I’ve had a LOT of emails and messages this week linked to various Wellness Programmes and links and my emotional response to them has surprised me. I’m not normally a cynic, I’m usually someone who is keen to engage and see the benefit of things. I have, instead of wanting to engage with these items, been really irritated by them and so I wanted to explore why I feel this way and understand if I’m the only one.

Let me start by talking about what my currently day to day looks like, as I think my thoughts linked to this are very context specific. I’m just getting home at 19:30 after leaving the house at 6:30 this morning and working a 10hr day without lunch or tea break.  I have an hour and half to spend with my husband and eat before going to bed and starting the whole thing again tomorrow.  The sad thing is that this has actually been quite a reasonable day, 12+ hour days are frequent.

Last week I ran 2 conferences and so wasn’t tied to my desk, followed by a couple of days off sick post booster vaccine That meant going into last weekend I had over 2200 emails on my inbox and over 1100 unread. I needed to cover IPC over the weekend and so in order to try to get back on top of it I worked to get the email mountain down from 2200+ to 156 to action. As I’m also on clinical this week that action pile in one day is back up to 190.

What’s the point of me telling you this? I think my aim is show that I fight just to stand still. If I take my eye off the ball even for a day I sink into quick sand. No one covers my whole role if I’m off sick, there isn’t another Consultant Clinical Scientist in the department. My point is that I don’t get how wellness works when this is my life?

My Trust and the NHS has invested a lot in wellness programmes and resilience training. This post may sound like its having a go at the really lovely people who provide those programmes and put so much energy into getting them up and running, but it isn’t. This is a post that is expressing my tiredness and exhaustion at working in Infection Prevention and Control in a pandemic within a system that does not deliver the resource for lunchbreaks, let alone provision for me to be training up my successor so there would be cover.

So what is that doesn’t work for me about wellness and resilience programmes?

The programmes we’ve instituted are things like ‘Wellness Wednesdays’ which includes a lunch time seminar on a wellness topic. We’ve been given access to the headspace app to support meditation and promote sleeping and healthy eating. There are also things like yoga sessions run in the Trust and GOSH supported 5k Park runs to encourage an active life style. There’s also access to counselling.

All of this looks amazing when written down and don’t get me wrong I think its great. However it only works if you’ve addressed the system issues that are driving some of the problems.

For example, I have never managed to attend a wellness seminar, despite having them in my diary, because I don’t have time to have lunch and usually spend my life in back to back ‘urgent’ work zooms. The biggest system change for me would be to enable me to have a lunch break and then I could choose whether to spend it on a wellness seminar OR I could step outside my windowless office and see sunlight!

The activity stuff is great. I used to run pre-pandemic. Now I work mostly 12 hours days with a 3 hour round trip commute. On a good day I get 2 hours at home in the evening during which time I might, for instance, have time to wash my hair and eat. On weekends I am either working or too broken to make food and catch up with all of the household tasks, such as food shopping, that are needed to get me through the next week. In terms of wellness, the better fix for me would be to enable me to actually have a homelife so I could choose what to do with it, if I don’t have time to eat I’m not going to be able to join in yoga.

One of the final things that I find really tricky about all the wellness stuff is that it seems to go on and on about being present in the moment. I have a meeting in a Tuesday where the first 5 minutes is a wellness meditation. I will give an honest confession here, if I have time I use that 5 minutes to actually make a cup of tea so I can have a drink. This doesn’t normally happen as I’m always running late from previous zooms, but that is the intervention that works for me. I find being in the present hard. I’m exhausted and physically pretty broken, spending 5 minutes noticing that is not helpful to me. I’m surviving this by planning and focusing on the future, which is how I always manage my stress and survive.

So where is the system letting me down?

Some of the problem with this is the way that Healthcare Science functions. We’re not like some other specialists, who effectively do the same job with different specialisms and therefore cover each other for sickness and holiday. We’re not like some other colleagues who work in a team of multiple similar roles and, although may not always truly cross cover, have someone to pick up their responsive role. We are usually lone individuals, as there’s never considered to be enough work to have more than one of us. That causes issues in terms of career progression and training up someone to eventually take over (as it can take 10+ years) but it also means that no one actually covers your work load. They may pick up the screaming urgent stuff that has to be managed but the rest just builds and builds.

All of this means taking holiday becomes a trial that becomes inherently stressful. You spend so much time trying to pin everything down before you go that you pull double hours and when I return I frequently have up to 3000 – 4000 emails and my diary is back to back as I’ve been unavailable for a week or 2.

It also means that when that workload becomes too much it very hard to get someone to help carry the load. Don’t get me wrong, I have great teams and we work really well together but I don’t have someone I’m training up to be the new me that I can hand bits off to, in the way my medical colleagues do with their registrars. It also means we’re not planning for the future

It’s not just Healthcare Scientists that are struggling however, so it’s not unique to us as a group. It is physically not possible to be on 8 hours of zoom calls, deal with 300 – 600 emails and a day and then actually do productive work that requires thinking on top of this. So how do we change the system to improve the way that we communicate? To determine whether the meetings we have are productive? To change expectations in terms of being available for 8am meetings and 6pm meetings when we only supposedly work 9 – 5? This is something we can start to tackle as individuals but requires changes in culture, which is in my opinion is something that organisations should be investing in as much as free yoga.

