What Scholar’s Voice™ Means to Me with Gina Robinson

She shares a bit of her personal experience, both as a professor going through the same gauntlet as many of our listeners, and as a coach working to shift mindsets, and talks about how much her personal story has influenced her coaching work. She describes the Scholars Voice™ community as a place where clients can be real, honest, and vulnerable, and where real growth and change happens on a daily basis.

How ‘Scholar’ Resonates with Gina

A few years ago, we saw that if we didn’t change and if we continued to view success and progress using the traditional American terms, that we would continue to perpetuate this academic mindset that we are actually trying to change.

There will always be programs that tell you what you need and promise to get you there. We intentionally decided that we didn’t want to be that. We want to be a company where we find out where you really want to go. We help you think about where you want to be, and then we help you get there.

The inclusivity that ‘scholar’ represents is also incredibly meaningful to me as a woman of minority.

The word ‘Scholar’ really unites us as a community separate from titles and awards and all the baggage that they carry, and we get to build a real community that is both safe and supportive. This lets our clients become very authentic and vulnerable with each other which is the catalyst for so much change.

How ‘Voice’ Resonates with Gina

Our company was founded on the idea that we need more diversity of voices, we need more marginalized voices, and we need more female and non binary voices. Those are the ones that are going to transform academia into something that actually represents the people in it.

The voice part of Scholar’s Voice™ is really about learning to embrace those identities. And knowing that for a lot of us, our very existence within academia is inspiring to a lot of other people. In the company, and as a coach, I work to bring out those voices on our clients.

Scholar’s Voice™ to me really feels like a long term collective action. We’re embracing our whole selves, acknowledging that we are humans with wants and needs, even outside of work, and then expressing those wants and needs in an effort to make our work lives better. I know that the world would be better with your voice and your wisdom out there.

Next Steps

Exciting changes, like our name change, take time, they take patience, and most importantly, they take self trust. 

Now, we want to take a minute and ask yourself, “what do I have brewing within myself?” You might be surprised at what you find.

“Change takes time… and that process is rarely visible to those around us. And honestly, we might not see it ourselves.”

“We are not trained in any way to look at our past efforts and milestones, and celebrate them as successes. So within this mindset, this ‘never enough’ mindset, no matter how much amazing work we do, and no matter how amazing the work is, we will always feel like imposters and fakes.”

Download Our University Retreats Brochure: 

We’ve created our faculty development retreats so you and the rest of your colleagues can work together to come up with ways to make the faculty experience better for everyone at your institution. These can be either in person or virtual and would be a great option if you aren’t able to participate in one of our traditional programs. 

Check out our Scholar’s Voice™ Faculty Development Retreats here!

Continue the conversation:

1. Our 12-week Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap® program helps tenure-track womxn and nonbinary professors with a disruptive perspective on their field to publish their backlog of papers so that their voice can have the impact they know is possible. Get on the waitlist here!
2. Cathy’s book, Making Time to Write: How to Resist the Patriarchy and Take Control of Your Academic Career Through Writing is available in print! Learn how to build your career around your writing practice while shattering the myths of writing every day, accountability, and motivation, doing mindset work that’s going to reshape your writing, and changing academic culture one womxn and nonbinary professor at a time. Get your print copy today or order it for a friend here!
3. Want to train with us for free on your campus? Now you can when you recommend our Scholar’s Voice Faculty Retreats to a decision-maker on your campus! Download the brochure with the retreat curriculum and both in-person and online retreat options here.

Rough transcript here.