I’m pleased to be speaking about how my values drive my work at this event at Newcastle University’s Business School on 21st October. Find out more and book here.
Author: juliescan
Talk: Lesbian Visibility Day 2021
Really excited for Lesbian Visibility Day, April 26th, this year. I’m giving a talk ‘Is Lesbian Visibility Day in your Diversity Calendar?’ for the Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging in the North East network. You can find out more here.
Interview: gender pay gap
Really pleased to be interviewed live on TRT World’s ‘Money Talks’ show on International Women’s Day, 2021, talking about the challenges globally of the gender pay gap and how to address it.
Competition for International Day of the Girl 2020: Free coaching offer!
Do you work or volunteer with girls or young women aged 18 or under?
You might be a mentor, a youth worker or work or volunteer with a girls’ group or organisation – anything that supports girls!
To mark the 25th anniversary of International Day of the Girl this year – 11th October 2020 – I am running a competition to win a programme of 3 x 1 hour FREE coaching sessions with me via Zoom between October and December 2020.
The winner will be drawn at random on Friday 9th October. Entries (open to people aged 18 or over) need to made on this 2 min online form by 5pm (UK time) on 8th October 2020.
What’s this coaching malarkey and how can it help?
I’ll work one-to-one with you and you set the agenda for what you wish to focus on. My coaching does not offer you advice but rather, through questioning techniques, you arrive at your own solutions and decide on actions to take. I bring a confidential, objective, listening ear. And, you get a supportive accountability buddy while you take your actions and make changes!
Developing your potential helps the girls/young women you work with to develop theirs – you’re worth it!
Some examples of what previous clients have worked on:
- facing a challenge, opportunity or having a decision to make
- struggling with managing time, confidence or working relationships
- not sure what direction to go in
- juggling work and life balance
But the agenda really is yours! For a chance to win, here’s the 2 min online form. Complete it by 5pm (UK time) on 8th October 2020. Entrants must be 18 or over.
International Day of the Girl
This year’s International Day of the Girl theme is ‘My Voice, Our Equal Future’.
This year focuses on girls’ and young women’s demands to:
- live free from gender-based violence, harmful practices, HIV and AIDS
- learn new skills towards the futures they choose
- lead as a generation of social activists accelerating social change
Here are just a couple of statistics that demonstrate why marking International Day of the Girl is needed to draw attention to inequalities and provoke change:
- Nearly 1 in 4 adolescent girls aged 15-19 globally are not in education, training or employment compared to 1 in 10 boys of the same age.
- Nearly 4 in 10 adolescent girls globally think wife-beating is justified.
- 1 in every 20 adolescent girls globally aged 15-19 has experienced rape or forced sex.
These are some of the reasons that if you’re supporting girls in your work or volunteering, I want to support you!
Here’s the short form again.
If you have any questions, get in touch here!
Good luck!
“There’s just so much to worry about”: How coaching can help during the Covid pandemic
What’s going on?
We are all experiencing the global Covid-19 pandemic in different ways.
Some have experienced the pain of personal illness, loss and grief. Some face threat or reality of losing a job and along with this the financial anxiety, the worry over what else you might do and perhaps your sense of identity that comes with your position.
If you are still working, you may well be doing so from home, perhaps juggling your children’s maths / ‘artwork’ / games / tantrums while your cat sits in front of your face on Zoom calls, and the Amazon delivery of your new pyjamas* arrives just as you are about to present to your team what you have worked on for two weeks (*you don’t need clothes for the outside world– you’re not going anywhere, after all).
Things are mixed up at the moment. They are not in their place – not the way it was ‘supposed’ to go.
On the other hand, you might have been guiltily enjoying some aspects of lockdown – time finally to watch the final season of Orange is the New Black, for instance (no spoilers – I still haven’t finished it).
Getting off the proverbial hamster wheel may have given you time to think about whether you are doing work you really enjoy / are interested in or if you fell into it and have stayed – 3, 5, 10 years. But what else could you do? Do you want something else? Maybe it’s promotion, maybe it’s a career change or a better work/life balance?
How could coaching help?
I’ve certainly noticed an increase in enquiries asking me about coaching throughout the pandemic.
You might not be sure what coaching is or may have the impression it’s just for senior executives. Here’s a thought: coaching is for anybody who wants to work on making some changes, wants a supportive thinking space, wants to be listened to (when were you last really listened to?!). An objective listening ear can illuminate different perspectives and get you to the place you need to be quicker than you would do yourself.
