Little Science Talks: Season 1, Episode 6

The first season of the Little Science Talks podcast focuses on generational influences in STEM. Little Science Co Founder, Heidi Gardner will be joined by her co-host Anna Kebke, along with a different guest for each episode.

You can listen to the episode in full here, and the full episode’s transcript is below if you’d prefer to read along.

Heidi  
Hello, and welcome to Little Science Talks. This is our final episode of season one. And today we are joined by Dr Marc Reed. Marc, would you like to introduce yourself?

Marc  
Thanks, Heidi, and thanks to you and Anna for having me on. I’m Marc Reid, I’m a UKRI  future leaders fellow based at the University of Strathclyde. I’m a chemist by training, as my accent will tell you I was born and raised in Glasgow, I’ve done most of my training inside academia and outside of that, I run a small company called Precise Safety for accident readiness and safety culture awareness. And amongst all the things that I would normally say on my CV I’ve failed a tonne more than I would normally say out loud to get here, but I thought I would mention that given today’s topic of conversation

Heidi  
And we do, we love to talk about failures. So yes, the first season of the podcast has been on kind of generational influences and STEM and how people get to STEM and how they feel once they’re there. And you came up as someone who well, basically, once we got to the end of the series Anna said we should have someone on to talk about being an imposter, experiencing being an imposter. And that feeling that you always have that every one of our guests has had throughout all of those episodes that we’ve had so far. And I kind of went away and was like, I’m not really sure. Have we heard enough about that? I’m not sure. And then as soon as I thought about it, I was like, no, it’s Marc we have to speak to Marc because I’ve done your study. And it made so much sense to do you want to tell us a bit about the study that I’m talking about? Because I’m guessing it’s still running, right? 

Marc  
Yeah, we are at this point just about to close everything off, to start to tell the story. But taking one step back to see how it all came around. What I didn’t mention in my introduction was that as I was getting to this point in my career, when I moved from my PhD lab at Strathclyde to my postdoc position in Edinburgh, that was really the first time that I had moved away from being intimately involved from one group of colleagues to another. That was the first milestone for me in terms of making a move from one professional location to another, from working on one project to another. And it was during that time that I really started to become aware that I was comparing myself a lot more than I used to tell other people around me. And it doesn’t take very many days/weeks within that new job for me to start to think that I really did not belong in this new group of people. I didn’t feel as qualified as they were, I felt like I didn’t know as much. And that somehow, someway the qualifications that I had and the certificates that I had in my back pocket were worth being taken away from me and burning or ripping up or doing something other than being on my person. But all of that was completely unnamed and unknown to me before then. And it was over a period of a few years, trying to write it down to get out of my head that I found a lot of this research and work on what had commonly been known as the imposter syndrome. And much later found out that that’s completely the wrong way to address it and to name that particular experience. But if you fast forward to now and in the past year and a half know that what turned out to be a diary evolved into a research project and the pandemic made that, I dare say, easier to scale because you could then invite a lot of people online through various channels and almost 900 participants later, we’re looking at trying to use the kindness of all those voices that have come forward to understand what are the things that trigger such experiences of feeling like an imposter? Or where are people feeling this way? Why are they feeling that way? And how do they describe it in their own words, and all of that will come to fruition very soon? And the book that I’ve been writing tells all of that story from the first time I ever felt that seedling of self-doubt, all the way through to what we’ve found in this research project now. 

Heidi  
It’s amazing, like that whole journey of kind of going from moving out of one relatively comfortable situation where you know everyone and you know, all those colleagues, they get you, they’ve watched you get your qualification, and you feel kind of, Okay, I feel right here, I know what’s going on, I get the power dynamics, I understand the politics or that kind of thing and then bringing that full circle into how can this experience be captured for other people as well. I think when I’d seen this study online, it was on Twitter and it had sort of gone, I guess, like semi-viral because you are giving people like a score for their own imposter syndrome or imposter phenomenon. Talk about that. Everyone was then looking at it and going, I want to know what my score is. But that’s what your score is, what’s my score? So it was, it was almost like a weird, like, comparison of imposter’s nerves. And then I would like to I saw a friend get her score. And I think she was like, 75% or something. And then I did it. And mine was 80 something per cent. And I was like, Oh, no, I’m more of an imposter than she is. Oh, wait, no, this is not a good thing is that about, like, start with this weird like this is I’m a higher level of a pastor. And that means what? And then you start with this whole trickle-down thing. So it’s not like we’ve had this conversation with her. And I was like, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Am I more equipped or less equipped by all these different things kind of spin-off? But that for me anyway, as someone who does clinical trial recruitment, that was a magical, magical way to get people involved in your study, just to give them a bit of information to then go, Oh, I want that bit of information too and it kind of spiralled.

