Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills
to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor.
As clinicians, we spend a decade or more as trainees learning to take care of patients.
When we finally start our careers, we want to build research programs, but then we find
that our years of clinical training did not adequately prepare us to lead our research
program.
Through no fault of our own, we struggle to find mentors, and when we can't, we quit.
However, clinicians hold the keys to the greatest research breakthroughs.
For this reason, the Clinician Researcher podcast exists to give academic clinicians
the tools to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor.
Now introducing your host, Toyosi Onwuemene.
Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast.
I'm your host, Toyosi Onwuemene, and it is an absolute pleasure to be talking with you
today.
I'm talking to you today about your superpower.
Yes, you have a superpower that you can leverage to accelerate your research career, and I
want to share that superpower with you right now because I think that sometimes we feel
like we're powerless, but we actually have superpowers that we can tap into, and I want
to share with you what they are.
But before I share it with you, I want to just remind you about superheroes, right?
So superheroes have superpowers, and I love that we are in an age, actually, to be honest,
we've always been in the age where there are superheroes, and they've been on display
for the longest of times.
But I feel like we're in a space now where there's just an onslaught of superheroes with
amazing powers, and it's like, oh my gosh, I can't believe the superhero has this power
and then that power.
But anyway, superheroes are amazing because they have superpowers.
But here's the thing about superheroes that is really important is that although they
can have superhuman strength, maybe they have the ability to fly like Superman, they also
have weaknesses.
Okay, so let's use Superman as the quintessential superhero.
And I know he may not be your favorite superhero.
I just want you to understand that this is not about favorites.
This is just about illustrating an example so that I can show you how you leverage your
superpower and avoid your weaknesses.
Okay, so superheroes, and we're using Superman as an example, have superpowers.
And they usually don't just have one superpower.
They usually have like a group of superpowers.
Like if maybe they have, you know, Superman, again, as our example, has incredible, incredible
vision.
He can fly and he has superhuman strength.
So let's just take those three, those three powers.
But Superman also has a big weakness.
It's kryptonite.
And every time that Superman is exposed to kryptonite, he just withers.
He just cannot do anything.
Like all of his superpowers just crumble.
It's like he's an ordinary person.
And if care is not taken, the kryptonite will extinguish Superman, right?
Okay, so this is really important to recognize that this whole concept of the superhero is
about someone who has incredible powers in one area, but then they have a weakness.
It's not just a weakness.
It's a weakness that could potentially just completely take away all their superpowers,
make them all irrelevant, but also weakness that could kill them.
Okay, now this is all metaphorical.
I know you're like, I'm no superhero, but I want you to just work with me here as I
show you your superpowers.
And I also show you what to do with your weaknesses, your superhero weaknesses, and show you how
to manage them so that they don't crush your superpowers, but also so that they don't kill
your research career.
And I do mean that.
So you're really talking about the superpowers you have in your research career.
Okay, what are those superpowers?
Who is the superpower?
Okay, are you ready?
Your superpower is your, the power to matrices.
Your power to choose is your one superpower.
It gives you control.
You have things that you control through your superpower of choice.
And it's just the one superpower of choice, but it gives you so many, so many powers come
out of that superpower because you can do whatever you choose if it's the thing that's
supported by your superpower.
Okay, so that's your superpower is your power of choice.
Your weakness is your weaknesses when you try to control the things that you have no
superpower over.
Your weakness is when you try to control the things that you have no power over.
So the things you're not in control of.
And the problem with them as weaknesses is that they will come and affect all your superpowers
because instead of choosing the things you have control over, you're focusing on the
things you have no control over, it'll like drain all your powers and the choices that
you're making otherwise.
And it may even kill, derail, squish your research career.
Let's talk about it.
Okay.
Think about the fact that there are very few things in life we really control.
There are very, very, very few things that we control.
We actually don't even control our own breathing.
I mean, we can, we can interrupt our breathing, but we're breathing when we're sleeping and
we're not in control of that, right?
So there are many automatic processes that we're not in control of, but the one that
we are the most in control of is our conscious thought.
That is our superpower is our conscious thought.
We use our conscious thought to move our bodies.
These are conscious thought to make decisions.
These are conscious thought from motor skills.
We use our conscious thought.
And so it is so powerful because the moment we say I choose this, right?
I exercise power over my will so that I, that's a superpower.
And I know you've looked at it and you're like, well, yeah, but so does everybody.
I just want you to focus now, focus on you.
Cause it's very easy to just start to compare yourself with other people and then lose track
of where you are.
We're just talking about you.
