You can’t change the past. But you can reset.

Hi everyone,

Recently, one of my clients realized something that I think many academics can relate to:

You cannot change the past.

It sounds simple, but more academics struggle with this than they admit.

I work with PhD students who grieve the fact that they are now in year six and did not finish in year four. I work with scholars whose habilitation has taken much longer than expected. I work with professors who are swamped with teaching and admin and feel terrible because they have not been able to publish in the past three years.

There is a lot of grief about lost time in academia.

And the problem is that this way of thinking keeps you stuck.

Many academics fall into a version of the sunk cost fallacy. Because they have already invested so much time into a plan or an idea of how academic life was supposed to go, they feel they now have to keep holding on to it. They stay attached to expectations about what their writing should look like or what their output should have been by now.

But if those expectations no longer match your reality, why keep hanging on to them?

At some point you have to look at the evidence and admit that something is not working the way you imagined.

And then you do one simple thing.

You reset.

That idea was also the theme of my latest group coaching session. We talked about projects that had not gone according to plan and the frustration that comes with that. And we talked about the most productive move in those moments: to stop living in the old version of the plan.

You cannot change what happened before.
But you can change what you do next.

Spring is a good moment for that reset. A moment to rethink how you work as an academic and how you create space again for the deep intellectual work that made you fall in love with academia in the first place.

A free way to practice this reset with me

Next week, I’m hosting a free five day Spring Writing Challenge inside the EMERGE Café, a free space with more than 120 scholars from the social sciences and humanities at all career stages.

Over five days, I will show you how to reset your current academic routines and move a writing project that has been stalled forward.

We’ll do this through:

• Workshops and short inputs

• Live coaching

• A lot of co writing sessions, so you actually get words on the page

If you have been stuck with your writing for a while, this is your invitation to reset. I’ll help you do it.

👉 You can check out the full program and sign up here.

Warmly,
Melanie