Make the Most of Mentoring: Best Practices and Core Principles for Mentors and Mentees

Mentoring relationships are key to helping you navigate and develop throughout your career. But maintaining those relationships, both as a mentor and as a mentee, can be a lot of work and can also present special challenges. Mentoring relationships suffer when mentors and mentees do not have a clear sense of expectations or goals (for instance, of when the relationship has run its course). This course will help you understand the purpose of a mentoring relationship, as well as how mentoring differs from other key relationships like those with advisors and sponsors. Additionally, you will learn how to impactfully set up and manage a mentoring relationship, from both the mentor and mentee perspectives, and how to handle roadblocks that arise through those relationships. The course is accompanied by a mentoring journal to help you plan your mentoring philosophy, goals and expectations and set boundaries with your mentor or mentee partner. This course is appropriate for mentors and mentees at all levels.

Essential Skills for Supervisors

All too often in higher education, individuals move into a supervisory role without the necessary tools and skills to be successful. Particularly in today’s challenging environment, effective and proactive supervision is key to building a high-performing culture where each individual contributes to team success. This video course—specifically designed for higher ed supervisors who are new to their roles or looking to deepen their skills—is designed to provide a foundational understanding of the most critical aspects of supervision, including: Creating a vision framework for your team Performance management strategies How to navigate conflict in a productive way Effective coaching techniques to help you develop your direct reports After watching the course, you will leave with greater confidence about what effective supervision entails, along with a host of practical tools you can apply right away to better support individual, team, and organizational goals.

Developing an Intentional Self-Care Practice

Despite engaging in regular self-care rituals like bubble baths, yoga retreats, and having drinks with friends, many of us feel constantly tired, stressed, and on the brink of burnout. It begs the question: are the self-care rituals we’re currently observing helping us or hurting us? Are we engaging in surface-level “socially acceptable” self-care practices, or are we truly thinking about what self-care means to us and how to integrate it intentionally into our everyday lives? Designed for higher ed professionals at all levels, this video course is designed to help you to reflect on and upgrade your current self-care practices. Through an examination of six pillars of self-care—nutrition, exercise, sleep, mindfulness, healthy relationships, and mental health—you will assess your current practice and identify ways to improve and integrate it more seamlessly into your everyday life.

Enhancing Your Personal and Professional Resilience

There remains a common misconception in our society that resilience is the ability to keep going at all costs. We lead busy lives and push ourselves to the brink of exhaustion in service of “resilience.” But in actuality, true resilience is created when we are able to pause, recharge, and generate the optimism and belief in our abilities that we need to sustain long-term and lead happier, more fulfilling lives. This video course will teach you how to use self-advocacy and intentional reflection to enhance resiliency across key aspects of your personal and professional life. Higher-ed professionals at all levels who would like to improve the quality of their relationships with themselves, others, and the various projects and day-to-day tasks in their lives will benefit from this course.

Women in STEM: Creating a Space Where You Can Thrive

Managing the more immediate demands of teaching and service while also staying on track with research and writing is a challenge for most faculty. But for many women STEM faculty, these challenges are often compounded by academic cultures of individualism and competition that result in sexism, academic bullying, and isolation in academic units that are insensitive to their unique needs and ways of working. In this course designed for early-career, women-identifying faculty in STEM fields at research universities, you will learn ways to better organize your academic life in order to foster focus and stay on track with your professional goals. This video course highlights a vision-driven approach for negotiating the challenges and pitfalls that often derail women STEM faculty during their early career. In this course, you will learn: How to craft and use a professional vision statement to set priorities and align your decision-making with your career goals; Strategies for identifying limiting beliefs, setting boundaries, and saying no; and How to build a support system in order to keep your professional goals front and center in your daily academic life. If you feel like you spend most of your time dealing with others’ “urgent” tasks to the detriment […]

Imposter Syndrome in Higher Ed: Examining the Self, the System, and Opportunities for Change

Too often, imposter syndrome is regarded as a deficiency of the person experiencing it. Rarely do we examine the system that created it and that allows it to thrive. For faculty, being in academia can seem like a never-ending quest for “more,” to prove you are “enough,” or that you are “worthy” of the accolades you achieve. For faculty who represent diverse and historically marginalized groups, the burden of imposter syndrome is especially heavy and inconducive to well-being and career success. This video course examines the experience of imposter syndrome in higher education from three angles: the self, the system, and opportunities for change. Our experts will help you to reflect on how you may experience imposter syndrome, understand its root causes, and enable you to change that narrative by understanding those elements of your career and well-being that you have control over. This video course has been designed specifically for faculty of all disciplines, both tenure-track and term faculty, although anyone who wants to better understand imposter syndrome and how it presents in higher education will also find value in this video course.

Building Your Research Brand: A Guide for Academics

An effective research brand provides a consistent interpretation of what you do and who you are as a scholar in the minds of others and yourself. It differentiates you from others by articulating the unique value that you bring. These are essential ingredients for those high stakes written communications required of academics, like job applications, research statements for promotion, and narratives for competitive grant proposals. More broadly, throughout your career, a clear research brand helps you strategically build your network and advance in your career. Branding also clarifies and reinforces your mission and purpose in the work that you do so you can make decisions with greater ease and confidence. Fundamentally, branding is about how you see yourself, because how you see yourself influences how others see you. This academic branding video course is designed for researchers who want to: You will walk away from this video with:

Practicing Mindfulness: A 9-Day Program for Higher-Ed Professionals

We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to show up, keep going, and perform. It’s easy to lose sight of the simple moments of joy and substance in our everyday lives. Through this video course, you will develop a daily mindfulness practice that enables you to pause, connect more deeply with what’s going on around you, and stay grounded in the present moment. Comprised of simple techniques that make use of all your senses—thought, sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, and feeling—you will come away with a variety of mindfulness methods that you can easily integrate into your busy everyday life. Higher ed professionals at all levels who are seeking more intention, purpose, and connection will benefit from this course. This course is valued at $595, but is free for members.