Two recent interactions made me think more about the importance of knowing our own unique superpowers (as Aaron Quigley discussed), ie our strengths, and also our kryponite (thanks Lewis Chuang), and how this can help us work out what is our good academic life. And to recognise that it’s ok that we can all have different superpowers.

Related Links:

The twitter thread started by Lewis Chuang:

Aaron Quigley podcast conversation

Mike Twidale podcast conversation

Acknowledgement: Photo of power pose by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash

Related Work:

Michelle McQuaid, 2014, Ten Reasons to Focus on Your Strengths No matter what your job description says, Psychology Today.

Jeremy Sutton, 2021, Cultivating Strengths at Work: 10+ Examples and Ideas, PositivePsychology.com.

Ryan M. Niemiec, 2020, Coronavirus Coping: 6 Ways Your Strengths Will Help You Turn to your best qualities for prevention, safety, and health. Psychology Today.

Transcript:

(00:05):

Welcome to changing academic life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick. And this is a bite-size related work podcast where we pick up on a single idea from literature and experience that may provide some insights or tips that will help us change academic life for the better.

(00:27):

Where do you naturally choose to spend your time? When you have the option of making a choice, what do you naturally gravitate to doing where's your happy place or places as an academic? What is it that you really love doing when you feel the most alive and in the flow maybe? I wanted to muse on this today triggered by two different, but I think related interactions from last week, one was the discussion with a senior professor whose colleague made a comment to them that they should be writing more and notice the 'should'. But for this senior academic, they would always choose to spend time with their students, not sitting down, writing another paper yet, even though they were really clear on this as their own choice, they felt that they still felt somehow weren't measuring up to what an academic should be. Again, the 'should'.

(01:32):

The other example was a Twitter discussion, responding to the conversation with Aaron Quigley, where he talked about his super powers of not worrying who gets the credit listening and talking. Lewis Chuang started a Twitter conversation around superpowers. And interestingly also asked Aaron what's his kryptonite. I love this nod to the Superman comics. So if you remember, kryptonite is Superman's Achilles heel, it made him weak and all sorts of different types of kryptonite emerged over the series, having different effects on Superman. And then in some, some of the episodes, he could become immune or found that he could be immune from kryptonite by traveling to alternate dimensions.

(02:19):

I think a generic kryptonite for many of us as academics is thinking that they must be some ideal, super academic academic that we all should be aspiring to. And this isn't helped by the hyper competitive culture and the generic metrics that we all have to report to. And I would suggest that we can get some immunity from this kryptonite by traveling to the alternate dimension of knowing ourselves better and identifying what are our unique superpowers, looking to where we get our energy from in doing our academic work and also knowing what's our kryptonite. It's more specifically, and having mitigation strategies against this. I really strongly believe and promote that there's no ideal academic that we should all be aspiring to. We're all unique. And we need the diverse mix of us all to deliver good science overall.

(03:25):

So what are your superpowers? The questions I started with can be one way to start to reflect on this. So for example, when you do have the option of making a choice of how you spend your time or the opportunity to volunteer to something, what sort of things do you naturally gravitate to doing? Where's your happy place? What is it that you really love doing that makes you feel alive and where you really get in flow? If I think of people I've worked with over the years, I know that there's one person I'll always find in the maker lab if they have free time, because this is what lights them up. Another person I know will be there behind their closed door, sitting at their desk and reveling in the time to write. And for me, I know that I will always prioritise time for people and mentoring over writing or tinkering. None of us are better or worse academics than the other. We're just different. And we bring different superpowers to our work.

(04:38):

So I can also give another illustration too, that just might help make this more concrete. So all of us work who are working in universities might be required to do some lecturing. And so on the surface by role title and by task, it might look like that is all pretty much the same, the same job of lecturing. But if you actually ask around to the people that you know, and ask them, what is it about lecturing that they really like if they, if they like it. And I'm sure that you will get a whole range of answers. So some of the answers that I've heard to this question, you know, some people love the aspect of actually standing up in front of the class and performing in a way and engaging this class. Other people will talk about it's really the interaction with the students and facilitating learning conversations. For others, it's about breaking down complex ideas into teachable chinks, and how to communicate that .For others, it's the creative work of developing, learning materials, innovative learning materials, or it might be the strategic planning of the whole learning journey for the student. And that sort of that strategic thinking is what really drives people. Or it might be that you're just motivated by inspiring the next generation of leaders.

(06:16):

And I'm sure you can come up with other reasons. And it'd be interesting to know what are your reasons for anything we do. I would suggest even in delivering to the metrics, the things that we have to do, we can still ask ourselves though, what other parts of this that we might actually love, and then look at how we can do more of that in delivering to what we have to do, because that's where our energy lies. And that's where we get to use our strengths and our superpowers. So in delivering to the metrics, it may be really annoying and painful, but maybe I can also take the time to celebrate for myself what it is that I've learned over the time. If love of learning is a strength for you just as an example.

