What's up guys, it's Josh and we're back in with another video. Today is a little bit of a story time I guess. I'm not one to do story time type of videos, but this is a story that a lot of people have been asking about because I didn't really go into a lot of detail about what exactly happened. But as you guys know, a couple of weeks ago when I was studying abroad in Paris I had all of my camera and editing equipment stolen from me. It was all in a single backpack and it was a very tragic event that almost ruined my summer if it wasn't for the generosity of you guys.  My Canon 70D DSLR camera with two different lenses. My Sony RX100 point and shoot camera and like hundreds of dollars worth of like magic gimmicks that I had purchased and hand made and that are, some of them are just not even replaceable. So it was a big loss. Basically everything of physical value in my life other than my phone or my wallet was in that backpack. Like to be completely honest, I would have rather had my phone or my wallet stolen. That would have been a lot easier of a time. At least my passport, I left it at home. I made a conscious effort to leave my passport at home because I did not want to lose that. That would be a whole entire mess in and of itself. Luckily you guys pulled through and with the help of a successful GoFundMe I was able to rebuy some of my gear and get back to making videos for you guys. We haven't completely recovered yet but we're on our way and we have everything we need right now to keep pumping out these videos so I'm excited. Regardless, I also received a lot of questions about how this theft actually occurred and since it's a pretty funny story and I'm still really salty about it, we have this video. So welcome to Storytime with Josh as we recount one of the most unfortunate events to happen to me in the recent future. Yay! As you guys know I was looking forward to a pretty big collab with a fellow YouTuber from Princeton and we had just set the date that we're going to meet in film. By the way if you haven't checked out our collab videos yet you should definitely do that as soon as possible because not only do they give a lot of great information about Princeton Yale but they also answer a lot of your guys' questions about college. So I'll leave the link below. Anyways I think we had decided to film on a Tuesday which did mean that I had class in the morning. After class finished I grabbed some lunch with some friends and then decided to do some work in a nearby park. We actually ended up going to Park des butchermans which if you guys haven't heard of it is probably one of the craziest and most beautiful parks I've seen in Paris. It looked like something straight out of the movie Avatar it was absolutely insane. I did have footage of it but it's gone now but Google it it's pretty cool. I'm getting sidetracked but anyways the point is that I did not have time to go home to charge my phone. I did swing by my host family's house for like five minutes but it was just to grab a microphone and a tripod for filming. So I decided to keep my laptop in my bag so I could plug the USB cord into it and charge my phone while it was on the metro and while we were filming. I also had both cameras in my bag because I have my small camera for blogging and then I have my big camera for taking pictures and stuff so those were both in my bag because we're gonna be by the Eiffel Tower. Who knows, might be able to take some pictures, might be able to vlog a little bit. I just wanted to be prepared for anything. Bad idea Josh. The point is by some perfect storm of events all of these big ticket items happened to be in my bag at the same time. I sprinted out of my house towards the metro because I was running late and straight to the Eiffel Tower which is where we decided to film. We met up, everything was going well, we filmed the first video and then we decided to change locations for the second video. We walked around the park a little bit and decided on this nice stone bench that had pretty good lighting. We sat down and I had my backpack right next to me on the bench. But when we were framing the shot I obviously didn't want my backpack next to me in the shot because it's obnoxious. Right next to me on the ground leaning against the stone pillar that was in between the two benches. You see the bag was like right down here, right, right in my peripheral vision, thought everything was good. But you know, we just happened to be filming a YouTube video. One of the only activities I know of that requires intense focus forward onto a lens and complete disregard for anything in your peripherals. Anyways, we finished filming, I was feeling good about the take. It was going well. We were answering the questions pretty well. I was really excited for the video. I get up, I stretch, I look to my right and I don't see my backpack. I'm like, wait a second, did it like fall under the bench? So I check under the bench. I'm like, huh, interesting, did I not set it down? I'm pretty sure I set it down right here. Where'd it go? Like the thought of theft didn't even register in my head because it seemed so impossible. It was literally within arms reach of me sitting in my peripheral vision. Like how would I not have seen it? How would I not have felt it? But eventually we nicknacked into the conclusion that theft was the only thing that made sense and that my backpack had been stolen. I didn't believe how somebody could come so close to us and sneak right behind us and snatch my backpack from right next to me. Not only that, but Nick was getting up like every two or three minutes to frame the shot. So somebody had to have been watching us because they didn't want to come and try to steal a backpack and then Nick get up and frame the shot. So here's your answer. These thieves in Europe, they're professionals.  