Fast Track Impact

This week, Mark continues to reframe failure as something that deeply affirms our values and leads to greater meaning and contentment. In part 2, he thinks about how we step back, withdraw from the fight and change tack, drawing on a philosophy of pessimism. This views challenge as a psychological necessity that makes us feel more fully alive, rather constantly looking forward to a time when there will be no suffering or being nostalgic for ​lost time before our challenges began. Academic life is full​​y of rejections, but this episode will help you transform your view of failure to become more resilient. ​

​This week, Mark explores how you can reframe the failures and rejections that are part of everyday academic life as something that deeply affirms our values and leads to greater meaning and contentment. In part 1, he focuses on how we pick our battles and choose to do things that are high risk but high reward in terms of expressing our values, and how to know when to stop fighting a losing battle in line with our values.

Read the some of the tweets quoted at the start of the episode here https://twitter.com/ph_d_epression/status/1130976574629715968?s=12

This week the podcast showcases a personalized approach to impact training being pioneered by Universities of Salford and Warwick. Find out how researcher development and impact teams can co-produce training to meeting key skills gaps on impact as part of a long-term personalized approach to training that enables researchers to build capacity systematically through a three-year​ training plan including targeted workshops and one-to-one coaching.

Find out more about Davina books at http://davinawhitnall.co.uk/books.htmlWhitnalll’s

This week Mark interviews Jane Mills and Jasmine Black from CCRI at University of Gloucestershire about how they are using social media to generate research impact. They discuss how to build stories and engagement throughout the research process (including before findings are available), how to break into stakeholder networks on Twitter and how to use case studies to evaluate, communicate and build impact online.

Read their paper: Mills, J, Reed, M, Skaalsveen, K and Ingram, J The use of Twitter for sustainable soil management knowledge exchange https://doi.org/10.1111/sum.12485

In this second part, Mark discusses a range of practical methods for managing power in meetings and workshops, including methods for opening up the discussion and exploring, methods for analysing and methods for closing down discussion and making decisions

How to make meetings and workshops with stakeholder and colleagues safe, fun and productive. This week, Mark explains how you can identify and manage power discrepancies in a group to successfully​ manage difficult individuals and situations using subtle cues and three simple techniques.

This week, Mark interviews Saskia Walcott, an independent impact expert who has helped researchers generate and evaluate their impact for over 15 years. In this interview, she talks about her research on perceptions of impact and the power of attitudes to shape how we respond to the impact agenda.

Read her blogs linked to this episode:

https://www.walcottcomms.co.uk/blog-1/3-nuggets-of-advice

https://www.walcottcomms.co.uk/blog-1/research-impact-individual-interpretation-and-translation

This week, Mark gives us an insight into two days of his working week, to illustrate how he puts the lessons from his book, The Productive Researcher, into practice. He illustrates practically how he prioritizes​ based on his values and builds mental health resilience into his working week.

This week Mark shares three ways to overcome imposter syndrome, based on his own experience battling feelings of inadequacy as a researcher. The first solution is to re-calibrate how you judge yourself to reframe your worth based on your values. The second solution is to re-balance your internal, invisible power with the external, visible power that is given to you by the world. The third solution draws on the previous two to create equally credible, evidence-based alternative narratives to your imposter syndrome narrative.

This is the third and final part of Mark's series of episodes on getting research into policy, and the last episode of 2018. Building on the ethics and principles from part 1 and interviews in part 2, in this final episode Mark considers practical ways to both inform and influence policy based on reliable evidence from research. He considers how to take a more relational approach to developing a policy brief and how you can make a "pincer movement" to work from both bottom-up and top-down to achieve impacts from research in the policy arena. The podcast will be back for more in February 2019.