Psychologist Julian Jaynes has stated that the most creative ideas often arrive unexpectedly, when not working directly on things, and in the most mundane places.  Students of creativity refer to this as the three B’s: the Bed, the Bath, and the Bus.  When relaxing on vacation, you have the opportunity to capture these ideas, and they are likely to pop into your head anyway.  If you are like most people, you give yourself little or no time during the workday to daydream about your future.  When on vacation, why not simply write down big ideas as they occur, perhaps on a small pad kept in your pocket?  Or dedicate a few minutes in the morning jotting down ideas that you want to consider.  If you enjoy your line of work, generating these ideas should be fun.  Just collect them, don’t analyze them in detail.

Here’s another reason to work on vacation.  Some people are able to completely forget about their work while on vacation, but most of us have worries or moments of guilt about leaving our responsibilities behind us.  Taking a few minutes to jot down ideas and plans each day can quell some of these feelings.  Just don’t turn it into a chore.

Finally, note that many people work on vacation despite feeling guilty about it.  If you are one of these people, simply acknowledging that it’s ok to do some work and sticking only to the most enjoyable work can help you feel better during the time you take off.

Gilbert claims that we overrate how well we know ourselves, underestimate our capacity to adapt to both good and bad situations, and fail to consider crucial factors that will play out in the future.   Gilbert blames these illusions on the cognitive limitations of the imagination, which also lead people to believe they differ from others more than they actually do.  According to Gilbert, looking at what makes others happy provides a more reliable indicator of your own potential happiness than imagining yourself in a future situation.  The takeaway message: learn to be more objective about yourself and about the decisions you make concerning your career trajectory. Rely less on your own imagination; instead, study what works for others.

In tandem with this approach, I suggest that you apply rationality in a new and different way when you find that self-doubts and fears interfere with carrying out your decisions. Use reason to challenge semi-conscious, self-destructive thoughts as they spontaneously arise.  For example, a scientist who submitted a paper to a journal several weeks ago might view the lack of response as a sign that the journal didn’t like the paper.  In fact, the journal may simply be delayed by a deluge of submissions.  The remedy in this case is to challenge the little voice that says “I knew it wasn’t good enough.  I can’t meet that journal’s standards.  I’m only fooling myself.” Mentally respond like a clever defense attorney, in effect saying, “What evidence do I have that the paper wasn’t good enough?  Could there be other reasons why I haven’t heard from the editors?  If I was incapable of meeting the journal’s standards, why would my colleagues who have published there encourage me to submit the manuscript?”  Then, instead of worrying, contact the editor and find out why you haven’t received word on your article. By learning to notice and then challenge these self-destructive thoughts, you can diminish their influence and replace them with a more evidence-based point of view.

This method of logically challenging self-destructive thinking is used in cognitive-behavioral therapy to treat depression, but it can have powerful applications off the couch as well.  For more about the theory, its empirical foundations, and how to apply it to your situation, I recommend Martin Seligman’s Learned Optimism.

Combining the message of this blog post with the previous one, consider this proposition: you probably don’t trust your intuitions about others as much as you should, and you probably trust your intuitions about yourself more than you should.  You can achieve a better balance between the use of intuition and the use of reason in your judgments by judicious use of methods recommended by Gilbert and Seligman.  Working with a good professional coach can help you jumpstart this process, make changes more quickly, and apply your skills more effectively as a leader and manager.

Gut feelings are felt in the belly, which is rich in serotonin receptors. We pay close attention to our gut feelings when someone strongly disgusts us. But if we attend to these feelings more closely on a daily basis, the gut can be a subtle and reliable source of social intelligence. As part of the brain-gut axis, it is referred to by some neurogastroenterologists as a “second brain.” Working together, these two coordinated “brains” combine our stored cognitions of people with immediate perceptions.

It may seem strange and even counterintuitive (ironically) for a scientist to pay such close attention to “subjective” reactions. However, these feelings provide a valuable and complementary source of knowledge to the questioning and analysis you must undertake when working with people in lab settings – and in the world beyond the lab. The use of gut feelings when making decisions can’t be taught, but it can certainly be learned. In my next post I will describe how to take advantage of such feelings in a common situation for scientists, evaluating potential postdocs.

The answer is fairly simple. When it comes to promotions in academia, what goes on in the lab stays in the lab as long as strong papers are published and grant money keeps rolling in. Even in corporate labs, evaluations are primarily based on lab performance against goals. If the lab is successful but the head is a dictator, that bad behavior can be overlooked if it is noticed at all.

