Engaging Struggling Colleagues: Taking the Risk

I want to recognize that there are risks involved in doing so engaging colleagues who are struggling. Sometimes the risk are emotional, sometimes they are "political," sometimes taking such a risk can put an important relationship at risk. As with all risk taking, we have to carefully weight the pros and the cons, and consider if the risks are worth taking.

There are times in life when it is best to be kind and to avoid conflict. Yet, when a colleague/friend is clearly in trouble, sometimes what is kind and "good" in the long term is not what is easy in the moment.

It is an emotional risk engaging colleagues about their lack of productivity and their struggles with writing and publishing. It is easy for someone to feel defensive, and many of behave in less than pleasant ways when feeling the need to defend. How this defensiveness looks various greatly. It can range from mild annoyance that will soon pass, to rage and a desire for "revenge."

Before you engage a struggling colleague, consider how you think they may react, and consider the risks for you. 

Engaging struggling colleagues: Normalizing

One of the most important things we can do to help colleagues who are struggling with the writing and publishing process is to help them normalize their struggles. By normalizing, I mean encouraging them to understand that each and every one of us has areas to improve and skills that we need to learn, and that struggling is part of the process of learning to write and publish.

Indeed, nobody really learns all of the skills and tools in graduate school that we need to succeed in this work. Many of us also have old baggage that we need to overcome.  Still, many come to believe that somehow they should already have mastered writing and publishing, and that somehow there is something wrong with them, something deficient, something broken (in the extreme). At the least, many of us carry a bit of impostor syndrome with us, hoping upon hope that we will not be discovered.

Some colleagues, friends and clients have erroneously assumed that writing has always been easy and satisfying for me; it has not. As I explore in this old post, there was a time when writing was the source of a good deal of pain and shame.

Sharing your own struggles with writing and publishing, no matter how accomplished you are, can help encourage normalization. Approach your struggling colleagues with empathy, warmth, and understanding. Help normalize the struggle for them. When experiences are normalize for us we can slowly let go of the shame that we often feel about not being "accomplished" enough.

Engaging Struggling Colleagues

Many many years, prior to starting my coaching practice, I did this work "pro bono." Colleagues and friends would ask me to help people they knew were at risk of not getting tenure. It was painful for my friends to see their colleagues struggle. Many were great teachers, wonderful people, dedicated to the good of their departments and universities, but they were not publishing, and so their careers were at risk.

It can be painful to see colleagues struggle. It can make you feel powerless. How do you help? How do you talk to your colleagues about their need for help?  How do you engage them in a way that helps them? What are the issues in play here?

Over the next two weeks,  I am going to explore a few key ideas to help you engage colleagues who are struggling with writing and publishing.  I am not going to explore how you can help them write, but instead, how can you connect with them about their need for help and support in a way. 

Wander the Stacks

While it might seem a bit old school to some younger scholars, this is an exercise that can be really powerful. It comes from the first edition of my book, Practical Tips for Publishing Scholarly Articles.

Go to the best research library in your area, one with the most academic journals.  Make sure you bring a paper journal with you (again, very old school). Spend a few hours just wandering the stacks. Pick up journals that you might not have seen before, those in your area of interest, and those well beyond it. Spend some time looking at the articles in the table of contents; read some abstracts. See if you can "bend" your area of interest in line with some of the titles of journals. Notice ideas that come up for you.

Take notes in your personal writing journal. This is a good way of generating new ideas, and giving ourselves a sense of connection to the "march of ideas" that is scholarship.

 Yes, old school, but many who have tried this have told me that it is powerful.

Directory of Open Access Journals

Do you know about the Directory of Open Access Journals? If you do not, you should! Play with the database; I will write about it more in a couple of days! 

Teaching and Writing on Masculinities

A recent twitter post on the relationship between gun violence and masculinities reminding me that I never have written a blog post about my book, Social Work Practice with Men at Risk, or about my teaching around masculinites.

Social Work Practice with Men at Risk was a book that I had to write. Mind you, I am not a gender studies scholar, and I am really not an expert on masculinities or masculinities studies. I am more of a social work scholar/practitioner whose experiences working with men lead him to "having to" write the book. It also pushed me into a few year period of really delving into gender studies literature.

Why did I have to write it? Well, there never has really been a book that addresses social work practices with men in general.  There are some fine books on specific sub-groups of men, but not on working with men as a distinct group. During my own social work education, back in the paleolithic era, I do not recall one professor every speaking about working with men. When men were discussed, it was only as oppressors or perpetrators of violence. While important, surely there was more to engaging in social work practice with men than that.

So, this has become a side area of interest for me, one which I teach more than I wrote about. When I do write about masculinities, it has been from a recently completed student on older expatriate men at risk or autoethnographic work, or with this article, both!

Each summer, I teach a course, Introduction to Masculinities. It is an online course  that is part of our Gender Studies minor program, which I was sort of part of starting. I love teaching this course. My goal is to help students develop a personal sense of how their own internalization of the "rules" of masculinities impacts their lives. I do not impose my own views about what men "should" be, but instead invite students to explore the positive and negative ways in which masculinites have shaped their lives. This is a wonderful journey; I have seen many male and female studies alike develop new insights into their own behavior and feelings, and have watched them change their own sense of identity and "being in the world."

Just thought I would share a bit about this part of my work life.

Dissertation Woes? Get Unstuck Package

Winter is a critical time for PhD candidates and students. The potential costs, emotionally and financially, of not getting unstuck and moving toward finishing your dissertation can be immense.

If you are feeling stuck at any stage of the dissertation process, I will work with you intensively for one month to help get you moving forward. This includes up to two coaching calls per week, accountability check ins, and other structures to get you on the right (write) path.  I am offer this to the first five doctoral students or candidates who sign up, for $500.

My specialty as a coach is in helping scholars work through their own emotional, psychosocial issues that are keeping them from meeting their goals. I have a unique set of skills and experiences, in that I am trained as a psychotherapist, have published over 15 books and 120 articles, and continue to be a tenured full professor at a great university. Unlike some who want you to leave the "evil world" of academia, I love higher education! I have helped many dozens of scholars move past their barriers and toward their goals.

If you want to talk about it, email me.