You might be dealing with change, wanting to make some changes in your life, to be more confident, to be better at prioritising, manage your time, feel less overwhelmed, need to make a decision…. the list goes on.
A coach works with you on your agenda, providing a safe, confidential space. They also act as a gentle accountability buddy. If you say you are going to do something to someone else, you tend to do it. So many of us are really good at ignoring ourselves – in fact we excel at it! Think: gym memberships, healthy eating, that small DIY task etc….
What’s within your control?
I’ve noticed that in coaching sessions recently I have been drawing a lot on the concept of the circles of control, of influence, and of concern. There is something timely about this framework, which is adapted from Stephen Covey’s bestselling book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
If we spend too much time thinking about things in the outer circle, we can become paralysed as we have no control or influence over these things. Examples of things in the circle of concern are the pandemic or becoming unemployed as a result of the economic downturn.
Instead, spending time and energy within the spheres of control and influence means we are agents in our lives (you’re not ignoring those areas of concern – you’re acknowledging them and choosing to re-focus). Coaching can help you to define what is within your capacity to influence, what you may wish to, and how to go about it. It can also support you with techniques to ‘park’ those elements out of your control so that you can re-focus and support yourself better.
Coaches do not have the answers for you (sorry!) – you do. What a coach does is help you elicit what you feel is right for you to do and get started on it.
So, if you have a challenge at the moment, think about what is within your circles of control and influence. How might you use this framework to support you through one of the most challenging times in a generation?
This piece was first published on Thrive Global.
Women in Academia Resolutions Retreat, online June 2020
An impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is its challenge to our day-to-day working and living practices.
For many people, this has provoked a reflection on what is truly important, what our personal values are.
Building on a successful Resolutions Retreat for Women in Academia held in ‘real life’ earlier this year, I’m pleased to offer an online version of this retreat.
The aim is to support women in academia to reflect on work and work/life values and consider how to set realistic goals at a time when the space to focus is stretched or maybe feels non-existent.
Numbers are strictly limited in order to enable plenty of interaction, with lots of reflection and discussion time – and space for coffee breaks!
The Resolutions Retreat:
- gives you a space to reflect on your values
- takes a values-led approach to deciding priorities and setting realistic goals
- provides a framework for supporting you stick to your resolutions and achieve your goals
Give yourself an afternoon to focus on you.
Share the space with other women who understand the particularities (and peculiarities?!) of the academic world.
Sign up on the Eventbrite page here
If you have any queries about the event, or are wondering if it is right for you, please do get in touch with Julie. You can email her via her website contact form or find her on LinkedIn or Twitter
Feedback on the previous (in person) Resolutions Retreat:
The space:
“Time for reflection and re-evaluation”
“A quiet, respectful space”
“There was openness and mutual respect”
The takeaways:
“It has consolidated ideas and next steps”
“Really enabled a clear thought direction”
“Enabled me to re-set goals and resolutions”
“It has helped me focus in terms of my direction, but also why I find certain things/issues important”
“It gave a framework for thinking/reflecting”
“It has made me see the mismatch between values and goals and made me think about how to create space for the values”
“It has really made me understand/see why I am struggling to ‘fit’ in both with the institution where I work and academia. I’ve realised this is because of the dissonance between my values and goals”
The shared experience:
“One of the best things was hearing other women discuss their experiences and goals”
“It helped me realise I am not alone in these difficulties”
The facilitator:
“It was run in a thoughtful and peaceful way”
“Julie is a skilled and enabling facilitator”
The only suggestion for improvement was that people wanted more…..!
Testimonial:
“Julie fostered a very safe atmosphere of positivity during the ‘Resolutions Retreat’ I attended, and she really helped me to think about my goals, aspirations, and why this is my career. The conversations were lively but incredibly respectful – not always something I’m used to at work. It was really important to get together with like-minded women, of different ages, experience, and backgrounds, and really heartening to know we often share similar stories. I was especially interested in the match or mismatch with an ‘institutional message’, and how to navigate that in terms of my own ethics. The most important thing though, was that Julie helped us all explore different perspectives, and learn new things about ourselves.”
And do take a look at this blog for some thoughts behind putting on the first resolutions retreat in January 2020.
Why a Resolutions Retreat for Women in Academia?
This week Times Higher Education published an interesting article covering The University of Glasgow’s welcome decision to make ‘collegiality’ an explicit requirement in its internal professorial promotions criteria. Examples given include recommending a colleague for an award, or crediting them as Co-Investigator on a major research project.
