Take back control
Today’s session is on the importance of positive reinforcement in our long PhD journey. We need to take control of positive reinforcement. Giving it, and receiving it. We rarely get any pats on the back as PhD students. In my experience, milestone meetings and supervisions are not treated as opportunities to provide positive messages (though they should be).
So we are left to our own devices, and when we do get feedback, it can be very negative (harsh critique from supervisors or at conferences). As a result, positive reinforcement is hard to come by. We might occasionally get it from teaching if we are engaged in that (which, hello, is why we prioritise those things) but not really in relation to research or the PhD.
Therefore we have to invent milestones to take time to celebrate. Celebrate finishing a draft chapter to submission to your supervisor, don’t wait until your PhD is finished (but when its submitted, celebrate again). Celebrate when you send off a conference abstract. Celebrate again when/if it gets accepted. Celebrate when you successfully organise your field work. Celebrate again when it is finished. Celebrate when you have finally secured access to that archive or dig site. Celebrate again when you have finished visiting it. Don’t wait to win some prize, or pass a milestone (but celebrate these too). You need to celebrate regularly the aspects of writing that you can control, not those you can’t. You can celebrate the others too - but to keep you going, you need to celebrate as often as possible for any reason you can think of. Celebrate with family and friends who might not know the minutiae of why this thing was so hard, but do know that it was hard, as they have no doubt had to listen to you moan about it. In a way, they deserve that celebration too.
This is related to those intrinsic and extrinsic motivations I talked about earlier, and reinforcing a belief in your competence to achieve things. When you take control of the things you can control, it makes dealing with things you cannot control much easier.
Today I will…
Reflect on all the minor and major achievements I have had on my PhD journey so far and plan a celebration of those things;
Write for 2 hours minimum, working my way down my task list;
Schedule some time for celebration of my writing achievements specifically, even if that is getting through module 5 of this writing course! A thing to celebrate indeed.