Clear Water RoundUp #094
Alter ego
Greetings, dear friends -
In the final month of the year of the Water Rabbit, I would like to introduce Liffy Saint Stiffbottom.
Liffy is a strict, 19th-century English boarding school mistress who wears a high-collared long-sleeved dress up to the neck, hair in a bun so tight as if attempting to undo forehead lines, lips perpetually puckered like one who drinks vinegar, and big circle glasses through which her eyes laser focus on rules and your adherence.
Liffy may seem like someone who likes authority and power. More than that, she likes systems, structure, and streamlined processes whenever possible in service to what she perceives as collective efficiency, effectiveness, and personal and public safety. She likes things to function so that we can count on getting what we want when we want. She always wears her seatbelt and she wants you to wear yours.
Liffy would be excellent on your team as a safety officer, lab manager, or chemical inventory specialist to sort out your chemicals and store them in groups and to make signs and labels and to admonish others to return them to their proper homes after using them to minimize inadvertent mixing that leads to spontaneous corrosion and/or explosion.
You want this person around when you need help documenting everything – procedures, protocols, quarantine accounts, etc. - and archiving them in a librarian-esque system.
You like this person for knowing the fire escape route and willingness to marshall people through it in a fire drill, and hopefully, in an actual fire.
She can help you organize your clothes a la Marie Kondo.
What happens if any of the rules, processes, structures, and lanes that make sense to her get trespassed, neglected, ignored, trampled on, thrown out, overrided, violated, or worse... disrespected?
Well-adjusted Liffy, socially and emotionally intelligent, will become curious and inquisitive about what happened. Did they miss the message? Did they not understand the message? Did they get the message and then forget about it? Might it have been an honest mistake? Did they disagree for a good reason?
A well-adjusted Liffy will ask herself if she even needs to follow-up with what happened or is can she let it go? If yes to follow-up, she'll investigate, learn, empathize, and communicate. She can assert perspectives and boundaries while listening.
She will not take personally the overstep, misstep, or mistake. She may even discover the blessings in the way things are different than what she expected and/or the opportunity for stronger relationships through communication and learning.
When Liffy is not feeling socially or emotionally intelligent, imagine the same caricature strict school mistress trapped in the body of an unsocialized child aged 4-8, capable of forming complete sentences with vastly varying intensities of emotional control, if any.
She takes it personally, judging the actions of the trespasser as the judgment of the rules or of her, possibly judging the trespasser's character, anywhere from ignorant, clueless, or aloof, to inconsiderate, selfish, stuck-up, self-centered, self-absorbed, or arrogant, to just plain dumb.
This Liffy struggles to examine and adjust her own thinking. She can hold a grudge too big and for too long over incidences rather small and rather short-lived.
She forgets that, when she points a finger at someone, three fingers point back at her. She needs a time-out and alternate perspectives.
Where is this story of Liffy Saint Stiffbottom going?
Last year in Conscious Dance, we organized a series called the Galactic Journey, where each week we visited a planet or luminary (sun or moon) in our solar system. I signed up to co-facilitate was Saturn - not because I love Saturn, but because that date matched my availability.
Weeks before we danced Saturn, someone told me that my personality is very Saturnian.
In what ways? I asked, surprised.
Saturn is the Roman counterpart to Kronos, the Greek god of time. Saturn governs generation, abundance, wealth, structure, moral obligations, authority, and manifestation; the Saturn in us can bring into existence what we want to exist through responsibility, discipline, maturity, and establishing long-lasting foundations.
Side note: according to mythology, Saturn castrated his own father, Uranus, in revenge for Uranus's hatred and imprisonment of his own children. (The entrails, tossed onto the sea, became Venus.) Thus, Saturn was cursed to be defeated by his own child. To avoid this fate, he ate his children... until his son Jupiter, secretly hidden by his mother, returned to overthrow Saturn and forced him to vomit up the other children he ate - Neptune, Pluto, Ceres, Juno, and Vesta.
Saturn is celebrated, cursed, and celebrated during the Italian festival, Saturnalia.
Like all archetypes we can embody, Saturn has a golden side and a shadow side.
Liffy Saint Stiffbottom is my über-Saturnian alter ego. (You may have noticed our initials.)
She is the caricature of my golden and shadow Saturnian characteristics.
