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Home > Fast Track Impact > Episode 23: Dealing with anxiety on the job
Podcast: Fast Track Impact
Episode:

Episode 23: Dealing with anxiety on the job
Category: Education
Duration: 00:56:13
Publish Date: 2022-10-15 17:01:32
Description:

Anxiety is a very real part of being an academic - public speaking comes high up most people's lists of scary things you have to do in life, and this is part of the job for us as academics. But if you're comfortable with public speaking, then most of us still have nightmares about being taken down publicly by an aggressive questioner in a conference. For me, farmers are my most scary audience - they don't mince their words and they often don't like the stuff I'm doing where conservation is pitted against farming - but more than that, they sometimes ask the most painfully obvious questions that for some reason I've never considered before and don't have an answer to.


Add to this the clear picture from the Welcomme Trust's recent survey on research culture, and many of us work in toxic cultures where bullying and short-term contracts are the norm, and where our ability to progress is dependent on the whims of anonymous reviewers - anxiety is baked into academic life for many of us.


If you add an anxiety disorder into that mix, you've got real problems.


Marr Lodge story and anxiety about going back to face to face meetings. Wedding. Two incredible colleagues and counsellor. Fear of failure (signpost to next week) - what if I can't go back? Imposter syndrome (nobody will even believe me if I tell them that I suffer from this level of anxiety because of my outside persona).


This is for a time - I will listen to what the fear is telling me and take time to heal, compressing hours to get time on my bike in nature with God. There is always hope - prayer day 1 from prayer book
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