Your Unapologetic Career® Podcast

Cultivating a self-leadership mindset is a crucial part of building a successful career on your terms.  In this episode, Kemi revisits her concept of the CEO, the Scientist, and the Worker Bee and offers clear insight into how 1) they impact our success and 2) how we can organize them in order to make the important shifts to up-level our careers. For more on this topic check out our previous episo...

“If I achieve this, then I will have balance, enjoyment, freedom, and flexibility in my career.” Sound familiar? The sneaky underbelly of this statement is that achievement comes first, then your well-being comes after… When important things like balance, enjoyment, and freedom are nice to have but *not* required in our day to day, they will always come last or not at all. And success will always...

J. Deanna Wilson, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health. Dr. Wilson's research interests include reducing substance use-related health disparities, with an emphasis on opioid use disorders in adolescent and adult populations. This includes integrating harm reduction into primary care settings, developing low threshold models of care to improve engagement a...

Our struggle with boundaries is so often about using the wrong tool at the wrong time.    Tune in as Kemi highlights a critical piece of effective boundary setting – our identities – and discusses how this root orientation can either enforce or dissolve boundaries! For more on this topic check out Episode 16: Creating Effective Boundaries in Your Career . And if you'd like to learn more found...

When it comes to asking for help we often do everything but actually ask. This makes sense in a passive-aggressive culture of academics. While this is understandable why it happens, it doesn't have to be this way. Listen in as Kemi offers insights on the things that we should think about when we plan to ask for help to improve the quality of our information gathering and, ultimately, our succ...

Dr. Crooks is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, College of Nursing and an affiliate faculty at the Center for Dissemination and Implementation Science (CDIS) in the UIC Department of Medicine. Her community-engaged research program centers on protecting Black female sexual and reproductive health. She has developed a conceptual model describing the sociocultural process...

The concept of ‘fundable ideas’ is both an important component of understanding grant strategy and a nebulous barrier rife with bias. Listen in as Kemi offers thoughts as to how Fundable Ideas applies to researchers with marginalized perspectives and topics -  often the case for women of color in academic medicine or public health.  If you'd like to learn more foundational career navigation c...

Today's conversation is about a very juicy topic, collaborations. And this is not going to be a surface-level discussion. Kemi and her guest, Dr. Whitney Robinson, are going all in!   Dr. Robinson is an Epidemiologist whose work focuses on gynecologic conditions like fibroids, endometriosis, and unexplained bleeding. She is also a very devoted podcast listener and an amazing collaborator.   I...

So many faculty have worked so hard for so long, created so much benefit, and poured into mentees, yet they don't get to experience the actual enjoyment of their career. This may have been your experience, or you’ve witnessed it with a colleague. Listen, we can have better. There is more available.   In this episode, Kemi shares that when you want better balance and don’t see immediate improv...

Dr. Leslie Appiah is a Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Chief of the Division of Academic Specialists in Obstetrics and Gynecology at The University of Colorado School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital Colorado. She is a fellowship-trained pediatric and adolescent gynecologist and Director of the Fertility Preservation and Reproductive Late Effects program at the Comprehensive Cancer C...

There is a part of academic culture that says we do this all for the greater good therefore, if we're too focused on finances and money, then somehow, we are not pure to the calling. Don't fall for the okey-doke of the academic culture y’all. Don't fall for it. Understand that the steps that you take to improve yourself as a faculty member, to improve your own relationship with work...

The truth is that for high-achieving WOC, betting on ourselves is the norm. We have gone through training programs, spent six figures of debt getting degrees, etc. But that kind of betting on ourselves is structured and normalized to the point we don’t even see it as risky. In this episode, Kemi is challenging us to think about how we can bet on ourselves in terms of choosing to want something dif...

We are so excited to welcome back Monique R. Shields to the podcast! Monique is an executive coach for women in the C suite, founders, entrepreneurs, and women of color in academic medicine and public health.    Listen in as Kemi and Monique have an open conversation about some of the themes, challenges, and perspectives they’ve personally experienced or seen from coaching women of color in academ...

Dr. Arora graduated from the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas, and completed her Internal Medicine Residency and Medical Hematology and Oncology Fellowship at UT Health San Antonio. She holds the John Eiler Endowed Professorship in Cancer Research and is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology, at UT Health San Antonio. As a me...

Being “First Only Different” doing the kind of work that we do comes with a needed level of hypervigilance. It’s necessary so that we can be sure that we are not experiencing what otherwise would be a default: lower quality support, pay, space, etc.   However, the longer we do that, the easier it bleeds into places it doesn’t belong. If we're constantly having to keep tabs and make sure that...

Mentorship is a valuable aspect of academic medicine. And although mentors and mentorship are not perfect, it's impossible to be successful with no mentorship. That would be a mess! So, this episode is directly for the Mentors. We thank you. We appreciate you. And also, some of y'all need HELP. This episode is about starting that conversation about help. Listen in as Kemi sheds some ligh...

Despite the fact that it's normal to grow and change over the course of our lives and careers, the culture of academic medicine is not built in ANY WAY to reflect this. We spend at least 7 years going from medical school to training to faculty and all the way through it’s reinforced over and over that once we make the transition to faculty, that's it - the last transition. The norm and t...

In this episode, we are continuing our conversation from Episode 100:Unapologetically Vulnerable: Kemi's Interview Part 1 . Kemi is back in the hot seat, being interviewed by her friend and incredible executive coach, Monique Shields of Seven Pines Leadership . And this week Kemi is revealing a secret pleasure project that’s in the works.   Join in as Kemi steps further into vulnerability and...

It's a celebration y’all!! We are celebrating our 100th episode of the Your Unapologetic Career Podcast. Thank you all for listening to the podcast and sharing it with your peeps. This is as much your celebration as it is ours, so thank you. We appreciate your continued support. To celebrate, we have a special treat for you. Kemi is taking the hot seat and is being interviewed by her friend a...

Creating quality work in our careers is a goal that we all have. But how do we do that consistently? Kemi defines it as work that is intentionally impactful to the people, audience, and place that you desire it to be. And that this impact is durable so that people can go back to it repeatedly and still experience its power. In this episode, Kemi shares the components required to create quality wor...

ENCORE EPISODE! I don’t know about y’all but I never learned how to quit anything in academic medicine. And yet, unless you have some kind of 100% perfect “No” response from the minute you started on faculty, you likely have at least 1 thing on your plate that just needs to go. Knowing it needs to go doesn’t mean you are any closer to quitting – because that’s just not what we do.  It’s not about...

There are many norms around leadership and managing people, yet there are no norms around self-management. It’s true for academics and beyond.  Why is this important? Because the skill of self-management is a major component of a successful leader. Listen in as Kemi shares her own experience with various leadership roles, why an expert level of self-management is required to be an effective leader...

It's not surprising that as women of color in academic medicine and public health, a lot of us have the experience of being the first person of color in our division or department or doing the kind of work we're doing. We know and live this, right? When discussing this experience of being “first, only, or different,” we're talking about it from an identity perspective, which is incr...

Dr. Barnes is an Assistant Professor in Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Delaware. Her research examines the social-emotional well-being of minoritized populations. She has published papers in several journals including Infant and Child Development, the Journal of School Violence, Aggression and Violent Behavior, and Beyond Behavior. She is the creator of the Scholarly Se...

We are talking today about how to find our career spark in 2023.  Kemi defines career spark as the connection to a sense of possibility and growth for the future. This is something that we all want.   BUT - how do we know what our career spark is? And once we’ve found it, how do we protect it?  Listen in as Kemi walks us through three steps to finding our career spark and keeping it alive for ours...