She comes alive frequently –when someone started something earlier than agreed making her uncomfortable, when someone didn’t want to complete their payment on time with everybody else, when someone did the laundry and didn’t fold it for two days, when she wants to update infrastructure for her business, when she is annoyed with herself for not doing it sooner.
Whilst Liffy often serves me very well, when she becomes that begrudging 4-to-8-year-old unadjusted child, I have to give her a time-out. If she’s not being helpful, I need her to calm her inner complaining, take back responsibility for her own experience, and integrate with the rest of me towards something more creative, collaborative, and peaceful.
If you’ve interacted with me before, you have certainly interacted with Liffy.
Over to you:
What are some characteristics that make you, you?
What would they look like in an exaggerated alter ego? (You can have more than one.)
Does your alter ego have a name?
What are the golden sides of those characteristics?
What are the shadow sides?
Take your time to think of different situations in which these characteristics came alive.
Lastly, what kind of relationship would you like to have with [INSERT NAME(S) of your alter ego(s)]?
This piece has now been published on the blog for Clear Water Science Consulting Limited. Feel free to view and share it here.
World improvement is a long road. Every moment of inner growth counts. Well done, and thank you for your consistent support!
Business and project updates
To lead off the year, our publication "The impact of a graduate training and career outlook program on diversity in the biotechnology sector" came out in Nature Biotechnology as a career feature!
This work describes an innovative program at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, USA:
"An intensive summer training program increased enrollment in a Master of Science in Biotechnology degree program, increasing awareness and opportunities among under-represented and underserved groups as a first step to transforming the biotech industry."
We detailed the rationale, strategy, content, and outcomes.
This breakthrough program was ignited by the thought leadership of Angelita Howard, EdD, MBA, MAT, FACHDM, LSSYB, who digs deep on what it really takes to transform a system and to attract the individuals who can transform it but otherwise might not know this potential.
This manuscript was possible thanks to a great team:
Rebecca McPherson, M.S., Ph.D. for leading the team through a tricky sticky data dilemma.
Keisha Bentley, MSBT, M.Ed. and Joan Adebowale for taking the plunge into the monstrous world of academic publishing, patiently and courageously taking on the literature, writing, coding, graphics design, and scrutinizing eyes needed to make it good!
It is such a joy and privilege to help communicate to this work to the global community.
An update about this milestone was also posted on LinkedIn - feel free to interact and spread the word there!
Conscious Dance Hong Kong has nurtured another dance facilitator - me!
After over a year of training and practice with our Guiding Angels, expert dance facilitators, organizing team, and collective of dancers, I completed my first solo dance facilitation with the theme of “Uranus & Neptune”.
These two planets are the ‘Outer Planets’, those planets in our solar system that cannot be seen from Earth with the naked eye. One represents our inner genius, inner rebel, and weirdness, the other our dreams, fantasies, and illusions. Like all the archetypes we can embody, they have golden sides and shadow sides.
On the dance floor, we create a non-evaluative space to embody these archetypes, learn about ourselves, or just dance our hearts out. Either way, going back into the world doing better than when we arrived, and it is so satisfying for me to have capacity, and the collective’s support, to facilitate that.
Intrigued? Follow the links above to find out more and to join us any Monday evening in Hong Kong.
Our science section
You have probably heard that emotional intelligence is important for leadership, and that leadership is important to success in science and research.
If all that is true, then emotional intelligence would be linked to success in science and research.
BUT, a quick internet search turns up very few hits on the idea.
Over the next several weeks, I'll be sharing insights from reading, watching, and listening about effective leadership in R&D, emotional intelligence in leadership, and links across the ideas. Let's see what connections we find between our emotions, behaviors, and implications for students, workers, and leaders in scientific research and development.
Sources could include research (very limited at this point), personal accounts, blogs, case studies, forums, podcasts & interviews, whitepapers, books, and more.
The purpose of this exercise is to raise our awareness of key concerns around emtions, interpersonal interactions, and decision-making in the science labs and workplaces and how awareness of ourselves and others can make us better directors of our interactions, decisions, and ultimately, the results of our efforts!
This week, we're starting with a piece called "Do we need emotional intelligence for research?" in the blog entitled "Walking in my science shoes" by CHUA Ngee Kiat, who recently earned his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics in Australia.