Alice Sapienza’s book, Managing Scientists: Leadership Strategies in Scientific Research, offers a glimpse of what good scientific leadership really looks like. She asked 147 experienced scientists, most of whom were in the life sciences and half of whom were in industry, how they would describe the best scientific leaders they had worked with. Interestingly, only about 15% cited the leader’s technical prowess as an important characteristic. Good communication, management and organizational skills topped the list. Being a good role model, mentor, or coach took second place as important characteristics possessed by strong scientific leaders they have known.

Here are some more characteristics of a strong scientific leader, based both on my client experience and the results of Sapienza’s poll: excellent listening skills, practiced with all lab members at all levels; a willingness to admit mistakes; appreciation of social, ethnic, and gender differences and how they contribute to a wider view of the scientific enterprise; an intuitive knowledge about how much independence each researcher requires and for how long; and the ability to handle conflict decisively but tactfully.

In other words, good scientific leadership is like good leadership in business and politics. Provide vision in an understandable way, supervise flexibly, ensure that morale is good, practice what you preach, etc. But lab heads who strive to practice these virtues often stumble when their lab members aren’t following the vision or are just being unproductive. How do you hold people accountable to hard metrics without treating unproductive workers as though they are faulty machines? How do you tell them their work is unacceptable without unnecessarily hurting their feelings or embarrassing them?

In brief, you need first to be sure that you can separate the projects from the people, seeing the steps to completion in a purely objective way. Then you learn to criticize the work without criticizing the person. This is not an easy task. I’ll introduce you to a few successful strategies in an upcoming post.

The problem of identifying good leaders and managers in science is compounded by the fact that cultural stereotypes about leaders exist, thanks to movie and television depictions of despicable characters.  Leaders of companies are often portrayed as bad guys who are only out for themselves and are willing to exploit their employees whenever it pleases their selfish aims.  Recent press coverage of bank CEOs, which plays into this stereotype, only add to the confusion about what a leader, good or bad, looks like.

Fortunately, there are some excellent resources out there to help you understand great leadership and management in science.  Unlike some of the fluffy bestsellers in the business book section of your bookstore, these are based on actual studies of how good and bad leadership works in and out of the lab.

One of my favorites is a book by Alice M. Sapienza called Managing Scientists: Leadership Strategies in Scientific Research.  Sapienza works from extensive interviews with scientists about their experience with good and bad PIs.  I’ll summarize her findings in a subsequent blog post.  Graduate students in the sciences should be required to take a science management course, and this should be a required textbook.

If you haven’t read it, get the valuable free book produced by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the  Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Making the Right Moves: A Practical Guide to Scientific Management for Postdocs and New Faculty.  Finally, take a look at some of the books written by Kathy Barker, especially At the Helm: A Laboratory Navigator.

I will continue to list good resources of scientific leadership and management on my Still Point Coaching and Consulting website.  Future blog posts will discuss the essential elements of great leadership and management in the lab and beyond.  Stay tuned.

Why is it so hard to change?  We all want to do it, once we feel that discomfort between where we are in life and where we want to be. Sure, there are plenty of people out there who say they can help you.  Psychologists, psychiatrists, New Age gurus, consultants and coaches tap into this multimillion dollar market.  There’s enough conflicting advice out there to make you wonder whether there really is a proven way to alter your behavior in positive ways.

If you really want to know how to change, the best way to find out is to study people who have successfully made great changes in their lives.  This was the reasoning of James O. Prochaska, a research psychologist who wanted to help people to overcome very serious habits, especially alcoholism and smoking.

Prochaska was aware that different types of therapy helped different patients more than others.  Combining his understanding of successful self-changers and his knowledge of different psychotherapy models, he formulated what is now called the Transtheoretical Model of change.  Its two main tenets: successful behavioral change unfolds over a period of time according to six basic stages, and each stage is best supported by a different type of intervention.  Unlike so many other approaches, Prochaska’s model has had proven success in everything from drug addiction to weight loss, adolescent rehabilitation and cancer management. 

Let’s cut to the chase.  Here are the 6 stages, summarized so nicely in Wikipedia that I stole them:

1. Precontemplation – lack of awareness that life can be improved by a change in behavior

2. Contemplation – recognition of the problem, initial consideration of behavior change, and information gathering about possible solutions and actions

3. Preparation – introspection about the decision, reaffirmation of the need and desire to change behavior, and completion of final pre-action steps

4. Action – implementation of the practices needed for successful behavior change (e.g. exercise class attendance)

5. Maintenance – consolidation of the behaviors initiated during the action stage

6. Termination – former problem behaviors are no longer perceived as desirable (e.g. skipping a run results in frustration rather than pleasure)

Although the stages are progressive, in real life people usually move back and forth through these stages until they finally succeed.  Relapse is normal and expected.

