Discover how nurturing a healthy academic career is possible and can be easier than you think. Learn to craft a career path in science that delivers worthwhile results and personal satisfaction. Learn to balance your academic career with the rest of your life with our brand-new Grid Introduction Training.
A successful academic career needs balancing skills
Knowing how to do this turns out to be essential for giving yourself a fair start and ensuring good progress. But, you’re not likely to learn the skills that are required in your typical time management workshop. What’s needed is a far more systematic approach. One that gives you structure and a process to link the big picture with everyday execution. A framework that won’t attempt to straight-jacket you into doing things you’re not likely to stick with. And, a set of simple tools that don’t require fancy apps and tech gizmos. Welcome to the Grid and how it can help you transform your work and life.
We understand academic careers
Many of our clients are academic departments and individual academics who seek personal support. They may be transitioning into greater independence or looking to make the next career step. What they have in common is having to forge a unique path on an academic career ladder where the guideposts often change. This demands that they are able to stay on top of many different things and manage multiple agendas.
While many academics appear to do this well, the truth is rather different. A great deal of what looks like success on the surface comes with an incredibly high personal price tag. From countless sacrifices, depression, mental health issues, to bullying and harassment, chronic stress, and at times a whopping dose of toxic colleagues. How come you may ask? Because when you’re an academic it is easy to get caught up in the prevailing cultural norms even if these are highly dysfunctional and ineffective. This is why we work with departments, institutional leadership as well as the people on the ground: students, academics and postdocs.
A different holistic approach to academic success
Having a successful career in academia is not accidental. This in part explains why so many talented researchers end up leaving the system. For many people, especially women and minorities, many current institutions and research environments present one giant hurdle. They appear to value and reward the wrong things, apply a heavy administrative burden that often seems pointless, forget to appreciate neurodiversity, and simply apply ever more pressure to make it. While this way of working does suit some personalities, it can often disproportionally disadvantage others.
We have seen this first hand in our 1:1 work. To help offset this even a little, we have created an approach that individuals can adopt to reduce stress, advance their careers and feel good about themselves. Their success creates better-working research cultures for others including students. And we’re dedicated to keep spreading it so that everyone with passion for science stands a reasonable chance in making a career in it.
How Grid™ Introduction Training can support your academic career
It’s long been our dream to create a stand-alone course that can teach this powerful method to anyone in the world. And now with some help from the pandemic, we have it! Our Grid Introduction Course is a 5-module online personal development course designed to guide you step-by-step in improving how you approach and manage four key areas:
- your personal life and your intimate relationships,
- you self-care to ensure health and wellbeing,
- your academic and research work,
- your professional career.
The reason why so many academics fail or derail is that they get into habits that create an imbalance between these four areas. Over time, success is actually impossible and not likely when a healthy balance is missing. In fact, in our experience, such imbalance creates stressful conditions that adversely affects:
- decision making,
- results delivery,
- healthy and effective teamwork,
- good supervision,
- how time is spent.
This has a massive individual and collective cost. People feel sick. Their performance is sub-optimal. Some people lose confidence and doubt their capability. Conflict with others escalates.
Our course helps you discover how you can achieve results, advance your multiple agendas and feel good from Day 1. Help put a stop to a sick way of being and working and be part of a positive change in your workplace.
Life-changing approach to your academic career
The framework we teach allows people just like you to achieve consistent results and build successful careers without sacrificing incredibly valuable things in the process. These including time with their loved ones, having children, staying fit, romance, and fun hobbies that nurture creativity and provide energetic renewal.
The course allows you to work at your own pace. That said, we’re with you every step of the way. We’ve built many useful worksheets, guided activities, tutorials, and motivational cheers to support your progress. We want you to learn the foundations of working with success and health in mind. For this reason, the course includes rest points which you can ignore or use to consolidate your learning.
Here are just some of the things you can expect to gain from this course. How to:
- Set a clear set of goals that have meaning for you and follow through on them to build your success.
- Keep track of your entire life’s agenda, tailoring tasks to your energy and refueling as you go to prevent burnout and lower stress.
- Overcome feelings of procrastination and the fear of getting started. This is key when it comes to writing papers and grants as well as promotion and career progression talks.
- Identify areas that need greater attention.
- Learn to reframe things you’re avoiding so that nothing gets neglected.
- Join up your vision with every-day execution that helps you put an end to a hard working day and have guilt-free rest.
If you value results and wellbeing this course and method is for you!
