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Stress, chronic stress, or burnout?
In my first post I introduced burnout as a collection of symptoms related to sustained nervous system arousal, and highlighted reasons why burnout may be particularly common in academia. In this post, I am going to introduce the stress-burnout spectrum, with some indicators for positioning yourself on that scale, and suggest appropriate interventions for each…
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Am I tired, or is it burnout?
By far the most common topic I have been asked about has been burnout: what is it? how do we mitigate against it? how can we recover? So over the next few posts I am going to do a series on burnout, including a deeper dive into what is happening in our bodies when we…
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No one cares, work harder. Or, why I started a specialist coaching practice for academics
We all know what the problems are. Overwork, presenteeism, constant emails and reactivity, lack of resourcing for complex pastoral needs, inadequate mentoring, non-transparent hiring, ever-changing research priorities, lack of opportunities, discrimination and internal bias, precarity, failure to confront the legacies of Covid… Higher education is a mess. Despite being one of the most potentially rewarding…
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Coaching, counselling, or mentoring? Choosing the option that is right for you.
Part Two – coach, therapist, or mentor? In part one of this blog I explained what coaching is, and is not, and offered some tips for choosing a coach to work with. In this post I am going to compare coaching to the other two prominent helping models that are often offered when workplace anxiety…
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Coaching, counselling, or mentoring? Choosing the option that is right for you.
When you are experiencing challenges in your working life, especially if those challenges involve or are impacting on your mental health, it can be tricky to know where to access support. In academia, mentoring programmes or referral to occupational health or counselling are fairly common; coaching remains less so, though perhaps with the caveat that…