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Understanding the Scope of Our Influence: Why we have to stop trying to ‘fix’ everything

girlymicro General, Leadership , , , , ,

I was having a retro moment recently, and I happened to hear The Mending Song from Bagpuss. It landed with me in a way that it hadn’t before. Many of us are ‘fixers’, that’s probably the reason we ended up working in healthcare. We are focussed on trying to make everything better, be that people, organisations, cultures or situations. There is no challenge that many of our ‘fix it’ nature’s won’t try to tackle.

This seemed especially poignant, as I posted last month about approaches when work life becomes challenging. A key aspect that struck me when I was writing that post was about really understanding what sits within our scope to impact and what doesn’t. There’s a really clear reason why it is important to understand this. If the thing you are trying to impact or ‘fix’ is outside your scope of impact or control, no matter how much you want it to be otherwise, you are setting yourself up for failure if your success criteria include change. You are setting yourself up for disappointment, stress, and frustration before you even start. This doesn’t mean that you can’t work to change your scope of influence or set a different set of success criteria, but that is really a different thing. If just just dive right in there, without first addressing this fundamental barrier, all you will impact is your blood pressure.

We will find it, we will bind it We will stick it with glue, glue, glue We will stickle it, every little bit of it We will fix it like new, new, new.

So, how do we understand what is in and out of our scope to impact or control. Well, there are layers to this, and it does truly depend on whether you are trying to influence or whether you are going as far as trying to control.

In terms of true control, the only person is we can exert that on is ourselves. Trying to control anything else sets us up for failure. So why did we try?

Impact and influence are a bit different. I think deep down we know the piece about control, but we are less good at having the conversation with ourselves about impact and influence. We start trying to ‘fix’ things and then see ourselves as failures when it doesn’t happen. The years during and since the pandemic have been a real life lesson in this area for me. So, in this post I’m going to talk about 6 areas where I’ve sought to undertake ‘the fix’, failed, and learnt why I’d set myself up with expectations that could not be achieved.

You can’t always ‘fix’ people

Throughout my life, I have been a somewhat collector of lost souls. From early boyfriends to PhD students who have had supervision issues, I’m a real believer that we should always be there for others and take situations as we find them, rather than judging based on hearsay or prior scenarios. Before I get started here, I’d like to say that I still strongly believe in this. What I have learnt the hard way though is that a certain percentage of time, the prior experiences of the person are so strong that patterns cannot be altered. If you take the open door approach, there will, therefore, be times when you can’t change the outcomes in the way you’d like.

When this happened to me recently, I wasted a lot of time agonising about what I should have done differently, where my flaws were in terms of response, where I had failed. I have come to realise that that time was wasted emotional energy that removed my focus from other important things. Don’t get me wrong, I think active reflection is always important, but there is a difference between that and entering into a self flagellation pity party. One is essential and productive, and the other leads to spirals and self recrimination.

Once I exited the spiral I realised I had fallen into thinking I had control rather than understanding my influence on another person, especially a person who is not a close friend or family, is always going to be highly limited. You can offer support, and you can change environments within your influence, but the person who actually has the control is the individual you are aiming to support. The work has to be done by them and not you. You can’t work harder as a surrogate for them.

As a result of this, I’m trying to be much more self-aware of where my control actually sits and using this to support my thinking in terms of boundaries and expectation setting. I’m giving myself permission to avoid entering into relationships that extend beyond support into ‘fixing’ territory. I’m also learning that this is important in maintaining my mental health and well-being. It is hard to see how badly those can be impacted until the situation is resolved, but I can’t help anyone else if I am not in a good space, and so sacrificing my mental well being is actually a short sighted response that leads to no one getting a good outcome in the end. It feels selfish, but sometimes you have to put yourself first.

You can’t always ‘fix’ situations

There are plenty of times when people come to you as someone in a leadership position and want you to ‘fix’ something. Sometimes, this is possible, often, more often than I’d hoped, you can make or help someone to make a step, but the ‘fix’ is out of your control.

On a large scale, I have previously written about some of the decision-making  during the pandemic. It was a really humbling and eye opening experience to discover how quickly scope of influence can expand and contract, and how much that scope of influence changes based on whether you are currently acting in the role of decision maker or not. Having people come to you and advocate for vastly different positions, combined with actually having a time limited ability to influence, made me realise how important it is to face up to the reality of where your scope lies. It also made me realise how much you may need to review where those zones lie in rapidly changing situations. Relationships and scopes of influence are never static and so always require periodic review, but this is even more important in changing or high stakes situations.

On a one to one level, I often experience this, not about organisational but about individual situations. A common one is the ‘I want to do a PhD’ approach. This happens multiple times each year. Sometimes, people just want more information about the pathway or what the options are. I’ve written a blog about this as I get asked the question a lot. Other times, it’s framed more like ‘what can you do to get me a PhD?’. In these circumstances, I give the information, but I often get stared at towards the end as if I’m not delivering. I then have to enter the discussion that acquiring a PhD is a self driven process and needs the individual to drive it. The same is true with a lot of postgraduate training pathways or career opportunities.  I can help and support, but I can’t do it for them. I can’t ‘fix’ the holes on CVs that need filling. Only they can do that. I can open doors, but they are the ones that need to choose to walk through them.

You can’t always ‘fix’ injustice

Sometimes, when I’m approached, it is about a situation, but just on the surface. When you dig deeper, it’s not about someone not stepping up and doing the work. It’s about a whole bunch of barriers they didn’t know about or haven’t been able to fix. Individuals either then reach out or I become aware, and of course, what I want to do is ride into those barriers, sledge hammer swinging, and break them down to bring equity and justice to the situation. This is definitely one where I thought, and do, have more influence over as I get more senior. The sad news is that although I can do more, I’m discovering I still can’t ‘fix’ everything.

I have a great number of examples on this one, anything from male colleagues not having to apply for or be interviewed for roles when female colleagues are made to jump through hoops, to scientists getting paid a third less to do the same jobs as medical colleagues. I wish I didn’t have so many, but if I started listing, I would be here all day.

So if I can’t fix it, what are my other routes of action. Well, firstly, writing things like this blog enables me to shine a light and at least raise awareness of the injustices I can’t ‘fix’. Then there are a whole bunch of active positions I can take with my leadership, even if the issue is too big for me to ‘fix’ alone. Actions such as advocacy and saying people names in rooms where they are absent in order to increase access. Being brave enough to call things out as they happen, challenging that misogynistic, racist or homophobic comment in the moment, and taking a stand. Being accountable and actively demonstrating my values, and by doing so, hopefully offering a safe space to those who might need it. Being there to support, whilst acknowledging that no sledgehammer wielded by a single person is going to be enough, so you have to lift up others so you can hammer those walls together.

You can’t always ‘fix’ cultures

Organisational cultures bring with them different values and different aims. They are complex and act almost like living beings, in that they develop and change over time. If ‘fixing’ individuals is difficult, then ‘fixing’ cultures can come with mind-boggling complexity.

One of the things I’ve found challenging is when I’ve been part of a group or organisation which started off with values that were completely aligned with my personal value set, which is the reason I joined, and then morphed into something where those two things were far from the same. It is also complicated even further when the espoused values do match, but the values demonstrated by the group decision making tell a different story.

There are a few different choices I’ve made at various points in my life and career, depending on how much continued participation mattered to me. The big one is always do you stay or do you go. Do you stay and try to influence internally, or do you call it quits and move on to something that is better aligned. The right decision, for me, is based on a) how committed you are to the purpose of said group and b) how much influence do you have to affect the change you want to make?

Large-scale organisations are even more complex as they not only have an overall culture,  but they will also consist of a number of smaller subcultures, which may be easier to change or influence. I count myself fortunate to be part of a team that I feel is super aligned with my values and beliefs. It hasn’t always been that way however. I’ve been part of other teams that haven’t been the same. On one occasion, many moons ago, my then team mates and I even had to escalate that we would leave if a change in leadership did not occur as the disconnect was so pronounced.  This was one of the most powerful examples of collective action I’ve been involved with, and it succeeded because our point of escalation was also aligned to our values and purpose. Knowing your scope of influence and the landscape you are navigating can therefore be incredibly powerful,  but understanding that scope is key to success.

You can’t always ‘fix’ the way others see the world

Firstly, and I cannot say this strongly enough, just because someone holds a different opinion, view, or vision of the world to you does not automatically make them wrong. There is room for diversity of thought in this world, and the very presence of that diversity makes us stronger as a whole. This is especially true when that diversity of thought is not causing anyone harm and drives us to better evolve our thinking in response.

The ‘not causing harm’ component of this one is key for me. If that world view is harming others by restricting access to care or opportunities, for example, I will always endeavour to challenge, as already discussed. What I’m having to learn, though, is that that challenge does not necessarily lead to changes in behaviour, no matter how many facts you put behind the discussion. Human beings are complex, and they have both intrinsic and extrinsic beliefs. Sometimes, it’s not even those that are proclaiming their beliefs that are the ones who are most firmly set in their world view and then it can be difficult to even identify where to start your discussions.

I think accepting our scope of influence in these cases is crucial to understand in order to not get disheartened.  In a world of spiralling conspiracy theories and loss of faith in science, it is important to know that it is not just a case of sitting someone down with a bunch of evidence and having a single good discussion. Changing someone’s beliefs or understanding of the world requires you to understand where the origin of those beliefs lies, and it may be no where near as obvious as we’d like to think. Additionally, long-term change is usually not seated in facts but in emotion, and that’s a whole different ball game that we may not be equipped to play.

Interestingly, for me, this ‘not causing harm’ component also extends to harm to self and links nicely back to not being able to change individuals. I’ve had people I’ve thought of as friends, who were so locked into self-destructive patterns of behaviour, based on their view that the grass was always greener elsewhere, that they couldn’t stay in any one situation long enough to start to ‘fix’ those patterns. I discovered the hard way that no matter the presented evidence you couldn’t get them to see the world in a different way. Sometimes, an external lens is just what someone needs to see themselves enough to spark change. Sometimes, that view is just so alien that discover you are not even speaking the same language.

You can’t always ‘fix’ yourself

Talking about changing people, we are not ourselves above having the same light cast upon us, and in theory, this is the one area where our scope should include control and not just variable levels of influence. The problem with discussion about ‘fixing’ ourselves is the mistaken assumption that some form of perfection can or will be able to exist. I have to tell you, as a recovering perfectionist, there is no such thing, and this is one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves. Worse than that, by aiming for such a lie, we set ourselves up to fail, over and over again.

None of us are, or can be perfect, we are constant works in progress. Perfection indicates some form of static existence,  whereas that cannot be the reality. Life is change, and we need to change and adapt with it. We learn and grow, and with that comes failure and the ability to do better next time. So my view on this has become: accept your flaws, and own your areas for improvement. After all, we are humans, not machines. The most powerful thought that I’m striving to embed is that I need to acknowledge there is sometimes beauty in both the flawed and the broken. If it is necessary for me to ‘fix’ parts of myself, as part of striving for improvement and healing, it is because I am better for it rather than because of punishing myself with the myth of perfection.

The one thing I hope we all take away from this blog is to not confuse the reality that change is outside of our area of influence with powerlessness. We always have the power to change. To change ourselves, to change our scope of influence, and eventually, if it matters enough, to work towards collective bigger change. Until then, treat yourself with the compassion that you would offer others and learn to not set yourself up for failure and distress by understanding where your current boundaries and influence lie. Stop trying to ‘fix’ what cannot be fixed, and try learning to love the flawed and different when it is right to do so.

All opinions in this blog are my own

One Step. One Day. One Moment at a Time: My top ten tips for carrying on when life feels a bit too much

girlymicro General , , , ,

This blog post is late, which seems to be a bit of a theme recently. The truth is there’s a lot going on, from a colleague passing away and auto immune flares, to mummy Girlymicro being about to re-locate. All of which have meant that I’ve been struggling to get out of bed and do the day job, let alone find the time and head space needed to get words down on this blog.

2024 was always going to be hard going. There is a lot of change. There is a whole heap of challenge. There is not enough time, people, or resource to make any of those things easier. The reality is that there is little I can do about any of these things. There is only one way, and that way is forward, but knowing that and getting there are not always the same thing. So today’s post is about how to just keep going when all you really want to do it stop.

Decide what is important

I had to cancel meetings last week as, to be honest, I was so unwell I could barely manage emails, let alone speak. It amazed me when push came to shove how many meetings I could cancel and it not have any catastrophic effect. Many of them could easily be moved by a week, and some others could just be straight out cancelled. The world did not end. It struck me then that I need to be so much better at curating my diary so that I don’t spend 8 hours a day in meetings, meaning that all my other work has to be done on evenings and weekends.

The other thing I’ve had to think quite hard about in recent months is what things am I doing because they are important to me and which things I’m doing because I’ve a) always done them, or b) they are important to other people and I’ve just passively agreed. You’d be amazed at how much a and b there is. My career has progressed at a fair amount of pace, and I have failed to do any of the spring cleaning that should probably come with that. The things I need and want to do now that I’m a professor are understandably different to what was required as an early career scientist, and yet I have carried on bringing all of that workload with me into my current post. It’s frankly unsustainable and so a re-evaluation of task list was much needed.

Become a quitter

All of which brings me to spring cleaning. I hate to break it to you, but if you are like me, you need to learn to quit. You need to quit regularly and firmly. What I mean by that is, in order to keep your sanity, you need to review the things you do and decide what purpose they still serve. I’ve failed to do this. I’ve failed to do this over a period of years. I suspect partly due to a failure to recognise that I have changed and my needs are different. Partly just because I failed to recognise that my needs were even part of the equation.  I feel very strongly about giving back to my profession and the community, and so, in general, I haven’t really included myself in any evaluation.  This is how I’ve ended up working every weekend and 14-hour days, and sadly, my body just can’t sustain it. My mind is writing checks my body cannot cash. I’ve had to quit things that I never thought I would quit, committees I’ve sat over for over a decade, just to keep my head above water. The thing is, quitting will open up that opportunity to someone else. Someone who will benefit more than I was and open me up to new opportunities when life calms down. I’m convincing myself that it is a win-win.

Confront your FOMO

I’m a fear of missing out (FOMO) addict. I’m terrified when I say no to anything that it might be the wrong decision. That it might impact my career, or my future. Partly, this is because I spent the first 13 years of my career on temporary contracts, and that lack of security means you are always needing to have multiple plans in order to stay employed and pay the bills. Partly, this is because I’m too greedy to choose a single interest and stick to it.  I want to maintain interests in my clinical work, research, and education. You can’t do everything in all areas, however. I couldn’t do that when things were going well, let alone now. Now, I’m having to ask myself ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’.  If I don’t go to that event, if I don’t manage that networking, if I don’t manage to post that blog, what’s the worst that can happen? Most of the time, the answer is nothing permanent or, more frequently, nothing at all. I may miss out on the odd opportunity,  but at the moment, I’m having  to turn down a lot of those anyway. So hard conversations are being had with my brain where I have to challenge both my FOMO and associated anxiety.

Try to live in the moment

One of the reasons that I think I experience FOMO so badly is because I’m always looking to the future. I always have a plan. It’s how I’ve managed to survive the uncertainty of the Healthcare Science progression pathway. It’s how I’ve managed to end up in my dream job, that didn’t really previously exist. The problem with this is that when you remove things and impact the ability to plan then my stress levels go through the roof. Uncertainty and a lack of control, or ability to impact can make everything feel overwhelming, leading to me spiralling. It also means that I struggle to feel peace or achievement in the moment. Right now though, I need to deliberately move from staring at the horizon to spending more time looking at my feet. Getting through each day, each moment, for what it is, be that good or bad. Knowing that the next moment will be different and I will deal with it as it arrives. Accepting that the future is uncertain and concentrating on the concrete of the now.

Accept failure

A wise Consultant once told me that the best advice he was given when he got his first post was to become comfortable with failure.  I cannot express how true I find this statement. Right now, keeping on top of everything is quite literally impossible. There are not enough hours in the day, even if I was in a position to just push through and work 20 hours a day. Failure is, in fact, my only option. This is an important realisation as it empowers you to make decisions about where those failures are going to occur, rather than letting them happen naturally by living in denial. After all, not all failures are equal. Needing to write and request a review extension on a paper is not the same as missing a clinical action. Failing to get a blog out on a Friday, and instead getting it out on a Wednesday, is not the same as missing a board report deadline. It feels horrible. I reproach myself for not being able to be more efficient and do more, but I accept it because in acceptance I regain a modicum of control and ability to manage risk.

Try being kinder to yourself

The acceptance of failure and the internal disdain for the fact that this is where I’ve landed brings me to the fact that the self judgement is not a helpful additional load to bear. I hold myself to pretty high standards and the fact that I’m not meeting those is pretty difficult to process.  I keep coming back to what I would expect of a member of my team or a friend if they were going through the same set of circumstances. I would never tell them to ‘buck up and get on with it’ which is the self-talk I use. I would tell them that’s it’s OK, that they will be OK. I would tell them to give themselves a break and to deal with the things directly in front of them and ask if there was anything I could do. I would have a judgement free conversation focusing on ways forward. Those are the conversations I’m trying to learn to have with myself. Followed by some honesty about what is actually achievable and what it is that I actually need in order to keep going.

Learn to ask for help

One of the things I would immediately ask someone else if my conversations were external, rather than internal, would be ‘what can I do to help?’. Well, I’m learning to ask for help. I’m learning to use the amazing support I have around me to get meetings sorted and to remind me of what I have going on. I’m trying to ask people to cover some of those meetings that don’t specifically need me. I’m asking for some task related help or taking it up when offered. I am not a one woman army, and I need to stop acting like I am. There is no shame in asking others for support.

Forgive yourself for bad days

When I’m in a bad space, I become more demonstrably emotional, my fuse is shorter, my bandwidth is smaller, and my memory becomes pretty poor. All of these can combine to impact my performance and handling of individual scenarios. All in all, I probably become just less efficient at a time when I need to do more and be more efficient than I normally am. The combo is not great. It means the frequency with which I walk away from a day feeling like I’ve messed up increases, just what you need when struggling. Some days are just bad, whether it’s all self perception or not. This is a key point though. A lot of this is my perception and me measuring myself against my mental benchmarks. I don’t even know how much others see it. So, I’m giving myself some self-talk about putting the bad days behind me. Trying to use the ‘living in the moment’ approach and reminding myself that each new day is just that, new. It’s a fresh chance to try and do it better than the day before, and if some days work out better than others, that’s OK. I am doing what I can, and that needs to be enough.

