oxygen masks and grit
drama in our lives
AMB James Smith will discuss trends with relation to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, 19 July at 5 pm eastern. With the developments underway on the West Bank yet again, this discussion takes on more urgency though the Saudi-U.S. relationship has its own frustrations regardless of any other nations globally. I am sure you will want to tune in. The link is below
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We had a superb display of fireworks on the banks of Spa Creek last night. I hope you enjoyed a safe evening with your family and friends observing local displays or watching them on television or on line
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I spent lunch with a woman embarking on a completely different career when she initiates a psychology doctoral program at the end of the month. It was inspiring not merely because she is brimming with excitement, anticipating the changes in her work. I have always believed in moving to new places and interests if my enthusiasm takes me there (read: Actions Create Consequences on substack) as i think being stale in one’s thinking is both heartbreakingly boring and dangerous.
What was so refreshing about our discussion was her commitment to do something beyond herself. She wasn’t talking pie-in-the-sky ‘I alone have the power to change the world’ that I hear sometimes from someone who has yet to tackle the obstacles that can end a sincere aspiration. In those cases, which I saw frequently among the students I advised thirty plus years back as Assistant Dean for Social Sciences at a midwestern university, students who came to see me generally fell into the psychology majors who hoped to get into medical school or the wannabe lawyers who had stuck our political science courses.
In both cases, many of the students chose these fields because they sought high paying salaries and/or assumed job security would justify their choices even when they rarely had contemplated the trade offs ahead. My favourite question is always ‘why are you doing this?’ The question mattered as I was likely to receive less than realistic answers from these aspirants. They weren’t bad kids, mind you, but they were often first generation college undergraduates who really had no idea what was involved in getting through the process of applying and then becoming professionals. They did not realise how many associated tasks, requirements, behaviours, and the like associated with the medical or legal fields. Instead, the students assumed that once you got a decent score on either the MCAT or the LSAT, that was all that it really took along with an undergraduate degree.
Uh, no. As my son found with his doctoral program in evolutionary biology, one also needs grit, forestalling many fun evenings because of long-term projects, delaying long-term commitments to where one will live or a higher income or other things that adults do. And even that is not always enough. Any academic can name at least a dozen folks she or he knows by name who simply lost interest, even after many years’ work. It happens in law and medicine as well.
What was most refreshing today was that this lady had indeed thought through those things. She was ready to refine her focus for an extended period in her life. She recognised this would entail serious trade offs but is willing to march through them.
We discussed what the friction points would be. I explained I thought she would find some of her program rather formulaic for someone seeking to address a mounting problem (a mental health challenge we hear about in the press at least weekly). Doctoral programs are about theory rather than action, in most cases. That can engender frustration for people who have already spent years working and want to get on to BEING the new practitioner.
My primary suggestion? Try not to let the drama suck you in. That probably sounds silly but how often do we find that our personal or someone else’s dramas (health issues or love life as examples), the overall condition of an academic department (tenure cases, funding threats, new research, filling holes in faculty expertise created by retirements), and the state of the world bring about distractions that rub off on us? It’s harder to avoid than it sounds.
For some people, that drama and sucking the air out of a room helps them THRIVE but for many of us in any environment, it becomes a net drag on the energy necessary to find that grit, persistence, and drive. One does not know in advance where these folks may show up in our programs (or our jobs for that matter).
She looked horrified but it was clear she is not in the drama camp. I suspect she will actually do just fine.
But the entire conversation made me think back on how many negative personalities I worked with over my career. I imagine at times I might have contributed to drama without even realising it but it was never my goal. I can only thank those folks who were non-drama queens and kings because they made the places I worked far more joyful environments.
In the end, we can only control our own contributions and our control is always day by day; all we ever have is right now no matter how much we think about the future or the past. We cannot control anyone else’s, hard as we may try, nor can we always prevent the drama from crashing down on us or on others. If we have the developed the understanding of why we want to pursue whatever we are doing, then we have a far better chance to let the drama fall as raindrops running off of a duck’s back as it floats in a rainstorm on a lake. If instead we become entranced by the tensions, the ‘she-said, he-said’ of any situation, we may lose our forward momentum as the actions tend to persist day after day after day which add into weeks, months, and the like.
I think the attendants on a plane have it right when the safety briefing tells us to put our own inidivdual oxygen masks on before trying to help others. That is true in succeeding at a doctoral program or many other things in life. That doesn’t mean you abandon others but it does mean that you truly only have power over yourself and reinforcing the positives you want to support rather than an ability to throw out everything bad from the past to start the world anew under your tutelage. Not going to happen.
I look forward to watching my hypothesis play out with this talented lady. The data may not support my arguments but it’s worth watching to see.FIN
Cynthia Watson is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Timely Topic: AMB James Smith on Saudi Arabia
Time: Jul 19, 2023 05:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
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