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Significant Impact: from K Award to Your First Big R01
For women faculty, transitioning from a Career Development (K) Award to your first NIH R01 is about more than just writing a fundable grant. Host and expert NIH grant consultant Sarah Dobson guides early career researchers through the roadmap for overcoming the hurdles of being a woman in academia and avoiding the K cliff. She’s ready to see passionate and tenacious women K Award recipients level up to R01 funding and build impactful, thriving, and fulfilling research careers. Visit https://sarahdobson.co to learn more.
Significant Impact: from K Award to Your First Big R01
[Greatest Hits] How Unconscious Decision-Making Can Derail Your Career
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Fear, pressure, and momentum can quietly shape a career you never meant to build. In another of our greatest hits episodes, we take a clear-eyed look at how unconscious choices creep into your career, leading to unintended consequences.
We help you understand the difference between conscious vs unconscious decision making and why it matters for early-stage investigators chasing R01-level funding. From the dangers of track-thinking and the shame of “falling off the path,” to the pitfalls of advice that reflects someone else’s goals, we unpack the hidden drivers that pull your work off course.
Interested in joining the next cohort of K to R Essentials? Join the waitlist at https://sarahdobson.co/k2r
Why Decisions Matter At K-To-R
SPEAKER_00Why does conscious and unconscious decision making matter at this specific point in your career? Well, I think it's really easy to slide into unconscious decision making at this K to R stage for a few reasons. Number one, it's scary. It is. I mean, you are at a very important transition point in your career that involves generating a lot of funding for your research, right? And it's about kind of securing your future in a lot of ways. And it's understandable that you would be scared. But like I said earlier, it's really easy to make unconscious choices based on fear. It's not really what you want, it's what you think you can manage or what you think you can get. And it's just really important to notice where you might be doing that and what kind of choices you are making when you're afraid.
Show Welcome And Episode Aim
SPEAKER_00Welcome to the Significant Impact Podcast, the show dedicated to helping overstretched, overachieving women faculty convert their career development award into their first big R01 with purpose, with ease, and with joy. I'm your host, Sarah Dobson. In this episode, I'm excited to talk about conscious versus unconscious decisions. It's surprisingly easy to wake up one day and realize that you've ended up designing a job and a career that is far more draining than it is fulfilling. So we're going to talk about why that happens, how you can prevent it from happening, and how to dig yourself out of it if that's where you've accidentally ended up. Let's get started.
Defining Conscious Versus Unconscious Choices
SPEAKER_00What is conscious decision-making versus unconscious decision-making and why does it matter in the context of the K-2R transition? So, conscious decision making is about being deliberate and intentional and thoughtful about what you focus on and how you choose to spend your time. Deliberate and intentional here means that you have a system for making these decisions or filtering requests. This system is based on your values and your priorities. And because of that, you can feel confident in every decision you make, especially if there are uncomfortable consequences because you chose this. You know that you chose this. On the other hand, unconscious decision making means that you don't have a system for how you make decisions about how to spend your time. So your decisions happen in the moment. Your choice to say yes or no to a request or an opportunity could be based on obligation or fear or social conditioning or just how you feel that day. You make choices because you think you should be doing something, not because you actually want to. That's how you end up in a situation where you look around and think, wait, how did I get here? So I'll also add as an aside that conscious and unconscious decision making doesn't just happen in your professional life. And well, for that matter, our personal and professional lives aren't actually separate from each other. But I'm going to give you a couple of very personal examples to illustrate. So I've always been the kind of person who is intentional
Personal Stories Of Social Pressure
SPEAKER_00about the choices I've made for my life. There's a lot about my life and my health in particular that I didn't get to choose. So it's really important to me to be deliberate in the places where I can choose. And in the instances where I made unconscious choices, I had to find ways to dig myself out of those decisions. So here are a couple of examples. I've already told you that I'm a law school dropout, which obviously was a conscious choice, but I ended up making that choice because of an unconscious decision I made coming out of undergrad. Back then, I just didn't know what I wanted my next step to be. I had already ruled out medical school, but the social pressure that I felt to immediately move on to something else and something else prestigious is what led me to enroll in a fancy law school, which I knew before even going there was a mistake for me. I felt like I should continue my academic career even if I wasn't 100% sure about what I wanted to do. If I had questioned that social and familial pressure a bit more, I probably would have gotten a job and taken a year or two off to just figure things out. But I didn't. And so I had to dig myself out of a mess that I created. Another personal example, if you fast forward about 15 years, is my decision not to bear children. If you're socialized as a woman, here is a really easy example of a life path that is heavily influenced by social norms and social pressures. So when I met my now husband, Philip, he told me pretty early on in our relationship that he didn't want to have more kids. I had always imagined or assumed that I would have kids of my own, even in spite of a pretty serious health condition I have. So when he told me that he didn't want more kids, I had to really figure out if I wanted to have kids more than I wanted to be with him. But what it really was about for me was figuring out how much of my desire to have kids was socially conditioned and how much of it was really what I wanted for my life. And that exploration, which, fun fact, I did publicly in a podcast I produced called Maybe Someday, it led me to conclude that I didn't actually want to bear children and that I would be perfectly happy being a bonus mom to Philip's kid. And it turns out I was absolutely right about that. But if I hadn't really grappled with that decision, and let me tell you, I grappled with it, I might have ended up making a choice based on what I thought I should do instead of what I actually wanted. So for me, the big important distinction between conscious and unconscious decision making is really about head versus heart. And just to be clear, unconscious is making a decision with your head, and conscious is making a decision with your heart. It isn't called
Head Versus Heart And Soul Searching
SPEAKER_00soul searching for nothing. And this might seem counterintuitive, right? That the unconscious decisions are the ones that you make with your head. But I think the more time that you, the more that you get in the habit of checking in with yourself and asking what you really want, you'll recognize that those answers are not coming from your brain.
