This is the first of a three part series on how to tell your story. It's really common, at any career stage, to feel like you've lost track of where you're at and how to get where you want to be. If you're applying for jobs, trying to secure awards or recognitions, or going for promotion or tenure, then these episodes are for you! Even if you're not doing these things at the moment, figuring out "your story" can help reduce overwhelm, ease decision making and lower your cognitive, and actual, work. In this first episode I talk about what I mean by "telling your story" and the many ways it can make your life better.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to episode 14 of the PhD Life Coach, and for the first time we are doing a three part special. In this episode today, we are mainly going to be thinking about how you can tell your story about what your expertise is, why you are good at what you do, so that you can use that when you are applying for jobs, so that you can use that if you're applying for recognitions, so awards, teaching recognitions, those sorts of things or when you're applying for promotion.
Then next week, what the podcast is going to do is take you through really practically how you go from having your PhD or career at the moment where maybe the story feels a bit fuzzy, it feels like you're doing tons of different things that don't really add up into something that sounds impressive in job applications or promotion applications, and how you turn that not only into a good story in the sense of being able to describe it, but also a plan for what you're going to do in the future to make sure that you are well set up for all these different milestones that you want to hit.
So that's going to be next week, and then the week after that, we're going to think about how you tell the story of you as a person. What do you tell yourself that you are good at, that you are bad at, and what implications do all those stories have and how do they change the way we behave?
And in that session, we're really going to think about how can we mindfully choose how we describe ourselves and how we describe our strengths and weaknesses and capabilities and histories so that we can have the most positive experience that we can and achieve the things we want to achieve and enjoy the process along the way.
So let's go with how to create your own academic story. I've really experienced this from both sides. There's been several points in my career where I've needed to figure out what my story is, what my narrative is, what am I actually expert in. And then I've used that to get awards and recognition and promotion.
And I've also been on the other side. I've also been on job boards, on promotion boards, looking at other people telling their story, particularly when it's people that I know outside of that setting. So, people where I already know how they are as an academic and now they're applying for promotion or something.
And seeing them tell their story in a way that I know doesn't reflect how good they are, doesn't reflect how much they do. That's why this is so important because we all work hard, all academics work hard, and if we don't figure out what our story is, so much of that can just feel like an endless grind that we don't get recognition for, we don't give ourselves recognition for, and we never feel those senses of achievement. Whereas when you have this narrative, it's so much easier to essentially manage your career.
Now what is the advantage, why is it better? Well, firstly, it's having your own sense of a professional identity. So many academics that I work with, and I know I felt like this myself at several points in my career feel like they're a jack of all trades. They've perhaps changed research area since what they've trained in originally. Or they're doing a PhD in the area that wasn't what their bachelor's were in and they're just not quite sure what they are.
They allow those doubts to mean something about their abilities and about their prospects. They allow it to mean that they're not really a specialist, that they sort of do a bit of this and a bit of that, but they're not brilliant at anything. They allow it to mean that they're probably going to struggle to get jobs that they don't really know where their path leads for them.
I've been at that stage a couple of times in my career. I was very interdisciplinary as a researcher and had quite a lot of doubts about myself from that perspective because I couldn't really call myself a specialist in any one of the areas. After that, I really reconciled myself to the fact that I was a specialist in interdisciplinary science, and actually I'm super proud of that now, the range of places I've published, I'm really, really proud of. But at the time it was a cause of a lot of self-doubt and a lot of imposter syndrome, overwhelm and all these things that don't make you happier and they don't make you more productive.
I also faced it as a teaching focused member of staff. I felt like I did everything, had loads of ideas, enthusiastic, running around, but that I didn't really specialize in anything. I specialized in teaching, but nothing more specific than that. But as I narrowed it down and developed a narrative where I specialized in innovative assessments and curricular civic engagement.
