Think Big by Grace Lordan

Author:Grace Lordan [Lordan, Grace Dr]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241987766
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

INSIGHT 9: TAKE RESPONSIBILITY AND GROW

There’s a lot more to a PhD than most potential students realize. Including me. You have to find an academic voice, and contribute ideas that are creative enough to get published in international journals that are highly regarded. You need to communicate your ideas at public speaking events with large (often scathing) academic audiences. Depending on what you are studying, you may have to hone skills in data science, maths, deductive reasoning, interviewing, writing, communicating, teaching … the list goes on.

This is how, in the summer of 2007, I found myself in a large auditorium at New York University, discussing one of my PhD papers in front of more than a dozen esteemed professors of econometrics. I take creative licence in using the word ‘discussing’ because on that day I choked. I stumbled over my words, stuttering, sweating, forgetting what I had to say …

I had thrown my hat in the ring. I had taken a risk. But I had failed.

It was important that I recognized my own part in this failure. I had never invested any real time in developing my presentation skills.

It happens. We don’t always nail it the first time. Sometimes we mess up. But when we do, it’s essential that we don’t succumb to self-serving bias, which is the tendency to take kudos for positive outcomes and lay the blame for failures at someone else’s door. Don’t point to bad luck or even skulduggery for failure. Remind yourself that any moment of failure is a good time for self-reflection. Were you responsible?

But is self-serving bias always a bad thing? Possibly not on occasions when you need to rally quickly. It is certainly a way we can post-rationalize our choices to ensure we get an appropriate amount of sleep at night. It is also, at its core, an act of self-preservation. It helps avoid paralysis in the future when we need to put ourselves out there again.

However, the problem with self-serving bias on occasions like my horror-show presentation is that we miss an opportunity to self-reflect when a genuine failure occurs. It may also cause us not to develop the new skills we require to move on. I needed to work on my presentation skills – I couldn’t blame that on circumstance. If we do not self-reflect, how can we know what to improve for next time around?

Self-serving bias may have influenced the skills and traits that you committed to developing in Chapter 2. Did you pick the skills that you already have as the ones that you need to develop? Were you puffing up your ego by emphasizing the value of qualities you already have, and neglecting to notice skills you don’t have but really need?

A study by Jeffrey Cucina and colleagues from 2005 illustrates this nicely. They asked participants to identify the personality traits that are necessary to ensure academic success. And what did they find? A significant overlap between the student’s own personality and the personality dimensions they chose as important.

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