Episode 114: Celebrate that Shit

In this week's episode, Marvette talks about the importance of learning to celebrate your failures and adopting a mindset to fail on purpose.

Dr. Lacy discusses how you need to feel the uncertainty and realize that your failures are evidence of action toward your goal.

Follow along on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marvettelacy/

TRANSCRIPT:

Hey friends. The time has come to finish your dissertation graduate and become doctor. Welcome to office hours with Dr. Lacey, where we talk about how to finally master this time management thing. So you can stay on top of it without losing your mind. Every Wednesday, you can find a new episode wherever you listen to podcasts. Make sure you hit the subscribe button to make sure you never miss an episode. I'm Dr. Marvette Lacey, your dissertation writing strategists here to be with you along every step of the way. I would like to thank you for coming to today's office hours. Let's get started on today's episode. Hey scholar, what are your plans for the summer? How are you going to get your writing goals accomplish? I know you because if you're like me, which you're probably are because you listened to this, then I know you have all of the plans to do all the writing over the summer.

But let me ask you a question. How has that worked out for you in the past? Have you just said, Oh, I just need a break and you're just going to take the rest of May off. And then before you know it, it's back in July and it's time for the semester to start all over again. Or have you spent your whole summer working, working, and you looked up and you didn't do anything. You have no fun. I want to show you how you can have your hot girl summer and make progress on your dissertation. We will be doing a special challenge inside of the finish your dissertation program for the summer. All about protecting your peace, drinking your water and minding your business and making consistent progress in the dissertation . You want to sign up. You don't want to miss out, come on over to qual scholars.com and sign up.

It's only 197 a month. You can cancel at anytime, but I promise you, you won't want to cancel. So let's this be your sign and come join us. And I will see you inside the program. Okay. Let's get back to this episode. Hey, Hey, welcome back to a new week. Yeah. At the time, if you hear my mouse, that's me pulling up my notes. But at the time that this is a release, I am going to be just getting back home from spending a few days on the beach, somewhere in North Carolina, looking at the water and feeling the sun on my skin. And I'm so excited. But today I'm coming to talk to you about desirability. Before we get into this episode, I want to remind you that there are two amazing opportunities for you. They're waiting for you inside of the collective number one summer of self love series that is kicking off in a couple of weeks, Tuesday, May 25th.

And we're going to be having a webinar, explaining all about what this new program is and why you need to be in there. Why you want be in there. And that webinar's Thursday, May 20th. And it's all about how to fall so deep in love with yourself that this is the best summer of your life. We're talking about stop hustling, right? Learn how to practice self care, not in a capitalistic way, but in a way that is true to you. And that helps fill you up. We're talking about working less, still getting your work done, but working less, so you can have more time to enjoy yourself, enjoy your life, enjoy your summer. And we're going to be talking about how you can you look and feel good from the inside, out putting boundaries in place like a boss and not feeling one ounce of guilt or shame about it.

I'm saying change your life for the better. It's a 12 week program. And if you are inside the membership, you get access to it. If you're not inside the membership, what are you doing? Come on. But if you're like, I need a little bit more information. Join us May 20th. So you can get [email protected] about that training. And then the second opportunity is we're doing a summer boot camp of sorts for those working on their dissertation and looking for a little bit more guidance and support because you want to make the most out of this summer, it's going to be a challenge. It's going to be lit up in the Facebook group. You do not want to miss it. We're starting it on the last week of May, all the way until the end of July, we're going to make nine weeks count. So you would always come to the website to find out more information.

But today I want to shout out my client, Kayla. Now we've done an episode together on the podcast is episode number 37. And we go over how we met. We come from same PhD program and we have known each other for a while now. Um, but I am bringing Kayla back up because she works in the housing department at Emory University. And if you are familiar with the housing lifestyle, I'm sure you can imagine how messy things have been over this past year with COVID. And just trying to figure out students' lives like over this year. And she also had a few personal family things going on and it just turned her world upside down. And now over a year later, things have calmed down and she has committed to like finally finishing his dissertation one, like for all right. And she's having some apprehensions about the research aspects of her dissertation, specifically with submitting the IRB and being comfortable with her methods section, right?

And we've been working on a one-on-one basis. So if you are inside of the membership, there is an option to work with me. One-on-one if you feel like you need that extra layer of support and what we've been really focusing on is her relationship with ourselves, practicing self-compassion and creating desire for her work. Now, you may be wondering, say, what now? Why would you be talking about desire and compassion and relationship with herself when she told you she was uncomfortable with the IRB and methods and what I want you to know, if you don't take anything else from this episode is that whenever things are coming up, whenever you have roadblocks or challenges in your dissertation, it rarely has anything to do with your dissertation. Most likely it has something to do with how you think about yourself and how you think about your ability to get the work done.

