When Sarah first reached out, she had everything that looked like progress on paper. Three years into her postdoc at a well-regarded European research institution, she had publications, a growing network, and a supervisor who respected her work. By most external measures, she was doing well.
But in our first session, she said something I’d heard before, though it never gets easier to hear: “I’m waiting for tenure. I feel stuck.” Every time someone says it, the same quiet resignation comes through — the sense of someone who has handed the steering wheel of their career to a system that was never built to hand it back.
Challenge
Sarah was 34, and she’d spent the better part of a decade aiming at the one destination academia tells you is the only legitimate one: a permanent position, ideally with tenure, at a research university. Every paper, every conference, every collaboration pointed at that single spot on the horizon.
Her ambition wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she’d outsourced her sense of worth to an institution that hadn’t yet decided whether it wanted her.
What Sarah was going through is one of the most common patterns I see in early- and mid-career academics. The tenure track has become a kind of mythology: stability, recognition, freedom to do meaningful work, all promised on the other side of one decision. So academics wait. They defer. They avoid building anything outside the system, worried it might look like they’re not fully committed.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: treating the tenure dream as your entire life strategy is a trap — not because tenure is bad or not worth pursuing, but because making one external outcome the sole measure of your worth stops you from building, growing, or making choices that are actually yours.
Sarah hadn’t published in the journals she found most exciting — she’d published where she thought a hiring committee would look. She hadn’t pursued the interdisciplinary collaboration that had energized her for two years — it felt too risky, too hard to explain on a CV. She hadn’t let herself imagine what a fulfilling academic life might look like on her own terms, because doing so felt like giving up. She wasn’t stuck for lack of ability. She was stuck because she’d confused waiting with working.
Coaching Process
We began where I always begin: not with strategy, but with clarity. Before we could talk about what Sarah should do, we needed to understand what she actually wanted — not what the system expected, not what her supervisor would approve of, but what she wanted from her research, her career, her working life as a whole.
That’s harder than it sounds. Years of internalizing external metrics leave most academics out of touch with their own compass, and Sarah was no exception. In early sessions she’d catch herself mid-sentence: “But I don’t know if that’s realistic.” We kept circling back to the same question — realistic according to whom?
Using the Envision–Engage–Emerge framework at the core of my coaching approach, we worked through three phases. In Envision, Sarah mapped out what a genuinely fulfilling academic career looked like — not the version she’d been performing for hiring committees, but the real one. She wanted to lead her own research group, work across disciplinary boundaries, teach in ways connected to her values. She still wanted stability, but realized it didn’t have to mean tenure at one specific institution.
In Engage, that vision became action. She pursued the interdisciplinary collaboration she’d been avoiding, submitted to a journal she actually respected instead of one meant to impress, and started having honest conversations with her network about what she was building rather than what she was applying for.
In Emerge, something shifted. Sarah stopped presenting herself as a candidate waiting to be chosen and started presenting herself as a researcher with a clear direction, building something of her own.
Changes
About three months in, she came to a session visibly different. She’d been invited to co-lead a cross-institutional research initiative (directly from the collaboration she’d almost talked herself out of). It wasn’t a tenure-track position. It was something better: it was hers.
“I realized,” she told me, “that I’d been so focused on getting permission to have a career that I forgot I could just build one.”
That’s the shift I look for in this work. Not the external win, though that matters, but the moment someone stops asking the system to validate them and starts trusting their own judgment. As I’ve written before: the academics who thrive today stopped waiting for someone else to define their worth. They build their own path, generate their own opportunities, and cultivate networks that are genuinely theirs. Sarah had become one of them.
Twelve months after our first session, Sarah had secured a two-year research leadership role with real autonomy over her agenda, published in two journals she actually respected with a stronger reception than her previous “strategic” submissions, built a cross-institutional network that opened doors she hadn’t known existed, and developed a clear five-year vision no longer dependent on a single institutional decision. She’s still pursuing a permanent position — she’s just no longer waiting for one. That difference is everything.
Learn
If you recognize yourself in Sarah’s story — if you’re deferring decisions, shrinking your ambitions, or measuring your worth by a system that hasn’t responded yet — here’s the point: academic freedom doesn’t start when an institution grants it. It starts when you decide to stop waiting. That decision is available right now.
If you’re ready to stop waiting and start building, book a free discovery call. Let’s find out what your academic career could look like designed on your own terms.