Perfect is the enemy of done or done is better than perfect

I first encountered Inger Mewburn when doing my Masters, and quickly became a big fan. I liked her realism, her ability to talk straight, and they way she made higher degree learning seem accessible to 'ordinary' people.

Inger ran a MOOC in 2015 called "How to Survive your PhD" which I attended, and learned a lot. The material fed into my study, my writing, and my ambitions. One of the many gems that I picked up was "Perfect is the enemy of done" (Mewburn, 2012, p. 12).

However, over time, this has morphed, for me, into "Done is better than perfect". I know what Inger said, but I keep rehashing it, skewing the focus a little to remind us that completion is the key thing to aim for. Then I decided to own my take on Inger's words, and made the poster accompanying this post. 

I say this to my students all the time. Hopefully they get the message that perfectionism can be their enemy - and a submitted piece of work has SOOO much more value than one that is being tinkered with and tinkered with... until its freshness is lost and its meaning blurred. 

What sparked this post was listening to Tara Brabazon last winter, when - in the midst of a training video for the HDR staff at Flinders University, she said exactly the same thing:

"Done is better than perfect" (Brabazon, 2022, p. 9:34)

Now I know I am onto a winner: paraphrasing one guru and citing a second.

Sam

References:

Brabazon, T. (25 August 2022). Steps - Managing student perfectionism [video]. https://youtu.be/0ztpc8tBxW4

Mewburn, I. (2012). How To Tame Your PhD. Thesis Whisperer Books [www.amazon.com ebook]

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The what, the how, and the why

Sometimes I have had students who have obviously put loads of time into their research. They have worked really hard at assembling the right components. They send a draft, and it is full of gems and links that they have gathered from multiple, good quality sources. They have PILES of evidence. However, they get stuck. And I wonder if they might be getting stuck because they have got mired in the search, and are not yet bending all the components to answer the issues that they are gathering the evidence for.

To me, gathering the facts and evidence is like inventorying the first aid kit. We have all the bits, but we haven't yet decided how we are best to treat the injury at hand. We still need to determine our strategy. We have the 'what' - all our evidence, our first aid bits - Now we need to work out our 'how': how will we treat this thing, what strategy do we need.

The how is what happens next, the next logical thing based on the evidence. Our strategy. My advice to students is to re-skim the 'what' (the gathered evidence). Then, we take a deep breath, and - drawing on the literature - take an evidenced stand, deciding on our likely best path through, and write that up showing our evidence. We use our 'what', bending it into the 'how' while explaining our 'why'. 

Our Why? This is explaining all the choices, the options, that we have made. We explain the 'best' whys at each decision point. Our 'why' is a key element: it gives us confidence that we are answering the question, and helps us to determine a 'best' choice... or at least, an optimal choice.

Writing around our topic, not around each author, helps us to write in a more synthesised way, so we are able to better develop argument. So we read, we take notes, and we sort all the fragments from the research papers we have gathered into topics, then write about the topics, and cite all our authors. The way I picture this is to think of Lego. From all the other houses built by individual authors, we take apart their work, and we group all the wall blocks; all the ceiling tiles; all the windows; all the doors. That gives us all the individual topics to write about. Then we rebuild our OWN construction around the grouped pieces - the topics - from the other author buildings, while noting what has come from where. That is how we synthesise and cite. When we write this up, it is so much easier to focus on the topic, not the writer when citing.

There is another reason why we write with the author last: so we don't give our power away, and don't write in a laundry list fashion. Read about those two traps here.

Sam

References:

Young, S. (17 November 2017). Giving our Power away. http://www.samyoung.co.nz/2021/01/giving-our-power-away.html

Young, S. (18 January 2021). The Laundry List Lit Review. http://www.samyoung.co.nz/2017/11/the-laundry-list-lit-review.html

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How to stop catastrophising

I recently watched a Tara Brabazon vlog (2021) which detailed ten tips to help us stop creating our own dramas, or as she said, to stop 'catastrophising'. Wow: what a kick in the pants this was!

To begin with, she so rightly pointed out that if we first determine what the problem is, we are halfway to solving it. The first tip then is to take stock before behaving like a two year old: to "frame it, label it, and understand it" (8:45). Excellent advice! She called the drama summoning out as being a habit: and I feel she is right. Once we start to let go, we can keep letting go. Then we get stuck in the drama of letting go and forget how to stop creating the tantrum. We initially do it to cope. But then we forget to stop doing it once we are coping again.

The ten tips which followed are: "frame and label the issue carefully" (7:05); stop buying into other people's drama (10:04); "live in [...]our present" (14:00); "avoid self pity", and take action (16:00); "know that [we] can cope" (18:00), or that we will be OK; "don't confuse thought with reality" (20.48); keep a reflective journal, and consider both the best and worst outcomes (22:58); "decrease [...]our options and reduce [...]our choices" (26:00), narrowing our scope and staying focused, do not dwelling on freedom of choice; "value [ourselves] on [...]our own terms" (28:50), which has quite a lot of cross-over with the second point; "be kind to" ourselves (33:25).