Marc  
Well, it was very intriguing, actually listening back to this, this is some of the information I’ve had from someone who’s actually taking part and, and looked at it from the point of view of the mechanism of the study itself growing. And I’ll shamelessly say that that part of it was entirely by design, a few ways to get that many people to come forward for a single study other than to do that. But you know, as it’s given people, that first piece of awareness of the integral and find out more of themselves, and just as you said, it’s that mechanism of sharing it between people that then gets the conversation started and, of course in time for that particular study brings more people forward. And we’re mentioning it’s a sort of hopelessly met in an ironic way that throwing out these numbers, makes people compare themselves more to one another. Now, it’s one of the things that we’re worried about with imposter experiences. But it’s worth it at this point, I know that I’ve mentioned it saying what that is. So the number that you’ve mentioned, be at 75, or 83, or whatever it is, when I first did it, that number for me was, I think 71. But the number itself is based on a well-known scale to describe imposter experiences known as the Clance imposter phenomenon scale. There are two interesting parts of that, Clance refers to Pauline Rose Clance who was the first psychologist and academic along with her research partners to coin the term imposter phenomenon, not imposter syndrome, which is something you’d alluded to earlier. And I’ve been digging and digging and digging and I can’t quite pin down exactly when the change was made. But those who coined this umbrella of experiences never ever intended for it to be called a syndrome. And in fact, it’s a complete misnomer to say so, because syndromes are more specifically defined for something that is more niche and diagnoseable. Whereas the imposter phenomenon can come in several different guises. It’s not a one size fits all, for everyone who’s ever felt that way. There are a series of commonalities that all of the individual stories that you’ll hear very rarely be the same. And even before we get to what the scores mean themselves, in the process of trying to research it, to then write about this, and in my book work was I came across something that I think, had only maybe had a few views online, but it was a plenary lecture that Pauline Clance was giving to an American graduate class. And it’s one of the only things I’ve seen said out loud by Pauline herself and I haven’t seen written down in many other places, where she went even further than phenomenon and said if I had to do all of this again, and this is stuff two years after she originally coined the term, she wouldn’t even call it phenomenon she would call it experiences, imposter experiences, just to make it plainer and more clear that this is something that shouldn’t have the dark cloud of the word syndrome over it. In terms of social networking, there’s probably something in “syndrome” that made for a better headline, or it’s an easier thing to say than phenomenon, it’ll be something as trite as that I believe. That’s my suspicion at this point but just haven’t pinned it down. But anyway, rabble aside, onto the scores themselves that Clance imposter phenomenon scale, quite intuitively ranges from zero to 100. It’s a series of 20 questions asked in an open fashion, some elements of what would be defined within the imposter experience. And anyone who takes that test will rank a statement that they read from one to five, depending on how much they agree with that statement. All those scores get added together, up to 100. If it’s closer to zero, it’s highly unlikely that you’ve ever felt imposter experiences, it’s just not part of your daily life or things that you’ve encountered. Of course, as you move up towards 100, that means that these experiences are ever more common, severe, chronic, and intense. And so it’s a good way to walk through the door of more details on the whole experience to see like put, a wet finger in the air and say roughly where may I lie on this scale. Now, it’s important to note that that’s not the be-all and end-all. But it’s a really good way to get people to start to think about it

Heidi  
It is, it’s a really, it’s something that I had, like taped up on a notice board by my desk, when we were in the office and the before times. I had it taped up because I was like, Look, it’s a constant reminder that what you’re feeling probably isn’t what’s actually happening here. And at some point, it felt really comforting to know that to be like, look, this is just you feeling like you’re not good enough or like you, I don’t know, like your experience isn’t as valid as the person sat next to you in you know, in the other desk or whatever. And it made me then question those feelings more often, in a really positive way, I think to be like, look, actually, you can’t do this, you’re doing it now. But you’re sat at this desk at the same desk as the person next to you with the same laptop and you’re doing it. So let’s just forget that feeling for a minute. Let’s just park it and try and get over it. And I think there are so many people in STEM, particularly younger people coming in that haven’t had a STEM background, in their families and stuff. Yeah, that feeling is quite constant, as we’ve seen in the last five episodes of different stories and stuff from people. And it is something that I think just kind of becomes like part of your every day because you just think well, surely everyone feels like this. And then as soon as you realise they don’t it’s like, oh, wait, what are you talking about? You don’t feel like this? I thought we all did. But we were all just pretending that we knew what we’re doing at this point.

Marc  
Yeah, there’s so much about that resonates for I think, first and foremost, there’s a real dichotomy in what you’ve said, and that there are times where you can feel like you’re the only person in the world has ever felt like that. And other times where you’re desperately seeking everyone else to have felt that those that was I think one of the biggest sighs of relief on my side was trying to find other stories, not necessarily academic literature, or anything like that to do with the imposter phenomenon, or experiences, but rather more detailed stories of those who had their own run-ins with it. And how they had first recognised that the way that you’ve so nicely put there for your own experience, but then how they’ve learned to, and I use these words carefully,  manage it. The other thing I heard in what you’ve just said, Heidi, that’s really intriguing about all of this is that I found that there is a temptation, I think in all of us to use terms, like overcome it, or crush it, or cure it, or destroy it, smash it or whatever you’re like. I’d be interested to hear what you both think about that. All of this time that I’ve been studying it and trying to figure it out for myself. I find that increasingly unhelpful, and not really the best frame in which to give yourself the tools to recognise it, and, and manage it. I’ve heard several different ways of people talking about this one. I’ve heard from an entrepreneur called Peter Shepard is that he dances with his, he calls it has imposter two-step, where it’s something that’s always there. It’s an old friend to recognise and live with, but you will set yourself up for disappointment, or I dare say some form of relapse into the worst instances of your experience if you go in with the assumption that it can be completely quashed

Heidi  
Completely, I think that’s part of the conscious change from syndrome to phenomenon as well because to me a syndrome is I don’t even know if this is scientifically accurate, but to me, a syndrome is more of a lifelong thing that you live with. And I think my conscious change to phenomenon is, it’s not going to be in every interaction that I have, it’s not going to be in every experience that I have, because it’s something that is more fleeting than a syndrome, for example, that’s just like a cognitive shift for myself rather than any kind of actual science behind it.

Anna  
Also thinking is it perhaps sometimes healthy to have some level of imposter phenomenon? Like to a point?