I was wearing a Yale t-shirt with salmon shorts. Nick was wearing a Princeton sweatshirt. It doesn't get any more American than that. Probably sat there watching us for 20 minutes, started to notice the patterns of Nick getting up, checking the framing, us filming the video, and observed us make sure that they were safe, scouted out the location of my gear right next to me, seeing that they were filming and then this son of a... Stuck up right behind me and stole my gear. Now I know what you're thinking. He must have shown up in the footage. Nope. Like I said, there was a giant stone pillar in between the two benches which the thief must have taken note of and literally must have gotten right behind so he wouldn't have been in the frame and reached down and snatched it. It was just ridiculous. We scrubbed through the footage afterwards and could not find even the slightest evidence of something. I'm just blown away by the extent that some people will go to steal and ruin someone's day. So basically we wanted the area looking forward but I knew I wouldn't be able to find it. I tried to talk to some security guards but of course they were no help. Basically I was just freaking out on the verge of tears, running around the Eiffel Tower like a... Big shout out to Nick for staying with me and helping me out because I don't know if I would have been able to do that by myself. Anyways, once I accepted that there was no way that we're going to find the thief, I immediately routed myself to the nearest police station except there was a problem. The Tuesday night that we had decided to film was actually the semifinals of the World Cup which France was in. So basically the streets were completely empty. Everyone was grouped around these bars and all the police stations were closed. I even tried going to a second police station but that was also closed. So we just ended up watching the last 10 minutes of the game at some random bar which was absolutely crazy by the way. Obviously France won so the streets begin to immediately erupt in madness. As I immediately became soaked in beer, I don't think there was a full drink in that entire bar. I witnessed a car crash in the middle of the street and a bunch of people ran and charged a public transport bus and it almost flipped over. I may have lost all my gear but witnessing that made my night a little bit better. The bad part was that my phone died. So it took me over three hours to get home because of all the crazed fans on the Metro. The Metro had to keep stopping. I didn't even know what Metro routes to take because I couldn't route using my phone. I got home and realized that my phone charger was in my backpack that was lost which meant that I had to router to my host family's house without a little phone flashlight and they didn't have a lot of lights in their house trying to find a phone charger because I needed to plug my phone in and call my parents and inform everyone of the situation. It was a mess, it was a mess. It was just a series of a lot of unfortunate events leading to a devastating consequence. People will always warn me about theft and pickpocketing in Paris. They said, oh, it's one of the most dangerous cities. And I was like, okay, I get it, I get it. But I didn't think it could happen to me.  I was doing all of that. I've been super careful, but you know, it just takes one moment. These guys are professionals. They're gonna get your stuff no matter what.  So that's the role of the story. Obviously, there's a lot more lessons that I have to learn from this and maybe I'll make a video about that in the future. But it was, headed in today, it was just a really, really unfortunate situation. All right, I hope you guys enjoyed listening to me rant about this because I definitely wanted to get it off my chest. If you enjoyed, feel free to drop a thumbs up down below. It helps me and supports the channel a lot more than you think. Comment down below any questions, comments, concerns, or future video ideas. I will try to respond to your new subscribers. You won't regret it. I will see you guys in the next video. Why she from Europe, take a joke, then you ride it. If you wanna get the smoke.


Hi, I'm Kate Senior and I'm the co-director of the Purae Global Indigenous History Centre. And today I'm talking to James Ballangari and James is going to talk about yarning. And we're going to start with just the basics about yarning. What is a yarn? So a yarn essentially is collaborative dialogue.  Yarning, it's quite different to other types of data collection. I was going to ask you, how is that different from an interview? Yeah, so an interview typically, you know, there's a list of questions and the interviewer is quite passive. They'll ask the questions and then receive the information. With a yarn, there is no title of an interviewer. You know, they're just as part of the yarn as the participant is. You know, it's collaboration and it's not a verbatim question. You have to cater the question to the people involved in the yarn. You have to be a lot more accessible in your wording. So you might not use formal wording. You might use what we call layman's terms or everyday speak and terminology. And it's one of those things where the person facilitating has to first share a part of themselves, which allows the space and the potential for the participants to share a part of themselves. Yeah, and is it that aspect? I think there must be more aspects, but it's more than a conversation too, isn't it? Yeah, it's more than a conversation. A conversation kind of has a much clearer purpose and direction. Your yarn can go anywhere and that's why to facilitate a yarn, it's definitely an art form. Yeah. So what are the key skills of a facilitator of a yarn? What skills do you need to have? I think you have to be able to be personable. You have to be able to socialise and be vulnerable and be open to that. Yeah, so a lot of people would be quite nervous about being vulnerable, like putting themselves into that sort of position. It's really tricky. Honestly, it's really tricky. We're so used to putting on that professional hat and the very kind of formal ways that we speak and we conduct ourselves, but when we actually do that in a yarn, it has the opposite effect. It gets you further away from the outcomes that you're hoping to achieve. Yeah, that's really interesting. And I suppose listening is a key skill of a facilitator too. Yeah, definitely. I mean, and it's active listening and it's making sense and understanding of what's going on. So you get different forms of communication. It's about understanding the cultural nuances of indigenous people who