So essentially bringing interactions with the community into the assessed curriculum. Then suddenly, I felt much more confident about who I was and what my expertise was. And when you have that inner sense of calm and clarity, it makes everything else so much easier. So one benefit is your own professional identity.
Now, one thing you might be saying here is “I don't want to be put in a box like that, though, that would limit me. What if I decide I want to do something different?” And I get it. I'm somebody who enjoys doing tons of different things. I have more ideas than I can ever fit into one lifetime, but, there's nothing about having a professional identity or a narrative of your career that prevents you from doing something different.
The key is that you know, you are doing something different and you are mindfully taking that on. So if you have a clear narrative, this is what I am and this is what I specialize in, and you get some other amazing idea, happy days.
I mean, as an example, coaching was an excellent separate, didn't fit with assessment, didn't fit with curricular civic engagement, but I was super fascinated by it, so I trained as one. But I did that mindfully knowing that it was different than the narrative that I had at the moment, but that I wanted to explore it, rather than it being a kind of haphazard “ooh, I do some of this and some of that, and oooh, here's a new idea, let's do some of that.” Creating a box, if you will, doesn't stop you stepping outside that box. It just means you know what you're doing and you can therefore make conscious decisions about it.
The second benefit of having a clear narrative is it makes it so much easier to make decisions and ultimately could lead to less work. Now we all need less work. Academia, I mean many careers, but academia's a nightmare for overwork. We have jobs come at us from all different directions. Our seniors can give us jobs to do. People below us can ask us to do stuff for them. Our colleagues ask us to do stuff for them. If you’re anything like me, maybe the worst one, your own brain suggests a whole load of things you could do. Oh, why don't we write this article too? Why don't we do that project? That'll be fun.
So we have all these millions of things and if we don't know a framework on which we decide which ones to do, again, we end up in this big pickle where we are just doing loads of stuff. We are really busy, but it doesn't feel particularly coherent or valuable.
If you know your narrative, you can look at each task and say, does it fit who I am as an academic? Does it fit my story? Now, you could decide to change your story. That's fine. There's nothing about this that has to be fixed, but it gives you that framework through which to make a decision.
Now, you might be saying, I don't have that much control. My supervisor tells me what to do. My head of school tells me what to do, and sometimes that's true. Often it's not as true as we like to tell ourselves.
Often if you say to your supervisor, that's really interesting, but I don't think it fits with this and this, what I'd really like to do is this, because look how that all fits together. Often there is much more of a discussion to be had there than you think there is. So keep that in mind.
The other angle is, yeah, sometimes we have to do things that are outside our main narrative, and that's not a problem. But there's some joys in knowing that they're outside our main narrative. Really, then you've got two choices. Do you do things to try and draw that into your main narrative? So if it's an admin role that you've been asked to take on, do you try and tweak it so that it fits your narrative a bit better? Or do you decide to do it good enough?
Because often as academics, as PhD students, we're high achieving people. We try and do everything to the best of our ability, and there's not time. There just isn't time to do everything to your best of your ability. And if you try to, you won't do everything to the best of your ability, but random chance will decide which things you do well and which things you do. Or pressures from other people will decide which things you do well and which things you do badly.
If you know your narrative and you know that some things are within your narrative, and some things that you need to do are outside your narrative, you can decide how much time and energy you give them.
Now, I'm not suggesting you slack off, but there are degrees of how well you do your job. You can tick it over, you can revolutionize it, you can do everything in between. So if you know your narrative and you're being asked to do something outside of your narrative, you can choose how much energy you give that thing.
Now, you might also be thinking that it's selfish to be strategic. It's selfish to half ass a job you've been asked to do. It's selfish to say no to things. And this is something I've really struggled with. I have judged myself when I've said no to things or done things badly. I've judged other people, sorry, old colleagues, I love you all, but I have, we've all done it. There is judgment. I'm not going to lie. There is judgment around being perceived as selfish in academia.