Acknowledge there may be no alternative

The reason I have to be more forgiving of myself is that there is no alternative or better way forward right now. It takes years to train staff. You can’t just pluck them off a shelf. The built environment and its challenges take months or years to fix. A period of tight deadlines is just that, a period of time, which needs to be got through. My grief at losing a valued colleague will stabilise. All things will pass. Until they do this, this is the reality, and everything needs to continue moving forward. Acceptance of this reality is the first step in finding a way to just get through it. We all have periods in our lives and careers where there is no ‘fixing it’. It’s just about getting through it. That’s the real world, and it’s OK.

Plan for a better future

I’ve talked about being a planner, and that one of the things I’ve needed to realise is that broadly planning doesn’t help me right now. The one area in which it still does however, is planning for when life returns to normal. Planning for what I will be able to use my annual leave for. Planning for what fun things Mr Girlymicro and I will do with mummy Girlymicro whilst she’s living with us. Planning for nice things when I have the mental space to enjoy them. Non work things that have nothing to do with pressure or deadlines. Engaging in frivolous daydreaming. When the moment becomes too much, I give my brain permission to dream of a better future. My nickname is Dream after all.

I’m painfully aware that this post is all about me rather than tips and tricks, which was the original intention. I guess it was the post I needed to write right now. I hope that despite the rather ‘me’ focus, it is still useful.  I also hope that if there is anyone out there who is having a hard time right now, you will read this and feel less alone. I hope you will read this and know that’s it’s OK to have hard days. I hope that you will read this and know that good times are coming and that we just need to hang on in there. Finally, I hope that we remember, when those good times arrive, to shed our fears, stress and worries, and fully deep dive in and embrace them for all the joy they will bring. Until then, be kind to yourself and dream!

All opinions in this blog are my own

I’ve Posted About Tea Before but Have We Spoken About Cake? Why something as simple as a piece of cake can make a big difference

girlymicro General , , , ,

Last week I was running a course alongside some amazing Healthcare Science, IPC, microbiology and estates colleagues. It always amazes me how we start the week as a room full of strangers and by the last day you watch as they have formed bonds and built relationship, and leave having swapped contact details.  When I first started running the course it was suggested that paying for food and refreshments was a waste of resources but I stood firm, as I genuinely believe that there by providing food makes a difference, both in how people learn, but also in facilitating networking and having more time in the room. In light of these continued reflections, it felt like today was the right time to talk to you about cake!

Sometimes we all need a little self care

It’s no secret to those of you who read this blog that I love a cup of tea, I’ve posted about it enough. Sometimes tea alone may not be enough, shocker. Sometimes, we need to do a little something more that is a demonstration that we are being kind and treating ourselves. I’m not advocating daily cake or using cake as a crutch for dealing with lives daily issues. I’m advocating for balance and the occasional indulgence that shows we are putting ourselves as a priority every now and again. It’s horses for courses. Some people would go for a ramble, Sunday lunch, and a pint. I’m a cake, bath, and book kinda girl. Life is hard and sometimes taking a little of what you want is not a bad thing.

If you feed them they will come

The second place I’ve found feeding people really helpful is when I’m expecting people to give of themselves or their time, and acknowledging this by giving something back. If I’m running events, especially public engagement events, and people have turned up to contribute or participate then offering food is one small way of thanking people for that contribution. This is especially true if you are running sessions during times when people would normally be eating, such as lunch or early evening events, as you will also get less fruitful discussions if people are hungry or distracted about if they will have time for food.

Sometimes, we all need a little pick me up

I’ve already said that life can be hard and, for me, cake can also be used to enable me to provide comfort. There’s plenty of data about the link between sugar and serotonin, and the ability of a little something sweet to provide comfort is a chemical fact. This one isn’t about sugar addiction and eating our feelings. It’s about a practical step that can enable an interaction that may help someone.

It can sometimes be challenging to talk about difficult topics whilst staring someone in the face. Bringing something else into the mix that allows someone to talk whilst eating, staring at, or playing with the food on their plate, can be a surprisingly powerful tool to enable an individual to get past that particular barrier to expressing how they feel.

Can make someone feel seen

Cake isn’t just about comfort however, sometimes it’s about celebration or just acknowledgement of a change or achievement.  There’s a reason we have cakes at our big life moments after all. Taking the time to arrange/make/buy a cake demonstrates that you are invested in the other person. It demonstrates that you care or are acknowledging something that can be a big deal to the other person. It’s a way of not letting moments past by unmarked. Making people feel seen is one of the best gifts we can give, and providing cake is just one way of doing it.

Breaks down barriers

We all sometimes put our defences up when we are facing the unknown or feel at risk. This can happen in all kinds of situations, from attending an education event where you worry about sticking out to meeting a lot of new people at a friend’s social gathering. Much like the weather, food, and the quality or lack of, can be used to provide an ice breaker that can make many social situations that little bit easier. The whole ‘oh you went for the lemon drizzle’ comment can open that first difficult conversational door.

Is an act of show don’t tell

Too often, it’s easy to make conversational pleasantries, especially in leadership.  We all know of scenarios where the words that come out of the mouths of those in charge are not matched by their actions. I think it is therefore important to consciously undertake acts of ‘show don’t tell’ where possible. In these cases, simple gestures, such as a card and cakes for Biomedical Science day, demonstrate that you not only recognise that such a day exists and is important to people, but that you care enough about those people to engage with it, even if you are not a Biomedical Scientist. There are plenty of examples of this, but I think as leaders we should think more about whether words alone are enough.

Takes the financial burden off another

I spent a few months in the states on sabbatical before the pandemic and one of the things that struck me was that whenever I went to an academic meeting at breakfast, lunch or after work, there would always be food provided. It was both nice and plentiful, and at one point I was chatting with some of the students who attended about whether this was standard. They said in most good departments it was because university fees and living costs are so high that many post graduate students can’t afford to buy food despite working extra jobs. Obviously that is an awful state of ‘normal’ but it also struck me that I don’t know that my students would be so open about not being able to afford things. Since then, whenever I take any one of my team, students, or staff out, I will insist on paying just in case and as a demonstration of the fact that I care about them. As I said, life is hard, so let’s try and make it easy.

Supports levelling of hierarchy

A lot of reasons I’ve talked about so far are linked to leadership, but there are other reasons where deliberately using the offering of food to remove hierarchy is important. Conversations and openness can be inhibited by artefacts such as hierarchy. There are reasons why, in high stakes moments, hierarchy in healthcare may be beneficial, but most of the time it can run the risk of inhibiting openness and collaboration. Food can really support breaking down some of these inhibitors. Some of that is because we will often move to a more neutral, less loaded, location in order to have our tea and cake. It’s often not going to happen in a consultants office. The other reason is that food is pretty embedded as a way of demonstrating friendship in most human cultures, and therefore it works on a subliminal part of our minds to support engagement.

Buys time away to focus on each other

Another benefit of the fact that we may need to step into another environment to enjoy our tea and cake, is that you are also removing yourselves from distractions. I don’t know about you, but I feel like I have emails that drop into my inbox and pop up every few minutes. If it’s not emails, it’s calls, or someone knocking at the door. Stepping away from those distractions so you each have the mental space and capacity to undertake some active listening and really be in the moment with each other is pretty priceless, way more than the cost of some tea and cake.

Gives the gift of time

One the things I have least of in my life is time. I have very little capacity to do anything other than survive and work. Therefore, if I take the time to make Christmas puddings for my friends, or bake a cake for colleagues, I think it goes some way to showing what those people mean to me. It means that I prioritised that act over something that I could have chosen for myself, such as bath and book time. I also hope that it holds greater meaning for them because they know how hard it is for me to carve out those moments in my life. I could buy a cake, and I often do, but when I can I will also try to give the gift of time by making one myself.

Enables you to show you care about the person not just the task

I often take my team out for tea, and sometimes lunch, but those sessions are usually working sessions. Sessions where we may be eating but we are also planning a project, talking through results/feedback, or developing a strategy. It’s so important sometimes to do the same thing but without work being on the table. I can be a pretty task focussed individual. It’s one of the reasons I probably ended up as a scientist. For getting stuff done, all that is pretty great, but to really do it well requires us to value the person and not just the task. Every now and again it’s important therefore to step away from the normal and catch up without a job or agenda, and to just be in the company of people you work with. It helps you get to know them better as people. To understand the challenges that they have going on, and not just in their work life. To value them as people, not just as cogs in the machine. It’s easily forgotten but crucial to do.

Can be a great educational tool

The slide below is one that I use to talk about molecular typing through the medium of cake. I find it works because most people know about cake, whereas many people don’t know about molecular typing. I talk about phenotypic, or growth based identification, being like a Victoria Sponge. You can see everything, you don’t need to cut it open to work out what it is. It’s a classic and will please most people most of the time. I then talk about fragment based typing, things like PFGE, VNTR, typing that looks at sections of the genome in order to decide on whether two things are linked or not. For the most part, this is like a meringue dessert. You can tell it from the outside that it’s meringue, but won’t be until you cut into it and get more information whether it is lime or lemon. Finally, you have whole genome sequencing, which is more like a pie. You can look at something and know that is a pie, but when you open it up you can get all kinds of information. You’ll be able to tell whether its fruit or savoury, what kind of fruit, and you’ll even be able to have a guess at what spices were used. It all depends on what level of information you need before choosing your cake.

Sometimes, it’s just nice to eat cake

Finally, and not to be under estimated. Sometimes it’s just nice to have cake. Be it because the world is glorious, or the world is gloomy. Be it on your own in glorious solitude, or to spend time with someone you care about. Be it on your sofa, tucked up in bed, or at the Savoy. One of the best things about the joy of cake is the flexibility to enjoy it (or not) however you wish!

All opinions in this blog are my own

PhD Top Tips: What do you need to think about when applying for a PhD?

girlymicro Academic Life, General, Microbiology (Research), Research/Academia , , , , ,

Spring has sprung and that means academic application time has also begun. I’ve already had a number of queries about what it is that I look for when I receive PhD applications. Selfishly, I therefore thought I might write this post so that I can refer people here to read it. Don’t worry if you’re not applying for a PhD though. I’ve just interviewed for a senior role and had to go through a LOT of applications when shortlisting. It’s probably obvious, but worth stating, that a lot of these tips are also relevant to when you are pulling together any personal statement or piece where you need to sell yourself. So, good luck, and I hope these help.

Understand what’s being asked of you

The first thing is to really understand what is being asked of you. A PhD application, although in many ways a job application, is also much more than that. It’s less about where you are at right now and more about where you could be at the end. There’s a lot more in the assessment about being able to demonstrate the way you think, your aspirations, and your passion, therefore, than the box ticking against a job spec that is often required for other posts. Your cover letter is therefore critical in order to help you stand out from the crowd and a generic letter that you’ve sent to 20+ options just won’t cut it, if like me you’re are getting tens to hundreds of applications to shortlist. Your generic version just won’t pass the skim test. Below are the kinds of things I want to see if I’m glancing over your application in order to put it in the consider pile.

Be specific, details matter

Having looked at a LOT of applications over the years for PhDs and other roles, my first big tip is that details matter. Making statements like ‘I have good communication skills’ won’t tick any of my boxes.  I need to have it followed up by a concrete example such as ‘this was shown by me winning X poster prize at X conference’ or ‘me being asked to lead our group presentation on X, where received a distinction’. Your examples don’t have to be revolutionary, but you do need to back up your statement with something concrete. You are applying for a science post after all, so evidence matters.

Show what got you here

It’s easy to think you have to be exceptional to succeed, but the truth is most of us aren’t exceptional. We just have a passion, interest, or tenacity that gets us somewhere. My father recently referred to me as ‘an academic late bloomer’, and I’ve written before that we are all more than the sum of our grades. Because of this, when I’m looking at applications, I’m most interested in the person behind the grades and the details. Some people will be exceptional undergraduates but will hit a ceiling when it comes to postgraduate study. Some of us dealt less well with the thought constrictions at that level and only really grew into our potential when the safety wheels were removed. I’m looking for your application to show me what makes you tick, how you think and approach challenges, and how you ended up sitting in front of a computer writing this application.

Be clear about where you want to go

I’ve talked in previous posts about the need for you to show me your why when discussing undertaking a PhD. There are lots of reasons why you might decide that a PhD is the right next move for you, and it doesn’t just have to be that you want a future career in academia. In some ways, the reason doesn’t matter as long as it’s thought out. What does matter is that you’ve taken the time to do that thinking and have the skills to be able to communicate it. PhDs are not a walk in the park. There will be hard days and challenging periods where you question whether this was the right move. Your motivation, whatever it is, has to be strong enough to get you through those dark days. It’s also important, that if you get the role, I understand how to support you in your future goals, and I can’t do that if you don’t know what they are.

Why this PhD

There are PhDs advertised all the time. One of the top things I want to have jump out of your letter is why you think this particular PhD is the one you want to do. What is it about the topic that interests you? How does this fit in as a logical next step from what you’ve been doing so far? Where is your passion or interest in this particular topic? PhDs with me will always have a clinical aspect, so what is it about this rather than primary science PhD that speaks to you. I want to know that you have considered, in my case, what it will be like to do research in healthcare and the benefits and challenges of the setting. I also want to know how it fits in with your goals as described above. This needs to be done in enough detail that I know you have thought about it and that it’s specific to the PhD I have advertised. Anything generic is a real turn-off at this point.

Why this supervisor

Supervisors make or break your PhD. It’s the honest truth. Demonstrating you have awareness of how important this relationship is to your PhD goes a long way to show that you understand the challenge you are choosing to take on. I would always recommend reaching out to the primary supervisor ahead of applying therefore. You can then make an informed choice about whether this person will be the right support for you. Every supervisor has different styles and you as a learner have different needs. Understanding whether those 2 things will mesh is so important.  You can then address why the supervisory team on offer is the right choice for you in your application.

Why this university

The other thing that is worth including is why the university you’re applying for is the right choice for you. Each university has a slightly different ethos or feel, and so why does the one you are applying to match your requirements? Is is because it has an associated medical school or strong pre-existing links to local hospitals? Is it because you really like the structure of the PhD programme? Is that they have a doctoral school or other funding that links into a research council you are particularly interested in working with? It’s always worth looking up what the PhD structure is actually like, some will require you to submit regular essays, others will just have an ongoing log, each is likely to have different upgrade windows and structures. State why this university works for you and your learning style. This not only makes it clear that you’ve done additional reading to understand the programme, but that you’ve also done the reflective thinking to see how you would fit into what is being offered.

What skills do you have

Let me be clear, no one expects you to have all the skills to do a PhD when you apply, otherwise you wouldn’t be doing a PhD you’d be doing a post doc. That said, on the advert there will be some skill requirements that you will be expected to meet or be on the pathway to meeting. It’s key that you cover these off in your application, either in the covering letter or CV. One of the key errors I find people make when putting together their applications is that they think all of the skills and experience listed have to come from their scientific or academic backgrounds. This really isn’t true, especially for an early career post. Leadership skills can be demonstrated from volunteer or other work experience, such as helping out at Scouts, Guides or Duke of Edinburgh. Conflict resolution skills can include things like bar work on a Saturday night. Time management could include how you helped your parents manage your 6 younger siblings when it came to after school activities. As part of you bringing your entire self to the post you should feel free to include all of the skills developed as part of the route that brought you to making the application.

What experience do you have

It can be challenging to split out skills from experience, but if you have any, experiences can go a big way to demonstrating your commitment to the career you are hoping to embark upon. Have you attended seminars or other voluntary activities as part of your time at university? Have you arranged to shadow or undertake placements within a laboratory to gain extra experience? Did you engage in weekend or other field trips? These help demonstrate interest, but they can also help to round out some of the short listers’ understanding of what you may be bringing in terms of scientific experience, and how that might benefit the initial phases of your PhD. I also always appreciate the way that applicants introduce items like these into the application, as it also helps me start to get a feel for how they think and approach challenges, which is one of the things I’m looking for to help an application stand out from the rest.

Ensure you use the literature

Another way you can show what you thought process is and how you might develop as a scientist is by making sure you use the scientific literature in developing your application. I want applicants to reference a couple of key pieces of literature when they talk about why this PhD interests them. It also makes the application stand out if you reference published literature from the group or supervisors when you talk about why you are interested in working with them. Finally, if the PhD is funded by a particular funder, or through a particularly funded centre then I would also expect the application to reference what the funders remit is and what they aim to achieve. Demonstrating that you’ve taken the time to understand the context in which your research will be undertaken shows, to me, that you have the beginnings of the strategic awareness you will need to develop future funding applications during an academic career.

Demonstrate your added extra

I hate it sounding like I’m saying that everyone has to go above and beyond, because that’s not really what I’m saying. What I think you need to do is embed something that makes your application stand out. That can be by including a lot of reading and referencing in your application, if that’s the kind of thing you enjoy. It can also be about sharing a story about why you have always wanted to work in this kind of research. One application I recently reviewed, focussed on the applicant talking about how much they wanted to engage with dementia research as their grandmother had been in a care home linked to dementia, and they they had spent a lot of time therefore getting to know individuals with dementia and had personally witnessed the impacts on their families. They then followed it up with information linked to dementia UK, showing they had both the drive and ability to find information. There are many different ways to make an impression. Your application is a blank slate but making sure that it has enough detail to show that you have thought through what might help you stand out is key. How you do that is completely up to you. Think of it as getting a head start on developing your scientific elevator pitch!

Follow the rules

Having said that PhDs are different, in terms of not being so tightly tied to a person specification, there were still be boxes you need to tick that are listed on the advert details. Please please therefore make sure that you do maintain enough focus to be certain to cover off the stated requirements. You want to weave in the other aspects that will make you stand out linked into what is being asked for. One thing it is always worth asking, is for someone else to read your application against the requirements, preferably a none expert, to get a neutral assessment of whether you have clearly covered off everything that is needed.

I do have one personal plea linked to this though. Please do not send a 90 page attachment with all of the certificates you have ever achieved and every paper you have ever written in full. It is possible to go too far the other way and send too much. I will tell you honestly, if your combined letter and CV for a starting level post is more than 5 pages I will start to become less and less engaged with the application. If you send me more than 10 pages, I will not consider it for shortlisting. A key skill as a scientist is being able to engage with a question, shift information to identify what is relevant, and build an evidence based response. If you send more than 10 pages it signals, to me, that you are unable to manage at least one of these steps in an efficient manner, and therefore cannot meet the person specification.

