Hey, everyone. Good
afternoon, I think. Yes, it's the afternoon, and I
hope you all had a
good,
long holiday weekend, maybe a chance to take a break and do some fun but
physically distanced and safe things, and I hope you're all well.
Today is the third part of our "Becoming a Resilient Scientist" series and the topic is self-advocacy and
assertiveness, and
it excites me to see some of you coming back.
I think that to hear all of this material as a package, to spend the time
doing some of the journaling prompts, to show up at the small group that will happen next week, I think it shows a real
willingness to grow and learn this summer, and I'm hoping that, you know,
this is, some of the the new skills you learn are going to become a part of your way of dealing with
setback and challenges and difficult moments, and you won't even have to think about it
eventually. It will just be second nature to take a mindful pause, pay attention to your thoughts, pay attention to your feelings,
and make good decisions to take care of yourself moving forward,
and so thank you all for coming and we're going to go ahead and get started.
I'm hoping Teo will stay quiet. He just left.
That's a good sign that we won't have too much barking, but if we do,
we'll just go ahead
and work through it. So, I wanted to start with a really short
journaling exercise, so if you have a pen and paper right next to you, I want you to pick it up,
and if not,
I want you to just sort of close your eyes and imagine that you have a pen and paper and you're writing down a little
bit about this prompt.
So, I want you to think about your school, whether that's undergrad, whether that's grad school, med school.
I want you to think about your self experience right now. If you're a postdoc, I want you to think about that.
I know lots of you are on break and now you're probably not thinking
that much about it, but I want you to go back to it and think things through about it a little bit.
I want you to think about some of the things that are holding you back,
bothering you enough to be a really major distraction.
I want you to think if there are some things getting in the way of your success,
if there's someone you really need to talk with about what's going on or
their interaction with you, something you need to change, and if you sit here and say, "Really, right now,
what's on my mind is what's going on this summer,"
go ahead and write about that. You don't have to stick to the school part.
I want you to go ahead now and sort of write
uninterrupted for three minutes, and you're not going to have to share it with anyone,
so be honest. Is there's something you'd really like to see change?
So, go ahead and get started.
Alright, everyone, so maybe you have a lot more to say about this or write about this and you'll want to
come back to this prompt. Maybe this was enough to crystallize
an issue in your mind. Maybe you're just getting started and
there's a whole lot there. In any case, what I'd like you to do is go ahead
and pause for a moment. If anybody wants to, without writing a very long thing, maybe just a sentence into the question box,
what are some of the things that you're thinking about
that might be getting in the way, things that you might like to change, people that you might like to talk with?
Don't give us a name, but, like, you know, my
roommate, my,
the postdoc I work with, somebody, anybody want to give us an idea of of some things? So, you'd like to
change respect. I assume that means getting more
respect, having people treat you with more respect, which means talking maybe to some people about that. Anybody else?
You'd like to communicate with the disabilities department. I imagine there's some of you who might like to
communicate with another
department at your school.
You want to make some changes
in taking care of yourself. That isn't so much maybe being assertive with someone else but maybe
looking at your own wellness.
You want to talk about safety controls, right?
People are having to start back to labs and you don't feel safe,
and so you want to talk with people
about that. You want to find better peer support and be a better peer mentor,
so things, a lot of different things here.
Here, somebody shares, "I'm worried. I'm not moving fast enough in developing my dissertation
proposal, and maybe there are people to talk with that can help in that regard,
looking at expectations that I set for myself and that others set for me." A
lot here from, I imagine, mostly graduate students about
wanting input and feedback,
mentorship, help with proposals, help pulling together
experiments, help
finding someone to help you get experience with research,
finding a way to talk to somebody about your career, starting conversations with mentors,
so a lot of things focused on
figuring out how to get the resources
you need to be successful in college, to be successful if you're in grad school, if you're in a postdoc,
and they all, many, many of them
are focused on education. Some are focused on racism. Some have been focused on
the economic disparities of the
coronavirus. There are some comments focused on wanting to talk to people at school about
improving issues about inclusiveness,
some things here about friends working to
find more friends,
wanting to expand peer networks, find other
peers from similar backgrounds but also expanding beyond that, a lot about talking to my PI,
talking to my,
talking to teachers, etc., so a whole lot of different things, and you know, the honest truth
is that all of us, whenever we do this exercise,
we are,
we will be, we will find ourselves writing about something or many somethings, and that's why
talking about assertiveness and self-advocacy is so important,
because first of all,
we need to be able to articulate our needs, but then we need to be able to put them on the table and
bring them up
with people who are important to us, who might be able to help us, people who maybe are getting in the way, so
whatever you wrote about, my hope is that
some of the material that we're
talking about today will be helpful in having conversations.
The thing is that, as we talk about what's holding us back,
I think
it's likely that some of the things holding us back are things we need to work on to change about and for ourselves,
the comments made about
eating better, exercising
more, getting outside, getting on a schedule, right?
Maybe there's someone we can talk to to get some help in that regard, but there's some element of us really
working on that
within,
but then, a lot of the things that are holding us back
are things that we need to express to others so we can work together to improve the situation,
whether that be just to get their support and ideas and talk it through
or to actually ask somebody to make a change or to ask somebody to give you more feedback, mentorship, etc,
and both of those are hard. Making change
for ourselves is difficult. Talking to others about change is difficult.
They're hard in different ways perhaps, but both of them start with developing your self-awareness skills, and I think by now you
are tired of hearing me talk about
self-awareness,
because it's come up in all of the webinars that we've done together,
and those of you who came to my grad school web webinar know I talked about
self-awareness around your long-term
career goals, and needs also came up, so self-awareness is really a critical skill for making
good educational moves, good career moves, for being resilient, taking care of yourself,
and I just want to remind you of some of the tools that there are available for building
self-awareness, and one is journaling, and, you know, every one of the workshops has a few journal prompts, and I hope that's
gotten many of you started. You know, you don't have to journal every day. There's no rule about amounts of time.
There's no need to pay attention to grammar.
There's no need to get really wrapped up in making sure it's complete, but the more we sit down and put our thoughts and feelings
onto paper, the more self-aware we become.
Mindfulness is another way of becoming self-aware,
pausing and paying attention to our body sensations, our thoughts, our feelings.
We might extend practicing mindfulness to learning some meditation skills.
We might choose just to learn about mindfulness and apply it within our daily life,
but it's a great way. I find myself more and more now
just pausing and saying, "I have a feeling there's a little turmoil going on within me and around me right now.
Let me just slow it down and pay attention." That
self-awareness lets me make better decisions, and so I'm always happy when I'm able to do that,
although it doesn't always work out
so well. The more we practice, the more likely it is that it will.
When we talk honestly with peers and mentors and family and friends about our wants and our needs,
about what we're thinking about, struggling about, it can really help build self-awareness.
Sometimes not, because talking with others,
we can get caught up in how we look and how we're being perceived by them. Sometimes, it becomes,
you know, a little bit of a
struggle to be completely honest, to feel completely heard, to be as vulnerable
as we want to be with people that we see all the time, but I do think that having open conversations
with people in our lives
builds self-awareness, and then of course, if we really are
struggling with self-awareness and we want support and guidance through this process, if we feel that we're in a time of
real growth and we would like
to get some input through that time of self-
exploration and discovery,
we can find a therapist or counselor
and use that as a tool for both building self-awareness and then skills on top of that,
so one thing we need to be
assertive and to advocate for ourself is self-awareness,
but the other thing that we need is we need to learn specific skills
and we need to find opportunities to practice, and so, for a little bit, I'm going to talk about
skills. We won't have a whole lot of opportunity, obviously, to practice in this format, but next week,
join the groups and you will have an opportunity
to model some assertive behavior, to practice within the group, to talk about
what gets in your way, what strategies work for you. I forgot to say so.Thank you, Jennifer, for asking.
This will be recorded. In a day or two,
it will be up on the NIH OITE YouTube channel and you can access it there.
You can share it with your friends. It would be
great to share it.
So, I want to start by talking about some assertiveness skills with some
some important truths that I think that we need to put on the table, and
that is that this is a struggle for all of us. To some degree,
each of us struggles to appropriately voice our wants, our needs, our concerns, our opinions. We
struggle to know how honest we can be, how vulnerable we can be, how forceful we can be. If
there's a hierarchy involved,
does our boss really want to hear our opinion?, so we all struggle with this.
We also, to some degree,
struggle with when to say no and how to say no, and the number of times I found myself doing something
I didn't really want to do because I choked in the moment and was not able to say, "No, thank you.
I'm afraid I can't do that," it's really a high number of times. I think about it, and
it makes me appreciate how hard this is to learn this material
when you're starting out in your career, because it's hard to use this material when you're pretty far along.
Another element of it that's a part of assertiveness and self-advocacy
is hearing and responding appropriately to feedback, and we're going to talk about feedback next week,
so I won't have a lot to say about that today,
so to some degree, we all struggle. Another
really
universal truth to keep in mind is that we all have different communication styles.
We all have different conflict styles, different work styles.
We all move through work and life in different ways. We're poked by different things.
