The ‘Research Mindset’: Some Pointers

After years of supervising—and teaching—Master’s and doctoral research students in counselling, psychotherapy, and counselling psychology, there’s one thing that, I’ve come to believe, is the key to success. It’s hard to describe, but goes something like this….

When you study or research at undergraduate level, it’s all about showing how much you know. You have to convince your assessors that you are ‘up to it’: that you know enough to meet the learning outcomes for that award.

Students often approach Master’s or doctoral research with the same mindset: they want to show how much they know, that they’re doing it the right way, that they understand the process and the content of the research that they are conducting.

For Master’s and doctoral research that is, indeed, still important; but there is also something much more. When you do research at this level, you are moving from being a student to being a teacher. You, now, are the one who knows. And what the academic community, including your examiners, want from you is not so much to test you or to check your knowledge in a particular field, but to learn from you. We’re looking to you to tell us about what you’re discovering because you know more than us. Yes, that’s right. You do (or, at least, will do); and you need to be able to own that authority.

This can be a hard one: ‘Who am I, I’m just a student, how am I supposed to know anything special?’ But, at doctoral (and to some extent Master’s) level, you are, by definition, being asked to make an original and significant contribution at the leading edge of your field. So, to some extent, this shift needs to happen whether you like it or not. You need to be the big person in the room.

Is this about being arrogant? No, of course not. Is it about pretending you know everything? No, not that either. Is it about patronising your supervisors or your examiners? Definitely not, no. What it is about is being confident and secure in your knowledge and feeling that you have something to educate others about—something to even the most senior figures in the field.

Because the reality is, you do. If you’re researching at Master’s or doctoral level, you should be focusing on a question that no-one else, or very few other people, have ever asked. And that does make you the expert. You know more than us. You know more than your supervisors, you know more than your examiners. You know more than other people in the academic field. And what’s really important to recognise is that we want to learn from you. When someone agrees to examine you for your viva, for instance, or when they come to see you present your research at a conference, they’re not thinking, ‘Mm, I’ve always wondered whether [insert your name here] is good enough for a Master’s/doctoral degree’, or, ‘I’ve always thought [insert your name here] is really just pretending to know things, and I’m now going to find out for sure.’ Nope, that’s probably the last things on their minds. Rather, a large part of the reason they’ve agreed to spend two days reading your thesis and then travelling to your university to examine you, etcetera, is because they’re interested in what you’ve discovered and want to find out more. After all (and apologies to the narcissists here) would anyone really want to spend two or more days of their life just checking up on you? In a world where everyone is so furiously busy what people mostly want is to learn, as effectively and efficiently, what you know so that they can inform and develop their own work and ideas. We want to learn from you.

Doing it despite

Of course that can be scary. When we start off learning in any field, we are inevitably novices; and some of us have ‘imposter syndrome’ throughout our careers. That’s totally understandable. But researching at doctoral and Master’s level means being and doing something despite these fears. It means holding, and owning, our knowledge, skills, and expertise. So if you find it difficult to own that teacher role, this might be something useful to take to therapy: ‘Why is it so difficult for me to see myself as an authority here?’ It gets to the very heart of who we are and how we feel about ourselves.

A key to researching and writing

Although this ‘teacher mindset’ is relatively hard to describe; once you can get into it, it can really unlock the research and writing up process. It means you can write with confidence; and with balance, because you know that what you are saying is important, and that people are wanting a serious, reflective, critical commentary from you. And it means that you are likely to avoid some of the pitfalls stemming from a wholly ‘student mindset’. One problem you sometimes see in students’ theses, for instance, is that their Discussion says next to nothing about their own findings—it focuses solely on the research and theory introduced in their Literature Review. Why does that happen? Probably because, to some extent, the student doesn’t really believe that their own findings have much to say: so they just skip over it and back to the ‘important stuff’. Get into that teacher mindset, however, and you’ll find that you naturally take your own findings much more seriously: they’re not just some throw-away bits of data, they’re carefully curated evidence that have a meaning and significance to the wider field of knowledge.