Have a little faith in yourself

My final tip is this, have some faith in who you are and your ability to succeed. If you write your application from a position of confidence rather than imposter syndrome, you will use words like ‘will’ and ‘can’, rather than using works ‘like’ and ‘attempt’. It seems a small change but there is a subconscious difference that is detected by the reader when someone writes in a definitive style that inspires confidence. It will not be the only thing that gets you across the finishing line, but it can definitely help. You have achieved so much to get you to the point where you are qualified to apply for a PhD. You deserve to give yourself the same self belief and encouragement that you would offer friends and family if they were in same situation. Remember. You are braver than you know, and so much stronger and more able than you believe, so take that leap and fly.

All opinions in this blog are my own

If you would like more tips and advice linked to your PhD journey then the first every Girlymicrobiologist book is here to help!

This book goes beyond the typical academic handbook, acknowledging the unique challenges and triumphs faced by PhD students and offering relatable, real-world advice to help you:

  • Master the art of effective research and time management to stay organized and on track.
  • Build a supportive network of peers, mentors, and supervisors to overcome challenges and foster collaboration.
  • Maintain a healthy work-life balance by prioritizing self-care and avoiding burnout.
  • Embrace the unexpected and view setbacks as opportunities for growth and innovation.
  • Navigate the complexities of academia with confidence and build a strong professional network

This book starts at the very beginning, with why you might want to do a PhD, how you might decide what route to PhD is right for you, and what a successful application might look like.

It then takes you through your PhD journey, year by year, with tips about how to approach and succeed during significant moments, such as attending your first conference, or writing your first academic paper.

Finally, you will discover what other skills you need to develop during your PhD to give you the best route to success after your viva. All of this supported by links to activities on The Girlymicrobiologist blog, to help you with practical exercises in order to apply what you have learned.

Take a look on Amazon to find out more

We Lift by Raising Others: Why we should all get our nomination heads on

girlymicro General, Healthcare Science, Leadership, Research/Academia , , , , ,

I’ve been fortunate enough to win a few awards in my time, but I count myself even more fortunate to have seen the great work and inspirational people in my science and Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) communities get recognised. Seeing the joy and the difference it has made to individuals and projects has really made me an awards convert.

I haven’t always been so supportive of them, as it some times feels like the same people, or groups, get recognised all the time. Now, having been on judging panels, I realise the reason for this is that they are the ones who are actively involved in nominating each other. So it’s less awards bias, more nomination limitations. So, for this weeks post, I wanted to try and persuade you all to remove some of that limitation by talking through both why and how you should nominate others, not only to show your appreciation but to enhance our communities.

Raises awareness

There are really three components to this one, linked to individuals, work, and the community. I think we often think of the person or project when people win awards and the benefit it provides to them. I think this misses out on what may be a cumulative, even larger, benefit. That is raising awareness of the community in which they sit. One example of this that I’ve experienced personally was last year when I was the first woman and scientist to be awarded the HIS Early Career Award. I was given a platform to be able to talk about my work at a national conference. As part of that session, I spent time talking about career paths in Healthcare Science. I got so many messages afterwards where people talked about how much that meant to them. It helped them feel seen and raised the profile of what scientists can bring to the world of microbiology and IPC. I’ve felt the same way when I’ve seen other IPC professionals win at mixed discipline awards. Any time a Healthcare Scientist or IPC professional is up for anything, no matter how well I know them, I will always be screaming at the top of my lungs if they even get nominated. Their visibility increases all of ours, and so by working together and supporting each other, we all flourish.

Acknowledges good work

Everyone works hard, I get that, so why should some people get awards for it and others not? Well, actually, in my ideal world, we would all get nominating for lots of different things and that hard work would be recognised more widely. It’s not just hard work that we are acknowledging in awards categories though. There are awards for those people who are not just great scientists but are also great leaders/educators/advocates/engagers/mentors, or even for bloggers. Sometimes, it’s an opportunity for us to express gratitude for that person who always throws themselves in to help or who we recognise is always there to support their peers. There are limited ways we can do this is a way that is visible or concrete in the NHS. Yes, we should always acknowledge and thank on a 1:1 basis, but sometimes it’s nice to go above and beyond as part of recognising others, just like the people we are celebrating.

Provides encouragement

I’m writing this as someone who weekly writes blogs and throws them out into the world and hopes that they make the tiniest bit of difference to a single person, acknowledgement is the most amazing encouragement to keep doing what you are doing. When I’m so tired or stressed out that I don’t have the energy to pull this weeks blog out of my brain, seeing previous comments/DMs/emails can be the thing that helps me get it done.

It’s the same with my projects, science related or not. Every project will go through challenging times, with trouble shooting, funding, or one of another 100 issues. If that project has been recognised, especially if recognised for the science or making a difference to patients, then that can be the pick me up required in order to persevere and take it to the next level, where that impact could be even greater. So if you see a project you admire, instead of saying, ‘I wish I’d thought of that’ say ‘I WISH I HAD THOUGHT OF THAT!!!’, and celebrate that joy by nominating it so others can have the same reaction.

Aids prospects

There is no getting away from it, money and positions can be difficult to find. Project funding especially is not as easy to come by, not matter how great the idea. Everyone says the average grant success rate is only 20% after all. Combine that with the fact that very few business cases are approved on a pure quality basis these days, and the landscape is pretty rough. Projects often need a something extra to stand out from the pack, especially when reviewers are often looking at a pile of papers and skim reading for initial comparison.  Winning a national award can make the project, or those involved with it, stand out from the others. So nomination doesn’t just recognise current work, but can really help to ensure projects can get taken to the next level.

Supports individuals so they are seen

The principle of standing out works not just for projects but for people too. There’s a lot about who you know and your connections in health. It shouldn’t be the case, but it definitely is. Networks mean you hear about opportunities, can reach out for coaching and mentorship, or have your name recognised when it’s mentioned by others in the room. All of these things are really helpful when developing careers. One of the things that winning any award gives people is visibility.  Those who win are often asked back to be judges, which enables you to spend one on one time with others. It may also mean your Trust decides to celebrate the win. At a minimum, it can be a talking point on your CV and helps open doors you didn’t even know existed. These are things that should be open to everyone, but unless we get our nomination heads on, it will continue to be the realm of the few.

Enables continuation

This may sound a little odd, but without nominees awards just doesn’t exist. I’ve held roles in numerous societies and sometimes it has been so hard to get any nominations submitted for some awards. Everyone thinks they are not good enough or that it will be too competitive, and frankly talk themselves out of nominating. What doesn’t seem to be so well understood is that awards have to be seen to add value by Trustees and other members of governance committees, and if no one is being nominated they will invest that resource elsewhere. This is even more true for awards, such as the AHAwards, which are not linked to charitable societies. There aren’t that many awards that recognise the small worlds I inhabit as a Healthcare Scientist in IPC. If I don’t nominate, there will be even fewer opportunities to raise the profile of both of these professions.  I suspect the same will be true for many of the people reading this blog and your specialisms. If we don’t nominate, these opportunities will decrease, so if we want to continue to have the option, we have to seize the day no matter how competitive we believe it might be.

Practice makes perfect

I always worry when I nominate someone that I won’t do them justice and that my lack of skill at writing the piece will be the reason they don’t get recognised.  I’ve written some top tips at the bottom of this blog, which I hope will help, but the bottom line is that practice makes perfect. Like everything in this life, you get better by doing, and the best way to learn is to start. From a purely selfish point of view, getting good at writing nominations will also have other benefits for your general working life. It will mean that you get better at the art of pitching, which helps with business cases and influencing skills in general. So really it’s a win win that we should all embrace.

Don’t be scared to self nominate

There are some awards that you have to self nominate for, and others that actively encourage it. There are also some that don’t permit self nomination. It is, in many ways, perfectly acceptable to nominate yourself. That said, I tend to find it a pretty uncomfortable process as it’s hard to shout about yourself the same way you’d shout about others. For this reason it certainly doesn’t give me the same pleasure as when I’m doing it for someone else. In contrast I’m happy to provide extra info about myself, if asked, as this is almost always necessary for someone else to be able to write in sufficient detail to do the nomination justice.

One of the main reasons why being able to self nominate is important is that we are not always networked enough, or in the lucky position where people think of us to nominate, or to even have people around us who know about the wide variety of awards out there to consider. It is sometimes the most sensible option, and I don’t think there is any shame in that. I would however always suggest a rule, and that is you always nominate others more than you nominate yourself. See it as a deliberate act of giving back to your community and building those networks that were lacking and meant you needed to self nominate in the first place.

If you get nominated, pay it forward

One of the more unanticipated consequences of being nominated for an award is that you are often then able to glimpse behind the curtain, as it were, to gain a greater insight into how that award works. If you have to attend an award interview, you gain insight into what kinds of questions they ask, which can in turn help you understand what they are looking for. If you are fortunate enough to win, you may get an even greater insight by being invited to become a judge, or have the opportunities to speak to the judges afterwards about what struck them about your nomination. All of these moments can really help increase your chances of success. This is your time to seize the moment and make sure that you capitalise on those insights to support others and make your own nominations. Someone nominated you after all, time to pay it forward.

Bring a little more joy into the world

Finally, I’d just like to be clear that this is not about the winning, it’s about finding joy in process of supporting and recognising others. Just being considered by someone else as worthy of nomination should make the nominees day a little bit brighter. If they get shortlisted, that is amazing! Winning is great, but all of the other parts are probably more important, winning is just the cherry on top of a pretty amazing cake. I also have one note of caution here, if you nominate and that person does well, feel good for them, enjoy the joy you have helped bring about, but try and not make their success about you. I have been to a few ceremonies where the nominators acted like they themselves had won the award. I think being able to write a good nomination is a skill, and I don’t want to take anything away from that. The nominee however usually did a lot of work to be worthy enough of being nominated, shortlisted and then possibly winning the award. Let’s make sure that we keep the focus on the brilliant nominee and keep the moment about raising them into the spotlight and recognising all they have done.

Here are some good examples of annual awards that you might want to consider (they’ll update links annually, and not all will be open right now, but these should sign post you in the right direction):

Please link to any others you know in the comments

Top tips for completing award nominations

  • Read the guidance – it will usually tell you how they are scoring
  • Check eligibility – both for you nominating and the nominee, sometimes you need membership
  • Take the time to choose the best category – there’s little point nominating a Clinical Scientist for an award sponsored by the IBMS for instance, or a scientist for the Nursing Times awards, even if they were in theory eligible it’s probably not the best choice
  • Don’t be worried about asking the nominee for more details – you’ll probably need more detail than you have to write something that does them justice
  • Be prepared – always look up the sections needed ahead of time and the word counts required
  • Spread the love – see if you can find some nomination buddies
  • Do you research – if you can look up previous winners, the details may help you focus the details of your nomination

So please please do me a tiny favour. Pick one award, any one, and ensure that some time this year you support someone or a great project by throwing their name into the pot! It won’t take long and you won’t regret it.

All opinions in this blog are my own

Beware the Lure of the Anxiety Rabbit Hole: Having the self-awareness to recognise when your thinking lacks clarity

girlymicro General, Leadership ,

April is always an interesting time for me and my mental health and well being. I’ve written a couple of posts as to why, but the main thing to know is that due to bereavement, I am probably not the most resilient version of myself at this time of year. In addition to this, I have a tendency to be pretty self-critical, which probably doesn’t help.

I’ve written before about shame spirals and how these play out for me. Shame spirals, for me, tend to be discreet events linked to a stimuli. In contrast, anxiety rabbit holes tend to be protracted. They build over time and tend to come to a bit of climax. They are driven internally by my state of being, although external stimuli can often pile onto what is already a pretty hard time. If I get into full-on ‘rabbit hole’ mode, it’s not pretty, not for me, but also for those around me. My husband refers to  these periods as me ‘developing bunny ears’, and it’s a pretty accurate description. I’m like a rabbit in the headlights, and every action, or lack of it, makes the anxiety worse. I’ve never really talked about this outside my family, but in the hope that others find it yourself I thought I should talk about what it looks like, for me, and how I’m learning to manage it better.

Know what your rabbit hole looks like

Everyone’s anxiety response looks different, feels different, and impacts differently. Mine hits with a massive decrease in confidence accompanied by an unhealthy dose of paranoia about how I’m perceived by others. Do I work hard enough? Am I committed enough? Am I good enough?

These particular drivers mean that I start to try to manage them by working harder, agreeing to more to justify my existence and holding myself to an even higher level of account. Sounds like it’s not a problem, right?  The problem is that the more I do the less I’m managing the cause, which is usually linked to tiredness or physical symptoms in my case. Pushing harder, driving harder, makes these symptoms worse until before I know it, I haven’t had an evening or weekend off for weeks and I’m on the verge of both physical and emotional collapse, as I still feel bad at my job and I have nothing else to give and yet I can no longer ‘push through’. At this point it really is a no win situation. The very thought of not working creates panic attack levels of response, but I also can’t work any harder or anymore. Just stepping away may mean I can be found crying over a laptop. It’s not pretty.

Become familiar with your warning signs

The ideal is obviously to recognise early in the process that the descent into the rabbit hole has begun. Sometimes, this is easier than others. Sometimes, the descent is slow and steady with a fair amount of warning signs.  Sometimes, it happens so rapidly that I’m at the bottom of the pit before I’ve even recognised I was falling. Some of that variability is linked to triggers and things that put me in a more vulnerable position, either physically or mentally. I sometimes find it hard to work out why the pattern of longer days and weekends occurs, whether it is the lack of rest that drives the anxiety, or the anxiety is what comes first, either way I need to recognise it’s happening. I think the other big sign for me is that I start to lose the ability to have a good nights sleep due to waking up and being faced by waves of anxiety linked to lists of things that I haven’t done, or reflections on conversations. None of which can be dealt with at 3am, and are therefore an unproductive use of time and emotional capital. Exhaustion then becomes a state of being, and any form of clarity or rational thought process becomes increasingly difficult to achieve and performing an intervention becomes required.

Identify your triggers

I’ve said that some things can get me into the hole faster than normal, knowing what those triggers are, for me, has been key to managing my approach. Specific triggers for me can be linked to:

  • Anything bad going on with my family, as this a direct short cut back to unresolved trauma linked to my sister
  • Health spirals, sometimes the auto immune responses I experience make sleeping harder and can generally make life uncomfortable
  • Mistakes or anything that makes me come up against my perfectionist tendencies
  • Attacking critiques, we’ve all been there, sometimes criticism is constructive, sometimes less so

All of these things can make it more likely that I’m going to respond in a less robust way to the general pressures of life than I would normally hope to. I therefore find being aware of these triggers a useful way of being self-aware linked to my anxiety levels and my responses. Everyone will have their own, I suspect there are some similarities, but these are mine.

Beware of poking the bear or rabbit in this case

There are always people out there who can help or hinder. I am super aware that when I’m in an anxious place there are definitely people who can accelerate my descent. Those people who take some joy in pointing out your flaws, who talk about how they don’t have ‘these issues’, or who take advantage of your anxiety driven need to agree to stuff to give you as much work as they possibly can. There are also those who will try to help by encouraging you to talk through what’s going on, but whilst doing so just draw focus onto the thing that is the source of your anxiety, whether it’s actionable or not. I personally need to step away from these high risk encounters when it’s not going well in order to have a little self preservation.

Be aware of how your behaviour impacts others

Having said that others can make the scenario worse, it’s also important to own the way that your behaviour may also impact others. I can get pretty short with people not responding in, what I have determined to be, a timely manner – as I can feel that everything is time critical even if it’s not. I can struggle to disengage and let others own their tasks, or properly delegate, which can muddy the waters or lead others to believe that I don’t have faith in them, which is definitely not the case. I can also make things worse for my colleagues by setting an example, or standard, of being constantly available, which is neither good nor sustainable. It can then appear that I expect others to do the same, and worse than that, it can mean that when I return to a more normal rhythm or routine, they get expected by others to pick up the slack. None of these things are intentional, but they are true none the less, and so being aware of how our responses impact others is key.

Have mechanisms to help you cope

So, having talked about how I end up in the anxiety rabbit hole and the less pretty consequences of it, how do I cope and manage myself? The first thing is, I have a couple of solid go to members of friends and family, and I have a very low bar for asking for help. This may mean that I need a bench marking phone call with the amazing Captain Claire about whether my responses are appropriate. I also have a wonderful team who I will sometimes message and ask for a second opinion on how an interaction went that I am replaying. I will also go to Mr Girlymicro and confess that I need a weekend completely off with no work and ask him to support me in being able to do so. To check in with me when he sees me opening my work laptop, or opening a blog post to write, to help me in stepping away. I also have a world of bad reality TV lined up which is sufficiently distracting but doesn’t require me to actively care, that enables some of the more challenging parts of my mind to be occupied doing something else.

Try to set yourself some rules

The hard bit comes when I’m in such a bad place that I have to set rules. Rules like, I will log off at 5pm, or that I won’t work at all over the weekend, that I will book leave and step away entirely. Sounds easy right? When I’m in the depths of the hole it’s anything but. If I could just get to the end of the inbox I would feel better. If I could just complete this task the anxiety would go away. It’s false, it doesn’t actually work that way. It just leads to the next thing and then the next thing, as it’s actually making the situation worse. It’s like when I have a skin flare, the scratching helps for the period I’m scratching, but the situation once I stop is oh so much worse. The only solution is to stop scratching and let it heal. The same is true for using work to manage my anxiety, it doesn’t fix it, only dealing with the root cause does that.

Understand that it will be uncomfortable

The long and short is that the crawling out of the hole is just incredibly hard and uncomfortable. A couple of week ago, as 5pm on a Friday, I knew I was in such a bad place that I had to stop as I was exhausted and needed some proper rest to be in a better place. At the same point closing that laptop screen was an act of willpower. The anxiety spike caused by walking away, when your brain says that everyone will be let down because you are failing to be on top of things when you do, is so hard. Even when the rational part of your brain knows that a) none of the way you are seeing the world is currently real, b) that everyone else is logging off and there is actually nothing to be accomplished by persisting and c) by working every weekend you are setting yourself up to never be able to have a weekend off as everyone will assume you are always around. It is uncomfortable to step away. It feels like you are making it worse, not better, but it is the only way out of the hole and the only way is through.

Know that you will get through it

The one thing that always helps me more than anything else is that I know that I have been here before and I know that I have come out the other side. It is not fun, it is not something that I like about how my brain works, but it is the reality of living with the mind I have. I have the best family, friends and colleagues who are supportive and understand that I am not always a bunch of roses to work/live with. I think they all know however that I strive to be better. Part of that striving is reflecting and building self awareness so that you are better able to cope in your own skin. Learning to love ourselves for the reality of who we are, warts and all, is a key part of life and happiness, and the sooner we accept the need to be as kind to ourselves as we are to others, the better our lives will be. So make sure you have a sign above the entrance to your rabbit hole so you know where it is, build in a ladder to help you climb out when you fall in, and importantly, if you find yourself there, more than anything else be kind.

