series of reflective questions you can consider and a few activities you can do to ground yourself in your values and intentions going into 2022.
This is an episode I don’t recommend listening to in the car! Grab a favorite notebook and a warm beverage, then cozy up in your favor chair before you jump in. I’ve also made a set of handouts with space to reflect if you’d like to print those out and work from them. You’ll find them on my website. I’ll link from the transcript as well.
If you’re curious before we get started, I’ll be drawing on techniques from my work with Scrum project management in this episode. Scrum is a project management framework that started in software development. I’ve written a lot about it, including in my book Agile Faculty: Practice Strategies for Managing Research, Service, and Teaching.
Part of the Scrum framework’s cycle is a meeting called a Retrospective which is a meeting of the team to honestly discuss how successful they have been working together and what they can do to improve their process. They use different activities to get those conversations going, and I’ll be using two here.
We’ll take this mindset of a Retrospective into the reflection today as well as a format called the user story which is basically a way for developers to articulate who their user is and what they want to accomplish. We’ll adapt it for our purposes to look at identity and action along with purpose. Fun stuff!
One more note as we get started – for many of us the importance of “productivity” varies, but please remember you are NOT your productivity. Your personal worth is not dependent on publications or student evaluation scores or leadership roles. You are more than a brain on a stick in higher education. As you reflect on your year, think about your other identities and successes, things you want to work on in your life not just your work. You are a whole person in academia. Something to consider as we move on. And there is a blog post linked from the transcript in which I talk more about productivity vs vitality.
OK, let’s jump into the deep end and think about purpose. Why start here? Purpose is the stuff that gives our life meaning, so definitely the stuff we want to take the time to articulate and reflect on. Our purpose, our values, those should guide our actions, interactions, and reflections. If you want to have a purpose-driven and meaningful life, articulating your values and purpose is a gut-check opportunity.
I’m not going to walk through an exercise to articulate your core values, but you can find a million online. I’ll link to Brene Brown’s version in the transcript if you’d like to do that before thinking about purpose. Both are really important to self-knowledge, making decisions, and finding our own paths.
So, I have a few questions for you to consider as our first reflective step. Thinking about this last year,
What aspects of higher ed did you find most fulfilling? Which drained you the most? Why?
I’m going to pause here. I’ll read through the questions one more time –they are on the handouts as well – and I invite you to pause the audio to spend some time responding to the questions that resonate most with you. You can restart the audio when you are ready.
So again, thinking about this last year,
What aspects of higher ed did you find most fulfilling? Which drained you the most? Why?
[PAUSE]
Welcome back, I hope those questions were generative for you and your reflection on the year. Before we move on, take a minute to read back over your thoughts. Highlight one or two insights that resonate most with you, thoughts you want to tuck away and consider more later. I’ll give you a minute to do that.
[PAUSE - brief]
OK, to expand on your reflections, let’s now add a bit of identity work to our thoughts about purpose. To do that, we are going to adapt the user story format I mentioned earlier. If you’d like to know more about user stories in general, check out Agile Faculty or the blog post linked in the transcript.
The purpose of this activity is to articulate aspects of your identity and their connection to your purpose as well as the reasons why you pursue that purpose. It’s a deceptively easy format to work with, just a fill-in-the-blank sentence:
As a <___>, I want to <___> so that I can <___>.
To expand it a little you might say,
As a <type of person>, I want to <do, pursue, remember, maintain, etc. something>, so that I can <something>.
Some of my identities wrapped up in my purpose are writer, podcaster, faculty developer, and coach. I also have identities tied to being also a partner, family member, and embodied person.
So for example, my identity as a writer has become very important to me again, and I have a story that says,
As a writer, I want to create meaningful content for a variety of venues so that I can start conversations about faculty burnout and the value of coaching in higher ed.
I can make that more detailed if I want, for example saying, “As a writer who focuses on higher ed culture,” but that’s up to you. I like to keep them broad at first.
For a few more examples, my role as a faculty developer in a center for teaching and learning is also important. My motives are similar since my writing is in the faculty development arena too, but this role focuses in more specifically on teaching. So I have a story that reads
As a faculty developer in a center for teaching and learning, I want to meaningfully contribute to and support faculty excellence in teaching and learning so that I can help realize our center’s mission and ultimately improve student learning.
Beyond work, I also want to care more about my physical self, to take better care of myself, so I have a story that says,
As a whole person, I want to learn to eat and move more intentionally so that I can feel physically stronger day-by-day and be active with my partner.
Your turn now. Take your time, experiment with different articulations of your identities and motives. Don’t censor yourself yet. See this as a brainstorming activity. See what happens when you write without judgment. Pause the audio here, and come back when you are ready for the next steps.
[PAUSE]
Let’s take one more moment to look over what you brainstormed. What do you notice about your stories? What’s surprising? What patterns do you see? Jot your thoughts down.
[PAUSE brief]
For the next part of our retrospective reflection, we’re going to get a little more concrete and do an activity called the starfish. On a piece of paper, draw a five-pointed star. You have five points to label using these terms:
· keep doing
· start doing
· stop doing
· do less of
· do more of.
There is a diagram already drawn and labeled for you on the handout as well.
Pick one of your stories, anyone that particularly resonates with you. Maybe the one that is closest to what you hold to be your most important purpose or identity. If you did a values activity on your own, pull those out to consider as well.
The starfish activity asks you to add action to your story statement. Remember I said the retrospective meeting was one that asked the team to assess its process to think about how successful or unsuccessful it has been and to think about ways to improve or find a deeper satisfaction. That’s our goal here. For each of the five points of the starfish - keep doing, start doing, stop doing, do less of, do more of – how might you take action.
For example, if we take my writer story:
As a writer, I want to create meaningful content for a variety of venues so that I can start conversations about faculty burnout and the value of coaching in higher ed.
I might say I want to start reaching out to publication editors with story ideas related to burnout and work with my collaborator on joint pieces. Maybe keep doing my morning pages to sustain my practice. And I might also push myself, saying I want to stop resting on my laurels by exploring new venues and approaches to my topics. I have a bunch more, but that’s a good start for an example!
Now it’s your turn again. Choose a story, and brainstorm actions using the starfish diagram or even just a list with the five categories. Pause your audio here, and do as many brainstorms as feels appropriate to you right now.
[PAUSE]
Let’s take another moment to look over what you brainstormed. Highlight some of the actions you think you can target to realize your story – maybe stopping doing something you do that impedes your progress OR something that is working that you could do more of. Jot down your thoughts. I’ll give you a minute.
[PAUSE brief]
How did that go? I hope the questions and activities were generative for you and helped you deepened your thinking about your purpose and ways to work toward it in the coming year. Reflection is so important for agile academics, it’s deeply connected to our personal and professional growth. I always find writing the stories, thinking about identity and action, to be so powerful.
I’d love to hear how your reflection went and maybe some tidbits of what you learned. Feel free to DM me on Twitter - @RPR_Agile – or send me a message through my website. And if you realized some things you might want to dig into further with a coach around, check out my coaching services – I’ll link in the transcript. Mention this episode and get 20 percent off your first session!
Take care of yourself going into this season and new year. I’ll see you again for season 3 of *the agile academic* starting in the Spring! And be on the lookout for a between-isode that might drop even earlier! Stay well, friends.