Please.
Just all eyes on you right now.
You have a superpower in your ability to control your will and therefore the choices that you
make.
You have control over the ability to, to control your will and therefore the choices that you
make.
You do not have control over the choices that other people make.
And anytime you leave controlling the things you control, that's your will, the choices
you make to focus on the choices other people make, it is kryptonite to you.
Because you have no power, no control over other people's choices.
If you are overwhelmed with situations in which you are trying to control other people's
choices, it diminishes your power to make your own choices and it extinguishes the work
you're supposed to be doing.
So I want to share with you what you control.
There are many things you control.
You're pretty super amazing human, but I'm focused right now on the things you control
that advance your research career.
Remember the thing you control is your will and the power to choose.
I control my will, therefore I choose.
Right?
Okay.
So what, what do you have control over?
So first of all, the thing you have control over are your thoughts.
Yeah.
You control the thoughts you think.
I know sometimes your thoughts just run away and many times they head in a downward spiral
and they're just on their way somewhere and it's like, wait a minute, when did you get
your thought?
But you control the thoughts that you have and the way you think about your career.
You control your thoughts and your thoughts drive your career.
Therefore you control the way you think about your career.
Now where do we usually go with our thoughts?
Usually we don't discipline our thoughts.
We just let our thoughts do whatever.
And for every thought, every thought is like a wayward child.
They will keep running away.
And there are different ways in which parents try to tame those wayward children, those
toddlers who are running away.
Sometimes parents will get a leash.
I don't necessarily advocate for a leash.
I'm just saying that there are different ways of keeping this wayward thought train in check.
You got to figure out what works for you.
Some parents get a leash, but some parents discipline their children.
They teach their children the discipline of staying within the range of mom or staying
within the range of mom and dad.
They teach their children the discipline.
So you choose.
You can either have a leash for your thoughts or you can discipline your thoughts so that
they don't think outside of the range that does not support your forward motion.
What do I mean by that?
You have had thoughts of, I'm never going to succeed.
I'm never going to win.
This research is never going to amount to nothing.
I'm going to wake up and be embarrassed.
I'm going to be so ashamed.
Someone's going to scoop me.
You've had those thoughts.
Do they serve you?
No.
They mostly don't serve you.
You might be like, oh no, they motivate me.
Like, I don't know.
I don't know if I would agree with that.
Do those thoughts motivate you or are they actually demotivating?
Because when you said you didn't think you could make that grant deadline, guess what
you did.
You stopped trying.
And then you didn't make the grant deadline.
So I don't know if that thought was serving you.
You're like, well, you know, it made me recognize that I needed to do better.
Maybe.
Maybe that was it.
Maybe.
Maybe your discipline thought life told you it was unrealistic.
But maybe what it did was it gave you permission and it gave you the excuse to stop trying.
And so I want you to think differently about your thoughts because you control the thoughts
you think.
And yeah, thoughts can come into your mind where you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait,
wait, wait, wait, wait.
Where did that thought come from?
They happen.
That does happen.
But you have the power to catch the thought, pause it, and then let it go.
Say, oh, no, I'm not thinking about this not succeeding.
I'm not going to do that.
And so I want to invite you to catch your thoughts about your research.
What thoughts are you constantly thinking?
And how do you change those thoughts?
How do you change from, oh, no, this is never going to work to this is guaranteed to be
successful?
Because here's what happens.
When you think this is guaranteed not to work, you start producing actions that guarantee
things not working.
I guarantee this is not going to work.
So when you go in to talk to the mentors, your attitude, that's self-the-mentor.
And they're like, I don't want to work with you.
I mean, like, there you go.
I knew it.
I knew it wasn't going to work.
Well, you made sure.
So of course you knew it because your thoughts produce the actions that guaranteed that
outcome.
So that's one way that your thought life may not have been serving you in your research.
But when you thought, hey, this is going to work, you went up to the mentor and you're
like, OK, I need you to mentor me in this thing.
And the mentor is like, I don't have time for you.
You're like, this is going to work.
Mentor, you're going to have time for me.
And you have bugging the mentor until the mentor was like, you know what, 30 minutes
on Monday.
And then will you leave me alone forever?
And you're like, yeah, of course.
And then you're like, oh, I knew it was going to work.
And it worked.
Because you knew it was going to work, you put in the actions that led you to make it
work.
Do you see how these thoughts work for or against us?
And so if all of your life you have been using your thoughts in your research to decide that
it's not going to work and therefore create the actions that make it not work, what if
you used your thoughts intentionally to serve your research?