Image credit Kate Rennie

All opinions in this blog are my own

Reputation is Everything: Why reputation matters & how reputational attacks can create shock waves

girlymicro General, Leadership, Science Communication , , , ,

It’s not something that comes up in conversation on this blog very often, but I’m a bit of a swifty. Watching the Taylor Swift in the Reputation concert video is a happy place for me, I often watch it on my commute when I’ve had a challenging day, and the music forms a staple of my ‘get psyched’ mixes, along with a fair share of rock and big band music.

Now, for those of you who have yet to discover this particular joy, there is a speech she makes linked to why we worry about how we are perceived and the impact of having a ‘bad’ reputation that really lands with me:

“For example, having a bad reputation in our mind could get in the way of finding real friendship, real love, real acceptance, people you really fit in with because you think what if they have heard something about me that isn’t true, what if they’ve got these preconceived notions about me that they heard from gossip and then they never want to meet me and then we’ll never know what could’ve happened,” she continued. “And I think that’s why some of us…meaning if not most or all of us are sort of afraid of having a bad reputation because we’re so scared of something fake, like gossip, or a rumor about you or a name you got called getting in the way of you finding something real.  And so, when it comes down to that fear and that anxiety, it’s just all really delicate,”

Taylor Swift – Reputation Tour 2018

There are many forms of reputation:

  • Personal
  • Professional
  • Organisational

I think there are a couple of reasons why anything that impacts reputation is so powerful. The first one is that both trust and reputations take a long time to build and can be destroyed in the blink of an eye, depending on the scenario. Another is that, I believe, at the core of our being most of us want to be liked, and having someone affecting how we are perceived can directly impact on that. Finally, it is difficult to know how to respond to situations that influence our reputations.  We say ‘stick and stones may break my bones, but words shall never hurt me’, implying we should rise above it, but we also say ‘no smoke without fire’, implying there is a burden of proof upon us to correct what is being said.

I think, depending on who you are and the circumstances, the impacts on different types of reputation may not feel equal. Now, I went to a girls school, and one of the reasons I’m glad to no longer be a teen or in my twenties is because I’ve learnt and grown so that personal reputational attacks in general have a lesser impact on me. I would love for everyone to like me, but I know the reality is that this will never be the case. Although often highly impactful, personal reputation attacks can often be dealt with by removing the individual from your social circle. You often have the choice to interact or not, and the other members of your circle often know you well enough to not listen too closely.

What I have found more challenging are circumstances that impact my professional reputation. For a self declared people pleaser, like me, the thought that someone could lead you to be a scenario where you were perceived to be difficult, mean, or destructive, is particularly stressful. This is doubly so when you have a very particular set of values, about being collaborative, supporting others, opening doors, and being patient focused, and the commentary indicates you are anything but.

There’s a movie I love called Gossip, most people have never heard of it. It starts with a group of college students running an experiment where they create some untrue gossip and then track how far it spreads, how it evolves, and the impact. Needless to say,  it doesn’t end well. Now, I’m as guilty of gossip as the next person. We all want to feel in the know and to almost feel special by knowing something others do not. There’s a bunch of research about why this is. Gossip in real life, just as in fiction, isn’t harmless however.

Although gossip is bad enough, I feel there is also a significant difference between gossip and the escalation to deliberate character assassination or attempts to damage the reputation of another person. The weaponisation of reputational attacks, or even the threat of them to gain leverage, can be one of the most stressful things I’ve encountered in my professional career. Partly because they tend to come as a complete surprise to those targeted, but also because it’s difficult to know how to respond whilst in the midst of it. I’ve seen this happen to others and been a (somewhat) minor victim myself. Having hopefully come out the other side, I wanted to capture my thoughts for anyone caught in a similar situation in the future.

You may not escape the fallout

The first thing to say is that I am always a fan of taking the high ground and not engaging. Engagement can just end up adding energy to the situation rather than letting it burn out. It is important to note that taking this sensible higher ground approach may not mean you escape reputational damage, however, at least in the short term. You need to be aware of the fact that a time may come when you do have to address what is happening, and you may need to have a plan for how you will do so. Hopefully, it will never get to that point, but like with many things in life, preparation is key.

You have to remember the long game

One of the reasons to start out with a policy of none engagement is that most of the time, this will just turn out to be a blip and nothing more. Something you will look back on in a few years, possibly sigh, but see as a learning experience and nothing more. Professional careers span decades. Sometimes, it’s very easy to be caught up in the now rather than seeing it in that context. No matter how bad it feels in the moment, you need to ask yourself: how will this feel in 6 weeks, 6 months or 6 years? Very often, with the distance of time, it won’t feel anywhere near as bad, and that is the context you need to hang onto.

You have to faith in those that know you

It can be pretty shocking when you first hear reports of things being said that could impact how you are seen by others. It can be easy to feel like you should rush in and respond, but as I’ve said, for many reasons that is unlikely to be the best option. During what can be an unsettling time, it is important to remember that nothing really has changed. You have had professional relationships with many people ahead of this moment, relationships built on mutual trust and respect. These relationships haven’t changed, and you have to have faith in those people who know you and know the value you hold. Never let a single moment devalue everything you have already built.

You have to believe in the system

We work within systems, systems that provide individuals with routes for escalation and complaint. It’s incredibly important that everyone has the opportunity to feel heard. Everyone has their own perception that is unique to them, and those perceptions are real, even if they don’t match our own. This can be hard to accept when that variance in perception means that we feel attacked, or worse than that, if it feels that there are other drivers behind the responses that mean they are less genuine. The harsh truth is that it doesn’t matter. The system is set up, crucially, so that individuals can pursue making complaints, and this is an essential part of parity and fairness. If actions are taken that are erroneous, you have to believe that the requirement for evidence and facts count. That truth will out. Even if it takes a little time.

You have to try and not get sucked into the whirlpool

Whilst rumours/gossip/complaints are swirling it can be easy to get sucked into the drama and the emotions of it. It can be easy for those voices to be the voices that you carry with you and for you to only hear them in your head, not the ones of those that support you. To focus on the negative, the stress and the fear that comes from a lack of control. It’s hard, but none of this is useful to you. If you can’t find a way to put it in a box and distance yourself from it, it will be all you see and experience. This can really start to impact how your interact with the rest of your working life, or even how you feel outside of work. You need to make a deliberate effort to not engage with the whirlpool and to maintain your sense of self.

You have to control your own responses

Part of not engaging is making sure you retain what control of the situation you can. In the end, the only thing we can ever truly control is how we respond. You have no control over how others perceive you, you have no control over their actions, or what they say. You can absolutely decide how you react to that stimuli. It is all too easy to let the fear associated with being unsettled lead to responses that are seated within that fear, or to appear angry and let that drive our interactions. Those kinds of responses aren’t helpful however, in fact they just add fuel to the fire. You have to be aware, that if not careful, you can end up with a self fulfilling prophecy if you lose control, becoming what you are accused of.

You have to keep being authentic

For me, some of the worst reputational attacks, are those that attack us around those values that we use to define ourselves. Calling us self interested, when our focus is on parity and fairness, calling us unsupportive, when we believe in lifting others. These may not seem so significant in the scheme of things, but when those things you prioritise and use to define yourself, are the things that are under attack, it can feel incredibly personal. From what I’ve seen, responses to this tend to go one of two ways. First, people stop undertaking some of the associated activities, as they fear further attacks or putting their head above the parapet. Or, second, they change the way they do it, through anxiety or fear. Now, I’m not saying changing is bad, but I think it needs to be based on genuine reflection, rather than in response to negative emotions. I think stopping, in some circumstances as a temporary measure, is a wise choice, but it shouldn’t be the long term solution. It’s important to not allow circumstances to change who you are and your values.

You have to find your support systems

All of these aspects can be highly challenging, and to be honest you are not going to be able to navigate this on your own. You will need support, you will need help to undertake reflection, you will need an external view point to aid you to sense check and evaluate responses. Feeling personally attacked can really throw off your sense of inner balance, and you will need other people to help you find and retain the sense of self that you need to traverse what is happening. I think you need to find people from your professional context, as well as your personal, so that you have people who know you, all of you, as well as people who know the players and the landscape in which this is all playing out. It can be easy to want to ostrich, whereas, in reality, what you need to do is use those connections and networks you have to be able to understand what is really going on. Word of warning here, I am not suggesting you go out and start talking to everyone about what is happening, or the person who is doing the talking, that would be as bad as the initial reputational attack. I’m talking about having a few key supports where you can safely and openly talk about how you feel and what’s going on.

You have to make the sensible choices

I’ve said to not engage, but I’m not saying to be foolish and ignore what it happening. I’ve already talked about the fact that you function within a system, with processes and requirements. The first thing you should do is really learn about what those processes look like. What are the requirements upon you, what kind of evidence may be required. Have you encouraged reporting/escalation? Have you referred to occupational health? Have you offered alternative lines of reporting/management? Have you spoken to your line management or HR to confidentially gain advice? You may not need to do anything complex, it could be as simple as recording meeting content in emails, or not meeting 1:1. Seeking advice however is key, as these scenarios can also be complex, dependent on whether the person is in your organisation, a direct report, a peer, all of which impacts the information you need. You need to know enough to make sure you are making sensible choices to protect yourself and that you are acting proportionately and appropriately.

You have to check what is perception and what is reality

It can be easy, when you feel like the rug has been pulled from under you, to lose your sense of what is real. The resulting self doubt can make you question every interaction you have. Paranoia can set in and it can colour the way that you see the world. It can also colour your perceptions of your interactions with those associated with the commentary that is currently ongoing. You can’t let this happen. You need to find strategies to manage this, otherwise you will read negativity into everything. This is another reason why being sensible and not having 1:1s, or having email confirmation of any discussions, can be helpful. You can get a neutral opinion that gives context to interactions, and written communication can be helpful to ensuring shared understanding. As the emotions can spill over into other spaces, you also have to check yourself more widely. If you are like me, you can be sent into a spiral of being hyper critical about yourself, and this can colour your perceptions. Awareness is part of the challenge, and if you can become aware of how you are responding, and how that might impact on the lens through which you are seeing your interactions, you can start making proactive steps to adjust appropriately.

When it is over you have to let it go

You will get through this situation, you will come out the other side. No matter what the outcome, this isn’t forever. It can leave you with a certain amount of trauma, or a changed view of the world, or level of trust. That’s understandable, I get it, depending on what has happened the personal cost can be significant, even in just emotional impact. The thing is, despite recognising this, you have to let it go. You need to take the learning, and grow, without letting it fundamentally change who you are. You can’t become less trusting, or have less faith in people, there wasn’t enough of both of those to start off with and the world can’t afford for us to have less. You have to move on, wiser, but fundamentally unchanged. So deep breaths, take one day, one hour, or if needed one minute at a time. Keep the faith, and the world will turn out OK.

All opinions in this blog are my own

Greetings from the Laziest Girl on the Internet: Living with a mind that won’t stop in a body that doesn’t want to begin

girlymicro General, Microbiology (Clinical), Research/Academia , , , ,

I woke up at 5 this morning, the alarm wasn’t set to go off until 6:15. I am desperately tired and in need of more sleep. Instead of allowing me this simple luxury my brain decided to a) run through an experimental protocol, b) draft a paper I need to write, and c) plan a conference presentation. Sadly, my body wasn’t in alignment with this and so none of it has been written down or recorded anywhere. I am therefore exhausted still and have no concrete outputs to balance it out. I’d like to state this was a one off, but it is in fact my life and daily existence.

People often ask me how I manage to ‘do’ so much. The sad fact is that I really don’t think I manage to ‘do’ very much at all. I’m always a chapter behind on my ‘to do’ list. That combined with the fact that I only manage to get as much done as I do because Mr Girlymicro keeps our lives together by making everything happen at home, means that I thought I’d write something that talks openly about what the reality of having a mind that just doesn’t stop looks like.

I only have 2 speeds

I think those people who think I achieve a lot only see me in ‘doing’ phase. Running around spinning multiple plates at the same time and being totally ‘eyes on the prize’ focused. The other side to this is that when this Duracell bunny phase is over, I become the sloth girl who inhabits the sofa and doesn’t contribute to house work or the want to leave the house. The challenge is that work generally gets the Duracell bunny which means there is very little left over for real life. Hence Mr Girlymicro deserving the husband of the year award 15 years running, and the fact that I need to find a way to split my energy better.

My mind can’t switch off

One of the reasons for the enormous to do list, is that although my body switches off, my mind really doesn’t. I would really love it if it did. Today is Easter Monday, it’s before 9am, and I would really love to be able to sit and chill out. Instead I’m writing this blog as my mind is so full of stuff that this is my equivalent of relaxing as it enables me to focus, and thus relax a little. I don’t know if this is how everyone lives? I really don’t. I have so many thoughts, I remember so many things I should have done, things I should be doing. My mind can make my life a less than relaxing existence. Lovely Mr Girlymicro has brought me some Lego for later though so that I can use it to help, as the process of doing something whilst watching a movie or listening to an audio book, is basically my relaxed happy place. It’s important to have a strategy when my head is spinning out of control.

I find it very uncomfortable to only do 1 thing at a time

This leads me onto another thing. I need to be doing at least 2 things at once to feel comfortable. I’m writing this blog whilst watching CSI on Netflix, later I’ll be putting together Lego whilst enjoying a movie, I even need an audio book to sleep. One of the reasons I’m so happy to have my little bathroom office is that I find it really challenging to work in silence and so it means I can have music or a book running as background audio. I really find it helps me focus. The advantage to this way of living life is that does it enable me to plan talks in my head whilst doing other things, or to plan a text book or blog outline whilst writing a policy. This adds to my ‘to do’ list but also helps keep my head above water when I’ve made too many commitments.

I’m physically lazy and don’t pull my weight

For all that my mind is active I am physically lazy. I always joke that I was born to lounge on a chaise lounge with a book in my hand surrounded by my library with someone to bring me Darjeeling on request. I know that I must be challenging to live with. I get so focused on things, that without adult supervision, I have a tendency to forget to eat or drink, one reason that I am much healthier when I work from home. When I work on-site I tend to come home in a ball of flames, exhausted by my working life and physically broken, and therefore contribute negligibly to doing any form of physical chores. I’m working on it, but saying that, whilst Mr Girlymicro is working upstairs here I am writing this blog instead of tidying the kitchen. I did say he deserves awards, and I am a work in progress.

My mind doesn’t let me rest

One of the other factors that contributes to my physical laziness is that I am so tired all the time. I rarely get a decent nights sleep. If I wake up between one and three to go to the bathroom, my brain kicks in as I’ve had just enough sleep. It’s then fully engaged, whilst my body remains sleepy, with things I should be doing or random thoughts. The same is true even if I get back to sleep, I rarely if ever manage to sleep to the alarm. I do all the tips that everyone talks about, I keep a notebook by the side of my bed, I make notes into this blog so get things out of my mind, but I find switching off really hard. Some of this is because I should probably just take some painkillers/antihistamines, to manage other things, but some of it is definitely the fact that my brain just doesn’t want to play normal.

I am a starter not a finisher

Another side effect of having a mind that is constantly full of ideas, is that it can be challenging to bring any of them to completion. I am very much a starter not a finisher. Finishing anything requires a lot of active effort, otherwise I have a tendency to get distracted by the next good idea that comes along. I think it’s one of the reasons that over the years I’ve become slightly obsessed about keeping my promises and deadlines if I’m given them, even if it means I work weekends and evenings, as I’m hyper aware of my natural tendency to drift. If I make a commitment I can be pretty over the top and harsh with myself about delivering on time. As a people pleaser, this has gotten me into trouble in the past due to over committing to too many things. There have been a lot of very late nights and lost weekends. These days I’m trying to not over commit, whilst using this particular fear of failure to ensure that I still finish things on occasion.

I find focusing on being in the moment incredibly challenging

I am aware that some people are able to really ‘be’ in the moment. When they achieve something, when they have successes, they are able to really be fully present in the moment and enjoy the depth of emotions that that presence achieves. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the moment, but my brain is always onto the next thing. I’m always planning and looking forward. In many ways this is a really useful trait, but it means that I’m pretty rubbish at stopping and smelling the roses. I think this is another contributor to why I find it so hard to relax, as even when I’m having a lovely time I’m planning for the next thing. When I’m on holiday, I find it hard not to be planning for how I need to address work when I get back. When I’m at work, it’s always about how to keep us moving forward, and what needs to happen next. I need to make more run for tea 🙂

I spend my day being reactive when I would love to be visionary

My tendency to plan is one of the reasons that I find the current state of the NHS and my role within it so stressful. I want to be planning how to make us better, but because we are still recovering from the pandemic, even if the outside world has moved on, I spend a lot of my time still in reaction mode. It’s one of the reasons that research is so very important to me. In that aspect of my role, as well as in education, I feel like I can be focused on how to make things better and move things forward, whereas that can be more challenging clinically. It is why I love and value the different aspects of my role, education, research and clinical, as they balance each other off for the different needs that I have personality wise. It’s why my role is perfect for me and I’m so grateful that I have been able to develop it the way I have.

I feel I should be doing so so much more

All of this leaves me with a continuous general underlying feeling that I should be doing so much more, that there is so much more to do, and that I need to be better. There’s a lot about this which is good, especially when I was training and it could be channeled into ticking off the necessary boxes. Frankly, it was also easier to work full force and recover when I was in my 20’s and 30’s. I don’t think I had the self awareness, or self reflection skills I have now to understand my drivers in the same way back then. I also don’t think I had the self forgiveness to handle my lack of perfection and therefore be open to change. Now, although looking in the mirror and seeing my flaws can be challenging, it also inspires me to be better and I try to treat myself with the kindness I would offer to others. All traits have a light side and a dark side. My brain means that I am more physically broken and can make the lives of those around me harder by not contributing as much as I should. It also enables me to create change and make the lives of others better. It has been the enabler and the driver to allow me to reach where I am today, and to do things like start this blog. Although peculiar, it is of more benefit than it is harm, and after 44 years in each others company, we have finally reached an en tant cordial, where we still strive for improvement but also live in acceptance of the reality of what the day to day looks like. So my advice, learn to love yourself for who you, whilst striving to be better.

All opinions in this blog are my own

Me and My Bathroom: Being an adult scientist has way more to do with bathrooms than I’d expected

girlymicro General, Healthcare Science, Microbiology (Clinical) , , , , ,

Last week, I was lucky enough to be the Lord Mayor’s Colloquies (an academic conference or seminar) on water and sanitation, where the wonderful Dr Susanne Surman-Lee was speaking. It was an event sponsored by the Lord Mayor and supported by the Worshipful Company of Plumbers.