We're excited by different things. We have different ways of seeing situations,
so you take that difference, which is what makes the world
interesting and, you know, effective in a lot of ways but also can lead to
misunderstanding and difficulty in advocating for yourself,
so you take those differences, you couple them with a power differential, and, boy,
does that complicate things, and the first question in here, which we'll
get to towards the end, is that
starts with, what about being open with my PI, right?
Like, is it really safe to be open to a boss? The minute we put a power
differential across a relationship, the more complicated it becomes to be assertive,
so we really need to learn
some skills in this area if we want to get what we want from our educational and work
experiences and, quite frankly, from life, too, right? It's not just work and school. It's life as well. If we want to get
what we need and want from that, if we want to be
able to
succeed within the spaces we spend time in, we need to learn how to say no.
We need to learn how to be assertive for ourself.
We need to learn how to go and say, "Hey, I'd like to talk about that opportunity.
I think that this would be good for me," so we have to learn how to advocate for ourselves,
how to be assertive, and how to set healthy boundaries, and saying no is about setting healthy boundaries,
so we're going to start by defining assertiveness, and I give two definitions here
I really like. One is "the ability to express one's feelings and assert one's rights and needs
while respecting the feelings, rights, and needs of others," and I like that
definition, because it reminds us, while we are responsible for
working to meet our own needs,
we are also responsible for respecting the feelings and rights and needs of others, and, boy, as many of you pointed out
in the comments
about the really complicated times that we live in right now, I feel that we could all use
a reminder that it's both about us and it's about others.
The other definition is a little bit more direct and focused on you, and that is "communication that is direct,
open, and honest to address situations that concern you," and I think having both of these definitions is a great reminder
that there's an important thing to take care of yourself in all of this,
but there's also an important responsibility to develop some skills and
work to take care of others and to be respectful as you take care of yourself.
Now, I think at the heart of
assertiveness, and I like to include, use the language, as well as
difficult conversations, because being assertive and telling somebody what you really need
across a power hierarchy or saying no or having a difference of opinion can really be a difficult conversation,
so at the heart of assertiveness and difficult conversations, I think, for each of us is
what we learned from our families and cultures as we have moved through the world.
We learn a lot by watching
the people around us when we are young. We learn a lot
by watching the people around us in school, as we work,
move into the research space. We learn a lot from the people around us in that space as well.
We also learn from the broader cultures around us,
right?, and I'm going to talk a little bit about cultural impacts on assertiveness in a slide or two,
so I want you to pause later,
get out pen and paper, and journal about what you learned about
assertiveness and difficult conversations from the family and cultures that you have moved in, and I
want you to pause for a moment and be open to the possibility, right?, or
likely possibility that some of the messages that you learned aren't so helpful.
Those of you who got a message that you have to be quiet and
respectful at all
costs, right?, as a child, that might make a lot of sense, but in the workplace, we have to tell our boss
what's going on. If our mentor isn't helping us with our
proposal, we have to find a way to say, "Hey, I need some input. Here's what I need from you right now,"
so I want you to ask yourself which of the messages that you received are
not helpful and which are generally helpful,
and the nice thing is, as we do this exercise, we can start to appreciate how
important it is to let go of any negative messages or
maladaptive behaviors.
That takes commitment and practice, but it can be done,
and as we begin to understand what pushes us to be maybe too assertive,
almost aggressive, or what pushes us to never speak up and
never be assertive, as we begin to understand where those messages come from, we have some power
over working to change them and
so this is a really important journal prompt and I really encourage you to spend some time on this,
so, you know, every time I
lecture on this, I reflect on my own
ability to be assertive and my own ability to have difficult conversations, and I
appreciate that, even after years of working hard at this, sometimes my
body language, the tone, the way I use language lands harder than I
mean it to land, that I'm trying to be soft and calm and
be assertive in a really respectful way, but a lot of things that I learned from my family and where I grew up
makes it land harder,
so I then can actively work to soften it.
The more we're aware of what we got from our families and cultures, the more
able we are to make change, and I think that is one of the really, really key messages. I
want to give you some information to help you think about
culture, okay?,
and the cultures that you grew up in. Sometimes, we think immediately, and in fact often
we think immediately, the place I grew up in, but it can also be
the religious community you grew up in. It can be the region, right?,
so people talk about the United States,
but actually, people who grew up in the South and in the Midwest versus California versus New England
experience a different culture within US culture, and that's true if you grew up in Central America, in
the EU, in Africa, right?
There's sort of overall
comments one can make about culture, but then there are subcultures, right?, city versus
country, small town versus big town,
so we're going to talk about how culture
impacts the way we see ourselves, and this is based on the work of two social psychologists, Hazel Rose
Markus and Alana Conner, and they wrote a book called "Clash: How to Thrive in a Multicultural World."
I think it's a great book for helping us to dissect
where we got messages
about our role in society, our role in hierarchy, our ability to be assertive, and they say,
essentially, there are really two constructs of self,
and we all
have elements of this, but some of us have a lot of one
construct and not so much of the other, so it's not that we can't
change and move between these, but we tend to see ourselves
dominantly through one of these
lenses or constructs, and the first is the independent self. People who grew up in cultures that
promote the
independent self, they value and emphasize being unique, getting their needs met, being heard,
influencing others. The primary focus of individuals who grew up in an independent
culture is
to meet our needs, our opinions, our goals, and
often as people talk about these cultures, they point out, and the book actually
starts with this premise, that this is very much US culture,
so those of us who grew up in the United States in a family that has been rooted here for some time,
we've likely received many messages
that drive the independent view of self.
Now, that can be modified by a lot of things, and, for example, in my case, it was modified greatly by the religious community
I grew up in, where we got a lot of messages that cultivated the
interdependent self, and so I don't want you to think about this as just an either/or,
okay?, but in general, the independent self is a primary focus on our own needs, our own opinions, our own goals.
People with a well-developed
interdependent self, they look at the world
emphasizing
relationships,
adjusting to others, sharing
responsibilities with others, and respecting authority, and the primary focus, if you grew up largely in
interdependent cultures, the primary focus is on supporting the group and maintaining tradition and
supporting the collective,
so if you grew up like I did, largely in an independent
self
construct but modified with some interdependent messages,
you're going to land on one place in this continuum. If you grew up in a community and culture where
interdependent self was cultivated, respected, talked about, modeled,
and suddenly you come to a culture where an independent self is
valued, there's going to be a little bit of shock and sort of like, how did this happen?
Everybody cares about themselves and not each other, and
so, however our lens is,
we have this expectation and view of the world as all about me or all about us, and obviously,
for most of us, somewhere in between, although we do see people in extremes of one side or the other.
Every time we move, every time we enter a new environment, our view of self is modified by that environment,
especially if we stay in that environment for a long time. A
lot of times when I talk to
children of immigrants, they point out such a huge clash between the culture of their
parents and their shared history and the culture of being here in the United States and seeing a more
independent view of self, and so this, I think, is important for assertiveness.
I also have to say I think it's important for understanding a lot about
how we see ourselves at work, a lot about how we make decisions about serving others, about meeting our own needs.
What do we put first? And so, if you're interested in this, there's a great website, cultureclashes.org.
There is also the book, which you can check out, hopefully fairly
easily from your library,
so if you think about this,
how much we view ourself, where we fall on this continuum of independent self and
interdependent self will impact communication. If we largely see the world through our
independent lens, we have an easier time
talking with our boss and other colleagues, because we don't see hierarchy as so fixed and rigid.
Our willingness to be assertive will be higher, and when we communicate, we like to communicate
fairly directly. The idea is to be clear in our message, to get work done,
to put on the table what we need, and that style of communication is generally considered to be a direct style.
If
we largely
spend time in
cultures where an
interdependent view of the world is highly valued, then we see
relationships with bosses and other colleagues as unequal and fixed.
It's much harder for people with a strongly developed
interdependent self to tell their boss, "No, I disagree," or "I'd really like to do it another way."
Our willingness to be assertive is more difficult,
especially given power difference, and
often, as we
interact with people, our focus is on, What does everybody around us need?
It's about preventing embarrassment.
It's about harmony and agreement, and that style of communication is often indirect,
so it's important for you to appreciate that you've received all of these messages, which are both
really fabulous, right? They're a part of who you are, your history, your culture,
right?, your community. They go back to this sort of whole sense of self,
so you've received all of these messages, and they work in many, many ways.
We all have received these messages, and they work for us in many ways,
but we also have to pause and say, "How don't they work?"
So, maybe we have such a highly developed independent view of self that we aren't a very good team player,
or we have such a highly developed
interdependent view of self
that we never are assertive, we never get our needs met, and, in silence and
behind the scenes, we resent everything,
so the idea is,
through that journal prompt and reading and reflecting on this and talking about it and showing up at the group next week and sharing about
it, we gain an appreciation for both the strengths and liabilities of the messages that we've received,
so one way to talk about communication is,
as I just said before, direct and indirect.
I want to give you another set of definitions as you think about
communication and approaches to getting your needs met, so we can be very passive, right?
That's an indirect style.
That's when we allow
what happens to happen.
We allow what others do to us without an active response or resistance.
We just accept it. They have power. They have hierarchy. Our
responsibility is to the group. I don't like what's happening, but
it's not my place to say something. That's passive. On
the other end of a spectrum of communication styles would be aggressive, which is a direct way of communicating,
but it's not a positive way of communicating. It's pursuing one's aims and interests forcefully,
without care about long-term consequences to the other or to the relationship.
