You want to start something new and have this new goal or dream you want to pursue. Then you look around and find that people around you don’t support it, they don’t provide the support you need. Your husband or wife, or your partner, are not supportive of this idea, your colleagues or friends think it is silly to do this, and maybe your supervisor or your boss are not supportive of it either.
This could have a big effect on you leading to you limiting yourself to which extend you want to pursue your goal or even to giving up on this dream completely. I have found myself doing it quite often in the past: having this new goal or dream and then giving up on it when not finding the support around myself.
There is a belief out there that this is what it takes to be successful: to have the support from those people around you. In fact I chatted to someone this week who has interviewed a successful female professor here in Edinburgh. This professor attributed a lot of her success to having a supportive husband and a supportive supervisor. And this is what we are often told – and if we don’t have this kind of support, we limit ourselves in our goals and dreams and sometimes we give up on them completely.
Today I want to tell you how you CAN start pursuing your goal or dream despite of the lack of such support and what you really need for that.
You don’t have to have the support from those people around you – your partner, your parents or your boss – and what you actually need is to find a support in a form of a mentor or a coach. A mentor or a coach is going to help you to get clear on this goal or dream and to support you and cover you back ALL the way until you’ve achieved your goal. And it won’t even matter so much whether you are getting support from people around you – your partner, your colleagues or friends.
What is going to happen is that you are going to move through the 3 known stages of how people react to the changes you are making: 1) ridicule, 2) resistance or opposition, and 3) then finally acceptance. By having a mentor or a coach you have someone helping and morally supporting you through all those stages of people ridiculing you, showing opposition and then finally accepting your idea. And at some point you find yourself successful and it does not even matter any more how people around you react – their final acceptance of your idea comes as a bonus.
And in my own personal experience I have lots of examples when I was first limiting myself and not pursuing my goals and dreams because I believe that I need to have the support from my partner, parent or supervisor. Taking as an example my idea of starting my own business, offering help to scientists around the world, and founding my own company, Productivity for Scientists, I’ve encountered so many unsupportive and discouraging comments!
The colleagues of my own level and more senior scientists have been telling me that it will never work, that scientists don’t have money to pay for this or that I won’t be as appealing to scientists if I transition from being a scientist to running a business full time. The colleagues would tell me this again and again trying to convince me not to do this. My husband, although he has been supporting in many different ways such as looking after our children during a lot of time, he has been quite sceptical about my idea of starting my own business. My mother has always seen me as a scientist, and invested a lot of time and effort in supportiing the advances in my career, educating as well as pushing me along this career path; she always saw me as a scientist and wished me a big recognition and success in my scientific career. And when I had this idea of starting my own company to help scientists around the world – I could not even mention it to her!
Instead I found a mentor. And now I attribute a lot of success to the support I received from her – she helped me to go through the whole process step-by-step. And here I am! In just two years after I had this idea for the first time and decided that I am going for it – I have a successful business! This summer I filled my part-time practice completely when I still worked part-time at the University. Now that I am running my business “full-time” my practice is almost full, I have one or maybe two places left. And because the practice is getting so busy and we are expecting another child, I am in the process of transitioning from working one-on-one with people to offering group coaching programs (I’ve just launched my first group program). It’s been an amazing journey.
And people around me still continue to be sceptical, people tell me now that my business is going uphill initially and then I will eventually decline – and I hear this kind of discouraging things all the time. But you know what! I am in a position not to care about it because I have a mentor who supports me; she provides support to me on a weekly basis as well as during the week. And this is exactly what I offer to other scientists!
Recently I had PhD students coming to me and saying that they have this goal of completing their PhD thesis but lack support. Sometimes even their supervisor does not care anymore if or when they complete their thesis. Sometimes students find themselves loosing passion for the subject or coming against other obstacles on their way to completion. And yet they know that they need or want to complete it, because when they do they will have their freedom back to move on with their life and to explore other things in their life. They could finally close this chapter of their life and move on – and it means a lot to them.
If this resonates with YOU, do check this online course “Start writing and complete your thesis” that I have just launched. It is maybe that you find yourself procrastinating with writing or having all those negative thoughts around your thesis – this course will help you to overcome these challenges and start writing.
If you are not a PhD student, but a postdoc or staff, I hope you found the above tips useful as well.
Your Productivity for Scientists assignment for this week:
1) reconnect with the goal or dream that you had recently in which you maybe limited yourself because of seeming lack of support.
2) start looking around for support. There might be a local mentoring scheme at your University, or a regional, or even national mentoring scheme that you can join. In fact this week I was at a launch event of a coaching scheme for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology that is being offered all across Scotland. And of course you know that I am always here for you, providing this kind of support and I always update you with the programs that I offer to support you all the way towards achieving you goals and dreams.
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