Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 57 seconds
I recently participated in a session by Academic Impressions focused on rediscovering joy at work in the midst of burnout and the aftereffects of the past two years. The session was led by Kathleen Vinson, whom I had never met before.
Among the questions we were encouraged to ask ourselves are:
What do you volunteer for, happily? My answer was mentorship. I am always happy to mentor someone else.
What do you do well? My gut reaction was that i am good at designing and facilitating workshops and conversations more broadly
Where do you have flow? My gut response was Teaching, workshops, keynotes
One of the revealing things this exercise did for me was show me that the direction I want my career to grow should be in a direction that increases or at least includes these elements to a large extent. I had been considering various career moves that would not be in this direction, but now it is clear to me that I was way off base!
Another interesting hidden element of this is that I am happy to do background work to help support these three things, like building networks, organizing events, etc., all the things *around* teaching, mentoring, facilitating. This includes, I guess, the reading and writing work I do, much of it alone, some of it collaborative, that I did not mention in my gut reactions there. I mean, I often volunteer go write, I am good at writing, I often have flow in my writing, but for some reason, research, reading and writing did not come up for me during this exercise. It may be a function of the day, or it may be they are secondary. I like researching teaching/learning, I like writing about it… I don’t know.
There were other elements of the session that were interesting but the next part is another one that stood out for me. Vinson asked us to ask ourselves some more details. She said most joy came from relationships. Does it matter who? But also other questions. Does it matter when, why, what, how, and I added where.
So I asked myself. Does it matter if my audience/collaborators are peers/faculty or students (grad or undergrad?). And my answer is, I love them all in different ways, but ultimately, I get the most joy from being with undergraduate students and seeing a sparkle in their eye.
I asked myself if it matters if the audience is in person or online? And while in general I am comfortable with both, there is an element of needing SOME f2f social time in my life when possible. And that the online is more enjoyable when I can ensure it is interactive and not when others restrict my ability to design the space as hospitable as I would like. It would be like being asked to host a dinner in someone else’s restaurant with someone else’s ingredients.
And I asked myself does it matter if my audience are local to Egypt or international, and I found that I love both, and I love getting them both together. Which is maybe why I love #myfest22 so much, because I can invite a l can invite a lot of local faculty and students and also a big bunch of international folks so we can all learn together and contextualize locally as well.
The featured image of a tree with beautiful purple flowers is one I took today in an outdoor space near my daughter’s school. It brought me so much joy!