However, you have to look at the alternative. What's the alternative to making strategic decisions about your career? It's doing whatever you are asked to do that you think you can possibly squeeze in. It’s exhausting yourself. It's happening at the expense of your health, your wellbeing, your friends, your family, and your life outside of work. And so maybe it is selfish to be strategic. Maybe we should all be a little bit more selfish.
On the other hand, I'd really encourage you to think about in what ways does it benefit other people? For me to be strategic, the reasons I came up with, especially as I became more senior, were saying no to things serves as an example to.
I hated the fact when I was a more senior member of staff that there would be junior members of staff who would see me doing things and think that they have to do all the things that I do. And so I really wanted to model the fact that you don't have to work all weekend and you don't have to work late every night, and you don't have to say yes to everything. So that was partly why I felt it was not selfish to be strategic because then you're a model to others that you don't have to give up your life to be a successful academic.
I was a more pleasant person when I was being strategic. When I was trying to do everything for everyone and trying to stay on top of it all, I was not pleasant to work with. I was snappy and grumpy and demanding and impatient, and I didn't do the fun things. And I got cross with people who hadn't done the things I needed them to do, because I only had about 45 seconds to do that task before I needed to do something else. When I became more strategic, way more nice to work with, way more fun, way more laid back, more forgiving of other people who hadn't done stuff, more likely just to have a chat in the corridor and enjoy myself. Just nicer to be around.
In terms of your seniors, your seniors want you to be strategic. They want you to contribute to the strategic aims of the university. They want you to contribute to the strategic aim of your department, of your discipline. Yes, they need the place to run. They need you to do things, but ultimately they do want people that they can post about and shout about and tell people about these leading academics they've got in their department. These amazing PhD students, aren't they successful? So they want you to be strategic too.
Another reason why having a clear narrative, and this was really the focus at the beginning, was that it makes it so much easier to get jobs, to get awards, to get promotions. I've done all of those things, but really my insight came from the other side. It came from evaluating people's applications for national awards, evaluating job applications, promotions applications, and seeing how many times people that clearly had done loads of work and were really good at what they did, but it just wasn't memorable and it just wasn't really clear quite who they were and what they did.
And you might say, well, you should look through that. You should be able to see the quality. And yeah, you are probably right. I should, but if I've got one application here where they've worked really hard and done some really interesting things, and there's a super clear, memorable, understandable narrative where I can say, “oh, she's the one that does innovative assessments”, it's so much easier to pick that than it is to look at the one where it's like “she's done some good stuff. There's some interesting things in here. She's clearly worked hard, but she sort of does stuff interactive teaching and also some teamwork skills and some stuff to do with community work and some other stuff as well.” It's just not quite clear who she is.
And you think when you try to describe it's the one that “something”, it's not easy to say what that “something” is. So having that really clear narrative where someone can describe you as, “oh, they're the one that does X,” just makes it so much easier for us to see why you are getting the award, to see what impact you would bring if we employ you, to see why you are worthy of that promotion. It just makes it much easier to know who you are.
Now again, there'll be some negative thoughts popping up in your head, and I'm going to try and guess some of them. If there are others, let me know in the comments and I will, try and get back to you. But one that I often get is this, “ugh, I'm an academic. I shouldn't have to manage a brand. I'm not a brand, I'm an academic.” And I get it. None of us want to be those Twitter bros going, “here's 10 things I learned before I was 30” or whatever. No one wants to be that highly curated, commercially focused, really sort of out there, promoting yourself brand or very few people do.
That can feel really yuck. It can feel really uncomfortable. Again, we judge people who do it and do it a lot, but there are ways to do it so that it still feels really coherent and it feels really in line with who you are. And the thing I found most was it actually made it easier to promote myself and can I explain why? Because I've seen this in a lot of people's applications.
