It's time to talk about failure again! In this episode, Taryn Bell chats with Ireen Litvak-Zur, Senior Consultant at Advance HE. Ireen discusses her experiences of failure both in and out of academia, and shares her thoughts on how to fail well.

Key takeaways:

• "Failure now is a step in a process, rather than an outcome": there's still an ingrained stigma against failure in academia, but Ireen's own views on failure changed dramatically after she left academia
• How we deal with failure can make those failures worse: The easy fix for failure is to put more pressure on yourself - but this has hugely negative impacts on academics in the long run
• The importance of both self-compassion and a growth mindset: When we stop punishing ourselves for our failures, we're more able to learn from them

To listen back to our previous episodes on failure, check out the links below:

• Navigating Failure in Academia
• How to Handle Professional Failure
• From setback to success: supporting researchers after unsuccessful funding applications

You can learn more about Ireen using the link below:

• Ireen Litvak-Zur

All of our episodes can be accessed via the following playlists: 

• Research Impact with Ged Hall (follow Ged on Bluesky and LinkedIn)
• Research Impact Heroes with Ged Hall
• Open Research with Nick Sheppard (follow Nick on Bluesky and LinkedIn)
• Research Careers with Ruth Winden (follow Ruth on Bluesky and LinkedIn)
• Research talent management
• Meet the Research Culturositists with Emma Spary (follow Emma on Bluesky and LinkedIn)
• Research co-production
• Research evaluation
• Research leadership
• Research professionals
• Academic failure with Taryn Bell (follow Taryn on Bluesky and LinkedIn)

Follow us on Bluesky: @researcherdevleeds.bsky.social (new episodes are announced here), @openresleeds.bsky.social, @researchcultureuol.bsky.social

Connect to us on LinkedIn: @ResearchUncoveredPodcast (new episodes are announced here)

If you would like to contribute to a podcast episode get in touch: researcherdevelopment@leeds.ac.uk

Welcome back to Research Culture Uncovered. I'm your host, Taryn Bell, and I work at the University of Leeds as a Researcher Development Advisor. If you are listening to this episode immediately after it's been released at the end of September, you may find yourself in that kind of new year, new me turning over a new leaf mentality.

We all do this from time to time. We set our resolutions. We tell ourselves we're gonna be better this year, we're gonna do loads of amazing work. We're not gonna overwork and we're gonna be super organized about it all the entire time.

I'm starting the year with a slightly different mentality this time around. A mentality where I try to be a little bit more self-compassionate and accept that with big, ambitious plans, it might not all go exactly as I wanted, but I'll still learn from it in the process. So with this in mind, it makes sense to start off the academic year with another episode in our series about academic failure and getting it wrong.

What does it mean to fail? What does failure look like in academia? Can we fail better? If you haven't listened to our previous episodes on failure, I'd really encourage you to do so, and I've put links to them in the show notes.

So today I'm glad to welcome back Ireen Litvak-Zur, who's a senior consultant in leadership and management at Advance HE. Ireen joined Advance HE in September 2023 from the University of Essex, where she worked as a Lecturer in the Government Department.

Ireen has a PhD in International Relations from UC Davis, and specializes in negotiation and team dynamics. She defines herself as a recovering academic and brings a really interesting combination of experiences, as both an experienced researcher and consultant. You may remember that Ireen chatted with me for another episode about a month ago where we discussed the recent Advance HE symposium on research culture.

But today, Ireen is here to talk from a much more personal perspective about her own experiences of failure and what she's learned from them. So welcome back to the podcast, Ireen.

Thank you very much, Taryn, for inviting me and great to be here again.

So let's start off with a very broad, big question. What does failure mean to you?

That's a great question and I think that I will answer as two different people. One is me as a researcher about three to four years ago and, and perhaps one as, as me today because the answer varies a lot, me, three or four years ago. Would have a completely different answer. So, as a researcher, failure to me was to get less than an a on my papers in grad school to have my papers rejected, not getting grants, not getting awards,

getting negative feedback from students, not getting statistically significant results in a model I ran. And, and of course, not being the fully present parent and partner that I can be whilst doing all of this. And so failure was being anything that is less than perfect.

Later, when I started thinking about leaving academia, this step of leaving seemed like the ultimate failure to me. And with a small, uh, star here from conversations across the sector, living academia is the ultimate failure for many. And I may even say for most researcher perhaps and I'm aware that it might be a provocative, statement to make, but I stand behind it.

Today, failure means to me not to be true to who I am and what I want. I think that most importantly, failure now is a step in a process rather than. An outcome. And I think that it really reflects in perhaps your year's resolution of making this into a process and not thinking about this is my goal and this is my goal, and this is my goal.

So it's about process versus outcomes.

That's a really interesting distinction, I think, and, and a lot of what you're saying, I don't necessarily think is provocative at all because I've heard these narratives a lot myself around, you know, particularly the classic narrative of if you leave academia, that means you've failed.