Because when you say this is going to work, then you start to ask yourself, well, how
can I make it work?
And then you start to produce the actions that lead to it working.
And then you really enhance your research career.
And so I know that you may be surrounded by people who use their thoughts to destroy everything,
who say it's never going to work, it's going to be awful.
And you know how inspired you get around people like that.
Not very much.
And so what you've got to do is to move away from anybody who changes your thoughts such
that they are not thoughts that serve your career.
Now if you don't want to succeed as a research researcher, it's okay to have thoughts about
not succeeding because you don't want to.
But because you are someone who wants to lead research, because you're someone who wants
to be successful in your scholarship, and the only thoughts that make sense are thoughts
that allow you to achieve that.
Thoughts that say this research project is going to work, because then it helps you figure
out how to make it work.
Because what you may be thinking is that in its current format it may not work, but because
this whole program is going to work, do what it takes, I'm going to make it work.
You're able to do that.
And I invite you to take control of your thoughts about your research career and discipline
them to be thoughts that enhance your forward motion.
Now I don't tell you that disciplining your thoughts is going to be easy, but I'm telling
you that you control the thoughts you think.
And I'm inviting you to take the steps needed to take control.
You are in control of your thoughts.
That's number one.
Number two is that you control the way you spend your time.
I want to say that one again, because sometimes it feels like a surprise to people.
It's like, wait a minute, I control the way I spend my time?
Yes you do.
Okay, so maybe you're 80% clinical.
That means you have clinic Monday, morning and afternoon, Tuesday, morning and afternoon.
Maybe you have clinic every day except Friday.
Okay.
But you're in control of how you use that time.
You're like, oh no, no, no, my patients are in control.
They're not.
The patients may be scheduled at eight o'clock, but you're in control of how you manage those
15 minutes in which they are scheduled.
Do you spend time outside of the exam room looking them up before you go in?
You choose that.
Do you go in the room and then look at the computer while also talking with them?
You choose that.
Do you go in already having written the note?
You choose that.
You are in control of the way you spend your time.
You're in control of how much time you spend writing notes.
You're in control of how much you allow the environment to interrupt your work.
Maybe you keep getting interrupted in your flow of thought.
You're in control of getting up and going to another location, closing the door, making
sure nobody interrupts you.
So you're in control of the way you spend your time.
Even when your time is spoken for, you're in control of how that time shows up for you.
Similarly, you are in control of the time spent for your research and writing.
You're in control of that.
You're like, well, I have clinic four days a week.
And you do not have clinic on Friday.
Well, I have administrative tasks.
That's fine.
You are in control of the way you spend that time.
I just need to remind you of your power because you are a superhero who is not maximizing
their superpowers.
And that's why we need to talk about your superhereness.
You cannot be a superhero if you're not using your superpowers.
And one of your superpowers is controlling the way you spend their time.
I'm inviting you to step into your superpower and to stop saying, I have no choice.
I have no choice.
I have to do this.
Oh my goodness.
If I don't do it, nothing will happen if you don't do it because you have a choice.
Maybe something happens, but you're still choosing.
And you are in control of these choices you make.
You are in control of the way you use your time.
You are in control of whether you spend all three days catching up on notes from your
clinic on Monday or whether your notes are done by the end of the day.
You are in control of the way you spend your time.
You are in control of whether you use three hours to write one note or whether you condense
it into 20 minutes.
You are in control of the way you spend your time.
That's the superpower that I am excited to see you take advantage of.
Okay.
Number three superpower.
I like this one.
You are in control of your schedule.
You are in control of your calendar.
Now you may say, well, the child has soccer at 3 PM.
What do you mean I control my schedule?
You control your schedule because you're choosing to take your child to the soccer game.
You choose.
You put that on the schedule you chose.
Like, well, I can't control when the game is.
You choose what's on your schedule even if you are not in control of the game.
You could say, daughter, we're not playing soccer today.
You don't want to make that choice.
But you are in control of doing that if you choose.
Or you could say, daughter, you got to go to your soccer game, but I choose not to be
there because I'm taking it off my schedule.
You could do that.
And then you could choose to pay somebody to show up there or you could choose to invite
a family member to show up for the soccer game.
But you are in control of that calendar.
You are actually also in control of your clinic calendar.
And so you're like, oh, no, there are 16 patients scheduled.
I do not control that.
Yes, there are 16 patients scheduled.
But if you wake up with a fever and you're retching, guess what happens to that schedule?
It gets cleared pretty quickly because you control your calendar.
And so it's really important that I share.
