Self-Compassionate Professor Podcast

Dr. Jennifer Costanza shares her journey from perfectionism, imposter syndrome, intense stress, and difficulty healing to feeling an overall sense of mental and physical well-being. She explains the importance of knowing your body’s stress response and emphasizes how making time to focus on your physical and mental health—finding ways to feel grounded, getting quality sleep, finding joy, etc.—makes you better at your job. Find Jennifer Costanza at https://www.rooted.life/ or @rooted.life on Instagram.

Dr. LuElla D’Amico describes how her own suffering during the tenure process opened up a whole new joyful adventure where she now shows up more fully for her family, her faith, her teaching, her university, her scholarship, her communities, and her own well-being. She offers inspiration, encouragement, and advice for academics who also aspire to be more whole. 

Dr. Victoria Wright shares her own story about leaving academia as a full professor. She now finds herself running the Ph.D. Life Coach Podcast and membership experience, helping PhD students and academics overcome overwhelm and procrastination. This work, as she explains, represents the culmination of having weaved together her research, skills she developed working with Ph.D. students, and the personal calling she answered during the pandemic. Find her podcast, The PhD Life Coach, anywhere you get podcasts as well as on her website at https://www.thephdlifecoach.com/.

This episode is not an interview, but a chat about the experiences of the Highly Sensitive Person, a designation perhaps overrepresented in academia. Drs. Geneviève Taylor and Danielle De La Mare discuss what it looks and feels like to process everything deeply, get overstimulated easily, feel emotions intensely, and notice the subtler parts of life. We also explore both the gifts and drawbacks of having a sensitive nervous system and ways we practice self-acceptance and self-compassion.

Our pausing practice is perhaps the most important part of creating more career wellness in our work, yet we don't have a social structure that supports pausing. In this episode, I discuss ways you might begin to think about pausing, how to structure an ongoing pausing practice, and the benefits of pausing for career wellness. During this seasonal transition, I hope you pause, detox, and declutter. Happy Equinox!