#138: 'So, what do you do?'
Imagine the scenario. You're hanging around the buffet at a conference, or skirting the edges of a post-seminar drinks reception, or - heaven forbid - drifting around an institutional networking event. As you're clutching your room-temperature drink and trying not to look too awkward, someone you've never met before says hello and asks, 'So, what do you do?' Do you have an answer? Is it a satisfactory one? Or are you someone who lies awake at night wondering how they can curate their career in a way that will enable them to be able to answer this question in a confident, self-assured way? It has come the attention of The Academic Imperfectionist that there are plenty of you out there who worry about this question. It's time to dial down the stress. Grab a cuppa, and get listening!
Episode transcript:
Is there any more stressful question, seriously?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello again, imperfectionists! Time for another new episode already - hasn’t that come around quickly? Oh, silly me, it’s the summer (in the UK, at least), so of course the time is running away with us. The dawn of the new academic year will be with us before we know it. It’s stressful even thinking about that, isn’t it? But in the mean time, I’m happy you’re here. Let’s regulate our nervous systems together. Not really. Well, I mean, maybe. Because what does that even mean and why is everyone banging on about it all of a sudden? I saw it on a post by a fashion brand a few days ago, where it seemed to mean something like ‘looking nice makes you feel better but also please believe that there are neuroscientifically sound reasons to buy our stuff’. Some YouTube yoga instructors too. You wouldn’t believe the amount of unyogic time I spend trying to do yoga in my living room while muttering things like ‘jeez shut up with the bullshit stoner monologue’. The nervous system guff seems to be just a fancy way of talking about how to calm down or destress or just generally feel better. Maybe there are people around who think that those needs have to be expressed in the language of biology in order to be taken seriously. No idea where it all came from, but I blame podcasts. Other podcasts. Wow, where am I going with this grumpy rant? My nervous system is obviously really dysregulated. Let’s take some deep breaths and get the old parasympathetic thing going, shall we?
Right then. On to this episode’s topic. If you’d asked me to guess, before I started coaching, what sort of problems academics typically struggle with, I’d have done a decent job of identifying a good many of them. Procrastination, impostor syndrome, anxieties around productivity, things like that. All super common, and all obviously common. They’re things we talk to each other about. There are jokes and memes and articles in The Onion about them. And then, on the other hand, there are some struggles that, despite being very common among academics - and also other professional people - are much less obvious. Certainly not something I’d have been able to predict before I started coaching. The topic I want to talk about here falls into this category. It keeps coming up with coaching clients. And when that happens, things sometimes reach a kind of critical mass where I think, ‘Right, that’s it, time to do a podcast episode about this!’ Time to let people know that they are not alone, and maybe even offer them a bit of a lifeline.
Over the years, I’ve had a number of clients who place great importance on being able to describe what they do to others in a coherent and concise way - on having a punchy answer to those ‘So, what do you do?’ questions that you get asked at conferences and parties and those excruciating networking events. Now, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be able to answer to that question. But some people I’ve coached are seriously bothered by the fact that, in their mind, they don’t have a good answer, and their need to find one is playing a major role in guiding their career choices, all while feeling stressed. It tends to be the case - often but not always - that people like this don’t have a specific, detailed template for themselves that they want to step into - it’s not like ‘I want to be able to say that I am a professor of this subject at that university’. They just want to have an answer that fits certain, sometimes vaguely defined criteria - it has to be impressive and/or easy to understand and/or sound interesting and/or whatever. It’s a ‘I’ll know it when I see it’ type thing. And there’s an existential edge to it - a sense unless and until they can answer this question, they’re not even real. So, they keep striving, and they hope that one day it will all slot into place - it will all feel right, they will finally be able to own the space they take up in the world, and the answer to the ‘What do you do?’ question will fall effortlessly from their lips.
This need to know how to describe themselves and what they do when someone asks is, for some people, the main motivation for why they seek out coaching in the first place. They don’t realise it at first, because that need is quite difficult to articulate, and they don’t understand exactly what it is that they’re struggling with. What they bring to that first coaching session is a kind of ‘What even am I?’ anxiety that turns out, we discover after quite a bit of digging, to have been triggered either by people asking them about themselves, or just by trying to imagine what they’d say were they to be asked. People like this want help with making changes in their life that will help them become … something that is easily identifiable, that will enable them to answer with a confident, ‘Me? Oh, I’m an X’ when they’re asked. Those changes might involve working towards getting a certain job - one that in their mind, is a recognisable thing - you know, something that doesn’t cause people’s eyes to glaze over with confusion when you mention it - and one that is (to them, although maybe not to other people) a proxy for all sorts of things that they value: achievement, intelligence, status, success, and so on. For academics, those changes might also involve things like choosing to work on this research project rather than that one - because believe it or not, the ‘How am I going to describe this to people?’ concern can be so important that it sometimes eclipses seemingly far more relevant questions like, ‘Is this the project I’m most interested in and excited about?’