The elements which I found particularly useful were the following:

• Stop buying into other people's drama. We must remember to create emotional distance when there is a problem. We need to step back, and think clearly about what is within our own span of control, our own sphere of interest, and draw a line around that. If we can do that, then we can then work out what is actually within the span of control of others, or in others' sphere of interest. We can be deliberate about choosing to only consider our own 'stuff'... and choosing what we can let go, and to stop poisoning ourselves with our own narrative.
• Take action. Tara's rather brutal advice is to stop dwelling on how we feel, and to start DOING. Focus outward on tasks, not inward on emotion. While this is easy to say, it is hard to do. To make progress in this area, we need excellent planning, and we need to stop ourselves dwelling in, as Eckhart Tolle says, our 'pain body' (1999). We need to put aside the hurt, our drama, our crisis; and focus on getting on with our lives, our task, our project, our research.
• We will be OK. We may not get things done perfectly, but probably whatever we do get done will be enough. We will be OK. The world probably won't end. The worst probably won't happen, but even if it does, we will still be OK. We can let go of the outcome, and just live with what we can achieve.
• Focusing on focus. We need to ensure that we choose wisely, and spend our scarce resources wisely. We cannot get our work, our project, our research done if we are not putting aside the time to get it done. Focus will get us through, but doing too much other stuff will not get us through. We need to simply focus on doing the things that will get us done.
• Reframing. Firstly asking 'what's the worst that could happen?', and then answering it for ourselves, will help us to stop worrying about a vague future that is likely not to happen anyway. Once we have identified a potential future, we can then let that future go, and focus on what we can control.

All good advice. Not easy to do, but we can start to take these steps to improve.

Sam

References:

• Brabazon, T. (23 April 2021). Vlog 266 - Catastrophizing [video]. Office of Graduate Research Flinders University. https://youtu.be/N3nKVvogZrQ
• Tolle, E. (1999). The Power of Now. Namaste Publishing & New World Library.

read more "How to stop catastrophising"

Ten Questions to Circumvent Over-Thinking

Ruminating too much on things can catch us all at times, usually when we are feeling vulnerability due to a change of some sort. To compensate we can over-plan: focusing too much on details, trying to control too many uncontrollable elements, or attempting to factor for all emergencies.

We forget about allowing for likely risk factors, and we can also dwell on the risks until they assume too much significance. The risks get so close in our line of vision that we can't see that the likelihood is infinitesimally small.

Worse, once we are in this kind of space, it can be difficult to get out of it. We have to recognise that we are in this space, then take steps to get ourselves out of it. So, if we think we might be ruminating too much, we can try some of the following techniques and see if they make us feel differently.

We can:

1. Ask: what good things will happen to me today? Start the day positively and get up in plenty of time. Don't watch the news, but read or listen to something uplifting on our commute. Start with some exercise and the endorphins can give us a lift right from the get-go.
2. Ask ourselves the magic question: will this matter in five minutes? In five days? In five months? In five years? Usually it won't matter in five days, so we can let it go a bit now, and step back from it.
3. Ask: how important is this? Set priorities for decisions. For low priorities, set a five minute timer to make the decision, or learn and practice a new decision-making technique and use it when making these minor decisions. Higher priority decisions will make time. Plan the process and diarise a few blocks of 15 minutes to take the time to think about it before the deadline. Put actions into each of the blocks so you know you are taking actual steps towards completion.
4. Ask ourselves: are we trying to make this perfect? If so, we know perfection is impossible, unrealistic and stressful. "Done" is better than perfect (after Mewburn, 2012).
5. Ask: what are we afraid of? This is an interesting question. Sometimes we can be afraid if something won't work out; sometimes we can be afraid if it does work out. We can be afraid of our own history, or of our uncertain future. Trying to remain present and enjoy the now will help us to put fear aside, but first we need to identify where fear is getting hold of us.
6. Ask: what can go wrong? We can set a timer and have a free-for-all listing all the things that could go wrong. Then when the timer stops, screw the paper up into a tight ball, and throw it away. A friend of mine gives what he calls the "Meh, meh, meh" voice time every morning from 8.00 to 8.05 to whine as much as it likes. Then it has to shut up for the rest of the day.
7. Ask: is it time for a break? Sometimes we throw too much time at one thing, or stare at the same problem in the same way for too long. Removing ourselves from a problem can sometimes make us see it in a new light.
8. Ask: who could solve this? Sometimes simply talking - or even imagining talking - to someone else can change our perspective, and we can see a solution that was not visible before.
9. Ask: do I have too much data? Sometimes in an effort to gather all the information which may be useful we overload ourselves and induce "analysis paralysis". We could choose our top ten inputs and see how much of a decision we could make with just those.
10. Ask: what good things happened to me today? I write a daily journal and work out what went well as well as what can be improved. Cataloguing the good things really ends the day on a good note.

Some of those questions may get us moving. However, if we are feeling really stuck, we should talk to a counsellor. Sometimes we can't do it alone: we need a professional to help us to move forward.