Instead the response is usually that we should find things that we can drop to create time and space. The sad thing about this response is that it means all drivers for work become focussed on core work and reduces both time and acceptance for tasks that require creativity and innovation, the kind of tasks that will actually permit changes to the system in which we are existing. For me it is these tasks that energise rather than drain me, these tasks that give me hope that I will make it out the other end and permit planning for a future where we do things better for both ourselves and our patients. I feel especially infuriated when I’m told I should discard the only things that are enabling me to continue, to do even more of all the things that are leaving me hollow and tired, even when these things are done on top of everything else. I know to many it seems like an easy fix but to me it would be the straw that broke my back.

So here’s my plea. Instead of placing the burden to fix burn out on individuals, lets also work with the systems that led us here. The pandemic is a once in a lifetime challenge, but what it’s done is expose problems that were already present in the system, not ones that only exist because of the pandemic. Personal responsibility is important, but making people feel responsible for their burnout as if its another of their failures is not the way forward. Support them, offer individual help, but also acknowledge the system wide issues that led them there.

Apologies for the rant, but I for one feel waaaaaaaaaaaay better for getting that off my chest. Now I’m off to watch a YouTube video on the importance of laughter yoga.

All opinions on this blog are my own.

The Girlymicrobiologist blog is one year old today, well in actual fact it’s 6 but we’re not talking about the wilderness years when it lingered unused. It started out as a way to help deal with some of the madness of the pandemic and in order to feel like I had a direct route to talk about science and being a scientist, that was unfiltered through anyone else. I thought it would be read by a handful of people and would be highly niche, but in the last year I’ve published 73 posts, and had over 16,000 views from ~11,000 visitors. Numbers I could never have dreamed of. I know there will be many blogs out there with much higher numbers but for someone who is basically putting her thoughts on electronic paper once a week I am constantly shocked and delighted by the response. So as someone who came into this a complete novice I wanted to share a few things I’ve learnt and thoughts that I’ve had.

It’s OK to break the rules

When I first started writing blogs for other people I was told to obey the following rules:

• 500 – 800 words
• 2 – 3 pictures
• use sub-headings
• post at the same time regularly

Now that I write one for myself you may have noticed that I have pretty much abandoned the word limit, if not the sub-headings. I try to post on a Friday, as writing my blog is what I do on a Friday night. You can however see that I also frequently don’t succeed at this. Mostly because I’m a real person managing this on top of a fairly stressful job and doing the best I can.

In terms of article length, apparently more the modern thinking is that the longer the length the more reads something will get and people are investing time and so like more for that investment. That’s not the reason my posts are longer however, my posts are longer because I don’t really over edit myself. I want to write as if you and are sitting and chatting over a nice G and T. This is probably not considered an acceptable ‘style’ but its mine and I’m OK with that. So my advice now is to write what you’re passionate about in a way that works for you and, in the nicest possible way, screw the rules.

Numbers only have meaning if you give it to them

I’ve quoted some numbers in terms of posts and viewership to you, but actually one of the main things I’ve learnt is that those don’t really matter. When people started to read the blog I tried to find benchmarks by which I could measure success, I am a scientist after all, What I found was that most of the benchmarks out there are for people who are doing this professionally or want to make money. I am neither of these things and so I found it hard to judge what I should be aiming for. What I’ve landed on, because I personally needed something, is a readership of ~1000 views a month. Mostly because I was looking for consistency, rather than any kind of massive growth.

Reads are obviously closely linked to numbers of posts. I try to post every week, in order to keep things regular and for people to get into a rhythm of knowing when things are going to come out. If you post more you will get more reads. Therefore you need to decide early on how much metrics matter to you. Some people find metrics are a good way of motivating them and giving them structure. I am a somewhat obsessive individual and if I focussed too much on numbers I would end up writing blogs at midnight in order to make sure I hit that weeks count and feeling like a failure if I didn’t hit quota. Because of this I tend to use metrics as a light touch to look at trends rather than using them to judge success.

I don’t really know what will land and generate a lot of reads

We’ve talked about everything from tea to childlessness on Girlymicro and what I’ve learnt is that I don’t ever know which posts will really resonate with people and get a lot of reads and which won’t. For instance my post about being childless in my 40 got over 2500 views, for a post that I thought would be read by and resonate with a small number of people. Other posts that I thought would have wide appeal have been read by a few hundred. Some of this is probably based on the timing of the post and who picks something up and shares it on. I try not to get too worried about this because, as I’ve said, I’ve decided not to be too concerned about numbers. I want to sit on a Friday night and write honestly from me to you, if that post has meaning for one other person that’s good enough for me.