An approach that emphasizes taking concrete action isn’t appropriate for  someone from precontemplation (Stage 1) to contemplation (Stage 2)  because the person isn’t ready.  However, a self-awareness technique, be it psychoanalysis or a simple self-assessment method, might move a person to the second stage.

A good change agent (therapist, coach, etc.) will be able to identify what stage you are in and use the approach that is most appropriate.

Interested in learning more?  Read Prochaska’s Change for Good.  If you are working with a change agent and you feel things aren’t moving forward, find out if the approach she is using matches your needs at your current stage.  For self-changers, use the Stages of Change framework to move yourself into more desirable behaviors and to understand yourself (empathically) when you are in a rut.

If coaching is all about helping you discover and achieve a better life at work and home, then trusting your dreams would seem to be terribly important. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert has some eye-popping news for people who believe they know what will make them happy. In his new book Stumbling on Happiness, Gilbert uses experimental studies to support a radical idea: if we really want to know what will make us happy, we are better off looking at what makes others happy instead of relying on introspection.

Gilbert claims that people are very bad at predicting their future happiness because they don’t account for how well they will adapt to new situations. Thus, they expect that both positive and negative events will have a much greater impact on their happiness than they will. For example, people who are eager to marry someone they love experience a blip of extra happiness (usually), but within two years their self-assessment of overall happiness is about where it was before marriage. Also, women who believe their life will be joyful if only they have a child eventually rate childcare on the same level of fulfillment as doing laundry.

When I went through formal training at a coaching school, a lot of emphasis was placed on helping clients discover their dreams. We were trained in helping clients through visualization exercises. This kind of thing seems to be fairly common in coaching training and practice. Gilbert’s work throws water on this notion.

So what consistently helps people to achieve greater happiness? A warm family and close friends is unrivalled. The satisfaction of making progress towards a worthy goal. Raises and increases in responsibility and status should be less valuable — at least after a certain level is achieved — than having more harmonious relationships with co-workers, mentoring, and leading teams towards a goal that they can collectively feel good about.

One lesson for coaches and their clients: if the stakes are always lower than the client imagines, reminding the client of this fact should help to reduce stress, leading to better performance.

The Boston Globe recently published an interesting article that provides a common sense account of why more women don’t go into science: they don’t want to.

Quoting several social scientific studies and interviews with their authors, the writer claims that the gender gap in science is greater in countries where women have more rights and overall freedom to choose their professions. She also cites other studies showing that women generally prefer working in people-intensive situations. In psychology, unlike the natural sciences, women outnumber men 10-1.

The findings of these studies have no bearing on whether women suffer from sexism in their scientific careers or whether women are typically discouraged from entering science. For anyone who has had children, the selective bias of girls from human relations and boys for tools seems obvious. Girls generally go for the dolls and boys head towards the trucks.

Perhaps if there’s a lesson to be learned from these studies, it is that science needs to be conducted in a more sociable, humane environment in order to attract more women. Men still set the rules of the game in science, and often it’s not pretty.

The courage to fail, and the acknowledgment that public failure is a possibility, is critical for a highly successful career. You need to be willing to promote your theories, even though they may be wrong or may be misunderstood. As an extreme version of this, see Richard Feynman’s wonderfully titled book: What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character. Before you stick your neck out at a conference or in a publication, you need to get informal feedback from colleagues. Once you feel confident about your work, however, you need to take the risk that you may make a fool of yourself — even if you are right.

In order to gain this confidence, and to have earned it, you must be able to claim some turf in your scientific territory. Care enough about what you have observed and understand its scientific value well enough that you can claim it as your own. There’s a tricky balance here: you must feel so confident of your work that you can defend it, yet you must be flexible enough to yield if you are proven wrong with good reason. Too many well-known scientists have repeated their disproven theories at conferences long after their closest colleagues have quietly written them off.

Are you a genius whose work nobody understands, or are you a stubborn, intractable person who won’t admit that you are wrong? Your closest associates can help here, if you let them. Listen to their logic, trusting that at least they don’t intend to shipwreck your career for the sake of their own success.

Once you can properly own your accomplishments, courage will come more easily. Junior scientists should look to their seniors for examples and inspiration. Find people who have persevered despite repeated rejections and eventually remade their fields. And don’t be afraid to be afraid. The only way to build your courage is to acknowledge and then ignore the fear.