Sam

References:

• Boyes, A. (13 July 2015). Make anxiety work for you: How to use 'overthinking to your advantage. Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/11731837/Make-anxiety-work-for-you-How-to-use-overthinking-to-your-advantage.html
• Daskal, L. (4 January 2016). 10 Simple Ways You Can Stop Yourself From Overthinking: Here are 10 simple ideas to help overthinkers stop spinning their wheels. Retrieved from https://www.inc.com/lolly-daskal/10-simple-ways-you-can-stop-yourself-from-overthinking.html
• Edberg, H. (9 August 2017). How to Stop Overthinking Everything: 12 Simple Habits. Retrieved from https://www.positivityblog.com/how-to-stop-overthinking/
• Mewburn, I. (2012). How To Tame Your PhD. Thesis Whisperer Books [www.amazon.com ebook]
• Raman, R. (14 July 2017). 11 Simple Ways To Stop Overthinking Everything And Take Control Of Your Life. Retrieved from https://medium.com/the-mission/11-simple-ways-to-stop-overthinking-everything-and-take-control-of-your-life-cf6de0b8d83f

read more "Ten Questions to Circumvent Over-Thinking"

Research Lostness Repairs

I have written about research lostness before (here, here and here), but read a great guest post on Thesis Whisperer blog by RMIT University's Rosie Chang (15 August 2018), about using some nous from the movie, The Martian (Scott, 2015).

Chang (15 August 2018) cited the last scene in the movie where Matt Damon's character, Mark Watney, is telling a class about the strategies he employed to get home:

"At some point, everything's gonna go south on you and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem and you solve the next one, and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home." (Scott, 2015)

Rosie suggested three groups of strategies that researchers could learn from the movie, identifying what she called external factors that were making us 'stuck':

• (a) stay alive, and
• (b) contact earth for help, and
• (c) take the first step, and "just begin".

What interested me is that Rosie didn't talk about the internal factors which make us stuck. I think they are even more interesting... and challenging.

We have to get our heads around the fact that usually, only we can get ourselves out of the hole. Only we have the insight to know what is holding us back. We often have to change our approach in order to make the rest work out. We have to decide to 'survive', and to face the things that challenge us... and to face them head-on.

Sometimes it is a lack of self-belief that we can do the task in front of us. Sometimes we avoid competing in case we fail. Sometimes we think we are frauds and have no right to a voice, or to be in the arena. Sometimes it is simply self-sabotage. Sometimes it is a resistance to who we may become if we succeed. Sometimes it is hidden doubts about how success might change our relationships with those around us. We hold ourselves back, refuse to push forward, and stall.

All this boils down to fear. Fear of the unknown, of the new, of the change, and of our new potential selves. So how do we get past fear?

Lester Levenson in 1952 was diagnosed with a fairly serious medical condition, and used reflective questions as a tool to restore his joie de vivre. Using his questions can help us to work through and to let go of fear. We first need to reflect on all the things which may be holding us back, pick one to work on, and do the following four things (Dwoskin, 2003):

1. Focus on that thing that we would like to change our approach to, then
2. Ask ourselves one of the following 'coulds':
• Could we let this feeling go?
• Could we allow this feeling to be here?
• Could we welcome these feelings? Then,
3. Ask ourselves the following questions:
• Would we let this go/allow it to be/welcome it?
• Are we willing to let this go/allow it to be/welcome it? Then
4. Lastly, ask ourselves: When can we let this go/allow it to be/welcome it?

If we have trouble with the four steps above, the following exercise might help. Think about holding an old pencil. We hold it in front of us, gripping it REALLY strongly. While we are hanging onto it, we imagine the pencil is one of our fears, and our hand is who we are. We think about how if we hang onto the pencil for a long time, it will feel painful, but also 'normal'. Then we open our hand and roll the pencil in our palm. We think about the fact that we are holding it, that it's not holding us, nor is it fixed to us (Meier, 2014). We have the choice about dropping it. The pencil does not have the choice about letting us go. This is a good visualisation for building an internal locus of control (Daft, 2008).

The steps and the visualisation might help us to move a block. Good luck!

Sam

References:

• Chang, R. (15 August 2018). Is your PhD stuck on Mars? Apply the Martian Method. Retrieved from https://thesiswhisperer.com/2018/08/15/is-your-phd-stuck-on-mars-apply-the-martian-method/
• Daft, R. (2008). The Leadership Experience (4th ed.). USA: Thomson-South Western.
• Dwoskin, H. (2003). The Sedona Method: Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Well-Being. Sedona AZ, USA: Sedona Press.
• Meier, J. D. (2014). How To Let Go of Limiting Emotions Using the Sedona Method. Retrieved from http://sourcesofinsight.com/how-to-let-go-of-limiting-emotions-using-the-sedona-method/
• Scott, R. (producer/director) (2015). The Martian. USA: Twentieth Century Fox.

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Recovering project enthusiasm

I was talking to my research students the other day about the doldrums; that patch of equatorial still air, where sailing ships stalled in the midst of their journeys from the northern hemisphere to the southern. I was using it as a metaphor for stalling in our research projects. I realised after the lecture that I forgot to give them two key pieces of advice.

