Reach for The Stars

Tuesday 17th September

When you are a postgraduate student, there are two scenarios that can dominate your horizons.  One is the here and now, the vicissitudes of life, the juggling, and getting to the end of the week/ the next deadline.  A PGCE PCET student of mine, a Commander in the Royal Navy used to describe their present challenges as the “crocodiles closest to my canoe”. 

The other is your endgame, as in your final deliverable, be that submission of a Masters dissertation or a doctoral viva.  Sometimes, though, we are so busy planning and creating contingencies for a variety of worst-case scenarios that we forget to create headspace for the best possible scenarios.

The fabulous Dr Rowena Senior conducted a succinct but really powerful workshop last week at the International Creative Research Methods Conference 2024 about story creation for professional development and using future stories to focus on your ambition.  So, my challenge to you this week, is to adapt Rowena’s presentation to focus on your own academic ambitions when your current postgraduate research is finished.

First of all, try to think about what that ambition is.  What have you learned from your studies so far. What have you learned?  What do you want to achieve?  Are you happy to leave your dissertation/ thesis on the shelf, or do you want to do something with it?  If so, what? Who needs to read your research? How are you going to make that happen?  If you don’t currently have any goals that you want to realise when your endgame is completed, or objectives that you want to achieve, try to formulate some.  Then use the outputs from this thinking to construct the narrative of a story about your best possible academic self.  To do this, think about your academic and professional life in the future.  Imaging that everything to do with your endgame has gone as well as it possibly could have done.   This could be that you’ve achieved a distinction in your Masters dissertation, that you’ve successfully defended you doctoral thesis and have only five minor amendments to make that will take you less than two weeks.

Rowena then says that you should write about what you imagined for between 10-15 minutes.  As discussed above there’s a temptation to focus on overcoming barriers, because that’s what we do as practitioners and postgraduate students (especially if you’re part-time and are juggling different priorities that look set to collide).  Don’t worry about how it looks, your story is for you at this stage.  Also remember to look as far beyond your endgame as you can.  Look beyond surviving to thriving.  For example, when I was a doctoral student; my goals were to survive my viva with amendments of any sort rather than a resubmission, and to visualise myself walking across the stage at graduation with the University’s then Vice Chancellor placing the floppy hat on my head.  For the record, I survived the viva with minor amendments, and second didn’t quite pan out because of covid.  Graduation was delayed by 15 months because of lockdowns, and when we got there in November 2021, restrictions on physical contact meant that you had to put your own hat on your own head, and simply doff it at the VC.  But the key point is that I restricted myself to the endgame, and the immediate aftermath thereof, rather than focusing on my own forward trajectory.

Rowena advises that you should then think about who in your academic or professional life you should share your ambition with.  Who can help you achieve it?  Can you apply this approach to any other ambitions that you have for any other areas of your life? 

The theoretical underpinnings for this workshop come from the Best Possible Self intervention (BPS), which was developed by King (2001)

‘…the “Best Possible Self” (BPS) intervention, which consists of writing about one’s best possible self in the future after everything has gone as well as it possibly could.’ (Carrillo et al 2019, p. 2)

Our stories (in whatever context we consider them – academic or otherwise) are important because they ‘…represent our unique experiences, lessons learned, and wisdom gained…’ (Box and Mocine-McQueen, 2019, p. 8).  And for every one of us, our postgraduate journeys are different.  There will be some commonalities in our learning and experience, but there will also be aspects that are unique to our particular contexts and circumstances.

Have a go at this and think about how it was for you.  Loveday at al. (2018) tell us that BPS can boost health and wellbeing. Rowena also advocates that it can also increase optimism ad positive
affect.  For me, the experience of writing the BPS intervention was surprisingly difficult at first, because (as previously discussed) it’s almost a reflex to dismantle the barriers to achievement rather than project forwards. If we’re focussed on finding the answers to the negative “what if” questions, we might never get as far as our BPS.  To envisage a BPS was both empowering and affirming.  Give it a go and let me know how you get on.

References

• Carrillo, A., Rubio-Aparicio, M., Molinari, G., Enrique, Á., Sánchez-Meca, J., & Baños, R. M. (2019). Effects of the Best Possible Self intervention: A systematic review and meta-analysis. PloSone, 14(9), e0222386. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0222386
• Box, H. and Mocine-McQueen, J. 2019. How your story sets you free. San Francisco: Chronical books.
• King, L. A. (2001). The health benefits of writing about life goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(7), 798–807. doi:10.1177/0146167201277003
• Loveday, P.M., Lovell, G.P. & Jones, C.M. The Best Possible Selves Intervention: A Review of the Literature to Evaluate Efficacy and Guide Future Research. J Happiness Stud 19, 607–628 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-016-9824-z
• Senior, R. (2024)  Story creation for professional development: using future stories to focus on your ambitions International Creative Research Methods Conference, 9^th September, Manchester