Marc  
That’s interesting. Yeah, well, maybe that’s a good point to begin to, to break down some of the things that are involved in an imposters experience, bringing together several different iterations of what the definition is. So it’s often more helpful actually, to start with what it’s not. The imposter experience is not plain lack of self-esteem, that is overlapping, but from experience one of the key things that sets the imposter experience apart is that it happens in high achieving people who have worked very hard, who have some qualification, or credential, or status that evidence very plainly, that they belong, where they are. And that they’ve, they’ve put in the work, they’ve paid the dues to be able to say, I’m qualified to do this. But despite all of that hardcore evidence, then they still have these thoughts of, reoccurring thoughts of self-doubt, and feelings of being a fraud or a phoney? And our constant sense, more or less that one day, you’re going to be found out and chucked out of your job. So it’s a good point of distinction to say, well what isn’t it? Well, what it is, and the main thing is that it’s amongst high achieving people with a feeling of being a fraud, even although all of the evidence says otherwise. They’re getting to the really intriguing point that Anna raised about what may be positive elements of the imposter experience. There are several different ways I’ve tried to break it down when I’ve been writing about it. And one thing that I’ll maybe come back to at the end, is a chapter I’ve written entirely about comparisons. And I think therein is probably the answer to Anna’s question, that there are elements of comparison that are fundamentally positive parts of the human condition. You know, we’ve had all heard, I dare say you know, similar terms or phrases along the lines of you know, you never want to be the smartest person in the room, because you’re not going to get any smarter doing that if you are the smartest person in the room. So those, you know, those bodies of psychology and social comparison theory that emerged in the 1950s, as far as, as my reading has led me to understand that sure, you being able to compare yourself to someone not so far ahead of you, you know, within your sights, someone who’s got the next level knows that the next rung on the ladder, has the next badge on their belt, someone who’s ahead of you, but tangibly close so that you can take steps in their direction. That is a positive element of social comparison. That’s what I’ve held to terms like an upward driver towards your success. And there’s a lot of distinction between, you can talk about that in terms of skills, and also talks about that in terms of opinions, which takes you into a whole rabbit hole of group thinking and stuff like that. But that part of it, being able to compare yourself to others around you who are at your skill level or just above gives you that push that momentum, take yourself up to those higher benchmarks, where it goes awry is when you start to compare yourself constantly, with really shaky foundations and making really abrupt conclusions about your worth versus someone else’s, or your qualifications versus someone else’s. So it’s a really blurry line between the positive parts of comparison and the much darker, I dare say more common elements of comparison that are associated with imposter experiences.

Heidi  
Absolutely. And those, the positive ones can be so positive and that you can, you then have this plan on how to advance your career or you know, learn how to do something new and all those positive things that you want to come out of them. And then these shaky foundational ones can be so damaging to the point where they can actually, like, I guess, crush the rung that you’re already on and move you down the ladder rather than pushing you to rise up. So the million-dollar question, how do you manage it, live with it? Dance with it? Whatever else you got to do with it? 

Marc  
Well, one of the things we’ve spoken a lot about already is the awareness of it. So if you assume that you’ve got to that stage already, then there’s a number of known things that you can do, and a number of things that I’ve found in addition that I’ve decided to write about. One of the things that I mentioned in my own experience, which I found later, actually to be pretty high and broadly recommended is to document, both in terms of a journal or a diary,  to play out on pen and paper what your experiences have been. But also, in addition to that, document, the successes that you’ve had. And I don’t simply mean, you know, the brightest lines on your CV, that are, you know, the accolades and the degrees that we normally assume needs to be on a CV, but also the successes of the times that you’ve faced a failure, or maybe even repeated failure, and found a way to move on past that. And to have another crack at the whip, or another go a particular goal. So being able to document things both in terms of just a diary level experience, but sort of write down what all those successes are, gives you more and more and more of that sort of evidence that imposters stereotypically will try to ignore, so that they don’t play success, or downplaying successes. Another major characteristic of imposter experiences and documenting as much as you possibly can is one of the finest tools that I think anyone has to be able to live with it and manage it without going down to any different rabbit holes at once. If I forced myself to think about some of the other things that in the course of my own journey, that I’ve made a profound impact on my ability to manage, I can tell you a little bit about a story of my first child, my daughter’s Christening, or naming ceremony as it was for us. And rather than having Thank You cards and stuff like that, for those who are kind enough to attend,  what I decided to do was to share with them a letter that I wrote for my daughter that she won’t see until she’s 10 or 12.

Heidi  
I just punched the microphone because I awwwwwww 

Marc  
The point of this story is that in that later, and I don’t have it to hand to read it out, but 

Heidi  
I’m thankful because I would cry! 

Marc 
Yeah, he giggles taking deep breaths to continue this story. The contents of that letter were a form of words to impress upon her that there is an absolute unlikeliness of her ever being. Full stop. The ways in which you can quantify someone’s likeliness of ever being alive take you to numbers that are so large as to be stupid and, and comprehensible to us mere humans. But there are ways in which you can start from you and the story of your parents and their grandparents. And as you continue to dig further and further back, you will find the stories of happenstance, luck, that meant that you were and instead of never being at all, there’s so much of that and everyone’s life, that I think if everyone had even a small taste of that, they would take on far more risk and not self-sabotage as much as many of us are tempted to do. So I wrote that for her because it came out of my own reading and attempts to bring it into my own life. And you know, I had found it actually, around the time that she was born when she met my grandfather, her great grandfather, and it wasn’t long before he passed away, but that just having I’ve got one photograph of them together and I was like my god, this is two pairs of eyes four generations apart looking at one another right now. And the amount that’s happened in order to be able to have that little baby held in those elderly arms is incredible. And in the case of my grandparents, you know, to give you a little bit of the flavour of Glasgow, they came from opposite ends of the Catholic-Protestant divide, such that when they got married, you know, large proportions of their families didn’t even attend the wedding. And so, you know, in my case, there’s a story of thinking had they not overcome that social hurdle for them, I never would have been, never mind my daughter. And so all of that plays out for everyone’s family. And so you know, as well as documenting your daily experiences of feeling like an imposter and documenting your successes, you know, be the accolades or ways to move past failure, you can document the story of you, and how you ever came to be. And it’s so much more likely that you weren’t, that it becomes much easier to say sod it!  I’m going to give this thing a go. Because there are so many other people that aren’t here that might have done it, but I am here, and I can try it. 