When we get into a project, everything can be going along swimmingly, and then a combination of circumstances can derail us. Where we were once making steady progress, we now stall. Or where we thought we had a good plan, it turns out there are gaps that we hadn't accounted for at the outset. Perhaps a key piece of data becomes difficult to get, or we get an unexpected delay on being able to start our primary data gathering. Sometimes it is simply a combination of who we are outside our research project that suddenly makes the project overwhelming.

This thing, that I called lostness, is something that happens regularly. And by regularly, I mean probably at least once in every research project. I think the main reason for lostness is that each research project has to be developed from the ground up, by us. There is no tick box template that we can follow to find the right way in to finding our research question, for gathering our data, and then for managing our write up: we have to create our project anew, from whole cloth, each time.

While I have written about lostness before (here, here, and here), it never hurts to have another visit to the antithesis of lostness: Strategy Land! There are a number of strategies that we can put in place to help us when we get lost, but there are two I favour. The first process is to have honest conversations about being lost. We need to develop a really strong and honest relationship with our research supervisor, or, if that is not possible, get an outside mentor who can fill this function for us. When we start to feel lost, we book a meeting to discuss why, and to come up with strategies to get us back on track. I personally find that this is probably the best way of managing lostness. The power of supervisor conversations ties in with work done by Adam Grant at the Wharton Business School, where five minutes spent talking to a client about why we are doing our job reinvigorates us and helps us key back in to our KPIs (Fanning, 8 August 2017).

Secondly, we need to have a really detailed research plan worked out ahead of time. We need to detail what we are doing, on what days, at what times, and for how long, from the outset of our project. These blocks of time and tasks need to be in our diaries, and we need to be disciplined about not taking them off until the job is done. Really thorough planning will help keep us moving when we're lost, as, if you are task oriented, we like to get things ticked off our diary task lists. Having everything in our diary, and chunked down into small segments, will help to keep us making progress until we come out of the doldrums (read more about planning here, here and here).

So, we need two key tools: our supervisor, and a plan. They will comfort us always!


Sam

• Reference: Fanning, B. (8 August 2017). Wharton Research Reveals a Powerful Way to Boost Your Team's Productivity. Retrieved 10 August 2017 from https://www.inc.com/ben-fanning/wharton-research-reveals-the-ultimate-5-minute-str.html

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Regaining momentum when lost

What contributes to us losing our way on a research project? The 'monsters in our box' are a lack of planning, a lack of planning detail, over-packing our diary, not building good habits, procrastination, not understanding why things need to be done, and not having a 'safe pair of hands' to unburden ourselves to can leave us feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by a project.

Understanding that these monsters will prevent us from success enables us to put things in place to avoid falling into their traps.

Some things that will help get us back on track when we strike any of these monsters are:

1. Plan. A detailed plan will help us keep on track, especially if we have planned well enough to have micro-tasks, daily goals, weekly aims and tasks that can be reorganised as we complete or reassign importance (read more here).
   
   
2. Micro-tasks. When we feel lost, we can use the detail in our plan to get a couple of micro-tasks done. Then at least we have moved further forward, which usually makes us feel less burdened (read more here).
3. Build routine. If we develop a routine for our research project, supported by our detailed plan, and block out time for our tasks, we are likely to stay on track. Some of us want to do the same job at the same time in the day: others prefer variety. Do what works for you. However, we have to be consistent in actually doing the work we set out to do.
4. Re-establish routine QUICKLY when derailed. It takes us roughly 70 iterations to embed a habit in ourselves (Lally, 2010), and around 7 missed iterations to make it hard work to rebuild momentum. It is MUCH easier to regain our habits if we only miss one or two days. As Gilkey (2016) says, “the longer [we]’ve been out of [...our] routine, the longer it’s going to take for [us] to transition out of and into it again”. If we leave things for a week or two weeks, it becomes significantly harder to rebuild habits: so try to do something every day.
   
5. Diarise. Enter our planned events into Google Calendar (read more here), and only tick tasks as being done once we have completed them. We need to be realistic too about how much time tasks will take: we have to resource ourselves well with large enough timeslots.
   
6. Set a timer. If we are really having trouble getting into things, there is a cool trick - using a timer - that takes one hour to work through here. Usually by the end of an hour, we are back on track.
   
7. Understand 'why'. Be really clear about why we need to do each of the tasks in our plan, and why each step is important. Reminding ourselves of 'why' will help keep us on track.
   
8. Buddy up. Have a friend who we can compare notes with regularly. Knowing that we will be checking in with them might be what gets us motivated to get just another couple of jobs done.
   
9. Talk to our Supervisor. When none of the listed techniques help, we need to go and see our supervisor. Straight away. We don't go dark and stop communicating: we meet and say "I am lost". The resulting discussion will help us no end.

So, to all my students reading this, please come to see me straight away when you are lost. Together we will forge a path to help you complete your projects well.


