Modern Renaissance Woman®️

E17: Caroline Clark - Leadership coach, Speaker and Analogue Astronaut

• Modern Renaissance Woman • Episode 17

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Today I'm taking you to lands far, far away - literally out of this world!

Caroline and I talk:

- Being a coach and helping ambitious leaders grow;

- Socialisations we experience and drivers for social justice ambitions;

- 'Enshitification' of tech platforms and potential barriers to reach your audiences;

- AI and ChatGPT vs data biases;

- What it means to be a space psychologist, and yes it's a real thing!;

...and so much more!


You can find more about Caroline here:

Linkedin profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/caroline-clark-psychologist/

Substack - https://liftoffwithcaroline.substack.com/

Find us @modern.renaissance.woman on Instagram

Don't forget to rate, 5* review wherever you get your podcasts! The more reviews, the better the guests for you!

Listen on Spotify, Apple, Deezer + more - NOW!

Music by Orel Pierre Louis - Audio Jungle

SPEAKER_02:

Welcome back to another episode of the Modern Renaissance Woman. Today, I am taking you far away, not even to faraway lands, but literally out of this world. Caroline Clark, product leadership coach, keynote speaker, board advisor of SheHub and aspiring space psychologist. Yep, you heard me. Her mission is to close the gender gap in tech by supporting women to build confidence, grow their influence and lead on their own terms. I think we'd all like a bit of that. Caroline Clark, welcome to the Modern Renaissance Woman. I can't wait to get started today. If our pre-record call is anything to go by, this episode is going to be everything left, right, centre and all the bits in the middle. So kick us off. Why don't you tell us a bit more about who is Caroline and what hats do you wear?

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks for having me, Mel. Really pleased to be here. So who am I? Yeah, I have been in the tech industry for more than 12 years now. Most recently transitioned into running my own business, coaching women. to get into leadership and then to build a career in leadership as well. I work in that kind of messy middle between stepping up from individual contributor and not at the exec level before you get there. So you're getting the pressure from both sides. Yeah, the bottleneck. working as a business analyst in local government. So that sense of social justice and doing things that help society become better, like looking after the most vulnerable in our society, has always been quite important to me.

SPEAKER_01:

And

SPEAKER_00:

I think that's a theme that carried through my tech career as well. Because although I started off working in a for-profit company, I then transitioned into... at the health tech space via a humanitarian gig, working in international development for a couple of years. So it's been really squiggly, different industries with that theme of kind of social justice and wanting to make an impact in the world, a positive impact, make the world a better place for people and not just within society, our society UK but in other parts of the world as well and I think with with the tech industry in particular it has massive potential to achieve that but right now also there's a lot of fear around you know AI and where that could lead us so that's an area that I'm also exploring particularly with the emerging gender usage gap in AI so don't want women to be left behind in in this latest revolution, evolution in the tech space.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, absolutely. So the, just going back to your point about social justice then, where do you think, where does this come from? Because obviously it sounds like a common thread through a lot of things that you've done, but has this always been something that you've been interested in or like a driver for you in kind of professional roles?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think it really started to emerge in secondary school. And that was kind of my first experience of privilege. So I come from a working class background. My dad was a lorry driver and he was also an immigrant to the UK from Spain back in the 70s when Spain was still ruled by a dictator, General Franco. And so I think that shaped a lot of my upbringing, the culture that we had at home, a lot of my worldview And when I got to secondary school and I went to grammar school, so I had that experience of being around very bright girls that I became really consciously aware of difference and economic difference and social difference in particular. And being kind of towards the lower end of that, like we weren't poor, but we struggled with things financially growing up, particularly as my dad ended up out of work due to ill health and we were single household income for a while. That, yeah, I became acutely aware of that difference and a sense of unfairness in the world as well. Why did I have it so hard and other people had it easier?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And I think that carried through as I became more aware of it and understood the dynamics at play in the world, that that was something that really needed to be addressed.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Is that something that you carry through to the work that you've kind of done along the way? But now, especially with coaching as well, it probably gives you quite a good perspective to understand people's stories and their backgrounds and then be able to coach them in a way that's probably more suitable for their circumstances and the context that they find themselves in as well.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. Yeah. So I work predominantly with women, because I'm really passionate about that gender equity in tech in particular, where it's very male dominated. But I think there's an intersectionality to it as well. So it's not just women, we're not this homogenous group. of 50% of the population. There's race, there's disability, there's socioeconomic status that comes into play, a whole host of things. And I see that intersection in my coaching. And I think that that creates a context from which women can And a lot of my coaching is I'm picking like what those beliefs are and where they come from and how helpful they are for my clients. And if they're not helpful, how could we. shape that into something that is helpful i don't want to use the word empowered because it's it's over i don't love

SPEAKER_02:

that word i have to say

SPEAKER_00:

overused

SPEAKER_02:

isn't

SPEAKER_00:

it overused um and i think power is very personal and it's not necessarily something that people give you it's something you give to other people so yeah a lot about changing those beliefs so that they change their behavior change what they do because they believe they can do it.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah and obviously I think just listening to you say that there's coaching has such a not using the word empower but it has such a power to it to change people's mindsets and kind of obviously the trajectory of what they're doing and you know their lives in that sense as well but are you working predominantly with women in tech then?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, there are a

SPEAKER_02:

few men

SPEAKER_00:

that I work with as well. And I think they are naturally drawn to what it is that I stand for and how I help people.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah,

