Self-reliability
This is post part of a new series on core principles and habits. These are the posts you should come back to again and again as they serve as a foundation; when things are going wrong, are you following these principles?
If you set goals for yourself but you don’t achieve them, you might think about how to improve your productivity, your time management or your motivation, but you’ll probably find that this doesn’t work because there are more fundamental skills you need to work on first.
One of those skills is self-reliability: This is the ability to rely on yourself to do what you said what you would; to make a decision and follow through with it, no matter what.
When you make a decision to do something, even something relatively easy, there can be all kinds of practical and emotional barriers to execution. It might be an external distraction, it might be some unexpected complication or it might be that you feel an intense resistance to doing it.
Although there probably won’t be any immediate consequences to putting it off, doing so has two important negative effects.
First, it solidifies the habit of putting things off. Because delaying the task relieves the initial stress, the brain hard-wires this an emergency response for similar situations in the future.
Second, it eats away at your confidence or your trust in yourself, just as you wouldn’t have confidence or trust in someone else who makes promises but doesn’t keep them. You might tell yourself that you’ll do it tomorrow, but deep down you know you won’t.
And deep down, you also know that if you can’t live up to your expectations on a small scale, it’s going to be very difficult to meet your longer-term ambitions.
Fortunately, self-reliability is not a fixed trait; it’s a skill you can develop.
How to develop self-reliability
When trying to break out of the negative cycle of procrastination, many students set their initial goals much too high, trying to maximise the amount they’re doing. But if you want to develop any skill, it’s better to start small and scale up gradually.
To do this, identify one easy task you’ve been putting off or feel some irrational resistance to and write it down. Don’t write a big list (or if you have a big list, pick just one thing and write it down somewhere else) and don’t pick something technically difficult or something completely new; it must be something easy that you’ve previously intended to do but feel resistance to.
If it’s something you’ve been putting off for a long time, you will feel some extra resistance. You’ll want to do something else first and you’ll come up with all kinds of rationalisations, but recognise that this is a crucial moment of decision.
No matter what happens and no matter how long it takes, you must follow through and you must not do anything else first. It’s not the task itself that’s important, it’s overcoming the resistance.
Maybe you lose the fight and do something else. If so, take a few deep breaths, refocus and start again. Keep coming back to it, no matter how many times it takes.
When you do overcome the resistance, take a moment to celebrate the achievement, recognising the difficulty you overcame. This is only the first battle of many, though. Having achieved one victory, you have to go again, picking another task and overcoming resistance and distraction once more.
After a few wins, you can try making slightly longer lists (of maybe three things) or planning slightly further in advance (setting priority tasks for the next day). And if you slip into bad habits, come back and start again.
It takes time, and like so many skills it’s more difficult in the beginning, but eventually you’ll start to recognise the resistance whenever it arises and you’ll be able to deal with it more easily, simply because you’ve practiced again and again.
Here, we’ve only covered resistance to easy tasks but during the course of your PhD you’ll face difficult technical problems too. I’ll deal with this issue in an upcoming post, but overcoming the resistance to the easy stuff is the foundation.