Sam

References:

• Gilkey, C. (2016, 23 August). Pulse #86: Buffer Days: The Key to Easier Travel. Retrieved 17 January 2017 from http://www.productiveflourishing.com/pulse-86-easier-travel/
• Lally, P., Van Jaarsveld, C. H., Potts, H. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European journal of social psychology, 40(6), 998-1009.

read more "Regaining momentum when lost"

Lostness

It's funny (funny-strange), but I get a sense of when students are derailing from their research projects. However, that is only when they are close to actual derailment.

You see, they go dark on me.

They stop sending email enquiries.

They stop asking to meet with me to discuss their project. I only see them in class, and they disappear at the end without stopping to have the normal chat.

They stop - or cut back on - contributing in class.

When I see them on campus, they say "Everything is going fine!" and then hurriedly rush away.

The worst thing is, the pattern start so small, but by the time I see it, it is usually quite a large problem. And some students are much better than others at hiding it.

But the pattern is the same, year after year.

Like I say, they go dark.

So why does that happen?

Research projects are very tricky beasts. When researching, we are creating something entirely new, that is never existed before. There is no real 'plan', because everything is uncharted territory. While we have guidelines, and we research other researcher's work, we have to create our own structure, our own method of working and research, curate our own materials, determine how we will manage and how we will communicate, and build our entire piece of work from nothing.

We make something new out of whole cloth.

This feeling of ‘lostness' is daunting when you're post-graduate, let alone when you're an undergraduate. But it is a really normal part of a research project. The trouble is, undergraduates have few tools to deal with it.

They have often not been this lost before, because undergraduate papers have a lot of structure.

Their sense of 'lostness' is quite profound and all-encompassing. They stop working, and that adds to their burden. Then they think they can never complete anyway, so they might as well drop out of the course.

On reflection, I think there are three main things that happen - possibly in order, maybe as a process - to students. They are all related to confidence, decision-making, and clarity.

1. Decision-making & Clarity. They get stuck at a pivot point, and cannot go forward until the 'stuckness' is passed.
2. Confidence & Decision-making. They loose confidence in their ability to make the 'right' choices.
3. Clarity & Confidence. The very scale of the project itself overwhelms them, and they can't see what the next move should be.

This is where a clear and detailed project plan can save a student project from derailing.

With coaching, the student can fall back on their project plan, and just plod through the steps that they have charted, until they get out of the doldrums.

Sam

• Reference: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1834). The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in H. Gardiner (Ed, 1985), The New Oxford Book of English Verse. UK: Oxford University Press (p. 529)

read more "Lostness"

Help with Research Lostness

I have been writing for a while on research 'lostness'.

I thought that as a resource for students, I should link a range of my posts in a single place, so they could be found - and consumed - more easily. 

First we look at loss of confidence:

• The Slough of Despond
• The Slap in the Face with a Dead Fish Moment
• Knowledge, expectations and fear

Secondly, what makes us lose confidence:

• Fixed Mind vs Growth Mindset
• Fake it Until You Become it
• Not enough reflection: Reflecting: where Schön meets Kolb

Then lastly, we look at strategies to help us overcome that loss of confidence:

• Micro-action planning
• Research Planning Tips
• Building a Research Planning Timeline
• Organising my Study
• Out of the Slough of Despond
• Procrastinating? Ask Five Questions...
• The Harder I Work the Luckier I Get
• The intersection of data transcription and pulling pig fern

I hope that helps!

Sam

read more "Help with Research Lostness"

Academic Dishonesty

I have a student whom I know has cheated on their final report. This student has obviously purchased their assignment - sub-contracted the writing up of their research.

The reason that I know this is that their submitted work is of a far higher quality than I know they are capable of. I have been talking to the student for the semester about their work, I have been marking their progress reports and their oral presentations, and I know that they do not have the deep level of understanding to be able to turn in the complexity of work that they have turned in.

The language is well above their level of spoken English. The spelling is not New Zealand English. There is no exploration of the local market, local conditions, the local industry or New Zealand in general. The student has missed threading through key information which is required by New Zealand legislation in the industry their report tackles. The assignment is somewhat off-track, overall.

I have marked the work, but it has taken three hours to forensically go through each section, each point and each connection. I have gone through the journals that the student has cited and found that some don't exist, the references are often incorrect, and the resulting articles are generally not well-related to the topic.

In addition, the participant information and consent paperwork created by the student has my name as the interviewer, instead of their own.

So. The student has supposedly conducted interviews with two local business owners. I decided to email them both to ask whether they did indeed participate in interviews with the student.

I will wait to see what happens: whether the interviewees reply. If I get a response back that the interviews did not happen, then the way forward is clear - I pass this to my head of school and it becomes an academic misconduct issue, and is out of my hands.

However, that does not deal with the dishonesty aspect of purchasing the assignment.

If the interviewees come back and said that, yes, they have talked to my student, it is hard to know what to do about this case, with the tools that I have available to me at present.

Why can't we be overt about it? I don't quite know why I can't just say "X, I know you bought that assignment. Why?" I don't want to have to do a "j'accuse!" thing. It is distasteful: but it is equally distasteful to me to ignore the dishonesty.