Heidi  
Mad isn’t it

Anna  
It resonates kind of with when I’m scared to do something, I think, or you know, I compare myself to other people like, say in my class, or whatever. And I think that all of these people are here at random, you know, had I moved or, you know, somewhere else. Had I chosen a different University, these people, I wouldn’t know they existed, and I would be faced with other random strangers around me. So, in a sense, it doesn’t really matter who’s around you, as long as you’re kind of securing yourself. Does that make sense?

Marc  
Yeah. Is there anything specific on your mind at the moment, are you toying with the idea of trying something new?

Anna  
Not at the moment, but it’s just come up, you know, throughout my childhood, when I was like, I used to compete in swimming. And that kind of helped, you know, before say, a competition that these people are actually random around me, they’ve all worked hard. But I’ve also worked hard. It’s kind of a way of self-distancing yourself from the situation and kind of what you’re saying that you’re here as well, you deserve to be here 

Marc  
Yeah, the randomness of it. I love that 

Anna  
It’s just random, you know? 

Marc  
That is actually that’s a better way to put it than parts of what I did. So I think, summing up this randomness is actually a really nicely distilled way of coming to terms with some other really large numbers that I mentioned. But you know, one of the estimates I’ve seen is that everyone’s chances of being here are something like 400 trillion to one. And so as indeed, essentially random to put it in your term

Heidi
It’s crazy, isn’t it? That level of randomness? How, why? Why is it you? Why is it me? All of these things that you just end up with this you end up down this philosophical rabbit hole of what is the world and how are we all here? It also ends up being like a, we’re so tiny in this massive world, like, I took the dog for a walk. So we’re in the woods, with huge, huge trees, and this teeny little terrier ahead of me. And I stood back and I was like, I’m gonna get a picture. And Kevin’s like, my partner is like, Why? Because he just looks tiny. He was like, Why is that a good thing? I was like, he just looks like a little dot love it, and then the whole reason is that it made me feel like he’s so tiny. And I’m so tiny. And what’s like, there’s no, there’s no such thing as failure really, is there because we’re so small, it’s comparative in that what is failure? Like you don’t get a job or you don’t get something else like fine, there are loads of other opportunities. So remembering that and having something physical that you can then look at and go oh, yeah, I actually like none of these failures or errors or poor circumstances or whatever actually, like matter that much do they because we’re all so teeny, that does it really matter?

Anna  
Do we matter?

Marc  
As long as you don’t go so far as to have an existential crisis. You can do something with that, like, with a wonderfully ridiculous it all is and the tininess of your dog against the trees reminds me of another version of that’s fairly well known as the great science communicator and astrophysicist Carl Sagan had this speech about the pale blue dot, about when one of the early satellites was turned back at the edges of the solar system to point towards us and, you know, on the tiniest parts of the sub texels that were on the rings of Saturn or something like that. You could see the blue hue of the planet Earth,  that was the pale blue dot, and there’s a beautiful speech that I would highly recommend that everyone looks up and there are lovely lines and it has to do with you know, this is where every King and Queen has ever been born. That’s the only home we’ve ever known. And it was at the time, you know, just a really profound statement about all of the silliness that we involve ourselves with, and few people until that moment had ever had the chance to set the perspective of looking at this tiny little dot.

Carl Sagan  

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. on it. everyone you love. Everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregates of joy and suffering 1000s of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every King and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. 

Heidi  
That level of perspective is needed by a lot of people. All right, come down, like get off Facebook, maybe spend some time outside? I think that level of perspective is something that we’re all kind of, when you get into those, you get into those moments in your head where you’re like, you know, I don’t belong here and all that kind of thing. And then as soon as you realise that level of perspective, like, no one belongs here. What is a room? All these different things,  just like, what, what is the point? It’s fine, everything is fine. We can only get to certain levels of importance, and even then, we’re still going to be a little dot. So what’s the issue?

Marc  
Yeah, the perspective part of it, like in other parts of the imposter experiences all of that sort of bled into other thoughts of, for example, to take the comparison thing one step further, looking at all of the metrics with which we busy ourselves. And it’s not particular to academia, but you know, many of those listening to this will be in academia and will know immediately what I’m talking about, in terms of, you know, number of citations and impact factors of journals and things like that. And, you know, a lot of these things to cut a long story short, you know, a lot of these things matter to the point that it’s the difference between putting food on the table or not, for some people that think about it so deeply. And that’s the way that they’ve allowed themselves to be fully judged for a promotion, or longer-term employment, or what have you. And those versions of that, and any other discipline, that if you have that broader perspective on you know, your place and all of this, to use another term that Anna brought up earlier, as a really good way with which to distance yourself from it. Another way you can do that is actually to find out the origins of a lot of these numbers, with which we address ourselves and that one of the things I have researched quite heavily that I’ve written on the comparisons chapter in my book was about the culinary world, in high-end cuisine, gourmet cuisine, the world of the Michelin star. And the origins of that are so so far removed from what it now means to hold a Michelin star that does many chefs out there who have gone so far as to kill themselves that had been known the story of just where these numbers came from, that they would have put the experience in entirely different frame and I hate to say it, but there are so many tragic stories like that, both in that world and academia and beyond were just that knowledge of what these numbers actually mean to have a distance from it. And to have a perspective of the bigger picture. Things could have been so different for so many.

Heidi  
Yeah. And I do think as well, things like that they’re almost put into perspective, again, that word perspective, but by events that often we either distance from naturally or that are just happening to us that we don’t have control over so COVID for example, suddenly everyone was much more understanding of each other because they could see what was happening in other people’s lives. Like before people had kind of figured out that they should probably be putting a blurry background on a Zoom call, their baby was wondering passed, I mean, and suddenly everyone was like, Oh, it’s fine you can show me your dog or it’s fine you can you know, the baby’s crying it’s alright put yourself on mute. Lots of those experiences tended to make people kinder, I think in a working environment. And suddenly, everyone was much more understanding of, oh, you haven’t been able to write because you know, there’s a freakin pandemic going on. Of course, you can’t write because you can’t concentrate. That’s okay. And it is these kinds of bigger things that happen around us. And it’s often after that the people like, Oh, we should have, we should have been more understanding before that thing happened, that awful thing happened. And it does, it takes people, whether it’s a suicide, whether it’s, you know, whatever horrible tragedy is happening to people, it then takes people afterwards to say, Oh, we should have done that thing earlier and let them know about this or told them how much we cared. At funerals, it’s always I wish I’d said this to them, or, you know, all these different avenues that you then change. And it’s kind of like, Well, why didn’t we do it before? What is it about that massive environment, you know, that massive ship that makes all of the things that we wish we’d done happen or, you know, we would be so happy to then do them?

