What’s the university going to do?

Many parts of higher education are living in a constant space of uncertainty and fear these days, with staff, colleagues, and students turning to others to ask,

What's going to happen?

What are you going to do?

What's the university going to do?

And many leaders, faculty, and administrators don't have great answers to these questions right now.

In the last couple of months, I’ve worked with two different universities in different parts of the country, one on the West Coast and one in the Midwest, but all saying versions of the same thing.

Higher education, along with the country, is rapidly changing in directions we didn’t anticipate, and it is negatively impacting our sense of belonging and wellbeing. We need to figure out how we will cope so that we can then equip others through this.

Yes! Higher ed folks are feeling the impacts deeply; in part, they are mission-driven professionals and faculty who advocate and work for a better, more equitable world.

To help with the coping and equipping at one of the universities, I designed a morning workshop for an interdisciplinary group of faculty on resilience, rest, and reorientations in higher education, where we explored these transitions as both individual and collective processes. For the other, it’s a multi-session consultation on building skill sets for leaders and professionals' resilience through change, loss, and forward movement to support the university's commitment to the Okanagan Charter by strengthening the human capacities that sustain wellbeing, belonging, resilience, and care for people, place, and planet.

Same work, different designs. Because the reason resilience work matters is that we are not all depleted in the same way, nor do we process change in the same manner. There may be similar emotional or cognitive responses to change like reorgs, program closures, job task additions, DEI erasures, but the experience and processing of it varies widely based on identities, context, and previous experiences.

What I’ve learned from working with groups through the messy middle of change is that while folks may be inside the same organization or program, moving through the same changes, policies, meetings, deadlines, or leadership transitions, they are often carrying very different pressures. One person may be trying to hold a boundary they have never been supported in holding. Another may be navigating grief about how their role or field has changed. Another may be over-functioning because the system has rewarded them for doing so. Another may be quietly disengaging because staying fully present has started to feel too costly.

That is why organizational resilience work needs both shared language and room for individual integration.

A workshop can help a team name what resilience actually requires. I offer folks language that can be shared and can help normalize the wild times we are in. It can create a common frame for understanding burnout, overwork, boundaries, communication, transition, or the patterns that keep people operating in survival mode. It can help staff and leaders see that resilience is not about pushing through harder, but about understanding what conditions make steadiness, honesty, and sustainable participation more possible.

And then people still have to return to their day-to-day work. They return to the same inboxes, relationships, expectations, decisions, and institutional patterns. They return to the places where the old habits are easiest to repeat. That is where coaching supports.

One form of support I offer organizations is a workshop paired with individual coaching sessions afterward, like I designed with the group of faculty after that year-end workshop. The workshop gave the group shared grounding. The coaching gave staff space to apply the learning to their specific situations, roles, and choices. It helped them ask: What does this mean for me? What boundary is actually mine to hold? Where am I over-functioning? What am I grieving? What support do I need in order to stay connected to the work without abandoning myself?

This kind of support can be especially helpful when organizations know their people are carrying a lot but do not want to respond with another one-time conversation that leaves everyone to figure out the integration on their own.

Resilience becomes more honest when it gets specific. And it becomes more sustainable when people have support practicing it inside the actual conditions of their work.

If your organization is considering a workshop with follow-up coaching support for staff later this year, I’d be glad to talk through what that could look like.

You can schedule a free consultation here.

I’d love to design something together.