I did think at the start that I would write a lot more about technical science, but as time has gone on that’s really not what I write about. There are a few reasons for this. One, there are many great technical science blogs out there that review the literature and sign post to good papers. I do some of this but mostly if I’m writing about science it also has a narrative element linked to it. I think that’s because what I’ve decided I most like to talk about is de-mystifying science and who scientists are. I want to talk about the highs and lows, the things that I’ve learnt and the things we can do better. These topics are the ones I haven’t found covered so well by other sources and also have the most meaning to me. I’ve come to the conclusion that what resonates most well are the posts that are authentically me, and that the topic is almost secondary. That’s serendipitous as those are also the posts that are easiest to write and so I just go with writing about things I care about.

Once you start it’s hard to stop

On the subject of writing about things that I care about. I had thought when I started, that writing a blog once a week would be a chore and that I would find it difficult to find things to talk about. The opposite has been true, I have a lot more ideas than I thought possible. For instance, I currently have 93 blog posts in some level of draft. I’m inspired to write by seeing what everyone tweets, by time taken with friends and colleagues to have cups of tea, and by corridor conversations. Ideas are sparked by reading news articles, by watching programmes and movies, by people sharing their science and by unexpected events that elicit an emotional response of some kind.

On a Friday night I will often sit down and words just happen, I have planned to write about something but then something will happen or I will have a thought and the words come almost fully formed. I don’t fight it and, for those of you who read this regularly, you’ll notice there are plenty of spelling and other mistakes. I write in a stream of consciousness and don’t worry about editing myself too much. I don’t aim for perfection, I aim for honestly.

We’re on this journey together and I don’t know where we will go

I have a had a number of people comment on how brave my blog is, but I don’t really think it’s brave. What I hope it is, is an honest space where I trust you to read what I write with the intention of that writing in mind, and that you trust me to not glamourize or pull punches with what I share. I hope that you know that I write in order to help us learn and develop together, to raise awareness and to help us rise to our challenges and everyday be a little more courageous together.

So where do we go from here? I’m not someone who can function without a plan, but I’m kind of trying. I’m really enjoying this, the dialogue and the conversations writing has prompted. I feel so much less alone in the challenges I face, and so something that I started in order to help others has ended up helping me so much more than I had believed possible.

Some lovely people have said I could try and get an agent interested in the blog, to be honest I wouldn’t even know where to start, although I will happily take suggestions if anyone has any. For now the most important thing for me, is that you and I keep our regular catch ups, that we spend 10 minutes together over virtual tea and cake, and continue to learn and grow in each others company. To every one of you who has invested some of your precious time in reading the blog over the last year I am grateful beyond having words to express. In what has been the most challenging of times you have been kind, generous and supportive, and I don’t know I would have made it through as intact as I have without you. Thank you!

All opinions on this blog are my own.

It’s Thursday night and I’ve been working for over 12 hours already in a desperate attempt to see the bottom of my inbox before I go. I have 45 left in my action folder and have reduced the inbox itself from 1250+ to 0. Sounds great, right? It definitely is but the act of getting to this point has left me so wound up about what I might have missed that I’m in a bit of a panic that I’ve forgotten something crucial. I’m thinking from the graph below that I’m not the only one who finds the build up to stepping away super stressful. So in an attempt to persuade myself of the benefits of a break and to lull my brain into some form of relaxation I’m going to focus on why holidays and taking time away from the inbox is so important.

As I write this my out of office is on. It says that I am away and will not be accessing emails whilst I’m away. More than that it states that I will delete any emails that arrive before I return from holiday, with a request that if it is still going to be relevant the sender should re-send after my return date. For many years I took laptops and phones away with me, in recent years I’ve decided that I will no longer do that. I can’t trust myself to not take it out and just ‘take a quick look’ or ‘do one quick thing’. Before I knew it I had always spent every day of my leave working and came back more frazzled then before I went. If the opportunity presents itself I will also become the person who is a walking version of the tweet below.

The ‘I will delete’ section comes from the fact that I will return to over 1000 new emails. My diary for when I get back is already full to bursting, from all the meetings I have to squeeze into less time because I’ve been on leave. This means that I will have A LOT of emails and no actual time to read them. I may or may not delete the intervening ones, but this message means that if anything is important it isn’t up to me to email dive to find it, it’s up to the sender to re-send. This means that when I come back I will panic less about the amount of time it will take me to catch up with having been away.

So given that even the process of going away drives me to a special level of stressed out, why am I doing it?

I think everyone in healthcare is run down and tired. When I’m this tired I lose the capacity to put things into perspective, everything is a disaster, my anxiety levels go up and I find it hard to see the wood for the trees. Going away and spending some quality time with my family enables me to recharge. It helps ground me and reminds me of what’s important. It enables me to become something other than Dr Cloutman-Green and spend time laughing, reading books, indulging in bubble baths and possibly even managing to have a lie in past 6am.

Letting my brain experience other things and stepping away from the day job also allows me to recharge my creative batteries. I come back able to look at problems from a different perspective, increasing my chance of solving issues. It also enables me to get inspired and remember why I have the best in the world, in order to help me plan and engage with change with a re-energised passion. Within 48 hours of being away I always have so many thoughts and plans that bubble up due to having a change of scenery. It’s another reason why I have to leave the laptop behind, as otherwise the urge to act on them immediately is too great. I keep a notebook to write them down so I don’t fear forgetting them but then can move onto the next book. It makes me better at my job when I return.