(07:12):

So there's really strong evidence across a lot of diverse literature in different countries, cultures, and with different settings from students to businesses, to everyday life. That points to really strong benefits of knowing and using and developing your strengths. And the literature talks about things like, you know, people use their strengths more, a happier experience, less stress, feel healthier, have more energy, feel more satisfied and more confident. They're more creative and agile at work, and they experience more meaning at work and are more engaged as well. So recognising that we all have different superpowers also reminds us that we don't have to be good or excellent at everything, and that's completely okay. And that we all bring very different interests and superpowers to our work. And that's the great value of working in collaboration with others. I had a conversation for the podcast with Mike Twidale some time ago, and he gave us a great example of how we can put our different super powers together to complement one another, just take a listen to this extract.

(08:32):

"I realized that, you know, one aspect of delegation that I could do with delegate things, to people who were really good at doing this thing that I was really bad at doing, and that's partly recognising strengths and weaknesses in ourselves. And it was a struggle because at times I'm inclined to be very egocentric and think, well, if I hate doing it that surely everybody else hates doing it. So I am now going to ask them to do this horrible thing. And then discovering this thing, I think is horrible. It's something they think is really nice. And this is something they think is horrible, I think is fun. So learning what it is that, you know, plays to other people's strengths. And then maybe it's something that everybody hates and that has to be dealt, but often there are these sort of different strengths and skills that can be played to." [Mike Twidale]

(09:20):

So isn't that a great example. So it's also worth knowing that it's not enough just to name our superpowers and assume that they're always fantastic to use or that we don't need to develop other skills if we need to. So two examples or caveats around the whole notion of superpowers. One is not having some super power doesn't mean that we can't do something at all, or that we couldn't learn. It just means that it doesn't come so naturally to us. And we'll have to put in more explicit effort to develop that programming is an example for me, so I could learn how to do programming and even be good at it. But I really had to draw on my super power of conscientiousness and persistence to put in the hard work, to get through it and to enjoy the sense of achievement at the end, even if I didn't enjoy the process and it took explicit effort. I'm also not so great at the bigger picture, strategic thinking. And I could go on courses for this. And luckily, so far, like Mike's example, I've been able to work with other people who are better at this and to compliment our strengths together.

(10:39):

The second caveat is that sometimes our strengths or our super powers can also be hidden kryptonite for us if we overuse them or under-use them, or use them unskilfully or inappropriately in a specific context. So one of my superpowers is being really curious and love, just love to learn. And what that means is I have really eclectic interests and, you know, have a broad feel of lots of what's going on in different areas. But the downside that I have to watch out for is because I can be interested in all sorts of things, I'm really prone to going down rabbit holes. And so I need to work much harder on staying in focus if there's something I need to do and watching out for myself, going down a rabbit hole and wasting time. Another example is I think one of my super powers might be fairness, and that leads me to behave in particular ways around people and with people to, to see that things are just and fair, but it can also not serve me well when I notice unfairness or injustice somewhere else, or feel like someone's treated me unfairly and I can really end up ruminating and being very upset and having sleepless nights around that. So I need to have strategies for trying to manage that. So just having a superpower doesn't mean that that's brilliant, you know, there's lots of nuances around actually understanding and using your superpowers to best advantage.

(12:28):

So in summary, we all have our own particular superpowers and our own particular kryptonite. And what I think is interesting in all of the podcast conversations that I have, how much we hear this in different people's stories, everyone has a different, a different career path, different motivations for their choices, different sorts of things that really drive them and that they get excited about. And it's just a great reminder that there's no such thing as the ideal academic or the good academic life. It's, what's a good academic life to you. And this connects to our related work today, as I said, there's a huge body of evidence in the psychology and in the organisational business literature about the power of using superpowers more.

(13:22):

So I'm going to link to two popular science articles that provide a broad overview or summary or discussion of strengths, and also links to the underlying peer reviewed papers. And I said that some of the ways that you can investigate your own superpowers is to just think about the questions that I asked, but you could also ask others, because often if we think something comes so naturally to us we, we just take it for granted and assume everyone can do that because it's just so effortless for us. So sometimes it needs others, we need other people to reflect it back. And so there's a link in one of those articles to an exercise called reflected best self, where it helps you. It talks about how you can go and talk to other people about helping you identify your strengths. And the articles also point to some online profile profiling tools that you may like to use as tools to think with that might start to point you I'll also link to a third article by Ryan Niemiec that talks about 'Coronavirus Coping: 6 Ways Your Strengths Will Help You turn to your best qualities for prevention, safety, and health’. So have fun discovering and playing.

(14:48):

You can find the summary notes and related links for this podcast on www dot, changing academic life.com. You can also subscribe to changing academic life on iTunes, and now also on Stitcher. And you can follow ChangeAcadLife on Twitter. And if something connected with you, please consider sharing this podcast with your colleagues so that we can widen the conversation about how we can do academia differently.

 15:26 END