I really feel like it's important for me to emphasize this because you may not want to
make different choices.
You may not want to cancel the 16 patients on your calendar.
You may not want to.
But you recognize that in saying, I don't want to, you're making an intentional choice.
I don't want to cancel them because I don't want to have to reschedule them.
That's a great choice.
It's a well-informed choice.
But you do have control.
And so I don't want you to focus on what you don't control.
Again, it's script tonight.
We're going to talk about it shortly.
I want you to focus on what you do control and you control your calendar.
Okay, somebody put a meeting on your calendar and you're not available then.
You don't accept the meeting.
You say, hey, thank you for scheduling a meeting at 8 a.m.
But I do my writing at 8 a.m.
I can meet you at 9 45 when I'll be done with my writing.
You control your schedule.
Okay.
And you may, I just want to do one more.
It may be that, oh, the faculty meeting is at 7 a.m.
I don't control that.
You do.
You control whether the faculty meeting at 7 a.m. goes on your schedule or not.
Ellie, what do you mean?
What do you mean?
I don't show up for the faculty meeting.
All is lost.
You control what goes on your schedule.
And you can say, hey, division director who put a meeting on my calendar at 7 a.m.
I have child drop off at 7 a.m.
Would love to be at your meeting.
And if you move it to 8 a.m. I can make it.
But if you do not move it and it stays at 7 a.m., I need you to know that I'm going
to first drop off the child and then I can show up for your meeting.
Maybe at 7 45 I'll be there.
You choose.
And I get the discomfort that comes with making choices that can affect other people.
And you get to choose whether you live with that discomfort versus the discomfort of showing
up in a space that you don't feel ready to show up in yet or feeling guilty about not
having dropped off your children as you usually do just to show up for a meeting so you wouldn't
anger anybody.
Again, you are in control of your calendar.
And what's on there can be moved by you or left there by you as you choose.
Okay.
You control your schedule.
You control your calendar.
You control what goes on it, what stays on it, what meetings you go to.
Okay.
Another thing that you have superpower in is your control over who speaks into or over
your life.
You control that.
You're like, oh, no, you don't know my mentor.
You're always yelling.
You control their access to yell at you.
Now you choose your mentors.
Your mentors do not choose you.
Or maybe they do.
You mutually choose each other.
And that's a beautiful thing.
But if you have chosen a mentor and maybe you chose when you didn't know that this was
an abusive mentor, you have the power to choose not to allow this mentor to continue to be
mentoring you.
You do.
And it may be that you're like, well, we have this major project that's going on together
and I need to get this done.
It's okay.
You're choosing to say, let's continue working together until I can figure out a way, a
safe way to transition.
But what you're doing is you're actively exercising your superpower of choice to start to transition
out of what is an abusive experience.
You are choosing that.
You're exercising your superpower to get out of that experience.
As opposed to, well, I can't control what my mentor does.
I'll just take it.
If people around you, and especially if any mentors, are treating you in a way that feels
disrespectful to you, you do have a choice in helping them understand that for whatever
reason the way they're interacting with you feels disrespectful.
You also have the choice of moving on to another mentor, but you are in control of creating
access to you.
And maybe as you're phasing out relationships with this mentor who, for whatever reason,
seems to be acting abusively towards you, maybe instead of your daily meetings, you
go to once weekly meetings.
Maybe instead of your once weekly meetings, you start to do a bi-weekly meeting.
You know what?
This new Fairel Development Award that came up is really important.
I want to focus this day that we would have meetings on actually getting the mentoring
I need for development of this particular protocol.
So I'm going to meet with you every other week, and then this week I'm going to meet
with this other person.
You have that power, and you may do it in a controlled and strategic way, but you have
power to limit who has access to your life who does not enhance your life.
Now, what do you mean I have power?
It's my division chief.
I have to see him every day.
Where's your office?
Oh, is your office right next door to your division chief?
You can ask for a different office for a different reason.
I'm not inviting you to do things that you're not comfortable with, but I'm just sharing
with you that you are in control, and if somebody's influencing your life, is making your life
miserable, you control their access to you.
Maybe that's all they do is ever make your life miserable.
You control their access to you.
Maybe part of controlling that access is by not showing up where they go.
Maybe they're always at the pool at 6 a.m. in the morning.
Maybe you change your time.
You go to the pool at 4 a.m.
Maybe you go at 7 a.m.
You control who has access to speaking into your life, including the mentors that you
work with.
The last thing, number five, is you control your own investment in your career.
You control your own investment in your research career.