What has this got to do with bathrooms I hear you ask? Is it because it was on water and sanitation? Is it because these things impact healthcare design? Or are linked with infectious diseases? Is it because of the LAKANA Mali study? You’d like to think, but actually the trigger for this post was none of these things. It was triggered because I have a habit of hiding in bathrooms.

Hiding in bathrooms

I have posted before about networking, and that I’m not a natural in this regard. I have over time developed tools and approaches to aid me, but I still don’t love it. Now for a confession, and to be honest I genuinely don’t know if this is just a me thing as I haven’t really talked about it. Sometimes when I just can’t face networking, I hide in the bathroom of wherever the event is taking place so I don’t have to be in the room until just before the event start so I don’t even have to try. I’ve hidden in some pretty Class A bathrooms in my time, at the Houses of Parliament, at fancy hotels and most recently at Mansion House.

Some days, I just can’t face the sea of people and trying to come up with something interesting that I can bring to the conversation. It is especially bad when entering rooms when I just don’t know anyone or at least anyone well. Occasionally, my game face just fails me and so I find myself locked in a toilet cubicle negotiating with myself about what point I will leave in order to still look like I’m arriving in a timely fashion and with a window to grab some tea.

The negotiation is also about convincing myself to not a) hide at the back of the room, b) just call it quits and go home, and c) look confident and like I haven’t been hiding in a bathroom when I enter the room.

The negotiating doesn’t end here. Many years ago I made a deal with myself. I am allowed to hide in the bathroom, but only pre-event. Once I make it to the room I am not allowed to leave without speaking to at least one person I don’t know. It doesn’t have to be extensive, but it has to be a deliberate act of networking. One of the reasons I find this bit easier is because post event, at least, the one thing I have in common with the other attendees is that we’ve just engaged in the same activity. So that’s the rule, one person, one conversation before I’m allowed to leave. I don’t know if I’m the only one that has these types of rules, but now you all know if you see me hiding out in a bathroom, there is a reason why.

Developing a more than normal interest in bathrooms and water

You won’t just find me in bathrooms at events, however. Working in IPC has waaaaay more to do with bathrooms than I could ever have imagined before I came into post. From overflowing toilets to drain flies, we deal with it all. We often joke that we don’t know which members of the team are Mario and which are Luigi, as even when it isn’t an IPC issue, we still get all the plumbing calls.

As time has progressed, I’ve developed strong opinions on a wealth of topics that I never thought would hold meaning for me, from sink design to tap choice. I’ve also learnt a lot more about IPS panels (the panels at the back of your sink) and TMVs (thermostatic mixer valves) and how both can impact on other areas, such as my need to revalidate my specialist mechanically ventilated rooms.

One of the key things I’ve learnt, as well as being open to continuously learning, is that relationships in this area are key. This is an area where you need to be able to ‘phone a friend’. Friends aren’t just other people in IPC. You need to build relationships with engineers and designers, as well as those people in the lab who can talk you through your water-based results. You simply can’t do this one alone. There are too many factors. Collaboration is key, and the sooner we recognise we can’t do it alone, the more impactful we will be.

Promoted to a bathroom

I don’t know if there’s any meaning behind it, or whether it is just an amusing coincidence, but when I finally got to a point in my career where I was allowed my own office it turned out it was a converted toilet cubicle. My office still says on-call bathroom on the door, alongside one of my favourite things the team have ever given me, my Dame Elaine sign (they always joke it will happen one day). It is a rather compact space, but I love it, and at least they remembered to take the actual toilet out.

The irony of a blog post that starts with how much I hide in bathroom cubicles then discussing how my office is now one is not lost on me. Quite a lot of people don’t like it as a space, as it has no natural light or any ventilation. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been hiding in bathrooms for way longer than I had a bathroom office, but I find it a really comforting space. I like the lack of distractions. I like being able to spin my chair and reach for anything I need. I like being able to listen to peppy music whilst I work, as I hate working in silence, and not having to worry about bothering others. To me, it’s sanctuary.

Being considered a bathroom expert

One of the things I didn’t realise when I started out as a Healthcare Scientist is how organically interests grow and end up turning into something more. I started involving myself in all things built environment and IPC, because I wanted to understand it better. I wanted to learn more. As time went on that wanting to learn led me to develop more and more questions, as I found gaps in the literature and questions I couldn’t find the answers to. Maybe because I am a scientist, those questions led me to create studies and collaborate with others to gain knowledge that not only solved some things but also created more questions. I’ve also had the painful experience of making bad decisions based on a lack of evidence to enable me to make better ones. Therefore, I think this area (water and water safety) is one that is often overlooked and yet is critical to all healthcare and healthcare environments.

One of the reasons it’s so easy to make less than ideal judgements and decisions in this area is that IPC teams get so little training on this. Most will know something about Legionella pneumophila and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, but very few will know much about other key organisms, such as atypical mycobacteria or Elizabethkingae. What can feel like fairly low consequence decisions based on aesthetic appeal, such as which tap you prefer, can have significant consequences down the line which might not be seen for years. This can make it hard to tie up cause and effect in order to lead to improved learning without external support.

I never aspired to, or meant to be considered an expert in this area, but somehow I have accrued some level of knowledge by being in a Trust that is always building, and having stayed in one place for 20 years to see the cause and effect in real time. For the same reasons, I’ve also published a few papers linked to ways to improve water hygiene, although only a handful.

The main thing I’ve done is establish the Environment Network as a way to share learning and talk through challenges, and more recently, a course that sits alongside it to help support those who are interested and don’t want to make the same trial and error mistakes that I did. I am far from an expert in reality. There’s too much to learn, and the landscape alters too quickly. What I am is intellectually curious and determined to try to learn enough that every decision I make it better than the last one.

Bathroom based recognition

I started this post talking about a Worshipful Company of Plumbers sponsored event at Mansion House and my bathroom based adventures. I thought I should finish it by telling you why I was there and how this transpired in case any of you would be interested in joining me at future versions.

As I said, there don’t seem to be that many people who work clinically who are interested in water safety, although I’m pleased to say the number is increasing. There are, however, amazing women working in this area from the microbiology perspective, women like Dr Susanne Surman-Lee and Elise Maynard. The brilliant thing about these women is that they are truly interested in engaging with others and also raising up other women. I first met Susanne 17 years ago as a trainee when she was working at UKHSA, she won’t remember the event but she made a definite impression on me, and I’ve known Elise for over a decade. They are my ‘phone a friends’ when I need expert advice. They also lead on a bunch of different guideline writing groups in relation to water, and over the years have been kind enough to include me so that these groups, which are usually fairly heavily engineering led, include a clinical perspective.

Over the years, we have written a few BSI guidelines together, and the one that I think is most useful to those of you out there in IPC is this one, BS 8580-2:2022 Water quality. Risk assessments for Pseudomonas aeruginosa and other waterborne pathogens. It has a wonderful table at the back from Elise that contains all of the kinds of organisms you are aiming to control and if there are any specific areas to be considered, such as Klebsiella pneumoniae and sinks. We’re currently writing a new one to help people make sampling based decisions, and one on atypical mycobacteria should hopefully start later in the year. Susanne also organises the Royal Society of Public Health water webinar series, and I’ve been fortunate enough to deliver a couple.

All of which ended up with me being here:

Worshipful Company of Plumbers Livery Ceremony May 2023

In 2022, I was asked if I’d consider becoming a Liveryman for the Worshipful Company of Plumbers, linked to my work on water and women in leadership. It’s been a fascinating process, and at some point I might do a blog post on it. Needless to say, I agreed and in May 2023 I was clothed in the Livery. One of the great things about joining has been to meet so many people who are also really interested in how we manage water better and differently. There are also so many different perspectives. At the Mansion House event, my one conversion ended up being the leader of a sustainability nonprofit who was interested in using STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) approaches to change how people think about water. This strikes a bell with me, as some of the challenges in the healthcare setting are around people thinking of sink areas being ‘clean’, whereas they are frequently highly loaded with bacteria and therefore potential risk.

Members of my team now jokingly refer to me as Her Plumbship, and all plumbing queries are light heartedly directed my way. The thing is, in this area, none of us can do it alone. I’m not a plumber (despite what my CV says). Nor am I an engineer, an environmental microbiologist or sustainability expert. If we are to make things better, make thing safer and deliver on key goals like those listed by the UN, we have to come together. We have to embrace the fact that there is no such thing as a stupid question, be prepared to stick our heads above the parapet and be uncomfortable in our lack of knowledge in order to work towards a better shared understanding.

All opinions in this blog are my own

My (possible) Mid-Life Crisis and Me 2023 Edition: Entering 2024 has left me questioning….have I peaked at 44?

girlymicro General, Healthcare Science, Leadership, Research/Academia, Writing , , ,

Heading into 2024 is a slightly odd event for me. Let me tell me why. 2023 ticked boxes for me I had never imagined existed, let alone had on my list. I attended the King’s Coronation. I got to fulfil a lifelong dream and go to Eurovision. I even managed to tick off the last remaining thing on my professional wish list and made professor.

Coming hard on the back of 2022 and 2021, I just don’t really have words for how privileged I feel to have had the experiences I’ve had. This is all amazing and mind-blowing. When you take a moment to breathe and reflect on all of this, however, it leaves me with one over whelming thought. What next?

I’m 44 years old. This year will be my 20th as a Healthcare Scientist, my 20th year working in the NHS. I have at least another 10 years of service in me. But what does that look like? I could never imagine where I am now, so how do I envision what’s to come? How do I therefore make it happen? I, like many others, have always kind of joked about people having a mid-life crisis, but for the first time ever, I can see how people get there. I’m super fortunate that I love my job, and I don’t want a change. At the same point, I also don’t want to stagnate. I want to keep on pushing. I want to keep getting better as a person and moving things forward for others.

Recently, though I have to admit, I am recognising how much I also need to get some rest and recognise how far I’ve come. I went from finishing my PhD to making professor in 8 years. Things have happened at pace. Part of my brain screams its time to sit back and smell the roses for a while and mentally catch up with all thats happened. The other part is saying that I need a plan to climb the next mountain, whatever that might be. I enter 2024 therefore in somewhat of a no man’s land, trying to work out who I want to be as I turn 45 and enter the next phase of my career. I don’t have much of this figured out yet, but I thought I would start by talking about the few things I do know.

It’s about giving back

For me, tunnel vision was very much a thing during the early stages of my career. I knew where I was going and what I wanted to achieve. In the last year or so I’ve very much had a change of perspective. I’m lucky enough to be offered a lot of opportunities, previously when I would have said yes or thrown my hat into the ring I’ve had a change of heart. When these opportunities come up, quite a lot of the time, I actively decide to not take them up, or to pass them on. It’s hard to gain experience and make connections when you are early in your career. I never really had that person in my career who would push me into the limelight, or pass things my way. I am aware, from seeing this happen with medical colleagues, quite what a difference it can make to someone’s career progression. I want to be the person who makes conscious decisions to do that now, and to pay things forward. I also want to still be open to mentorship and coaching opportunities where I can support others to take these steps. I feel like it’s not about me anymore, it’s about growing the people who will replace me, and do the job I’m doing even better, who will grow the change even further.

It’s about inspiring others

It’s so much harder to become something if you don’t know it exists. How do you follow a road map to a destination that you don’t have a location for. Everyone has their own pathway, but it’s so much harder if you can’t make informed choices about what your options could be. I struggled with this so much for a very long time. I was lucky, in that I could picture what I wanted, but as there was no one I could find in that space I just didn’t know how to get there. It must be even harder if you dont have that strong sense of where you want to be. Now, I don’t know that I’m particularly inspirational, but what I can be is visible and work to be even more so. Visible enough so that people feel they can reach out and ask questions, visible enough that I can show possibility for those thinking about future destinations.

I still remember the scientist who came into my primary school classroom. I have so much love for all the people, like Ruth Thomsen and others, who are living embodiments of the possibilities that are available for scientific careers. I want to continue to ring fence time so that I can live up to those examples. Although I took a while to realise it, I think that visibility is another reason why this blog is so important to me and why I hope that it will continue to grow and be useful to others. So, every day I want to consciously be trying to do better and inspire more.

It’s about opening doors

I have been blessed to have a career that both challenges me and fulfils me. I have also been fairly successful and managed to tick my personal tick boxes, becoming a Consultant Clinical Scientist, maintaining a clinical academic career, and making Professor. That’s great for me, but I think that if I don’t make it so that others can achieve those things or make the pathway easier, I will actually have fundamentally failed in my goals. Now I’ve finally managed to get over the line I’ve realised that the goal was never just about me. It was about making sure that anyone who had those aspirations had a pathway that they could follow, rather than wandering in the darkness and making it up as they went alone, like I did. So that’s the job, sharing my mistakes and learning so others don’t have to repeat them and can start a bit further along the pathway. 

It’s also my job to put a wedge in the door so that others don’t have to push anywhere near as hard to get it open as I did, and by using what level of influence and privilege I have to serve those who will follow. I am fortunate enough to have access to some resources that mean I can make practical contributions to this, not just work as a mentor or from an individual standpoint. I sit on national groups and run national meetings, which I really hope means that we can build networks and change things together. We are always stronger as a group. This is something that is really important to me, and a priority I want to continue to pursue.

It’s about trying new things

Now, when I say I’m passing on opportunities, it’s not that I don’t want to be challenged or to stagnate. I still want to take on new challenges, develop skills and take on new things. I’m just aware that there are experiences I’ve already had that could benefit others more. Some of the things I want to do are work adjacent, rather than purely work based skills. I’d like to get better at doing things like this, writing my blog, structuring it into something new, but also other things like science communication. I’d also like to be a better leader and communicator in general. I think, for me, it’s about moving from pure knowledge acquisition to pass exams etc, to skill/tool acquisition and application to help me implement change. I’m still passionate about my job and excited for the scope it gives me, I just want to gain the skills to do it better in the broadest possible sense.

It’s about knowing myself

All of this change has come from feeling like I’m growing into my own skin and learning to be unapologetically me. That doesn’t mean I’m a saint, I have so so many flaws, but it’s a growing acceptance that I’m a work in progress and that that is OK. Being open to that knowledge and that improvement is something I want to embrace. The more I get to know me, flaws and all, the more I can understand my drivers and responses. The more I do that the more I can reduce the noise, the more clarity I can have to embrace where I want to move towards. In my 20s and 30s I think I was scared to look and really see myself as I was clinging to ideas of perfection. Now in my 40s I just want to be the best authentic version of myself, and that’s the journey I’m on now.

It’s about finding time and balance

Part of that knowing myself is acknowledging that I use work as a way of feeling worthy and marking progression. There is so much more to me, and my sense of self worth cannot rely on numbers of papers published, or my professional reputation. Finding value in myself through work drives a fairly unhealthy relationship, where it’s difficult to step away and leads to working an excessive amount of hours. At one point prior to the pandemic I didn’t have a weekend off for 3 years, Weirdly I was OK with this, but now I have staff and students, I’m aware of how toxic an example this is to set. Also, as my health gets more challenging, I just can’t maintain it. I need rest and relaxation. I need to have periods where I completely step away, for both my physical and mental health. I want to learn to read books for fun again and take long bubble baths. To move away from my work being quite so core to my identity for the good of everybody, especially Mr Girlymicro.

It’s about allowing time for celebration and joy

The other part of allowing space to relax and enjoy life is finding time to celebrate. I’ve been very much ‘onto the next thing’ for so long that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to really sit back and smell the roses. I’ve always been the same. I never managed to celebrate GCSE results, degree results etc. By the time I finished the exam I was so burnt out and broken all I could do was crawl into my bed to recover. Having posted last year about the importance of celebration, I want to try to learn a new healthier habit where I do celebrate things, both large and small.

Again, this is something having students and teams has taught me. I want them to embrace their successes and take time to really recognise what they have achieved. It’s not therefore just about taking time to recognise my own progress but really ensure I put a focus on celebrating the progress of others. It’s so easy to put it off and say we will do it another time, then nothing ever happens, it’s time to prioritise joy.

It’s about staying brave

Finally, I want to make sure that I stay open to failure. I don’t want to avoid trying things or embracing experiences just because I fear I will fail or what others will think of me. I want to stay brave, I want to be fierce. Being fortunate enough to have reached a position of some privilege I want to also ensure I own that position and continue to speak my truth, even if that comes with risk or discomfort, for the benefit of others. I want, when needed, to know that I will always stick my head above the parapet, be seen, be part of the conversation, and use what voice I have for the benefit of people other than myself.

I may not know where this next phase will lead me, but there is joy in the not knowing as well as fear. I genuinely think that as long as I keep to the list of the things that I do know as a cornerstone of my decision making, it will all work out. I want to strive to be kind, I want to know myself better, and I want to leave this world a better place than I found it. I hope whatever part of the journey you are on you are able to find your own signposts to the life you want to lead. Welcome to the mid-life, it’s not so scary as it seemed!

All opinions in this blog are my own

Taking the End of Year Hype with a Pinch of Salt: Understanding the social media declarations of successes probably come with undeclared context

girlymicro General, Writing , , , ,

I’m not a massive New Year person. I talk a lot about how much I love Christmas, but when it comes to New Year’s Eve, I kind of find putting so much pressure on a single night a bit much for me. That said, I do understand the benefits of using it as a moment to reflect, celebrate, and recognise the progress we’ve made. We all know that I’m a fan of ring fencing some time for reflection, I think the benefit and challenge of New Year is that it feels like the whole world is doing it simultaneously and occasionally the messaging that comes with that can be hard to digest and process.

I think it can be especially challenging if perhaps the year hasn’t gone so well or if you are going through something hard just as the year turns. The plethora of messaging out there, whilst laudable, can easily send individuals into a spiral that adds to what they were already dealing with. So, this year, instead of adding to that burden by merely posting my highs, I thought I would post a blog that I hope will remind anyone struggling to read those posts for what they truly are, nice words with limited context. I thought I would also throw in a few thoughts on how I work to process them when the world overwhelms me. Happy New Year, and welcome to 2024!

New Year is an arbitrary marker

The first thing I want to be clear about is that New Year is actually a completely arbitrary marker. There is nothing that states that this is the best time for you, as an individual, to reflect. January is cold and dark, and depending on how you feel about Christmas, it can come after a time that has already been emotionally challenging. It may not, therefore, be sensible to think you have the bandwidth to undertake some true reflection at this time. I see the world differently when the days are longer and when I have access to sunlight. I feel differently about the world when spring hits, and my challenges don’t seem as overwhelming. I thought I would start by saying, therefore, that there is no rule that you should do your reflection piece now. Choose a time that works for you. Be as individual as you choose and empowered to just opt out if you so wish.

