Studies of student satisfaction, dropout, failure, and disappointment with grading and examination events are plentiful. There are fewer corresponding studies of faculty, except for PhD students' experiences (McAlpine, Skakni, & Pyhältö, 2022). Higher education is characterized as an instrumental selection process designed to complete a meritocratic project of separating the wheat from the chaff, the talented from the untalented, and the promising from those who cannot expect an academic future. This process is a reflection of the competition that exists for a position or promotion in the academic world. If you succeed with your education and also qualify for an entry-level qualification for employment, there are still many who do not succeed in the competition for that one position at the institution where the applicant wants to build a career. Whether applying for a position in competition with others or for promotion based on merit criteria, there is excitement, anticipation, and, in some cases, desperation, shame, and disgust when applicants are rejected, and experience negative judgments and downward thumbs down. Students' assessment of teaching can be disheartening, and colleagues' unwillingness to understand or comply with decisions or agreed principles, just as a decree of rejection or crushing peer reviews can undermine employees' faith, hopes and dreams. For the person concerned, the experience of such crises is a process of depletion of ardour and enthusiasm, self-confidence and ambition - or it is part of a resilience-building experience base. When life in higher education institutions is portrayed in university self-presentations, it is almost without exception positive news, about careers flourishing, projects being won, and results being achieved. To some extent, critical journalism leads to pointing out injustices, crises, poor working environments, and intolerable conditions for individual academics. Stories about sexual harassment, unreasonable favouritism, unequal distribution and unfair conditions are the critical approach of trade union journals. Similarly, there is a large research literature on the experiences of students and staff during COVID-19.

To get through disappointments, rejections, and inhospitable mechanisms in higher education, resilience research shows that people who can be flexible and adaptable more easily take disappointments as part of the ordinary register of experience and remain resilient. They can dismantle challenges into manageable sub-tasks and continue undaunted (Robertson, Cooper, Sarkar, & Curran, 2015). They show the ability to develop emotional intelligence, which involves an ability to regulate their reactions to emotional fluctuations within themselves and from others, show coolness when crises occur, find support from significant others, and develop good relationships with others. Resilience is also linked to an ability to maintain oneself, both physically and mentally, balance work and private life and regulate one's feelings of stress, dimensions that are largely trainable. People with resilient traits are also diligent in maintaining supportive networks and anyone who can provide positive support through challenging times. The research literature shows that people who are characterized as resilient and satisfied in their profession are less likely to experience the challenges as exhausting (Castro, Labra, Bergheul, Ependa, & Bedoya Mejia, 2022).

Our research question is how employees in higher education develop this balance of well-being and ambition in light of the distinctive experiences each individual has with adversity and success, rejection and acceptance, and how support and perseverance are shaped through networks and as a result of individual characteristics. In our study, we want to shed light on the experience of being part of the academy's meritocratic theatrical game and what this can do to the individual in their encounter with themselves and others as a professional.

The two methods we will use are life history research and autoethnography (Adams et.al. 2021; Ball, 2003; Brinkmann, 2012; Dunpath, 2000; Klevan, 2022). Life history as an educational research method originates from the Chicago School of the 1920s and is seen by many as the most authentic approach to seeing the connection between the experiences of individuals and institutions as interacting entities. Autoethnography, when also utilising historical memory material, offers many of the same characteristics as the life history method, and dramatically strengthens authenticity and the insider perspective (Lofthus, 2020). Emotional competence is most often measured with questionnaires or in experimental or quasi-experimental settings. In an autoethnographic and life history context, the term "narradigm" is used to value narratives as research material and research on narratives as access to rich experiential material, and deep connections in the experienced lives - also in higher education. Our approach will illuminate the problem based on the understanding of Ellis and Bochner (2006), who do not distinguish between an analytical and evocative approach. Our work will thus be analytical in that narratives are used in analyses and theorizing, while the evocative will be an overarching goal by playing on the emotions aroused in the reader. The two authors describe in dialogue their frustrations, joys, and all facets of emotions related to the rules of meritocracy and how they have met them with their different strategies for dealing with adversity, disappointment, shame, perseverance, and coping (Wells, Dickens, McBraer, & Cleveland, 2019). The two followed different career paths that are recognized in Norway (Eriksen & Nordkvelle, 2021). The authors have an age difference of 13 years and represent the experiences of men and women. They entered academia in 1985 and 2000.

