Well, welcome everyone. So my name is Christiane Whitehouse, and you’re calling into a Dragonfly public talk. And this talk is called managing upwards. So optimizing students supervisor communication to support well being. And I think we have a mix of people here today, people who are Dragonfly ambassadors. So Welcome to this session. And also, hopefully some graduate students who are here to learn about managing upwards. So we’ll see. On that note, I will get started just a bit of an introduction of me, oh, and I should, okay, let me know if you can’t see my slide. But it should be alright. So just a bit of an introduction about me. Like I said, my name is Christiane, she/her pronouns, and I’m one of the lead signers for today’s workshop. So it’s been a really fun collaboration between myself and Dragonfly Mental Health. I just completed my PhD in clinical psych last month. So being a graduate student is very, very fresh in my mind. And I’ll be starting as a-. Oh I see a clapping hands. Thank you very much. But so I’ll be starting as a psychologist, this October here in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, and my specialty, or one of my specialties is neuropsychology, so looking at cognitive functioning, but also the other pieces, kind of treating the mental health side of living with chronic physical health conditions. And so kind of similarly, I’m interested in the mental health side of being a graduate student and being in academia. And I have been an advocate for grad student mental health in academia throughout my PhD, which is kind of what landed me here collaborating with Dragonfly. So excited to be here. For anyone who who doesn’t know, already, I know we have lots of Dragonfly alumni, Dragonfly, a nonprofit organization. It was founded in 2019, by Wendy Ingram and Jelena Brasanac. And this organization does many things, but there’s kind of three main domains of activity. So there’s a large group of volunteers, largely academics that are working together to conduct research and address systemic issues within academia. And that’s the global Consortium for academic mental health. We have Dragonfly Cafe, which is also a worldwide community of academics that care about mental health, both their own and their colleagues. And there’s frequent sessions of kind of peer support and networking. And then the on campus program. So developing, deploying and delivering these programs. And this includes our workshops like today, educational talks, anti stigma campaigns, on all of these kind of aim to create a culture and climate changes directly in academia. But you can read more about dragon fly and what they do on their website, DragonflyMentalHealth.com that’s there at the bottom, certainly encourage you to do so. Alright, but so Dragonfly’s approach to kind of cultivating this excellent mental health is multifaceted. So helping develop department committees, there’s peer networks, putting on skills workshops, mental mental health literacy, anti stigma campaigns. And the approach of each of these is kind of developed for the community that dragonflies worth working with. So the goal of today’s workshop is to provide practical strategies for students to manage their supervisory relationships in support of their mental health and wellness. So hopefully a great goal. We do have structured points for polls, for discussion that you can either choose to jump in with or just listen. And we are going to do putting some of the skills to work some practice and near the end. And so my hope is that you leave here today feeling ready to immediately implement what we discussed in your, your student-supervisor relationship. That being said, before we go, I’m going to launch a poll. So I’d love everyone to take a second and just before we get started, reply to these questions.
