My room with a view.
If someone was to ask what the key things are that have made me a happier person, I would have to say it was knowing myself and learning to trust myself.
Having faith in my own instincts, instead of the words of another.
When you don’t know who you are or what you stand for, it becomes very hard to make decisions. I don’t mean choices like green top milk or blue top milk. I mean decisions about your future. Should I change jobs? Should I leave this relationship? Should I buy that house or travel?
By now we have all learnt how strong the relationship between the body and the mind can be. Your core values are buried deep within you and when something happens that goes against them, your body will find a way to tell you.
I have very powerful instincts. For me, I feel it in my tummy. My tummy always tells me when something isn’t ok. My tummy tells me when I am making a decision just because it is easier or safer, rather than right.
And what happens when I ignore my instincts…tummy upsets. It literally feels like my stomach and intestines have wound themselves into a tight ball and I feel stressed.
There have been times when I sat with that stress, sat with that sore tummy and refused to acknowledge what my mind was trying to tell me: ‘You are not being true to yourself’.
When I first started my PhD, someone wise told me: ‘you will learn a lot over the next three years, but most of it will not be about child brain development, it will be about yourself.’
At the time I nodded and smiled politely, but thought he was diving a bit deep.
I am focusing on one of the most crucial parts of my research right now. The results.
Obviously I can’t discuss them on my blog until they are published, but these findings have taught me as much about myself as they have about pediatric research, just as my wise friend predicted.
When you are first accepted into a PhD you spend a good couple of months combing the literature and learning everything you can about your field. A few things kept jumping out at me and my gut told me to pursue them, even though I couldn’t find any quantitative studies around the topic.
So I built this area of new interest into the model for my PhD research proposal. And when I presented this model, someone academically higher than me with much more experience told me:
‘you probably won’t find any correlations with this, it could be a waste of money’.
But I decided to do it anyway. My gut was telling me to have faith. If we find nothing, we find nothing. It will still be valuable knowledge for clinicians and researchers alike.
It turns out, that this new topic, has displayed the biggest correlations of all. By taking the risk, walking off the beaten track and investigating an area that many before thought was pointless, I may have stumbled upon something that is yet to be published anywhere in the world.
And I know what you are thinking. Did I go and have my ‘I told you so’ moment with said senior person. Nope. I just did a little tribal dance in my mind, stomping through the dust and waving my hands in the air excitedly...
At the end of the day, I am grateful to the person who doubted me. That person forced me to become an innovator. To lead, rather than follow. And to learn the most valuable lesson of all…
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
-Steve Jobbs.
Much love XX
