[Grad-postdoc-assn] Overcoming academic perfectionism & finding your passion

Thu Apr 19 08:52:42 MDT 2018

Dear all,

Thought I would share this nice piece from Kerry Ann Rockquemore in Inside
Higher Ed
<https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2012/12/05/essay-confronting-academic-perfectionism-yourself>about
letting go of perfectionism in teaching, service, and writing, and using
your internal compass to help you guide your work and choices.

As a speaker I heard last week say, "What do you love? What are you good
at? How can you serve?"

Another way to figure out what your passions are is to ask yourself "If I
wasn't doing science, what would I be doing?"  It could be communications,
art, social work, engineering, law, geriatric care, or who knows what?  For
me, it was always medicine, social work, or teaching.  As it turns out, I
love working in science higher ed in the realm of career development, and
am much more fulfilled than I was when I was doing scientific research or
working with GIS and remote sensing in the private sector.  All are
valuable, but this is a better fit for me.

Take good care of yourself this week, with good rest, taking real breaks,
and doing something that you really enjoy.

See some of you tomorrow at the NCAR Networking & Discovery Day at CG1!

Valerie

****

Do You Measure Up?

Concluding a series, Kerry Ann Rockquemore suggests three ways to move
forward.
By
Kerry Ann Rockquemore
<https://www.insidehighered.com/users/kerry-ann-rockquemore>

December 5, 2012
3 COMMENTS
<https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2012/12/05/essay-confronting-academic-perfectionism-yourself#disqus_thread>

It’s been quite a journey over the past five weeks of our collective work to
 overcome academic perfectionism.
<https://www.insidehighered.com/career-advice/overcoming-academic-perfectionism>
 We calculated the costs of perfectionism,
<https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2012/11/07/start-series-essays-about-dealing-academic-perfectionism>
 we learned what the cycle of perfectionism
<https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2012/11/14/essay-breaking-cycle-academic-perfectionism>
 looks like and how to disrupt it, and we explored concrete strategies for
overcoming perfectionism in teaching, service
<https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2012/11/28/essay-academics-who-do-too-many-things>
 and writing.
<https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2012/11/21/essay-issues-perfectionism-writing-and-procrastination>
 I love that so many of you experimented with new strategies in your
writing, teaching, and service and found immediate relief in doing so.

By now you know that I believe the quickest and easiest way to launch your
journey to overcome perfectionism is to experiment with new strategies and
assess the outcomes. I’m not surprised to hear that many of you also
discovered the inevitable: When you take the first steps in changing your
behavior, all of your "stuff" comes flying up to the surface. It may feel
uncomfortable in the moment, but once your stuff is up at the surface
(instead of invisibly and quietly driving you under the surface), you can
take a good hard look at it, see if it’s true or false, decide if it’s
serving you or tormenting you, and then choose whether you want to continue
holding onto limiting beliefs, other people’s definitions of success,
flawed assumptions, and/or unrealistically high expectations.

If you want to keep your stuff, that’s great. It’s your choice. If not,
it’s time to start creating new beliefs, assumptions, expectations and
definitions of success. In short, it’s time to create a new vision for
yourself that has the power to shape your decisions, your day-to-day
activities, and how you feel about your work.

I don't want to make it sound like the process of overcoming perfectionism
is easy. It’s not. The environment and system in which you are embedded trigger
and exacerbate perfectionist tendencies.
<https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2012/11/07/start-series-essays-about-dealing-academic-perfectionism>
 And the ugly truth is that academic perfectionism stems from a deep and
profound insecurity that you aren’t good enough or smart enough, or don't
deserve to be in your position. And those feelings are going to require
more than tips and tricks to evolve into something that is useful. In other
words, if you truly want to overcome academic perfectionism, you will need
to start working on the core of the problem (your insecurity about
measuring up) so let me suggest three steps to help you permanently
eradicate your perfectionism.

*Clarify Your Vision*

Perfectionists hold the flawed notion that everything they do must be done
at the very highest standard (perfection). And because the root of
perfectionism is insecurity, the force driving the unreachable goals is the
desperate attempt to prove (to yourself and others) that you deserve to be
a professor, to win tenure, to get promoted to full professor, etc. I’m not
sure how to say this nicely, so let me give it to you directly: proving
yourself is toxic fuel. You will never get what you want, you’ll never feel
fulfilled, and you will never be satisfied by your quest to prove your
worth. I know this because I work with many people who have all the titles,
accolades, awards, grants, and honors you can imagine and they still feel
that if they achieve one more thing, their colleagues will recognize their
intellectual worth and then they can feel accepted and worthy.

