Mental Health Episodes

It’s the reminder episode you maybe forgot you needed: STOP COMPARING YOURSELF TO OTHERS BECAUSE YOU ARE AMAZING AS YOU ARE. Your unique set of interests, skills, and talents make you you, and no one else is bringing all of that to the table. Ok, ok, it’s easier said than done but take a listen and let’s walk away with some concrete actions for reminding ourselves to get out of the cycle of negative comparison and into the habit of self-appreciation! Even world-renowned artists like Katsushika ...

Ok spoiler alert: if you have a super satisfying, rich social life and you get to hang out with people in all walks of your life - work, hobbies, and anything else that lights you up - this episode might not be the one for you! Don’t worry, I’ll be back next week! And for the rest of us.... I see you. I am you. It’s never been easy for me to just “fit in” with the people I work or go to school with and it’s taken me some time to find my people in my STEM parts of my life. But I have, and I’m so...

Making any progress at all on the things that challenge us in our STEM jobs - and our lives - is AWESOME. Celebrate the hell out of these wins! And: sometimes you need a little extra oomph to get over hurdles that are more stressful. That’s where this episode comes in…It just takes next courageous steps! Want to hang out and do a social media challenge sharing your courageous steps? Tag me on Instagram @STEMdentity so I can celebrate the hell out of you!! Check out the companion episode on nex...

Does this sound familiar: you need to start a paper but you stare at the blank page and then keep writing and deleting the first sentence. Or you have a draft that you need to pass onto your team for feedback but really it would be much better if you just stayed up for a few more hours and obsessively edited it. There are a lot of scenarios in our STEM work that put us in freeze or perfectionism cycles. I’ve been there and still find myself there more often than I’d like! So today I’m sharing on...

It’s graduation season! And graduating means transitions and transitions means people giving you advice, whether you asked for it or not. That being said, some advice is truly excellent and I’m excited to bring you advice from three STEM professionals who all graduated from the Colorado State University Systems Engineering program: Dr. Sarah Shaw, Dr. Art Villanueva, and Brian Johnston. They were recently challenged on an alumni panel that I had the pleasure to attend to provide 3-word advice to...

No matter where you are in your STEM career stage, chances are very high that you are someone’s mentee and you are also someone’s mentor, or you’re about to start mentoring. These relationships can go extremely well - and it’s also really common for them to run into bumps or roadblocks. What can you do when these challenges arise? I’m excited to welcome Dr. Jeff Pierce back onto STEMdentiy for part 2 of our conversation, this time on mentor-mentee relationships. Even though we mostly focus on t...

Mental health: we all know we should be doing “something” to take care of it, but it’s often easy to put mental on the back burner amidst our busy lives until we’ve forgotten about it for too long and realize that the kitchen is starting to burn down. Someone I really admire for realizing that his kitchen was in full flames, taking accountability and action, and coming out the other side stronger is my graduate advisor, Dr. Jeff Pierce. Jeff has had challenges on and off with mental health but ...

If you are a (mostly) normal, functioning adult in a STEM career or school, you’ve probably experienced times like this: you are in a lecture or meeting or talk and you have a question. All of a sudden, you’re getting sweaty. Maybe shaky. You doubt your question. You consider whether you’ve forgotten how to speak words altogether. And the chance to ask your question passes, and you’re left feeling relieved that you didn’t have to speak up but disappointed that you didn’t get to satisfy your curi...

Emails. They probably had a brief moment in the sun as a useful communication tool before they exploded into endless-headed Hydras with no end in sight. Does it need to be this way? In this episode, we figure out your relationship with email and steps towards not letting your inbox run your days. How we spend our days is how we spend our lives, and I sure don’t want my life to be a reply-all email chain! BTW - I talk about the nervous system briefly in this episode. To really get an awesome dis...

As scientists and engineers, we are trained to tune into our minds. Critical thought and mental output is often the quantities recognized and nurtured throughout our career. But our minds don’t exist in a vacuum: they exist as a part of our body system. This episode with Somatic Coach Tami Schweber is all about tuning back into our bodies and why that might help us in our STEM careers. Check out Tami’s website: https://theknowingwell.ca/ and sign up for her monthly community sessions here. Fol...

Having fun in your STEM job is something that probably seems like a good idea but can get completely lost in the rush of the day-to-day. Even more subversive, much of our time might be spent thinking about when we will be happy: We’ll be happy when we get the job, graduate with the degree, go on the vacation, get the paper published, get the successful experimental result… Instead of “I’ll be happy when”ing ourselves, can we shift towards “I am happy now” throughout our days? Take a listen! So...

I’m dropping this quick minisode to invite us all to jump joy first into a creativity challenge: 15 minutes a day. 30 days. Just…explore the thing you’re curious about. Maybe you take an intentional break at work. Maybe you write the things that pop into mind on a sticky note and you do a deep dive at the end of your day. Curiosity and creativity are STEM super powers for us scientists and engineers, but the busyness of our days can stifle those sparks. It doesn’t matter when you find this episo...

Groundhog Day: it’s a holiday AND a movie! (Movie spoiler alert ahead FYI - it’s been out for >30 years so I don’t apologize.) For those of us who know the 1993 movie classic starring Bill Murray as grumpy TV weather forecaster Phil Conners, we’ll remember that poor Phil got himself stuck in a time loop, forced to relive Groundhog Day over and over and over and over again. And ultimately, only through growth and change did he find his way out of the time loop. And….I can almost guarantee that e...

I’m so excited to bring you this conversation with my very good friends, Taylor Christenson and Tim Remkes! Taylor and Tim met during their bachelor’s degree program in Botany at Weber State University and married shortly after school. They’ve successfully explored several career paths and keep finding themselves back doing what they love with being outside and teaching. Tim has built his own amazing environmental services company for native landscapes - https://remkesenvironmental.com/. He wor...

Sometimes life is like learning to drive a car in flat, dry conditions and then all of a sudden you find yourself in the middle of the mountains, trying to navigate curves and learning that you might just burn your brakes out if you don’t use your car’s other tools when you’re careening downhill. Just like you needed to shift into a lower gear, we all need tools that help us become more resilient towards work’s (and life’s!) stressors. Today I talk about two major categories of tools: tools tha...

We are all scientists, engineers, and artists, and we can use this innate curiosity and creativity to keep pointing ourselves towards the life we want. We all know about frameworks like growth mindset, but sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the flurry of work pressures and before you know it, work feels stagnant and the farthest thing from magical. In this episode, I dig into core values versus limiting beliefs, growth mindset, and how we can apply tools to move towards the jobs and careers we ...

What if you’re in your STEM career path (school, first job out of school, nth job….) and you don’t feel like you’ve found a job that lights you up? Or like you mostly like your job but something(s) is missing? This is so normal AND we can actively start moving ourselves towards jobs and careers that let us shine at what we love. In this episode, I go over techniques for starting to figure out what makes you light up at work. Loving this but listening while on your dog walk/commute/cleaning/etc...