Confessions from Backstage

Putting yourself out there when you think that doesn't feel good.

Yeah.

But doing it changes you as a person.

Obviously, part of academic jobs, research jobs, they involve academics.

having to tell people about the work that you do it's like

a big part

of

the

job

yeah

and that in and of itself isn't easy for everyone for some people it comes more naturally than others and I think it's like well for me it was anyway like a long journey from feeling completely awful about it and still do sometimes to sort of feeling okay about it now let's

just take a minute to unpack what Why does that not feel good? The things that come to my mind, partly because academia is riddled with credibility signals.

We're constantly made to feel or perhaps we make ourselves feel like we're being evaluated in every which way.

Yeah, comparison against other people.

Is this the kind of stuff that you mean? Yeah, and just credibility signals in terms of...

Your papers, your grants, your H-index, your impact factors, your numbers, your numbers, your metrics, your metrics.

And there's that sort of like constant evaluation and various things, they signal credibility.

And I think that can then make it really uncomfortable when you're going into a space that can feel risky or exposing, which sometimes doing science communication or communication full stop can be.

Yeah, I agree.

Especially when you've not like, I mean, you have your script maybe, but it's very in the moment.

You have definitely have less control over that situation than you do over a paper or an article or even I'm thinking about students when they have coursework versus presentations.

there's one that's more risky and scary.

Yeah, and the voice in your written work, unless you're using AI, but let's just not do that because I'm really getting upset about everybody losing their own voice.

So we might need to do another Finding Your Voice episode about

putting your voice