Asking powerful questions

What delights me?

As a kid, it was a special treat to have Turkish Delight, a squishy candy with a mild fruit flavor. When I vacationed in Ireland in 2009, we ate Jelly Babies, a very similar candy. Sour patch kids and Spree are also favorites of mine.

Zoom-beers, zoom happy hours I hosted during the pandemic with friends I taught online with, were also a delight. One friend, Chris, would share his ratings of weird Oreo flavors. Now, whenever I see new Oreos, I text him and we share our reviews. Last year, it was Space Dunk Oreos with Pop Rocks (I call them Space Junk). This year, it is Oreos with Sour Patch Kids. Funny how stuff comes back around.

During a text conversation on Thursday with one of my former graduate students who is now a colleague, “La” wrote, “Funny how the grad students we have in our lives come back to us as friends sometimes [laughing emoji]. As I’ve done the same!” I wrote back “This last week alone I’ve interacted with four of my past students.” She replied back with four love emojis. By Saturday, that number had reached eight. It was a delight to have them share with me how they are stepping into their own power. “Le” has been doing new programs for graduate students and we collaboratively wrote a fiery email about a paper review process that went sideways. I had a splendid zoom meeting with “Ra” who is building a new life that works for her. “LC” had a baby. “Fr” has a new faculty job. “Ch” is leading the charge on a recently accepted paper we co-authored. “Ja” and I connected about Mother’s Day as complicated mothers. “La” later texted me about what matters to her and lights her fire in her life and job. 

Connections with my former graduate students delight me. Over the time I worked for Indiana University from 2005 to 2013, I had significant collaborations with almost 40 graduate students. I directly supervised 14 in the teaching center and 5 in the graduate school. Fourteen are co-authors on peer-reviewed papers with me. Over 30 are contributing authors on the book Teaching as if Learning Matters (IU Press, 2022). I served on eight PhD committees and hooded two graduate students. Twenty-two graduate students were in learning communities about teaching and learning I facilitated. What has delighted me is how much they have taught me about courage, leadership, collaboration, curiosity, fortitude, strength of character, clarity of purpose, and stepping into their own power.

On Friday, the dam burst, my heart broke open, and my willingness to step into my power as a storykeeper is returning. I received an email out of the blue from “Je”. She and I had zoomed several times during the pandemic while I was working in the graduate school. So many things in her life had been falling apart around her. Every step of her academic progress was becoming extraordinarily difficult and distressing to her. The last email exchange we had had was in December 2022, days before I had a major surgery and six months before I left IU. This past Friday, almost 18 months later, she told me she had finished her dissertation and successfully defended. She shared with me that I made it into her acknowledgements: “I would like to particularly thank Katie Kearns for being the best ‘academic doula’”. That made my heart soar. And sore. 

What’s not being said that needs to be said?

My former graduate students have been stepping into their power, and I am delighted. They are keeping their fires lit. Meanwhile, I feel like my internal house has been burning down and left to ashes. I have been in my own stalled labor into elderhood. In the last five years, I have witnessed as an academic doula so many miscarriages of power and so much distressed and stalled labor among the graduate students I supported and staff I had the honor of walking beside. It hurt my heart and squashed my spirit to witness, to be a part of, and to not be able to prevent or cure. I had experienced too much stagnation and death physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. I had taken on and internalized so much of my own and others’ difficult stories and I had lost faith, hope, and will to carry on in that direction. So many experiences remained unprocessed, undigested, and metaphorically constipated as each successive distressing event felt like a tidal wave that left me breathless and knocked out my connection to what had previously anchored me. My body was literally and rapidly collapsing in 2022 and 2023 (ask me about my toes), the outward manifestation of several years of inner turmoil and cataclysmic shifts in my professional and familial relationships and sense of self. 

Almost a year ago today, I gave a keynote talk about professional crossroads at a national conference on grad and postdoc career development (here’s a view-only link to my materials if you’re interested). I wish I had worked with a speech coach because the keynote I gave was a mess. To all of you reading who attended my talk, I’m sorry. It was my best at the time, but it was not the storytelling I am capable of when I am calm, anchored, and clear in the story that wants to be heard. I want a do-over where you actually receive wisdom you need and not watch a person as they are unfolding in front of you.

I was definitely at a professional and personal crossroads. I was “knocked on [my] ass by the demands of leading,” from Jerry Colonna’s book Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up (Harper, 2019, p. 47). I had left a job just weeks before that wasn’t a good fit for my passions, talents, gifts, interests, and higher purpose. I was anxiously applying for jobs. My world order was disintegrating and I was actively deconstructing the elements in front of colleagues without a coherent explanatory narrative. I felt directionless and at sea. I have often used the metaphor of a shaken-up snow globe to describe how I felt in early summer 2023. I was emptying out my metaphorical closets, and traumatic stories from both the present and college were coming out in public. A colleague I work with now who witnessed that talk said, “yeah, I knew you were going through some things.” Yup. 