If you do a whole mishmash of things and then you come to write an application for something, then you're sort of telling all these stories of “I did this and I did this and I did this,” and the only way really that I know that you are any good at it all is because you say “and I was really good at this and I won this and I won that.” Whereas where you have a clear story, you don't have to have the “I'm an excellent this, I'm a leading practitioner in that”. You don't have to have all those superlatives because the story tells itself.
The story is “I specialize in x. On the basis of that I did this. This is the impact that that had. I then trained other people to do that. This has now had this wider impact, da, da, da.” It enables you to tell this much more factual story that demonstrates your impact, whereas when it's a bit all over the place, it relies on you having to sort of go “and I'm really, really good, honest, I promise.”
And that can feel super awkward to do and it doesn't lead to getting promoted and getting jobs and recognition. Demonstrating your impact is what does those things, and a clear narrative makes that so much easier to see.
The final benefit that I'm going to talk about today is opportunities. So one of the things that I found as I sort of honed what my professional narrative was as an academic, especially in that sort of teaching focused last 10 years or so of my career was that so many more opportunities came my way. Once it was clear what I specialized in, then it became much more often that people would say, “oh, you need to talk to Vikki about that.”
When I was just the teaching woman, I was useful on most projects, but there wasn't any “Oh, you really need to talk to Vicky about this” moments. Whereas once I'd established myself as a specialist, then if anyone in the university was doing something about innovative assessments, they'd talk to me about it because they knew that was my thing.
They knew that was what I talked about at conferences. That was what I'd written a book about. That was what I'd innovated change in my own program and across the university is, what I'd advise other universities about.
So once you have that narrative, you find things come to you. As you start telling your story in a way that people go, “oh, she's the one who, whatever,” they then know which opportunities to bring to your attention.
So I hope I've convinced you of the benefit of having a clear narrative of what your academic story is. Now, many of you might be thinking, because my listeners go from brand new PhD students to senior academics, so you might be thinking, when do I need to do this? And the answer, whoever you are, is now. If you are a first year PhD student, you can have this preliminary story of who you are at the moment. It doesn't have to be who you're going to be in 10 years time, this preliminary story of who you are at the moment, why you're doing your PhD, why you chose that one, what you want to do, to enable you to pick which things you're going to focus on during your study period. To make sure you get invited to the right things and you start to build name for the things that you do.
If you are a postdoc who's maybe changed direction a couple of times and looking for your first permanent post, this is the perfect way to get a narrative that you can then use when you're applying for jobs. If you are an early to mid-career academic, you're perhaps not looking to move, but you want to start getting some awards in your research or some recognitions in your teaching, then you can start creating this story to help you manage your workload, to get more recognition, to be able to apply for these things and so on.
It makes those applications so much easier. Once I had a narrative and had that story clear. I applied for Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and got it. I applied for National Teaching Fellowship and got it. I applied for full professor and got it, and all three of them used basically the same story, the same narrative, framed in different ways, but having that clear story made it so easy to write all of those things in a way that I had never experienced when I was applying for senior lectureship or my senior fellowship, for example. I got those too, but it was much more painful. So if you are in that early mid-career, having this clear narrative makes all that stuff so much easier.
And if you are a senior academic, this is useful for you in two ways. One, tell your own story. Where do you want to go next? What's the next steps of your career and how are you going to have that to fit your narrative, but also to help other people below you, the staff that you support and mentor, help them to craft their narratives if you're head of school, head department, you're giving out admin jobs.
can you help people have admin jobs that fit their own narratives? You'll have staff that are super more motivated to do those jobs and to do them well if it fits their clear narrative. So you can use this to help yourself, but you can also use it to help other people.
How do you do it? That's the next big question, and that is the question we're going to be talking about next week.
So next week I'm going to give you a step-by-step guide to going from having a chaotic, stressful, pulled in lots of different directions, spinning all the plates career, to having a clear narrative as to who you are and what you do to make decisions in the future, reduce your work, know who you are and get the recognition you deserve. So see you all next week to get working on that.
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