The K-To-R Triggers For Fear
SPEAKER_00Okay, so why does conscious and unconscious decision making matter at this specific point in your career? Well, I think it's really easy to slide into unconscious decision making at this K-to-R stage for a few reasons. Number one, it's scary. It is. I mean, you are at a very important transition point in your career that involves generating a lot of funding for your research, right? And it's about kind of securing your future in a lot of ways. And it's understandable that you would be scared. But like I said earlier, it's really easy to make unconscious choices based on fear. It's not really what you want, it's what you think you can manage or what you think you can get. And it's just really important to notice where you might be doing that and what kind of choices you are making when you're afraid. And again, it is totally normal and understandable that this would be a scary moment, and especially considering, you know, as your K award funding comes to an end and you are not quite where you want to be with your research project funding, that that would be uh anxiety-inducing. But again, I want to caution you here and remind you that this is where you can fall into the messes that are made when you are basing your decisions on fear and you're making those unconscious choices.
Track Thinking And Shame Risk
SPEAKER_00Number two, another reason you might make unconscious decisions is that you're already on a track, right? You've gotten your K award, and the natural next step is to move to R01 level funding, right? That is what you are quote unquote supposed to do. Uh, and if you don't do that successfully, there can be a lot of embarrassment or shame attached to that, right? So you are on a track. And so it's easy to just think that that's the next step that you are supposed to make without really thinking about it too hard, without really considering what you want. So there's another place where it's super, super easy to make an unconscious choice and end up in a situation that for you is really unfulfilling. Number
Advice Overload And Misaligned Values
SPEAKER_00three, you are getting a ton of advice from people, mostly unsolicited, but perhaps some of it is solicited. And this can be a huge challenge because at this early stage, relatively early stage of your career, there's no roadmap for you, right? You might be on a track, but it's not exactly clear the steps that you need to take. And so getting advice from other people who are further ahead can seem really useful and important because they've been there and they have the answers and you don't. However, please remember that those people are giving you advice based on their experience, their values, and what they want for their career, probably without knowing very much about what you want. And so if you are taking all of that in and not being particularly discerning or thoughtful about what you're doing with that advice, there's another place where you can end up making unconscious decisions.
Build A Values-Rooted Decision System
SPEAKER_00Well, if we go back to those definitions or general overviews of conscious versus unconscious decision making, right? We we definitely want to end up in the conscious, intentional, thoughtful side of things, right? So what that looks like is really having a system for decision making that is rooted in your values and what you want for yourself and your career. And that requires a lot of reflection, which in turn requires a lot of time and space to do that reflection. And so if you're not creating that for yourself, if you are just unconsciously rushing from one thing to the next, that is exactly how you end up in these scenarios that you don't want to be in.
Slow Down To Speed Up
SPEAKER_00And so on the prevention side, how do you prevent it from happening? It's really about slowing down and figuring out where you want to go. And one of the ways that I like to think about this, and one of the things that we talk about inside the Impact Incubator is slowing down to speed up, right? So you might think that it's a waste of your time to slow all the way down and really figure out where you're going, why you want to go there, why it matters to you. But in fact, it ends up saving you an enormous amount of time down the line because you are so much clearer on where you're headed, why you are headed there, why it matters to you. And you have developed that framework for decision making that will prevent you from ending up in these situations that you don't want to be in that are generally a giant waste of your time. So slowing down to speed up is crucial here, right?
Digging Out Of Overcommitment
SPEAKER_00But if you've already ended up in this scenario, and I know even at this stage in your career, it's very easy to already be overstretched and overwhelmed, right? How do you dig yourself out? So again, it's about being deliberate and intentional about what you take on and what you say no to. And always remember that every yes means a no for something else. And so even if you're in a situation where you've said yes to a lot of things that you regret, you can start looking at ways to gracefully remove yourself from those opportunities, but especially not to pile on more, right? So even just noticing is a really important first phase of digging yourself out of this unconscious decision-making process that you've been in. Just noticing how you make decisions is going to make a big difference for you. But over time, just recognizing where you can remove yourself and where you can say no to things that you would have previously said yes to because you didn't really think about it too hard, that's the beginnings of how you dig yourself out.
Closing And Listener Actions
SPEAKER_00So, of course, my wish, my goal for you is to always make deliberate, intentional decisions about how you design your career so that it is meaningful and fulfilling and impactful in the ways that matter to you. And nobody else can figure that out except for you. And so the first step of that is to just notice where you are making unconscious decisions and how you can shift those into being more conscious and intentional and deliberate. Thanks for listening to this episode of Significant Impact from K Award to your first big R01. If you want to geek out on what we learned today and move a significant step closer to getting your R01 funded, visit Sarah Dobson.co slash pod and check out all the free stuff we have to help you do just that. Is there a specific question you have about the K-2R transition that you'd like me to talk about on the show? Head to Sarah Dobson.co slash pod and click on the listener question form to submit your question. You can choose to be anonymous or you can leave your name. It's totally up to you. But here's what I know. If you have a question, chances are you're not alone. So the questions you submit to the show won't just help you, they'll help everyone who listens. Head to Sarahdobson.co slash pod and submit your question now. Don't forget to subscribe to the show to make sure you hear new episodes as soon as they're released. If today's episode made you think of a colleague or a friend, please tell them about it. We need more fearless, tenacious researchers out here. Tune in next time and thanks again for listening.