But you may think of this more in terms of motivation and not necessarily desire. But my goal for you in this episode is to think deeper about the role that desire plays not only for yourself, but also for your dissertation. So in this episode, I'll be talking to you about what is desire, how is desire connected to the dissertation and how you can generate more desirability for your dissertation? So first, what is desired? I first want to start with the definition of motivation, because again, I think that people enter this conversation from like, I just need to be more motivated. I wish I had motivation to write or have motivation to finish. So motivation is a now and I just typed this into Google and saw what came up. And the first definition that came up was motivation is the general desire or willingness of someone to do something again, the general desire or willingness of someone to do something.

And I thought that was interesting. Well, what does desire mean? Right? Cause that's the core word hearing this definition. So desire also a noun is a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen. Again, a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen. Do you have a strong feeling of wanting for your dissertation? Not just to finish it, not because you think you have all these stories about what life is going to be after you finish a dissertation, but do you have a longing, a wanting for the dissertation process? Now I talked about this a little bit last week about learning to practice joy and celebrating a process. And I'm going to go deeper in that on that concept for today. And if you're like Kayla, you're like, okay, great. I don't care. I just want to get to the finish line.

Tell me how to get to the finish line. But here's the thing. Like I get it for Kayla. She could take her, leave the process of researching, collecting, and analyzing data or writing up the final dissertation. She is more motivated to spend time with RAs who are going to be her participant. Her study is about how do RAs utilize tech technology, specifically social media to build community with their residents, RAs, for those of you who are not familiar with this world, our students, staff members who live with students when they live on campus and RAs usually have a particular floor of a residence or floor or a building of residents, which they are responsible for facilitating various community building activities. They're also usually the first ones to respond. If a student needs assistance or a student is breaking a policy or a rule, they'll, they'll be the first ones there.

And so a big part of their role is to build community where residents to help residents know each other, help them feel a sense of connection to where they live into continuing their learning and development outside of the classroom. And so that's what Kayla is more interested in. She doesn't really care about the research part. She wants to do a good job. Don't get me wrong, but it's not what lights her up. And I get that. But here's what I've been talking to Kayla about. And here's what I will say to you. If you're in a place of constantly resisting the dissertation process, it will be a much tougher, longer road to get to that finish line. Right? How I was saying last week, if you're not practicing, you know, joy or celebration, why do you think that's going to happen when you get to the end?

And why do you think that you're going to want to do something that you are dreading, right? Because if you're thinking like, you're going to feel like and you're going to do work. The same thing is true. Like if you're dreading it, you're going to feel the dread. And you're not going to want to take action. Think about like how excited you were when you first started your program. Cause this is an example, right? Your desire to get started with classes was probably really high. You probably thought about how you were going to plan out your schedule, like with planners and notebooks you were going to use for what class and how this time around, like things were going to be different. Like, if you like me, I'm like, I, when I first started, I'm like, I am going to be the best student they've ever seen.

I'm going to do everything perfect. I'm going to have all my reading or my assignments done ahead of time. I'm going to contribute. I'm going to do all the things, right. Maybe you told your friends and family that you were going to need to be disciplined and you couldn't be distracted and that you don't need to take as much time and energy to focus on school. And you were not going to be available for them. Maybe you said no to like other commitments or other things. Cause you're like, no, I am going to school. Maybe you buy like a new laptop or a tablet for your readings. Cause he was like, listen, I'm organized over here. And then he just did all these things. But you did all these things from a place of great desire to start your doctoral journey. But at then you started taking some classes, right?

You started looking at the syllabus . You're like, well, who's going to do all this reading and all this. Right. And they set me up as a trap. Right. And every time, like every class, every week that desire you initially had started to decrease and decrease and your excitement dropped and dropped. Right? Cause you like reality has something maybe doubt crept in. And you're like, I just don't know who I was. I was so young and naive. But what I want you to know is that that level of desire that you had at the beginning, that level of excitement that you had at the beginning is always available to you. It's available to you right now. Why? Because that, that high level of desire and assignment didn't come from you starting school or this new program or a new academic year, that level of desire and excitement came from the thoughts you had about starting school.

It started in your head, right? Because you're still in the same program. You're still around the same people. The program didn't change. How you're thinking about the program has changed. How you're thinking about your ability has changed. I'm going to let that sit for a minute because some of Jada's going, gonna hit you on the way home. It is not the program itself, but it's how you're approaching it, how you're thinking about it. And so when I say that, that same level of desire and anxiety and excitement is available to you right now, it is because if you can find pieces that you love about the journey and you learn to practice, join excitement, guess what? You're going to have that level of excitement. I'm just telling you what I noticed. I ain't woo-hoo but this is how you do it. If for my more, my friends who need more tangible things, first, I want you to write out 25 reasons why you want to become doctor.