The course is built around Dr. Magdalena Bak-Maier’s Grid™ method. Magdalena is a leading coach to top academics and research leaders around the globe and a sought-after advisor on effective research cultures.
Over the 5 modules (excluding Preparations and the Final Review), you will see and learn how to:
- use Grids to construct a working life that has time for all the things you value and need to be well and do well,
- understand the neuroscience that makes the method so effective and be guided in adopting it to your circumstances,
- see how making space for actual career management can help you flourish more over time and ensure your hard work fruits.
It’s time to say goodbye to feeling tired and overwhelmed in your academic career. Our simple structure gives you flexibility and focus to ensure you get results and look after yourself!
Academics who follow this method have been able to:
- get on top of their work
- find time to write winning grants and proposals
- enjoy student supervision
- build a roadmap to getting promoted
- end up feeling they no longer wish to quit their job!
A quick run through the course modules
A practical start to building your academic career and a healthy life
First, we help you establish your starting point (so you can compare it with the results you will get in this course!).
We quickly show you the 7 Grid Principles and the neuroscience that makes this method so effective – we believe it helps to know why something works before you try it yourself! We then guide you in becoming clear on the actual conditions that will help your nervous system truly thrive. If you know what helps you, you can go find it or create it. This is something many super create academics forget to apply to themselves.
Building a vision that takes you towards the academic career you want and deserve
The next module helps you create a vision for the future. Without one it’s really hard to succeed! We teach you how to set goals in a way that feels deeply meaningful and won’t get your inner procrastinator to oppose taking action. And, we even added a bonus module on how to beat your procrastinator and stay resourceful! Sounds good, right? But wait! That’s not all!
With theory comes practical application. The course is designed to help you try out many of the Grid™ method aspects right away. With our Day and week grids you can see for yourself how easy it is to get things done and advance when you’ve got the right structure and system to support you.
Integrating meta and micro level for results that move you forward
By the end of the fourth module, you begin to see how your personal life, wellbeing, your work, and career meet (both on the Grid™ and during each of your days) and how you can learn to surf your energy to get things done in the most effective way!
Ever say around trying to write a cover letter or hours? Or felt your paper dragged for weeks if not months? Grid helps you free yourself from this crippling habit.
And, because the secret ingredient to life is joy, we’ve got a whole module on helping you discover how to refuel and advance your results in a way that actually allows you to enjoy what you do! It’s why so many people choose an academic or research career after all and we believe it’s how it can be! What is often missing is a systematic method and Grid gives you that.
Supporting you with live group tutorial!
Finally, we know being a researcher can sometimes feel a tad lonely. While meeting other like-minded people and connecting over things we have in common is fun! This is often why we go to all these conferences! For this reason, our introductory course comes with automatic FREE admission to one of our live small-group Grid clinics.
So what are you waiting for? How about you give yourself every chance to succeed on your terms! Our Grid Introductory Training will help.
Q&A
No. The course is a personal development programme that uses the Grid method to overhaul your life or perform a good tune-up. This would be roughly equivalent to having at least six sessions with a professional coach. In the process, you’re also learning how to Grid. Pretty clever, we think!
You don’t! You will learn all you need on the course. However, some people completing the course said the Get Productive Grid book was a useful additional resource. The book summarizes the method and includes great exercises to diagnose your starting point. It offers fun ways to measure your 3-month progress; the course does this too, but in a different and more in-depth way.
We recommend that you take the course on a desktop instead of iPad or mobile. Access to a printer is helpful when using our PDF worksheets if you like to write by hand. If you’re a fan of the digital, you can annotate the PDFs on your favorite device or make notes using your preferred method.
Once you gain access to the Grid™ Introduction Training, you will have 14 days to complete all the modules. The material is broken down into bite-size units, making progress easy while also ensuring that you keep up the momentum and get worthwhile results!
Next steps
Ready to start? Head over here and enroll on the Grid Introduction Training today!
If you want to explore our Grid™ method further, you can:
- Start by checking out Dr. Magdalena Bak-Maier’s Get Productive: Grid book.
- Book on a 90-minute Grid Clinic to get a feel for the method as well as personalized advice on life’s little and big niggles. (P.S. We have included one FREE Clinic appointment in your Grid Introduction Training package. Yay!)
- Read up on how other Grid adopters use this practice to stay healthy and productive across life and work, studies or business.
Lastly, we invite you to join our email community to stay up to date with our advice, get free resources and be the first to know about our upcoming offers. It’s our way of helping you Make Time Count, as we say!