That's not to say that sometimes we don't need to be aggressive. We do, right? Somebody threatens us or someone or
something important to us. Sometimes, we do need to be pretty forceful,
right?, so I'm not saying we never want to be aggressive,
but if everything that we ask for is asked for in an aggressive tone,
we alienate people, and as I was reflecting
for you about the styles that I learned from my community and from my family, I realized that it's a
little bit too much on the aggressive side,
and so some of us will look and say, "Whoa! All the way on the passive side."
Some of us will look and say, "All the way on the aggressive side"
Now,
where we really want to land and where we want to spend a lot of time - not always.
There are times to be passive. There are times to be aggressive, but where we mostly want to
develop skills is in being assertive. This is another direct way of communicating,
but it's having and showing confidence and a clear approach to meeting your needs,
so it's pursuing your aims and interests,
but it's pursuing it in a respectful way, and remember we defined assertiveness that way in the
previous slide. You
will also see many, many people, and you might see yourself in this, using what's called
or known as a passive-aggressive style, so that is both direct and indirect, right?
It's generally indirectly pursuing your aims by saying one thing and doing another, so you seem
passive sure, it's okay, but behind the scenes,
you manipulate the situation to have your needs met, and so that's why I say it's both direct and indirect.
In general,
where we're looking to develop skills is
to be as assertive as we can be, given the context and the situation,
but we need to appreciate that there are times to be passive and allow things to happen and
there are times when we really need to step up and
head towards the aggressive side, to say, "No, that's not okay,"
right?, but in general, where we want to be is assertive.
People usually, when this is in the classroom, raise their hand and say, "What about passive-aggressive?," and
I always struggle to answer that, so I'm going to answer that question,
because I know I'm going to get it and I think that there are times
when
we want to,
when we say, "Okay," and we work behind the scenes to
solve an issue,
but generally we don't do it.
We shouldn't be doing it to hurt others, and I'll give you an example where I, this is why I really
struggled with this one,
so trainees come to me a lot and say, "My PI is not supporting me in doing this volunteer work
that's really important for my
career development. I feel like I really will benefit from this. I'm going to make contacts.
I'm going to be able to try on something
I think I love.
What do you think I should do?," and I sometimes say, "Okay," agreeing with them that you won't do it in the middle of the
day.
"Is there some way you can do it
without them having to know about it?," and so in some ways, that's a passive-aggressive style, and I do think at times
that is an appropriate approach,
but in general, I want to encourage you to really look at your assertiveness and think about developing
skills in that regard,
so if you present this another way,
there's what you need, right?,
and there's what the other person needs, so it's what I need and what you need, if
all I do is worry about what I need, then I'm behaving aggressively.
If all I do is worry about what you need and never take care of myself,
then I'm behaving passively.
Being assertive is sort of hitting the sweet spot between those. I am focused on myself and
making sure I'm being taken care of in school,
but I am also aware of what others around me need.
I'm in a study group, and
sometimes I want to focus on the material I want to focus on, but other times I'm willing to
pause and let somebody else set the agenda because they have needs as well, so we want to keep in mind
both
perspectives.
As you think about using
assertive communication, passive communication,
aggressive communication, I think this table really helps, and it reminds us that it's not just the words that we use.
It's our body language. It's our eyes. it's our posture. It's how we hold ourselves, and
so we want our,
we want to keep in mind that it's so much more than just words, and so this is a great table
for helping you think about that.
Some students have, I
did this webinar a couple of months ago and some people emailed me and said that they actually stood in front of a mirror a
little bit to get a sense of their body language,
posture, how they hold their hands as they're communicating and that they found that very, very helpful.
Another way to get a sense of,
you know, how you look and sound is to ask others, and
so it can be really, really helpful to pause here for a little bit.
Remember that, if you tend to use a passive style,
you may not get what you want because it may not be easily understood through your message, and
if you use an aggressive style, you may get what you want, but you're going to alienate people over time.
Assertive styles give you the best chance of getting what you want and
feeling heard, while also respecting others, and so we really want to work on developing our
assertiveness and an assertive communication style,
so I want to pause here for a moment and just think about why is it that we're not assertive at times,
and in part
I addressed that by talking about the messages that we've received from our families and our culture's. A lot of us,
because of messages, don't believe we actually have the right to be
assertive in general or in a specific situation.
This can be related to
family of origin. It can be related to culture. It can be related to
identities, right?, so women in male-dominated
environments, students of color in
academic spaces where there's a lot of white privilege around them and they get these subtle messages of,
"Your opinion isn't as important.
Your needs aren't as important," so often we don't believe we have the right to be assertive. I
think we really want to pause on this one,  think about which ones apply to you, and really question
what messages you've received about each of these.
Sometimes, we're not assertive because we don't know what we want or need.
Sometimes, we just have this vague sense that we need something, something needs to change, but we're not exactly sure
what it is,
and I know that this has happened for me often at work, where I just have a sense that I
need to address something.
I can't quite tell what it is and, until I really pause and stop and try to pay attention to what's happening
and how I'm feeling and what I'm thinking, I
can't quite put a handle on it,
so sometimes we're not assertive because we just have no good idea of what we want or need.
Sometimes, we're really afraid of displeasing others or of not being liked.
This is an issue with both friends and co-workers and colleagues and, of course, an issue with family and loved ones,
right?
We don't want to displease someone that we really care deeply about. I made that comment about not saying no,
and I think it's deeply rooted in some of those
interdependent cultural messages and a fear of displeasing others, right? That drives us often to not be assertive,
and I think these first three are things that we reflect on, that we think about, that we
develop
an understanding of where those messages came from and which parts of those messages we want to let go of.
We need self-compassion to appreciate this is hard for everyone. These three, top
three are really about, I think, the internal growth that we've been trying to
highlight this summer through this series. The fourth one I think is an equally large problem and one that we can
rectify through things like books and webinars and reading, and that is that often we lack the skills that we need to
effectively be assertive. If we were not taught those skills, they do not necessarily come naturally,
especially because generally what we do is mimic what's around us, right?,
and so, if you happen to be around people who were really effectively assertive,
you're going to learn some great skills from that and you're going to hear this and tweak some things and you're on your way,
but if you were around people who were very passive or people who are very aggressive,
you have to unlearn some bad skills before you can develop those positive skills,
so I want you to ask which ones apply to you. I don't know that it's fixed.
It might be that at work some of these apply; at home, others apply,
but I think an interesting thing for you to do is to spend a little bit of time here,
and so I'm going to give you one other journaling exercise to help with this part
and then we're going to dive into some skills for being assertive. This is an exercise
where I want you to think about, pick an important relationship at home or at work. Based on what I saw in the
question box at the beginning, you know, some of you will pick your PI, some will pick peers, some will
talk about someone in a program, an office at school. Some of you mentioned family and friend issues,
so pick an important relationship.
Consider a time when you struggled to be assertive, and
also consider a time when you were assertive and you did a great job
communicating your needs and write about it: what happened, why it happened that way, what you think made the difference
between being able to assert yourself and not being able to assert yourself, and I know for me a
part of that is, when I learned to have a more mindful pause,
then I give myself a moment to collect my thoughts and move forward.
It's also, I think, for many, as we do this exercise, we appreciate how much self-care
and wellness is tied into this. When we're not hungry and stressed and exhausted,
when we have not ignored our hobbies and our life,
it's easier to be assertive, and when we are stressed and angry and all we've had is some coffee
and we've run from task to task ignoring everything important to us,
it's harder to get it right. We either explode in an aggressiveness that we didn't mean or we
totally shrink back and just say, "I can't do this," depending on, sort of, who we are,
so this here is a
really, really important exercise, and I really encourage you to get out pen and paper and work on that.
Let's learn a little bit about some assertiveness skills, and I want to start with these factors.
We have to have some awareness about what we want to be assertive about, and that's a whole range of topics, and
some things are really important to us and some things are not as important us and we want to be able to
identify that, because we want to work in areas that are really important to us.
We also
want to look at, so who is it that we want to be assertive with? Is it intimates, our spouse and partner?
Is it family members? Is it friends and acquaintances? Is it service workers and strangers?
So, we're out and we want some help and
we need to to be assertive to get it. Is it supervisors and authority figures?
I should probably have here work colleagues and peers as well.
So, who? What do you want to be assertive about? Who do you want to be assertive about?, and then why
we want to be assertive. Sometimes, we are assertive to get our needs met.
Sometimes, we just want to express a concern.
Sometimes, we are assertive to support someone else, and sometimes we're assertive to make change in the long term.
We're not trying to meet an immediate need. We're trying to get our university's disability office to change the way it provides services.
We're trying to get our university to look at
institutionalized racism. We're trying to get our program to consider changes in the qualifying exam,
so we have a lot of reasons why we want to be assertive, and some of those examples
that, I mean, actually, all of those that I picked out were prompted by comments that I saw
in the question box at the start of the webinar, so you're all thinking both about
yourself. Some of the needs that you talked about were your own needs. You
pointed out expressing concerns. You really pointed out making change, supporting others.
You've hit on all of these in what you're thinking about already.