We just want to get a sense of where everyone’s at. All right. Great, okay. I’m going to stop here. Thanks, everyone. So we can see, do you feel like your student-supervisor relationship can be improved to support your well being? And we, we definitely have a high group of people saying yes, in some way. And that’s great. That’s probably why you’re here today. And you’ve come to the right place. Are you aware of skills and approaches, and we have a lot of somewhat Great, so you might be able to tell us what you know. And we’ll tell you what, what we know today! And how confident you are you at implementing these skills, and a big mix here, we’ve got maybe the bell curve a little bit with somewhat confident, neutral kind of being the more common responses. Awesome. So let’s get started. Introduction to managing upwards. Alright, so before we can jump into managing upwards, we got to start with the you know, the big topic, mental health and academia. So I like to reference in 2018, nature biotechnology published an article listed here, titled evidence for a mental health crisis in graduate education. And this article really highlighted that graduate students were six times more likely to experience depression and anxiety than the general population. And they wrote that there’s a call for cultural change. And so although and we’ve got to start off by saying, you know, this cultural change needs to be bigger than just the students, they need to have support from people in positions of power, you know, that faculty, university, scientific societies, but in the meantime, there’s still meaningful steps that graduate students can take to support their mental health and overall wellness. And so the researchers in this article identified two phenomenon relevant to our workshop today. So the first is that over, of the over 2000 graduate students that replied to their survey, those who agreed with the statement, I have good work-life balance, were significantly less likely to experience depression and anxiety. So first, and second, the student supervisor relationship also seemed to play a role. So students who did not think their supervisor provided real mentorship made them feel valued, or provided ample support, those students reported significantly higher rates of depression and anxiety. But so for comparison here, the global prevalence of depression and anxiety published by the World Health Organization is around 4%. So this article is certainly isn’t suggesting that, you know, work-life balance makes everything perfect, no. But it seems that having good work life balance and less positive supervisory relationship can have an impact on those high rates of depression and anxiety. So that’s, that’s good for us. But so I’ve got a poll for you. Have you ever felt depressed and are anxious at some point during your graduate training? We know that one, that this is actually the norm. Everyone on here said yes. And depression and anxiety are something that that makes us feel very alone. That’s, that’s part of the illness, you know, there’s not necessarily physical illnesses that have the same effect. But depression, yeah, it makes us feel alone. And I think it’s useful to even just know that your peers are likely going through the same thing, or have gone through the same thing at some point, even if it was just a moment during their training. So something to keep in mind as we go forward. All right. But so let’s jump into it managing upwards. So this refers to creating a good and productive working relationship with your boss to your mutual benefit. And this term is much more common in business. And it’s used when discussing how to be a better employee. But I use this term to describe strategies for graduate students in academia. So managing upwards is a skill that graduate students can apply in their relationship with their supervisor, in order to support their mental health while maintaining a good supervisory relationship,
because that’s key as well. But there are a couple of points that I’d like to highlight that the student supervisor relationship. So the first is that supervisors want their students to succeed. And this, people have argued with me on this point. But I think that that can indicate, you know, a particularly rough relationship and that does happen. But I want you to think about the fact that supervisors benefit from your success. They want to encourage it. So even if they’re being selfish, they still want you to succeed. And in general, I think a lot of supervisors aren’t selfish, they just want you to do well. However, it’s important to keep Mind the second point that you know, supervisors are submerged in that overworking culture of acting yet this culture that dismiss mental health and wellness as a priority, and they’ve succeeded, they’ve succeeded in receiving a job where they supervise students. And so their perception of what it takes to succeed in academia is likely biased towards this, you know, working nonstop working without boundaries, and they might expect or encourage their students to do the same. So this last point here is that there is a power imbalance in this relationship. The supervisor has the ability to affect your progress, and your standing as student in academia. And this dynamic is what leads students feeling limited in their ability to challenge the academic culture with their supervisor. And I know I’m using the term supervisor, but there’s a variety of terms people use Principal Investigator, PI is also common, so you can insert whatever makes sense in your, your field. All right, so how are we going to get this great work life balance, and good supervisory relationship sounds like a tall order. But so a buzzword or a big buzzword that you’ll kind of hear is this idea of self care. But so in general, self care can be thought of as actions an individual takes to promote their own physical, mental and spiritual health. But what those actions are may look very different from person to person. But so Community Care is kind of another aspect, on the other hand, is actions taken to support the collective or community. So for example, a community engaging in their mental health knowledge or their mental health literacy, so that people in the community can learn how to support one another. And of course, this is not mutually exclusive, self, from self care, we have to take care of ourselves before we can take care of others. But so today’s topic, I’d like to think falls in the interaction between these two spaces, self advocacy, and so think of self advocacy as gaining the skills yourself to ask your community for the things you personally need. So giving the people who want to support you the information they need, in order to best do that. I see a heart there in the audience. That’s great. But so let’s think about communication. We’re talking about communication here. And I want you to think about commuting things we, communicating things we want, or that we need as being on the spectrum. So on one end, there’s being passive. And on the other end, there’s being aggressive. So what is passive communication? What is aggressive communication? So there’s lots of possible answers here and different ways we can define it. But for today, let’s say that passive is not expressing ourselves honestly. And they’re, therefore allowing other people to violate our rights. This can also look like us expressing our thoughts and apologetic or a tentative way. So being like, oh, I’m sorry, I would like this, right? Aggressive, on the other hand, is where you stand up for your personal rights you, you express your thoughts, your feelings, your beliefs, but in a way that’s potentially inappropriate, and that it violates the rights of the other person. So potentially putting down the other person. And by rights, I mean, kind of your rights to say no your rights to take care of yourself, those kinds of things. So often hear students say that they feel like communicating their needs comes off as aggressive, and therefore they end up on the other end, passive. But so I want us to think today about assertive communication. So assertive communication is a middle ground, where communicating your needs while not disregarding the needs of the other person.
