4.25 How to do difficult tasks

If you are stuck on a difficult task, then this is the episode for you! So often we get caught up on a task that we’re finding difficult, and then we struggle to see a way forward. Unfortunately we often then start making it mean something about ourselves - that we’re not good enough to be able to do the task, or that other people would find it easy, or that it “should” be achievable and it’s a problem that it’s not. In this episode we’ll think of different reasons why a task might be difficult, and go through some simple steps forward that both reframe how we think about these tasks and help us navigate a way forward.

If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on what to do if you feel stuck.

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. I don't know whether you can hear it or not, but I am currently not at my healthiest. I have managed to pick up a bit of a bug. I'm not feeling too bad, but I am aware I sound a little bit coldy, and for that reason, we are gonna keep this week relatively short and sweet. But the topic that I want to talk about today is something that came up in one of our coaching sessions last week, and that I think could be really, really useful to many of you. In fact, after the session where we discussed it, one of my members came back to me and thanked me for what she called the nugget of wisdom that I shared and talked about how it really then went on to change how she was thinking about the work that she's been doing, how it enabled her to have a bit of a eureka moment, and how she's now feeling really proud of herself and what she's got done over the last few weeks.

So, I really hope it has a similar effect on you too. So what were we [00:01:00] talking about? We were talking about doing a difficult task, and that might sound like, well, yeah, obviously we're doing PhDs, we're doing academia of course we do difficult tasks, but one of the things that I've really noticed is that we really conflate what that means in our heads.

So many people tell me that they are finding a task too difficult and that this means they can't work on it, or it means that they may be not cut out to do their PhD or to stay in academia, that they shouldn't be finding it difficult, that if they were good enough, they wouldn't be finding it difficult and I always notice when people say those things because I think it's such a understandable thing to tell yourself. I think all the way through our academic studies and then careers, we kind of have [00:02:00] that sense that if you're good at something, you don't find it too difficult, and I think society reinforces that and praises people who find things easy or that things come naturally to them.

And the other reason I always really pay attention is because I've seen the damage that these sorts of beliefs can cause. When we tell ourselves that something being difficult is a signifier of our abilities and a signifier of whether we are going to be able to do it or not, and in fact, it is signifying that there's a problem here, then it's really hard to keep persisting with that task. It's really hard to feel like you belong. It's really hard to feel like this is the right environment for you, when in reality I don't believe that finding a task difficult means any of those things at all.

So what we're gonna think about in the [00:03:00] episode today is how we can distinguish different types of difficult and what you can do when you find yourself facing a difficult task that will enable you to engage with it and dare I even say, enjoy it, rather than finding it a massive threat.

And I actually hadn't intended to talk about this bit of research today, but my use of the word threat made me think of it. So we're going to wing it and tell you about it now. So there is actually a portion of psychology and psychophysiology, which used to be my area. I'll tell you more about that in a second, which distinguishes between things that are challenges and things that threats. And I think this can be a really useful way of framing difficult tasks. And in that psychology literature, a challenge is framed as something that is difficult, but that you have the resources to address. And a [00:04:00] threat is framed as something that is difficult, that you don't have the resources to address and that therefore in some way could be harmful. And that can be physically harmful, but it can also be sort of socially harmful, psychologically harmful and so on. And there's a whole lot of literature around how when we perceive things more as challenges, we sort of rise to that challenge and approach those goals, try hard to do them, whereas when they're threats, we tend to try and avoid them and so on. There is also a literature on, so psychophysiology is how the body responds to the psychological stimuli, there is also a whole body of literature that claims that we have different physiological responses to challenge and threat. I have thoughts about that literature, which I'm not gonna go into on the podcast, but suffice to say, I don't think there is much evidence of that side of things. But I do think on the psychological aspect of whether you perceive something as a challenge or a threat [00:05:00] can have a really big difference in how you feel about it and how you therefore behave.

So how do we figure out what we wanna do? We're facing this difficult task. We don't know. We could just say, oh, see it as a challenge, but we don't necessarily know whether our resources can meet it or not. So it's hard to just force yourself to see it as a challenge. So what do we do instead?