I'm
in some ways summarizing where we're, where we've been, but a little bit laying a roadmap for the
next few steps, next few slides here,
so the first strategy for assertive communication is self-awareness,
and I've given you some tips to gain some of that self-awareness.
We've worked a lot on self-awareness through these three webinars, and we'll be talking a lot more about self-awareness in the next one.
We also need to really be willing to work hard to change.
People are often very
disappointed: "I tried and it didn't work,"
right?, but old habits take a while to soften and it takes a lot of practice.
Developing
our assertive communication skills, toning down an aggressive communication style if we have it, it takes work
and it's uncomfortable, so we have to really be comfortable with being uncomfortable
in working on this. We also need to understand communication and conflict styles.
I gave you a tiny little bit about communication styles. Next week, two weeks from now when we do feedback,
I'm going to give you a grid with four types of communication styles
to supplement what we learned today about aggressive, passive,
assertive, etc., and I'm going to talk very briefly about conflict styles today. They go hand in hand.
The way
we view conflict, the way we use
communication, understanding both of those are intertwined, and the more we understand them, the easier it is for us
to develop our own assertive communication style.
We need some tools for being assertive, and I'm going to provide you with some tools today,
and we have talked a lot about tools for managing stress and for building resilience. You put into the
question box big, complicated things: to go talk with my PI
about this, to have a discussion about what type of postdoc is right for me, to go and address
systemic racism issues in my program. Those are big things, and that's going to cause stress.
Actually, if you're not used to being assertive, it's going to cause stress
even when it feels like a smaller topic, when you're just going to say, "No,
I'd rather not have Mexican food. Can we have Thai tonight?,"
right?, which, in the grand scheme of things, might seem easy,
but if you haven't done it a lot, then that's going to be stressful as well,
so we need to go back every time to the first principle of "to do
well, we have to be well." If
we want to develop these skills,
we have to take care of ourselves. We have to appreciate that they're hard to develop and cultivate that giraffe
self-talk instead of jackal approaches. We have to be more self-
compassionate, right? We have to really appreciate that
this is hard for us and that we're working at it, and we have to do everything we can to
constantly be asking how we're doing and what we're doing to take care of ourself,
so those are the strategies
around
assertive communication.
I'm just going to talk a tiny little bit more about the stress around being
assertive and point out that we should be stressed around being assertive,
because we need to be worried about our personal safety, our educational safety, our career safety, and
for some, that's a bigger issue than others, but a lot of the stress around being assertive comes from
our need to be safe.
Some of it comes from our cognitive distortions. Sometimes, we think if we tell our friend no, they'll
erase our contact and never reach out. If we tell our PI we'd like to do things differently, they'll say, "There's the door.
Move on," so sometimes it's our cognitive distortions, in particular
catastrophizing. Two other cognitive distortions adding stress around assertive communication are mind-reading,
we think we know what people are going to say, and
fortune-telling, we think we know how it's going to end up, and so I think cognitive distortions add stress,
but the basic premise that there's stress around this, to me, is completely accurate. There should be. We want to stay safe,
so in many ways, to deal with this stress, some of it's the self-care that I just talked about and the self-compassion and the
mindfulness that we've been talking about again and again.
Some of it, though, is learning in this particular case how to weigh the risks and the potential rewards,
right? Is it worth being assertive about this? Is
it really important to me or not so important to me?
So, the first question is, How important is this to me?
The second reflects on the other person: How important is this
relationship to me?
Those are two really key questions.
Now, sometimes people say to me, "It's a little thing, but it happens all the time,"
so that really led me to this question to put out there, and that is, Is this situation part of a pattern?,
because if it's a part of a pattern,
choosing not to take action may have unintended, long-term consequences, right?,
so sometimes it's a small thing, but there's always a small thing.
It happens the same all the time, and then it's a pattern, and we really have to ask ourselves,
What can we do to change that pattern? So, those are three things
I want you to ask yourself to help you put that stress in perspective, and the fourth is to, like, sort of befriend that fear.
"I have a feeling this is a bad idea. It actually makes me afraid to think about this,"
so spend a moment with that fear,
but ask yourself, Is your fear of taking action fully warranted? This brings you back to your cognitive
distortions. This lets you ask, Am I really unsafe? Will having this
conversation really harm my educational journey?
Will it really damage my relationship with my PI? If I do this well, what's the potential
reward?
Maybe it's worth it, and so I think managing the stress around being assertive can be easily done -
well, not easily done. Let me say managing the stress around being assertive can be easily teased apart by
using
these questions. It's not easily dealt with,
because stress is stress and
it can really weigh on us and be difficult. I
want to give you a model to consider, and it's actually based on
conflict models and, like I said, difficult conversations. To me, they go together.
I think that we can learn a lot from the Thomas Kilmann conflict
grid.
It gives us a framework for
understanding our options. These questions give you an entree into starting to sort out your options,
but this model, I think, really gives you a framework for considering your options,
so we're going to
go ahead and look at this.
The other really nice thing about the Thomas Kilmann conflict grid is it makes a point that, while we might have
one style that we tend to use a lot, all of the styles that they put on the table in this grid are
appropriate at certain times,
so it helps us catalog and evaluate what we typically choose, and then over time it helps
us expand our options.
We see from the grid that there are other choices, not our go-to style,
so we're going to look at the Thomas Kilmann conflict grid in the next slide. It's an XY axis.
I really love it because, for scientists, it's, you know, reminiscent of
looking at data in the lab,
so on one axis is your focus on self, and
that's the level of motivation that you have to get your own goals and objectives met,
right?,
how much you're focused on your needs in this particular case, and
on the other axis is the focus on others, and that's your willingness to let the other party
achieve their goals and objectives.
You're on a
team to organize a
lab retreat. You have an idea. So does someone else.
How much are you focused on
getting your idea moved forward and how much are you willing to let go of your idea to let somebody else
have their idea? That's focused on self and focused on others, and they just put this on an XY,
right? On the x axis is focus on others. On the y axis is focus on self, and there are five styles.
Avoiding is that passive communication style, right? We avoid the problem.
We avoid discussing it with people. We avoid saying, "No, I don't want to do this."
We avoid saying, "Actually, that's a problem," right? We just avoid.
That
can often feel safe in the moment, but if it's something that really matters to you, boy, over time,
it can really feel that you're getting taken advantage of.
Now, often, instead of avoiding, which is we just walk away, we don't engage at all,
sometimes, we accommodate. There, our focus on self is very low,
right?, but our focus on others is very high. So,
often, Sunday at about one o'clock, my wife will say, "Do you want to take a bike ride
or garden?,"
and
accommodating would be, "Whatever you want."
Sometimes actually, I don't want to garden. She always wants to garden, so that's a given, right?,
and sometimes, it's really great to say, "Yeah, let's garden," right?, but accommodating is
every time I say, "Whatever you want is fine,"
right? At work,
somebody says, "I'll give the introduction and you'll go second," and I say, "Sure, no problem," every time. That's
accommodating, alright? Now, competing
is
really
high on self. Let's go look at
one that's high on
self,
low on others.
Competing means, "No, I'm going to do it my way," so you have a group
presentation and somebody says, "I'm going first. You're third. She's second. We're done,"
alright? That's an example of competing. That's a very
aggressive style, right?,
so that's competing, high on self and low on focus on others.
Compromising is sort of in-between on both. Nobody really fully gets their needs met, okay?
You know,
people think that's often the best thing: "We should always compromise."
Sometimes we should, but sometimes maybe not, so we won't talk a lot about compromises.
We're not going to talk a lot about conflict today,
and I really just wanted to use this to help you get a sense of
the styles that you tend to use when you need to have a difficult conversation.
Now, collaborating is like the picture of
assertive communication. It's a back and forth,
okay? This doesn't mean collaborating we do experiments and publish together.
This means that we have a back and forth to figure out what is it that you really need out of this,
what does, what is it that I
really need out of this, and we go back and forth until we figure out the best option.
If you think about it, passive communication is a lot about avoiding and accommodating,
aggressive communication is a lot about competing, and
collaborating is really trying to be assertive,
and this grid doesn't perfectly map onto that,
but I think it's a great thing for you to look at in thinking about
conflict, and it does really, I think, give you a sense that, as you're making a decision to be assertive, you can ask yourself,
How important is this to me? How important is it?
How important is it to me that the other people in this situation are also
respected, accommodated, have their needs met? So, I think it's helpful,
although it doesn't map perfectly, and if there are questions about it, I'll take them at the end.
So, you have some questions that you can ask yourself
right over here. How important is it to me? How important is the relationship?
Why am I afraid to take action? You can realize that there are
multiple things. You can go and talk to somebody and actually
accommodate and it might be appropriate. You can compromise. You can be more firm in getting your needs met.
You can work through
this focus on self and focus on others to consider exactly
what the best outcomes would be, and
then I just wanted to give you another set of questions,
so you have one initial set of questions that might lead you to decide
I'm going to have a conversation about this, and then that model to give you some stretch that there's accommodating, there's
collaborating, there's compromising, there's really saying, "I need it to be this way,"
right? So, you've decided to have a conversation.
You think a little bit about what different approaches you can use, and then I wanted to give you some tools for
actually asking some questions,
so this assumes now you've decided you need to have a conversation,
and it addresses a little bit of, Am I certain what the best outcome is?
