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Until now, I've been posting my view of the workshops we've held on Defeating Self Sabotage on my blog, but no longer. I've now set up a forum on this topic and my account of the last workshop we held on 1st November is posted there. The topics we discussed included building communication with supervisors and the very interesting concepts of "the Planning Fallacy" and "Implementation Intentions" - more details are on the Defeating Self Sabotage Forum.
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The theme of the workshop held on Friday 20th October was motivation – more on this below.
We began the workshop with our usual reflective exercise on how we’d gone with tasks that had been specified at the previous workshop. We now have a “log of progress” for everyone, and despite the fact that not everyone feels happy with their progress, everyone has moved forward on tasks related to their thesis or research. It seems to me that those whose issues were largely related to task management and setting priorities, feel they are achieving better results than those for whom the issues are more complex.
We moved onto a discussion of motivation, since motivation is related to an ability to think our way around problems rather than be defeated by them. We discussed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and also theories of motivation and goal orientation. The concept of “Implementation Intentions” was also briefly introduced.
According to Maslow, our hierarchy of needs moves through physiological, safety and security, social, self esteem and self actualisation. The highest level, that of self actualisation, is our need to express our potential and is the level at which we need to operate in challenging projects that require creativity, such as a PhD. Unfortunately, if our lower level needs remain unmet, we are not free to operate effectively at higher levels. We discussed what this hierarchy may mean in the environment experienced by research students. Apart from the obvious issue of financial stress (particularly if the Scholarship has run out), other issues that may commonly prevent PhD students from achieving their potential, are feelings of isolation (social needs), poor self esteem (seemingly always under challenge when feedback on work is given) and even concerns about safety if there is bullying or intimidation in the work environment. We discussed all of these, but in particular, the challenges of maintaining self-esteem in an academic environment where critical peer review is the name of the game. A paper by Prof. David Pannell entitled “Prose, psychopaths and persistence: personal perspectives on publishing” (http://cyllene.uwa.edu.au/~dpannell/prose.htm) was a useful point of discussion.
Motivation and goal orientation looks at 3 extremes of goal orientation, and of course we all have a mix of each of these extremes.
- Mastery goal orientation. People who are strongly this way inclined gain a lot of satisfaction from attaining competence. They are likely to show persistence in the face of difficulties, because they find overcoming difficulties intrinsically rewarding.
- Performance goal orientation. People who are strongly this way inclined require extrinsic rewards (eg praise, gain in status, recognition) to stay motivated.
- Social goal orientation. People who are strongly this way inclined require meaningful social interaction on tasks they undertake, in order to maintain their psychological well-being.
We all reflected on our own balance of orientations, and discussed how and if we could manipulate our research environment to better suit our personal style.
Finally, one of the participants at the workshop drew our attention to some literature on “Implementation Intentions”. This concept is tied to the formation of goals, but talks about how our external environment and techniques such as visualisation can be used to trigger automatic action towards our goals. More on this at the next workshop.
We concluded the workshop as always, with plans for the coming 10 days. Our next workshop will be held at 2-4pm on Wednesday 1st November in Guild Seminar Room 1. All welcome.
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The intricacies of PhD supervision were highlighted in the workshop entitled “Engaging students through supervision and writing” held on Friday 13th October at CATL. A common theme was the need to find a balance between possible extremes, and to adapt the point of balance to different students, stages of the candidature and research topics. Presenters were Karen Hall, an “almost completed” PhD candidate, and two experienced supervisors, Prof. Philippa Maddern and Prof. Catherine Belsey.
There’s the need to find balance between having a professional working relationship of the employer-employee type, and allowing for the sort of personal involvement inherent in working together on a long term project that needs to make a significant and original contribution to knowledge. Research is done by people within the broader context of their lives, and not by “research automatons”.
Two key balances within this relationship are between intervention and autonomy, and between criticism and encouragement. An appropriate balance in these areas will facilitate the development of independent researchers who produce the best work they are capable of, without falling into the traps of excessive perfectionism.
According to Karen Hall, students need their supervisors for guidance, mentoring and perspective. According to the supervisors, facilitating interaction between their students (eg critical reading of each other’s work) makes supervision easier and more effective.
Students need guidance in the practical as well as academic aspects of their research.
On the practical side, they need help with project management skills (eg time management and goal setting), with procedural aspects of candidature (eg research proposals, annual reports, protocols for thesis submission, applying for travel funding) and establishing a constructive and emotionally safe framework for supervisory meetings. Reciprocal trust between student and supervisor was seen as crucial by all speakers.