Not only is it good for me but it’s good for my team

It’s really easy to fall into a trap where you feel like if you aren’t there things fall apart. To be honest for me it’s less about this but my imposter syndrome telling me that if I’m not there to catch and double check myself people will find that I’ve made some huge mistake (let me be clear I’ve never found this to be the case – it’s why it’s irrational). It’s really important for me to go away and find that this doesn’t happen. It’s a little bonkers I know, but the more tired I am the more this fear grows, and the harder it is to step away and become less tired. It is quite the cycle, but knowing that it exists is 50% of the battle of controlling it.

Although I fear stepping away it’s easy to ignore the opportunity that this gives to my team(s) to try things out, to take on tasks or sit on meetings that they don’t always have access to. It gives them experience of a slightly different role to decide whether they enjoy it and supports their career development and networking. We are a team and I am not a one woman army, so it’s important to acknowledge that.

Not only is stepping away a development opportunity for teams, it is also a needed piece of leadership by example. I would hate anyone I work with to feel they can’t take breaks and recharge. I don’t want them working stupid long hours and fearing what happens if they are not ‘always on’. I need to lead by example and therefore give implicit permission that others also fully step away. For example I took the ‘I will delete’ message from my Clinical Lead. She led by example and I therefore feel able to adopt her practice. I want to make sure I also lead by example.

Finally, it makes me a less grouchy human being! When I’m tired, like many people, I get tetchy, read more than is meant into communication and frankly don’t communicate as well. My patience and tolerance become stretched wafer thin. I think that everyone around me has a much better experience of working with/living with/being friends with me when I’m refreshed, recharged and ready to go.

On that note this is my final job of the day, apart from packing and all that jazz, so I’m outta here.

See you all when I get back!

All opinions on this blog are my own

A couple of weeks ago I came off a virtual meeting. There was a delay and the sound dropped in and out. I should have raised awareness of this or sat back and kept quiet, instead I kept trying to contribute and ended up talking over everyone. This is rude and a trait of mine that I’m super aware of at the best of times. Sometimes I have so many thoughts I just have to articulate them to process and this comes across as super domineering and is especially not good for the introverts around the table. I struggle with it and I try every day to be better, it’s just I fail more frequently than I’d like.

This post isn’t actually about that though. It’s about the fact that I hung up on the call, sat on my sofa and cried. I then engaged in panicked reaching out for reassurance, which just makes everything worse. When I hit this point its usually a warning sign that I’m a) not well or b) so tired I’m not functioning well. It results in me wanting to ostrich and run away from interactions with anyone but my most trusted. Crucially it also stops me being able to self reflect, take the learning and move on in a balanced way.

When I am strung out like this I get stuck on feelings and can’t process enough to really engage with unbiased evaluation. To me that’s what a shame spiral is, the inability to evaluate and therefore move onto the other sections of the reflective cycle. Therefore preventing real learning from the scenario to take place.

Its taken me a long time to see these warning signs in myself. To know when I’m wallowing in self recrimination rather than self reflection.

I sometimes wonder if it’s just me that does this, goes through this, reacts in this way? I don’t wish this on anyone else but in many ways I’m hoping I’m not alone. On the off chance that the Shame Club isn’t a party of one I thought I would talk about it and share some of the things that I’ve learnt to help me deal.

Break the Cycle

The first thing I need to do is to find a way to stop the spiral. Part of the reason for me writing this post is that the writing of it will support the processing. It will help me to move past feeling to evaluation and to put the incident into context. I need to stop relieving the moment and get to the point where I have distance to evaluate and learn.

Now sometimes I need more of a break than others to let this happen. For me as my spirals are often triggered by tiredness, just the process of getting some sleep can enable me to look on things with fresh eyes. If I can concentrate enough a good book can transport me enough, so can a complete change of scene such as a walk/bubble bath/run. Shame spirals were one of the reasons I took up running, I’m so bad at it all I can do is focus on taking one step after another and it breaks the thought process.

Get a Reality Check

Once I’ve broken my descent it’s key for me to really undertake an evaluation step. Was it really as bad as I felt? Was anyone hurt by what I did? What are the ramifications? Is it just my imposter syndrome screaming at me that I should be seen and not heard? This is where checking in with others is more useful. If I do it too early I can only hear the response through the lens of shame. If I get feedback at this point I am able to put it in context and therefore it’s more useful in terms of evaluating what my next steps should be. This process is the start of me regaining some balance.

Own it and Embrace the Learning

No one is perfect! I know we all know this but for me there’s is a gaping chasm between knowing this and feeling/accepting it. I am super aware of my flaws (I mean I bet there are ones I don’t know about, but the ones I’m aware of loom big in my mind). When I mess up, especially linked to a flaw I know I have, I feel the failure of it strongly. There’s no point in ignoring it however, the main thing is for me to acknowledge the failure or ‘not being my best self’ and try to learn from it.

The big thing for me is to try to work with the incident and take learning from that, separating out my emotions. For instance: I talked over someone in a meeting, I should apologise for it, try to be even more aware of that tendency and do it less in the future. The key thing here for me is to commit to reduction rather than setting myself up for future failure. I will do X less, I will do Y better. I acknowledge this is an interative process and that development takes time and continuous improvement.