What I usually do when people express this sort of concern is encourage them to reflect with me on why any of this is so important in the first place. What need would be fulfilled by having an answer to that ‘What do you do?’ question? What does the importance that they are placing on all this reveal about their most deeply-held values? What old battles are they trying to fight and, finally, win here? That last one is therapy territory rather than coaching - but my point is: if it really matters to you that you have some pithy elevator pitch about yourself, it’s really really important to try to understand why it matters so much. Because if you don’t understand that - if, instead, you allow yourself to be led by that need, then far from moving towards the sort of satisfying, rewarding life you’d like, you’re just getting in your own way.
Let me talk about why that is. I’ll focus on two main reasons. One is this: do you even know what it is that you’re striving for? If, like lots of my coaching clients, you don’t even realise that you’re striving for this thing, then the answer is probably no. You’re just assuming, or hoping, that one day, if you keep improving in whatever the relevant domains are, things will all slot into place and you’ll be able to step out into the world with confidence and assurance, and the ultimate expression of all that is having a confident answer whenever people ask you what you do. Maybe that will happen when you get your PhD. Maybe when you get that postdoc. When you get your first grant. When you get a secure job. No, it has to be somewhere more impressive than that. When you make prof. When you win that award. And so on. Who knows? If you don’t have a specific goal in mind, the goalposts will keep moving. You’re not chasing a specific outcome - you’re chasing a feeling. Now, I’m going to try to persuade you that you’d be better off not chasing after this elevator pitch form of self-realisation in the first place - but even if I don’t manage to convince you of that, at the very least, please sit down and work out what the success conditions are here. Get it all down in terms of SMART goals. What does success look like? Because if you don’t know that, the idea that you’ll ever get there is pure fantasy. You’re in the position of someone struggling to pay off a debt with a loan shark. It’s not going to happen.
Here’s another reason to resist being unquestioningly led by that need: even ignoring whether it’s possible to achieve what you’re trying to achieve, it’s likely that your preoccupation with being able to answer the ‘What do you do?’ question is actually leading you away from a more fulfilling life, not getting you closer. I’ve been struck several times by how this can happen. A lot of people who hope eventually to have a secure and rewarding career in academia, tie their identity to academia in various ways. The answer to the ‘What do you do?’ question that they want to be able to give involves being a professor or something else academia-related. That leads to placing a lot of weight on succeeding in academia, and relatively little weight on exploring potentially fulfilling opportunities outside of academia. It’s more common that you might realise for people to spend years moving from one precarious, temporary, poorly-paid academic job to the next, while refusing to consider other options that they themselves recognise are really promising, simply because if they moved in that direction, they’d be leaving academia. They’d no longer be one of the gang. They wouldn’t know who they were. They wouldn’t be real any more. Now, I’m not here to tell anyone that the value they place on working in academia, or anything else, is wrong. I’m not telling anyone that they should prefer x rather than y. But I do encourage people who come to me for coaching (or who listen to my podcast) to reflect carefully on what assumptions are leading them to value certain things and to pursue certain goals, and to question whether those assumptions are tenable. Assumptions like, ‘success in academia directly reflects my worth as a person’. I mean, just saying that out loud goes some way to making it less compelling, doesn’t it?
Ok. So, don’t allow yourself to strive for some ill-defined conception of what you ought to be, and try to avoid sabotaging your own happiness by giving weight to values and goals that you haven’t tried to understand and which might be built on dodgy foundations. These are important pitfalls to avoid. But beyond that, what’s wrong with caring being able to answer that ‘What do you do?’ question?
Well, maybe nothing much. We all get asked that question from time to time, and it’s completely normal to want to be able to answer it concisely, engagingly, and in a way that reflects well on us. The problems come when we allow it to derail our lives. I know it’s difficult, and that it can be a sensitive issue. For some people, I think that question becomes a focus for their own attempts to make sense of their life. It’s not as simple as wanting to have something to say to people when they’re making smalltalk after a seminar. What they really want to do is have an answer that encapsulates something interesting and meaningful, so that they can reassure themselves that what they are doing is worthwhile and perhaps even impressive. And that, of course, is about their own relationship with the choices they make and the goals they pursue and the things they achieve - not simply about the information they share about themselves with others. Having worked with several clients on this sort of thing, let me now talk about how to remove some of the angst from thinking about your answer to that question.