Narrowing down your focus

One key thing in getting to be—and feeling like—the expert is ensuring that the scope of your research is sufficiently narrow. If you take on a massive area, like ‘the effectiveness of therapy’, you’re never going to feel like (or, indeed, be) the leading authority in that area. There’s people who have spent their lifetimes researching this, carried out hundreds of studies, so, of course, you are going to feel less knowledgeable than them. But if you narrow down your focus—for instance, ‘the effectiveness of compassion-focused therapy (CFT) for health anxiety’—then, immediately, the number of leading authorities in the field dramatically reduces. Sure, people might know about the overall effectiveness of CFT more than you, or the processes by which it supports change; but when it comes to CFT for health anxiety, you’re likely to be in a field of one. And that’s when everyone starts to turn to you to discover what you’ve found, because you’re then genuinely contributing to the knowledge-base. So if you’re feeling like you could never ‘hold’ that expert position in your field, it may be worth looking at how broad your field is. You can, I promise, get to that expertise level, but it is very dependent on the breadth of the question you are asking.

Against authority

But is it OK to be an ‘authority’? Perhaps another block to that teacher mindset, for those of us from more humanistic and person-centred orientations, is that we’re wary of taking on too dominant a role: we don’t like to position ourselves as ‘better’ than others. Here, equality, respect, treating the other as like ourselves are all the principal values. Yes, absolutely; but recognising that we know more than others in one particular field isn’t saying we’re better or smarter than others. We can know lots and others can know lots as well; and if we all share our specialist knowledges—and dialogue between them—then we can all make contributions to a better world for all. Equality doesn’t have to mean sameness. Indeed, recognising our own special knowledges—and giving that away to others—can be part of a world that celebrates difference, diversity, and uniqueness for all.

facing the unknowable

To adopt that teacher mindset, you also have to be willing to face the unknowability of a lot of the questions you are asking. At school and at undergraduate level, the questions you were asked had ‘right’ answers—or, at least, your teachers and lecturers told you they did. Multiple choice questions make it clear that there are ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’. But when you’re leading the field, when you’re at the cutting edge of developments, there’s often not one right way of going forward. You’re ahead now, and you have to decide which path to cut. Should you use IPA or grounded theory? Two or three levels in your multilevel analysis? Well, sorry, but as your supervisors, examiners, and readers it’s very likely that we don’t actually know. We’ve got our own ideas, but what we’re hoping for is that you’ll be able to face those really difficult questions and, in the absent of any certainties, work if out for yourself (in a sensible, informed, and transparent way). And that’s not because we want to provide a non-directive environment to teach you to work these things out for yourself: it’s because we genuinely, really, don’t know.

That’s what doctoral level competences are about: being able to move forward in the face of incomplete knowledge. If you don’t know, it’s almost certainly not because you are incapable or dumb, but because the reality is that no one else knows either: no one has managed to work it out yet. And what we’re hoping for is that you’ll do the work of working it out. There’s so many questions, uncertainties, and unknowns out there; and if you can take one small chunk of this and do some thinking that can contribute to the wider field, you’ll be doing a massive benefit to all of us.

Conclusion

Be serious, then, about your research. You do nothing for yourself, or for the field, if you treat your research as simply an academic exercise that you have to get through—that isn’t ever going to teach anyone about anything. Sorry if that sounds harsh; but be serious about your research in the same way that you would be serious about your work as a therapist. That doesn’t mean not being able to laugh, or joke, or enjoy it along the way; but it does mean having the confidence to believe that you can give something meaningful to the wider world. And if you don’t feel that, take some time to work on it, in the same way that you would work on your insecurities as a therapist (in research supervisor, for instance, or in therapy, or on your course). Get to a position where, in transactional analysis terms, you’re an adult: where you’re able to own your strengths and your abilities to contribute, as well as your limitations. You have so much to offer.


Acknowledgements

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

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