Tackle underconfidence & Own your work

To get the most out of supervision, it is essential that you realise that YOU are responsible for ‘managing’ your supervisor, and not the other way around. Academics are notoriously busy, and although that is not an excuse to not invest time in you and your work, in practice it may mean that you have to work hard to get the attention you deserve. Some of the basics are respecting your deadlines and other arrangements you agreed on, arranging supervision meetings well in advance, setting an agenda for the supervision meeting, sending him/ her your work to read well before the meeting, and in general making an effort to respect your supervisor’s time. It also means that you inform him or her regularly on how things are going, and what your plans are. Being proactive in your communication is incredibly important.

That all sounds straight-forward enough. Then why can it be so complicated in practice? There are so many researchers who have difficulty communicating with their supervisor, and I was one of them. It was mind-boggling to me. I am normally someone who communicates quite well. So why was it so hard?

The main reason for me, and for many people I have talked to, was underconfidence. There are many ways in which this can manifest, but it often shows in that we retreat. We don’t want to present our work to our supervisor before it’s ‘ready’, because the supervisor may be overly critical or not ‘get’ what we are trying to do, especially if they have been critical before. We start to feel like the ‘lesser’ party, feeling misunderstood, and we decide to try and figure things out by ourselves. Once that happens the supervisor becomes less and less involved, and trust issues may arise in both directions. For me personally it resulted in a PhD that was 98% a solo project. Not good.

One way of approaching this issue is to work at changing your mind-set. No matter how difficult, staying in communication, allowing and working with criticism, doing the emotional work of coming to terms with disappointments and keeping going anyway. You have to set the pace, you have to call the shots. Sometimes it means less intense contact with your supervisor while you are working things out, often it means taking the risk of showing up, even when you feel you are not ready.

You have to take ownership of your work. No matter how difficult that may feel.

Some examples:

Owner of your PhD	Victim of your PhD
Responsible	Waiting for others to take responsibility
Pro-active	Passive
Independent	Waiting for approval/ recognition
Decisive	Undecided / Wavering
Proud	Apologetic
Solution-oriented	Defeated
Optimistic	Depressed
Confident	Insecure
Helicopter View	Tripping yourself up over every detail
Alternating Between Action / Relaxation	Worrying
Never Fail	Fail at Every Step
Always Learning	Never Know Enough
Committed	Overcommitted

Don’t worry if you look at the left-hand column and either think: ‘that could never be me’, or ‘I don’t even want to be that person. They sound unbearable.’ I understand and I agree. This isn’t so much about forcing yourself into a ‘positive’ mind-set. It is about gently asking whether you are sliding towards the victim side of PhD life, and how you might rekindle your confidence. How to lean towards ownership and autonomy. How to not let the PhD take you down. And how to move back towards a healthier approach to yourself and your work. Owning your work is an important part of the PhD process, yet it is something we aren’t taught how to do. Somehow we are expected to figure out along the way.

Unfortunately, writing a PhD stacks the odds in favour of the right-hand victim column in every possible manner.

Here are a number of reasons why:

Writing a PhD is a huge undertaking in which objectives are vague and ever-shifting. Especially in first years of writing a PhD you feel you can’t own your work, because you simply don’t know what you’re doing. How to pick a direction if you’re just not sure? How to feel confident about a certain methodology if you don’t have the skills to judge that decision? How to defend your work if you’re not even sure what that work is? How to be proud if you haven’t yet produced anything to be proud of? It’s so easy to get confused and lost.

Academic work is based on falsification. Doing research means you’re always trying to prove yourself wrong. (Self-)criticism is the currency of academic life. It may be good for your work (if you manage to not take it personally), but it can be seriously lethal for your confidence (because we are human and we do take it personally). Because you’re always looking for what is wrong with our work (and if you don’t, your supervisor/ other commenters will) you tend to focus on what is wrong and lacking. All these ‘failures’ may lead you to seriously doubt the quality of your work and your capability. Maybe you start doubting the theoretical or methodological approach you took. Maybe your data aren’t as powerful as you had hoped. Maybe you start doubting everything about your PhD project, start to finish. There are so many ways in which your work ‘fails’. It’s inevitable.

The balance between efforts, and rewards for those efforts is notoriously poor in academia. When you’re writing a PhD the moments you feel are doing a good job and appreciated are likely to be few and far between. That alone is enough to make you feel stressed and miserable.

Academia can be intimidating, and there’s a lot of jargon involved. Do you remember your first contribution to an academic discussion? I can and I was shaking. I used to be in awe of people who managed to play the ‘academic game’ well. I once asked someone who I thought was particularly articulate how he did it: impress everybody. He answered: ‘It’s just training’. And so it is. He went to Oxford or one of these places where they teach you how to do this. If you weren’t blessed with such an education, take heart. It’s just a skill. You can learn how to do this too. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that the intimidating person actually knows what he is doing. It just means he has been taught how to hide his insecurities well.

It takes a lot of stamina to write a PhD. Most (non-academic) people get depressed even thinking about working on one, single project for four years. Lucky you – you get to do it.

Publishing a paper isn’t as easy as people make it sound. It takes ages to get a paper written. It takes even longer to get it published. Until then you may be unsure whether you have it in you to become a published scholar. If you’re especially unlucky it may be all your supervisors seem to be interested in. And if you haven’t published anything yet it you may feel like you have to prove yourself. Unfortunately, the feeling of having to prove yourself doesn’t go away after your first publication. After all, it wasn’t a top publication. You’ll have to do better next time. And so the rat race continues.