SPEAKER_02:

absolutely. And like you say, it's, you know, it's this whole feminism debate, isn't it? It's not just all about women. And I know the podcast is Modern Renaissance Women, and we want to talk about and celebrate women in all their kind of variations and intersectionality and all of that. But the point I wanted to talk about really was the, I guess, thinking about this, the bias that we have in, if we think about AI specifically, and we're thinking about the gender gaps there, how has that come through? I guess there's two questions. How has that come through in the women that you coach because they're working in this industry so how does that sit with them you know to actually perform a job if they know that the nub of the thing that they're doing there's such this disparity in it so there's probably a question around how do you coach women that are working in this context and then I wonder if and maybe this is a question for later but with this bias and this data gap what can we do about it and are you seeing the way that you're coaching people are they're their success stories that are coming out of that that then we can maybe implement to change some of this stuff it's a very big question but

SPEAKER_00:

I'll take it in two parts so the first part what am I seeing from the women that I'm coaching there's a real fear of getting left behind. And I actually went to a talk not so long ago with a guy in Cambridge, Paul Jervis Heath, and he was talking about this concept of future shock. And it's that feeling that things are changing too quickly and you can't keep up. And certainly if you spend any amount of time on LinkedIn or in like the tech communities going to like London Tech Week was classic because definitely more than 80%, if not 90% of the talks were about AI. It's unavoidable at the moment in the tech industry. And there's this spectrum between like massive hype on AI is gonna solve all the problems and we won't even need to work, like it's gonna make you massively efficient. We see some of that messaging being latched onto by business leaders who have laid people off, even after those people have been training the AI, like there's ethical issues with that. To the other end of the spectrum, which is real skepticism and not unfounded to be fair, There are very valid concerns about how we're using AI, the energy consumption, the water consumption. Yeah, so I think many women that I speak to and that I coach are just really not sure where to get started with AI, whether to believe the hype. I think there's a natural skepticism and I think that that is a good thing because then it makes you think critically about what is happening and all of these claims. But I think it can also lead some women not to engage with the technology at all. And I think that might be somewhat driving the gender usage gap. The other side of it is, wow, there's a new technology. It's something new that I've got to learn. And when am I gonna find the time to do that? Because as we know, women are still largely responsible for the domestic work, raising and looking after children. And great if it's an equal partnership, but I think there's still that imbalance in caregiving responsibilities. And so it can feel like one other thing to add on to the plate

SPEAKER_01:

yeah

SPEAKER_00:

so it's that that cost benefit I think that some women are going through mentally like is it worth me investing in my skills versus like something else that I'm gonna have to drop right now to find that time and and how is that gonna benefit my career long term so I think that's like there's a real like combination of different factors that that are happening. And I think there's also fear, particularly for women my age, so I'm mid 40s now, that in the tech industry, there's also an ageism problem. So where are all the women and where are we going? And that sense of are we relevant still in this industry?

SPEAKER_02:

and I guess there's been no blueprint before has there because this is you know cutting edge in a sense of we're very much still in the mud with it I know if you're in the industry you're a lot further forward in that thinking and I think the layperson still to some degree might think oh robots they're going to take over our jobs you know the standard kind of response to it and then the more we're learning about it and you know the more people are using chat GPT and all of that but also as you alluded to the kind of the environmental impacts as well of this so every time I Even if I send an email, I'm like, do I need to send that thank you email? Now that I know how much water consumption that is having and kind of the carbon footprint of the Google search and like all of these things, it really does make you think about how you're engaging with some of this. But then to some of your points that you've said, how, and I don't know if this is a, if it's a question that you can answer, but if we are kind of in the mud with it, do you know, have you got any kind of indication as to where we might be heading towards? Are we kind of in a, as a society, do you think we're in quite a positive place in terms of using it for the right things, but also being cognizant of the carbon footprint and, you know, that type of stuff? Or are we still bumbling forwards? And also, if there's no female leaders in this space, and as we've said, the are biased towards the people that are making the technology as well, which is typically the men because they're the dominant ones in the industry. I mean, what does it look like? What does the future look like at the moment for us, do you think?

SPEAKER_00:

So I think there's a whole heap of we just don't know. Yeah. And lots and lots of speculation about how it will happen. And, you know, we can look to the past and I think our best example is things like when the motor car was invented, it changed how we got around, like it used to be horse and cart, horse and carriage. And then the motor car took over and there were a lot of safety concerns around the introduction of that as a new technology, which were overcome to an extent. But even now, you know, we talk about like the risks of driving in a car. So they're not completely unavoidable. And I think we will have some of that with any new technology we introduce. There's costs and there's benefits to it. But now we see horses as a bit of a luxury now. So, you know, you can go to a riding school and you can pay for lessons or go out on hacks and it's more of a leisure activity than it is like a day-to-day transactional kind of, I need to get from A to B, how do I do that on a horse? And I wonder, I think that's probably our closest analogy for the impact that AI will have is there will be some things that we do right now that maybe we can't even imagine would be stopped done by ai but will and then there will be something else that we do i think that's where human creativity comes into it because we will find other things that are valuable that are a better use of our time when ai is doing doing a load of the grunt work as it were