Celebration and supporting others is important but…….

I’ve posted about how important I think it is to celebrate and support others. I think lifting each other up is key and an important way to give back. The way you do this doesn’t have to result in you damaging your own mental health and wellbeing however. You can choose to like posts as you scroll down them rather than fully engage and comment if you are having a difficult time. You can choose to have a social media break and know that at this time of the year, there will be plenty of others prepared to carry that particular load on your behalf. Sometimes, noting and filing away, so your congratulations or support comes later and individually, can actually be the more meaningful way to respond. My point I suppose is this, if you are in a difficult place there is nothing wrong with periodically prioritising your wellbeing.  This is different from choosing not to engage and celebrate others, and it’s OK, not that you need my permission or anything.

Not everything is as shiny as people say

One of the reasons I don’t fully engage with the hype at New Year is that I’m aware that people feel like they have to put something out there. Many people feel like they have to find something to shout about. I can, in many ways, see why this is helpful, as even if you’ve not had a great time, it encourages you to find the good. I actually feel this is a positive way to process if you are in the right space for it. If you are not, however, it can add undue pressure and make things worse. If you are in a place where you can’t do that processing, it’s worth noting 2 things. First, you will get to that place at some point. You just don’t need to get there in time for an arbitrary date that may or may not work for you. Second, a percentage of what you’re seeing posted won’t be from a place of true reflection and joy. It will come from the social pressure to post something.  There are a heap of people out there desperately trying to find something to say, and even more who are not posting anything as they are in the same space as you, they are just not visible in their absence. On this one, I would be aware of the absence of things as well as the presence of others and use it to help contextualise how your feeling.

Benchmarking against others is not always helpful

Betty, from the Tales of Female Badassery podcast, reminded me of a phrase today ‘comparison is the thief of joy’. It really struck me, today of all days, how true that can be. Benchmarking is a useful tool. It can inspire you, show us the possible, and help us plan the paths to our dreams. If you try to do it without full context or all the information, however, it can lead to negativity and self-recrimination. So, if you are tempted to fall down this particular rabbit hole, ask yourself……is this helpful? If the answer is no then it’s time to crawl your way back out into the sunlight and park it for later, you are probably either using the wrong sources or are not in the right head space for the undertaking. Your journey is yours, and benchmarking is a tool, not an outcome.

Life is multifactorial

You’ll see a lot of posts about professional success at this time of year. I wanted to take a moment to remind us all, however, that life is not just about work. When you are considering successes it needs to include not just work financial components but what happened in other aspects of your life. Did you take that drawing class you’ve wanted to? Did you finally manage to finish writing a poem? Did you get the kids to school in one piece this term? We are more than one thing, and our reflections should encompass all of who we are, not just a box that society deems we should tick off. It’s OK to bring all of you to whatever it is you’re doing, and that includes reflection and celebration. No one gets to tell you what matters and what is significant but you.

People are often not sharing the bits that didn’t go well

I have had an objectively amazing year. I got to go to eurovision, to the Kings Coronation, I got papers out, and won awards. All of which are brilliant.  The other side of that coin is that I’ve pretty much broken myself physically and mentally at points, to the extent that even writing this blog, which means so much to me, had to be paused for a month. Now, because of what this blog is, I’ve shared some of those challenges as well as the highs. You often don’t get to see both sides of the coin, however. Success often comes at a cost, and that is a conversation we often seem to avoid having. There is nothing wrong with deciding that it’s a cost that you are not currently prepared to pay. Even straightforward things, like exams, come with a financial and time penalties, and depending on where you are in life, you may say not now, or not ever. People are also always shocked when I talk about failure, as so many people don’t, but failure is a part of life, and it’s OK both that it happens and that we talk about it. You’ll see some people sharing their CVs of failure and this time of year, as well as their successes, and I think that that is brilliant and brave act, and something we should do more of.

You are on your own journey

Fundamentally,  we are all on our own path. No one will be on the same path as you. You have your own values, your own goals, your own history, all of which will be personal to you and impact on your decision-making. Celebrating rather than crushing that individuality under the weight of expectation and comparison is something I’ve found is key to my own happiness.

It actually, from my experience, takes a fair amount of courage to own this individuality and way of approaching the world. So what I’m wishing for us all in 2024 is the bravery to walk and own our paths, and to use that ownership to be a little less impacted by the distraction of the paths of others. You do you! Leave others to be themselves in turn.

Goals should support aspiration, not self-recrimination

Goals and even New Year’s resolutions should be tools that help us on this journey. They should not be a weight around your neck to suffocate you if you do not achieve them. Goals need to be flexible enough to change as the landscape changes, and we need to be able to respond and throw them off if there are no longer relevant. I think we should all bear this is mind, least of all me, even with what should be simple things. Sometimes, when I say I will post on a specific day and I don’t manage it, I will go into a flight of self recrimination that baffles Mr Girlymicro who points out that the world has neither ended nor has someone been harmed by my lack of delivery. Perspective is needed. What are the consequences of achieving a goal or not? They should be map markers to aid you. If they become more than this, they probably need to be reviewed and further understood as to why they matter so much. Understanding your drivers is key to understanding yourself after all.

Sometimes, getting off the hamster wheel is more important than staying on it

One of the things I can’t work out if I learnt due to the pandemic or would have learnt in my 40s anyway is that sometimes the goal itself may be to become OK with not having a goal. Sometimes, the important thing is not to tick another box, add another level, or achieve more. Sometimes, the important thing is to do the opposite, to do less, take on less, to feel freed. In a world about consumption and visible gain it can be hard to feel legitimately able to make decisions that go against the tide and decide it’s time for a break. It’s often not even talked about as an option. It is however one. It’s OK to step away. It’s OK to table something for later. It’s OK to pause and re-evaluate. The rat race isn’t going anywhere. It will be there waiting for you when you are ready to re-join it. So go ahead and breath, everything will be fine.

Here’s to celebrating the little things in 2024

My 2024 will not therefore be filled with grand declarations. I’m hoping that it will still be filled with success, but the success that I want is about the little things. It’s about finding time to make and drink tea out of the pot instead of always rushing and having it from a tea bag in a cup. It’s about finding time to write this blog and be creative in a way that is joyful, not squeezed into existence. It’s about balancing my life and work, finding time to deal with my emails during working hours, and even on occasion seeing the bottom of my inbox. It’s about finding more moments with friends and family by achieving that balance. It’s about all those little moments every day that, for me, make life worthwhile. I hope that in 2024, you get whatever it is that you wish for and know, whatever you decide that is, that it is practically perfect in every way. Happy New Year.

All opinions in this blog are my own

A DINK Household: Embracing a life with no kids, no guilt, only joy

girlymicro General , , , ,

I’ve got a few days off this week and so have finally been able to catch up with some friends and family. It’s also given me more time than normal to catch my breath and reflect a little. Most of my friends with kids however are instead running around from show to show, attending carol concerts, and trying to buy presents at midnight. This comparison has caused me to reflect on how glad I am to be part of a DINK household.

What on earth is a DINK? It’s a term I’ve heard thrown around for a while and I finally asked Mr Girlymicro what it stood for. Apparently, it stands for: double income, no kids. There’s also DINKY, which stands for double income, no kids yet.

I wrote a while ago about how it felt to be childless in my 40s and to discover I couldn’t have children. At that point, I had come to terms with it as a reality. Now, in the year my niece would have become a teenager, I have to say I’m more than OK. 13 years on I have such a different view on the whole situation. Not only am I OK, but I have come to embrace and enjoy all the opportunities that have come my way, many of which would not be available to me if I was looking after the next generation. This post is not to revel in the stress of those who have a different path, but to share that there can be joy for those of us who are on a different journey.

It’s not them versus us

Too often when I post about being childless on social media, whether defending my right to still leave work on time or stating that my life still has value, I get a response that sets me up as if it’s the childless vs the parents. My claiming that people who are not parents still have the right to work life balance does not take away from the rights of parents to have the same. One group having value does not detract from the other. I think it’s an interesting societal artefact that we are set up as opposites, when really we are nothing of the sort. It is not ‘Them vs Us’. It is about an appreciation of difference and recognising  the challenges and impacts on everyone’s lives of the decisions we make. I can want to have my life recognised as ‘of value’ without asking for someone else to have theirs diminished. 

My friends with children are a brilliant and an important part of my life. Being the fun aunt is important to me. My wonderful colleagues who have children absolute deserve to have allowances made so that they can be present and involved parents. I love hearing about the activities of their kids, their lives, and seeing the pictures. On the rare occasion I also need to leave on time to see my family, they are brilliant about ensuring it happens. I hope they feel I support them in the same way. This positioning of ‘Them vs Us’ isn’t real and if 2023 has taught me anything, it’s not to feed the trolls, so let’s see and value each other.

I have found my joy

I work hard. The days are long, and I’m often pretty tired and worn thin. I think there was a certain level of work for distraction for a while, but an awareness of using it to avoid processing has enabled me to face some things head on. As 2023 draws to a close, it’s turned out to have been a year of some amazing highs. 2022 in fact, also had some particularly rocking moments. There were some great professional wins brought about by all that work, which I’ve been forced to acknowledge would never have happened if I’d had to split my focus. I also had some truly wonderful times with Mr and mummy Girlymicro and some great friends, many of which would have been harder or more complicated if we’d had children. Sunsets, cocktails, and shopping would have just been more complicated. I experienced pure and unadulterated joy in just being in these moments. In the freedom, we have to just book a weekend away on a whim. Freedom that being a DINK household gives us that we would be unlikely to have otherwise. Joy that has become uncoloured by the ‘What Ifs’ that had previously removed some of the shine. Learning to live in and for these moments without looking back.

My life has value

One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced in moving forward is the unwritten societal expectation. I don’t know whether it is unconscious evolutionary pressure or a societal construct, but there is a perception that somehow your life has less value as you are not contributing the future by having children. That’s not to say that it all comes from other people. A lot of this is something we put on ourselves. It is not helped by people feeling like it is OK to make you justify your decisions at every point. You can’t have children? Why don’t you adopt? Have you considered IVF? Have you researched trying via a surrogate? To which I have a tendency to want to scream back ‘Oh no, I never considered any of those things. I’ve never lied awake at night running through my options. It just never occurred to me to research and find out more. Thank you so much for changing my life by enlightening me that there are other options!’. All of these conversations, whilst driven from a place of support, just reinforce the fact that no kids = no value.

Let me tell you now what I tell myself every day. I have value. It may not be in the same way, but my life is valuable, my contributions are valuable, and although different, I am still contributing the future of humankind.  I feel like I contribute professionally, but also by supporting friends with their families. Recognising this contribution in myself means that I now feel empowered to put more boundaries around my life to protect it and to respect that value. I am trying to leave work on time. I’m trying to not work weekends. I’m trying to find time for contributions that mean something to me and which I believe matter, like this blog and being a visible woman in STEM. If I don’t do it, how can I role model that for others, and how else can we have conversations about how to change some of the perceptions about value and childlessness.

I refuse to feel guilty

I’m done apologising. I’m done apologising if I need to put my life first some times. Now, I’m not talking all the time. We all have to be team players. I am, however, done with throwing myself over the metaphorical ledge in some perverse form of self flagellation for something I had no control over. I am also done with being made to feel guilty in conversations where I talk about my life and my opportunities. Yes, I get to go on holiday to New York and shop because I’m not paying out a crazy amount of money in nursery fees. I’m not going to hide it because I get to do something someone else can’t. In the same way, I embrace people showing me pictures of their kids, even if I can’t have any. Their children are an important part of their lives, and I care enough to be interested. The way I feel about lunch at Serendipity III in New York and the fact it featured in one of my favourite movies with my sister has meaning for me. Things are meaningful for different people in different ways, thus is the joy and variety of life.

I’ve heard the phrase ‘Not everyone is cut out to be a parent’ said to me a few times in recent years from a variety of sources. This is almost always linked to conversations about activities in which I’ve embraced my childless existence. The first few times, it really stung, almost as if it was a way of saying that if I’d been able to have kids I would have been a bad mum. It made me pretty unhappy that it was OK to throw around that kind of judgement. The more I’ve heard it though, the more I now see it as a sign that I have genuinely grown to be comfortable with who I am now. My identity is now so OK with my childless state that I am also OK with talking about the pieces of motherhood I would have found challenging, about being open with who I am to others. Although, if you feel like saying these words, probably best to discover how they might be taken before you do. Six years ago, the response may not have been so open and embracing of the conversation.

Embracing the life we’re given

Becoming comfortable with who you are, whether you have just encorporated grief into that identity or not, has been the first step in giving myself permission. Permission to make choices that work for me, permission to be happy, permission to draw boundaries, and if needed permission to stay in the bath soaking for 3 hours with tea and an audiobook.

Embracing the life I lead, rather than some sort of societal expectation or perception of the life I should lead, has completely changed how I make choices. Being aware of my privilege in getting to make those choices makes me value them even more. In one week this year, I got to go to the King’s Coronation and Eurovision. My life is pretty epic, and none of that is defined by whether I have a child or not. It’s defined by the choices I make to lead me down wonderful and unexpected pathways and filling my life with love through the people I make the journey with.

Never looking back

I’m done with ‘What Ifs’. If you are looking back all the time you can’t truly look forward. I’ve embraced the road that led me here but I’m not defined by it. It’s just a part of who I am, not the whole. It is all too easy to be haunted by the past, especially if  the reality of that past was that we had no control over the events. This can lead to a sense of disempowerment and a feeling that we lack agency from that moment forward. At some point, to regain a sense of control, you have to have some hard conversations with yourself about what that control looks like. For me, it’s about waking up every day and consciously choosing to embrace my now. To see the future as filled with possibilities rather than filled with ghosts of a future that will never be. I no longer have a crick in my neck from looking back, and I’m OK with that.

Travelling the road less travelled

So join me, whether your circumstances are driven by choices out of your control or not, in embracing the road less travelled. Join me in committing to being braver in facing up to uncertainty, reality and in having difficult conversations with ourselves when needed in 2024. We don’t know where the doors we open by these acts of bravery will lead us, but I can almost guarantee it will be unexpected. Your journey doesn’t need to look like anyone else’s. It’s uniquely yours, and that is the joy of it!

All opinions in this blog are my own

A Shout Out to My Girls: This one is for all the women that support others & see them as inspiration not competition

girlymicro General , , , , , ,

I was fortunate enough to be asked to record a podcast last week with the absolutely awesome Betty Adamou for her series Tales of Female Badassery.  Just as we were prepping to record I was struck with a moment of panic.  I didn’t know whether I was a Badass.  I didn’t know if I’d every done anything that would make me a Badass.  I called one my girls in a state of panic, she responded with ‘don’t be so ridiculous, you’re not only a badass, you’re one of the most badass people I know’.

https://tofb.buzzsprout.com/

It got me to thinking. I am super fortunate to be really close to my family and to have the wonderful Mr Girlymicro as my constant companion. In more recent years I have, however, also become aware of how wonderful it is to have a small tight knit group of women in my life. These are the people who understand if I don’t call them for months. The ones who know me well enough to know when to challenge and when to comfort. The ones who I can sit and watch bad movies with in pyjamas and who would never judge me for the state of my house. Some of them I have known for decades, others more like 5 years, but time doesn’t really matter.  They are my girls. They get me, and this post is dedicated to them and why you should consider finding your own equivalents.

Constructive challenge

Not everyone has a Mr Girlymicro in their lives and to be honest we all need someone to call us on our BS sometimes. Having a small cicle that you trust completely, which have the ability to stop you in your tracks when you’re going down a cognitive rabbit hole is so valuable.

I suspect we’ve all been there, sounded off about X or Y, when suddenly someone trusts calls us out on what we are doing that could trigger that behaviour, or pushes us to understand why we are so triggered. This calling out opens up a whole new vehicle to understanding or route for a response that would not have been available to us otherwise.

In my case, my girls often join forces with Mr and mummy Girlymicro in asking me why? Why have I decided to take on yet another thing? Why do I think it’s needed? What extra will it add? What will I drop to enable me to take on the shiny new? What does it mean for them? Will they see even less of me now? Will I be even more distracted and do even less at home? These conversations can lead to me walking back commitments,  or at least force me to articulate my thought process and gain a better understanding of where I actually am with my workload.

Unconditional support

The reason that constructive challenge can happen is because I know these guys are 100% on my side. They are unwavering. They know all the bad in me and choose me anyway. They can, therefore, be brutal about the truth when needed, as they are also around for the rebuilding that is sometimes required after being faced with a harsh truth.

This also means that I hear what they say. If they tell me someone is out of line and validate my feelings, I hear it more because I also know they would tell me if the opposite was true and I was the one who’d acted badly. To me, unconditional support isn’t about just giving me what I want to hear. It’s giving me what I need to hear in terms of the truth/reality check. They tell me both that I’m not superwoman, but also that I’m a god damn queen who can achieve anything she puts her mind to. Just not simultaneously.

Shared experiences

Not through any deliberate endeavour,  but just because of how life has worked out, my girls all happen to be kick ass women who either work in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) or are STEM qualified. In fact, they are all coincidentally PhD qualified. I didn’t meet them all through science however. For instance, Diane, I met my first day at uni and has been keeping me sane for over 20 years. Claire (known as Dr Claire, as she was the first Claire with a PhD) I met because she was dating a friend of my future husband, the boyfriend exited the picture and we stayed friends. Claire (Captain Claire, due to our shared appreciation of Captain Jean Luc Picard) and I met over several bottles of wine when we were both doing our PhDs and have continued on the wine trajectory ever since. This means we have both a bunch of shared and different experiences.

Our shared experiences, linked to being women in science, mean that they can sometimes help me see challenges coming in a way I wouldn’t have anticipated.  They  can also share what did and did not work for them when they encountered something similar.  We can, on occasion, also just rage about the injustice of it all in a way that enables us to put our feelings in a box and carry on regardless.

A different view of the world

I have some wonderful women in my world who I count as dear friends but whom I still work with. These wonderful women are often my go-to for support and guidance as they are emersed in my world. The difference between them and this group of girls is that we don’t work together, and have never worked together in the same department. This means that we took different paths through both work and life. We don’t just reinforce each others perceptions and bias therefore through having pre-established knowledge of the other people in each others lives or work. We have a bunch of shared experiences, but a lot of our progress has led us to very different places. Some of us have kids, some don’t, some of us still work academically or in science, some don’t.  This breadth of experiences mean that they can sometimes offer a very different view to mine. They can point out nuance I would have missed or when my previous experience is biasing me to a current situation.