Marc  
Yeah, I actually came across a work of a guy called an academic in the states called Adam Alter, some of his more recent research sites have been based on end of life, reflections and to your point, Heidi, people always regret what they didn’t do more than what they did because there’s nothing more painful than, what if?

Heidi  
It’s frustrating isn’t it

Anna  
It kind of comes back to your CV of failure, and I absolutely love that concept. You know, it gives self distance but it also kind of makes the fact that rejection is a daily part of, well hopefully not daily, but is a part of life. It’s kind of hard, I think when you’re just entering academia as well.

Marc  
Yeah. I certainly distance myself from taking credit for that concept. That was those two people most credited with it, Melanie Stefan and Johannes Haushofer each in their own way had been among the first to put out a PDF of their CV of failures, in partnership with the more traditional CV, and others, many others have done it since. And I definitely took inspiration from that, you know, to make it a webpage right next to my standard biography, CV thing that you copy and paste and send off to every talk that you ever give. I did it because I think, and I’ve had more people coming forward now, and it’s been really insightful to see just how, even though it’s been popularised, since around 2016, there’s still a hell of a lot of people out there who have no idea of how to do that, or that it’s even something that you can do on maybe even should so, even go further than being part of the experience in many cases, for many of the toughest things you want to achieve, it’s the real fabric of it, it’s the canvas on which the entire process is drawn out. Another thing that became so clear to me is that I had to write about that very specifically. And one really amazing story that I had researched from a book, I ended up working, this links back into the family thing, by the way. So after thinking about, you know, family trees, and stuff like that, I’d come across the story of an author, who had been rejected so many times, that our photographer had done an entire project on this woman’s experiences of going around London, trying to get her work published

Heidi  
That is savage, wow. 

Marc  
It’s really beautifully done, if you look at the photographs. So this, this woman whose pen name was Zara Raeburn, tried to get published for over 30 years and had no success. And when she did have success, it just happened to be during war years when the publishers who did take on her first book was bombed out of existence. I went down this incredible rabbit hole with a genealogist who I worked with who was incredibly talented at finding some of these documents that are not on the face of the internet, but have really given clarity as to what it means to fail and persist. And once I had found the depths of Zara Raeburn’s story, I found more and more and that’s why I say that this whole concept of like failure, can be more than a part of it, it can be the entire thing from which you learn, you know Zara’s case it came to the point where she thought, well, I’ve been rejected so many times that I’ve, I’ve got into this world of asking for permission for everything, rather than, you know, seeking forgiveness and doing it on our own terms. And eventually, she did and she self-published some of our work. That’s one example where the repeated rejection over not days or weeks, but decades, actually led to the beautiful realisation at a time when self publishing wasn’t really a thing, that that could be a way forwards. And that was the moment of enlightenment for her that there was another way to do that, rather than continue to collect rejection letters for the rest of her days. 

Heidi  
I think as well, that story kind of peeked something in me. So, you know, we’re often told about JK Rowling, for her sins, she attempted to get published multiple times before she published Harry Potter and then she did Harry Potter and look what happened. And it was magical, I think often, like it’s the human condition, isn’t it? any bit of failure is then with, but look, then they did the succeed in the end. And it’s this constant discomfort with just failing and being okay with that, and it not being while you’ll fail 18 times, but then you’ll get a multimillion-pound deal for something like it’s Yeah, no, you might, you might just get a tenner, the likelihood is that you’ll you’ll fail and fail and fail. And suddenly, you might come up with a different idea that might be successful, or maybe that will be successful, but potentially not to the same extent as JK Rowling. Yeah, discomfort with failures. It’s rife throughout life, right?

Marc  
Oh, yeah. It’s actually, as I’m listening to you, it’s actually making me again, put a bit of a metalens on all and I dare ask, you know, you could think about this through the lens of what we are doing right now. I mean, you’re building a business of your own, that, having done it myself and feel comfortable saying, you don’t know if this is going to succeed yet, but you’re trying and, you know, I love seeing a lot of the stuff that you do, because I think it just gives a really clear positive signal that this is a risk worth taking. So then seeing that then the question comes to my mind of, if it does fail tomorrow, what have you learned that still has made it worthwhile?  I mean, what comes to mind? Like, what if you’re, I certainly hope it continues to get bigger and go to better places still, but if it doesn’t, was one of the things that you would take away from having made your company?

Heidi  
Honestly, I think at the minute, it’s enjoying the journey, and that sounds so cheesy, and I hate it when anybody else says it. But I get asked all the time, because I split my life between academia and this business that fell out of a conversation that someone annoyed me, and therefore I created this business, essentially. So most people will then come to me and go so so when are you going to leave academia, or when you’re going to stop the business, you know, it’s one or the other, I’ve kind of been like, Oh, God, I don’t know, what am I going to have to make that choice? And I paid for business coaching earlier this year. And I went into this self-coaching, and got to a point where I was like, No, I don’t want to choose and that’s fine. And I won’t do it, so what’s the issue? And I think it’s more those learning that that series of decisions where I’m like, I’m just going to make the decision that I’m happy with and I’m not bothered if somebody else doesn’t believe me, or doesn’t agree with it, and that kind of thing. It’s more like when you said, I hope the business goes to bigger and better things. I kind of shudder because I really hope it doesn’t. I’m happy with it at the minute, I’m kind of good with it now. 