SPEAKER_02:

yeah and i think that's something that definitely comes through when you know like i said not just the lay person, I guess, and not all lay people, but some people that still believe that robots will kind of take over our jobs. I think the counter argument to that was just to that point that it should free us up from, you know, the mundane, I don't know, repetitive tasks that no one really gets a kick out of or really wants to be doing, you know, they're quite laborious things. And then hopefully that should free us up to be more creative. And maybe like you say, horses now being a leisure activity, could we now just go back to painting and doing, you some things that genuinely bring people joy, but make them creative and fuel them in different ways. And I can't remember what the book was. There's a book out there around the value of using your hands, basically. And if you're in a desk-based job, for example, why you should have a... I don't know. Maybe it was something to do with a shed. I can't remember. But this idea of you being really hands-on and still doing things away from a screen, that has such benefits to us as human beings as well and obviously engages different parts of our brain and definitely probably saves some of our eyesight as well because some of us are glued to a screen all the time, which is not great. So hopefully, I mean, I don't know where I'm sitting on the fence of future tech and AI. And I think if the bias stuff could be looked at, that would be really helpful. And it's also interesting thinking, and I think we touched upon this when we spoke before, but thinking about jobs and kind of CVs that are going into these machines now and AI picking them up and I had a friend was telling me about white text the other day. I don't know if you've heard of white text and I hadn't. So if anyone's listening, if you want to get a specific job and you're submitting your CV into a, I don't know, say it's on LinkedIn or a job site, typically the technology will pick up your CV when it's submitted and it will discard it if it doesn't include the correct wording that's probably in the job ad. So people are now going in and putting, literally putting those words in somewhere in the CV, but turning them to white, to white text. And then the algorithms are still kind of picking them up and i was like oh my god why have i not done that it makes perfect sense but then i don't know you obviously i don't think you could get away with it if you're you know applying to a i don't know data scientist job and you're a jewelry maker or you know you've got to have a bit of common sense there i think but um There

SPEAKER_00:

are some limits to that for sure. And one thing that I wanted to share as well is like yesterday I was having a chat with my partner and he works for a startup based in Cambridge that is using AI and has created its own proprietary models that it's using in the automotive industry. And I think one thing that I think has kind of swayed the conversation is AI and LLM's large language models have almost become synonymous.

UNKNOWN:

Yes.

SPEAKER_00:

And so when people now, especially with the discourse in public, it's people think AI is LLMs and it's not just LLMs. There's a whole load of other technologies that fall under the artificial intelligence domain. that have been around for like decades and that replicate other aspects of human intelligence artificially. So LLMs are obviously natural language processes, but you've got sort of visual processing, you've got reasoning models, you've got all sorts of things that replicate like how the human brain, how human cognition works.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And so I think we need to be really careful that we're not diluting the conversation down to just LLMs. Because the other side of it is, I know OpenAI is going to release their Model 5 soon. But there is concern around how much improvement we'll get over the existing Model 4. Because it very much depends on what it's able to ingest. as its training data and like it's well publicized that it's scoured the internet and pulled through all of the information available publicly that humans have ever created. So now we're not looking at those big step improvements. We're looking at those incremental 1% improvements. So how much better is the model going to get? And how much better is it going to get at overcoming the existing limitations within the model? You know, chat GPT gets it wrong sometimes.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, exactly. And so if this new version, what is it claiming to do more than the version before? Do you know?

SPEAKER_00:

It's around accuracy and efficiency and augmented reasoning capabilities, as I understand it. Proof will be in the pudding when we test it.

SPEAKER_02:

definitely and I think and you might not be able to answer this and it's maybe something that I haven't I haven't looked into but when I hear about people that are training AI models or you know people that have I've used a few tools I guess people have created their own versions to do specifically and I mentioned her in every episode but Dr. Sarah Beth Burbickerton that I've had on that talks about hybrid identities she's made a few of these where you can go in and work out what your archetypes are and work out which type of hybrid are you and it's incredible when I did this thing and I like oh my god this is accurate and this is me and this is amazing if someone like her is making these like literally how do they make them is the bit that i still can't get my head around do

SPEAKER_00:

you know i'm guessing that she's using chat gpt and the gpt function so right you can do that right now if you're on a plus account

SPEAKER_03:

okay

SPEAKER_00:

you can engineer a prompt and train it on you know models or frameworks or your own work so that it can be interrogated or it can kind of brainstorm with you yeah i've created one in fact i created two last week one was based on the international coaching federation's core competencies and that was to help give me feedback on my coaching practice so I knew which areas to develop. So I will record coaching sessions and transcribe them and then feed that text file into the custom GPT and it will tell me what I've done well and what I need to do better.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

So I can kind of double down on that in future coaching sessions and look at the themes that are coming out across the different sessions, that's been really helpful.

SPEAKER_02:

So that's using the framework to compare your notes with to know how much you've met them. Right, okay.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Wow. I mean, I don't know if I make my, I don't know what I would make, to be honest. I was still just not sure how you did that. Do you think then, in that case, if we're thinking about this gender, if we go back to the gender point around bias, that's one way for us to start to help to change the bias if more women are starting to create their own Because they're putting more data sets in it, right? And then we can obviously build more of a.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So to be clear, when you create your own custom GPT and you're inputting data into it, that's not going into training the underlying model. Okay. Large language model that is still owned by open AI. Right. But it's almost like a version of that. for a specific purpose when you're creating the custom GPT. And to come back to your question and what you asked me earlier as well, I think the best way to bridge this gender gap is to just help women get stuck into it, just give it a go. What I find with coaching women is that unless we have a certificate or a qualification, or we've done a course, there can be some reticence to try something out. It's that old, I need to feel like I've mastered this before I'm going to put myself out there because it's that fear of judgment. And I think also that fear of if I get it wrong, I'm not going to be given another opportunity to do it again. It comes into that prove it again bias that's very prevalent in our society. So what I've done is create a study group that meets every two weeks to get women together so that we can just practice this. just jump in, you know, it's friendly, it's accessible. The last one I ran was exactly on custom GPTs. And some of that was just setting it up.