Rather than accepting that they're simply for most people aren't enough. Jobs in academia for the number of people who want them, but also for me, for example, someone who still works in academia but has left academic life, so to speak. For me it wasn't because there weren't the jobs for me, it was because it just wasn't the right step for me anymore.

So I don't see that as a failure, but you are right. There is this really ingrained narrative. And I find it really interesting actually because when, I dunno about you, but when I talk to researchers, when, when they think about what failure means to them, it's often like there's this imaginary ideal academic that no one can ever reach up to, but everybody aspires to be.

And it strikes me that, yeah, there's, there's this clear outcome, as you say in academia, that it's never possible for anyone to reach those heights at all. So I think it's really interesting to see how your own view of failure has changed over time.

Yeah, I completely agree, and I think that it is never true because when you ask academics.

Even the, those start researchers they will tell you yes, most grant applications get rejections. Most, um, paper submissions get rejections. I applied for this and this many jobs when I was applying for grad school, and I already found my advisor. He told me you need to apply to at least 10 different institutions.

So right from the start, those odds that are stacked against you are reflected to you. Yet were not expected to, to, to have these setbacks.

Given that failure is something that, that you've been familiar with from then, a fairly early career stage, how have you coped with failure in the past, and do you cope with it in a different way today?

Well, in the past it was very easy. It was by increasing pressure on myself. Everything except self-care had to be more, more trying, more working hours, more reading, more writing, more models, more applications. This also came of course, with more anxiety, more guilt, and much higher expectations from myself.

It was like the only way to get over a failure for me was to set the bar higher than before. After listening to your conversation with Anna Pilz on navigating failure in academia, what you said about the need to sit down with your emotions really resonated with me because I think I was doing everything I could to get away from quiet time, from time.

To actually sit with my emotions. And it's funny because the language you used at the beginning there was, it was, it was very easy. There's an easy fix for coping with failure there to put more pressure on yourself, but then that becomes incredibly difficult. And that's, I imagine that was such a way upon you and I can see that growing over time.

Is that how it felt?

Absolutely. And I think that this is how burnout is described, right? You put more and more pressure on yourself, and then of course you can't live up to unrealistic expectations. So, so then you fail again, and then you put even more pressure on yourself. And there is, there is no way around it.

Other than feel it and stop.

So what have you learned from these experiences of failure? Was there a particular experience that stuck out for you or has it been something that's just changed over time?

There was a particular experience that I really remember and I was, I was sitting and I was, uh, getting ready to submit a paper for review. I already presented it at a conference. it got good reviews and I got useful feedback. I worked on it. Everything looked good to me and, and several colleagues, more than several colleagues actually read it.

And I was getting ready to submit it for a journal and I was sitting there and trying. To, to, to just breathe. And my, my fitness tracker started screaming at me, you're doing so great. Keep up the good work because it, it perceived it as, as a workout. And then I realized that I was in the middle of a panic attack and I thought to myself why does this need to be?

A part of your job. If your job is to publish more and more and this is what you get before every submission, why do you need this? So this was the experience and, and I have two key learnings from this. From this and the entire journey. And the first one, that there are many paths to success as there are ways to fail, if not even more.

And if we're in the topic of success versus failure, these are not, and, and they shouldn't be mutually exclusive. This is again, something that you already discussed previously in my current role. I'm not a researcher, but I feel that my contribution to higher education is more meaningful and has a greater impact.

It makes me happy and satisfied with what I do, and I still fail a lot. But when I stopped fighting this and pushing myself and punishing myself for my failures, I started learning from them. And my second learning is about resilience. So, once again, I'll go back to your words in in the episode on failure in academia, and you said that you don't like the word resilience.

Previously resilience meant to stay strong, not let this and this, and this break you not let, let this get get to you and don't give up. And in that sense, I agree with you. This is an excuse not to change the way we do things, and it can be our research culture or our individual ways of working.

But today, resilience means to me to accept change rather than resist it. When I left academia, I felt incredibly resilient because I changed the narrative for myself from failure to a new path to success,

I love that notion of, stopping that resistance of being more adaptable, of being able to kind of pick yourself up and move on from things or accept the way things are. I think that's really, really powerful because I think that to me, strikes at the heart of what a lot of academic failure is about. It's

resisting those uncomfortable feelings and resisting the, your frustration and your, and your, your self-doubt and things like that in a way that can be really incredibly damaging to academics and the people around them.

Yes, absolutely. And, and I hear this in conversations with researchers on a daily basis, and it's, it's about, and especially these days when the higher education sector faces a lot of financial struggles and, and researchers do not only face the regular pressures.

Of being a researcher and everything that comes with it, but they also face uncertainty. Resisting change is putting so much more pressure on yourself.

So you've kind of alluded to this a little bit already but you've got this real, this dual experience both having worked as an academic and now working not, not entirely outside of academia, but kind of

adjacent to academia. For you, coming from both of these sides, what differences are there between failing in academia and failing outside of academia? Have you noticed any differences at all?

I think, I think it would be difficult to, to generalize. Sectors. Mm-hmm. I'm very lucky to work in a supportive team that allows taking risks and allows mistakes and encourages new ideas.

