Your Unapologetic Career® Podcast

When we want our entire experience to change, we will do something odd: we will want that deeply... while sitting around hoping it happens. Instead of considering the usually inconvenient things that we know work...we will just wait for a miracle.   That's not how change works and we are about to get dragged! LOL  Listen in as Kemi challenges us to create the experience we want in our careers...

We’re taking you back to an oldie, but a goodie, one of our top episodes of 2021, and a forever skill to help you bring ownership to your time and energy. {ENCORE} We all do this. We know we do it, but it’s still so hard to stop. Or we have gotten much better with our Nos, but it’s still painful and energy-draining to execute. Yet, we know we have to say No – a LOT more. This week Kemi tackles one...

As we begin a new year, there are usually some things that we declare that we don't want to be the same at the end of next year.  Whether that thing is tangible or not, what we're trying to do is engineer a transformation so that we have a different experience in our careers. This is excellent - and it is important to identify for ourselves the actual experience that we want to have whil...

As women of color in academic medicine, public health, and allied fields, we simultaneously have the following qualities: 1) a desire to serve the greater good and 2) a strong interest in tangible productivity. Because of this, it's common to feel like we lose ourselves in our work. The reason for this is that the academic culture is effective at taking what's already there - our desire...

Our Top 10 most popular episodes of 2022 and some behind the scenes of how they came to be.  Happy Holidays and Happy New Year! Have a topic you want me to cover on the podcast? To submit your Listener Letter, send an email to  podcast@kdollcoach.com with your question, and let’s go! 🎧 🎙{Bonus} Top 10 Episodes of 2022. Check out this week’s episode of Your Unapologetic Career today! Text Dr. Kemi...

Dr.  Michelle Ogunwole is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is a health disparities researcher, social epidemiologist, and General Internal Medicine physician additionally boarded in obesity medicine and lifestyle medicine.   Dr. Ogunwole’s research focuses on racial disparities in maternal health among African American women with a specific...

Being overwhelmed is a common feeling for faculty who engage in research as a big part of their role.  As we approach the end of the year, we begin to have thoughts about all the places we thought we would be versus where we actually are. Add to that the holiday season to-do list and festivities and it’s the perfect recipe for feeling out of control at a time when you want to just relax and ease i...

Dr. Mya Roberson is a social epidemiologist, health services researcher, and assistant professor. She is also an Associate Editor of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at JAMA Dermatology and a Board Member Trustee at Brown University.  In 2021, she completed her Ph. D. in Epidemiology at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health where she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Res...

It's been nearly a year in the making...... Introducing our Get That Grant Program Coaches! These are fantastic, accomplished faculty in their own right who all went through Get That Grant themselves as clients. They are now trained Program Coaches and excited to help other women of color faculty get free.  Listen in for: WHO these amazing ladies are... WHY they decided to move from client to...

This episode is a beautiful story of Kemi’s career evolution. Listen in as Kemi describes how for her 40th birthday, she read through her journals from the previous two decades, reflecting on all the changes and growth she has experienced. She shares the importance of taking time to journal and set clear intentions for your time and your life. Often we disregard the "underneath progress"...

There is a theme in academic medicine that rolls around annually where newbies start tweeting questions like how are you all doing all these meetings and still getting your work done or how do you balance XYZ? This is definitely the culture of academic medicine, yet every year it feels like a new problem where we just woke up and realized that the way that the academic culture is set up is not act...

A main ingredient in creating your unapologetic career is clarity.  We have established review and evaluation processes for gaining clarity around the more tangible things we do for our jobs but what does this look like for the other things that we constantly bring up difficult such as:  organization time management  navigating politics and power optimizing mentor and leader relationships developi...

Adapting to survive in the insane structures of academic medicine and public health is a superpower. However, when you adapt to survive in your careers, you are recreating the exact circumstances that you do not want. In this episode, Kemi calls for you to stop using this old strategy to try to create your unapologetic career because it doesn't work.  To be clear, this skill of adapting is no...

Being in cycles of disappointment is exhausting. But we high achievers often create and sustain them unknowingly, because they are linked to how we succeed in the first place.  When what you use to be successful - which is learning what people's expectations are of you, and going hard and crushing it -  trying not to do that feels insane. So, we’ll disappoint ourselves instead, then try to ma...

Dr. Toyosi Onwuemene is an Assistant Professor of Medicine-Hematology at Duke University School of Medicine and has clinical and research interests in hemostasis/thrombosis and therapeutic apheresis. Her long-term goal is to develop and run therapeutic apheresis multi-center trials with a focus on applications of therapeutic plasma exchange in thrombotic disorders which disproportionately affect w...

There are two very powerful characteristics that are admirable in high-achieving women of color faculty in academic medicine and public health: 1) a dogged determination to get things done and 2) a private, inner working world These same two reasons can also cause so much pain, challenge, and frustration for you and your career. In this episode, Kemi celebrates these characteristics and shares how...

Relationships have the power to both help you grow and stunt your growth. That is why discerning between healthy and unhealthy professional relationships is an important skill. In this episode, Kemi discusses frenemy energy. What it is, how it shows up, how to discern it, and how you can minimize the impact of it on your professional life and the career moves you're trying to make. Let's...

Unpopular opinion: successful integrated research careers and the folks who get successfully funded don’t just get there by luck. There is a gap between the dream academic medicine sells and the reality of the research training, or lack thereof, that is provided. As a field, Kemi would like us to stop lying about that gap.  Listen in this week for why Kemi thinks it’s critical to tell people the t...

Dr. Ufere is a transplant hepatologist and medicine instructor in the gastroenterology division at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. Her work focuses on building palliative and supportive care interventions and increasing health care system empathy to improve the quality of life and care for patients with advanced liver disease and their caregivers. She is al...

We are finally recognizing the importance of ongoing active professional development for faculty to grow their skills, self-awareness, and ability to take action toward their goals. Fortunately, coaching is gaining traction in academic medicine and public health - and I think this is a good thing, especially for women of color.  Still, I want you to be skeptical about coaching. Spoiler alert, I am...

There is this thing that is baked into so much of our experiences and the culture of academics where the expectation is that if you're ever going to be high achieving, ideally, you need to be perfect. Your point needs to be perfect. Your presentation needs to be flawless. Your paper needs to be invulnerable to critique. And - that's just not possible. Yes, this is a very strong motivator...

Dr. Weeks is a physician and scientist at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA.  She is passionately driven to study the prediction of myeloid malignancies or acute leukemias in people who have precursor conditions. She is also an advocate and peer-educator on issues of racial justice and health equity and she currently serves as co-chair on the anti-racism task force for the American So...

This week we are doing a listener letter with a #plottwist. This letter is from a supportive bae wanting to know how he can best support his person! 😍   For us high-achieving women, finding a supportive oasis is *rare.* And so I’d like to give a special shout-out to all of you who are in those supportive roles. Boos, baes, friends, mamas, cousins - we appreciate you. We need you. And this episode...

As high-achieving women of color in academic medicine being able to get done what we want to get done is a priority but we often sabotage this goal with what I’m calling shadow tasks.  These are tasks that we have agreed to do but they don't have space, time, or structure anywhere on our calendar or to-do list. The reason why they are so detrimental to productivity is that the task doesn&apos...

Transitions are not easy but they are necessary for our growth. A common challenge is teasing out whether we still have something to accomplish where we are on our journey or whether we're ready to move on. This is especially important in academia where the norm is to wait until someone else tells us a transition is due. Here are my thoughts about when YOU know it's time and how to leave...