What makes you famous? If you are working on getting a job or communicating your value for fellowships or other audiences, chances are you are getting tips on your “brand,” or trying to write the perfect tagline for LinkedIn. Boiling your dissertation or many years of experience down to a few words might feel too hard, or overly simplistic, or even trivial, but this skill of distilling your contribution is useful for both you and your audience.

If you had to describe your approach or contribution in five words, what would they be? Here I tell you my words and how I found them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be successful lately. But what does it mean to fail? Especially during this season of so many layoffs and people trying and failing to get jobs, we’re supposed to think about how to learn from these events and stay positive to move forward. Fail your way to success! It was either that or a broken plate for today’s image, but I am trying to be optimistic.

This weekend I reviewed all the Polished Owl materials and wanted to make sure my audience knows about all the great resources available!

Did you know that I have a great guide on Mentoring, written by one of my best friends and smartest colleagues Adam Beaver? Whether you are a student navigating your relationship with your advisor, a faculty member or scholar mentoring students, or even a parent worrying about this aspect of your responsibility to your kids, this guide can help you think about how to make any mentoring relationship rewarding and productive. As I was reading this again, it hit me (again) how many parallels there are with good practices, whether you are teaching, advising, or leading in any way. 

I was raised with a fixed mindset. I think everyone of my generation was. You were either “good” or “bad” at school. I guess it was good in that system that I was good, but it meant that anytime things were even a little challenging for me, I thought something was wrong. In contrast, a growth mindset, or the belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed through effort and persistence, has been part of my kids’ education from the beginning. I remember going to the first school open house and seeing it on display everywhere. They had a poster on the wall that said “I can’t do it YET.”

How do you think about mindset? How do you decide where to focus your energies to become your best self? Read more.

I am good at getting things done. When I asked great colleagues about my strengths for an upcoming workshop I’m attending, it came back pretty clearly as a theme. As one said so nicely, “You are able to take the vision you have, map out a plan, and work towards it. I feel like a lot of people talk about what needs to be done and you get it done.”

Yes, I can do things! Here I explore three important complications to this value of getting things done: in some cases, things actually aren’t worth finishing, getting it done is not more important than the process, and sometimes you can’t do things because you don’t have the opportunity. 

I pride myself on my ability to help students get in touch with their own inner voice. I have coached hundreds of scholars on teaching, presenting their research, interviewing, impromptu speaking, you name it. Given my experience, you might expect that engaged communication comes naturally to me. Alas, in this year of change I have realized that helping others do hard things is way easier than doing them myself! I have had a few interviews recently, and I am here to tell you, it is humbling. Read more about engaged communication and what I am learning.

How can what you learned from your academic work and other jobs you’ve had transfer to jobs you would like to have now? Learn more about how to take stock of your transferable skills, and how developing your teaching skills prepares you to be a leader.

My kids love baseball. I love watching them play, and watching MLB games with them. It makes me think about so many things, like how we learn, how we perform and show up mentally, how we manage setbacks, and what it means to be successful. Crazy things happened in both baseball games I watched on Saturday. What we can learn from baseball about high-stakes moments and how to handle mistakes?

As a follow up to my last post about feedback, I wanted to share my favorite technique for getting feedback from students, the minute paper. I learned this from a language program director more than 15 years ago, and I can say that this activity is timeless. In fact, it might be even more useful now in the age of Generative AI, when there is such concern about students doing their own work, reflecting, and learning for themselves. 

Today I went to Brandeis to do my second invited workshop on the feedback-driven classroom. I teach a framework about ways to learn and grow as a teacher, and different sources of feedback you can draw on. For feedback on teaching you likely think about students first. Are the students learning? How is their experience in the course? But you also can consider your own self-reflections on your teaching, how you might learn and get feedback from your colleagues, and how you can learn from the research on teaching in your discipline. But what if you don’t want to hear it from anyone? This can be a very real problem, especially these days when it seems challenging to have clear, honest, and respectful communication.

I was wearing this t-shirt on a walk with my son the other day, and he said, “Mom, that shirt is so appropriate for you!” And of course it is. I think he was thinking it because we were going for a walk despite the rain, but really so much of life feels like this right now. I had a milestone birthday this week, which has been looming in this challenging year, and it occurred to me that when you get older, the things you love doing aren’t always easy to do. Whether you are navigating graduate school, hoping to advance professionally, pursuing a challenging hobby, or just trying to keep your household running, so much of life is just about sticking with it.

This week I was thrilled to have the opportunity to lead a workshop for graduate students at Brandeis University. It was great to be there and to be with a group of students for the first time this year. I was reminded that while every campus is different, there are so many commonalities with the graduate student experience. The students I met and the questions they had really resonated with me and reminded me of the value of my work and how important it is to give students the opportunity to explore and discuss topics related to their professional development.

I have been exploring big questions this year, about what I like to do, what I really care about, and what unique value I bring to my work. I will unpack some of my core contributions here over the next few weeks. Today I focus on collaboration.