Marc  
Well, you know, in some way, it’s sustained. You know, I had shudders of my own there to hear your realisation that it doesn’t have to be A or B, but can indeed be A and B. And I, when I started, I don’t want to delve into this part of things, because it’s a story for another time, but when I registered my first business and tried to do it, whilst building a career in academia, it got very close to the point with such scepticism from certain parts of my surroundings that I almost didn’t have an academic job to go to after it. Because there were so many people who were entrenched in the idea of you need to go and be the CEO of this business, or you need to be Mr academic that can stay here and build your research career, there was always A or B for certain conversations, and it took a very long time to get to where you are, which was to say that, you know, there are definitely ways and strong precedent globally, for people being able to do both.

Heidi  
And also the benefits of both. So yeah, you know, the businesses sort of moulding itself, or I’m moulding it, take some responsibility Heidi. Along with my academic, that was some self coaching. Leona, if you’re listening, I know the thing. Yeah. So being able to mould it at the same stage of my academic career to be like, look, I’m not going to launch any new products in the next six months, because I’ve got papers that I want to write or I’ve got grant applications I want to put in for and to focus on that now. And, and being able to sort of ride the roller coaster of it, and make it opposite to how academic life is going at the moment. And it’s not necessarily a measure of one’s going to be successful for a certain length of time, but one isn’t it, it’s just a natural push and pull of things, of that’s going to be busy, you know, July in a small business, when things are starting to reopen after a pandemic, probably not going to be the height of sales, let’s get some papers written, you know, I mean, like those, the push and pull happens. And also the the networking and the positive things that come out of both can complement each other. And there’s no reason why they can’t I think it took an awfully long time for me to say to people stop asking that question of A or B because I’m demonstrating that it’s A and B. Yes, both. Both of those things are benefiting from each other. So just stop asking the question, it’s not going to help either of those. 

Anna  
And you’re showing that you can smash both 

Heidi  
Smash may be a little far, but it’s just like, I don’t have kids, so I always have it as like, well, you’re going home to look after your children. I don’t want kids and I haven’t got kids so let me piss about with my pin badges! Let me live man if you want to go and, you know, have kids and you’ve got that a huge commitment, but people wouldn’t say Oh, when are you going to give up your academic career? Because you’ve got a child now? Or maybe they would to a woman? but potentially not? 

Anna  
They did to me

Heidi  
Yeah, they shouldn’t say that. But you know, it’s, you don’t ask someone you’ve just bought a new car. So when are you going to give up your academic career? Like it’s just I just find the whole the two things just completely different. Like it’s something that I do in my spare time. It’s a hobby and a business and that’s magic that it’s come into a business from a hobby. So what’s the harm? It’s also a case of our generation, they’ve always been told to have backups, and I say this to people all the time like, you’re always taught at school, I was anyway, what you’re going to be when you grow up? but what if that doesn’t work? Hedge your bets. If you go to Uni, you’re going to do this degree, but what else could you do with that degree? If that dream career didn’t work out and yet, suddenly, all of the people of my age and around our age, are kind of multitaskers, we’re multi-doers. There’s a membership site signed up to called Multipotentialites. Our generation are multipotentialites. 

Marc  
That’s also a good TED talk for you. 

Heidi  
Yeah, it’s a great TED Talk, definitely. But it is it’s like, ooh, shiny. That’s that sounds exciting, why can I not go and do that as well? and being able to do those things, I just, to me, it’s like, all I can do is benefit all of the things that you’re doing, rather than it being a negative. 

Marc  
There’s a really good book to go along with that same theme that has become my Bible of sorts, a book called Range, by a sports journalist called David Epstein takes the idea of being a multipotentialite and runs with it to talk about why those who are generalists in the modern era have an advantage over those who hyper-specialise. And it really shook the foundations, I think of a lot of what is subconsciously or otherwise drip-fed to you in academia to carve out your tiny little niche and play in your own lane, but not to go into anyone else’s. And this book entirely times that on its head, to talk about the likes of innovators, or Nobel Prize winners, or however you want to define success, many of those who have done that, but have delayed specialisation until later in life, because they’ve needed more time to play in different fields long enough to be able to build concrete branches of ideas between worlds that within either, you know, within one discipline, it’s completely obvious, but and another is completely revolutionary. And, you know, those who are generalists struggle with that, because taking that longer time, that longer gestation period to follow these ideas, and experiences and other disciplines to form could be very detrimental to just having some money coming in, you know,  it’s very difficult. But I find that a revelation because, you know, others have asked me in the past to, you know, build on your own experience there have A or B, question on people waiting for you to fell on one side or the other. I’ve had perplexed looks at people saying, you’ve trained as a chemist, why are you doing this project in psychology, as if you know, you’ve done your X number of years doing these degrees, you can’t possibly want to do anything else, or learn anything else. Or you know, just playing in that sandpit with which you’ve already spent a tonne of time.

Heidi  
I just think it’s really detrimental to even the quality of the science that comes out as well because, as you were saying, the conference that you’re in today, you’re looking at people playing with the same toys and how can we then figure out how to maybe use the way that they play with their toys in this sandpit or in that sandpit, we know the interdisciplinary research is a strength we know that it, you know, there’s evidence for that, there’s evidence that shows that the more intersect that we have, the more impactful that research will ultimately be. So it’s a really strange mindset that academia has us in that says, actually, you should just be in one lane because we know that  the ref and all the rest of it being ref-able, being impactful all these metrics are actually better if you’re not in one lane. And it’s almost like the training hasn’t yet caught up with what those generalists and what those people that have specialised later have actually shown us, the training of being an academic hasn’t quite caught up yet. 

