The silver medal
Recently I have been sharing good news, and focusing on positive things, like my client getting into her dream program. But what happens when you just miss your victory? What about those students who are on the waitlist now, or those who were finalists for positions at what they thought might be their next professional home, only to have their hopes dashed?
I was talking to a friend about the heartbreak of coming up a little bit short professionally, and she said, “Pamela, it’s like the Olympics, they just got the silver medal instead of the gold.” It’s a great analogy. Like the Olympics, the academic job market works on a cycle. You can decide if you want to stay in shape, and go for it again in the next cycle. You have to think about how long you want to keep trying, and if it might make sense to pivot. Unlike the Olympics, no one knows you got the silver medal. You don’t get credit for being a finalist. As in other sports, there are no points for second place.
I was thinking about these topics in conjunction with a great podcast I listened to recently, Mel Robbins’s interview with Maya Shankar. Dr. Shankar was on her way to being an elite violinist when she suffered a career-ending hand injury. She became a cognitive scientist, and recently published a book, The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans, which I now want to read. What do you do when your plan for your life falls apart? How do you cope with the need to build your identity around something else, if you always expected an academic career, for example? She talks about “identify foreclosure,” where we too quickly decide on who we are without exploring or even realizing there might be other possibilities. There is some security in thinking we have a defined path, but she encourages us to tap into our “possible selves,” creating a mental album of different futures we can imagine for ourselves.
Her message may be helpful for academics, who traditionally expect to follow a pretty defined path, and for whom it may be hard to separate work from identity. No matter what dream you are pursuing right now, it is a good idea to develop a full picture of who you are apart from your work, who you can be, and how you think about your own identity. As she says, “The hardest moments in your life can help you reimagine who you are.”
Do you need to do some reimagining? Are you recovering from an academic silver medal, where you just missed the mark? You are not alone. I am here as a thought partner to help you figure out what’s next.