Just earlier today, I pitched a new idea and I've been told, go ahead, do it. We're behind you and you have our support.

So failing in this sense has a lesser cost, but I'm also conscious that the costs that were imposed on me when I was a researcher were mostly self-imposed.

Yes. I don't take away from the weight of research culture that I felt that I'm expected to be disappointed and raise the bar for myself.

Otherwise, I'm not as ambitious perhaps. otherwise, I do not. Fit in with other researchers. However, the decision to impose these costs, I think eventually was my own. So, so the difference I want to say comes from within. But perhaps this change is also the one that that contributed to my decision to move away from a research career.

And is there anything that your current, because you say you have a very supportive environment in which you work now, and is there, is there any messaging that's coming from that environment either from senior colleagues or those you work alongside? Is there anything there that really helps support you in feeling more comfortable to fail?

Hmm, that's a good question.

I can give an example of my line manager when I received a very negative feedback from a program that I facilitated. I came to her and I showed her and I told her, look, this is really. Difficult to read and she said, and I remember it so well. Do you have anything to learn from it? Was this feedback just being negative or was it constructive?

If you don't have anything to learn from it, put it aside. If you have something to learn from it, write it down. Learn for the future. And that was incredibly helpful and supportive. But, but also I think that the general approach is to say, okay, what do we do from here?

I think that's a really interesting, way to put it. Because it strikes me as I've been doing some work recently on kind of fixed mindset versus growth mindset. And I think going from that kind of fixed mindset of, oh, this is a, this is a terrible thing. It reflects badly on me to thinking, oh, what can I learn from this?

How can I grow from this? That can be. Really, really beneficial, but, but it can also be really difficult to do and it can take time to get there, to get to that frame of mind. And it sounds like this is a process that you've been through over the course of a number of years.

Yes, absolutely. And I think that what you've said, time is key because I remember myself.

Reading a review from the infamous reviewer, number two, and, and really holding back the tears, telling myself, okay, it's not the time to cry now, it's the time to go and work on this. But that's not true, is it? Because there is time. To cry and to feel and to pause and, and there is time to come and say, wow, this is really difficult, I need a moment.

It reminds me, I, we recorded an episode a while back with Anna Pilz, where we talked about how we support researchers who've been through unsuccessful funding applications. And I al I'll always remember one of the things she said was, you've gotta give yourself time to cry, be frustrated, you know, go out for a long walk and, and vent to a loved one.

Because we don't spend enough time letting ourselves actually work through those emotions. And it's like you talked earlier, we spend so much time resisting those negative emotions and treating them as if they're not there, that conversely actually makes it harder to release them and let them go. It's only by kind of.

Accepting that they're there, accepting that we feel that way, that we kind of release their power and allow ourselves to move on.

Yes, absolutely. And you said vent to a loved one Yes, absolutely. That helps. And also vent to your team because. It allows you time to process and it also opens a door to others to sharing their own frustrations.

Absolutely. I've noticed that in my team actually, is that we have a, I have a couple of colleagues who are really willing to share when things haven't gone right for them. And it's been so interesting for me because for years I'd fell into that old trap of, if I tell anyone that I didn't get this right or this thing didn't go perfectly, people will think less of me.

But actually that example has shown me how powerful it can be to be, to be honest about these things too. So in your current work, thinking about leadership and management at Advance HE, what, if anything, do you hear from those in those areas about this notion of failure and about this notion of getting, getting it wrong?

And how does that fit into kind of leadership programs or leadership training or your work at Advance HE.

Yeah. It fits with various research leadership programs that, that we have, because we are talking about failing well, and we are talking about the role of research leaders in allowing and building. A research culture that allows failure where you are not the brave individual that takes a step forward and shares their failure.

When it is just part of your day, it is part of your meeting where you can start a meeting with what is going well and what is going not well. And you can normalize the not going well part researchers. Perceive this well from, from what I see and and what I hear, and I think there's an appetite for change and that makes me happy.

Yeah, I feel the same way too. I think we are, we are at the beginning of a, a real period of change where people are more willing to open up about when things didn't go right. And I think that's where leaders can be really, really important in, setting an example in, role modelling those behaviours and saying it's okay to, to not get things right all the time.

I don't get things right all the time.

Yes, absolutely. Because, because you model and others follow and then it is not as difficult. It is still challenging. It is still demanding, but you're less lonely in it.

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for coming to talk to me today, Ireen, about failure and sharing your own personal experiences. Um, hopefully this has been an, a valuable conversation for you as much as it has been for me.

Thank you Taryn, for inviting me. It's, it's been a really incredible and personal experience and I, and I felt heard, so I thank you for this.

Thank you so much to all of you who are listening. As always, we really appreciate your feedback. So please let us know what you thought of this episode and feel free to share with me your own examples of failure.

if you'd like to catch up with some of our previous episodes then those will be found in the show notes. And if you'd like to be a guest yourself on a future episode, do get in touch. We'd love to hear from you. So thanks so much for listening, and we will see you again soon.