If you work in higher education facing all of these challenges, you might benefit from working with a coach. A coach, particularly one who specializes in higher education, can help you discover and actualize the best possible version of yourself. Participating in a coaching program can be a powerful way to not only navigate the increasingly complex world of higher education but to envision bigger goals, live more intentionally, and enjoy all of the benefits that life has to offer more fully..

We’re almost at the two-year mark of when the pandemic changed higher education overnight. We never quite got “back to normal.” Instead, we're in the middle of co-creating a new reality with lots of challenges but also interesting opportunities, including professional development. Whether you start with hour-long webinars or hire a professional coach, now is the time to evaluate how you might invest in yourself and subsequently your institution.

Breathing is such an important component of yoga but I hadn’t heard it used this way. Aside from keeping us alive, it can center us, provide balance, imbalance, energy, and calm. But what does it mean to “organize my breath” not just in yoga but around different day-to-day activities and situations?

This past fall I thought a lot about how to create a “new normal” learning environment for my students, who are mostly freshmen. For many of them, my class was their first large college classroom experience. My goals were to create a community of learners that would actively engage with the course and with each other, while also (re-)introducing them to group work, and a typical exam situation at the digital test center (pending any potential challenges the pandemic might throw our way). Here are some of the tech tools that have been helpful in my large intro class.

Happy New Year! On this first day of 2022, I thought it might be helpful to reflect on what we’ve learned and how we might move forward as we enter the third year of the pandemic. Although it sometimes feels like we’re at a standstill because we are literally still spending most of our time in a fixed space, I think it’s worth remembering all of the things that we’ve accomplished and, perhaps most importantly, what we’ve learned as part of the process.

After a well-deserved holiday break, we are getting ready for a new semester or have already started a new term. Reflecting on the fall semester where everyone in higher ed went above and beyond to create a covid-friendly learning environment, we’ve learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t. Many of us used the pedagogical tools that were available to us, learned new ones, took risks, and above all, tried to take care of our students as they adjusted to a highly complex, challenging new learning environment. But did we take care of ourselves?

Happy New Year! As we leave 2020 behind and jump head-first into a promising new year, I can’t think of a better time to share some exciting news: I recently became a board-certified coach!