What else might be out there? So, I'd like you to sit and think, What are the options available to me?
What's the best possible outcome? What's the worst possible outcome? What are some middle outcomes
I can be happy with? If this is a give and take and I'm asking for something, say I'm asking my
PI for time to do
a short internship in industry,
so I'm asking for time away from lab to go ahead and meet my own needs,
is there something I can offer to address their concerns?
So, those are five questions.
What are all the options? Let me be creative and expand
possible options. What's the best? What's the worst? What are some things I could live with
that are good enough, and what can I offer the other party?
We then want, especially when this is a hard conversation with a supervisor and we don't feel totally safe,
we then want to find people to help us prepare and who can add to our safety,
so we don't want to just do this exercise and decide we're going to, you know, tomorrow reach out and have this conversation.
We want to prepare, we want to talk to mentors that we trust to get their perspective, and we want to make sure
to talk to people who can help add to safety. If you're a graduate student, that's often a
graduate program director, an
administrator of the program. If you're at NIH, that could be someone in your training office; that could be someone in the OITE,
that could be somebody else in the branch, another PI that you know.
If it's
around something at home, you need to ask yourself, Who can I rely on here
to prepare, to feel safe, etc?,
so those are some things to ask yourself as you are beginning to consider
having a conversation,
and now I just want to give you some skills, and these are,
the skill part of this is what's coming up next,
okay?, so the first are I-statements, and my hope is that you have all learned about I-statements before. I was sort of
surprised that the first time I heard about I-statements, I think I was probably a PI
taking a leadership course
fairly early in my career.
My hope is that these are taught at much earlier stages in people's
lives at this point. Really, we should probably learn them as children. I-
statements are taking responsibility for your feelings, your wants, and your needs and
expressing them clearly,
alright?
It's really, the key part is both knowing what you want and need and
expressing it clearly, and I'm just going to give you a structure,
because I like to keep it in mind and those of you who, like me, haven't had a lot of information on this,
it's useful to have: "I feel", "When," "Because," "I would like." You don't always use all four parts of these. A lot of times,
trainees
have a sense that talking about feelings with their boss might make them very vulnerable. People sort of say, you know,
"Let go of those feelings," you know, that feelings don't matter at work,
so a lot of times people hesitate to start with "I feel," and you don't need to,
but sometimes it really is helpful and works, and I just wanted to give you a structure to work with,
so here's an example. You're working on a group project.
One of your team members doesn't respond to you with comments about the draft you submitted last week.
They also did not respond to an updated draft you emailed this week,
so for two weeks, you are working; you get no feedback.
You have no idea what's going on, and you really feel you need to say something,
so I
highlighted the four parts here. "I feel," and you can put in "anxious, frustrated, worried," right?,
whatever. "I feel confused," right? "I thought you were interested," so you can put in whatever word is appropriate there.
"I feel
frustrated when you don't respond to my emails about our project,
because I really want to get a good grade and finish this without too much stress right now."
Right there, you owned your feelings. You pointed out what the issue was. "I
would appreciate if you can make this a priority
and give me a sense of when I can expect to hear from you with your input."
That's what I like to call a clear ask,
right? If you don't ask for what you want, you might get nothing,
you might get something different, and even when you ask clearly for what you want, you might not get it,
but at least you've asked clearly.
Alright, so this is one example of an I-statement.
Another one, this is related to your belief that your PI's
expectations during the pandemic are unrealistic, and I actually am glad I left this in, because I saw three comments in the
question box at the beginning about "what I need to change is I need to talk to my PI about both their
expectations and my expectations right now,"
so in this case,
the PI's expectations are too high. "When you send such a long list of projects for me to work on each Monday,
I feel." There's the second part, "overwhelmed and concerned,
because I want to make progress and contribute even under these difficult
circumstances. I would like to Zoom with you to talk," etc, etc.,
okay? Another example of an I-statement, and
again, sometimes, you know, it's so hard to do these webinars where I'm not in front of people.
I see people roll their eyes when I'm in the room and I can look at people,
because people are like, "Even if I was that clear,
I wouldn't get my needs met," and, you know, that may be true, and we're going to talk about
finding the mentoring that you need, and, you know, sometimes we do find ourselves really in a tough spot, that we communicate
incredibly clearly and we still don't get our needs met,
but number one is
the feeling of victory and satisfaction in actually asking clearly,
and number two is often people are surprised. They really do get their needs met. Trainees tell me all the time,
"I could never do that,"
and then they work through all of that stress, they practice, they make a plan, they do it, and I get this email of,
"I can't believe it," you know, "She said yes!" "I can't believe it. He agreed!," and so it's a really
good skill to develop, even if it's not necessarily,
if it doesn't necessarily lead to change immediately,
but also, sometimes it does. I will have a lot to say when we talk about mentoring about
patterns where your needs are never met by your PI and what you need to do about that, and that of course
depends on where you're at in your training, and we'll talk about that later. I
wanted to do one last I-statement around
micro-aggressions, because I, you know, I, today, I did earlier today a listening session with a
large lab group and somebody
shared so eloquently. You know, he just said, "It's so tiring.
Micro-aggression after
micro-aggression. It's just tiring,"
and I think that that's true for so many, and all of us have a
responsibility to look at our own language, to be allies and support others and speak up, right?, and so I
wanted to address this, because it's a topic now that a lot of people
rightfully are talking about, so in this case, you overhear micro-aggressions from someone in your research group
and they're making you feel unwelcome and you're worried about others. "I feel
hurt,
disrespected, unwelcome, angry,"
 right? Pick your feeling word, "when you make comments about
women in science,
about
the
coronavirus coming from China, when you make comments about
immigrants, when you make comments about" fill in the blank. "I would like for you to stop making these comments,"
right? If you don't, if you're an ally and
those comments are directed at you and you want to point out that you're worried for others,
you just modify your I-statement:
"I believe that some of our colleagues will feel unwelcome when you make comments about." The honest truth is
I think we all should feel disrespected when people make inappropriate comments about others,
but I think it's important also to speak up for others, so I wanted to give both of these options,
although I feel like the first one should apply and does apply
for us all often,
so these are examples of I-statements, and
you might not want to start
with a hard example like this. You might want to start with an easier
situation, but it's a great skill to learn.
You know, people can debate all kinds of things, but they can't debate how you feel, right?,
so "I feel unwelcomed" or "I feel ignored,"
"I feel stressed," people really can't debate that with you,
so in some way it's an empowering way to start an assertive communication, because it's a focus on you.
Another really important skill for having assertive conversations is
listening
empathically. That's where you summarize what you think the communicator said, what they think, feel, mean.
You don't have to necessarily agree,
but you show that you heard them. You show that you understood them. This is really important
in
a difficult conversation,
because often we feel better even just being heard. We can often agree to disagree and
to not be fully satisfied, but we really want to be heard on the way
to the, you know, through that experience, and
so I just wanted to give you some examples of empathic listening.
Someone in your lab is pressuring you to give up the cell-culture hood.
You signed up weeks ago for the ten o'clock time and they're pressuring you to give up the hood, and
maybe you don't have any problem and you might choose, you know, not even to engage with this one.
You might just say, "Sure. No problem," but maybe you're a little bit worried about
this, right? They've asked a lot of times.
It tends to happen often, so you want to have a conversation about it, and
this by itself
doesn't stand. This is a part of a broader conversation but demonstrating this ability to
hear and echo back what you heard:
"I hear you saying that you're worried about getting your paper published before your grant is due, and
because of that, you want me to let you use the hood at ten o'clock today."
You are confirming that you understand.
You're also letting them know that you were listening, and it's a great skill for making people feel heard.
It's also a great skill for making sure you're agreeing to the thing you think you're agreeing to, right?
Another example: "f I understand correctly, you want to use the cell-culture hood during my time today," okay?
"You're worried about getting experiments done," so I just wanted to give you two examples there.
Another one, this I took out of the workspace. A friend is disappointed that you were not available for a Zoom chat twice this week.
The reason for that is that you have a review die for your PI. You also want to be a good friend, right?
You really want to be a good friend,
but you also want to get this review due
done and you would need to set some strong boundaries till you turn it in,
and these are the kinds of things where we think, you know,
we get lost in our mind-reading and our catastrophizing and oh, you know,
our friendship is going to be really ruined, so you want to show that you understand.
"I hear you saying that you're disappointed that I did not make time for the two Zoom sessions you invited me to," right?
Maybe you go a little farther: "and if I understand,
maybe you feel I let you down. You really need a friend right now," right?, and so you've really shown -
Remember we said assertive communication is focus on yourself
but also focus on others. You pause for a moment and appreciate your friend really needs some time right now:
"Can we talk about it so I can be a good friend and
also take care of my work deadline right now?" I know so many times
I would just avoid this or I would just be too forceful,
"I have work, too," right?, but if we can pause and really think about these skills,
then we have a chance of having a much better communication.
So, those are two skills. I want to teach you two more. I'm going to do them together.
Fogging and stuck record. Fogging is when, so, as things get more intense, you're talking with somebody
to get your needs met and you're not getting a lot of agreement. Fogging is when you calmly respond with a minimal response.
You focus on whatever truth is in the statement.
