Positive Psychology How to deal with failure/rejection. Neta Erez 16.1.12.

Positive Psychology

How to deal with failure/rejection.

Neta Erez16.1.12

Positive Psychology Positive psychology is a recent branch of

psychology.

Positive psychologists seek "to find and nurture genius and talent", and "to make normal life more fulfilling”, not simply to treat mental illness.

The field is intended to complement, not to replace traditional psychology. It does not seek to deny the importance of studying how things go wrong, but rather to emphasize the importance of using the scientific method to determine how things go right.

Researchers in the field analyze things like states of pleasure or flow, values, strengths, virtues, talents, as well as the ways that they can be promoted by social systems and institutions. (Wikipedia).

Society's take on psychology…..

our entire approach to psychology is focused on disease and failure. There are some 40,000 studies on depression on record with the American Psychology Association, and just 14 on joy. That bias translates to the workplace as an obsession with correcting weaknesses, filling gaps, and focusing on the laggards.

In science this translates to people rarely getting/giving positive feedback….

Rejection/Failure: Science is a thankless field..

We experience failure in science all the time:

Experiments often don’t work

Only some of our grant proposals get funded.

Publishing a paper is often a struggle, including rejections, rebuttals, resubmissions.

You are only as good as your last paper..

“The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact”.

Thomas H. Huxley

English biologist (1825 - 1895)

Our distorted take on science

• We are often taught that Science deals with objective things and absolute truths and think that doing science is the same.

• When we find that our own discoveries have a big element of randomness we feel that we were just lucky.

• It can seem like people around us discovered things in a logical way since that is the way papers and seminars are presented.

More Failure than Success?

Uri Alon’s cloud model of how scientific progress usually works.

B.A

Start undergraduate school

M.SC

Ph.D

PostDoc (before you publish)

PostDoc (After....)

PI

an academic

More Failure than Success?

The life style of an academic means that every couple of years we also move into a smaller group of people that have been “selected” for very specific talents. Our “reference” group is therefore becoming smaller and smaller.

The Pyramid Effect..

Why it sucks to wallow is negative feelings….

It can make you prone to procrastination. This often causes delays in graduation of students.

It can cause stress-related problems leading to disease. M.Sc and PhD students are under VERY high risk for psychological stress

It makes you more likely to see constructive criticism as proof of your ineptitude, rather than using it to improve skills and knowledge.

1. Separate feelings from fact.

Fact: Rejection is an integral part of doing science.

If the grant you wrote has a success rate of 20%, you have 80% chance of getting rejected.

Almost all our papers get initially rejected.

Although we like to think of science as objective, the peer review process is very subjective. So rejection of our paper does not mean it is bad in any objective manner.

So how can you deal with rejection/failure?

1. Separate feelings from fact.

Feeling: Give yourself a few minutes to fully wallow in your disappointment,

Anger, sadness, bitterness etc.

Then RELAX and Give yourself time for perspective and ideas of how to carry on.

How can you use the rejection to make your grant/paper better?

(Is the rejection really a rejection? Can you rebuttal?)

So how can you deal with rejection/failure?

2. Accentuate the positive. Forgive yourself when the inevitable rejection happens.

3. Develop a new response to failure and mistake making. Henry Ford once said, “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” (PI’s – remember this when talking to your students….)

4. Right the rules. Recognize that you have just as much right as the next person to be wrong, have an off-day (or day off….), or ask for assistance.

So how can you deal with rejection/failure?

5. Break the silence. Realize that you are not alone can be tremendously freeing.

6. Reward yourself. Break the cycle of continually seeking and then dismissing validation outside of yourself by learning to pat YOURSELF on the back.

So how can you deal with rejection/failure?

Rewarding ourselves in science

We often feel like we get very few moments of happiness in science (people often say it’s a “thankless” job) but it is only because of the way WE choose to view it.

For example – when you get a good PCR to work – you will never stop to celebrate (it seems SO trivial to have a PCR work – anyone can do it – right?) but when you have run it for 10 times without success you will SURE beat yourself up about it…

SO – learn how to give equal weight to your failures and successes.

Rewarding ourselves in science

We never celebrate when we send a paper/grant/PhD proposal out because we fear it still might get rejected or criticized

By the time news of the submission comes back you can only feel relief.

If you learn to measure yourself and celebrate your OWN finish lines you will increase your own self assessment skills.

Another practical option?

Dear Editors,

Thank you for the rejection of our paper. As you know we receive a great many rejections, andunfortunately it is not possible for us to accept all of them. Your rejection was carefully reviewed by three experts in our laboratory, and based on their opinions, we find that it is not possible for us to accept your rejection. By this we do not imply any lack of esteem for you or your journal, and we hope that you will not hesitate to rejectour papers in the future.

Yours sincerely,Professor Hedgehog.

http://jcs.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/120/8/1311A useful article on howTo write a rebuttal letter

What famous “failures” have to say about it…

Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. ~ Jennifer White

I use not only all the brains I have but all that I can borrow. ~ Woodrow Wilson

The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. ~ Albert Einstein

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects. ~ Woodrow Wilson

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said, I don't know. ~ Mark Twain

And Finally..next time you review someone else’s paper:

stop and think: am I being fair in what I am requesting?

Am I using double standards?

Am I being kind to a person who has spent several years doing this work?

If you let your students review the manuscript – read their reviews.

Remember – a review is not a time to show how clever you are, just to help another person do the best science you think they can or suggest a place that would be relevant for that science to be published.

Some of the materials in this presentation were also taken from:

John Grademhttp://www.johngraden.com/impsyn.html

Based on a presentation on “The Impostor Syndrome” By Maya Schuldiner.

Dr. Valerie Younghttp://impostorsyndrome.com/

http://www.weizmann.ac.il/mcb/UriAlon/nurturing/MiloWeizmannYoungPIForum.pdf