And so other things you can think of in terms of needs or rights, you know, I’d said the rights say no, or that you don’t understand the right to change your mind, the right to make mistakes, all of those things. Okay. But so now I want us to think about communication from the supervisor side. So this was the student. Something that I’ll hear from faculty is that they’re worried about being too invasive, right, so that asking students about how they’re doing is not their place. And this comes up a lot in in many fields, but in my field for clinical psychology, and supervisors, faculty will say, Well, this is not therapy. You know, therapy is our work and I shouldn’t be doing therapy with my, my student. And that’s, that’s true. But so what ends up happening, though, is that they end up on the other end of this continuum of being avoidant. And what we want to do with our managing upward skills is encouraging our supervisors to meet you in the middle ground, being invested. So communication is always a two way street. And communicating and your student supervisor relationship is no different. So our goal today is to give you the skills and approaches to have you feel confident in bringing your supervisor to that middle ground, assertive and invested. That’s our goal. All right. But so that was a bit of the introduction, I realized there was no discussion point there. But we’re gonna switch gears into talking about the strategies. And so these are strategies that I found particularly helpful in managing my my relationship with my PhD supervisor, and also have some strategies thrown in from Dragonfly. But also, you can think of this as being useful in other situations where as a student, you need to report up to someone or you are trying to negotiate for your needs for your mental health. And here, we’ll have some discussion as well. Okay, I should also check before I keep going, was there any questions about the first section I’m just looking at? There is a question in the chat. Um, if your supervisor doesn’t want you to succeed or is overtly selfish in their demand sign that they’re poor supervisor, your relationship is also poor. Okay, so more of a comment. Um, and yeah, I think there’s can be a real breakdown in that relationship sometimes. And it does, it does happen, and what we hope this today is being able to bring everyone to that middle ground, being able to communicate to Oh, now I’m reading here. Point of being evasive. So interesting. What our sign, so we do have a question here. I’d never thought about faculty being too invasive. What are some signs that they’re feeling that way? And so I think that that probably really depends on the person and kind of the style of the person of interacting. But you can maybe imagine that they’re, in some ways being a bit avoidant, so that, so that other ends, you know, they’re not asking you about how you’re doing or you know, what, what have you been doing? Or how is this going? Or? And I guess it depends because it at least, for me, in Nova Scotia, it’s really common if you if you run into someone, or if you’re meeting with someone, you would ask them how they’re doing. And so if they’re not doing that, maybe that’s a suggestion. Yeah, I like that. Stephanie mentioned, they’re basically avoiding personal topics. Yeah. All right. Well, let’s jump into the strategies here. Um, okay. So, first, setting expectations. So ideally, supervisors would clearly set expectations with their students, given that they’re in the position of power in the relationship, remember, but it’s still to the students benefit to kind of navigate these conversations if their supervisor doesn’t initiate them. And there’s a variety of reasons why supervisors may not initiate them, they may just have had lots of students, they’re just used to the routine. Who knows or you know, it’s something that they don’t feel like they need or that is clear already, whereas a new student coming in may not feel like those things are clear. But so a couple of examples here so you know, what are your expectations around me replying to emails, how long would you need me to provide feedback on this? When should we meet next? What’s our timeline on this project? When would you expect me to complete this next section of the manuscript or the work all these are expectations. And so setting expectations or discussing goals around expectations should really happen every time there’s a change of situation. So COVID is a great example. You know, COVID comes real shift in the way that everyone works and is doing and that would affect how how graduate school is going right? Um, but so this is easier said than done. And I start with this one, because really all of the subsequent strategies we’ll talk about today can be used to kind of navigate these conversations around expectations. But we can know that this is kind of our goal.