For me, the first step is to figure out why it feels difficult. Because there are some things that feel difficult because of all the self-talk we're piling on top of it. And I don't mean that to say it's your fault, but when we are telling ourselves all the way through something, you haven't got time to do this, you should have done this before. Other people wouldn't find this, this difficult, other people will be able to do this straight away, all this kind of self-talk stuff, then things become difficult that aren't necessarily hugely difficult tasks in themselves. We make them difficult. We make them feel difficult because we tell ourselves we should know the [00:06:00] answer and it should be clear to us, and the fact that it isn't is a problem. There are then things that are inherently difficult tasks, and I would argue that an awful lot of the teaching and research that we do in academia is dealing with inherently difficult tasks. Where we are trying to generate and analyze and get meaning from complex data, where we are trying to make arguments based on evidence that people haven't argued before. When we are trying to communicate effectively a position, whether that's to teach it or to write about it in an article, and we are trying to work out the best way or the most effective way of communicating that argument in a convincing manner.

These are inherently cognitively difficult tasks. The fact that you find them hard is [00:07:00] not a sign that you're not good enough for what you're doing. The fact that you find them hard is that you are engaging with difficult academic concepts. People who are good at research, the people who are the best at research, the people that have got all the Nobel Prizes and all that stuff, they have found it difficult. They have grappled with difficult problems. Grappling with a difficult academic problem is not the same thing as a task being too hard for you. It is not the same thing as just telling yourself you are not good enough to be here or should find it easy.

I like thinking of like scientists of old in the, with their like heads in their hands being like, but I don't understand, why the planets move the way they move and grappling with these fundamental questions and not being able to explain it to other people, but having a gut feeling of something going on, but not being able to explain why it's going on. Those people weren't too stupid to do [00:08:00] science. They were grappling with difficult, difficult things that people hadn't done before.

And so are you. So sometimes things are difficult because we make them difficult. We turn them into unpleasant experiences by the stories we tell ourselves. Sometimes they're difficult because they're inherently difficult and cognitively challenging. And then a third way that I see things that are difficult are where you are under-resourced in some way to do it.

And that might be resourced in terms of having sufficient time, having sufficient training, having sufficient support, sufficient background. So as an example, if you gave me some music theory challenge to do, okay. That would be difficult for me not to, just because it is cognitively demanding, but because I am woefully underprepared to do it. I am not naturally musical on any level, and I have [00:09:00] had, apart from a brief term of playing the clarinet at secondary school badly, um, which incidentally tangent alert, uh, which incidentally I gave up because I had got a top grade in every class except for clarinet, which I got an A two in instead of an A one. So I gave up clarinet because I wasn't as perfect at it as I was at everybody else. Good old 13-year-old Vikki. Anyway, beside the point. I don't have much music training for me. I would be massively under resourced to answer a music theory question. It wouldn't be my self talks problem. It wouldn't necessarily be inherently challenging. I would just be under resourced to answer it.

So I want you to think, think of something that you have been feeling is very difficult at the moment. Particularly if you've been telling yourself that it shouldn't feel this difficult. But it's been frustrating you. It takes this long and try to think, am I making it [00:10:00] more unpleasant than I need to? Is that why it's so difficult? Is it inherently difficult or am I actually under resourced undertrained to do this at the moment?

Notice the kind of growth mindset vibes over there. It's not that we're not able to do it. I am sure that, I mean, I'm not sure I could sing in tune, but I'm sure I could answer music theory questions if I got sufficient training and support. It's not that we're inherently unable to do it, but we're currently unprepared to do it. Have a think for yourself, which does it fall into?

Because once we can better understand that, it fundamentally changes how we engage with it. Because if the main problem is that we are making it unpleasant for ourselves by what we say to ourselves, as easy as it doesn't sound, we don't have to do that. We can notice, right? We're gonna keep, you know, habitually, we are gonna still think of these thoughts, but we can choose that we don't do that to ourselves. We can choose more intentional thoughts, that don't focus on us not being good [00:11:00] enough to be here, that don't focus on everybody else finding it easier, but focus instead on us grappling with a difficult problem.

If you are noticing that the reason it's unpleasant is because of all this stuff you are layering on top of it, let's notice that compassionately, we're not gonna beat ourselves up 'cause we all do it, but let's notice it and work on that mindset stuff.