You don't want to escalate this from assertive to aggressive, right? You don't want to turn this from a
difficult conversation into a massive argument,
right?, so you don't want to become defensive or argumentative and you want to keep things calm,
so fogging is where you acknowledge what they've said and any truth in the statement, and
stuck record goes together. It's where you repeat what you want time and time again. You don't
raise the tone of your voice. You don't become angry.
You don't take the bait on some side issue and start debating something else.
You stay really focused on what your needs are, and
an example here. This is one, it's not always a wedding, but it
surprises me how often
somebody's need to be away clashes
with a really stressful period in the research group, and PIs,
most of us are not our best when we're stressed,
so you are going to take some time off. Your PI has a grant deadline and they want you to finish up this data analysis
really quickly,
right?,
so you think this isn't going to be such a difficult conversation.
You're just letting them know about time off, and you get one of these,
"You know now's not a good time," right? "Science doesn't stop for
vacations," right?
You don't want to escalate this, and especially, this is across hierarchy and power, right?,
so this is, you really want to be conscious of that, so you might say something like you show that you understood: "I
understand you want the paper submitted as soon as possible. I do, too."
That's the
fogging, right? You commented on what you understand and agree on, right?
"I understand you want the paper submitted. So do I. I
still need to take that time off, because this friendship is important to me,
so I will be away." Your PI comes back with something. You continue the same way:
"I hear the paper is a priority to you. I hear you're stressed about your grant deadline.
It's important to me, too, right? The timing isn't great,
so I hear you. Still, being at this wedding is important to me and I will be away."
That's an example of using fogging and stuck record. In many ways, there's empathic listening in this as well,
alright?, and I know
everybody is rolling their eyes and saying, "Never in a million years. I can't do this.
I won't be able to do this." The thing is I have seen so many
trainees
say that and move on and develop skills in this area and
grow so much, and it really starts by treating it like a foreign language that you need to learn,
right?, and so you practice. You practice in safe spaces,
so these are four strategies. The fifth are
strategies to get feedback that you need, and they're called negative and positive inquiry, and I'm going to give you the source where
these come from. I think they're such great skills to learn,
so here you presented a virtual poster just last week.
It's your department's research festival and you got feedback from a faculty member: "Good job. Keep it up"
Like, what part of it should you keep up? Like, that's not really the best of feedback.
It's not specific enough, and so you could try a positive inquiry: "Thanks. Thank you for that feedback. I'm glad you liked it.
I want to learn from this and I want to continue to improve. Would you mind talking in a bit of detail?
What did you like about
it?" Or the flip side, you get some negative feedback,
right? "You might not be cut out for graduate school," which, you know,
it makes me sad how many students have told me somebody said something like that to them. Alright, that's not helpful at all.
it doesn't help you improve your
poster presentation skills. It doesn't help you improve your ability to talk about science. It just cuts you down, right?
It's just like, really just an example of jackal language.
Sometimes we want to fold, but if we can be assertive in getting our needs met and getting some information:
"Oh, that's disappointing to hear. Grad school is important to me. I'd like to learn from this experience.
Would you mind going over the slides and talking in more detail?" Now,
I want to stress that sometimes people are unkind and our best decision is to walk away:
"I'm sorry you didn't like it," and then you can go to somebody else for feedback,
but, depending on who this is and exactly what was said in the conversation, if this is your PI and
this is the person that you've worked with for a year,
it might be really important, as
jackal
as this is, it might be really important to try to have a conversation, and that's going to take some serious
assertiveness skills, and so I wanted to give you some examples. This is one of my favorite books. I
have tried to get electronic books that people can check out from our library electronically. It turns out to be incredibly difficult,
but you can get this on Amazon. You can get it at a lot of public libraries, and I encourage you, if assertiveness
is something that you struggle with, to check this out. It's really, really helpful.
One element of being assertive is learning how to say no,
right?, also making requests: "Can you take care of this for me?,"
but I really want to talk about saying no for a little bit, so here's this cycle. You
think, Oh, I'm going to feel guilty if I say no, right? It's my friend. It's my family member. It's my boss.
I can't say no. I can't make this request, right? I'll feel guilty. It's somebody really important to me. I can't do it,
so you agree and say yes,
or you don't make your request and you ignore your own needs.
Then, your own needs aren't met. You feel resentful,
tired, and used, and if this happens occasionally, no big deal,
but if this happens all the time, if you never say no, if you never put your needs on the table,
you will eventually really feel depleted. You'll feel unseen.
You won't feel like you're a part of the work community,
and I think it's really the risk of students saying, "This is hard for me, and I'll just, it is what it is
and I'm not going to try to change it" is why it's so important that we have trainings like this. It's also
important that we train faculty members to be able to help you be assertive by calmly hearing
you when you assert for yourself,
and so I acknowledge that I'm asking a lot of you to do this across hierarchy,
so don't start with the hardest of conversations
then, right? Start across relationships that feel a little bit easier to practice with,
right? Show up
next week and practice with us in a super-safe environment where we're going to be just wishing for you to have the most success
possible.
I like to give students when they, or I actually use this myself,
but I give this sheet to students a lot, staff in my office who are trying to decide
to say yes to something or not. Here are just some questions you can ask yourself as you're trying to decide.
Sometimes, it's easy. You know, you really don't want to do it and you just say no.
Sometimes, there's really reasons you might say yes. You're a fourth-year grad student.
You're getting close to the end.
You don't really want to take a summer intern, but on the other hand, you need some mentoring skills.
This could look good on your resume.
Your PI really wants you to do it. It's not so clear yes or no,
so here's a set of questions that you can ask yourself. I
often say, "Will it matter a week from now? Will it matter a month from now?
Will it matter a year from now?" That often leads me to say no when I realize it won't matter. I
also like to ask myself, Is this a request from someone I prefer not to ignore or I can't ignore, right?
Sometimes, even if it comes from someone we can't ignore, we have to say no because of the timing or other circumstances,
but we want to be really thoughtful about that,
so here are some questions and here are some effective ways to say no.
I just wanted to give you some words. When this is hard, having a script really helps, right?,
so learning some phrases really helps. "I'm sorry.
I have a lot going on right now and really can't take on anything new."
"I'm sorry, but my current situation makes it impossible for me to say yes to this." "I'm sorry
I can't participate in this. Perhaps another time." Only use that if you really mean it,
alright?,
and often people tell me that they're asked to help out with other people, teach other
people, so I gave an example like that: "I would like to help you learn how to
do PCR or how to run the flow cytometer, but this is a really busy time for me.
Would you like to schedule a time with me and talk about it?," right?
So, you're saying no, but here's another option, and so I wanted to give that as an example.
Now, people tend to over-apologize, and the more you over-
apologize, the more likely it is people will push, so you want to say, "No. I'm sorry
I can't do that." If they ask you to reconsider, you can pause for a minute, and maybe you do want to reconsider,
but if you don't, you need to say, "I'm really sorry. Right now," right?, a little bit of broken record,
"I can't do that right now."
The other thing is don't say, "Perhaps another time," or "Please ask me again,"
unless you mean it, and, boy, did my wife and I learn this the hard way. We met a couple.
We went out one time. We were like. "Well, that was okay but not the best." We went out a second time.
I was like, "This is really not a friendship. In fact, this is a friendship we do not want." Yet,
we weren't clear enough. We got invited to something else. We said, "Oh, it's a bad time. Our son is
home that weekend. It's a bad time,"
so they invited again and it really got uncomfortable, and I think if we had just been more honest at the beginning,
it would have helped. We don't need to be mean.
We just need to say, "I'm sorry, that's not going to work out for us and we don't want to join that group."
It was a regular thing. We were going to meet every month in a group.
It's like, we don't enjoy these people. Don't say "ask again" unless you mean it,
because it's just a way to get caught, so
I earlier gave you these
questions, and
I wanted to just end by giving you a chance to see that
sort of play out in real time, so what are some options?
What's the best possible one, worse possible one, middle ones, right?, and what can I offer
to mitigate concerns? So, because a lot of folks were undergrads, I changed the example to one that would be
relevant to both undergrads and
more senior
trainees.
Usually, I have one a little bit more focused on grad school, but I think this one resonates a little better,
so you were expecting to do an internship this fall, right?
if you're an undergrad, they were going to let you in the lab and you were going to get some credit and you were going to
get some important experience for your graduate school application. Maybe you're a grad student or postdoc and you were going to do a one-day internship
in
teaching or a one-day in
internship in a policy office. If you're a post-bac, maybe you were going to go out and
do something and suddenly the person who
is able to make that happen says no, so what options are available?
Well, so you can talk to the PI and explain why the internship is really important, hoping she's going to change her mind,
so you can try to convince her. You could also just let go and hope to find another
opportunity somewhere else or not at all. You could just say, "Okay, well, someone in power said no. I'm done."
Those are the two extremes. You could talk to your PI and try to find a way to make it happen, just with some
adjustments. You could, so if you go back to that grid, if you think about it, one was
the, letting it go is sort of avoiding. Here, you're trying to compromise or collaborate:
"Is there something we can work out?"
You could
complain to the department chair, with the hope that they'll
intervene and fix it for you, and my guess is you could come up with other options here. Okay, so what are all the options?