SPEAKER_01:

Getting

SPEAKER_00:

into the console and starting to type some things in that would go on to create the prompt, like literally just get used to typing things in and seeing what comes back and that it's not scary and that it can be really helpful. The other side of it is thinking around use cases, which is something you just mentioned. So what I would encourage is as you're going about your day to day, what are the things that come up often, like the tasks? that you're doing on repeat because maybe there's something there that could be changed into a custom GPT

SPEAKER_02:

yeah yeah absolutely and yeah I mean I had really just scratched the surface with it I am I don't use it as much as I probably could but then at the same time I have on the other hand also read studies that the more that we're using it the more it's actually making us not I don't know if not as intelligent is the right way to put it but it is affecting our brains and cognitively we're we're doing tasks in different ways now because we're not using the same kind of neural pathways and I'm not a neuroscientist I can't talk to the science of it but I think it is it's the same as us you know being on our phones all the time isn't it or you know being on a computer and then you kind of become a bit lazy with not or use it as a good example, using a calculator rather than doing manual kind of arithmetic or mental arithmetic. It's kind of how I'm starting to think about it. So I'm reluctant to dive too deeply into it because I don't want it to change kind of my creativity and who I am and how I kind of operate as well. But at the same time, I think, and probably I'm of a group of people that are feeling quite similar at the moment. You're on the fence. It's like, should we utilise it? Should we not? Is it going to be a phase? Is it, you know, watching it almost play out to see kind of what's going to happen? So I think it is exciting. And I think hopefully if it can be used in the right ways, then who knows what will happen with it.

SPEAKER_00:

You raise a really good point there. So it was MIT that recently released a paper saying people using chat GPT, cloud, perplexity, are starting to lose some of those cognitive abilities, particularly around critical thinking. And that is... absolutely necessary more so in today's world than ever before because there is the ability to manipulate data and manipulate information and feed that through the media and actually change people's perspectives on key topics we've seen it happen in our politics here and across the pond so there is definitely something around We need to still use those cognitive abilities like critical thinking, reasoning, creativity in order to not lose them. And probably more so now because those are, I believe, what makes us somewhat unique as humans. Setting us aside evolutionarily from other animals. It's the... capabilities that came from the development of the prefrontal cortex so it is that that reasoning that logic that critical thinking but also the creativity the problem solving

SPEAKER_01:

let's

SPEAKER_02:

see i was just thinking of these i don't love using kind of instagram and social media and i recall when we spoke we were we can talk about this in a minute but we were talking about social media and it just started to make me think of um i see some of these like really cute animals on there that are doing things and i'm like oh look this is so sweet and then all the comments are like this is ai this is ai and you're like damn it i thought this is going to be something that you know genuinely sweet but um yeah i guess there's there's times to use it and then that crosses over i think definitely to like the fake news and you know all of that stuff i think there's a maybe a darker side to it that as humans if we're not critical enough we're not able to spot what's real and what's not and that's actually quite scary um So yeah, it will be really interesting to see where it goes. Yeah, we were talking about social media and one of my notes was in shitification of platform was something that you said. I think what we were talking about was the prologarchy. We don't have to get too political, but it's probably quite an interesting time to mention this type of stuff. Remind me, what was the in shitification of platform bit? Can you remember?

SPEAKER_00:

This was probably in relation to LinkedIn. I think it was. That is the only social media platform that I have now. I moved away from Meta. I closed down my Instagram and Facebook accounts because with what was happening in the US and a lot of the messaging coming from Mark Zuckerberg, I didn't want to be associated with that platform. I think I also had concerns around how my personal data was being utilized to build Those products and that there was really not much regard for privacy. Facebook, I think it was fairly recently, was found to be downloading things onto... the operating system so it could track you even if you had set it at the cookie level in the browser not to. So, you know, some really dubious ethical things happening there. But and shitification as a concept was about platforms start off, they're solving this problem, they're trying to find users that have this particular problem and make it something that's really valuable for them so in the early days of creating an app or a product it's it's very user focused and it's it's just trying to gain traction and just trying to make a bit of an impact in the world and then that kind of switches once you've got a good user base to well let's let's start to please like the shareholders a bit more you know for-profit businesses they're important stakeholders and then it moves into that whole kind of well how can we commercialize how can we squeeze as much out of this as possible advertisers inevitably come into the social media platforms and so it then becomes about well how can we keep the advertisers happy and so what happens in all of this is whereas the focus in the beginning is very much on great user experience so that you draw people in and get them to stay using your product over time the user experience kind of falls down on the priority list so it's like right at the bottom yeah an afterthought almost and so the user experience is really degraded

