What does my work need?

A few days before the supervision meeting, sit down to prepare for your meeting. Ask yourself: what does my work need right now, and how could my supervisor contribute? Brainstorm and make a list of issues that are coming up for you. These could be as large as finding a direction for your research, or as small as helping you with literature and references. Maybe you are unsure about a certain part of your paper, or you need specific feedback on whether you are using a method correctly. Maybe you need help in interpreting your data. Maybe you need your supervisor’s opinion on a theoretical approach. Maybe you need to know what the weak points of your paper are so you can improve on them. Maybe you need to use his academic network. Maybe there are administrative things you need to settle. Whatever it is, make it specific and write it down. It has to be crystal clear (1) what you’re grappling with and (2) how you think your supervisor could contribute. Once you have your list, put yourself in his or her shoes and (3) ask yourself how you could make it easy for them to contribute.

The third step of the process, asking yourself how to make it easy for your supervisor to contribute, is essential for good supervision. You need to help them help you. I’ll give you two examples of how not to do this:

A professor has a brilliant PhD student in his first year of his PhD who keeps firing ideas at him, but can’t seem to commit to a single idea. That in itself is not a problem (yet). He’s only halfway through his first year, so even though he will have to commit at one point or another, and according to his professor, preferably sooner rather than later, it’s OK to brainstorm and have plenty ideas to choose from. The problem for the professor is that the PhD student keeps sending him long chaotic papers, full of topics and questions. Every time a new wave of brilliant ideas arrives, the PhD student writes a paper with new research topics. After the third paper in three months, the poor professor, who is desperately trying to keep track of not only this PhD student’s papers and ideas, but of all his PhD students’ papers and ideas, as well as his own, is losing his patience. By now, he feels as lost as the PhD student is feeling himself! The PhD student could have made life a lot easier on himself and his professor if he had been more succinct and specific. That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have communicated his ideas, or that he should have settled on a specific topic sooner. Rather, he should have done some more deep and critical thinking into what he wants and expects from his supervisor. Some ideas: he could have asked (1) which ideas would be researchable, (2) how the supervisor would go about researching this specific topic and (3) where to get started in researching the current literature. He could also have asked more specifically how to proceed: (4) what the next step would be to get from this abstract idea to a researchable project, (5) what the supervisor expects to see in his next paper.

On the other end of the spectrum: I was talking to a professor who didn’t know what to do with one of his PhD students because the only information she could give him meeting after meeting was: ‘I’m stuck’, which doesn’t give him much to work with. He felt increasingly useless and frustrated, and didn’t really know how to get her back on track. Again, the PhD-student hadn’t really give much thought as to how her supervisor might help her. Some ideas: (1) She could have tried to figure out more specifically where she was stuck. Did she suffer from a lack of ideas? Did she have an idea, but no clue as to how to make it into a research project? Was she, for whatever reason, afraid to start, and was she feeling blocked (i.e. the block was of a psychological nature)? Was she struggling finding a theoretical or methodological approach? Was she overwhelmed by the enormity of the literature? What exactly was the problem? Quite possibly, there were a number of problems occurring simultaneously: that’s why she was so confused. Trying to get clarity on the specific blocks would have helped her help her supervisor help her (!) conquer her being stuck one block at a time. (2) She could have asked her supervisor what the next step could be, given the writing or research she had done to date or (3) she could have discussed the possibility of moving on to another part of her project, and leaving this part to stew for a bit. In other words: she should have given him something specific to work and engage with: something of a direction or cue, a beginning of an answer to the question: How could he help her?

When you are overwhelmed or stuck it’s often difficult to create some critical distance between yourself and your work, and that’s what is also frustrating your communication with your supervisor. But a minimum level of critical distance is exactly what you need to allow your supervisor to contribute to your work. Your supervisor isn’t in your head; you are the only one in your head, and you are expecting the impossible if you think your supervisor can magically propel your work and thinking forward. They need leads (but not too many), and the more specific the better.

Ask yourself: what does my work need right now, to move one step ahead? How could my supervisor contribute to me taking that step? If you are clear on these questions, you can then ask your supervisor for advice. And if he can’t help you, he may know someone else who can. Most importantly, just through gaining clarity, you will be able to better help yourself. You will be back in the driver’s seat. Even better if you can email your supervisor with an outline of what you would like to discuss well in advance of the meeting.

What do I need?

The second question to ask yourself when you’re preparing for the supervision meeting is: What do I need right now? We often tend to overlook this question. In an attempt to be ‘professional’ we stifle our feelings and focus solely on our work. More often than not this strategy of ignoring our feelings is counter-productive. Precisely because we don’t look at what we need emotionally, our emotional hang-ups can take over our relationship with our work and our supervisor unexpectedly. Supervision meetings may primarily become a venue for validation (even though we vehemently deny this), which isn’t the best idea for two reasons.

Reason One: when you’re focused on yourself there isn’t much room for having a constructive dialogue about your work (which is the whole point of supervision meetings…right?).
Reason Two: your emotional needs are unlikely to be met in a supervision meeting. It’s unfortunate, but it’s true.

Getting your emotional needs met in academia is complicated. The academic model revolves around criticism, which is necessary and good for your work, but it not necessarily good for you if not communicated in a way that is helpful (and what’s ‘helpful’ depends not only on your personality, but also on how you are doing at any specific point of writing your PhD). There are no easy solutions to this conundrum. It wouldn’t do any harm if supervisors were more aware of the importance of positive feedback and the benefits of the occasional pat on the back for their PhD students’ productivity and confidence, but unfortunately even frequent pats on the back would likely not suffice. Even when supervisors try to be generous with their compliments, it’s easy to focus on the negatives. The positive points are brushed aside all too easily, and all that’s left is the thing that needs to be fixed. When we receive a compliment and critical comment simultaneously we focus on the critical comment. It’s called the negativity bias, and it’s only human. Our brain reacts more strongly to negative news or a negative comment, than to its positive counterpart. The negative comment is internalised, while the positive comment is all but forgotten.