Generally, at the start of being assertive or having a difficult conversation or wanting to have an assertive conversation,
we see one option and that's what makes this so scary, when there's just one option, right?
Often then, it really feels like the risk is high, but if we work hard to think of creative solutions,
sometimes we can go into a meeting and offer an alternate that works, and suddenly
we get what we want, so best possible outcome here:
"Well, my PI would reconsider and I get to do that when school starts." The worst: "I alienate my PI
by going to talk to them, by the decision I make. I can't easily ask for a recommendation letter.
I can't come back another time," whatever, depending on the situation, the worst possible outcome,
but it starts with, "I alienate my PI by what I decide to do."
What are some middle outcomes? Well, you could do a virtual
internship, work on a review with the promise of starting back in the lab later.
That's if it's an undergrad situation.
If you're a grad student and you really wanted to spend that time in another office,
maybe a middle outcome is,
because things are so busy getting back, you
defer it for three months and your PI agrees to let you start later.
Another middle outcome could be half the amount of time as I was hoping to do,
and then what can I offer?, and it really depends on the scenario,
but here you could offer to be more flexible with scheduling. You could, if you want to do your internship now
virtually, you could have a list of activities that you could do virtually. You know, you could,
it might be that you can't mitigate their concerns until you understand them better,
so maybe you need to say, "Can you explain your reasons, so I can try to address your worries?"
So, this is an example of how to use the best/worst/middle/what-can-I-offer
model. A
lot of this is about prepping and preparing and practicing.
Remember to seek guidance when the stakes are high. Be really mindful that it takes practice.
We really need
to practice and be very intentional about how to have that discussion.
You, especially if it's somebody who matters to you a lot and you have time to prepare, you want to prepare.
Sometimes, we don't. Somebody just comes and says, "Hey, can you do this?," and we are
given a chance to practice assertiveness right then. I
want you to appreciate two important things about developing your assertiveness skills. One is you can't make anyone do anything
they don't want to do, so it doesn't mean you've failed if you didn't get your
needs met. You tried. You can't make anybody else do something.
The only
person's behavior you can control is yours.
That's the correlate that goes with that, which means, if it gets heated and you stay calm, you did a great job.
You cannot take on
the outcome or how the other person behaved and use that to sort of be down on
yourself about how things went. I
encourage you to use journaling and other wellness strategies before and afterward as you're working to develop your
assertiveness skills, because it really does take time and practice. Whether we want to tone down an
aggressive style or tone up a passive style,
they are both hard and old habits really, really take effort to change,
and I just want you to remember that it's not always going to go well. You should embrace your growth mindset.
These are chances to learn, and so I just
want to wrap up with this slide, which reminds you of all of the important things
I've already talked about, how important self-awareness is, that this is a part of life-long learning,
so find your growth mindset. You have to put your oxygen mask on yourself first,
so learn to say no. If you can't set boundaries and say no, you will always feel exhausted and depleted.
Asking for help is nearly always hard and nearly always part of the solution, so reach out to mentors and get support about this.
Appreciate that we are all a product of all the messages we received and all the examples
we were shown, and it can take time to identify those and deal with them, and again,
I'll end by saying, To do well, we have to be well. There are already a ton of questions in the chat box,
and so I'm going to just go ahead and start with that.
So, "in terms of talking with mentors, how open and vulnerable you should be when talking about professional
issues. If you're too
vulnerable, it's easy for people to dismiss your concerns as
emotional, but if you hold things close,
people don't realize how important it is."
You know,
that really starts not only by an awareness of how important this is to you but also an awareness of your boss and
what is appropriate
sharing with that particular individual. I tend to feel that many students don't share enough,
but I also see students who go too far, and that's why
practicing with a mentor can be so powerful and important, someone where you're more comfortable. You say,
"Well, how do you know?
What about what I just said?," and maybe that mentor's going to say, "That was a little too much information. You might have stopped here,"
but with some TIs, we can share. With my boss, I
find with this boss I have right now, I can share a lot. With the boss I had previously,
in my last job, I didn't want to share very
much
except the facts, because of
the person he was and the way he interacted, so it's a lot about awareness of self and others.
"Can you demonstrate some assertive statements, common phrases
used?" "I would appreciate" is a great way to start an assertive statement.
"I'd like to talk with you about something that concerns me" is a good entree to an assertive conversation. Notice
I'm starting with "I":
"I am concerned about
the timing of this project. Can we talk about it?" Very clear, right?, and hopefully that helps.
Here's a comment from a trainee thanking me for acknowledging Black students and trainees of color,
and I want to thank you for giving me feedback about that and also
say that I think
all of us
have a heightened awareness right now to be
sensitive and you should hold us to it moving forward as well,
and so if I am ever not sensitive, you should put that in the questions as well, and
thank you for for making comment about that. I appreciate it.
"Can you go over how to communicate with other people who might have aggressive or passive-aggressive communication?"
I'm going to talk about aggressive for a minute.
When people are very heated, you can take a really deep breath.
Sometimes, that signals to them to slow down, but it also helps you slow down. You
don't want to match their
aggression,
so they're yelling and you start to yell, and I think that that just is upsetting, and especially across power,
it doesn't always work very well,
but you might want to stand a little taller.
You might want to make a little bit stronger eye contact. You might want to use your body language to convey
your confidence a little bit more. You also could say to someone who's being aggressive,
"I'm feeling a little bit
overwhelmed by your communication style right now," and I know you're rolling your eyes,
but somebody once used that to me and, boy, was it helpful, because I
was feeling passionate, not angry,
but that passion was looking like anger to somebody and, boy, was it helpful, and
so, if it's a person you're comfortable with, to say, "Boy, right now,
I'm a little overwhelmed by your communication," can be very helpful.
Passive
communication,
so you're talking to someone and you're not getting much. You could say, "I really would appreciate
hearing your thoughts and feelings about this."
So, you're working on that project and
you put an idea out there, and the honest truth is you feel like it's a damn good idea and you'd love for
everybody to take it, but you can't tell if they're excited or just
agreeing to agree, and you could pause for a moment and say, "Hey, I know I'm sort of excited here,
but I'd really like to hear what you have to say,"
and then, like I just did there, pause for
a little bit, longer than I just did, to give people a chance to speak up,
so I hope those are some examples that work. You know,
the honest truth is that I'm giving this workshop and you're asking such great questions, and I'm thinking, "Whoa,
you know, I
have some things to learn in this.
 and "Are my examples going to really work?"
I feel like this is a challenge for everyone life-long,
and so I hope those examples helped. "What should I do if I've been avoiding something for so long
and I don't want to avoid it anymore? How do I make that shift?"
You know,
you just started making that shift. You started making that shift by acknowledging that you don't want to keep avoiding this, and
then you have to go through those questions: So who is this
about, and what is it about, and how important is the person to me?,
so that I can move slowly and with respect, and maybe that conversation starts with a really soft,
"There's been something that has been bothering me for a long time
that I'd really like to share with you. When might be a good time?," but I don't think you just, you know,
sometimes people get really excited about making a change and it
translates into really fast action. I think generally, if we've been putting something off,
we've been putting it off for a lot of good reasons.
They go back to those safety issues that I talked about and they go back to those messages that we got and
how we deal with those messages in various communities, and so
starting to deal with something you've put off
starts with some self-compassion that there are reasons, and it involves getting support to do it, and
it really starts when you go talk to the person with, "I acknowledge
I've been putting this off, but I value our relationship and I don't want to put it off anymore."
I really encourage you to get support.
"What do you do when your PI doesn't care about when you express your feelings and is turned off by it?'
Yeah, it's a hard place to be, because one of the things we really want is for our feelings to be acknowledged. Even if somebody
doesn't give us what we want, it really feels good for them to say, "I
understand you're really angry about this." I
think it's a sort of first principle that
people acknowledge what we said, so
it depend. If you're in, and I'm going to talk about mentoring a lot in the last
part of the series, the last talk in August, if this is a long-term relationship and you are really,
there's a lot of positive happening but some of your needs aren't met, you try to meet them other places.
You
start to have a realistic view of your PI and you express your feelings somewhere else,
so you come to your PI with logical arguments and you deal with your feelings at a
resilience discussion group, at a student support group, out on the tennis court, at the gym, etc.
You find people to mentor you beyond your PI.
Sometimes, though, you feel that it's comfortable to say to, you know, depending on the relationship,
it might feel comfortable to say, you know,
"I want to tell you that when you tell me not to get emotional or when you dismiss my
feelings and just turn right back to work, it makes it much harder for me to focus on work,
and so could we talk about how to work better together?,"
and so many of these questions are based on the context of how
supportive that person is, how well you know them, how much you know them.
The name of the book about being assertive is "Your Perfect Right."
"What if you aren't sure if it is a request or a demand?"
Yeah. "For example, my friend's PI frequently makes requests that really feel more like directions."
You know, sometimes I think
the best way to to handle that is with a question, and I actually think another assertiveness skill that I maybe should is asking
questions out of curiosity,
so,
you know, somebody says something and you say, "Would you mind
giving me a sense of how important this is to you."
I used to tell people in my lab,
but now I joke with people in my office, if I suggest something one time, it's Sharon talking out loud and thinking out loud.