In case it’s not obvious, if your self-worth is dependent on the appraisal
of others, you will constantly feel like you have to do __________ to prove
yourself. Instead, I want to suggest that you clarify what the fuel is that
is driving you and that you develop an internally generated vision of what
it means to be successful. In other words, if you’re driven by proving
yourself and your success is determined by external accomplishments, that’s
a red flag. By contrast, I’m asking you to consider what would happen if
you answer the following questions:

   - What do I want?
   - What is my passion and purpose?
   - What does it mean to be successful and what does success look like for
   me?

Early in our careers, most of us allow others to define what we should want
and the terms of success for us so that we only get to feel a sense of
accomplishment when we finish the Ph.D., get the right job, win tenure, or
get promoted to full professor. This is reinforced by the fact that our
colleagues tend to use these markers of success as a collective shortcut to
determine our worth (e.g., "what’s on your nametag at a conference
determines whether I’ll bother to talk to you or not").

Creating your own vision of what you want, what you’re meant to leave as a
legacy in this world, and what success looks like for you is a powerful act
because it fundamentally reshapes your relationship to work. The key to
getting clear about it that most people miss is that you want to specify
things that are within your control (e.g., produce high-quality scholarship
and a tenurable research portfolio) rather than things that are controlled
by other people (e.g., become a tenured professor at ________ University).
This may sound like a nuanced distinction, but it’s critically important
because one of the biggest mistakes I see faculty members make is that they
constantly compare themselves to others instead of using their vision as
the reference point for success.

In my case, my vision is to provide high-quality training, tools, and a
supportive community for academics who want to maximize their potential.
Notice that I’m not saying that I want to generate a specific amount of
revenue, or serve a specific number of people, because I don’t control who
steps into the opportunities we provide or what they do when they take
advantage of them. I do, however, control the quality of training I
provide, how I utilize technology to create a safe space across
institutions, and how responsive our tools are to the needs of our members.
A vision that is within your control allows YOU to set the bar (instead of
it being set for you), it allows YOU to meet the standards you set for
yourself (instead of letting other people’s subjective evaluation become
your sense of self worth), and it enables YOU to feel a deep sense of
accomplishment because your vision is the articulation of success so moving
towards it means you’re doing the work you truly desire and is meaningful
for you.

*Use Your Vision as a Filter*

Perfectionists often believe that everything has to be done at the highest
standard. But let’s be honest: In academic life there are many things where
"done is good enough." I’ll even go a step further and suggest that the
majority of perfectionist clients I work with are doing a whole bunch of
work that doesn’t need to be done at all. The challenge is to develop a
filter that can reliably and consistently help you to vary your standards
in a conscious and intentional way by determining which activities need to
be done at a high standard, which activities need to just get done, and
which activities you can let go of entirely without any consequences.

When you’re clear about your vision, you can use it as a filter to vary
your standards. This requires you to develop the mental habit of running
your activities through your vision filter. For example, I get a huge
number of requests to sit on dissertation committees, review journal
submissions, and sit on various editorial and advisory boards. I run each
request through my filter and ask: Will this bring me closer to my vision?
The vast majority of the time, the answer is a quick and easy "no" –- and
that’s the beauty of a filter. It’s also the case that a vision filter is a
great tool for shaping my daily activities. Some work (like writing and
course development) bring me closer to my vision so I consciously choose to
spend time on them. Other types of activities take me away from my vision
(like bookkeeping) and while they are necessary for my organization to keep
functioning, somebody else can do them so I delegate them to other people.

*Use Your Vision as the Measuring Stick*

We all know intellectually that comparing ourselves to others tends to
produce negative feelings. For perfectionists this is especially the case
because we often choose reference groups for comparison that aren’t
appropriate and guarantee feelings of failure (the most successful person
in your field, a peer who doesn’t have the childcare responsibilities you
do, or someone at a different type of institution, which has significantly
greater resources to support their work). No matter how dangerous we know
comparison is, it’s very hard to avoid because we all want to locate
ourselves on the continuum of progress and the easiest way to do so is to
compare ourselves to others.

Having a clear vision enables you to stop comparing yourself to others to
see if you measure up. Instead you use your vision as your measuring stick.
That shifts the inner conversation from "how do I stack up next to
_________ [fill in inappropriate comparison person]?" to "how far have I
moved toward living my vision?" It's a seismic internal shift to move from
a self-evaluation that is contingent upon comparing yourself to others, to
an assessment of how close or far you are from the vision of your work that
YOU desire.

Ultimately, overcoming perfectionism requires you to clarify your vision,
use it as a filter for varying your standards, and shift your approach
around self-worth from negative comparison to others to a personal
assessment of your proximity to your vision. While incredibly difficult
work, it’s the one thing that will move you from misery of perfectionism to
a truly empowered stance in the academy.

Peace and productivity,

Kerry Ann Rockquemore
Read more by
Kerry Ann Rockquemore
<https://www.insidehighered.com/users/kerry-ann-rockquemore>
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