A cure for the Semester Scaries
Tell me if any of these feel like I can overhear your thoughts and feel your feels:
Dread that feels like a sucking out of your life force.
Wondering where the back to school excitement went.
An imminent sense of doom but you can’t place why because you’re okay.
Anxiety that feels like tension in your chest and shoulders or knotted up stomach.
A general pessimistic cloud that hasn’t been your usual.
Burnout. Rusted out. Blah.
Wondering if THIS is your mid-career crisis playing out.
If a version of these resonates, you’re in good company. Talking to clients and colleagues in the last few weeks I’m noticing a lot of what I’m naming as the Semester Scaries or, if you’re outside of higher ed, then this shows up in that palatable shift from summer to fall. Even though the weather doesn’t reflect autumn, and the fall equinox isn’t until September 22, we feel it. If you have kids or are in the education field you know this time is full of back to school tasks. And stores are already showing fall flavored food, and there were halloween costumes at Costco last weekend. Not ready for that, thanks. My tomatoes are just coming in, for the love of summer!
I was looking back on my own life timeline of summer to fall transitions. I started grad school in the fall of 2001. The three years before that, I was teaching. So that’s over 25 years of fall kick offs after graduating college. Damn.
Now having been out of academia and administration for three years now, I’m still working in this back to school energy. So many of my client community conversations involve helping people redesign their relationships to their career and their J-O-B because they feel some version of the Semester Scaries (which stay tuned to next week’s email for some specific antidote ideas).
Here’s what I’ve learned:
Part of antidote to the Semester Scaries is searching for the hidden joys in the garden of your own life. To attempt to ward off the Semester Scaries, I offered out a midyear reflection workbook last month. (Click here to get your own free copy).I learned this time last year I needed to ground into my gold standards practices to make the transition smooth. And that means sometimes you have to cull the weeds that crowded out the joys, and this guide will lead you through that process.
Remember: weeds are not inherently good or bad. They are information. Weeds can signal:
Areas of your life that you’ve ignored
Misaligned choices between your values and your behavior
Burnout, rust out, and career grief
Patterns that are old and not in alignment with current or future intentions
Stuck stories of limiting beliefs and mindsets
Self-sabotaging procrastination behavior that transitions can trigger.
Weeds are just signals to pay attention and take what I call Embodied Action, where you take action that is grounded in the ‘hell yea’ feeling that lives in your body rather than the thinking-wanting-to-overrationalize brain.
Next week I’ll give you part two of the antidote. In the meantime, I’m opening up my typically client-only community call on Wednesday, August 28 at 11am MST to you because I want to make these strategies accessible.
Click here to sign up for the call. Feel free to forward this invite to a friend or colleague.
Transitions don’t have to be joyless and hard. Join us for a one hour conversation with tips and shifts to reduce the Semester Scaries.