SPEAKER_02:

yeah and I see that especially with reach in particular it's really interesting at the moment and just this morning I saw a a man actually posting on linkedin listing a bunch of female like very successful females that have either left linkedin or they've kind of he's just like given a snapshot of what their experience has been but and a lot of them are getting censored a lot of people if they're using specific words like women or patriarchy or anything like this these people have got I don't know. I think Cindy Gallop, who's got how many? I don't know. Let's say like 100,000 followers. I don't know if that's true, but she's got a lot of followers and her impressions or the people that she reaches is minimal. like 100 or, you know, it's incredibly low. And I haven't watched it yet, but I've done a, bought a course with a kind of content creation company, which is all about F the algorithm, basically. And much to their points and much to what you've just said, they're talking about increasing reach, but also why, you know, you need to F the algorithm quite literally, because the algorithm is set up not to support whether or not, I know I haven't got the evidence to say if this is the case or not, but, you know, for me, for example, for Modern Renaissance Woman, Am I getting censored because the word woman... is in it you know the reach is terrible is that because I'm not on there every literally all day every day which I know is something that they try and keep they're trying to keep you on it as well which for your mental health is not great so it's a really interesting way I think of looking at it at the moment kind of objectively and just as a kind of societal case study as well and like human behavior and all of those things I'm yet to like I said I'm yet to actually do the workshop to see what the magic or secret sauce apparently might be and it might be things I'm already doing and actually I just have to create more content and I have to do more stuff and which I think is also a great point to bring up talking about modern renaissance women who were trying to do so many different things it's so it's a lot it's really laborious to be doing all this stuff and I know that when we talked we were talking about burnout as well as a thing that we can talk about in a minute but you end up juggling so many things to satisfy what in the end I think you do start to question a lot of things because there's a lot of very well-meaning and very talented women we're out there and all sorts of people doing lots of interesting things but if they're not getting the reach or you know the clients or they're not making the money that they thought they would or and these are really talented people so why are they falling through the cracks so I think we do need that criticality going back to your point yeah I just there's a there's a lot there and I don't know what the answers are yet

SPEAKER_00:

so Cindy Gallop was the one that came to mind I follow her on LinkedIn as well and she has been very outspoken about essentially what is a form of censorship. She's not been able to get to the bottom of exactly what's happening, but she has noticed that her reach, her impressions have dropped. And you're absolutely right. She's got hundreds of thousands of followers. So the percentage that are actually seeing her content does not make sense.

UNKNOWN:

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00:

The other person I heard of this week was Erin Gallagher, who, again, was a very prolific content creator on LinkedIn. She's gone to Substack. But I think, honestly, it's only a matter of time before Substack follows in the same footsteps of inshittification. Unfortunately, it seems to be like rite of passage.

SPEAKER_01:

The

SPEAKER_00:

big tech products. So yeah, I absolutely think this is a form of censorship. I think if you are a woman on these platforms, who is outspoken about gender bias and gender related issues, then there must be some form of censorship. targeting happening, whether it's within the algorithm, like certain keywords, certain topics. I think we need more men to speak up for us as well. There's some really great male allies out there. The guy that you mentioned, Jonathan, I cannot remember his surname.

SPEAKER_02:

I can't either. Sorry, Jonathan, if

SPEAKER_00:

you're listening. He's great at promoting other women and tagging women in his posts. And I think that's something to be cherished is men are standing up for us as well and there are a lot out there like absolutely it's not all kind of toxic masculinity drowning out voices there yeah

SPEAKER_02:

yeah i mean one way for us to test it i guess is see how many see what downloads and reach this episode gets now that we've mentioned

SPEAKER_00:

it

SPEAKER_02:

We might just be proving a point. Let's move from AI now to space, because this is something that is, I mean, it blows my mind anyway, space as a concept. So congratulations, you have just have you got your degree in

SPEAKER_00:

I have yes my results last week

SPEAKER_02:

congratulations um so tell us a bit about obviously you have just done a psychology degree but you are an aspiring space psychologist which I didn't even know was a thing and then when we spoke it was absolutely fascinating so why don't you tell us a bit about why did you transition over to psychology and then how does the space part come into it

SPEAKER_00:

yeah so the psychology thing I started my degree down at back in lockdown so it was the gap between lockdowns in 2021 in February of that year and I'd just kind of run out of excuses I've been to university twice before in fact three times really I'd studied a year of law when I was in my early 20s and dropped out again because it wasn't the right course for me and I was surrounded by a lot of people that knew they wanted to be barristers or solicitors you know they might have come from multiple Mm-hmm. So got into a lot of debt. And over that summer, I started working for the Housing Association and decided I liked earning money more than I like being in debt. So I dropped out of law. And then a few years later, that same Housing Association sponsored me to do quantity surveying. So I did sort of three quarters of that degree. And then the financial crash happened.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And not only were they not going to continue sponsoring me, my job was potentially at risk. So I ended up retraining, as I said, into lean and systems thinking. So I left that degree at kind of HND level, higher national diploma level. And somewhere in there as well, I also studied an open university module in natural sciences. So I think just the breadth there probably speaks to modern Renaissance woman, going from law to quantity surveying to natural sciences. Like I could not pick a lane. So psychology was a subject that always interested me, like understanding what makes us human, why we think and behave the way that we do, how we interact in social dynamics as well. I was really interested in the social side. And I think on reflection, that was probably because I was autistic. I didn't know this at the time. I didn't know, yeah. only a couple of years ago but it was always like that I need to figure people out because I don't understand why people are behaving in that way yeah it's not intuitive for me like it may be for someone who's holistic or neurotypical so yeah I started my degree and it was about halfway through I was like what am I doing here like is this a career transition again and if so what direction am I going to go in and so I started to think about what aspects of psychology I really enjoyed. This was about halfway through the second stage, the degree. So at that point, I'd not completed, but I was taking an elective module, which was in social psychology. And I've always been massively into space, like as a kid, flicking through the Reader's Digest Atlas of the World with the first kind of 20 pages taken up with the Big Bang. And I was at school when Pluto was still a planet. So I was really, really fascinated by... what was out there beyond our planet. And it just came to me like, can I combine these two things, space and psychology? And at the time I was questioning it, I didn't know it was a real thing. So