I also try to work out the triggers for whatever the incident was and therefore consider if there’s anything I can do to support it not reoccurring in future. For instance I’m more likely to fail when I’m tired or unwell. I’m more likely to spiral as a result of that failure if I’m, you’ve guessed it, tired or unwell. The key learning therefore is that I need to take better care of myself, or identify earlier before the failure that I’m not in the best place.

I’m hoping that by hooking my responses and thought process onto the Gibbs reflective cycle that it will support visualisation of the steps I find helpful and might give you a framework if you ever have similar issues to use as a framework to help you through.

Also, let’s all remember:

• Life is learning
• Perfection is not all that interesting
• We are often our own biggest critics

All opinions on this blog are my own

I’m writing this blog post on a tube on the way to work. I try not to work on the tube these days, I try to use it as time to get me into and out of the right head space for work. Right now my brain is whirling too much to focus and in circumstances like this I’ve learnt the best thing I can do is get some of those thoughts down into something productive.

I’m an all or nothing kind of girl. I’m not good at doing things in moderation. I’m not good with hierarchy, barriers and boundaries. Sometimes I like to think its why I’ve (to some extent) achieved. It’s my inner voice that moves me on rather than external drivers. The flip side to this is I also don’t know when and how to stop. The same urge that makes me want to cross artificial barriers imposed upon me mean that I struggle to impose them on myself.

This means that I find work life balance a difficult thing to identify sometimes, let alone to achieve.

Learning the hard way

During my PhD I didn’t have a full weekend off for three years. By the time I submitted my PhD and was preparing for FRCPath I had developed a discreet bald patch where I’d lost my hair and was doing a regular battle with angio oedema, where my face would swell when I tried to eat. I submitted my PhD one year early so I could successfully pass FRCPath first time, however the legacy of that time lives on in my deteriorated health.

I grew up thinking that success was about hard work. If you worked hard enough then you would be rewarded. If you got the qualifications then you would get the job. It was a really simplistic view of the world that I think I only woke up to not being true over the last couple of years. The fight doesn’t stop just because you are qualified to step into the role, that is when the fight actually begins. If you use all your energy and will power to cross the line to get the qualifications it will leave you depleted when you have to step into the arena for the true battle.

Succeeding and being good at my job is something that has always been important to me. Lately however I’ve begun to realise that giving it my all, all the time, isn’t in itself enough. I can’t work for the next 25 years until I’m due to retire with the intensity that I have worked for the last 10 + years. I need time away to really be successful. I need time to refresh my mind to enable me to bring the best version of myself to the challenges I face. Creativity needs energy not exhaustion. I don’t really feel yet that I have mastered or even begun to be able to prioritise stepping away in order to achieve this, but at least having the realisation is taking an important step along the way.

Facing the hard truth. We are all replaceable

I used to run, I was awful at it, but never the less I persisted. I haven’t been running since the pandemic started. I arrive home in a ball of flames at the end of the week and my husband spends the weekend putting me back together so that I go out and do it all again. This isn’t sustainable, and as time goes on I feel less and less than me and more and more like an infection prevention automaton. I have given up most of what makes me me to try and deliver for my job because I believe in it. This isn’t a long term strategy however. It is the bits that make me me that also make me good at my job. The other thing is that if something happened to me tomorrow, it is my friends and family that would mourn me. Another infection control doctor would be found. My stuff would be packed up and handed over and at most I would occasionally be brought up in conversation. I know this because I’ve already seen it happen to a colleague.

I worked with an amazing admin guy in my department. He’d been there for 15 years. A few years ago he went home one night, sat in his favourite chair and died. I’d worked with him for 10 years, he pulled my pony tail every time he went past my desk. He left chocolate on that same desk when I was having a bad day to cheer me up. He talked to me about his dogs, his music and his wife. After 15 years working in the department I was one of 3 people who went from work to his funeral. No one from the lab he supported went. My wonderful consultant boss went with me and our clinical lead went to represent the department. 3 people out of 40.

That day was a real revelation to me. The people who I spend more time with than my family may not feel the same way about me as I do about them. If the same thing happened to me would I even get three? Would I be replaced and never discussed in the same way after all those years of service? Sometimes I think my knowledge matters but I’m not convinced that I do. Then I think should it? After all this is a job, its not a family. The problem is as someone who is ‘all in’ sometimes I can find it hard to remember the difference.

Family is everything

Given all the above I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I balance the person that I am, the environment I work in and the need to re-energise and be the best version of myself. This has involved coming to the realisation that the thing that matters most to me and what I need above all else is my family. They mean everything to me. They have been my cheer leaders to get me to where I am, but they are also the ones who have suffered from me having my focus elsewhere. I have missed so many birthdays and special events due to being ‘all in’ elsewhere. Life is not a movie. Life isn’t a 3 part story arch about the workaholic who final finds love, moves to the country and raises sheep. It is however about constant learning and re-evaluation. So here is what I have learnt:

I don’t have the capacity sometimes to set boundaries for myself, but if I’m ‘all in’ for them that that is the start for me of being able to find a way to balance the demands of a job I love with the need to be ‘all in’ with those that matter most.

