Hi, Professors! This is Karen Gonzalez Rice, art historian, professor and life coach for academics. You are listening to “The Good Enough Professor,” the show that reimagines academic life for overwhelmed professors. Let's create a more supportive, more humane academia, one small, intentional choice at a time. Listen on for how we can do this together.
This month, I've been working on my annual report, and while I feel pretty good about my work, and it's really nice to see my accomplishments all together, it just feels like something is missing in this process, like all the questions are the wrong questions.
So today I'm going to share an alternative and kind of countercultural annual report where we focus not on our professional achievements and putting things in the best light, but rather the realities of what kinds of self-compassion we expressed for ourselves, how we felt in our bodies, and how empowered we were to go after the things that really matter to us and let go of the things that don't.
I'm interested in what it will be like to assess ourselves on different metrics that the annual report by necessity ignores, and I'm calling this the Shadow Annual Report. This process can inform your annual report. It might feel totally separate. You might want to relax into these questions after you submit your annual report. Whatever your timing, I hope this will find you some peace and some meaning around your annual report this year.
The annual report for our institutions: it's a kind of specific document, right? It's designed for promotion and for institutional accountability. In a certain light, it can be a reflective document, but it really is a document that's meant for sharing with the Dean, with the Provost, with tenure and promotion committees, depending on how your institution works. But really the annual report is for evaluative purposes, and because of that, we often moderate our thoughts and our conclusions and our tone as we draft it. Of course we do, thinking about that audience! In contrast, the Shadow Annual Report is not meant to be shared. The audience is simply you, so you can respond in a more raw, unfiltered way to a broader set of questions about your whole life this year.
Now, I am actually a real proponent of truth-telling in the annual report. But of course, I'm tenured, and given my subject identity, my intersectional identity as a white, middle class professor—woman professor!—that's a privilege that I use to speak the truth without fear (currently) of reprisal. And of course, that's not the case for everyone, and it's not the case for me at all times in my career either, right? And yet, even if we're straightforward in our annual report, there's quite a difference between a raw response, something that I'm going to write for myself, versus something that I'm going to share, that I know will come up in evaluations and promotion decisions.
So when I suggest that we take the time for a Shadow Annual Report, what I'm talking about is an honest reckoning with your lived experience of the academic year. The Shadow Annual Report can be an opportunity to reflect on how well we're doing on the measures that really matter to us, some of which may be difficult to think about and probably unpalatable to our institutions. And this can really help us notice patterns and consider implementing some shifts in the summer and into the next academic year to better attend to our needs.
Now I'm being a little bit tongue-in-cheek in terms of “shadow work.” I'm referencing the kind of New Age TikTok social media phenomenon. But shadow work actually has roots in two different disciplines with important consequences to the way that we think about our work in academia and as academics. I'm going to quote sociologist Ashley Barnwell here on these meanings of shadow work. This is from her article “Aunting as Family Shadow Work,” from the Journal of Family History from 2022 and I'll cite this in the show notes.
"The term “shadow work” is used in two contexts, in political economy to describe unremunerated labor, and in psychology as a technique of Jungian psychoanalysis. In both arenas, shadow work is labor that constitutes the whole but is kept out of sight. For Ivan Illich, shadow work was exemplified by women's labor in the home, which motored the wage economy, even if cast as private. For Jung the analysand’s shadow work attends to vital parts of the self that are troubling and difficult to assimilate and therefore kept out of consciousness."
So these two meanings of the concept are not addressed in the annual report! Certainly not the psychoanalytic side, and probably not in terms of unpaid labor. Although my institution for a couple of years has had an invisible labor section, which is nice to see.
What I think really is important is that both kinds of shadow work have a huge impact on our wellbeing as professors, our sense of community and belonging and our ability to not only experience satisfaction, but also to actually continue doing this work.
Our institutional annual reports are often organized into sections for teaching, research and service, right? That familiar triad. I'm going to propose that for your Shadow Annual Report, you also consider three sections, but these will be empathy, embodiment and empowerment.
Okay, so let's start with empathy. This is really about self-compassion. These are some examples for how you might have shown self-compassion, how you might have been gentle with yourself this year:
How did you release perfectionism?
How might you have accepted help and support?
When did you build more margin into your schedule?
How about making time for loved ones or for movement or for hobbies?
And how about just practicing being present?