SPEAKER_01:

I

SPEAKER_00:

started doing some internet research and found some documents from NASA. So I was like, oh, okay. It is a real thing. And then just researching that more and more to understand like, well, what, what does that involve? So space psychologists work with the big space agencies in the selection and training of astronauts for missions. And then when they are on missions, they're providing in-flight support as well. And I find this fascinating because the plans are to go back to the moon to put humans back on the moon um by 2028 was the original plan that might have slipped a bit and then to go on to mars

SPEAKER_01:

and

SPEAKER_00:

mars will be a three-year round journey nine months there time on the planet and then 12 months back

SPEAKER_03:

wow

SPEAKER_00:

and the majority of that mission is going to be in a tin can that's probably the size of the downstairs of my house so quite small with maybe five or six other people and very quickly when you leave earth's orbit the earth will disappear and all you will see is just pitch black so there's a unique set of challenges involved in this mission not least like how we're going to survive and how we're going to propel ourselves to mars but how are we going to deal with the isolation the monotony disruption to our circadian and vestibular systems which control like when we sleep when we're awake our sense of balance because it will be weightless

SPEAKER_03:

yeah

SPEAKER_00:

so all sorts of really unique challenges And I think what really interests me about that is it's really pushing humanity to its limits in every sense, in engineering, in physical, in mental, in social. So the thing that always gets me is when they're nearer to Mars, there's going to be a 30-minute communication delay back to Earth. So you can't have real-time communication. Wow. So any problems that you have, any interpersonal issues, any conflict, you're basically on your own with the people that you're in that relationship with.

SPEAKER_02:

Half an hour is a long time. If you're in that context as well, you know, do they have a sense of time while they're up there? Like, I can't even imagine if they're not going to have, you know, light and I guess they're going to have to synthesize some of this stuff and create fake environments and to support them to stay human in a way there's so many questions that pop up isn't there and

SPEAKER_00:

yeah so from a time perspective like we have we have the international space station as a good proxy for this so you keep time with a set place on earth which is normally where mission control is located and then you use artificial lighting to mimic daylight and And then nighttime. The ISS itself is orbiting around the Earth every 90 minutes.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

So I think it's 18 times it goes all the way around the Earth in any 24-hour period.

SPEAKER_03:

Wow.

SPEAKER_00:

So if you think like you're going from light in Australia to dark in Europe and you're doing that 18 times a day, they found ways to accommodate that, to replicate something that is more in line with our 24-hour circadian rhythm.

SPEAKER_02:

yeah absolutely mind-blowing um stunned for words in in ways when i think about it i just can't i think space always literally blows my mind and it fascinates me but i find it absolutely terrifying at the same time i know i know there's a lot of people that think oh just have some perspective and you know just we're just we're just a dot on earth aren't we and you've got a problem just think of something bigger and i'm like that terrifies me i'm not very good at thinking about it in like a comforting kind of way i don't know where that comes from but so if we're thinking about then human performance factors which I know that we spoke about we've obviously spoken about these kind of extreme environments this Mars mission in particular the role of a psychologist then in this so you've alluded to you would work with the astronauts so is that something that you work with them on their resilience is that is this I can imagine there's a kind of a pre-mission set of work that has to be done and then maybe they take some there's a toolkit that they take up with them so in emergencies, what do they do in those contexts? And then also, how do they integrate back into society when they come back?

SPEAKER_00:

These are really great questions. So absolutely, like to become an astronaut, you've got years of training. And historically, many astronauts actually came from the armed forces. So whether it was the Air Force or the army, like in the case of Tim Peake, because of the discipline, and a lot of the mental preparation for operating in what is extreme environments, they already had a lot of training in. More recently, particularly with ESA, astronauts are, it's open call and they come from all sorts of different backgrounds, medical, engineering, physics, and so on. So that two to three years of training is about giving them all of the skills that they're going to need to survive in space. And there's a lot around leadership, teamwork, communication, conflict resolution. There's a lot around mental resilience. So absolutely, like no one's going up into space on a whim. And that psychological preparation is as important as the physical preparation. So a lot is invested in that as well. There's a concept that I find interesting. really interesting in leadership from astronauts and bringing that back into my work as a coach and supporting businesses with leadership development is this concept of stepping up and stepping down from leadership, being a good follower. So I think we glamorize leadership quite a lot and everyone aspires to be the person in control of everything. Not that leadership is about control, of course, it's about responding to complexity. But with astronauts, they're trained so that depending on the situation, the person who has the most expertise is the one who steps up. So yes, you have a mission commander who's in overall control. But if it's a medical emergency, it's the person with the medical training, the doctor, that will step up. If it's an engineering emergency, the engineer will step up. And everyone else recognises that, doesn't have an ego... an issue with it. They fall in with really solid followership.

SPEAKER_01:

So it's what can I do to support?

SPEAKER_03:

What do you need from me?

SPEAKER_00:

Plus the rest of their training kicking in. And I think there's a lot that we can take from that into our own organizations right now. Like if we're not in leadership, we can be really, really good followers.