You can also think of setting expectations, as you know, just trying to be on the same page. Also, I realized there’s something across my face, it’s just sunlight for anyone who’s confused or thinks their computer’s broken. Alright, but so this second one here, establish and maintain boundaries. And so it’s quite likely quite possible that your supervisor is a busy person. And as a supervisor, they’re also likely subjected to those, those pressures to produce research quickly. And like I’d said before, they’re used to that overworking culture of academia in terms of achieving their goals. So it therefore may kind of fall on you as a graduate student to set your own boundaries regarding your time. Um, and the discussion around setting boundaries may not always be explicit, you might not start off by saying these are my boundaries, that’s likely not the way it will go. But so for example, um, if you think of, for me, I, you know, try not to work on weekends. So I might say, I won’t be able to complete that by the weekend, but I should have it for you on Tuesday or Wednesday. Right. So there, I haven’t said, I don’t work on weekends, that’s my boundary. But instead, I’ve kind of indirectly said that, once I’ve reached the weekend, I won’t be able to work on it. And I’ll continue next week, right. Um, something else here is to kind of assume that your supervisor doesn’t know what else is on your plate. And this can be something that we kind of forget, especially if you’re in a program with, you know, courses going on as well, or your TAships. So there’s a number of things you’re juggling beside just your work with your supervisor. So for example, you know, a deadline is coming up, and they’re asking you to do something, but they don’t know that you have these other deadlines for your courses for your TAship. So being able to bring those up. The other piece here is about consistency. And really having consistency between your actions and your words is really key. So an example that I like to give is around emails. So for example, I try not to answer my emails in the evenings. Or I say that I don’t want to answer emails in the evenings. But sometimes I do. Of course, sometimes I answer my emails in the evenings. But I want to make sure that my actions, what my supervisor receives on the other end is consistent with what I told them. And so for me, I have on Gmail, you can have the send later option. And I’m sure there’s many email servers that allow this. So even though I’m answering my email at night, I set it to send at 8am the next morning. So then it’s that consistency between what I’ve said and what my supervisor sees. Um, the last thing to kind of think about here, or kind of something that can be useful is that if you’re new to setting boundaries, you can provide an explanation. And so what I mean here is if you think of the example of not not working on the weekend, so you’re saying, oh, I won’t be able to complete that for you by the weekend, I have it to you for Tuesday. It feels a little softer, if you give it an ex-, or give a reasoning, so I won’t be able to have it to you by the weekend. I have some family up visiting and all and I haven’t seen them in a while. But I should have it to you by Tuesday. But so you can see there how that may feel easier, right? Like you’re you’re being less assertive, remember tentative. But something to keep in mind here is that this actually undermines your boundary a little bit. What you’re saying by giving an explanation, or what you’re indirectly saying is that this isn’t the usual thing. It’s not normally the case that I don’t work on weekends, this weekend is special, right? So it’s, it’s less about kind of setting that consistent boundary and more about an exception to the rule. But it can be a great way to start, especially if you’re you’re nervous or feeling tentative.