We also have very different ideas of what constitutes a good time. I’m a book, fire, sofa and afternoon tea kind of girl. Whereas the Claires would way prefer to be with their animals (chickens, wallabies, etc) and Diane would happily be walking through the Scottish countryside.  This is also helpful. It has always pushed me to try things I wouldn’t have. Once it pushed me to try camping. This was a mistake. Camping was a step too far. They love me anyway.

Parachute provision

I’ve written before about my tendency to shame spiral. I’m not alone. Captain Claire and I are known to call each other up mid shame spiral and offer each other a parachute outta there. We talk through what we’ve done, talk through the possible consequences, and how we might act or handle things differently next time, in a space of acceptance without judgement. It’s this last piece that is key. We’re not trying to ‘fix’ each other, just support each other by providing a safe space for verbal reflection and to articulate our fears, whether rational or not. From my perspective, this often permits an early exit from the spiral combined with some centering and learning. What more could a girl ask for?

Sometimes, we all cry

That same space of zero judgement is also important as it provides a space where you have licence to just feel. Sometimes, I have to ride the wave of emotions to process them and get through to the other side. It’s no secret to the readers of this blog that there have been some tough times in the last few years. Having a space where you can just have freedom to express that you are angry or upset by the state of the world or the way you have been treated professionally is so special. I have this with Mr and mummy Girlymicro as well, but it helps them to be able to share the load, especially when things can go through intense periods. Sometimes, I just need to cry and say that things are unfair, and then I get it out of my system and find the emotional band width to remember my why and can get back on with the fight.

Borrowed courage

When I phoned up Dr Claire and declared ‘I’m just not a badass’, her first response of ‘hell yes you are’ gave me courage. It made me brave enough to go ahead and record something I was hesitant about. This is what my girls do. They loan me courage when mine fails me. When my imposter syndrome or my fear tells me I can’t, they are always there to tell me I can.  When I receive awards or recognition and I ask ‘why me’, they respond ‘because’. They see me when I cannot see myself. They will tell me to ignore the fear and just get on with it. They will challenge me when I’m avoiding things because I’m not brave enough and loan me the courage I need to do what is needed. When required, they bring out the bad ass warrior in me.

Courageous authenticity

The validation I am lucky enough to receive from my family and my girls is important for another reason. They make me feel like it’s OK for me to be myself, not some projected version of myself. I’m pretty open in this blog about who I am, how I feel, and how I respond to challenges. I’m also (I hope) pretty honest about my personal flaws and areas that I’m trying to grow and improve around. This blog wouldn’t be possible without having people around who not only validate that that message is OK, but that it is actually important and helpful to talk about these things.

There are days for all of us where we can’t love ourselves. Days where all we can see are our flaws and none of our strengths. Days when we compare and we just don’t stack up. Having people in your world who also see and acknowledge these weaknesses, love you anyway, and tell you you have value even in their presence is one of the greatest gifts we can receive from another person. It enables you to still be who you are even when that may be the last thing you want to be. To continue to work on being unapologetically authentically you.

Mutual appreciation society

One of the best things about these relationships is that they are bi-directional. Most of the time, when one of us is having a bad time, the other is doing OK and can be there to lift the other up. On the occasions where we are both just going through it, then a shared pit of despair can still provide comfort. (We’ve decked ours our with pillows, blankets, and everything). I think these ladies rock it. I trust them completely. I trust them to call me out and challenge me, which means when they validate my other feelings, I believe that too. I love them and consider myself blessed to have them in my life. I also hope that I am there for them as much as they are there for me.

My girls and I aren’t in competition with each other. We’re all on different paths. We value different things, and that’s not only OK but joyous! It doesn’t matter who is achieving what. It doesn’t matter if that’s getting the kids to school on time, or getting out of bed and just making it to work when we’re having a bad time and just wish to hide from the world. All of it is valid and worth celebrating. When they were having kids and I was finding it hard as I was still working through my own situation, they were always mindful but still knew that I was genuinely happy for them. One thing does not obliviate the other.

Distilled awesome

So, to end, I want to say thank you. Thank you to the women out there supporting other women. Thank you to the ladies who straighten my crown even when I don’t realise it’s crooked. Thank you to my girls, the one’s who I cry, scream and cheer with. You are distilled awesome and I will never be able to truly describe the difference you’ve made to my life and how grateful I am to have you on this journey with me. I may be absent for months, I may be a special kind of crazy, but know I am always here for you!

All opinions in this blog are my own

World Antimicrobial Awareness Week 2023: Thinking differently about ‘Super Wicked’ problems

girlymicro General, Healthcare Science, Science Communication

It’s the end of November and we’ve just come to the end of World Antimicrobial Awareness Week 2023 #waaw. I have previously posted about some of the challenges linked to antimicrobial resistance and this year I’ve been really impressed by the amount of information on social media. I also know of some face to face events (more on that later) linked to speaking to school children and healthcare staff. Many of us are involved with an engagement push linked to this week, and one-off events are both valuable and have strength of purpose. I wonder though how many of us have really thought about how we design or put these events together in a chain for greater impact or in the wider context of the challenge?

What do we normally do?

It is sometimes tempting, especially if we’re doing a one off event, to focus on the activity or engagement first. This means that we will often come up with the cool fun idea of what we are going to do, focussing on the science, and how to break that down. This means that sometimes we start towards the end of the process, rather than starting off spending time thinking about what it is we want to achieve and then building everything based around that.

Even when you have the objectives nailed there are a number of different ways and factors that may impact your messaging and how that message is co-created/received, and your audience is a key component of the design process. Factors to consider can include aspects such as:

  • Gender distribution
  • Geographical location
  • Age
  • Family status (care givers, children)
  • Professional status
  • Socio-economic status
  • Education level
  • Shared experiences (special interest groups, prior intervention
    experience)
  • Social and cultural norms (beliefs or religious practices)

Different objectives lend themselves to different things, and to different audiences. Infographics are a very common way of communicating. They are easy to share and have great longevity, as they can be used in social media, but can also be utilised in print form for posters and leaflets to allow a different form of targeted spread. They can work better with some groups than others, and depending on the content are more likely to appeal to individuals with pre-existing knowledge or interest.

One of the challenges with a lot of the way that we communicate is that some of the facts can come across as pretty scary. The classic message that often gets used is modelling data that more people will die from antimicrobial resistance (AMR) than cancer by 2050. The problem with using these kind of shock statistics is that it runs the risk of turning general members of the public off the message as it’s both a scary and a big problem, which they can’t face engaging with as they don’t feel they have the capacity to influence it. This is especially true for those who see themselves as rarely interacting with healthcare, who might go to the GP every other winter for a course of antibiotics, but don’t see themselves as getting sick.

Another challenge is balancing some of the messaging, the message that everyone is responsible can sometimes read that no one is actually responsible. When I’m out and about having conversations about this right now, the pandemic has definitely had an impact. There is a lot of compassion and other fatigue post SARS CoV2, where people feel like they have given up a lot for the ‘greater good’ and don’t want to feel like more is being asked of them, in terms of personal sacrifice.

It is also hard to get both your ‘what’ and your ‘why’ into a single infographic. Messages linked to action are very powerful, but they tend to work better for audiences who already have a strong grasp of why the message is important and how it relates to a specific issue.

Great programmes, such as the Antibiotic Guardian programme, are already doing great work and position themselves linked to a behaviour change by encouraging individuals to sign up to behaviour pledges. They tend to appeal to people who have some pre-existing baseline knowledge, with pledges acting as re-enforcement. For instance, images, like the one below, are great and super easy to interpret, if you already have an understanding of antimicrobial resistance being a One Health issue. This is valuable, especially if your target audience is those using large amounts of antibiotics in daily life, such as farming, or antimicrobial prescribers, such as medics and vet.

Other types of engagement options enable you to tackle some of the frequent mis-conceptions, such as the fact that it is the person and not the organism that becomes resistant. Face to face encounters allow you to get a greater feel for where any of the knowledge gaps or pre-conceptions lie, in a way that is harder when you are just sending messaging out into the world. The limitation of this approach is always going to be the number of people who can be engaged. So the choice of objective really does impact which approach would be best, alongside whether you are aiming for knowledge/awareness raising or whether you are aiming to impact or change behaviour.

One of the other challenges with designing content or activities without having first defined your audience is that the language pitch can be particularly challenging. Words like diagnostics work really well when talking to healthcare professionals, but may resonate with the wider public. The things are also not static, the wider public may be more comfortable with certain terms post pandemic than they were before, this may or may not be maintained as part of common language as the years past. Therefore language options that may be appropriate in 2023 may not be appropriate in 2027, and undertaking a conscious review of pitch and language is required every time.

What does the literature tell us?

We recently published a paper focussing on some of these issues and processes linked to designing outreach or engagement for AMR, and it really made me think about some of the steps that might be helpful. It also made me realise how we should be using other tools and options when designing both our activities and evaluations linked to social behavioural models (Participatory learning and action approaches (PLA), Information-Motivation-Behavioural (IMB), Transtheoretical approaches) taking the learning and understanding from other areas to maximise our success in this area. Some of the key prompts for me included:

  • How many of us really take the time to define our target populations and think about what would work for the group we are going to target?
  • How many of us really define the single simple message we want that target audience to take away from our interaction and think about whether we are looking at knowledge/awareness increase or behaviour change?
  • How many of us design evaluation strategies based on population and target message/change in order to understand whether we have achieved our aims and how to improve it next time?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590088923000471

Without really embedding a rationale, design, and evaluation process, are we ever going to achieve what we want to achieve within a highly complex landscape? Because of the ‘super wicked’ nature of communicating about AMR unless we take a co-productive approach, will any of our interactions lead to long-term impacts? Are we really going to reach the groups that could most influence that change?

How can we approach things differently?

It takes a lot of time to design activities and I for one am always tempted to re-use and re-purpose as I’m time resource limited. One of the main things that came out of writing the paper, for me, was being very conscious of picking of the right tool for the job, and that one size doesn’t fit all because of the different reasons we might be undertaking the work in the first place.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590088923000471

Another thing that really struck me when reading the literature in this area is how much the power of telling stories can really address some of the issues that are linked to fear or the complexity of the challenge. It offers a route into the topic for people who are not necessarily already engaged by offering entertainment, and also to describe scenarios in a way to allow people to not feel so judged about personal actions whilst raising knowledge/awareness. It can provide a safe way to engage with a topic on an emotional level with reduced risk.

We’ve tried some of these concepts as part of The Project Nosocomial, with different approaches, from drag Klebsiella and panel discussions, to complete plays aimed at different audiences.

It is not just us that have tried this approach, there have been films such as Catch and musicals such as The Mould that Changed the World.

HOME

Not everyone is going to write a full on play however in order to engage others. Despite this I think there are things that we can still learn as scientists, like feeling empowered to tell our stories and our whys, that can support connections and innovation in this area. These approaches can be embedded in a low key way in all of our activity planning in order to enrich them. This type of experience, just like with Ted and others talks, can be really valuable in helping us improve our wider communication skills, and therefore also help with our wider professional practice.

One of the big challenges can be feeling secure enough to bring yourself, as well as the scientist, to your activity. By doing so, by sharing our stories and our why, you can engage in a deeper way than by just being the expert in the room. It adds depth and the ability to respond during engagement that hopefully leads to improved longevity of impact, and inspiration of intellectual curiosity of those involved. It also provides a route for us to learn as scientists, not just about communication, but also about how lived experience can impact patient choices.

I suppose, my point in this article is that I hope we can all be a bit braver, both in acknowledging the challenges we face in addressing an issue of this complexity, but also the steps we take in designing our responses to those challenges. I’d love to hear what other people are doing, so if you want to let me know that would be great, or you could even write a guest blog on your experiences of what you are up to in this area.

All opinions in this blog are my own

Do Or Do Not, There Is No Try: Why seeking external validation will never be enough

girlymicro Academic Life, General, Healthcare Science, Leadership

This has been a pretty amazing week, I was fortunate enough to receive the HIS Early Career Award from the Healthcare Infection Society. As the first woman and the first Healthcare Scientist to receive it, it was pretty wonderful. As part of receiving the award I was also given a 30 minute speaking slot. Now, unlike normal, the brief was pretty open which resulted in 2 things. First, a sense of overwhelming panic about what I should talk about. Two, a gradual realisation of what a privilege it is to be given the opportunity for 30 minutes as yourself and how invaluable such an opportunity is to represent yourself and others.

The other thing that happened was I spent some time thinking about how amazingly fortunate I have been in terms of external recognition in general. The thing is though, at its heart, it’s unsustainable. My husband is always telling me (tongue in cheek) that I have to stop winning things so that others can. No matter how much this is said in jest, there’s a lot of truth in this statement. When do we get out of the way so that recognition can be given to others? And what happens when that external recognition has become a benchmark in how you assess your own standing or success? This blog is the result of some of my musings on reliance on external markers of success, and what work we might need to do on ourselves whilst enjoying the recognition.

Recognition is amazing

In all honesty, I was never someone who won awards, not at school, not at university. It wasn’t really part of my psyche or something that I realised could happen to someone like me. After all, I’m a pretty normal run of the mill kind of girl. I work hard, but that’s my main feature. Then waaaay back in 2015 I was nominated for rising star award at the CSO awards by a kind Consultant Healthcare Scientist. I didn’t win, but it made me aware that such things exist. As Trust Lead Healthcare Scientist, I’ve always remembered that kindness and what it meant to me, and as a team we try to always ensure that we nominate as widely as possible for any external awards that come up. We even started the Healthcare Science Awards at GOSH in order to provide a similar kind of internal recognition.

Recognition is great. It’s a real confidence boost. It can also open doors (like to the Coronation) that you never thought would be open to you. Increasingly, awards and recognition are increasingly important for things like career progression and grant funding, so they are no longer just a nice to have. Now, sitting on/chairing a number award judging panels, I see how it impacts those in the running and how important those decisions are.

Recognition is also sometimes the only thing that gets you through. For a long time, there was not much acknowledgement of my value as a Healthcare Scientist internally. There have been some very challenging times. The external recognition I received was the thing that told me it was worth persisting, that I was doing something right when I spent a lot of time questioning myself, my value and my vision. The problem with this as a coping strategy is that recognition can become addictive, and as a people pleaser, you can come to believe that unless you receive it, you don’t have intrinsic value.

Acknowledge that we are trained into a certain way of viewing the world

Whether you’re a people pleaser, a gifted child, or someone who was just raised to strive, we are taught to see the world through a specific lens and to judge our success by it. There’s an always ‘onto the next thing’ mentality combined with a need to know we are good enough, as we secretly suspect that we aren’t. That specific lens can engender large amounts of success, but it can also make it hard to have a true appreciation of the facts, making external validation take on an increasingly significant role. But what happens when it stops?

I hate to break it to you, but there are only so many awards and qualifications out there, IPC and Healthcare Science are small worlds after all. What do you do when you have ticked the qualification boxes, and other forms of recognition are few and far between. This is especially true when you become a senior leader, and to be honest, no one is interested in tapping you on the back and telling you you’ve done a good job anymore. Doing a good job is assumed. Everyone will be quick enough to tell you you’ve messed up, but silence is where positive feedback used to be. If you are someone who needs external reinforcement, this is a lonely place to be, and it’s better to recognise it before you get there so you can have already begun work on your coping strategies.

There are benefits to the ‘onto the next thing’ mentality

One of the traps we can find ourselves in is that the ‘onto the next thing’ mentality can reap huge rewards. In competitive fields, such as academia and medicine, it can be an important driver to success. It allows you to dig that little bit deeper and be that little bit more focused. To tick the boxes that need ticking, and to sometimes tick them faster or more efficiently than would have been possible otherwise. This means that both the good and bad aspects of this personality trait get enforced, and whilst there are training competencies to be ticked and qualifications to be had, the negative side of this particular coin don’t feel so bad.

As time goes on however, and careers change, the boxes that need ticking are no longer so clearly defined, and the list of things to do has no end. The positive reinforcement produced from this way of dealing with the world therefore turns into a sense of failure and inability to see progress. The list of jobs never ends, and so a sense that it is because of a failure in ourselves, rather than the system we are working in, persists. We run faster on the hamster wheel in order to try to reach the finish line without realising we’re going in circles, and the line will always be just out of reach.

It will never be enough

One of the dangers when on the hamster wheel, therefore, becomes that we further lose sight of how to benchmark progress. This means we turn even more to others to guide us as to whether we are doing OK. Whatever OK is. And that’s a problem, isn’t it. No one really knows what we are seeking, especially when we don’t know what it is ourselves. Progress when early career may be challenging, but it is often fairly straightforward to define. As we develop, both ourselves and our careers progress and how we need others to feed back to us is frequently becomes less clear.

The other thing to note is that if you listen to the positive comments and hold them to be so significant, you will also listen to the negatives, and probably even more intensely. As the saying goes, ‘you have to take the good with the bad’. Now, listening to constructive negative feedback is an important part of developing. The sad thing is that sometimes it’s not so constructive, and that can lead to some pretty destructive self-talk, spiralling, and challenges with processing of the feedback you are getting. So, how do we move ourselves from the position where we hold the opinions of others in such high account, to where we can evaluate and add our own self reflection into the mix, in order to achieve a stable equilibrium?

Know that what success looks like changes

As I’ve said, what success looks like changes, and it may not look the same from day to day, let alone year to year. One of the things I’ve become increasingly aware of in recent times is that I want to achieve across my life. I’ve spent a long time focusing on achieving at work, but this means that my long-suffering husband has lacked support, and any non work achievements have very much been on the back burner. I want to regain some balance in my life. It won’t happen overnight, and progress is being made by inches, but that is what success for me would currently look like. Everyone is different and your idea of success may look very different to my current one, but unless you take the time to identify what it looks like for you you will continue to be driven by how others define it for you.

Beware of your self talk

I’m so guilty of staring at myself in the mirror and telling myself how stupid I’ve been or asking why the fuck I said that. I suspect that no one else talks to me as badly as I talk to myself, and when I do screw up part of me wishes people realised there’s no need to make me feel bad about as I’m already waaaaay ahead of anything they could say. The thing is, this is not a healthy way to treat myself. I am now putting in active effort to become a better cheer leader for myself. Before my talk at HIS, I took 2 minutes to tell myself that I could ‘do this’. I could appear like a grown-up and give a good talk. I tried to speak to myself the same way I would speak to my students and/or colleagues before they were due to do something they were nervous about. I gave myself the same compassionate time that I would give to someone else. This isn’t something that is an embedded behaviour for me yet, but I’m hoping if I continue to work at it it eventually will be.