SPEAKER_02:

But also it sounds like there's an opportunity then to have an interchangeable leadership structure in a way because we think of it as like a hierarchy at the moment don't we and you know or like a food chain as one of my other guests was talking about it as and having that you know everybody has typically got a skill to bring and we don't necessarily have to think about experts because also modern renaissance women quite often they're not experts they're probably experts at being everything or being a generalist you know because they just have their fingers in so many pies all the time but that that kind of concept of democratizing it perhaps and having it as a i don't know more more of a place where people's strengths can come forward i know that doesn't work with everyone and the structures that we have at the moment isn't you know it's not necessarily set up to work with that but i think there's definitely sounds like there's a lot of really interesting things that could we could learn from this i recall you were talking about is it rosemary coogan she was talking about mental resilience i found this quite interesting we were talking about you know having talking about discipline but also thinking about human performance factors and then thinking about burnout and then feeling exhausted so remind me what what's kind of her concept around mental resilience when we are exhausted

SPEAKER_00:

yeah so this was a recent track training exercise that she was doing over at NASA with their their big swimming pool with a mock-up of the International Space Station and of course going into water into a pool replicates weightlessness so she was entirely suited up in her space suit, which is very, very heavy and very, very cumbersome. So like you try bending your arm or your fingers and, you know, it's a pressurized suit. So you're fighting against the fabric and the air pressure to maneuver yourself. So she'd been down there with a colleague practicing doing an extravehicular activity, an EVA. So walking around and using tools to fix something. She'd been in this pool for six hours and was expecting like this is it the end of the exercise I'm going to be going back up absolutely spent physically, mentally, emotionally. What she wasn't aware of was that the instructors had asked her colleague to imitate a loss of consciousness and she had to go and rescue him. So at the point where she's thinking, I'm at the end, I'm completely spent, I've got nothing left, she has to go and perform an emergency rescue. And she does this... successfully gets her colleague to safety but it's where do you dig down when you've got nothing left

SPEAKER_01:

yeah

SPEAKER_00:

and that's why they practice it they practice it over and over and over again in the pool in real life on land before they get up into space because in space it's it's entirely hostile you have got very little chance of surviving if anything goes wrong and you're not prepared for it and you don't dig deep yeah so yeah

SPEAKER_02:

probably putting your feet up can you

SPEAKER_00:

yeah yeah and that that concept of mental toughness i think a lot of it comes down to your self-talk and the whole have you heard of the chimp paradox yes yeah yeah well-known concept yeah that little inner chimp kind of telling you what you can't do that you have to not listen to it and break through. And actually, I think the talk, the language part, how we speak to ourself, how we internalize messages from other people is a big factor in how our beliefs form. And we can change that through the language that we use, through the talk that we give ourselves.

SPEAKER_02:

Also, I think survival... until you're actually in those moments i think it's it's incredible i think everyone would surprise themselves at exactly how much grit and mental resilience and or having something left in the tank when they think that they really don't because that's very hard to simulate you know on a normal day if you're just practicing and you know the context isn't quite the same but until you're in that state of emergency we are built for survival as humans aren't we it goes back to darwin and evolution and all of that

SPEAKER_00:

and i think there's something else here as well which is about thinking less of yourself and thinking of the other person you know there's a physiological response around adrenaline starts pumping through the body to get everything kind of fired up ready to act quickly but I think it's also like it's not about you it takes you out of yourself to be thinking that other person is in danger you know you see it with people rescuing other people that they're not thinking of themselves it's instinctive to respond to And it's about that other person.

SPEAKER_02:

There's so much that we can learn, I think, from astronauts as one. Have there been any missions of late where people have come back and then you're able to maybe, I guess, analyse or see the effects of that type of trip to then take some evidence from them as to, I don't know, could you apply that in different contexts? I was thinking of a prison context and me talking about integrating back into society. Are there things then as a psychologist that you can take or that you've heard so far that you're like, oh, that would be really interesting to use that technique and then put it in different contexts.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and every time astronauts come back into Earth after a period in space, they are fully debriefed. And if it has been a significant period of time, then they receive that psychological support to reintegrate them back into society. And I think probably the most recent famous example would be Sonny and Butch, who went up on a rocket that mis-funked and ended up stranded on the ISS for like nine months. They were expecting to be up there for just a couple of weeks and then they were there for nine months. So of course, they're totally trained and totally prepared for every eventuality and they just took this in their stride. But of course, they missed Christmas, they missed key events in their families' lives. So it's what can you do whilst they're up there to maintain those connections and sense of being being a part of something that's important to them. And when they come back, how can you support them to reintegrate? That goes from the physical side of it as well. So when you're in space, you're obviously in weightlessness there's no gravity and so your body relaxes and that means that you can come back a couple of inches taller than when you left because your spine stretches wow but you also have a lot of muscle wastage so even though astronauts um are exercising for two hours a day it's exercising in zero gravity and it's low resistance essentially so you come back and there's the physical side effects and of course that affects us psychologically as well so it's it's a complete holistic view of coming back to earth and addressing like the physical issues eating eating proper food again not freeze-dried food

SPEAKER_03:

yeah

SPEAKER_00:

great uh not eating in weightlessness so you've got gravity that's pulling food down your digestive system yeah so yeah it's it's how do you adapt back to all of that i was going to add the the other side of it is when you leave the space sector and return to a civilian lifestyle it's how do you make sense of having that experience