All right. But so last one of these before we stop for discussion, I know I’ve been talking for a while but so I want you to take a minute and ask yourself, How many times has a task taken longer than you originally estimated. And for me, it’s feels like all the tasks, everything always takes longer than I think it’s going to. But so when we underestimate the length of a task, and we and we actually end up working longer hours to meet that deadline, right. So instead, overestimate how long it’ll take you to do a task. And so I know personally, I’m really terrible at being overly optimistic at how quickly I can get something done. And, and sometimes I’m right, sometimes, but often, I’m wrong. And so definitely keep that optimism yourself. But when you’re communicating your timelines to others be a bit more conservative. If you end up finishing before the deadline, amazing. People love if you finish things before the deadline. But giving yourself a buffer also gives you room for other things to come up. So maybe it’s something you enjoy, a friend reaches out to you, they want to meet up, something comes up, you know, you’re feeling sick, you didn’t sleep well, your family needs you, something right. And so hopefully, you can kind of see how managing expectations in this way with your supervisor is, is really to support your well being. And by I didn’t give an example here, but you can think of overestimating timelines as you get sent something from from your supervisor or you’re you’re working on a poster together, or you’re working on a manuscript together. And instead of saying, great, I’ll have that to you by Friday, you say great, I’ll have it to you by next week, or by next Wednesday. And if you have it to them by Friday, like you originally thought great, they’re going to be happy to see it by Friday. But if you don’t get it done by then you still have till next week to keep going. Alright, so I’ve been talking a lot. So we’re going to pause here, I’m going to launch another poll, and then we’re going to chat. Alright, so I want to know, has your supervisor ever initiated an explicit conversation around expectations for you working? Great. Okay, I’ll end poll here we’ll share results. End poll share results. Okay, so has your supervisor ever initiated explicit conversation around expectations? 30% said yes. 70% said no. So that’s I’m glad to see that 30%, that’s great. But we can see that, for most people, that’s not the norm. How comfortable are you setting expectations, you see a mix here? Some very comfortable and comfortable, a lot of people neutral or slightly uncomfortable. And setting and maintaining boundaries. So we have a bi modal split here, either slightly uncomfortable or comfortable. Great. Okay. So I’m wondering that kind of this discussion point, if people could could jump in, you know why or why not? Have you you felt comfortable about setting expectations or boundaries with your supervisor. Thank you, everyone, for the discussion. I think we could probably spend the whole time right here. But we will keep going and those who have their their hands raised. I think there was at least one more jump in two slides from now, we’ve got more discussion points. All right, so more strategies here. And this is honestly one of my favorites because it feels like a such a concrete thing. So using the the “yes, but” methods. So we’re often told to just say no to more work and responsibility. But that is way easier said than done. Especially when there’s a power imbalance, right? I’m saying no to your supervisor seems daunting, or like we mentioned earlier, maybe there’s that, that that culture that the supervisor, their needs matter. Right. So it’s difficult, but so something that we can do is trying the “yes, but” method instead. So this allows students to not take on any more work than they have time for hopefully, but makes it a bit harder for the supervisor to say no.