Divergent career paths provide different opportunities for status and recognition. Brew et.al. (2018) write that "academic artisans in the research universities" are given tasks that do not provide status and late-career development and constitute a "learning culture", while those who focus on research identify with the research community, without a strong connection to teaching and student well-being (Ese, 2019). Despite the differences in career paths, the extent and experiences of humiliation and encouragement seem to form part of an emotional cabal that often leads to an equilibrium. The mapping of the two authors' different and parallel processes will be used to create a map for survival and courage to fulfil the different roles of the academy. The authors are developing a course for new employees in academia with the ambition to describe tripwires, dilemmas, and areas of conflict that they should be aware of that can determine their career choices and identity formation as employees in higher education. The course will develop the participants' ability to reflect on their own careers, their emotional reactions, stress experiences, and encounters with challenges through writing autoethnographic texts, producing digital stories, and other expressive methods. The ambition is to develop a deeper self-reflexivity that can create more harmonious and balanced relationships in the tension between research culture and teaching and learning culture.

Adams, T. E., Boylorn, R. M., & Tillmann, L. M. (2021). Advances in Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry: Reflections on the Legacy of Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner (1st ed.). Milton: Milton: Taylor and Francis. Ball, S. J. (2003). The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215-228. Brew, A., Boud, D., Lucas, L., & Crawford, K. (2018). Academic artisans in the research university. Higher education, 76(1), 115-127. doi:10.1007/s10734-017-0200-7 Brinkmann, S. (2012). Qualitative inquiry in everyday life. Castro, C., Labra, O., Bergheul, S., Ependa, A., & Bedoya Mejia, J. P. (2022). Predictive Factors of Resilience in University Students in a Context of COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown Measures. The international journal of humanities education, 20(1), 185-197. doi:10.18848/2327-0063/CGP/v20i01/185-197 Dhunpath, R. (2000). Life history methodology: "narradigm" regained. International journal of qualitative studies in education, 13(5), 543-551. doi:10.1080/09518390050156459 Ellis, C. S., & Bochner, A. P. (2006). Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography: An Autopsy. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4), 429-449. doi:10.1177/0891241606286979 Eriksen, S., & Nordkvelle, Y. (2021). The Norwegian 1. Lecturer - Shunned or Lost and Found? Journal of Higher Education Theory & Practice Vol. 21 (7), p171-180. 110p. Ese, J. (2019). Defending the university?: Academics' reactions to managerialism in Norwegian higher education. (2019:9). Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Working Life Science, Karlstad University, Karlstad. Klevan, T. (2022). An Autoethnography of Becoming A Qualitative Researcher: A Dialogic View of Academic Development(1st edition ed.). doi:10.4324/9780367853181 Lofthus, A.-M. (2020). «Dette er det vanskeligste av alt: Å være seg sjøl – og synes at det duger» En autoetnografisk artikkel om avvisning i akademia. doi:https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1893-8981-2020-03-02 McAlpine, L., Skakni, I., & Pyhältö, K. (2022). PhD experience (and progress) is more than work: life-work relations and reducing exhaustion (and cynicism). Studies in higher education (Dorchester-on-Thames), 47(2), 352-366. doi:10.1080/03075079.2020.1744128 Robertson, I. T., Cooper, C. L., Sarkar, M., & Curran, T. (2015). Resilience training in the workplace from 2003 to 2014: A systematic review. J Occup Organ Psychol, 88(3), 533-562. doi:10.1111/joop.12120 Wells, P., Dickens, K. N., McBraer, J. S., & Cleveland, R. E. (2019). “If I don't laugh, I'm going to cry”: Meaning-making in the promotion, tenure, and retention process: A collaborative autoethnography. Qualitative report, 24(2), 334-351. doi:10.46743/2160-3715/2019.3379