Marc  
Well, you can certainly take that idea further to qualify the whole thing of ref, a lot of people will still focus very heavily on showing impact for an exercise like research excellence, framework entirely through how many journals that got into, but the exercise is becoming more sophisticated, because in the same breath, no, you shouldn’t really just be talking about high impact papers, but many of the cases that will go into ref will talk about the number of jobs that have been created out of entrepreneurial ventures that have come out from fundamental research to talking about impact above and beyond anything that will end up in any jounrnal open or otherwise,

Heidi  
Its economic impacts, environmental impacts, even things like mindset impact, and particularly in science and science communication, there are often those bits of interactions that you can’t measure the impact of because it’s a little seed that you planted, that the impact of that seed will be felt in 10 years time. And suddenly, you have to try and build that into a metric to be like, okay, and how will we measure you at the end of the year? We can’t it’s not, I think we have to also try and let go as scientists to be like, look our impact is not fully measurable. And why should it be, because surely the things that we do, should also have an impact on thoughts and feelings and hearts and minds and all this fluffy stuff, the academic pathway doesn’t really want to take into account in a lot of cases, and how on earth you measure an impact on a patient’s thought process? And Health Sciences is really difficult to capture. Whereas it’s quite easy to feel like yes, I was cited 15 times for this paper that I published and this impact factor journal, but if that paper doesn’t get to the people, you know, those patients, for example, what’s the point?

Marc  
Yeah, if there’s a way I find to try to generalise that so that you can, you know, in balance, sure that there is some value and, you know, the traditional publishing side, of course, it’s not without its merits, but those numbers are, those are just the easiest to capture. If you are going to challenge yourself to take your work beyond those papers, then a good question to ask is how can you capture all those things that are otherwise ethereal? Can you capture the things that are not traditionally captured? So you know, how could you capture the thought processes of you know, someone and a clinic or hospital changing as a result of some work that came from miles away, and a small academic lab? And it could be that it’s recorded conversations like this, or it’s making videos on YouTube, or something else, you know, you can think wildly beyond? What are the things that commonly capture your attention for the metrics that drive your daily work?

Heidi  
It’s conversations as well, and I think so a lot of the work that I do is qualitative, which I love because it means I just basically just do this, but in a professional setting, to someone to transcribe and look at it for ages and pick apart everything about it. But often, that is expensive and is time-consuming. And that is a really difficult metric to then sell, if you’re like, Okay, so I know that the paper number thing, great work, and well, but I want to go out and have conversations with 50 different people and then transcribe all that audio and then analyse all of that data and then tell you exactly how I’ve made someone feel. I’m guessing that that wouldn’t sell in ref terms. But there are examples of it now where the bigger funders in the UK are kind of asking about how are you going to evaluate that, really how you’re going to evaluate it rather than it being I don’t know, number of people that you’ve operated on, you know, mortality levels or anything like that. I have all of these examples of my health Health Sciences perspective because that’s where I’m based, but you know, how many reactions you’re going to do any of those sorts of deals, those things are now becoming a bit more they are a given and, often the funders want more they want something that you can properly evaluate, like the feelings and the fizzy things that you can go okay but did you make someone’s tummy flip, like that? And I think that’s also part of this introspection that we’ve all done throughout COVID, and all of these big life events, like I think it all comes back to that of, okay, we need to sort of think of what we’re doing, did it work? Has it been okay? Probably not. And those, those big changes might then have like little changes that come in them. So these little tummy flips that we often miss in health sciences, maybe we’ll get to catch them in later points because of what happened with COVID. And those thought processes and seeds that were planted and that kind of thing, to me, it’s kind of like a, it’s a longer road that we need to look out to be like, Okay, well, I’ll give you my Citation Index or whatever but give me 10 years, and then I’ll tell you what actually happened. It’s more of a story. You said at the beginning, you know, you’re now pulling together all of those results from your study to write the story of the study. And it is, it is a story, it’s, you know. I was conference once and someone said the plural of data is data, right? But the plural of stories is culture. I think I was someone from care opinion, I can’t remember who it was, I will find it because I definitely tweeted it. So I will reference it in the show notes. But it’s the culture of the imposter phenomenon that you’re about to break. And I think that’s really special, like you’ve managed to run this long study with stories, which is not, it’s not an easy thing to do. 

Marc  
But what certainly I would hard I agree with what you’ve just said about qualitative research is the length of time and the depth of work involved in that. I stupidly tried to begin analysing that myself. That is why I no longer have any hair to speak of. But after I brought on a really wonderful research assistant, who as a psychologist to help with that, that was about three to four months of solidly just looking at analysing the open text parts of this research survey that we’ve done. So the first part of it was the client’s impostor scores that we spoke about earlier. But the second part of it was, as you may remember, Heidi, these open questions to get more individual granular responses of why someone thought they might have felt like that, where and when it had come up, and ideas of how they had tried to manage it and move on past that if indeed they had. And there was a lot of the things that came out of that, were some unsurprising things were like some of those who cited an environment for having triggered such experiences, over half of them are within academia. Which sounds profound, but it’s also got some network effects built into that because you know, this is coming from, it started from me, a lot of my network is within academia. And no matter how fancy you try to be in spreading out that message to a broader number of people, you know, that can be amplified. So you are a product of your network for any survey research. And I know full heartedly, you’re preaching to the converted here. But that was one thing that came out that was perhaps unsurprising, but nonetheless valuable, but something that was altogether more surprising, and I hadn’t expected was that there was a tangible subset of people who had just felt a lack of awareness of it muddled up another type of experience altogether, and reached out to see if it was an imposter experience. There were people for example, who had shared stories that were better categorised as pure anxiety, or post-traumatic stress even so that you know, part of the value of this that we’re really trying to draw out now is to work with that surprise, and make it abundantly clear not just this whole aspect of syndrome versus phenomenon. But really the entire umbrella of imposter experiences versus either experiences that are better managed or even treated in a different setting. So that’s, that was really unexpected. But it gave me more confidence, at least that you know, this as much as I’ve become intimately aware of it. I now know that it does definitely want to be done to make it clearer to a larger number of people.