PhD students struggle with this phenomenon, but so do supervisors. I talked to one professor who explained he really tries to support his PhD students, but feels he fails every time. ‘They’re brilliant’ he told me, ‘and I tell them they are. But of course, I also have a lot of criticism. It’s something they have to learn about academic work: standards are high, and if they want their work to meet these standards, they will have to keep working on a paper for far longer than is comfortable. I can see how that could be disheartening, and how all my comments can be seen as too much. But they also take it personally. They think they are failing. They’re not failing. It’s just that failing and succeeding feel the same in academia. I couldn’t wish for better PhD students, but I don’t think they quite believe me when I tell them that.’

All of this doesn’t bode well for the emotional satisfaction supervision meetings are likely to bring. Criticism is experienced more strongly than anything nice that might be said, and moreover, the criticism is likely to be taken too personally because we tend to be over-identified with our work. There are no easy answers to tackle these issues, but there are a couple of things you can do to improve your emotional experience of supervision meetings.

Be aware of your emotional needs

The first and most important step is to be aware of your emotional needs relating to the supervision relationship. Often the most pressing need is the need for acknowledgement. You have worked really hard, and you want your supervisor to acknowledge this. Maybe you also need encouragement and support, or you need your supervisor to confirm that your work is ‘good enough’. When you are preparing for a supervision meeting, ask yourself what you think you need from your supervisor on an emotional level. Don’t worry about whether he will be able or willing to meet your needs. That would be nice, but it’s not the point of this exercise. The point of this exercise is simply to understand and be aware of your own emotional needs. That alone is extremely powerful, whether your needs are being met, or not. It allows you to understand why you may tend to react emotionally to some aspects of supervision. You can even predict when such situations will arise. (For me, if my supervisor said I had to ‘work hard’ – it was enough for my emotional response to go berserk). It also creates more room for a constructive dialogue, as you’ll be better able to catch yourself before the emotional reaction, and focus on more productive ways to relate.

I’ll give you an example. Above, I mentioned the supervision meeting in which I was being overly defensive, because I was feeling vulnerable and was afraid my work didn’t measure up. To try and ‘cover up’ my vulnerability, and in order to try to get my supervisor to agree with me and acknowledge me I was trying to get my point across a little too enthusiastically. If I had reflected beforehand on these feelings of needing to feel acknowledged and if I had realised I wasn’t feeling self-confident at all I might have handled the supervision meeting quite differently. If I had connected with my feelings beforehand, I could have realised that my supervisor could not solve these issues for me, even if he wanted to. If he had said my work was great I wouldn’t have believed him, and if he had said my work needed more work my defences would have been triggered… No easy win for him. I could also have realised that these uncomfortable feelings might be clouding our interaction, and I could have made a concerted effort to not indulge in these feelings and their corresponding habitual defensive responses when they came up in the meeting. Instead I could have taken a deep breath when the feelings came up, acknowledged my feelings in the moment, and then re-focused on what the conversation was about: improving my work and how to best do it. I could have kept my defensive reaction for another occasion.

It’s important to ask yourself how you could contribute to your own emotional wellbeing. Are you being hard on yourself? Can you make your own life easier by being a bit kinder to yourself? Can you compliment yourself for the work you have done, instead of looking at everything that still needs to be done? Can you be satisfied with your work as it stands now? Can you be nice to yourself just because?

Accept & believe compliments

We take criticism far more seriously than we take compliments. Tackle your negativity bias head-on and accept and cherish every compliment you get! I know I never quite trusted my supervisor when he said something positive about my work. Stupid mistake. Because criticism is the norm in academia, you should believe and cherish any compliments you get. When your supervisor pays you a compliment you may think your supervisor is just trying to be nice. That’s highly unlikely. More probably, you have done something to deserve it. Try writing all the positive comments he made down, after the supervision meeting. It will improve your mood and perspective.

Be straight in your communication

Very often we use supervision meetings to try and figure out whether our work is ‘good enough’. We want our supervisor’s stamp of approval. If this is the case for you, why not just ask. Ask your supervisor whether your work meets his standards. Ask whether your chapter is good enough as is, as a chapter of your PhD. Ask whether your paper is ready to be published. Even better: ask your supervisor what you could improve on to make your paper ‘good’ or ‘very good’. The clearer you are on where you stand, what is expected from you, and what specific actions you could take to improve your work, the less you’ll be tortured by feelings of under-confidence. It’s often the uncertainty surrounding our work that trips us up, more than the fact that we still need to improve our work.

Really be there

When you are in your supervision meeting try to really be there. What I mean by that, is that instead of engaging with your own internal dialogue, you try to keep all of your attention on the interaction with your supervisor. Your mental chatter is likely giving a running commentary of the meeting and it’s tempting to internally engage with your chatter, instead of the conversation: ‘Does he like it? Is it good enough? Oh, god I hope he doesn’t say something about the methodology section. I really don’t want to do any more work on that right now.’ etc. etc. If your attention is on your internal dialogue…that means every time you catch yourself thinking about how you measure up, how your work measures up, whether someone likes you, or your work, what to say next to make yourself look better, or about what he or she may be thinking…your attention is not on the actual conversation you are having. Once you notice you’re engaged in a dialogue with yourself, instead of with your supervisor, simply bring your attention back to the conversation. That’s it. Fully engage. It will make a big difference.