So for example, yes. So for example, you can imagine that that you’re working on a paper or presentation and the supervisor brings up something else that they’d like the student to do oh I just saw this abstract posting that’s come out that would be great for your research. Let’s do it. Let’s fill it out this week. But you know that you also have this poster presentation you’re working on for the week or something like that. So the way the yes but method would work is that you respond to your supervisor saying, Wow, yeah, that that paper sounds right up my alley, you’re right. It’s, it’s such a good fit for my research, but I do have that presentation that that I’ve been working on already. And they’re both due around the same time, you know, which, which one would you prefer I work on, or do you think we’d have to, to drop the presentation in order to do this. Right? And you can imagine that you might have to offer to drop something, right. And something that I will suggest to people or they can consider is offering to drop the item that’s less important to your supervisor, and makes it more appealing. You know, if they’re really on this paper, they really want this paper, you can offer to drop the presentation. Um, but you can also think about that offering to drop an item is difficult, because it’s also setting a boundary with yourself. You know, it’s often the case that lots of things that come up are really great opportunities. And it’s a matter of us as not taking on all of them. So it can be hard for us to say, okay, well, I’m, I’m not going to do this and do this instead, or vice versa. But so can imagine this, yes, but method. So I have another poll for you. A short one. It says, have you ever said yes to requests from your supervisor when you wanted to or should have said no. So Perhaps unsurprisingly, most people here said yes. But So and you’re you’re you’re not alone. But so my question for you maybe at this point is what got in the way of saying know, what made it difficult? And, you know, for me, it’s often been, you know, that academic culture, perhaps this idea that all I see other people, publishing lots and also doing well here, and you know, if they can do it, I can do it. Or this thought that I can’t say no, you know, that is my supervisor. They told me they want me to do it. I guess I got to do it, right. But so, please do jump in what got in the way of saying no, or has anyone used the yes, but method before how that go. But all right, let’s keep going here. We’re doing good on time that I was hoping to be an hour in once we’ve gone through all the strategy. So I think we’re on track. We’re doing good. Thanks for everyone for sticking with us so far. All right. So next piece here. So keeping your supervisor accountable. So I want you to imagine that you’ve just navigating a meeting with your supervisor using all your managing upward skills, you’re uncomfortable, but you were assertive, and you left really happy knowing that you agreed on reasonable timelines and expectations. All right, this beautiful meeting has just happened. Um, but supervisors often have, you know, maybe labs, they have many students, they have lots to juggle. So summarizing your key points via email, both your commitments in there is can be very helpful.
So example number one here was thanks for meeting today just to summarize what we discussed, you know, I’ll have my conference poster draft you by this date, you agreed to give me feedback by this date, we agreed to reading writing a manuscript at the moment, it’s not feasible with my current course load this term and load revisit it next time. But something that can be kind of useful about this is that it does make it easier to follow up. So for example, if they haven’t given you feedback, you can follow up within timeline, or if a supervisor comes to you and says, oh, what about that manuscript? You know, where is it? Likely because they’ve forgotten your conversation if they have lots of students, right? It makes it a bit easier to be assertive about the decisions made in the meeting. So, in this example, Supervisor: Hi, student, we should meet to discuss the many manuscripts outline for your current projects. Student: Hi supervisor, unfortunately, I’ll not be able to start the manuscript this term, we agreed that I’d revisit the topic next term seen before the email below from the summary of our last meeting. Um, and so this is a strategy that you can talk about with your your supervisor directly. If they have a lot on their plate, that’s some I appreciate kind of that extra structure, that extra organization on on your end makes it so there’s less for them to worry about, they don’t have to worry that they’re dropping the ball or that they’ve missed something, or what is it that we talked about. But there might be a variation that that works for you both. So for example, with me and my supervisor, we had an ongoing Google document where I kept track of kind of our meeting minutes, and instead of sending them emails, and this worked well, because they didn’t have many students, they didn’t need an email summary, each time, they could kind of keep track of where we’re at, because it was it was just a few of us. And if there’s any other questions, or we were wondering about what we agreed on, or if I was concerned about what we agreed on, I could open up this document, but I didn’t need to send them an email every time. They got too many emails and emails Anyway, I’m sure. But so you can imagine this can be a discussion with your supervisor. And it can be viewed to him as being or taking initiative. You know, if you can imagine a meeting with your supervisor and kind of offers to take on this extra organizational piece, which is actually to your benefit. I’m sure they would be happy or be impressed or have another suggestion for what would work well for you guys. But something else to keep in mind here is coming in with an