A leadership role I believe in

I get asked this question often (especially in the last couple months):

“What made you leave academia?”

Often folks assume that I left academia because I was disillusioned.

And in some ways, yes, I was at certain points. But not at first and not when I left.

I stayed, at first, to lead. 

When I became department chair of two graduate programs, I took that role because I still believed in the students and in the transformational power of education. I knew that leadership could be different - more human, more embodied, more creative, and more healing.

And so I experimented. I lead with connection and community in mind.

But the more I tried to create space for care, the more I saw how the institution consumed it. How it fairly plainly expects you to live a chronic burnout life. How it normalized the self-sacrifice of faculty, staff, and students alike. The price of belonging to the tower that I paid for in just one more budget reduction scenario spreadsheet. 

I realized I was being asked to lead inside a structure that couldn’t hold the kind of change it claimed to want and change I was there for.

The worst part: I was being asked to train others to carry that same burden forward.

And I couldn’t do that anymore.

As a scholar of higher education organizations, I understood the writing on the wall. Budgets were shrinking. Expectations were growing exponentially as if fueled by the fears of the pandemic. And the very essence of what once made academia worth enduring–the space for inquiry, reflection, dialogue–was becoming increasingly unsustainable.

These things became really clear to me by the end of that first pandemic year:

The system would continue to demand more and take rather than give back.
The system was not capable of the care from which I wanted to lead.
The advice I was getting from those within the system reinforced overing rather than changed from within.
The system I had once nearly killed myself to belong to was not worthy of the version of me I was becoming.

That’s when I knew I had to leave in order to live. So when I walked away in 2021, it was an act of self-leadership and clarity not disillusionment. 

As you can see then, that life and work is unsustainable, for me and for anyone trying to live a whole, well, and joyful life inside it.

I didn’t want to become complicit in training the next generation to survive what had nearly broken me.

So I left. And by the time I did, I stepped into a life I had been rebuilding:

A way of slow working that doesn’t glorify burnout.
A business that regenerates and builds community.
A version of leadership rooted in joy, wholeness, and truth.

I want to offer you some reflection prompts that I wish I had had back then so that you can make choices in self-leadership, too:

• Where have you stayed because you still believed, and what happens when that belief starts to fade?

• Have you been trained (or trained others) to normalize sacrifice? What has been the cost?

• What would it mean to lead, live, or work in a way that gives more than it takes?

Sometimes, leaving is the most radical act of leadership we can choose. If you’re standing at that edge, tired, uncertain, but no longer willing to betray yourself, I’ve written this next month’s Awakening Resilience newsletters for this exact moment.