If we're noticing, you know what, I am just underprepared to do this. I know a lot of my clients work interdisciplinarily, for example, I, I did, um, I did a lot at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and immunology. And there were times where it wasn't just that I felt like an imposter, I just was undertrained to do some of the things I needed to do. And then if we realize that that's the issue, then we take different approaches. Yes, there might be a mindset piece that we stop beating ourselves up about it and recognize that actually we're under prepared. But then we start thinking, okay, how do I get prepared? Who can support me with this? What specific training do I need? What specific help or opportunities do I need in order to be able to [00:12:00] engage with this meaningfully?

So we get to think in terms of help and those sorts of things if we recognize that it's, it's an under preparedness issue. But what do we do when it's an inherently difficult task? A task that we are prepared to do. We are trained for this, but is really feeling very difficult.

The first thing, same always self-talk first. We stop telling ourselves that we should find it easy. It's inherently difficult, and that's okay. Any of you who do puzzles and things, right? If you got a children's book of word searches or crosswords or whatever. You have a go at that it's not gonna engage you for very long 'cause it's like, duh, dah, dah, duh. Easy, easy, easy. Yeah, fine. Bored now. But the best puzzles, if you are a puzzle person, the best puzzles are the ones where it's like, ugh, I dunno what's going wrong here. I can't work out how to do this, but I think I can get there. I think I can figure it out. [00:13:00] This word is definitely in this word search somewhere or one of those, you know, like the logic puzzles with the little grids and stuff. There's definitely more clues here. How can I figure them out. When we have that sense that it's difficult, but we are engaging with it.

But when we're in this situation, in that self-talk piece, we are thinking not just about, what can I stop saying to myself, but what can I say to myself? In our quarterly planning session last week for my membership, I used the analogy of swimmers that, actually if you are going, you're doing a big, let's say you are swimming the English channel or something like that, some big open water extravaganza. You are doing something really hard, but your coach on the boat isn't gonna be like yelling to you. You are rubbish. You should have swum faster. You should have trained more. Your coach is gonna be reminding you to use your technique, telling you how well you are doing, reminding you when the next break's coming up, giving you snacks, reminding you why you [00:14:00] decided to do this, keeping you on track, all of those sorts of things.

And that's the vibe that we wanna generate in our self-talk. When we're engaging with something difficult, we wanna be reminding ourselves why we do this, why this is interesting, how we're definitely gonna figure this out at some point. We definitely believe we're capable of this. Here are the resources you need to do it. We are cheering ourselves on to get it done instead of beating ourselves up.

From a more pragmatic perspective, we can also think about how we engage with the task, because when we recognize it as being inherently difficult, then we can start getting a bit experimental about how we might go about answering the problem, how we might go about overcoming the difficulty.

 here we might ask ourselves, what techniques might I use to be able to look at this in a different way? Are there different ways of visualizing the data? Are there different ways of like visualizing what argument I'm going to make here? Can I [00:15:00] experiment with different options? If I'm not sure how to argue this, let's try arguing it that way and see what evidence I would be able to talk about if I argue it that way but then let's see if I can work it that way. Or if your difficult challenge is your piece of lab equipment's not working, or your cells keep dying, or whatever it is, what options have we got? What, how can we think through all the different steps of the procedure you're trying to do to figure out where it's going wrong?

So instead of thinking, I'm just not good enough to do this, when we recognize it's difficult, we start to shining lights in lots of different directions and bring our creativity to play, to decide and try and under give ourselves the best opportunity of figuring out a way into this difficulty.

A really useful, apparently my members love my analogies and I feel like I'm mixing all my metaphors today, but I've got a cold. We're going with it. Another analogy that I find [00:16:00] really useful is have you ever seen like a bundle of tangled necklaces? So if you think of like fine gold chains, that kind of necklace, right? So not like big beady things, just like little gold chains. And somehow you put them down in a jewelry box and somehow they tie themselves into a massive knot. When we want to untangle those, it can be really frustrating 'cause it's like, ah, it is really knotted, it's really difficult. But when we just get cross about the fact they're knotted, we pull too hard and often that's when we end up breaking a necklace. But when we say to ourselves, I can, I can slowly ease this apart. This is something I can do. It's gonna take a bit of time, but I can go at it gently. I can go at it from different directions. And if you're watching on YouTube, I'm doing like little pulling apart motions. Um. We can like ease this bit out so I can see a little bit more. We can ease that bit out. What happens if I pull it from this side? What happens if I loosen it over [00:17:00] here? That's the approach we want to take to difficult questions like how can I ease it apart? How can I find bits of clarity in here? How can I find bits of space? And we allow ourselves to do those things when we acknowledge that it's difficult and we recognize that we can go through the process, and we don't even have to believe we will find a solution, but we believe that we have the capacity to go through some steps to see what we can figure out.