agenda. Um, so this, if you think of here, I’ve kind of talked about emailing after your meeting, you can also think about talking with your supervisor, if you think it’s a good fit about emailing before the meeting, so is emailing about what you’re going to cover. And this can work well for both overbearing, and really passive supervisors, if your supervisor happens to fall on either of those ends. So if you have someone who is trying to get you to do a lot, and it’s kind of difficult to keep them on track with the things that you’re trying to work on at the moment, setting an agenda really narrows that it right, it’s like these are the things that I need to work on. If it’s a passive supervisor, it’s difficult to to pull their feedback to get their input, kind of sending them this in advance and sticking to it can help be a structure to the conversation, make sure you get feedback on things you’re looking for. But so I’ve got one more strategy point that I want to just highlight. And this is kind of just a general thought. And, and I think it fits with something that we were talking about earlier. So anticipating communicate issues. And so I think there’s this this misconception and we’ve we have talked about this a bit, that reaching out to change a deadline or a plan is perceived really poorly. And maybe that’s the case in some places that you’ve you’ve been told that that’s been met poorly. But I think there’s a lot of times where
the reality is that it feels uncomfortable, but it actually shows strong organizational and problem solving skills. And another way to think about it too, is that it shows respect for your supervisors time. So for example, if you had said that you were going to have the draft and by, you know, the end of the week, and it’s now Tuesday, and you know that it’s just not going to happen, emailing them to let them know that that’s not going to you’re not on track to meet that. And that actually, you know, next Friday is more reasonable, does show respect for for the time. And I think a better scenario would be even that you anticipate issues way in advance. So I know for me in graduate school, we would meet with our supervisors in the first couple weeks, but then you would also we have to take a lot of courses for psychology. And so in addition to your research, so you would then get your syllabus for courses and you’d get your deadlines for when things are due. And so suddenly, the deadlines that I might have discussed with my supervisor don’t seem reasonable. It’s only been a week since we last we talked about them and decided about them, but I’ve already realizing that they aren’t, they, they’re going to be really difficult to meet because of this new information that I’ve gathered so so reaching out to them then and talking about anticipating this issue and communicating. Before we would kind of really practice something that I’d like to do is a little exercise that you’ll just do at home right now. And I want you to put it in writing. So if you think of, you know, you’re trying to communicate with your supervisor, your boundaries, your expectations, what’s important to you. But it’s important to kind of know what those are for you. And I’d imagine a lot of people know already, but it’s useful to kind of explicitly Think about it. So I want you just now to either you can jot down on your computer, you can jot down on your phone, you can sit and think about it just for a minute, write down at least three boundaries for yourself. And to give you an example, I’ll show you some of mine. So my example is not sending emails in the evenings or weekends. But like I said, I do still use the boomerang extension or the Gmail send later extension, so that I can answer in the email in the evenings but it doesn’t send to the morning. My second one is not including my weekends in my available work time. And you’ve noticed kind of the way I’ve written it doesn’t say never work on weekends, because that’s also that’s that feels hard. As a grad student, at least it did to me, you know, sometimes there were things I wanted to get done on the weekends. But when I’m budgeting out how long something is going to take me, I don’t include the weekend. If it ends up falling over into the weekend, that’s a different story. So my last one is taking a lunch break, some kind of lunch break, maybe it’s five minutes, maybe it’s 10 minutes, maybe I get a whole hour in but something. But so once people have written down a couple of these or thought about them, if you feel comfortable putting one of them in the chat, I’d love to see what people come up with. If you don’t feel comfortable, that’s also alright. I’ll give everyone a minute. While people are still putting in the boundaries, if they feel comfortable, something that I like to bring up kind of at this point, too, is this idea, because you’ve probably heard it before work life balance, right? And we’ve talked about it already today. And often, I think we think of work life balance as being this, or the the goal that we’re trying to achieve is this perfect balance. You can imagine, like, work life just perfectly balanced. Wouldn’t that be nice. But I think something that someone had told me me once that I really took to heart was this idea of work life balance being more like a seesaw or a teeter totter. Or I don’t know if that’s just a very Nova Scotian term. But the teeter totter is one of those things that can sit on one on each side, and it goes back and forth like this. So this idea that it’s not always a perfect balance, that sometimes it’s more work, sometimes it’s more life, and it’s really about this idea of kind of equaling out overall that over time, you get a balance of the two. And so I really appreciate that, you know, sometimes if I miss my lunch break, but I know that last week, I got a lunch break every day for I don’t know, 30 minutes, then maybe I don’t feel so bad, right? Because it’s that teeter totter.
