Self-direction for resilience in research
Setting smart goals
Research is a difficult thing to plan. If we knew what the outcomes of the work we were doing were going to be, there would be no point in doing the research.
Having broader goals can help us manage the resilience-draining uncertainty in research outcomes. Having overarching goals helps us to set a direction of travel for our work. For example, having the goal of ‘finishing my current research project within the next 8 months of funding with a draft publication in that time’ creates a focus of ‘what actions am I taking today to take me towards the current research project; what data or observations can I capture towards publication?’
Having overarching goals can help you become more resilience. Such goals can provide ongoing motivation and act as a reminder that there is a bigger picture beyond the sometimes fruitless activity of day-to-day tasks.
Dr Heidi Grant Halvorson shares some techniques for delivering against your goals.
Thinking ahead: what outcomes do I want?
In terms of building your resilience, it is most important to think about the daily inputs that you can manage, to help us build the overall ability to bounce back or respond to setbacks. However, like the goals outlined in the previous section, it is often useful to think of the outcomes that you want from the behaviours that you employ on a daily basis.
Sometimes it is useful to spend some time reminding yourself to think about the bigger picture and focus on the outcome that you want from situations or pieces of work. Having an outcome focus can help to determine whether or not any piece of work fits with what you want to be doing or achieving in your career.
When you mindlessly say yes, or as importantly, don’t say no, you can find yourself with things that are not your work or that may be enjoyable but don’t move you forward in the things that are either pure enjoyment and fun or useful.
An interesting blog from Mindful Mind Hacking, which has 6 simple guidelines to help you develop well-formed outcomes.
Setting up forms of accountability
Sometimes our plans to do a large piece of work can feel like the kind of overwhelming task that never quite gets done and forms a mammoth project. It can feel difficult to get started, acting like a burden that we carry everywhere – grinding us down when we are doing something more pleasant and sitting there as an expectation when we need to be doing something else.
So, two things may help. Firstly, to break down the bigger project into smaller tasks that seem more do-able and feasible to fit into a particular timescale. Secondly, to create a plan to be delivered by a particular time or date for review by others for comment or completion. Creating accountability with other people for delivering smaller tasks prevents us from drifting. It helps us to make progress when the task is big and the major deadlines are a long way off.
Researcher Tanya Boza writes on her blog about creating accountability for work and personal goals.
Creating a writing habit
Writing is such an important part of being a researcher and the dread of writing or not being able to find the time to write, can nag away at us and take up time and space that we could be using for something else. This raises the question about whether writing is a resilience builder or a resilience drainer for you and what you might do about it?
Senior academics talk about the importance of writing every day, writing regularly and having a sense of what they are writing now and planning to write in the future. Professor Sarah Moore, from the University of Limerick, talks about having a writing strategy for papers that is ‘one in my head, one on the desk, one out for review – one in, one on, one out’ and many have a practice that is about writing something, however small, every day.
These two groups provide support for researchers in the writing process:
Done is better than best
We can sometimes notice that our level of resilience is in inverse proportion to the size of our to-do list. The more overwhelmed we appear, the less resilient we can feel. Often by trying to be ‘excellent’ in all areas of work, one can end up putting energy into too many different things at the same time, therefore being unable to give adequate time and attention to the most important areas of work.
There are clear messages in books like Deep Work by Cal Newport, Overwhelmed by Bridgid Schulte and Do More Great Work by Michael Bungay Stanier: by focusing on the areas in your life, at both work and home, which are of most importance to you, will make the biggest difference. How not to let perfect be the enemy of good or to accept that some minor or less important tasks just may not get done.
Evelyn Tsitas writes on her blog about overcoming perfection tendencies.
Celebrating success
Celebrating success and feeling like you are making progress against your goals, challenges and objectives helps to strengthen your commitment to managing yourself. It doesn’t need to be a big or demonstrative thing you do – it is about taking a short amount of time just to acknowledge that you did well at something before moving on to the ‘next thing’.
Academia involves so much failure on the road to success for every academic, however junior or senior. To be able to celebrate your own successes and those of others helps to balance out the struggle to get published or gain grant funding.
It can be easy for our failures to dominate our successes. Constantly focusing on what we haven’t achieved can be resilience draining. Keeping a list of successes, or adding them frequently to our CV, can be a way of keeping both failure and success in perspective.