Heidi  
Yeah. 100% I think that the difference between imposter phenomenon, imposter experiences and straight mental health experiences is very different. And I think often we can be gaslit in, in academia is that, you know, that’s my frame of reference, but we can be cast out within academia to be like, actually, this is just your imposter syndrome. No, that’s actually anxiety or that’s actually depression or that that’s actually harassment or bullying. It’s a way to kind of discount it and be like, that’s your issue that you need to deal with. Because as everybody else here is fine, rather than it being something like anxiety is coming from the experiences that you’re having within academia, and that is the fault of the experiences rather than the fault of you. And it is kind of this horrible balance where you’re thinking, at what point do people because obviously, there’ll be a lot of people listening and myself included that have mental health issues, at what point do you say, you need to go get a treatment for that, or, you know, learn how to clinically manage that, or this is an imposter experience and it’s a relatively normal thing that most people will have at some point within the lives

Marc  
That’s a really profound point and not one that’s easy to answer. Maybe to say, again, you know, I’d started by saying, what is the imposter phenomenon not divorcing what it is. And I think that’s such a good reminder to me to clarify that everything that I’ve done, and everything that I’m trying to distil into this book is really within the frame of here are all the things as imposter experiences that I’ve learned, that are worthwhile learning to manage, take responsibility for and, and have self-reliance, as you know, part of your framework to deal with it. And it’s, you know, it’s just through that research that has become clear to them draw the line between that the value that I’m trying to bring in that book verses things that can’t possibly be covered by imposter experiences and should not be covered under that frame of reference.

Heidi  
Yeah, it is this, it’s that conscious should not this is somebody else’s territory. This is somewhere that you need to get help for, and this book is not going to be helpful. It’d be might be helpful for other things, but it’s not gonna be helpful for that thing.

Marc  
Uh, yeah, well, that’s, you know, maybe brings several things full circle here, but part of the thing that has made it challenging and there are several elements of literature for this, but there are elements of imposter experiences, which do overlap with other territories. So the whole, the point of anxiety, there are elements of that, that have nothing to do with feeling like an imposter. But that can in some way be part of the experience of feeling like an imposter. So you know there’s shades of grey, rather than blacks and whites here. And I think that the fact that many of us will frame questions, and the way that wants one answer bar, you know, one variable that accounts for everything to do with the response that’s been observed, makes it very difficult to answer because more times than not the answer is, kind of. 

Heidi  
Yeah, it depends, sometimes. And that is essentially all of science. So usually, we finish up by asking you for a top tip, or a pearl of wisdom for you to give our audience so something that you wish you’d learned earlier, something that you use in your everyday life, is there anything that you would like to impart on our listeners?

Marc  
Yeah, maybe bringing it back to the comparisons thing, I’ve been so bold, purely for you and your audiences to look out for a short passage of my book that I would like to read for? And I read this out loud, to anyone else, I found this as being relevant to a lot of what I hoped we would talk about, and indeed we have and in terms of the comparisons, so this is in context, a small summarising part of chapter seven of my book, which is on comparisons. So I’ll read that for you know.

Marc  
In many ways, the story of the imposter phenomenon is the story of social comparison. If you’ve ever felt like an imposter, I’d be willing to bet that is, at least in part, because you have endlessly compared yourself to the best in your business, and the big shots a few ranks above you, whose famous and showered with fandom. Their success seems so close, yet so far. There are myriad pressures, systems, metrics, and games that would have you consciously or not, compare yourself to other people. The incentives of the game can make you lose sight of what matters most. You take on the game’s definition of success and forget all about your own. You try to tick the boxes and not your own. Feeling like an imposter often arises from people trying desperately to find their unique place in the crowd. You feel like such a ripoff, because you have so many opportunities to think of yourself as the small fish swimming into a shark-infested ocean. Stave off impostor experiences by finding your niche, face unchartered waters. Don’t be the big fish, be the only fish. Comparisons between ourselves and our peers are unavoidable, from war, from sociology, from psychology, comparison is part of the human condition metrics of our classrooms and workplaces can drive these comparisons beyond a means of improving ourselves towards  deranged means of concluding that we are always under-qualified. Understanding where our metric comes from, where it was born, can help us tick it off the pedestal in which we’ve unconsciously placed it. Whether it’s Michelin stars, or paper citations, or grade point averages, the story of why these numbers exist can take our minds away from them. And onto the only game of comparison that any of us can ever win. Making you now better than you then.

Heidi  
Anyone else got goosebumps?

Marc  
Thank you for allowing me to do that. 

Anna  
Can we have an audiobook of your book? 

Heidi  
Please say that you’re doing an audiobook?

Marc  
I haven’t actually mentioned that but the book is called You Are Not A Fraud. And on this side of 2021 I’m putting out an advanced e-book, really so that others can can help that broader part of the project. So that will be going out on a platform called Leanpub, which can give you the link to that. 

Heidi  
Yeah, definitely. We’ll put it in the show notes

Marc  
But in early 2022 I’ll be putting out all the other media versions of it, the paperback, the hardback and the Glaswegian toned audiobook.

Heidi  
Fantastic, that’s brilliant. I’m just gonna get “Be the only fish” tattooed on my forehead.  So what we’ll do is we’ll put all of the links to whatever you send me in the show notes, including Twitter website, book, the whole shabang, and yeah, if you would like to come back, once the book has been released, we can do this a Little Science Co book club as well. So if you want to come, we could do a book club for that, too. 

Marc  
I’d love that. Thank you. 

Heidi 
I’m so excited for this book to be released, because I feel like it’s just gonna be everything that I’ve ever thought but in a really eloquent way. It’s gonna be like those thoughts and feelings that I’ve had, but in better English, essentially, it’s gonna be great.

Marc  
And I can barely speak English. So that would be a milestone in my life and career so thank you again.

Heidi  
Very excited about it and it’ll be fun.

Marc  
Thanks so much again for having me. It’s been a real privilege, I’ll remember it fondly

Heidi  
Thank you so much.