By far the most important and rewarding thing, I think, is to recognise that coming up with a way to answer that question and living your dream life are two completely separate projects. Perhaps that sounds obvious, but plenty of people don’t realise. Their rationale is: I first need to get to a point where I’m living a really impressive life, and then when someone asks me what I do, I just describe my amazing life. So, realise the life first, and you get the answer for free. And since someone might ask me that question quite soon, I need to sort out my life urgently. The clock is ticking. Hurry up and start winning at life, my friend! All super stressful, but thankfully all completely unnecessary. Think of the project of finding a good answer to that question as a public relations exercise. If you want to be able to say something impressive, just go ahead. Work out a good answer based on the life you already have. I’m not suggesting you tell lies about yourself - but you don’t need to give the warts-and-all account either. Set aside some time to do this, as a serious exercise. Think about what you’d like to convey about yourself with your answer. Competence? Ambition? Dedication? Intelligence? Get clear about that, and then give some thought to what sort of thing you’d be comfortable saying. Why not talk it over with a friend or a colleague? You could brainstorm together and help each other come up with ways to represent yourselves in the situations you have in mind. If you’d like a little help along the way, let me make a suggestion. I know you have all sorts of anxieties about not being good enough, not being as impressive as that other person, not having achieved this and that. I know it can be hard to keep those anxieties from seeping into how you think about yourself and how you anticipate presenting yourself to others, and those anxieties have no place in your public relations campaign. So, imagine for a second that you’re proud of everything you’ve achieved. That you don’t feel the need to apologise for any of it. That you’re already confident taking your seat at the table. It might help to imagine how you’d describe, not yourself, but someone else - a friend or a colleague - whose life is going the way yours is right now. How would that self-assurance filter through to the way you’d answer the question ‘What do you do?’ Channel that, and there’s your answer.
Recognising that you can work on your answer to this question independently of working towards the life you want simplifies things a lot. Making important decisions about your career and your long-term goals is challenging enough without needing to worry simultaneously about how you are going to represent it all to other people. They are two different tasks. That’s why big organisations have dedicated PR departments, separate from the departments that make decisions about company strategy.
Next, let’s go back to something I said earlier, about the importance of understanding why having an answer to this question is so important to you. Do you understand why? Is it recognition from your peers that you’re after? Admiration? Acceptance? Validation of your choices? Reassurance that you’re on the right track? There are several reasons why gaining insight here is important. One is that understanding what you want from being able to answer this question opens up the possibility of considering other ways to get it. So, for example, if you want recognition, what other ways could you get that, besides having a snappy way to convey what you’re up to? Are you already getting recognition in various important ways, but perhaps discounting it - which people sometimes do when they tell themselves that yes, they got praise from that important person in their field, but it doesn’t count because it probably wasn’t sincere or maybe that person was mistaken? Thinking along these lines is - as I hope I’m making clear - a much more vigorous and direct way to engage with and try to meet your needs than pinning your hopes on maybe one day being able to give a satisfactory answer to a question at a drinks party.
Oh, and finally. Isn’t it a horrible question, anyway? ‘What do you do?’ tends to mean ‘How do you monetise yourself?’ and in practice it seems to mean ‘What sort of person are you?’ and even ‘Are you worth my time?’ There is so much that is wrong with that, and so many ways to feel inadequate. I have a memorable experience here. Once, many years ago, when I was between finishing my PhD and getting an academic job, I attended a philosophy event in London. There was a drinks reception afterwards and people were milling around, chatting. I got talking to a man there - a professional philosopher - about the event and our interests and various other stuff, and after a few minutes of this he asked, ‘So, what do you do?’ I told him how I’d finished my PhD and was in the process of applying for jobs. The very next thing he said to me was, ‘Have a good evening’, and then he turned away with his glass of free wine and went to find someone else to talk to, presumably someone who was already successfully selling their labour. It was hurtful and very rude. The reason I’m telling you this is because, although I’ve spent most of this episode trying to convince you not to be too preoccupied with being able to answer ‘What do you do?’ questions, I do understand why it is so fraught, not just within academia, but within a culture that treats what you’re paid to do as a measure of who you are. It’s stressful, isn’t it? So, let me bid you farewell, and leave you to get on with some parasympathetic activation, or cortisol downregulation, or whatever your comforting TikTok pseudoscience of choice is. I’m sure your nervous system is just fine, by the way. Tan y tro nesa.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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