The top things I’ve learnt:

• Spend time reflecting on who you are and what drives you
• Know which things refresh you and which thing drain you
• If like me you find it difficult to set boundaries find something/someone who can support you in doing so

I am far from having cracked this one but having done the thinking I feel I’ve at least taken some steps in the right direction. Like all things I’ll be taking it one day and one step at a time.

All opinions on 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

I’ve been a football fan for almost my entire life. I’m an Aston Villa fan so I know quite a lot about loss, quite a lot about hope, followed by broken dreams. So Sunday’s England game is not my first road show. I have also faced a fair number of road blocks on the road to success. Most people look at my career path and see success and progress. I look at it and see all the people who told me I wasn’t good enough, that I couldn’t make it, and that I didn’t have what it takes. I see the fire and determination that built up in me to show them they were wrong. It’s one of the reasons I’m so passionate about lifting others up. I’m no stranger to failure, but my experiences have taught me to believe that failure is actually critical to success. We come back from it stronger. We also (if we take the time) come back wiser, having learnt the lessons it offers us.

My bad relationship with failure started early

When I was at secondary school I took a history exam, I got 96%, my father jokingly asked what happened to the other 4%. I took it to heart and was crushed by my ‘failure’.

No member of my family has ever failed an exam, not a driving test, not an academic test, nothing. It was just not done or considered a possibility.

So imagine my horror when I became sick whilst doing my GCSE’s. I went from planning to sit 11 GCSE’s to only being able to go to school for an hour a day and being allowed to sit only Maths, Duel Science and English. I was well enough in the build up to revise for a single weekend. I had been told that all plans to attend university needed to be revised and that I would be lucky to attend Sixth Form. I was a failure. People were planning for my complete academic crash and burn. This was super hard for the girl who had never considered anything else but an academic future.

So I took a beat, or, in reality, quite a few, and decided screw it. I would not be defined by being ill, I would not be defined by being a failure. I got my 5 GCSE’s and found a Sixth Form that would take me. The first year of Sixth Form I still couldn’t attend normally. I did 2 A-levels, Biology and Drama. I also did General Studies, mostly as I didn’t need to turn up for class. My Drama classes were end of day, so I could crash out. It was only the Biology that was the stretch. In my second year I realised I needed a third subject to go to uni. I found a Psychology teacher who allowed me to attend classes at evening school as well as during the day. I covered the minimum amount of topics to be able to pass the exam. I crossed my fingers and hoped that I would overcome. I got my 4 A-levels, I came second in my year and I got into Uni. I took a year off in between as I still was not well so that I could maximise my chances. Needless to say this journey left me a fair number of hang ups about not only failing, but not being able to keep up and whether I was ever going to be good enough again to be accepted by my peers.

My rocky journey to learning to, if not love, then at least to appreciate failure

Since our rocky start, failure and I have gradually come to an uneasy détente. I try to avoid it at all costs and it reminds me that it is an ever-present part of life. Rather like that relative/friend who always turns up at parties, even if they haven’t actually been invited. In recent years, we’ve spent an increasing amount of time in each other’s company and, although it surprises no one more than I, I actually have some good things to say about about the F word thatcan make you better in the long run.

Sometimes you need to feel the fear

Let’s start with the easier things to like. I often talk to my students and mentees about the benefits of feeling the fear. Fear of failure can be overwhelming, leading to paralysis. However, if you can manage the fear it can be used to motivate and focus the mind. This is especially true with high-stakes assessments, such as exams or dissertations. There are different ways that can be used in order to harness the fear of failure to your advantage: from being prepared far enough ahead that the fear is spread over time, to working with peers to support bench marking and fear control. Different strokes for different folks. The main thing is to not hide from it, but acknowledge it and manage it to your advantage.Failure, however, comes in all shapes and forms, not just as high-stakes encounters. It happens in leadership conversations, data analysis and day to day life. When the inevitable happens, and it is inevitable, you need a plan for how to address it. Below are some of my tips about how I face, process, and learn from failure.

Separating the failure from the person

I often shock people when I say I fail all the time, but it’s true. I fail to have conversations in the way I want, I fail to always be there for my team in the way I want to and I most certainly fail to keep on top of my workload. That’s before I even begin to talk about failing to have any work life balance or to give my husband the attention he deserves.

One of the things that has really helped me to manage some of the guilt and fear linked with these failures is understanding that most of them are linked to roles that I play. That doesn’t make them any less significant, but it does enable me to box them and learn from them without them creeping into everything I do and impacting on how I feel about myself as a person. Dr Cloutman-Green often needs to do better and learn from failure in terms of how that outbreak phone call went. That doesn’t mean that Dream is a failure at all she does. It’s about placing sufficient boundaries on the failure to give me distance to permit reflection and learning.