On the academic side, students need guidance in conceptualising the project as it evolves from an idea into a thesis. As Karen said, research is often a search for direction in what can be useful and what can be stimulating, and students need help to see where their work is situated in the wider body of knowledge. This sort of help often provides the impetus that takes the research in creative and useful directions.
Feedback on work is a crucial part of the guidance supervisors provide. Feedback will function most effectively as guidance if students feel free to ask for the sort of feedback they need at a particular time, and if they feel supervisors have engaged with the work presented. Feedback also needs to be structured to help students “find their own voice” within the conventions of academic writing.
Feedback requires meetings. Approaches to scheduling meetings varied among the speakers. Prof. Belsey found that scheduling meetings at regular time intervals tended to encourage avoiding behaviours such as excuse making and frequent rescheduling, and therefore to be counterproductive. Her approach is to ask students to meet with her when they have something to show. She also expects it to appear in reasonably polished form. A cat bringing its owner “the dead mouse” was the metaphor used to describe the situation here. Prof. Maddern prefers to be flexible, and to meet at intervals that would be most helpful to students. Often students are surprised at this and expect her to impose an external structure, which she felt was a shame because it means they are writing for her and not, as they should, for themselves. Where there are multiple supervisors, joint meetings were seen as necessary, though individual meetings with individual supervisors were also considered useful.
Students can develop tunnel vision with respect to their research and may become obsessive about it. Supervisors are needed to give a sense of perspective: when is the work good enough? when has enough work been done? how important is a particular part of the research in the overall scheme of the thesis? etc. In this context Prof. Belsey requires her students to develop and continually refine a plan of their thesis. They begin early in their candidature with a single A4 sheet on which they outline the titles for chapters and write a sentence or two about what the chapter might contain. This plan is revisited and amended after each meeting to discuss a particular piece of writing. Prof. Belsey maintains that meaningful work on a thesis cannot start until the student has an hypothesis.
Supervisors act as role models to their students, whether they intend to or not. Students gain their impressions of academic life from their supervisor’s academic life including approaches to teaching, publishing and winning research grants and also to the ‘work-life balance’.
In the final part of the workshop, Prof. Belsey outlined her approach to writing. She aims in her writing to capture the reader’s imagination, to stimulate their curiosity and to incite them to think. One favourite technique is to begin with a surprising proposition, so that the reader knows where she is going, but can’t imagine how she’s going to get there.
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The focus of this workshop was the “80/20” rule. According to this rule, 80% of our results, attainments and achievements come from only 20% of what we do. The key in prioritising how we spend our time then, is to identify that small subset of all our possible tasks, that will lead to the greatest progress. For self sabotagers, the challenge is to also identify behavioural and thought patterns that lead to us to spend undue time on tasks outside that “20%” group.
We began the workshop by reflecting on progress towards goals that had been articulated at the previous workshop. As part of this reflection, participants were asked to write down what they had actually done in the previous 10 days and to list what they felt they had achieved in that time.
While all members of the group had met their goals to some extent, many were dissatisfied with their progress. The discussion that followed brought up the following point: although it can feel frustrating not to have progressed as far with a plan as you’d hoped, you need to evaluate what you have achieved against longer-term perspectives eg if the difficulties in keeping to a plan have taught you something about research processes or your own approaches to your work you have achieved something that can help you be more effective in the long term. However you will not know that you have achieved anything, if you don’t reflect on what’s happened, and use all experiences as opportunities for learning and development. This means that you must make time for “intelligent” reflection as part of your daily plan. In our workshop, we used a self sabotage checklist accompanied by a list of suggested strategies for dealing with self sabotaging behaviours (see below), as a prompt for “intelligent” reflection.
The workshop concluded with planning for the following week. Each student was asked to identify the single most important practical thing they could do in the coming week, that would give the greatest progress with their PhD or Masters. As always, they were also asked to specify times when this could be done, to identify behaviours that are likely to get in the way of progress, and strategies to enhance progress with this task.
Our next meeting is scheduled for 2-4pm on Friday 20th October in Guild Seminar Room 1.
Self Sabotage Checklist
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Self sabotaging behaviour |
Strategies for dealing with it |
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Procrastination |
Action leads to motivation which then leads to further action.
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Perfectionism |
Work in ways that reduce fear (eg use a “draft” stamp on work you submit to your supervisor for comment).