He writes, "Emotional intelligence isn’t something I find in many scientists. After all, we are not trained to have these skills honed but it doesn’t mean they aren’t important."
He asks, "How would emotional intelligence look like for an average PhD student?" and gives you some concrete examples of high EI and low EI in interactions with research colleagues and supervisors.
He closes with key questions you can ask to test yourself on 5 pillars of emotional intelligence:
Self-awareness
Self-regulation
Motivation
Empathy
Social skills
Enjoy the graphic in this post.
Stay tuned for more insights over the coming weeks!
Human Resources – the most important resource in any enterprise
Qin Shen – Hong Kong-based coach, half-marathon runner, music & movie lover, and mother of two in a mixed culture family. Qin’s 20-year career in brand development and business management took her to Shanghai, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Working with luxury brands like L’Oreal, Dior, Kipling, Swarovski, and American Eagle, she’s had a hand in everything that makes a business alive, including marketing, consumer experience, distribution, talent development, and leadership, expanding to new markets, driving vision and strategy, and digital ecosystems.
After 20 years of success in branding and high-performing organizations, she has set up her own coaching practice to support individuals more deeply and personally to develop their careers and manage change. She believes that everyone is a star with their own path and sparkle, and she helps them tap into their own resourcefulness to enhance their self-awareness, effectiveness, and mental strength as the first step to success in navigating changes and disruptions.
She coaches in Mandarin and English (and speaks Italian and French) and her clients have included graduates and professionals in corporate roles in Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China. Ask her about completing her first running race, parenting a teenager, and balancing a meaningful life with family, personal ambitions, and career.
Reach out to her to explore great coaching on transitions and decisions at a very friendly rate.
Interesting Reads
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl - by Jesse Andrews, published 2012
Narrated by a pasty overweight teenage boy whose best friend and movie-making partner is a short foul-mouthed black kid from a challenging family. Our pasty protagonist's mother zealously encourages him to become friends with a classmate when she is diagnosed with cancer. A tearfully funny, honest, and tearful account of high school, friendship, and the inner world of a teenage boy. After reading the book, I learned and was surprised, that it is now among the most banned books in parts of the United States. Film released in 2015.
Read the author's July 2023 essay in response to his book banned - with comments on the literacy crisis in the US and how likely book bans will 'work': Jesse Andrews On ‘Me And Earl’ And The Book-Banning Girls In Tallahassee, Florida – Guest Column
Coraline - by Neil Gaiman, published 2002
Young Coraline loves to explore the old house and the grounds around her family's new house. She also wants a different kind of attention from her parents than she has. Mischievously acting against the advice of her parents and the neighbor's mice, she enters a mysterious door in her house that propels her into a parallel universe of other parents and other neighbors with a serious villain. The parallel worlds in this novel for young adults inside us raise questions of parenthood, childhood, love, and bravery. Stop-motion claymation film released in 2009.
Interesting Re-Watch
The Nightmare Before Christmas released in 1993
As Jack Skellington, the pumpkin king of Halloween town, begins to languish about his role and life purpose, he stumbles upon Christmas town. The experience lights him up and on return, he zealously mobilizes all of Halloween town to run Christmas… Impressive stop-motion claymation directed by Tim Burton.
Interesting Listen
You Have More Control Over Your Emotions Than You Think You Do on the ReThinking with Adam Grant podcast, featuring guest Lisa Feldmann Barrett, psychologist & neuroscientist at Northeastern University and Harvard Medical School.
About
The Clear Water RoundUp is Clear Water Science Consulting’s regular newsletter – a collection of sharable business updates and insights, news from select locales, and features of interesting people and media.
Clear Water Science Consulting provides coaching and communication solutions to support the growth of science and scientists so we can better address the world’s pressing issues. Lately, we are focused on leadership - especially empowering the leader in each of us through personalized coaching, workshops, web content, and academic publications.
Our coaching services are personalized - we bring curiosity, inquiry, patience, and persistence to helping people help themselves become more empowered actors in their own lives. We are now listed with the Hong Kong International Coaching Community (HKICC).
Visit our website to learn more about our vision, services, portfolio, and reviews.
For our regular content, check out our updates and science posts, many of them about COVID, on LinkedIn.