Allowing time to grieve and emotionally process

Now, you may all be better people than I and leap straight into the ‘learning’ post-failure. I’m afraid I don’t have that much mental strength. I need ‘wallow time’. Time to process the emotions linked to what’s happened, so I can move forward and reach a point where I have the cognitive space to reflect. Reflection for me needs to have the emotional response removed. I don’t believe in bottling up my emotions for a later melt down so I allow myself a grieving period. This is normally 48 hours-(it can be a week if it’s something big) where I allow myself guilt-free to feel. To express (in an appropriate way) my frustration/anger/disappointment targeted at the failure. This helps me understand the level to which the activity linked to the failure mattered to me. Is it worth repeating, do I care enough to end up potentially back in this place? I usually do this in the company of my two coping mechanisms: cake and gin. They’ve been my companions in failure for over 10 years, so they are experts in handling me and getting me back to a balanced viewpoint.

Devoting time to reflection to support learning once the grieving us done

So we’ve acknowledge that the failure sucks. We’ve learnt that we care enough about whatever it was linked to that we are prepared to put on the Big Girl Pants and get back into the foray. Now is the time to sit down and learn the lessons in order to reduce our chance of ending up back with cake and gin.

If the failure is linked to things like paper or grant failure, now is the time to open that dreaded feedback and spend some time with it now your emotions are under control. Which parts of it are the things you secretly knew were true? Which parts, despite feeling harsh, can be used to make what you’ve done better for the second time around? If it’s for an exam, which parts didn’t go well? How will your planning and preparation address these next time? If it’s that you sucked when having that conversation or argument, then now is the time to reflect on why and be prepared to dive back in there and try it again. Hopefully the next time will be better.

It’s rarely as bad as it feels in the moment

Some of the time I take when reflecting and learning lessons is to think: if this had happened to my best friend, what would I say to her? We are often our own worst critics. As well as the learning, and sometimes to help with this, thinking of how you would handle this as a friend means that you can review it from a different viewpoint. This can not only help your learning but also put it in a context that may enable you to be just a little kinder to yourself.

Failure is context specific, so find the right people to support your thinking

If you can’t manage distancing during reflection, this is the time to call on your champions in order to get them to help you. My husband, who is a great fan of telling me that experiencing a little failure would be good for me, fulfils this for me. I will arrive home in floods of tears because I haven’t met X deadline. He will ask “did anyone die?” No. “Did anyone get fired?” No. “Was anyone hurt in anyway?” No. “Then either let it go or put it in late, there will always be another X.”

Sometimes we all get so bogged in the weeds of what we should be doing that we find it difficult to put our failures in the context that they deserve. Can you try again? Almost always. So why are you still here? Learn the lessons and go try again. Good luck with that. If you fail I’ll be here with my good friends gin and cake to help you recover, reflect and learn.

All opinions on 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

I know I normally post about science and science adjacent topics, but in the interest of practicing what I preach and bringing my full authentic self, I wanted to post about a topic that I don’t think gets discussed. This is partly prompted by the time of year, but also by quite a few posts I’ve seen this week on twitter from people who have felt alone in similar scenarios. I also wanted to to give a view of how this feels 11 years on to those who are going through this now, to let them know that you will find a new normal. It will never be the same, it can’t be. It doesn’t however devalue what your life is worth, you will find a new way, one that is uniquely your own. This is all from my perspective: if your journey has been different I am in no way devaluing your experience, just sharing my own. Feel free to not read this post if you don’t want to hear me overshare.

So now the disclaimers are done, a little history which you may or may not wish to skip if you want to miss the details.

I’m 41 and 11 years ago, this weekend, my sister Claire died. She died when she was 5 1/2 months pregnant with my niece Morgan. Her pregnancy was normal, although there were concerns on the ultrasound from the start in terms of whether Morgan had an underlying condition that would mean the course of the pregnancy might not be successful. We were all super excited when she reached five months, as that had been the milestone beyond which we all thought a positive outcome more likely. Two weeks later my sister had a headache on a Friday night. I was away at a hen do for my best friend. She phoned my mum when she started vomiting. She called 111, who told her that it was likely to be a stomach bug and to remain hydrated. At 3 that morning she awoke partially paralysed. An ambulance was called. She seized on the way to the hospital and was brain dead when she arrived. This was confirmed 48 hours later when we turned off her ventilator and donated her organs. Morgan survived 24 hours and then also died. She was two weeks too early to be considered legally a person and for a C-section to be attempted. I got a call asking me to get from Leeds to the hospital in Cambridge at 7am, whilst horribly hungover, and in the way of these things the information handed over didn’t really cover the clinical picture. When I arrived and saw her chart (she was in surgery to see if anything could be done) I knew it was over. I was 30 and she was 32. She died of early onset pre-eclampsia and I was told they couldn’t rule out a genetic component and that I should consider not having children as we had a family history of difficult pregnancies. I’d been married 6 months.