SPEAKER_01:

of being

SPEAKER_00:

in space and what you're doing now might actually be really mundane and boring and quite ordinary it's

SPEAKER_02:

very hard for other people to understand isn't it because they have not had that so yeah that's a huge thing isn't it it's much like this obviously Thank you so much for joining us. What that other person might be thinking or feeling is quite something, I think. There's a definite area of sitting with uncertainty, isn't there? Just you talking about them being up there for nine months. But then it made me think we've all been through COVID and we didn't know what was going to happen. And that was a very much like, we just have to take it in our stride, hope for the best, do what we think is best at any given moment with any good or bad instructions that we were getting, but we won't go into that. I think as humans, we're incredibly adaptable and we are very versatile and we have a lot more strength in us than I think So I absolutely think that there's so much that we can learn from them. So what's next for you in terms of, are you going to go into space, like, what's happening for you next?

SPEAKER_00:

So it's funny you say about the lockdown, and that actually being quite a good analogue for living in space in isolation, because next week, in fact, You're not going there, are you? No, not into space, but on an analog space mission. So researchers as well as astronauts in training will spend time in habitats on land or under the sea that replicate the conditions of living in space. So no contact with the outside world except through email, eating freeze-dried rations, having to exercise every day, having a set list of activities, including EVAs that need to be completed. Yeah. So I'm going to Poland next week to have that experience. I have to tell you afterwards what it's like to reintegrate.

SPEAKER_02:

I would love to hear after. Maybe we can do another episode. I think it's absolutely fascinating. Yeah. How long will you be there for a week? Did you say?

SPEAKER_00:

It's one week and it's kind of a precursor to doing longer missions. So one of the people I've connected, who is a space psychologist, is currently in Canada in the Arctic Circle doing a much longer mission that she's been training for for many, many months. So yeah, these happen all over the world in extreme locations. And it's a chance to run what they call analog missions. So it's exactly the same as it would be in space, minus the weightlessness on Earth. And a lot of that is running research and experiments, particularly in the early stages where you're fine tuning kind of the experiment to get the right kind of data out before you take it up into space. so that we can learn what works for living and working in space

SPEAKER_02:

wow i think we i think you should definitely come back and tell us

SPEAKER_01:

okay

SPEAKER_02:

how it went that could be a part two absolutely because i think it's at the moment with everyone that's going to be listening is going to be you know coming up with conjuring all these pictures in their mind as to what it might be like and you know much to all the things that you've said today there's it's just it blows my mind it's absolutely incredible and it will be very interesting to hear then your experience of it what you have learned and then even how your thinking has changed and how you might then utilize some of these experiences and i don't know would you translate that into some of your coaching for your clients or what could that mean for leadership structures and you know it's it's a very rich resource of or source rather of in insight and intel i guess isn't it so i can't wait to hear it's amazing i think if we just circle it back then i'm just conscious of time we're just going to keep talking all day otherwise so um we're just fine just thinking about about then the modern renaissance woman obviously you've told us all about all the multiple things that you have done and you're still very interested in lots of things as well and you are operating in this way you are where you are doing multiple things kind of professionally as well do you have any advice for modern renaissance women that are maybe feeling conflicted by wanting to do all the things but not knowing where to start or any advice that you might give to anyone that wants to do multiple things to succeed

SPEAKER_00:

yes i think there's two parts to this I think curiosity has been a And I think the other side of that related is to not feel like you have to specialize, because that is something I felt at multiple points in my career. And earlier as a child, like my dad had a single track career as a lorry driver. And I think he really struggled to understand like, my different interests and why I wouldn't commit to just one. And I think that that's a real strength again. And in the world that we live in, there will always be that pressure to specialize. I think going forwards, generalist approach with the curiosity, with the creativity, with the critical thinking, that is how we're going to adapt and not just survive, but thrive in this new world that's emerging. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02:

I agree with you. Thank you so much for joining us today. Well, thank you. I want to say we've covered a lot of ground, but we've spoken about space. We've been trying to think of all these like sarcastic analogies all the way through, but they'll come later, I'm sure. If anybody wants to connect with you, where can they do that?

SPEAKER_00:

So I'm on LinkedIn. caroline clark is a very common name so my profile is caroline hyphen clark hyphen psychologist and on substack at liftoffwithcaroline.substack.com

SPEAKER_02:

i love that liftoff with caroline amazing thank you so much um we'll put some links and show notes in the section below on the episode and obviously if you've got any links or anything that you want to share that might teach us more about women going, and women astronauts as well, and women going into space, as well as, you know, the things that you're doing. We can absolutely include those. Do let us know when you are back, normally Earthside, in a, where you're staying on Earth, when you're back and integrated, and then we can have a part two and hear how you got on.

SPEAKER_00:

That would be amazing. Thank you, Mel. Thanks for having

SPEAKER_02:

me. You are more than welcome. Thank you very much for joining me. Thank you, Caroline, for joining us today. My mind is absolutely blown. I cannot wait to hear how you got on on your first mission. So until next time, don't forget you can find me on modern.renaissance.woman on Instagram. Please rate, five-star review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. The more reviews, the more guests and inspiring insights that I can bring to you. So please do take a minute and let me know what you thought of today's episode. It really does make a difference. And you can also find some show notes and some links below. And if you identify as a modern renaissance woman or you know someone who does, then I would love to hear from you. See you next time.