It's probably not a big deal to ignore. If I say something two times, you know,
"We really should do," it's probably worth asking me a few questions about why, and if I say it three times,
it's really important for us to talk about. It's really nice when you
can start to understand your boss, and that's called managing up when you start to get a sense of your boss's
personality and you adjust to it,
but I think if my boss
said something, "I think it might be a great idea if you do," and I have a feeling usually that's
more of a demand or an instruction, I might say,
"I just want to be clear. On a scale of one to ten, how important this is to you." Now, sometimes people make these
requests and you already have a really, really full plate. You're doing six experiments
now. How are you going to fit in a seventh? You might respond back by saying, "I hear this is important.
Can we talk about
reprioritizing some other things?"
Over time,
you'll get better with using questions to figure that out.
"When a style arrives from a single event or something that happened within a few months, rather than from a longer
period of time." You know,
I'm not an expert in this and I don't know, but I'm going to say one thing that I think is true, that I've seen students
become really
passive after a really traumatic interaction with their PI or some other person of authority,
where I've known them for a while and I've seen one way of moving in the world and one way of
communicating and being
assertive, and then something happens and it really changes, so I do think that it's possible that a style
can be changed by a one-off event, or you do a
rotation or
work with somebody where, day after day, you're really
not being treated with respect, and it can lead you to feel sort of
hopeless and helpless and lead to a more passive style,
so I think there's some truth to that, but I'll be honest and tell you that I'm not an expert. "I
have been trying to be assertive in how I want to move forward with my research and my advisor,
but he's not good at communicating with me and sometimes does not answer my emails."
I have a suggestion for the not-answered emails. I've actually
realized now that people in my office use it with me, and I have to say that it
works a lot of the time, not all of the time, and that is
that somebody says, "So I'm going to do this and this, and then I'm going to do that." Fill in the blanks there. "I
hope this is okay with you, and I'd like to hear your thoughts.
If I don't hear from you by Friday, I'll assume it's okay to go ahead."
Now, that works a lot of times, but again, none of the strategies I give you are a hundred percent
strategies, because I don't know you and I don't know your PI.
I don't know your adviser, but for a lot of us, that is the gentle kick in the butt to say,
"Oh, no, I would prefer you do it that way."
Another thing, in terms of managing up and knowing your PI, we'll again cover this a lot later, is
maybe email's not the best, and so you send an email and say, "I'll drop by tomorrow,"
and then you drop by, which is, of course, not so easy now
but hopefully will be easy again soon,
and you say, "Hey, I sent that email about this experiment or that experiment. I sent that email about the abstract.
Did you have a chance to read it?,"
and so that's one way of trying to get an answer, actually two ways of trying to get an answer.
Somebody says that they're currently reading "Negotiating at Work" by Deborah Kolb and that there's a lot of similar things
in that,
and so that's another book I'll recommend, based on this recommendation.
She talks about, when you're asked to do something that you don't want to do, then you can incorporate a "yes-and"
approach, and so I'm not, I like "yes-and" and I use it,
although I worry, if you don't want to do something and you say yes, that you might get stuck
doing something you don't want to do, but it is a great strategy, so
that's when you agree to something, but you want to make it clear that something has to give: "Yes,
I'll do this, and I also won't be able to do
that." I
encourage people to check out the book to learn more about that.
"Many times, I doubt my facts when I want to prove something to a teacher, a parent,
family, and then I don't say anything because I feel that I'm wrong.
Is that a result of a certain style I have or is it just overthinking?
How can I change my mindset?," and again, you know, I
don't know you
enough or the situation enough to fully answer that, but I do think that some of us
got messages growing up where everything we said was questioned back,
so
we say something to somebody like, "Really? Did it happen that way? Don't you think it happened this way?
No, that's not exactly right. Isn't it this way?," where everything we say gets questioned, and that can really lead us to
doubt ourself, so that could be a part of some messages that you got.
It also could be a part of overthinking. Remember that a lot of us tend, in that triangle
of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, a lot of us tend to get really caught up there in our thoughts, and we let our thoughts
really take control. Again, the fact that you recognize this is
really the first step to making change. I mean, it really is the beginning. Now, there might be times,
sometimes, having the facts all right
is not required. If it's about what you want or feel, it's not always
based on a fact, so you might learn how to pause and realize that you're letting your
"Maybe I'm not right" take over and you could ask yourself, Does it really matter if I have every detail right or not?
It doesn't really matter. I mean,
I was just talking with my wife about some safety things around the pandemic and spending time with a friend, and
we got sort of lost in details,
and I finally said, "Well, actually, do these details matter?,"
and we both, it was great, because we were getting really caught and it was not going anywhere very well.
We both paused and realized the details weren't so important.
What was important was she had real fears about that situation, and so why were we debating it?
It was so much easier
as soon as we let go of, do we really need to have all the facts?
Remember that, in a lot of situations, we don't have all the facts.
We're never going to know if we're fully right or wrong,
and so maybe you need to learn, when you hear that, to question that voice and say, "Does it really matter?,"
so that would be my thoughts about that.
"I have some trouble trying to communicate my thoughts to my American lab mates, but not with international ones. How do you think I can improve my
communication with them? I have the feeling that it is difficult to communicate to them my feelings about behaviors that affect me."
You know, the honest truth is that it's a huge gap in this
workshop to not talk about cultural elements of communication,
and I really wanted to talk more today about assertiveness and I will talk a little bit about communication styles
and I'll try to
make sure to add a little bit about cross-cultural communication.
It's been weighing on me since the first time I delivered this webinar that we really need to develop more
resources for our trainees. We're such an international
community and such a diverse community and we all come from such different experiences
that we all need to really appreciate that
everyone's style is going to be different and that it's our responsibility to work hard to adjust to the other person's style.
You know,
it's hard to
come in to an environment and to feel a little bit or a lot like the other and like an outsider,
and I guess, the more we slow down and try to get to know people,
the more when we see a
sort of confused look on their face, perhaps the more we say, "Maybe I didn't communicate clearly.
Can you help me with that?," that might help, but I also think that, you know,
I want to make it clear that it's a two-way street.
Your colleagues are
responsible for making an effort to learn to communicate, so I don't want you to be hard on yourself,
that this is all just about you, okay?,
but you can use that curious questioning, you know, and talk with them about it:
"Hey, I really want to be a part of the lab. I really want to contribute effectively.
I
sometimes feel like you don't understand me.
Are there some things I can do to help?" You might even have some thoughts about what they could do to help, and
you might feel confident putting that on the table.
Alright, what else? "I am having
a bunch of trouble with my internet." I don't know if I read your previous question.
I did, okay, because I just answered that.
"This is risky. In case your PI likes to micro-manage,
it might be something." Oh, probably the one where I said, "If I don't hear from you by Monday,
I'll just go ahead." You're right.
Every one of these strategies
both has a chance to be incredibly successful
and it has chance to cause all kinds of headache and to be risky.
The key thing is for you to view these not as "I'm going to do it this way,"
but as, "Here is a whole set of
strategies and approaches that I can use," because you're right.
It could be risky. My experience with some people who like to micro-manage
is, the minute you say, "If I don't hear from you,
I'll go ahead with
Plan A," is that often they say,
"Oh,
I got some time." Not always, and then you really need to know
your PI and to decide how to handle it, but you're right. You're totally right.
"Today's presentation made me reflect on how I approach situations, how others view me."
It did the same for me as I'm doing, as I'm giving this workshop.
I'm thinking maybe I'm going to go to the small group next week and learn some skills,
because you all ask such thoughtful questions and put out some really great
ideas.
Many of the comments that you made show a
great sense of
growing self-awareness,
a sense of
responsibility to others that makes me feel really optimistic,
and a willingness to address hard things to put into the question box.
I know it maybe feels somewhat anonymous, but it's really not. You still have to put your ideas out and you put,
you made
important comments and asked important questions, and so I have a feeling I would learn a lot from all of you
as part of the small groups. I hope that you'll all find time to be there
next week.
I hope that all of you who are interested in the long term in graduate school or professional
school or who are unsure and just want to collect data, I hope you register for the grad fair.
It's coming up soon. I'm really excited about it.
We've never done it virtually, and I feel a little disappointed about it, but we have
three hundred schools coming to talk with you, and that's a result of them being able to do it virtually,
so think about how much information you could get over the course of that week, so
with that, I will
remind you that
you will get an email from, I
think,
Dr. Klenke, from Uli.
Some of you know her from small groups.
I'm sure you'll get an email with an invitation to register for a small group. You actually have to register. Just coming today
doesn't mean you'll get the link. You actually have to register for the small group.
I want to really, really push you all to attend a small group.
The learning is not listening to me here,
and while some of the learning is journaling and thinking about it and reading over the slides,
a lot of the learning is sharing with others, so I know it's so easy to say,
"Oh, that's a cool idea,
but I'm gonna be busy." Find time next Wednesday at either one o'clock Eastern Time or three o'clock Eastern Time.
Every time I talk with all of you, I feel so much more
positive and optimistic for the future. It makes me believe that somehow
science and healthcare and
community and the way we treat each other is going to all change for the better,
so thank you all very, very much for today and for coming to all of our different events. Please be well.
Please stay safe, and I'll talk to you in two weeks. Thank you.
You
