First, I am the productivity coach for The Professor Is In. I support a wide array of scholars in everything from staying on task to imagining the road ahead.

In the past decade, little has changed in my coaching. I mean, I am always reading and modifying how I frame strategies to help clients meet their challenges, but the core pillars of my coaching have remained unchanged: Honesty. Realistic Expectations. Small Measurable Goals.

Concurrently, I know, because the research shows it, that the two things we need for motivation are: 1) Knowing we can do it. 2) Knowing that it’s worth it.

So, in my coaching for, let’s say writing a grant, I know that you can write a grant. You may not believe it, but I can walk you through where your thinking is fucking you up and you can get there. I know that if you focus on whether the grant will get funded, you will talk yourself out of working on it as being worth it. No worries, I can coach you on how to make your goals the things you can control (e.g. the next paragraph) and how to keep plugging along until voila it’s finished!

But what if it isn’t a question of whether the grant will get funded, but rather the fact that there is no funding? As in, the Racist in Chief has cut it off. As in, you are no longer betting on a potential win but all bets are off. The answer to ‘is it worth it?’ is a pretty solid “no.” And that means bye-bye motivation. AKA freeze in place.

That’s exactly what happened this year with one of my longtime clients — Dr. Christy Till, the PI of a research lab at a large, public university — a full stop NO.

First a bit of background from Dr. Till:

My lab studies the processes that form magma and cause eruptions, mostly on Earth and mostly at volcanoes within the U.S. Cascades Mountain Range these days, although we’ve been lucky enough to work on volcanoes all over the world. One of the key things we do is estimate the likely time interval between a volcano rumbling awake and a future eruption based on its past behavior.

I’ve been fortunate in my career thus far, usually managing to bring in a couple of grants at any given time from the National Science Foundation and NASA to support our research expenses, as well as part of the salary and tuition for several graduate students at a time. However, due to a combination of a prolonged medical leave due to Long COVID a couple of years ago and the current federal shit show, my lab finds itself with basically no funding to do this work at present. And as a lab focused on cultivating the talent of those who have historically been pushed out of science at a state school, we don’t have much of a safety net to fall back on.

I had worked with Christy through the Long COVID struggles, challenged her to focus on telling the truth about what resources she actually had (vs wanted); invited her to ease back into full time work with reasonable expectations. And, of course, reminded her to keep the goals SMALL. No easy task for a former professional ballet dancer, but lo and behold, the fierce will that it takes to compete on stage is extremely valuable in an academic career. (As long as it is met with a shit ton of effort to overcome the perfectionism overwork thing!).

But, Kel, this goes beyond just worrying about failure…I don’t even know how to tackle this problem…Whelp….Advice?!

And… we are back to the shock of NO options and freezing.

It would be lying to say that I haven’t spent some time feeling mad and scared – someone just suddenly changed all the rules of the game that I’ve been working so hard to play for so long – and I’m worried that I’m failing my students whose livelihood and education are suddenly in jeopardy. “Queue rolling ‘Anxiety’ in three, two, one…”

I’ll be honest, I was rolling right along with her. Staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night wondering what the hell I could do to support her and other academics while their careers and universities were starting to look like the medieval castles Karen is always dragging me to in the UK. The remnants of greatness sunken into the earth and drowning in the ivy that was once elegant.

My go-to reminder: “Right here, right now, you’re fine.” seemed insensitive at best and delusional at the worst.

But the truth is she and I and her students are fine, in that the wolves may be circling, but like the vast majority of academics, they are not at our throats. (And for those who are face to face with the wolf, funding is far from the most critical issue at hand.)

If I learned anything useful as a professional dancer, it was that I can survive failure and come out the other side. And I know that I’m still coming at this from a pretty privileged position. I still have a tenured job, an income, and my health is actually better than it has been in several years. Plus, I’m in a field where it is even possible to consider having federal grants support the cost of our research and part of a graduate student’s education.

AND still we are in big trouble!

The way we make space for any executive function at all is to meet the moment with the truth. In other words, the only way to quiet the screaming in our heads is to go back to that first pillar: Honesty. (Also, see Joann Macy.) The way you have always done it is gone. Full stop. Once you face that, maybe not for good, but for right now, you can make time to grieve and then think of options.

Of course, that introduces another problem: No one wants to walk INTO that grief! Instead we keep lying awake looking for a way to keep all of this from being real.

So, it should come as no surprise that when I suggested that the solution was to abandon traditional funding sources altogether, and think more along the lines of how we as Americans have had to handle every situation in which our government fails us — in other words, what would Go Fund Me and Patreon look like for a volcanology lab — I was met first with a shoulder sagging sigh followed by wailing despair.

“KEL! I AM TIRED. WE ARE ALL TIRED!”

We are aren’t we? We are all so tired. Because those of us who pay attention know that none of us has recovered from the stress and upending of COVID, whether we have long COVID or not. And we also know that we did that COVID thing with the Senior Sociopath running the response plan.

Let me repeat: Honestly, WE ARE TIRED!

So, if we accept that, how do we move on to Pillar Two: Reasonable Expectations. First, I was asking her to face really hard shit. It takes time. Breathe. Cry. Breathe. Second, focus on the realistic part of the step. I wasn’t asking an award winning volcanologist to SOLVE SCIENCE’S FUNDING COLLAPSE. I was asking her to let go of one way to have room to contemplate another.

After several coaching sessions with mutual rants and good laughs at ridiculous fundraising ideas, she worked her way around to deep breathing and trying to imagine herself as scrappy rather than beleaguered. That shift in position, ultimately led to gathering her wits and taking a big leap! Trusting that she could survive whatever that landing was, even if it was ugly.

Her next message read,

“I am going to launch a crowdfunding campaign using the website experiment.com (a site specifically designed for crowdfunding scientific research where the backers don’t get charged unless you meet your goal). While I am totally new to this fundraising world and have no idea if we can make it to our base goal of $4159, I figure at the very least we’ll learn a lot about fundraising and working with our university’s foundation office!”

And just like that we were back to YES! Continuing was worth it.

Time for Small Measurable Goals.

The support team she has worked with for years brainstormed ways to talk about the project on social media doing old school volcano eruptions. See the results here.