Alright. And I love this to see a couple other self care days menial duties. Awesome. I’m glad you’re all thinking about this. Okay, so our next piece is our roleplays. But so what we’re going to do in this section is there I have three scenarios for you or three prompts. And for each prompt, what we’re going to do is that we’ll go into a breakout rooms, I’ll I’ll assign you, for two people for a room. And I want you to each try each role. So imagine yourself being supervisor, and then imagine yourself being the student. And I’m going to we’re going to start off with eight minutes and see how that goes. So four minutes for each role and all give you a signal when it’s been four minutes and it’s time to switch. And then we’re going to come back together and we’re going to discuss as a group, right and talk about how that went. Did it feel uncomfortable? Did it feel really easy? Is, is it something you’ve done before and this is use your cheat sheet if you forget the strategies that was the document you downloaded, but I will also type it into the chat. It’s just a list of the six strategies in case here, you’re forgetting. Okay, so our very already our first roleplay and then we’ll break you off. So our first one is you are having the first meeting with your supervisor since attending the managing upward workshop. You have decided to apply the strategies you’ve learned By starting a conversation about expectations and timelines. And remember, a great way to start a discussion is to be curious. So ask questions. So what I mean by that one is, if you imagine yourself in your first meeting, a great way to open up to a topic that you’re wondering about is to ask a question about it. It’s a very non threatening way to introduce topics. So if I’m interested in knowing about emails, I might just ask, you know, so nice to meet you. We’re talking about our work. Just wondering about emails, are you someone that that replies to emails in the evenings or on weekends? You know, what, what are your expectations for for your students? Or for me, as a new student, or what should I expect as a new student, right? Very non threatening, okay, so we’re going to break you off, if you didn’t, weren’t able to download the documents, feel free to take a picture or a screenshot of this scenario, too. And you can adapt the scenario how you’d like. Okay, but so I guess just in closing, thoughts, so something that you can think about is that the strategies we’ve talked about today can really be summarized as both being assertive, and communicating both clearly and often, we really broke that down a lot today. But given that being assertive is really difficult in a relationship where there’s a power imbalance, it’s important to know, you know, why are you trying to be assertive? And what are you trying to achieve? And something that I like to think about and show it to fellow graduate students is this idea that, you know, being a graduate student is actually just one part of your life. And so what makes you you outside of being a graduate student? And it’s can be fine, kind of a fun question to think about. But so when you’re saying no to work, and when your other work, and when you’re setting boundaries, when you’re overestimating those timelines, and you know that you’re doing it to protect your mental health, and also to make space for all these other things that are important and meaningful to you. And I think kind of knowing what those other aspects are, can be kind of a buffer against sometimes that that negative workplace culture of academia, so you know, if a graduate student is, is doing poorly, or their work is going poorly, and it feels like that’s the only thing going on in their life are the most important thing, then those setbacks are going to feel a lot worse than if you’re looking at your graduate student work is only a piece
of who you are. But so a closing thought. But so I do have poll, that’s the same questions we asked at the beginning. And I’m gonna throw it out to you all now. And then we are wrapped up for the day. Awesome. Well, that’s fun, there’s a little bit of a shift here. You can see people who’ve made it all the way to the end today are definitely aware of some skills and approaches, how confident they feel some more confidence, some still neutral, that’s fair. Maybe take some time. It’s also hard when we without having put any of this into practice. But I just want to thank you all for coming today. And something that I’ll highlight to folks, especially in the aspect of kind of different cultures, if you think about it, is finding a mentor can be really useful if you’re from a particular culture or a particular background, and finding someone else who is really in that as well and would understand your your your viewpoint or your situation more perfectly, that can be really helpful. The other thing that I’ll bring up to people is that you know, today’s workshop was based on a blog post, originally a long before it developed into this workshop today, a blog post for voices of academia which I highly recommend. It’s a website where academics share their mental health journeys. It’s really a fabulous read that’s applied, updated all the time. And, and that’s, that’s all