A way around it - hah! passive aggressive behaviour - is that we could change our research paper prescriptors to include an optional assessment, ie, if considered necessary by the organisation, to have students provide an oral defence of their research. Then that gives us a mechanism for dealing with the problem without having to be overt.

What infuriates me about this situation is that learning has not really taken place: that students will not walk out the door with the skills that they should have, because they have not met the learning outcomes. This student cannot do 'what it says on the tin' by having completed the course.

And someone will hire yet another dishonest business student in a world where business students are the most dishonest of all graduates (McCabe, Butterfield & Trevino, 2006).


Sam

• Reference: McCabe, Donald L., Butterfield, Kenneth D. & Trevino, Linda Klebe (2006). Academic dishonesty in graduate business programs: Prevalence, causes, and proposed action. Academy of Management Learning & Education, September 2006, Volume 5, issue 3 (pp. 294-305).

NB: One of my colleagues made a valuable point about the cost of education to our students: that if they are not New Zealand taxpayers, they have paid and invested so much in each paper that they cannot afford to fail. They will then do anything to pass; and if we were in their situation - young, away from home, with the pressure of parental expectation, the hopes of their future career opportunity hanging on each positive outcome, and the lack of affordability to repeat - we would do that too. He makes a good point.

While I would like to think that I would not be expeditous, I think if I were in that situation that my colleague is right: I would definitely be tempted to be dishonest too. And gee, that's a sad thing to think about yourself.

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Want Growth? Only Praise for Hard Work

Professor Carol Dweck is interested in what influences us. As a teacher, she has got interested in what happens in the brains of children, when they are rewarded for work they have done. She set up an experiment where she divided a group of 10 year old maths students into three groups, and set them all the same maths test.

The interesting thing was that each group was given a positive response, regardless of how well they did on the test. Group A was told that "That's a really good score! You are really smart at this!". Group B was told that "That's a really good score! You must have worked really hard!". Group C, the control group, was told that "That's a really good score".

The students were then given some new problems to do straight after the test, in vary degrees of difficulty. They could chose whatever problems they would like to do.

There were some differences in the level of problems that the students chose to do next. Group B, the students who were told they had worked very hard, chose harder problems than those they had taken in the test. Group A, the students who were told they were smart, chose much easier problems than those they had done in the test.

So they took a look at what was going on by repeating the test with participants in an fMRI machine. Our brains at rest, regardless of whether we show Group A or Group B behaviours, look the same. But when we are told we worked hard, and chose harder problems to work on, we can see our frontal cortex firing hard and the heat from our brains working hard on the next problem.

If we are a Group A student, and are told we are smart, our brains do not fire: if we are praised for ability, we have something we want to protect: we have 'talent' that we want to protect, a position that we have to defend. We don't want to risk our cleverness, and have it eroded away by taking on something that is too hard for us. Dweck says this is a "fixed mindset brain, looking oh-so-cool, fleeing, running from errors as quickly as possible" (2013).

The brain image of someone who has worked hard is something they can continue to affect themselves: the comment has given them control. They know that trying harder will gain them mastery of things that are difficult, and will build their resilience. This has created a growth mindset. "Researchers monitored in the brain as students worked on the tests and made errors. See the red hot brains on the left? Those are growth mindset students, detecting the errors, processing them and correcting them" (Dweck, 2013).

How well people bounce back from mistakes depends on their beliefs about learning and intelligence. For individuals with a growth mind-set, who believe intelligence develops through effort, mistakes are seen as opportunities to learn and improve. For individuals with a fixed mind-set, who believe intelligence is a stable characteristic, mistakes indicate a lack of ability.

The brain is like a muscle. The harder we work it, the stronger it gets. "Every time you push out of your comfort zone to learn something new and hard, these neurons formed new connections and over time they would get smarter" (Dweck, 2013).

Neural pathways build and strengthen with repetition, and these in turn build behavioural traits.

We need to praise ability, not effort, and understand the power of yet. As in "You haven't mastered this YET".

What a great gift: we can improve with hard work. It means never telling someone that they can't do something: only that they have yet to find the key to unlock that particular skill set.

A fixed mindset leaves us stuck. We are unable to grow until we are able to honestly reflect and allow other possibilities in: until we have dismantled our encircling lager. The fixed mindset is a place of fear and avoidance.

A growth mindset lets us embrace challenges, helps us to keep our resilience when everything around us turns to custard, helps us see the incremental gains we are making towards mastery in our chosen profession, helps us learn from adversity, from criticism, from difficulty and from new situations; and helps us adopt other's learning and build it into our own practice. It helps us take on new ideas, and to think of new practices.

It is a virtuous cycle that builds.


