Print This PostI’m Scottish and I speak fast. At least, that’s what I am told often. I’m definitely Scottish, sure, but the fast I am less sure about. When I am home and in non-academic contexts, I am considered slow-speaking, drawling through my words like I have all the time in the world. In the academic world, I am often fast and impenetrable, with an accent that is already hard for some people to decipher. For ages, I have tried to reconcile these extremes, and felt confused for a long time as to why there was such a difference for me between these different worlds.
Like many, I speak faster when I am nervous, it is something that has stressed me out for years, every time I do a talk at a conference or a meeting. I even regularly have to re-record these podcasts to ensure I can be understood because even I can hear the speed (I purposefully slow down in these – this is maybe around 0.6x my usual speed). Eventually, it dawned on me during my PhD that the crux of my sometimes-impenetrable speed was to do with my confidence – if you’ve read my recent blogs, you’ll know that my PhD experience ensured that I was not left with that in spades…
After my PhD, my confidence was at its lowest low, and I realised that I needed to make a change there. I figured if I could find this mysterious confidence that I was so lacking, the words would come out of my face at the speed they’re supposed to, and not run away from me. However, as I am sure you’re thinking as you read this, you can’t just decide to have confidence. Confidence in academia is a tricky thing, and it is one thing to capture it for the duration of a talk, a whole other to keep it within you as a permanent change.
People often tell me I am lots of things that pertain to an approximation of confident – loud, outspoken, self-assured, once it was “too comfortable”, and although I don’t agree with that last one, I think it is maybe something we should invite more of in a career such as academia, where there’s a lack of comfort inherent to its structure and imposter syndrome runs rampant. Despite admittedly being those things (at least in the academic world), for me that didn’t equate to the accomplishment of the seemingly mythical and perpetually pedestalled ‘confidence.’
With this new-found realisation (yes, I know, I am surprised it took me this long too), I headed to the old friend of every academic, Google. And then I became frustrated. It’s not that the suggestions aren’t good or helpful, they definitely are – suggestions like limiting and removing those who are negative and competitive from our academic lives, self-reflection to identify our own issues with imposter syndrome and where we experience academic insecurity and harvesting a culture of transparency around such issues within the lab and with senior academics actually sounds incredibly useful (although not necessarily easily achievable for many of us). No, the frustration originated from the fact that all the suggestions I found at the time focused on strategies that encourage the building of confidence within the very academic machine that makes us doubt ourselves. To say that sounds like an uphill challenge is an understatement (at least as far as I am concerned). None of the thinking and self-reflection stuff has really helped me with any sort of permanence, that has always been more of a fast fix for urgent situations. The closest that got me was to the idea of thinking about ‘doing’ confidence, rather than a binarised idea of having it or not having it (and therefore identifying myself as someone who didn’t have it).
Whilst I still speak fast in moments – more often to do with a lack of enough practice on my part when I am pressed for time – I feel as though I am now in a position where I can safely say I am confident. So, how did I harvest an identity that includes inherent confidence? The truth is, I didn’t…at least not intentionally. You may remember from a prior post that I am in something of a chaos mode since finishing my PhD – I don’t know how to slow down since I finished, and I dabble in various things to try and find the self that I lost during my PhD. Turns out, when you’re a dabbler, every once in a while you might hit on something that changes things for you.
The single greatest thing I have done for my confidence as a whole – and that has in turn improved my academic confidence tenfold – is life modelling. Yep, that thing where you get butt naked, sit in front of a room full of people who draw every nuance of your body as you stay alarmingly still, left alone with your own thoughts. If you’d told me 5 years ago that this would be a thing I’d have done regularly I would have said “not a chance.” Why this works for me, I am not sure. Maybe it is subverting that thing where people during my PhD would say “oh you’re nervous? Just imagine the audience in <insert uncomfortable situation where we perceive we would be embarrassed and therefore the audience should be too here>”, or maybe it is that no possible academic circumstance can be as exposing and nerve-wracking as life modelling (particularly the first time I did it), and if I can do that, then I can do anything academia throws at me. I suspect it is the second one, and there is a huge amount of power in that.
I appreciate that this is, for many people reading this, the epitome of a chaos mode approach, and in no way relatable. That’s ok, I’m not here to insist that it is something everyone should do. I’m not saying everyone in academia needs to find their closest life drawing group and offer to model. But what I am saying is that, just maybe, the thing we need to do for our own personal confidence improvement has absolutely nothing to do with the world in which we work and everything to do with what we do when we aren’t working.
Jodi Watt
Author
Dr Jodi Watt is a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Glasgow. Jodi’s academic interests are in both healthy ageing and neurodegenerative diseases of older age, and they are currently working on drug repurposing for dementia. Previously they worked on understanding structural, metabolic and physiological brain changes with age, as measured using magnetic resonance imaging. As a queer and neurodiverse person, Jodi is also incredibly interested in improving diversity and inclusion practices both within and outside of the academic context.
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