These are all forms of self-compassion. And of course, there are many more! Another way to think about this: in hard times, when were you kind to yourself? How did that support your wellbeing, as well as your work and your relationships, all the things that matter to you? What are some moments when you really needed more gentleness than you gave yourself? Think back, what was going on in those moments. How can you notice when that comes up for you again in the future? So that you might shift to show a little more self-compassion. Another way into thinking about empathy as part of your Shadow Annual Report is to ask: What emotions did you feel most often this year? When did you laugh the most? What were you grieving this year, and what feelings did you resist or set aside? This one, this last one, can be painful, but it can be so useful to think about what you were resisting. What was I really pushing aside, what was I actively trying not to address? There's gold there in our Shadow Annual Report.
Another section: embodiment. How have you experienced yourself in your body this year? This is such an important question, and it's one that I think we often think is completely separate from our academic lives, certainly from our annual report. But our bodies are the bedrock of how we engage with the world, right? So some ways of thinking about this: When did you pay attention to your body's cues? Resting when tired, eating when hungry, moving as needed. Or, when did you find yourself ignoring your body? I have a quick example for you here. I was back on my campus. I've been away on a research fellowship for a year, and I went back to my campus and was there for a couple of days. What I noticed is that I never found time to go to the bathroom. I never found time to eat. When I was on campus, I was falling into some very ingrained pre-tenure habits from a long time ago that were coming back up. This sense of urgency. Noticing that, that I was not paying attention to the cues for my body, my body's cues, was a really helpful moment of reset for me, especially as I think about returning to campus in the fall. How can I really build into my daily experience more attention to my body, right?
Another way of thinking about embodiment: what got in the way of connecting with your body this year? I just named one for me: urgency is a surefire way to kind of flip that switch against my body. And I always talk about my neck pain! That's one of the things I experienced most this year. And I know I've talked a lot about it on my podcast, because, at this point in my Shadow Annual Report, I'm wondering, What does my neck pain have to tell me about my lifestyle, right? And one thing that I'm celebrating in my Shadow Annual Report is that I took so many steps to address my neck pain and it is getting better. I mean, I have a long way to go, but that is an awesome start that I'm celebrating.
Empowerment is another section of our Shadow Annual Report, and this is really about: What actions did you take to more fully embrace your authentic self? That's how I'm thinking about empowerment. How are we hewing closer and closer to, first of all, understanding our true selves, and then expressing that self in all kinds of ways. What did you intentionally let go of this year? What did you want to let go of what really couldn't or didn't? A little kaleidoscope shift on this is: What are some different ways that you practiced saying no this year? And then, the opposite: What were some “hell yes” moments for you? When did you say yes to something and feel really, really good about it, knowing that it was the right decision? And how do you want to be more of yourself and take up more space in the future? And maybe that's a big step, maybe it's a tiny step.
As you are reflecting on these questions, notice what is happening. Are there themes that are coming up for you? Are there images of people, particular people, that are recurring for you, or certain thoughts or ideas that are kind of circling back? What's hard to think about as you look back on the year? As Barnwell said, shadow work is “labor that constitutes the whole but is kept out of sight.” How might what is hard for us to consider, what we're keeping out of sight, actually be constituting our academic lives and beyond—our whole lives. What would it be like to put empathy and embodiment and empowerment at the forefront of our experience of the academic year, just as we do teaching, research, and service? One final thing to think about as you're wrapping up your Shadow Annual Report, what do you want to bring forward into the fall from this process of the Shadow Annual Report?
The Shadow Annual Report is just for you. You can burn it later if you need to. It's really just for you and for your own understanding, for your own clarity about the year, really, as this kind of alternative to the institutional-focused annual report. But if you want to chat about what you noticed, reach out to a friend or send me an email or a DM. I would love to know what came up for you in this process.
I'm also aware that many of us don't have a lot of capacity right now. Please know that you can absolutely half-ass the Shadow Annual Report and still get so much out of it!
Next week, in my newsletter, I'll be sending out a workbook to help guide you through the Shadow Annual Report process. So get on my email list if you're not already, and I will be thinking of you as we transition into academic summer.
Thanks so much for listening to “The Good Enough Professor Podcast.” If you want to release academic grind culture and embrace your own Good Enough Professor within, join my email list. You'll get my reflections, gentle challenges, and simple prompts, all aligned with the rhythms of academic life and designed to disrupt the assumptions that get us over committed and keep us overwhelmed. Because remember, you are already good enough.
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