Dr. Lacey (13:27):

I don't care what these reasons are. I don't care how silly they sound. Just write out 25 reasons why you want to become doctor. I think about when I first started my weight loss journey and I wrote out 25 reasons why I wanted to do it high on that list was that I wanted to wear cute gym clothes. And I had this story that I couldn't in my, at my current size and weight. But then I started to think about like, is that really true? No, but that was one of my reasons, right? One of my reasons was that I wanted to walk outside and hit return again. I just, I didn't judge it. I just let it be on there. And I keep it, um, list on my phone notes app so I can see it when I need it. So number one, write out a list of 25 reasons.

Number two, do some daily journaling. Now I know some of y'all don't like the journal. I get it. But if you don't like to journal what I'm going to say, when you go to the bathroom in the morning, pull out your phone. Cause I know your phone is with you in the bathroom, take your phone and look at your twenty-five reasons, read over them and then choose one of those reasons. And you want to imagine yourself in the future already achieving the goal of being in doctor. And I want you to think about how is your life different? How are you living out this reason? How do you feel about it? Right. So to use my example of cute gym clothes, I would imagine myself walking outside and some bright colored gym clothes that were real cute, that I can go from walking the trader Joe's.

Right. And I just would imagine how I would feel good, how confident I felt. And I just let myself dream about that. So you can dream about that while you're taking a poop or you can journal about that, you know, you choose your adventure. And it helped me to live in that land, in that possibility. And here's the thing like I started to realize as I was doing that future dreaming, like, you know, that's available to you right now, you know, you could wear cute gym clothes right now. You could walk outside and his concern right now. But I would have never gotten there. Had I not wrote out those reasons and allow myself to think about what life would look like. And it helped me to build this connection of you don't really want to lose late. Well, it's like you want to lose weight for these reasons, but these reasons are available to you right now.

So how about we just get these reasons now and we'll see where we are with the weight loss. Honestly, that was my approach, but that's a whole another podcast. Number three, focus on the parts that you enjoy most about the dissertation for Kayla rise, the opportunity to talk to RAs, help other housing departments approve their training and their development for their para-professional staff. Like for you, what are those parts? What are you looking forward to most focus on that. And for those other parts, leave them. Remember they're just a means to an end. They're just a means for you to get to the favorite parts of the dissertation process. What do you like? Maybe you like the research part, maybe you liked the writing part. Maybe like, I don't want to talk to people. Right. But when you know what you like, you can just let the parts that you don't like, let it be simple and get them done so that you can get to the parts you do.

Like so you can have that joy. So that's number three. Number four is find at least one thing every day that you enjoyed about this dissertation process and allow yourself to drop down in your body, like feel, what does joy feel like in your body? When you think about that one thing, what does it feel like to experience that one thing? How does desire feel? How does joy feel? And then number five, which I would argue is probably the most important is to find other people or fill up your social media feeds and timeline lines with folks who are having a positive experience with their dissertation, who loves to talk about their research or their findings or their process, right? Or maybe you post on social media about what you're enjoying about your process or what you're looking forward to because here's the thing, words mean things.

The people we surround ourselves with, it matters. You probably heard that quote of you're the sum of the five people you hang out with the most, that includes people on social media that you probably never met in real life, but you consume all their content. Are they keeping you like in a spirit of Julian celebration or looking forward to it or are they and moaning and complaining their dissertation? That's going to rub off on you because words mean things. Y'all words have vibrational effects on our body. You know, everybody's like, you know the kids, this is my bad. Yo vibe comes from how you think and what you say and what you consume. If you want to keep your vibe high, you gotta be protective of what you let into your space, who you let into your space. You're gonna have to find some people who love their dissertation process.

Otherwise you're going to be, moaning, and complaining with them and wondering why you miserable throughout the whole process. Get you some good people. Keep your vibe high. Okay. All that is going to do it for me today. Let me know what you thought about this idea of desiring a dissertation. I would love to know your thoughts. You can let us know over at Instagram at qual underscore scholars, and then that's going to do it all. I'm going to see y'all next week. Bye for now. Thank you for joining in for today's office hours. If you're ready to take this work to the next level, I invite you to join the happy free and pay collective. We will show you how to finish your dissertation and build your consulting business, using the skills and knowledge you already possessed. Come on over to Marvettelacy.com and let's get started. I'll see you on the inside of the collective bye for now.