Your supervisor may be intimidating. One researcher confessed to me it took him days to get back to work every time he had lunch with his supervisor and small group of colleagues and professors. Most of the conversation went over his head, although he sat there pretending to look interested, smart and engaged. After lunch he would return to his desk defeated and deflated. Was he even cut out for being in this field? Or was he just a wannabe, who wasn’t smart enough and could be found out any minute. The supervisor in question, who I know fairly well, had no idea this was even an issue. For him it was just an enjoyable lunch, with a stimulating discussion between professors and PhD students. Or, on reflection, perhaps only between professors. The PhD students were too busy trying to hide their bafflement and feelings of being a pathetic loser.

Academic work is never finished and is never ‘good enough’. When you’re writing a PhD, you know your work so intimately that every small detail becomes an opportunity to trip yourself up. You know exactly what those loose ends are. Maybe those loose ends mean your work isn’t good enough? A professor I know (the same professor who now unknowingly intimidates his PhD students) told me he was convinced he would be exposed as a fraud at his defence. What if they told him: ‘I’m very sorry, I’m sure you did your best, but it just doesn’t cut it. We expected higher quality work from a promising scholar like yourself.’ Yes, it sucks when you think your work isn’t good enough, and never will be, which, in academia, is never far from the truth. Even an ‘excellent’ piece of work has flaws. Ask any seasoned academic.

The power balance in the supervision relationship makes you feel tiny and powerless next to your supervisor. You feel your supervisor gets to decide your academic fate. In the gladiatorial game that is called writing a PhD he or she gets to be the emperor who gives you the thumbs up or the thumbs down. And even though his thumbs are up most of the time, the occasional thumbs down (even the prospect of one) makes you break out in a cold sweat. What if he doesn’t allow me into the next year of the programme? What if I fail my yearly performance assessment? What if he doesn’t think my work is up to scratch? I am toast.

Your supervisor’s well-consolidated academic framework inhibits him/ her from understanding what you’re trying to do. Although academia is supposed to be a meeting of the minds, rigid and dogmatic ways of thinking may severely limit interaction. It has taken your supervisor years to develop his thinking, and if your ideas don’t fit into his framework, don’t be surprised if he or she will gently, or not so gently, encourage you to adapt them to make them fit his worldview. It makes his life so much easier! One researcher I know felt she had to fight her supervisors tooth and nail every supervision meeting. They forcefully suggested she should adapt her methodology. ‘To improve her work’, they said. ‘So they can at least understand it without putting in too much effort,’ she thought. Her method was over their heads – that she was almost certain of. Or were they right in asking her to dumb it down? Hmmm, maybe they were right and maybe she was wrong… Maybe she had done it all wrong, and her investment had been for nothing.

Communicating your ideas well is a herculean task, especially when you are not yet 100% sure what you are doing (which is 90% of the time when you are writing a PhD). The same researcher as mentioned directly above opted to hide from her supervisors as much as possible until she had figured out how to communicate her thoughts less chaotically. Better wait until she felt more confident before discussing with them again…

You are working with two supervisors who are giving you the opposite advice. What to do? You can’t please them both. It’s a catch 22. Damned if you choose A, damned if you choose B.

Supervisors are busy and may be evasive. Which means you are not worth their time. Doesn’t it?

There is no shortage of reasons why writing a PhD can be stressful and demoralising, and it’s important to realise that you are not to blame. It’s (partly) inherent to the job.

That’s why it’s especially important to cultivate an attitude of ownership (as well as self-compassion). It’s also important to realise that developing academic skills and confidence takes time and effort. For everybody. Don’t let feelings of littleness or ‘not being there yet’ get you down. Your confidence will grow once you start mastering the various components of your research. You don’t have to have it all figured out. Being willing to learn is good enough. Mustering this willingness, over and over again, is the key to success, and self-confidence (sometimes it takes a while…)

‘Owning your work’ is immensely important to establish a good supervision relationship. It doesn’t imply that you no longer have to listen to your supervisor and can simply decide do things your way. It implies that, because you take responsibility for your work, you can engage in a constructive dialogue with your supervisor. Although there is inequality of formal power, knowledge and expertise in the relationship, your ‘ownership’ mindset will help you to stand your ground, and resist retreating or engaging in other types of less-than-constructive behaviour.

It will help prevent supervision from becoming a power struggle, in which the PhD either asserts himself as the ‘top dog’ by being ‘arrogant’ and aloof, uncommunicative, doing things his own way, or the ‘underdog’ by being passive and compliant, without much of an own voice; or a combination of both. You have got to get out of this power struggle, and become the equal partner in the supervision dialogue. I am not saying this is easy – I can recount a number of occasions in which I felt my supervisor really didn’t understand what I wanted to do, which led me to flip-flop through the above states repeatedly. But if you want to get the most out of your supervisor, do your very best to avoid the top-dog – underdog dynamic. Be as open-minded and willing to engage as you can possibly muster.

One trick to foster an attitude of ownership, is to stay curious about your research. Really get into your topic, and your own fascination with it. Why are you writing this PhD? Find out what excites you about it, and start from there. Your enthusiasm may rub off on your supervisor… But even if it doesn’t: don’t let anything take the wind out of your sails. Keep cultivating the qualities in the left-hand column of the table above. As much as possible, anyway… What do YOU think is best for your research? It’s YOUR PhD, YOU get to set the course.