Sam

To test your own mindset, go to
http://mindsetonline.com/testyourmindset/step1.php  

References:

• Dweck, Carol (2013). Professor Carol Dweck 'Teaching a growth mindset' at Young Minds 2013. Retrieved 14 February 2014 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXhbtCcmsyQ
• Dweck, Carol (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. USA: Baltimore Books
• Luft, Caroline Di Bernardi; Nolte, Guido & Bhattacharya, Joydeep (2013). High-Learners Present Larger Mid-Frontal Theta Power and Connectivity in Response to Incorrect Performance Feedback. The Journal of Neuroscience, Volume 33, issue 5 (pp. 2029-2038)
• Moser, Jason S.; Schroder, Hans S.; Heeter, Carrie; Moran; Tim P. & Lee, Yu-Hao (2011). Mind Your Errors: Evidence for a Neural Mechanism Linking Growth Mind-Set to Adaptive Posterior Adjustments. Psychological Science, December 2011, Volume 22, issue 12 (pp. 1484-1489)

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Practice Practice Practice = Habit

My husband said about two hours ago that he was going to bed. Instead of thinking, "Yay! I can go to bed early!", I have been moping around my office trying to work out why I felt so at a loose end.

Then I realised.

For the past ten weeks, on a Wednesday, I have been reading and interacting with others on a MOOC. The MOOC was an edX course, How to Survive your PhD. My Wednesday nights have been #survivephd15 nights, where I have been focused on learning, on catching up with all that has gone on since the last time I checked in with this 13,500-strong community, on the edX site, on Twitter, on Fb and in sourcing readings.

But tonight is different.

It is different because the MOOC is over.

I didn't think I would miss it, but I do.

The title of this blog post comes from my old HR lecturer: it was something he would say regularly in class (along with his prescriptive instructions for us taking our notes "Now, take a new line..."!).

What he meant by that was that if we repeated a behaviour enough, we would build it into our psyche. We didn't build habits by not repeating the behaviour we wanted: we built habits by doing the work. Regularly. Often. Ad nauseam.

I built a habit: Wednesday night MOOCing for ten weeks. There is no more MOOC; thus I am suffering #survivephd15 withdrawal.

<sigh>

I am sad, and lost. Two emotions that we didn't cover on the MOOC. Perhaps I should tweet Dr Mewburn and suggest another course...?!

...so instead I went and read all the #HDRblog15 challenge posts. Maybe Debsnet's challenge will become my new Wednesday night treat. Or maybe I should put on my big girl panties and make my own entertainment.

But I want to keep the habit I have built, and keep working on how a PhD works, not just in it :-)


Sam

References:

• Mewburn, Dr Inger (2015). How to Survive Your PhD: Activity Description | Final Activity. Retrieved 7 November 2015 from https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:ANUx+RSIT-01x+3T2015/courseware/db2b871a078e455cb2fa43f78e5b362e/771699afb7244bc787923d85be817b01/?discussion_page=1
• the édu flâneuse (2015). The Research Student Blog Challenge – #HDRblog15 – November 2015. Retrieved 7 November 2015 from https://theeduflaneuse.wordpress.com/2015/10/22/hdr-blog-challenge-2015/ 

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Knowledge, expectations and fear

When I had just started doing my Master's, my supervisor asked me to present my research at a highly specialist and elite conference (to be delivered nine months in to a two year programme of study).

To start off with, I was SO excited. I had been asked to present at a conference!

Then, as the realisation dawned, the request completely derailed me. I had fear, imposter syndrome (Clance & Imes, 1978), and feelings of isolating inadequacy all at once. I felt that I couldn't talk to my supervisor about it (as he had asked me to submit an abstract, so must think that I was 'good enough'), nor was there anyone else that I knew who was going through the same experience (I was the last - and only - Master's by thesis student in the programme, and I was studying at distance).

Perfect storm.

I ended up writing a submission in answer to the call for abstracts for conference, but the fear was almost crippling. My fear delayed my submission - I put off writing it, and then submitting it - until I was so late that the response wasn't reviewed, but was simply accepted.

I was so green that I didn't even realise that abstract were reviewed. That we didn't just auto-magically get in. This was my first time presenting at a conference, and, of course, it had to be at a conference that really meant something to me.

My supervisor was very encouraging, all the way through. However, if I had been given a more structured understanding of the process of abstracts, reviews and so forth, it would have been so VERY useful. I had no idea of any of that.

Academia is so arcane, we often don't even know to ask, because we don't know what we don't know.

Because of my experiences, because it is so easy to assume foreknowledge, I try to be more explicit with my research students. I have deliberate conversations, and encourage them to be open with me and to be questioning. And I probably only get it right half of the time, even then.

And I try to keep front-and-centre how daunting these requests can be.


Sam

• Reference: Clance, P. R. & Imes, S. (1978). The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention. Psychotherapy Theory, Research and Practice, 15(3), 241-249. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0086006

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The Slap in the Face with a Dead Fish Moment

I am currently undertaking Inger Mewburn's MOOC called How to Survive Your PhD, on edX.

One of the first discussion topics explores the black hole of despair that academics fall into during the research process. There is also a great deal of literature in the wild detailing how many PhD candidates fail to complete, and why.

Apparently a lot of failure is driven by poor self-worth and self-belief. It is often called imposter syndrome, where we are sure that others will rip through our carefully constructed tissue of competence and discover the fraudulent, incompetent and crippled human beings that we really are.

Researched nearly 40 years ago by Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, we show imposter syndrome through "anxiety, lack of self-confidence, depression, and frustration related to inability to meet self-imposed standards of achievement" (1978, p. 242).