The image THE chose to accompany this positive news – an image of men helping other men over a wall – is somewhat ironic if you’re a woman in the academic world. For, one could be forgiven for reading statistics on the overrepresentation of men in senior academic and managerial positions as evidence of the fact that academia is already working efficiently in supporting men’s collegiality with one another.
I was motivated to offer my first Women in Academia Resolutions Retreat, coming up in January 2020, to support women to take some time out to focus on themselves. It’s important to continue to challenge the imperfect structures of academia, while at the same time to work on how we can support ourselves within those imperfect structures. Anecdotes, academic research and personal experience demonstrate that women can be notoriously bad at prioritising ourselves. Some men experience this, too, of course, and they are the ones doing the ‘housework’ of the department alongside the women.
Housework might take the form of being the (implicitly-) understood ‘go to’ person for students for support, being the person always assigned programme leadership, teaching introductory core modules or given administrative tasks etc. It’s a real skill – and indeed a compliment – being the ‘safe pair of hands’ who can hold that ticking grenade safely. But holding that grenade comes at a cost – you are likely holding it for someone else whilst they are getting on with the things they want to do.
While you’re holding the grenade for someone else, it’s very easy to lose sight of what you want to achieve. After all, if you lose focus, you will drop the grenade and it will, you feel, be catastrophic for everyone!
So, how exactly do you focus on you instead? It’s key to take some time out to reflect on where YOU want to go.
First – put down the grenade (psst – it’s not actually a grenade and it’ll be OK!!)
Now you’re more relaxed, consider what you would like to achieve and what steps you need to take logically in order to get there. It could be that you already know what you want to achieve – great! But it could be that you need to sit back and think about what is important to you. What’s important to you aligns with your values. If you set goals in line with your values, you are going to be more motivated and likely to achieve those goals.
To use myself as an example, once I realised I was working to an agenda that was not my own in a previous situation, I had a proverbial light-bulb moment: “it’s not my goal- I’m not motivated by it”. Without realising it, I hadn’t been realistically working toward that goal; instead, I’d been procrastinating and finding distractions. It was because I was not only not bothered about achieving it but actually felt it would be pretty worthless, judged by my own value system. It was a tough lesson as I had spent many years not realising this! But I re-set things and took steps toward what I actually wanted to achieve.
We all have contexts in which we work and things we need to do that we might prefer not to (for me now I’m self-employed, that’s my accounts!). But there are ways to work within our realities.
My goal for the Resolutions Retreat is that participants leave with a clearer idea of their goals, how to achieve them and with the resolve to take action.
Someone to talk to
Someone to talk to is an event with a blend of archive film, artist film and live elements being held at the Tyneside Cinema on 16 October. With other colleagues in the Yes We Can Coaching Collective, I’ll be offering ‘speed-coaching’ sessions to attendees wishing to take advantage of the chance for ‘someone to talk to’. This should be fun!!
Women in Academia: Resolutions Retreat
25 January, 2020, 10AM-1PM, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
- Too much to do?
- Hard to find time for the important tasks?
- Not sure what your priorites are?
Give yourself some space to focus on YOU.
This interactive workshop will support you to:
- Define what is important to you, professionally or personally.
- Set realistic goals to aim for.
- Leave with a personalised plan of how to stay on track and achieve your goals.
Be guided to reflect, to learn and to set your goals.
Share the space with other women who understand the particularites (and peculiarities?!) of the academic world.
Join us in the supportive retreat of the Figgis Suite at the Tyneside Cinema to set your direction for 2020.
Tea and coffee will be served on arrival to help us get started!
***EARLY BIRD OFFER: Book by midnight on 8th December to qualify for a 30 min phone/skype call with Julie in February/March/April to provide personalised support in progressing with your plan!***
BOOK VIA EVENTBRITE: https://wiarr.eventbrite.com
Information about the Tyneside Cinema, including information for people with acccess requirements, can be viewed on their website.
If you have any queries about the event, or are wondering if it is right for you, please do get in touch. You can email me via my website contact form or find me on LinkedIn or Twitter
And do check out this blog on my rationale behind this event!
EDI in the Charity Sector, Panel Discussion
I was delighted to contribute to the Institute of Fundraising North East Conference, September 2019. It was my second year of supporting the conference and this year I was invited to be part of a panel discussing Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in fundraising and in the charity sector more broadly.
Dr Julie Scanlon 