This is also where I want you to be very careful of your notions of efficiency, because often people think, I don't wanna write anything until I know what I'm writing. 'cause it will be inefficient to write it one way and not another. And so then people end up grappling with this difficult thing, trying to decide how they're gonna write it, how gonna do it, but they don't make any progress on it. It doesn't feel like they get anywhere. Whereas actually exploring options going, oh, what if I did it like this? What if I did it like that? Let's [00:18:00] spend two hours writing a few paragraphs as though I was arguing it this way. How easy does it come, does the evidence seem to fit? Do I believe myself? What if I argue it that way? Okay, so we get to experiment with these different options and accept that we are not necessarily gonna to see immediate benefits of these things, we are not, that knot is not going to automatically, immediately come untied, but we are gonna leave it a little looser and the next time we come back we'll ease it again. And sometimes we'll do something and it'll make it less clear. But that's progress. Moving to towards solving the problem.

When tasks are inherently difficult, we can also still ask for support even if we feel like we're readily resourced to do it. So we talked about asking for support if you feel under prepared to do a difficult task, but if it's a task that kind of should be within, should, You know, that's always a big word, but should be within your capacity that you have been trained to solve, but you're finding it difficult.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't ask for support. [00:19:00] What it does mean though, is you can think carefully about what sort of support might be useful, because often if it's inherently difficult and you are prepared to do it, sometimes people might be able to give you advice about it, but often they won't know either. Because you guys are working at the edges of human knowledge. That's literally what academia does. And so if you are expecting somebody just to be able to give you advice and tell you how to do it, you're probably underestimating the complexity of the problem and you're probably underestimating yourself too.

But that doesn't mean that asking for support isn't helpful. What we wanna think about instead is how can we be creative about that support? So what I ask for sometimes when I'm trying to figure something out is just the opportunity to talk it through some of us like that kind of verbal processing and sometimes in explaining it to somebody else and them asking questions, it clarifies our thinking. Other times just telling somebody, it will help you recognize blind spots, things that you thought were obvious but weren't obvious, that you [00:20:00] hadn't noticed before. So it's not necessarily about getting expertise from somebody who is better than you, but it can be getting sort of fresh eyes on a problem that you've looked at for too long. So don't underestimate how much support can help, even if it's something that you feel like you should be able to do on your own.

So those are my tips for grappling with difficult tasks is make sure we are not making it more difficult than it could be by the way we speak to ourselves. Make sure that if there's any way that you are under-prepared or under-resourced to doing it, how can we go about getting the resource that you need there, and then recognizing and celebrating the fact that you are grappling with a difficult problem and that this is literally what you came here to do.

This is the bit that's meant to be fun, that having hard intellectual conversations with yourself, grappling with difficult data. This is meant to be the bit that we love and enjoy. And often it's the time pressure, often it's the um, kind of [00:21:00] judgment we pile on ourselves that stop us enjoying the bit that's the bit we came here for. We can reclaim that by saying, no, this is just a hard task. I'm doing academia, man. I'm doing science, I'm doing research. Whatever it is for you. The more we can reclaim the fact that doing difficult things can be joyous and beautifully frustrating and interesting and engaging and all of these things, the more we can re-embrace that, the easier and safer it is to get on with those difficult tasks, to perceive them as a challenge rather than as a threat, and to look creatively at ways to navigate our way through, figure things out, and make decisions about how we're gonna solve these difficult tasks.

I really hope that's helpful. It definitely resonated with my members and they asked for more details on it, so I said I would do this episode for them. I hope you all enjoyed it too. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week.