Apparently women suffer from this far more than men. Dammit: AND we get paid less!

I too have a big chunk of the I'm not worthies. However, one of my colleagues very powerfully pointed out a flaw in my own self-depricating argument when I was doing my Master's thesis. This gave me a drowning-in-self-doubt life buoy that I reuse regularly.

We were talking about my supervisor, a worthy, kind, supportive and erudite professor. My colleague said, "You trust [X]'s opinion, don't you?"

"Yes", I replied.

"So when [X] thinks you are doing really well, why don't you believe it?"

Doh.

I call this my "slap in the face with a dead fish" moment. I try to keep my life buoy close by, as I am about to start my PhD, in case I get sucked back into the rip tide of "I am not worthy".


Sam

Chris Jones (2015) wrote an interesting piece on RockYourResearch detailing his journey, which inspired me to write this piece (see link in references below).

References: 

• Australian National University & Mewburn, I. (2015). How to Survive Your PhD. https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:ANUx+RSIT-01x+3T2015/info  
• Clance, P. R. & Imes, S. (1978). The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention. Psychotherapy Theory, Research and Practice, 15(3),  241-249.
• Jones, C. (2015). Impostor syndrome made me want to quit grad school. http://www.rockyourresearch.com/impostor-syndrome/

read more "The Slap in the Face with a Dead Fish Moment"

The Harder I Work the Luckier I Get

A friend of mine, Kenn Butler (2015), reposted a story originally told by Ange Fonce (2014), about a 'gifted' person who travelled the world doing what they loved.

This person practices daily, saying "I always start the day with two hours of practice & do three hours in the evening. If I didn't I would be hopeless!" (Fonce, 2014) The talent that others see is down to years of hard work and dedication. The 'gifted' person has made their own gift.

As Ange says "natural talent counts for little unless it is supercharged by self-discipline" and "Self-discipline can, to some extent, overcome lack of natural talent" (2014).

We can be sucked into what Ange calls the "myth of easy success", were we see the success, but don't see the thousands of hours that successful people put into their training, their research, their drills, their reviewing, being coached, being observant, and being driven to hone their professional skills (2014).

I think that what gets these people into the 'gifted' category is the ability to strategise, control and direct their thoughts, feelings and behaviours. They can wrestle with their own limiting mental models and find a way to turn off that negative inner voice, and keep working on limitations until they can get past them. They build their confidence in their own abilities by risking and succeeding, or risking and failing - and then working out why they failed and risking again.

Ange (2014) suggests there are seven tactics to becoming successful:

1. Don't wait to 'feel like it'. Self-discipline is hard, don't expect ease. Set a routine to practice and stick to it, even when you don't feel like it
2. Finish what you start (as a point of honour). Ange suggests that we say to ourselves that "Today is not over until I have done everything" for everything that is on today's agenda; that we can literally, not go to bed until what we set out to do is complete.
3. No excuses. Be scrupulously honest with yourself. Say "I am not going to go for the run now because I am too soft and lazy". You might find that honesty is harder to take than doing the thing you are trying to avoid.
4. Make self-discipline of your scheduled time "non-negotiable". At the scheduled time, start. At the end of the scheduled time, stop. Start again, if you are on a roll, in your scheduled free time. When you procrastinate, in Ange's words, you "start to 'leak' motivation".
5. Create deadlines. Even if there aren't any 'real' due dates, create some so you get the work done. Use your deadlines as non-negotiable time. Do jobs on the clock to help keep you focused. Just like any training, alternate sprints and endurance work, drills and strategy. 
6. Avoid negative people. Keep working at your own goals and don't get derailed by others. As Ange says, "Seek the advice of experts by all means and learn from the best, and never accept negativity from people who have not themselves achieved what it is you are set upon achieving".
7. Don't get hijacked by trivia. Don't let your inner two year old rule the show by distracting you with small things that can be ticked off as complete instead of doing the real work, like answering email, playing computer games or polishing a job that is already complete. Focus on the real work first, then do the trivia when the the real work is done. The lure of it will disappear like morning mist.

Good tactics.

Sam

The title of this article is based on a quote from Gary Player "It's a funny thing; the more I practice, the luckier I get" (Yocom, 2002).
References:

• Butler, Kenn (2015). Kenn Butler Leadership Newsletter: Self-Discipline. Retrieved 31 May 2015 from http://us3.campaign-archive2.com/?u=9f97bb333086697c5703a153e&id=86a15d6164&e=d3fd8ec5fb
• Fonce, Ange (2014). 7 Self-Discipline Methods To Help You Acquire Your Goals. Retrieved 1 June 2015 from http://www.intimate-relationships.com/the-dynamic-express/7-self-discipline-methods-to-help-you-acquire-your-goals#axzz3bnpe0r3D
• Yocom, Guy (2002). Gary Player: take it from the man in black: rats save lives, caning isn't all bad, and we make our own breaks. Golf Digest. Retrieved 19 October 2010 from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HFI/is_10_53/ai_93487307/

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