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Taking on too much/not saying “no” |
Assess what you actually do against your long term priorities.
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Always looking for something better to come along |
Undertake all tasks using sound methodological principles of your discipline and document everything accurately. What you are doing IS part of your PhD and not a rehearsal for it.
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Commitment to things that are unlikely to work within a reasonable timeframe |
Seek guidance from others, read other theses in your field to see what a student can be expected to achieve. You can check out passed theses from a wide range of disciplines at http://adt.caul.edu.au (Australian Digital Thesis).
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Disorganisation |
Make lists, use notebooks, diaries, planners etc.
Set aside a specific time each day to organise a list of priorities for the next day.
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Underestimate time |
Multiply all your time estimates by 3 (or a larger number if you are a gross underestimater).
Undertake some timed trials before embarking on larger tasks and use simple arithmetic to estimate the likely time for the larger task.
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Negative focus on the self |
Remember that most people believe everyone else is doing better than they are. Calibrate your work against a range of theses that have passed.
Those with a strongly entrenched negative self view should seek help from the Counsellors at Student Services.
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Intentionally work in ineffective ways so that failure can be attributed to a lack of preparation etc. |
Admit to yourself that this is what you’re doing.
Work in ways that reduce fear.
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Anxiety |
Make time for physical activity, yoga, meditation etc.
Work in ways that reduce fear.
Recognise if you’re using anxiety as an excuse for underachievement.
Avoid group “anxiety-fests.”
Make use of the free Counselling Service at Student Services.
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Busyness with tasks requiring minimum skill |
Admit that’s what you’re doing.
Work in ways that reduce fear of undertaking difficult tasks.
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Not prioritising
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Follow basic principles of time management and remember the “80/20” rule.
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Drug and alcohol abuse |
Make use of the free Counselling service at Student Services
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This 10 page booklet written by Hugh Kearns and Maria Gardiner is now available for loan from the Learning, Language and Research Skills resource collection, located at Student Services on the 2nd floor of the Guild Village. This booklet lists “the 7 secrets”, asks you to rate your effectiveness on each, provides suggestions for improvement and a challenge to set yourself further goals.
The 7 secrets are:
- “care and maintenance of your supervisor
- write and show as you go: this is show and tell, not hide and seek
- be realistic: it’s not a Nobel Prize
- Say no to distractions: even the fun one and the ones you think you must do
- it’s a job: that means working nine to five but you get holidays
- get help: you are not an owner-operator single business person
- you can do it: a PhD is 90% persistence and 10% intelligence”
An audio recording of "The 7 Secrets" workshop that was held at UWA on 12th September 2006 is available from http://www.postgraduate.uwa.edu.au/home/current. This was an interactive workshop based on discussion, so the first 13 minutes of the recording are a bit hard to hear, but from that point on the recording is quite clear.
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On Friday 30th September Michael Azariadis and I met with a group of students to discuss their success in overcoming behaviours they’d identified as sabotaging their progress in their PhD or Masters. These students had previously attended Hugh Kearns’ workshop on “Self Sabotage: why we do it and what you can do about it”. The follow up workshop was divided into 3 parts: recall, reflection and planning.
In the first part, we asked students to recall the plans they’d made at the end of the initial workshop, to work more effectively on their research. We asked “What was the specific practical thing you planned to do after the workshop on September 11th, to move you closer to completing you PhD or Masters? When were you going to do this? What behavioural pattern/s did you believe was/were likely to interfere with achieving your goals?”
For most students, meeting with the supervisor within the coming week, setting up a schedule for further meetings and being proactive in obtaining feedback or help from others, were the practical things they felt would be most helpful to progress.
Avoiding the supervisor was a common behavioural pattern likely to interfere with progress. The underlying motivation for this avoidance was fear of appearing inadequate. One student described strategies he had used over the past 2 weeks to “desensitise” himself against the fear he felt in showing work to his supervisor. These included telling himself he was only a student and not an experienced researcher, using opportunities for informal contact with his supervisor as opportunities for friendly conversation, using a “draft” stamp on the work he submitted to his supervisor, and reminding himself that feedback is not personal criticism and is necessary for progress.