So, I’m newly married. Children were the next thing on the cards. I was so so excited that I was going to be an auntie. In fact the first issue of the gift subscription to Mother and Baby magazine arrived at Claire’s the day she died and was there to greet me as I picked out her outfit to lay her out in. Suddenly, everywhere I go I’m faced with the question that every newly married woman gets…. are you having a baby? I get it from cab drivers, colleagues at work who don’t know what’s going on, from reps and other people who you see infrequently, and strangers who’ve you’ve never even met before. It’s a knife that gets stuck in your heart. Even now, all these years later, I dread these questions. “How many kids do you have?” None. Then the look as people decide where to go next: do they go for the super intrusive question or the platitude about the fact that you’ll enjoy them when you have them. It’s not like I don’t get it and, on a 1:1 basis, you shrug it off rather than scream back, because it’s not the individuals fault. It’s the fault of a society that bases my value on the Darwinian concept of my reproductive legacy. No one asks my husband these questions, at least not with the regularity with which I am. Certainly not strangers or cab drivers who notice his wedding ring. (NB when he read this he pointed out he does get asked, not so frequently, but it does happen).

I started my NIHR Doctoral Fellowship 4 weeks after my sisters death and, to be honest, I threw myself into it in order to see something concrete come out of the period. My sister had been planning on starting a PhD after she came back to work from maternity leave and I felt very much I was doing it for both of us. As people don’t talk about this stuff it was a hard time. There was no one who had been through a similar thing. Talking about not being able to have children makes people so uncomfortable as no one really knows what to say. My friends and I had all just got married and non of us had had kids, so I was the first one to face the issue. Although, now, I have a number of friends who for different reasons are in the same boat. In many ways, I wish the medical guidance had been ‘you can’t have children’. I found that you could try and have a termination as soon as there’s any rise in blood pressure or change in markers detected tortuous. The idea of walking into a hospital every week wondering if that was the week I’d have to abort was more than I could face. Even now it makes me feel sick. My husband and I agreed to keep talking about it. We have a wonderful and fulfilling life together. Although it is my body, for me it very much needed to be our decision. He has been a godsend throughout and always said that I was the most important thing in his world. He wasn’t prepared to risk me. Nevertheless, having the ‘will we won’t we’ decision hanging over our heads was an indescribable weight. Especially when our friends went on to get pregnant and raise wonderful children.

Close friends were great about the pregnancy piece. I had some friends who were too scared to speak about it too much as they knew how much it hurt. I had other people in my world who just threw baby pictures in my face without even thinking about it. The best ones knew how incredibly happy I was for them, even if some days I couldn’t face the detail. These friends checked in with whether I wanted to see that picture or hear that story so depending on how resilient I was feeling so I could still be part of their story. These ones would also message Jon before they phoned to tell me their great news so that I could have a glass of something treaty and get myself into the right headspace. I know it’s so tricky for people that I both want to be there and can’t fully always engage and, therefore, the rules change day by day. My plea is: if you aren’t in this particular boat, that you ask the question about whether I’d like to see/know/hold and not just assume consent. As time goes by, you’d probably never know that when you share without asking it hurts me. But it still does some days none the less.

So here we are 11 years on. One day, a couple of years ago, my husband and I spontaneously turned to each, with no preparation and said almost simultaneously ‘that ship has sailed’. We cried and, in all honestly, we drank champagne to celebrate. It was only in that moment that I realised the weight of ‘do i risk my life for this?’ and ‘am I a bad person for not wanting it at whatever the cost?’ and ‘am I letting my husband down by not just trying?’ I realised that he had been carrying exactly the same weight. It took a long long time to get here. I’d be lying if I said that there were not still some days, like the ones coming over the weekend, where it isn’t hard. Partly it’s hard because I can’t separate the grief for the children I never had from the grief over the sister I did.

I’m doing pretty great these days. We are the adopted aunt and uncle of a few of our friends children and we delight in spoiling them. On the 18th of August every year which was Morgan’,s due to date we send ‘Morgans gifts’ to children in our social circle in her honour and remembrance. Just because we can’t spoil her doesn’t mean we can’t spoil others in her name.

Here are some thoughts that might help if you are on the outside looking in (these are not all issues I feel in my setting but they are ones over the last 11 years I’ve come across):

• Please understand that my life has meaning even if I don’t have kids. Please, therefore, don’t devalue my plans and life by always expecting me to be the one to work late/cover the weekend because everyone else has children. You don’t mean the way it comes across or the way it sometimes makes me feel. I know that. I also know you need to be there for your family, and that’s completely right, but I have family too.
• Please consider altering slightly those questions you ask strangers who have life paths they may not be willing to share.
• Take a couple of seconds to think about consent before you give me your baby to hold. Neither of us want me to flinch and drop your precious parcel and sometimes my physical reaction is to back away before my brain kicks in.
• If you have a friend on IVF, please don’t ask if they are pregnant yet (this also goes for PhD students and their thesis being finished).

For the people who are still experiencing the panic attacks, the society doesn’t value my life depression, the what will my legacy be thought cycle. Know this. Your value does not depend on whether you can produce a child. Your value does not depend on what reproductive legacy you leave. Your value lies in who you are and whether you can have a child is nothing to do with it. Know also that it will get better. That the knives in the heart of well-meaning questions start to hurt a little less. You will find a new normal, you will form a new version of you of which this is a part, but not the dominant self-defining part. Know, also, that if you ever want to talk it through over tea and cake I am here for you.

All opinions in this blog are my own