A question that I was asked a lot soon after I left my job was, “what happened?” It was the most unhelpful question I encountered. The second most unhelpful question was “what now?” I felt like I was being asked to reconstruct the accident scene, to make it make sense to other people when I could hardly make sense of it myself. I felt like an object of morbid curiosity, a potentially contagious agent, a cautionary tale, a parable for others to learn what not to do. Recounting what happened would bring me physiologically and psychologically back to painful things from the past. And it wasn’t just one thing. It was a sequence and accumulation of things, a years-long path that kept leading further away from what sparks my spirit. I had no ability to filter what were the appropriate and necessary bits of the story for the audience. I was participating actively in two modalities of therapy and a group grief recovery group. Even with all that support, every telling of my story felt retraumatizing and I didn’t have the skills at the time to redirect and reframe people’s questions to something more therapeutic and collectively wise and necessary to the occasion. 

A better question would have been, “what’s not being said that needs to be said?” from Reboot, similar to the healing question Percival asks the fisher king, “what ails you?” Examples of questions I now know I wanted to be asked instead of “what happened?”:

• What do you want more of?
• What do you want less of?
• What have you lost?
• What needs protecting?
• What are you sure about?
• What do you want to learn?
• What are you curious about?

What am I curious about?

An interesting thing DID happen while I was at that conference that planted a delightful seed, that ever so slightly moved me out of the deconstruction and demolition phase. I attended a talk by someone I had met at my other professional conference 22 years earlier (“Louisa”, who has appeared in another post, “What’s love got to do with teaching?”). At the grad career coaching conference last year, where I gave my keynote, she gave a talk comparing coaching, consulting, mentoring, and advising. That’s when the therapeutic seed was planted that I wanted the skill of coaching. Because of extensive conversations we’ve had since then, I’ve done courses from the Center for Courage and Renewal, I’ve read some of Parker Palmer’s work including Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life (Jossey-Bass, 2008), and I am in the middle of training for coaching in higher education certification with the International Coaching Federation. Participating in class by zoom on Saturday afternoons is absolutely my favorite, most energizing and motivating thing happening in my life right now. My harsh winter is over (I hope) and life, creativity, passion, and direction are returning to my mind, heart, body, and spirit. [side note, on my birthday, “Louisa” sent me a package with a card that mentioned the delights inside]

One of the main skills we learn is how to ask powerful questions, open-ended non-judgmental questions that invite the client’s deeper, inner knowing to speak. The questions usually take the form of “what” questions (look at all the “what” questions that appear in this post). I am developing a delightful, daily, early morning meditation practice of self-coaching. Each morning, I journal about an inquiry card chosen from a deck given to me by a co-author; each card has a “what” question on it. I then journal about a selected animal medicine card, a guide to help me with that “what” question. Finally, I journal about a tarot card, a task or focus to the “what” question. Over the past month, these three cards – inquiry card (mind), animal medicine card (heart), and tarot card (body) – have been in direct alignment with each other. Here are my note from today’s draws:

Inquiry card	Animal medicine card	Tarot card
What am I curious about?	Butterfly	Ace of Wands
What do I want to be? What do I want to learn? What do I want to do? What motivates and energizes me? What do I want more and less of? What is meaningful and fulfilling to me? What liberates and empowers me? What aligns my mind, heart, and spirit? What helps me be curious about others? What supports do I need to level up? What is the next step? What do I dream about?	Transformation What stage am I in? Egg – beginning Larva – create an idea in the physical world Cocoon – develop the idea, go within Butterfly – sharing the joy with the world What to do next? Finding the next step Having courage to keep transforming	Desire Courage What unites the ethereal and corporeal Fire – energy that brings transformation Energy that drives and motivates The Way Direction Mercury Inspiration Creativity Be bold, decisive, confident, excited Strength Optimism Vitality Passion Direction

What am I shepherding into being?

It was such a delightful gift to have “La” remind me that so many of my former graduate students were now my colleagues and that I was having the pleasure of interacting with them daily. It was a jumpstart to my heart to have “Je” call my spirit by name as an academic doula to grads. Their messages together reminded me to take courage from my former graduate students. I, too, can now stand in my own power, unstick my stalled labor, allow structure to form from the Jelly Baby goo in my cocoon, leave the clubhouse and begin the back nine of my life, stop revving my engine in neutral and put my transmission in first gear.

I now work remotely full time for a national, grant-funded initiative to disseminate evidence-based models in career exploration. Specifically, I serve as a pedagogy consultant and coach to career coaches as they innovate and adapt their programming for graduate students and postdocs. In my home office, I have a watercolor a former graduate student of mine made for me during the pandemic. It is a tree with a quotation from Octavia Butler, “I always knew I had stories to tell.” I’ve not known how to publicly burst the dam, tell the stories, and share wisdom from dark places I have been in the past five years. Like Frodo returning to Hobbiton from throwing the One Ring into Mount Doom or Demeter returning to the surface from Hades, much has happened that defies explanation, logic, rationalization, or straightforward storytelling. The Eight of Cups keeps feeling like an accurate representation of “what happened”: a person walking away from a wall of cups toward the mountains. 

What now? What am I shepherding into being? I am becoming a storykeeper, a “holder of the stories of the brokenhearted leaders” (Colonna, p. 35). A kindness warrior. A rainbow warrior. “Listening, I’ve come to understand, is bearing witness to lives unfolding, to lives being discovered. Deep listening, listening compassionately, means guiding, gently nudging, or sometimes shoving people down the path of radical self-inquiry so they can make their way to their own truest selves. Then, and only then, can they lead with the dignity and grace of being human.” I help graduate students “lead from the place of [their] truest self” (Colonna, p. 35).