All students in the group found the fear that had driven them to avoid contact with the supervisor, to be largely unfounded, once they’d actually met with their supervisor. However in one case the meeting with the supervisor did not provide the help required with a particular aspect of the research. After discussion, we came to the conclusion that the student had probably asked for feedback on too large a unit of work and agreed that at the next meeting he should limit the discussion to the specific part of the research problem that was causing the greatest impediment to further progress. We also agreed that the student should email the supervisor with an agenda outlining the precise issue for discussion, before their next meeting. This student had also sought help from other academic staff in the School, and felt this would be a useful strategy to continue with.
Two students had planned to give thesis writing a higher priority than they had previously. Both decided to spend 2 hours a day on thesis writing before attending to other tasks. For one student it was important that members of the family were informed of this change in priorities. Another student highlighted the fact that she needed to give thesis writing a higher priority than research related tasks that were used as excuses to procrastinate on thesis writing and that research related tasks needed to be prioritised against interesting tasks relevant to broader career development, but not directly related to the PhD.
In the second part of the workshop students were asked to reflect on their behaviours in the week immediately following the initial workshop and to compare them with their behaviours in the preceeding week (ie 2 weeks later). In the discussion that followed we aimed to identify thought and behaviour patterns likely to help with or to hinder continued progress over time.
Helpful behaviours included setting well defined and achievable goals, taking responsibility for progress with the research and being proactive in seeking feedback and support.
Detrimental behaviours included setting goals that were too broad or poorly defined, overcommitting to various tasks and spending too much emotional energy on self blame when expectations were not reached. We also identified stress, tiredness and unexpected circumstances as factors likely to lead to a return to self sabotaging patterns of behaviour
The final part of the workshop involved planning for the coming week. Students were asked to write responses to the following questions:
What is the specific, practical thing in the next week that you could be doing to get closer to finishing your PhD or Masters?
When will you do this? Specify the times you have available for working on your research/thesis.
What behavioural patterns are likely to get in the way of doing this?
What strategies could you use to enhance your progress?
Most students needed help to define the specific task more clearly. For example one student planned to read 3 articles for a literature review in the coming week. This task was refined as follows:
Read articles 1 and 2 to provide a historical perspective to the development of… ( the research issue). This is required to fill out section…of the current draft of the literature review. Article 3 provides further discussion of… (a particular issue) that is inadequately dealt with in the current draft of the literature review. These articles will be read on …(a particular day of the week) when there are no other commitments and likely to be few distractions.
We also discussed strategies for amending plans when circumstances change and the unexpected happens. The point was made that external circumstances can’t necessarily be controlled but that your reaction to these circumstances can be, and will determine your effectiveness. The point was also made that drawing on the support of friends, family and the variety of services available to students at UWA is a wise strategy.
The next follow up workshop is scheduled to take place from 2-4pm on Wednesday 11th October 2006, in Guild Seminar Room 1.
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It's now over 2 weeks since Hugh Kearns ran a workshop entitled "Self Sabotage: why we do it and what you can do about it" at UWA. A number of participants left the workshop inspired and determined to work in more effective ways, so now it's time to follow up and see how everyone is progressing. We've scheduled a follow-up workshop for tomorrow afternoon, which will be based on a brief recap. of material covered by Hugh, and an extended period of reflection, discussion and planning for the next step in developing more effective ways of working.
A"Self Sabotage Checklist" accompanied by a list of possible strategies to deal with self sabotaging behaviours and thoughts, will be used as a basis for discussion.
Self sabotaging behaviours include:
1. Procrastination
2. Perfectionism
3. Taking on too much
4. Always looking for something better to come along
5. Commitment to things that are unlikely to work within a reasonable timeframe
6. Disorganisation
7. Consistently underestimating time
8. Consistently comparing yourself negatively with others
9. A negative focus on the self
10. Excessive anxiety
11. Cognitive busyness (always busy with tasks that require little skill)
12. Not prioritising
13. Drug and alcohol abuse
14. Intentionally working ineffectively so that failure can be attributed to a lack of preparation, to anxiety, to too many other important commitments, to drug/alcohol use etc (ie "without my problem, I'd be a failure now; with it, I'm a success on hold")
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I'm just getting ready for the next series of Research Skills Workshops scheduled for 1pm today. The number of students enrolling has been good, and we're looking forward to showing them MyResearchSpace at the end of the day. Michael Azariadis has written some instructions that we'll hand out, and these are what I have followed to post this Blog - they seem to be working! I'm embarrassed to say that I have not contributed any useful instructions yet. Posting this Blog, and adding a photo are my start to being a MyResearchSpace user. I'd like to use the facility for storing files - that's my next learning task. Have a great day!
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