Hi Professors,
I hope that you are all holding up okay as your semester comes to a close. I imagine that some of you may be sprinting towards the finish line with your grading, last committee meetings, writing recommendation letters, and administrative work. And this is all happening in the midst of many big, bleak, and traumatic things that are going on in the world right now.
So I just want to say: It’s a really difficult time to navigate the higher ed landscape as a professor right now. I can completely understand why you are looking forward to finishing off your semester and beginning your holiday break as soon as possible so that you can work on self-preservation.
Today I’m going to be doing something a little bit different for the podcast. I’m going to be sharing some information with you about my journey into coaching and Rise with Clarity, which is the name of my business, which is a coaching and consulting business for women of color faculty in higher education.
Now although I’ve talked a bit here and there on the podcast about the business, I haven’t devoted a lot of time to how I came into this work and what my current offerings are. And this is partly because I’m still acclimating to this dimension of being a small business owner—the whole marketing aspect.
I have to admit, I’m much more comfortable inhabiting the coaching space and working with my clients. But there does come a time when you have to let people know what you have to offer!
So, consider this episode a very short introduction to Rise with Clarity! And yes, I am borrowing that phrase from the Very Short Introduction series – those pocket-sized books from Oxford that many of you are familiar with.
My Journey into Higher Ed Coaching
I started my journey into higher ed coaching in 2021. At that time, I was a tenured faculty member, and I was teaching full time. Now you can remember, about 4 years ago, we were in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. So my institution, like many others, was offering remote instruction during the first half of the year.
Since I didn’t have to spend extra time commuting in a city that involves a lot of commuting, the pandemic gave me a chance to explore some of my curiosities post-tenure. I had been considering the possibility of a career pivot because I had the sense that my work situation was not going to improve and was going to be untenable in the long run.
So at the beginning of 2021, I decided to explore two possible pathways or two possible pivots: arts administration and coaching. For the first path, I enrolled in the Executive Program in Arts and Culture Strategy offered by the National Arts Strategies and the University of Pennsylvania. This was an 8-month online course designed to cultivate leaders in the nonprofit arts and culture sector.
The second path of exploration was coaching, and it involved dipping my toes in a sort of nascent coaching practice.
This was a very busy time for me, juggling my full-time teaching load and service with these two areas of exploration—but I felt like I was learning so many new things, so many different things, and also learning about myself at that time.
By the fall, I realized that arts administration—the first pathway—wasn’t really that compelling to me anymore, even though I had that as part of my past work employment history. And on the flip side, I found that the coaching was really interesting, meaningful, and gratifying. I also learned that there was a definite need for this kind of service—especially for women of color faculty—which gave me the sense that there was a financial viability for this pathway.
If you’ve been listening to the Rise with Clarity podcast for a while, you may remember an episode, an earlier one that I did on how a health scare made me rethink my professorship. That was episode 9. Well, that happened at the very end of 2021. So, in many ways, it was a kick in the pants—more like kick in the stomach—that I needed in order to take action on something that I had been kind of stuck on.
If coaching indeed was going to be my exit strategy, then I decided that I needed to learn more about its best practices, its form, and its ethics.
So, I began coach training in 2022, working with Dr. Katie Linder in her Higher Ed Coach Training program. And also I was doing this while working full time as a faculty member. Fortunately, the coach training sessions were on the weekends, so I was able to build this into my schedule.
I have to say I’m so grateful that that opportunity opened up for me and that I was able to be a part of that cohort—as I actively practice the skills and tools that I learned during those courses. And I’m also still in touch with many amazing individuals who were in my cohort.
I was really focused on getting the credential of Associate Certified Coach through the International Coaching Federation, which took me about 18 months in total from start to end. This required 70 hours of coach training, 100 hours of coaching engagement, the successful completion of a performance evaluation and also the successful completion of a written exam.
I am now working towards the next level of credentialing, which is Professional Certified Coach. This year I completed the coach training courses required for that, and I will be working towards completing my 500 hours of coaching engagements next year. So this is something that is definitely an investment and takes its own amount of time. But I have found it incredibly rewarding.
Last September, I ended up launching Rise with Clarity a few weeks after I resigned from my tenured faculty position. I talk about the reasons why I decided to leave my faculty position in episode 1 of this podcast—if you’d like to hear more about that.
But for now, I would love to share with you some of the offerings of Rise with Clarity, and share some of the different ways that you can work with me—especially if you are needing some extra support as a professor.
The Signature Rise with Clarity Program
In my Signature Rise with Clarity Program, I work very closely with women of color faculty to help them advance their careers with clarity and with confidence.
In 12 60-minute sessions over the course of 6-months, we work through a series of milestones during our time together—like strategizing ways to reclaim time and set priorities, navigating politics and aggressions, speaking up and gaining recognition, and designing a sustainable path forward—whether that involves ramping up in higher education, or pivoting to a different position, or out of academia.
Yet, since each client’s situation is unique, I take a flexible approach to the objectives and the goals of the coaching, which is entirely client-led. Some clients want to work specifically on preparing a strong tenure portfolio, like a slam-dunk portfolio. Others want to figure out ways to reclaim the time and the bandwidth to work on their book manuscripts, which they will need to complete in order to achieve tenure.
And then there are some other clients who want to brainstorm ways to navigate challenging workplace situations so that they can eventually free up space to work on their own research and writing.
In addition to these 1-1 coaching sessions, which are all held on Zoom, you receive:
•2 Clarity Assessments
• Feedback on mid-career or tenure portfolio materials
• Access to my library of job-related documents
• Confidential e-mail support in between sessions, and
• A private workspace on Notion, with archived post-session notes.
So you may be curious now. What is the financial investment in this? It is currently at $4597. And most, if not all of my clients utilize their professional development funds from their universities to help defray the costs or cover the entire costs of the Signature Program.
Past clients have successfully gone through the tenure process at their universities, won major fellowships to pursue their research and writing, and also developed strategies for navigating their roles at their university, post-tenure.
If you’re at all interested in learning about the Rise with Clarity Signature program, do feel free to reach out to me at Katherine at RisewithClarity.com.
Some other services that I offer include:
90-minute strategy sessions.
This can be for a bite-sized topic that you would like to receive either coaching or consultation on.
Examples can include:
• Identifying areas where you are falling behind on the tenure track and how to gain control
• Crafting your tenure self-statement; and
• Pondering a possible pivot—a career pivot.
A few days before our session, I provide you with a questionnaire that you’ll fill out that prepares us to jump right into the session. And you can go ahead and book that directly on my website, under RisewithClarity.com/strategy. The cost for this is $397.
And this is not on the website, but I also do offer
• Professional development workshops for graduate students and faculty, as well as
• Keynotes on a variety of topics.
I know I’ve provided a lot of information here, so I think I will leave it at this. If you have any questions whatsoever or if you’re interested in possibly working with me next year, just drop me a line anytime. I would love to hear from you!