Unraveling Faculty Burnout Chapter 3 Purpose

On this episode of the agile academic, I share an excerpt from the first of the four burnout resilience chapters in Unraveling Faculty Burnout – chapter 3 on purpose.canv

Transcript

On this episode of the agile academic, I share an excerpt from the first of the four burnout resilience chapters in Unraveling Faculty Burnout – chapter 3 on purpose.

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Welcome to this special series of bite-sized agile academic episodes about my book, Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways for Reckoning and Renewal, available from Johns Hopkins University Press. I talk through what you’ll find in each chapter, read a short excerpts, and even share thoughts from women who contributed to the book. Unraveling Faculty Burnout ships September 20. Links are in the transcript. I’m your host, Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark. And now, on to the mini-episode.
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The first chapter in the burnout resilience section of the book is about purpose. When I experienced my burnout, I lost my sense of purpose with my job and career, which is tough when your job is your life, for better or worse. I had been really dedicated to my students for years and years but found myself pulling away and dreading interaction. I couldn’t write. I didn’t want to be anywhere near campus. The pilot program I had developed with some colleagues had, in a sense, broken me professionally and that seeped into the personal. 

I wanted to have a chapter in the book about articulating values and finding or redefining your purpose because having something that is a guiding light or motivation is one way to start to overcome burnout, especially that third characteristic – feelings of decreased efficacy and meaning. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter:

When I ask faculty members what their purpose is or what fulfills them, I usually get a range of answers. On the most positive and idealistic end, I hear things like “I’m shaping problem-solvers/citizens/artists of tomorrow” and “My research with zebrafish may lead to a significant finding in the treatment of cancer.” But at the other end of the spectrum, I hear something quite different: “I need to make it through this week, and then the next, and then the next” and “If I can just survive this semester, I’ll be OK.” How do we get from the peak of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs all the way down to the base of his triangle, the way I certainly did?

Many of us come to higher education with a level of idealism and determination to make a difference through some combination of teaching, research, and service to the community. Maybe an undergraduate course sparked a passion in you, or a mentor recognized your potential as an academic. Maybe you had something to prove to someone, or to yourself. Or maybe like me, you felt most comfortable—the most “you”—in a university setting. 

You hope you find, to quote Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, “the work that gives your life meaning; the work that lets you be yourself and helps you become a better self; the work that is an unparalleled pleasure when it goes well and is worth fighting for when it goes poorly; the work you are willing to organize your life around. I think we all have this work, and the quality of our lives is determined by how well we are able to do it” (17–18, emphasis added). Pang’s last statement gives me pause; it’s especially relevant to higher education. What purpose drives us? What values ground us? How much of ourselves do we give to the work of higher ed? What is fulfilling and meaningful in this work—not ideally, but actually?

Without diving into the deep well of philosophy from Aristotle to Monty Python, and in the interest of brevity, I’ll define my terms in the following way: Values are the firm beliefs and moral guides that inform everything we do. A purpose is what inspires us to do the work, a driving question, commitment, goal, contribution, or legacy that one pursues to make a difference in some way. Meaning is the value we derive from that pursuit. And fulfillment is the satisfaction of achieving one’s potential and contentment. My thinking is shaped by Aristotle’s value ethics in the sense that our highest purpose and motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic, should be to create our best selves.

Finding and fulfilling a purpose is an active journey as we work, thrive, and overcome to do so. It is not a static state, nor is it created for us externally. In their book about women and burnout, Nagoski and Nagoski (2019) describe a sense of meaning and purpose as crucial to overcoming burnout when purpose is defined, they say, as “the nourishing experience of feeling like we’re connected to something larger than ourselves. It helps us thrive when things are going well, and it helps us cope when things go wrong” (58). And I say it is this pursuit of a meaningful purpose guided by our values that can help us avoid or at least mitigate burnout.

The chapter also has exercises to help you think through your purpose in different ways. Here’s Dr. Katherine Segal talking about the exercise she shares in the book:

Hi, I'm Dr. Katherine Segal, mind body medicine, coach integrative therapist, educator, researcher, and burnout expert job burnout has been a focus of my career for many years. Ever since I experienced job burnout as a young therapist, and then witnessed my colleagues suffering through job burnout as well during my doctoral program, when it was time for me to design my own studies, I jumped at the opportunity to create a study that not only explored the experience of job burnout, but more importantly explored the experience of healing from job burnout. I have been utilizing these findings with my graduate students, coaching and therapy clients, as well as embodying and enacting the recommendations myself to support my own career sustainability. The activity I share in the text helps you identify your overall purpose for being in this field. And we can use that purpose as a sort of compass to help guide career choices. 

We know that one aspect of job burnout for some people is lack of control. And what that looks like is doing a lot, putting a lot of time, energy and effort into activities at work, but not feeling the momentum or a sense of moving forward or that our efforts have any real meaning. When we use our purpose to help guide our decision making, we can more easily discern which activities to say yes to because they are connected to and in line with our purpose and which activities to say no to. We can give ourselves permission to pass on certain activities, because we can recognize that these activities are likely going to use up our energy, leave us drained and not move us forward. This also makes it easier to do those tasks and activities that we need to do, but we don't really like doing or aren't excited about doing, but once we see how they are connected to our purpose, they become a lot less draining and as they are still moving us forward, I hope you give this activity a try and it helps guide you to a more meaningful and sustainable career. 

Thank you.

So that’s a sneak peek at chapter 3 of Unraveling Faculty Burnout. Stay tuned for the next episode on the Compassion chapter.