Miss out on the best bits of yourself

If you live in a spiral of self critism or an echo chamber where you only value the opinions of others, you will miss out on the best bits of yourself. I’m a pretty weird person, but I think at heart we probably all are. I think I’m also pretty compassionate and loyal, as well as occasionally funny. It’s super cliche, but as I get older I do think that our relationship with ourselves is one of the best ones we can ever develop. It takes courage to stand and know your flaws and love yourself anyway. It takes time to see past that long list of flaws to see that many of them have flip sides that represent strengths. To honestly work on them whilst not constantly chastising yourself because they exist. If asked, I could immediately give you a list of the best qualities about just about everyone in my work and personal life. It shouldn’t therefore have taken me to my 40s to be able to produce an equivalent list for myself, but I’m a work in progress afterall.

Start by giving some conscious time to your thought processes

I made the shift (am making the shift?) by giving myself the gift of time and self reflection. When I react strongly, when I feel certain ways, I’m trying to just take a few moments to understand what drove me to behave or feel that way. My poor husband also spends a lot of time with me talking through just about everything. I personally need that verbalisation as part of the process to support my thinking. I should probably just get a coach and relieve my hubby of the process, but I trust him so much to call me on my bullshit when I’m trying to avoid seeing things I don’t like about myself.

I’m also allowing myself to care a little less about others think of me. There are certainly people out there who are not my biggest fans. The thing is that is their process, their decision. I used to try and bend myself into knots to change those opinions, but at its essence, I can’t control what others think of me. I can only control how much weight I give to those opinions. I’ve been described as marmite in the past, and just like you will never persuade me to like marmite, I suppose I cannot persuade those who find me jarring to like me.

Give yourself the pep talk you would give to others

I’ve talked about being aware of the way I talk to myself, and the occasional reassuring pick me up chat before high consequence moments. I’m stuck though by how much we don’t service our own needs in the same way that we respond and service those of others. At least once a day I will have a pep talk conversation with my colleagues or trainees. I may also have virtual ones in order to support my professional communities or friendship groups. Yet we don’t invest the same care, or energy into ourselves. More and more recently I’ve been prioritising the fact that if I feel certain ways that it’s OK to step away, get some alone time and give myself the same kind of pep talk that I give others. Now, in all honesty I don’t always believe the words I say to myself yet, hearing it from yourself is not the same as hearing it from someone else. That said, if we are setting benchmarks of kindness then those should extend to ourselves, not just others. I believe, like most positive change and habit formation, it will become easier the more I do it, and slightly less cringe inducing.

Give yourself permission

One of the biggest changes I’ve consciously made it to also give myself permission to feel the way I feel. Instead of telling myself to ‘get over it’ or telling myself how stupid I am for feeling a specific way, I allow myself to feel it and then to follow up with a question about why I feel that why. Asking why, with the aim to move towards resolution or at least greater understanding, rather than festering in denial. I think it’s important to acknowledge that we don’t live in this idealised space where we all feel good and confident all the time. If we wait on someone else ‘fixing’ us when we feel anything less than perfect then in some ways I’ve come to believe we’re not putting in the work. That’s not to say that I am not over the moon when someone recognises what I’ve been up to, it’s highly validating and makes so much of the extra hours and effort worthwhile. If we wait to be noticed and to receive that recognition however, and don’t strive to have internal validation that stands alone, we may not be able to receive it when we need it most.

If you are fortunate enough to be given a stage you are obligated to use it

Finally, from a recognition junkie, it is so important that if that recognition results in opening doors or giving you a platform that you choose to consciously use it. It is lovely to sit in the warm glow of someone telling you you are doing something right, but recognition offers more than that. It gives you a voice, a voice that you can use to shine a spotlight or to raise awareness. It is one of the reasons that I still strive for recognition, even having acknowledged some of my not so positive personality traits that it can amplify. If someone gives you a stage, stand on it and use it for the good of everyone who hasn’t been given one and who may not yet have a voice of their own.

All opinions in this blog are my own

An Unexpected Absence and Why It’s OK to Not Be OK

girlymicro General

I haven’t taken more than 2 weeks off from posting on this blog for over 3 years, but I have been unexpectedly absent in October. Normally, I would have tried to get some guest blogs to fill the void, but I kept thinking I would feel better/different, so time has just slipped away, and so here we are.

So what happened? Well, some of you will remember how excited I was to go on holiday mid-September. It was my birthday and wedding anniversary, and the Girlymicro team were super excited as we were heading off to the Agatha Christie Festival, a trip 10 years in the planning. Sadly, things did not go to plan.

We arrived on the Saturday and everything was glorious. By the Monday Mr Girlymicro had an upset stomach. By my birthday on Tuesday, he was feeling so unwell with a temperature that he had to retire to bed. On Wednesday, I went out and brought SARS CoV2 tests for everyone. Both mummy Girlymicro and Mr Girlymicro were stonkingly positive. I followed soon after on Thursday. Now you might be thinking, what’s the big deal? Everyone has had COVID by now, but you’d be wrong. Mr Girlymicro had avoided it for over 3 and half years. Mummy had had it once, and I had a nasty respiratory version in March, but nothing like this. Thus ensued 2 weeks of laying on sofas and not leaving the holiday let whilst temperatures ran riot and I worried about whether hospital trips were in our near future. As is obvious, we all survived, although no festival was had.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that in addition to the physical side effects (tiredness, auto immune etc) my mind is quite frankly fucked. I can barely type sentences without errors, and the cognitive impacts have included a delightful range of emotional instability and anxiety outside of even my normal range. Long and short, I’ve felt cognitively paralysed and quite frankly far from OK. This is week 6 though and I’m trying to force my mind back into some sort of normal, but if you’re reading this and it makes no sense please just give me a free pass for a bit. Just in case anyone else has been experiencing this delightful combo, below are some thoughts about how I’m trying to weather this particular storm and also be OK with just not feeling entirely like myself.

Getting back to basics

One of the key things I’ve been trying to do whilst riding this particular wave is to focus only on the things right in front of me. My inbox is a bit of a car crash as a result, sorry about that, and you may or may not have noticed that I haven’t really been on social media much. I’ve been struggling just to pick up the basic tasks of survival, like eating, and to generally pretend to be functional.

All the extra bells and whistles have, therefore, had to go. I’ve not been able to pull late nights or work weekends, which is where I generally manage to get my above and beyond done. In consequence, it’s just not been happening. I’ve not even been able to make myself work on the tube on my way in. Hence, these posts have just not happened. Normally, this would cause me huge amounts of anxiety, and I think it’s telling that I’ve just not even been able to worry about letting you all down. It’s been one foot in front of the other, and I’ve needed to just accept that that is the most I can do and my current new normal.

Learning to give myself a break

Speaking of anxiety, I tend to have a decent amount just in everyday life. During this period however, my god, I’ve never experienced anything like it. It’s been crushing. Up side, I’ve had so much I couldn’t get anxious about the things I would normally worry about. Down side, every interaction is something I’m struggling with. Partly because I’m super aware that my brain is not working the way it normally does. I’ve never been great with names, but now I’m a car crash. I just can’t find the words I’m looking for, or worse, I’m using words that I know are not correct. I write emails, which I check because I know I’m not at my best, and hit send. Then, when I read them later, they are just strings of random words. As someone who usually thinks of themselves as an OK communicator, it’s crushing to not be able to trust yourself.

I am having to let some of the self judgement go though. I’m doing the best I can. So I forget words or names, so what! I’m still understandable. Others are probably either not noticing or not caring. Plus, it is what it is, and will continue to get better. I just have to myself a break and learn to be OK in the now.

Working out what’s real

One other big challenge right now is working out what of my self-talk is real and what is being driven by this enhanced anxiety and de-stabilisisation. Am I really bad at things? Am I just being paranoid about the agenda of others or their motivation or judgement towards me. How much of the 3am panic is genuine towards things I should have done, or is the fear the world will end because I didn’t respond to that email totally self contrived?

Trying to get out of my own head is hard right now, so I’m trying to just not make big decisions or be too expressive linked to individual thoughts and judgements. To be honest, I don’t trust my instincts or responses right now. I even had a massive rant at Mr Girlymicro for no reason. We’ve been together for over 20 years, and that’s never happened before, and it was totally undeserved. I believe I may be apologising for the next 20. It’s a good thing he’s such a saint. I’m thinking awareness of my current mindset is key and, in some ways, is a good chunk of the battle. Knowing enough to realise this isn’t the time to responsively engage is a step forward. Knowing to run your thoughts processes by others to sense check your assumptions and thinking is another. I am currently an unreliable witness to my own life.

Allowing myself to ostrich

Because of all of the above, I have pretty much given myself permission to ostrich and hide away for a while until I feel more like myself. Mr and mummy Girlymicro will always be my safe space, but beyond them, even close friends I’ve known for years are triggering my spirals. There are many times in life when I tell people to feel the fear and do it anyway. This, for me, is not one of those times. Right now, I’m putting up walls and hiding away in my castle until I feel more like myself.

Most people think of me as being super extroverted, but in reality I’m not. I happily turn it on when I’ll presenting or networking. I can maintain it for several hours. Then, I need to retreat and chill with a trusted few to recharge. Right now, though, I don’t have the capacity to turn it on for very long at all. So, if you see me at conferences or meetings, forgive me for not appearing like myself. Right now, my ideal is lying under a blanket, listening to an audio book, as I lack the concentration to even read. I’m giving myself permission to do just that rather than pretending I can manage otherwise. Plus, as I’m still really tired, hiding out and napping is the biggest piece of self care I can give myself.

Working on my boundaries

I’m naturally a people pleaser. Making people happy is important to me. I’m also a planner, I always have lists and know what my tasks are (even if I dont manage to get them done). All of that is out of the window right now. I can’t face my lists, I just can’t make myself do even the simple things that need to be done, such as messaging people or booking household tasks in. Simple requests, such as organising trips for next year, are just beyond me, and for once, I’m the one pushing back and saying,’I can’t think about that right now’. I’m putting one foot in front of the other and trying to set boundaries linked to things that make it harder.

On the way into work, I’m watching nonsense TV instead of writing blogs. On the weekend, the ever wonderful Mr Girlymicro is playing Balders Gate 3 for me whilst I very deliberately do not write talks or emails. I’m consciously changing the demands I put upon myself, as the requirements for these things come from me rather than anything external. If I set these demands, I can also consciously change them, and for now, I am. Until I have the energy and capacity to cook and do basic household tasks, like putting my clothes away, I’m not accepting other demands on my time. Even if they come from me.

Knowing that I will get back to me

I suspect one of the other reasons that I haven’t blogged in this time is that I like to hope that what I write can be constructive or helpful. I’m only just now getting to the space where I can think about what interventions or comments could fulfil that brief. You don’t all need 2000 words on the fact that I feel rubbish. On the other hand, I did want to write about the fact that sometimes it’s OK to not be OK. It’s OK to admit it. It’s OK to ask for help. It’s also OK to tap out for a bit if you need to. I think it’s sometimes helpful to have others acknowledge and talk about this. No one can run at 100% all the time. Currently, I honestly believe just showing up and doing whatever I can in the moment has to be enough.

The other thing is, I know this is temporary. It’s not like some of the other things my body does to me, which are a fact of daily life and need to be managed. This one just needs me to do 2 things I’m not great at, be patient and kind to myself. Every week it’s a bit better. The fact that I’m getting this blog out today is a testament to that. I will feel more like me again, until then I have kind people in my world who will remind me of who I am and that it’s OK to take a break occasionally. Normal service shall resume, but until then there shall be copious amounts of tea and self care. See you on the other side.

All opinions in this blog are my own

The Power of Celebration: Why we should see celebration as essential and not a selfish act

girlymicro Academic Life, General, Healthcare Science, Leadership, Research/Academia, Science Communication

I’m still laid up with COVID, and so today I’m missing out on a pretty great event. The London Healthcare Science Collaborative is running an event on the power of celebration (led by Betty Adamou) and women in leadership (led by Claire Walker and Ant De Souza). Whilst I’ve not been able to attend, it has caused me to reflect on the topic and some of the different thoughts and experiences I’ve had linked to opportunities for celebration.

I’ve gone through periods of my career where I’ve definitely not felt like I’ve been allowed to celebrate my successes. I’ve also gone through periods where the barrier to celebration has definitely been me rather than anyone else. Some days, I feel like I’m not allowed to even discuss or mention successes as it will be seen as ungracious or egotistical. In contrast, there have definitely been times, and other situations, where I’ve felt not only empowered to celebrate but that others fully engaged and amplified those celebrations. I’ve been thinking, therefore, why celebration is important and what factors can impact whether we choose to undertake it or not.

Marking your progress

One of the first reasons I think celebration is important and powerful is that it can be used to mark big transitions in life, whether work related or not. The challenge comes in deciding whether the event is ‘sufficient’ and worthy of celebration. It can be easy, at least work wise, to be so focused on an end goal or big picture that nothing is considered to be worthy of celebration along the way. The problem with this is that there is always another step, another target, and so if celebration is not prioritised, it may just never happen. My plea on this one is that we all support each other to celebrate the little things as well as the big things. Sometimes in life, merely getting out of bed is worth a celebratory cup of tea. At least that’s true right now in my COVID world.

Celebrating the journey, not just the destination

But why should celebration be prioritised anyway? One of the key reasons is that it is easy to forget how far you’ve come and to not sufficiently recognise your true progress if individual moments are not recognised. Ensuring that you take the time to celebrate is actually a key part of you recognising your progress and investing in some self care.

Recognising individual stages of progress can also help with the big stages. Sometimes, completing a task, such as writing a PhD thesis, can just seem unattainable. Breaking down the massive task into sections that feel more achievable and allowing yourself to recognise that progress can, mean the entire task feels more managble. It can also help maintain momentum and positive attitude during tasks that are particularly challenging or where it can be easy to become bogged down. After all, most of the learning, and therefore the reason to celebrate, occurs as part of the journey rather than just at the destination.

Owning your progress

We often talk about owning our failures and the learning that results from them. We don’t talk so much about owning our successes. Now, I suspect that some of this is down to imposter syndrome, and the stories we tell ourselves that our successes are down to luck and is ephemeral, whereas our failures are somehow much more real rooted in truth.

The thing is, if we are going to ‘own it’ we need to own ALL of it, the good and the bad. Your progress is yours alone, you are responsible for the things that don’t go well, but the flip side of that is that you also get to claim responsibility for the times when they do. Own it, celebrate it, for once let taking responsibility not be a burden but an act of celebration and joy. Otherwise, you may find that there are plenty of people out there who may take ownership of the good on your behalf.

Enjoy the moment

The other thing about taking ownership is that you should use it to buy you time to reflect and enjoy the moment. Trust me, if you rush through it, always onto the next thing, you’ll reach your destination, only to be aware that the journey has been a blur, and wishing you’d savoured it more. I was in such a rush to ‘get things done’ that I never stopped after one thing before leaping head first into another. In hindsight, that meant it took me longer to learn key lessons. It took me longer to see where I sat within the big picture. It meant I missed out on sharing my successes with those who had contributed or given up a lot to enable them to happen.

Celebrations are not just about you. They are an opportunity for you to give back and acknowledge the input and impact of others. By choosing not to celebrate, we also steal an opportunity away that could be used to thank and recognise colleagues, friends, and family, without whom none of this stuff would happen.

Extrinsic vs intrinsic recognition of success

One of the reasons I’ve written about owning my success is because this is a real work in progress area for me. Success and reasons to celebrate come in all shapes and sizes. I have gotten into the habit of needing external validation, prizes and the like, in order to measure how well I’m doing. These are lovely, but there are some problems with using this as a yardstick. Firstly, how many prizes and awards can you realistically actually win across your career, and are you suddenly worthless when they become unavailable? The other issue is that if we need others to tell us our value, rather than being able to see it in ourselves, you are are constantly in a vulnerable position, especially with people who would use that requirement against you. It is a necessary step in growth to be able to see that we have intrinsic value and to celebrate that, rather than relying on others to see our worth.

Integrate all the versions of yourself

One of the other big challenges I wrestle with is whether it is OK to be seen to celebrate. Is it boastful? Is it narcissistic? Does it end in arrogance? Here is where I have landed in my thinking. It is not a bad thing to share and celebrate your successes, as long as you also share and discuss the learning from your failures. Those people who only shout about the triumphs are within their rights to do so, but I think those shouts are much more meaningful if you’ve also journeyed with them through the failures it took to get to that success.

The other thing I’ve decided is that it is important to celebrate throughout all the aspects of who I am. I am a scientist, IPC professional, and academic, but I am also a wife, a daughter, an aspiring creative, and sister. Therefore, I want to show the depth of all of that when I celebrate and acknowledge the roles and importance of people across those aspects when the good things happen. It takes a village after all.

Understand the power of being seen

Having struggled with the whole celebration thing for some time, I have also come to realise something else. I celebrate not only to share success and say thank you to those who have helped but also to be visible to others that those attainments are possible. I know I say this a lot, but you can’t be what you can’t see. If you don’t know that a route is open to you, it is much harder to aspire to achieve it. If you only see medical colleagues winning a certain award, you may not think that you could get there as a scientist. We break new ground to make it easier for those who follow, but if no one knows about it, we are not fully completing the job. You never know who may see that tweet, read that blog post, or listen to a podcast. You may never meet or know the people you inspire, but by sharing and being visible, you will be inspiring someone, so don’t be afraid to be seen.

Let no one steal your joy

You will encounter people who will try to mute your celebrations, who attempt to steal your joy. I have been told my success makes other people feel uncomfortable. I know there is sometimes eye rolling at my social media presence. The thing is, that aspect will always be there, whether you celebrate or not. Whether you talk about it or not. Those comments and those people don’t go away. You do, however, have the power to decide how much they influence your decision-making. To decide how much power they have over you. How much right they have to stop the work you are doing or to dampen all the reasons I’ve written about that you should celebrate and be seen to do so. You can’t control the reactions of others, but you can control how they affect you.

Share and amplify the celebrations of others

Finally, celebration is not just about you. To really embrace the art of celebration, we need to see it as the gift it is. We need to amplify the celebration of others! When you hear of good things happening, buy that card or bottle of fizz to support the person who may be struggling to feel they can celebrate. When you see a social media post, share it and comment on it. Let the person know how happy you are for them and help to get the word out. Be genuinely happy, rather than challenged, by the success you see all around you. People are showing you what can be achieved, and you are inspiring others. Let’s truly be a community that values and celebrates success, not just our own but of everyone.

All opinions in this blog are my own