Now, we need support to succeed in research, and many times we find ourselves without support,
and we don't control whether other people support us or not, but we do control the investment
we make.
We control how many days a week we dedicate to writing daily.
We communicate how much time every week we commit to planning our weekly research agenda.
We commit how much time we spend creating a research agenda in the first place.
We control how much time we spend getting the skills that we need to enhance our research.
We control the investment.
And even if other people do not invest, we invest.
And that is also a financial investment as well.
I hear people saying to me, it's like, oh, coaching is so expensive.
Well, you can think of it as an expense, or you can think of it as an investment.
You can think of it as an investment.
And I have a lot of coaches, so this is not like, oh, well, I'm the only coach that could
transform your life.
I get coached, my coaches are amazing, and I coach others as well.
But here's the thing.
If you make zero investment in coaching, guess what you don't get an investment in?
You don't get a return on investment in your coaching.
Your life goes on.
But you control the investment you make, which leads to the return on your investment.
You control that investment.
You can wait until somebody else makes an investment, and then you're like, okay, now
I'll make the investment myself.
But the way it usually works is that you make the investment first.
Other people see the returns that you're getting from your investment, and then they say, you
want to come alongside and support this investment, and then they contribute too.
But until you make the investment, you may not get other people to buy into the investment.
Okay, so I talked about the superpowers, now I want to tell you about the Kryptonite.
Because you do not control what other people do, if you focus on what you do not control,
it would drag down everything you do control, because the energy you should spend in adjusting
the things you do control, you're actually spending not doing the things that you control.
The energy you spend pursuing the things you're not in control of affect the things that you
actually are in control of.
For example, you are not in control of how your mentor interprets your work.
Maybe they look at your work and you're like, look at you, you're not doing any work.
You know that for the last three days, you've been holed up in your room turning out the
pages of this proposal, and they look at it and say, you're not even really serious about
this, are you?
You don't control how they interpret the results of your work.
You control you.
But if you're working so hard to change your mentor's perspective of you, maybe your mentor
doesn't think you're really invested, you're like, how do I change this person's mind?
You don't control that.
You don't control them.
You don't control their choices.
But every time you spend waking energy into trying to control them, and you don't control
their choices, it's time that you're not spending actually moving forward in your research.
It's kryptonite.
It's kryptonite because for many of us, and especially those of us who in one way or the
other may be underrepresented in the academy, and for many times even us, those of us who
identify as women, we are so fixated on the things we don't control because they feel
like they're driving our experience.
And the more time and attention we give to the things we don't control, the more we are
frustrated and disempowered.
And then we don't actually take ownership for the things we do control, and the kryptonite
does its dirty work.
I want to invite you to do something.
This is a really powerful exercise that I did just yesterday.
Now I want to invite you to do it too.
I want you to take a piece of paper or maybe your notes app on your phone or some other
strategy to write.
I want you to make two lists.
So put a line down the middle of this piece of paper or make a table if you're using the
app.
And on one side, write a list of the things I control in my research career.
And on the other hand, write a list of the things I do not control in my research career.
Write that list.
And it may look like this.
On the one hand is, I control which proposals I submit.
On the other hand, I do not control the outcomes of the reviewers.
I do not control how the reviewers view my grant.
You write down the list of things you control.
You write down the list of the things you don't control.
And just take five minutes.
That's all.
Just five minutes.
Come up with a list and see.
And then choose to own the things you control and ignore, leave out, and stop worrying about
the things you do not control.
I'm so excited because this exercise is really transformative for me and for the group of
women I coached in doing it.
And I hope that it's going to be impactful and insightful for you.
And if you want to share what breakthroughs or insights may have come to you from the
exercise, please do.
I would love to hear it.
I'd also love you to please share with somebody else who needs to understand their superpower
and the things they control versus the things that they do not control.
All right.
It's been a pleasure talking with you today.
I am excited when we come into a world of superheroes, superheroes who are working in
their superpower all the time.
And they are avoiding the kryptonite of destruction, the kryptonite of discouragement, the kryptonite
of disillusionment.
What kind of academic environments would we have?
What kind of productivity would we see?
It would be so, so awesome.
And I'm so excited about it.
All right.
It's been a pleasure talking with you today.
I look forward to talking with you again the next time.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Clinician Researcher Podcast, where academic
clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they
have a mentor.
If you found the information in this episode to be helpful, don't keep it all to yourself.
Someone else needs to hear it.
So take a minute right now and share it.
As you share this episode, you become part of our mission to help launch a new generation
of clinician researchers who make transformative discoveries that change the way we do health
care.