are part of the yarn. And that takes a long time. And what you find when people are first learning how to yarn, especially in the research space, is they will hear something and they'll have a direct assumption of what it is, but they might be pretty far off because it's all around context. It's all around those cultural nuances and understandings. Yeah, and often people do forget to listen when they're doing this sort of interaction. They're so focused on getting the information, they're forgetting to listen. So that's a really important skill. Yeah, exactly. And the thing is with the yarn, it doesn't fit the Western structures of time. You know, a lot of Western structures of time is by the clock, by the minute, by the hour, by the second. And to do a yarn properly, you have to go what we call, you know, we call curry time here in New South Wales, Victoria, some people call it Murray time. It's actually a lot more similar to other cultures, like I've been to Hawaii and native Hawaiians called Hawaiian time. We used to have Northern Territory time. Yeah, I've met a few friends from Africa, they call it African time. Yeah.  Yeah. And we're not bound by the hands of the clock. Yeah, yeah. And it takes a lot of getting used to for people who are not used to that. Yeah, yeah. And that's why I suggest to anybody, if you're making time for a yarn, whatever time you've set aside that you think you would normally take to do it, almost double it. Yeah, yeah. Because you have to have a period beforehand to get to know each other and to connect on different things. Yeah, that's really important. And that's a sort of really good lead into what I was going to ask you about next, which was, you know, how do you set up a yarn? What do you need to think about when you're establishing this? It's really difficult because, again, it's the taking of that professional hat off. It's about connection. It's not about connection on the professional level. It's not about knowing somebody has an acquaintance. It's a lot of connecting on a personal level, connecting on a social level and truly understanding who the person is that you're yawning with. But also making sure that the first thing you do is show them who you are. So they truly understand your intentions and your intentions are pure. Your intentions are authentic. And that there is a relationship already established before you even approach them to yarn. Yeah, so a lot of the work is in the initiation stages rather than the yarn itself. Exactly, exactly. The yarn is essentially, I wouldn't like to say the spiritual peak because it's a continuation of a journey and a relationship that kind of never ends. If your relationship with the participants end after the yarn, then it was never authentic in the first place. Yeah, good to know. And what do you do with the information from a yawning session? What's the, how do you analyze it? So it sounds quite complex. It is quite complex, especially when indigenizing research practices is quite new. So it's actually an exploratory process at the moment, and it's being led by a lot of great indigenous researchers. Even then, we have the challenge of how do we create the space within the system to take off our professional heart and put on our community heart and then be able to bring who we are and who we've grown up to become in community. How do we bring that into the research space? One thing that I've found is that you can't assume, you can't assume the findings and the outcomes prior to the analyzing. And you have to find a way that when you're looking at say transcripts, that the transcripts aren't just words on a paper. They carry the essence and they carry the energy of the yarn at the time. So if you find yourself very sluggish and like, oh, paperwork, then you're probably not in the right state to analyze these transcripts effectively to get the essence and the true understanding of what the participants are saying. Any of you looking to draw out all the voices in that process? Well, it depends on what you're trying to achieve and your ethics processes, because some topics and some voices are very sensitive and some things should not be shared and some things should be kept in the confidentiality of the project. But also, when you speak about indigenous knowledges, in a lot of senses, indigenous knowledges are sacred. And they're not supposed to be shared with everybody. That's another set of skills for facilitator is to keep that yarn sort of contained, I suppose. Yeah, exactly. And make sure that what is shared is appropriate to be shared. Yeah, and it's a real challenge because a lot of times in western understands of knowledge, it's knowledge is for everybody, knowledge is to be shared. Whereas with indigenous understates of knowledge, as I said, knowledge is sacred. And you have certain knowledge holders, knowledge keepers who have the right to share knowledge if they choose to. And at the right time. At the right time. But also to say to somebody, this is for you and you cannot share this. So it's about respecting those understandings of knowledges and that if you're using young methodology and if you're intentionally pure and authentic, that regardless of whether you think the outcome is going to be better, the rights, the understandings, the knowledges and the sacred philosophies of the aboriginal people come first. Yeah, great. And just a final question. Is it possible for non-indigenous people to be involved in yarning? I believe so. It takes a lot of time. As I said, it's cultural understanding of nuances. And can non-indigenous people learn through that process as well? Do you think it could be a learning tool? Yeah, honestly, it can be in the past. I didn't believe so until a friend of mine was speaking about the use of indigenous teaching methods by non-indigenous people. And I realized that it's a process and we have to allow that process to happen. But we have to do this best we can to mitigate any negative effects that we may be unaware of. I mean, we are very much still in the start of indigenizing research practices. So non-indigenous colleagues have a lot of growth and a lot of learning and they have to come along to that journey with us. And it's quite difficult and it's not going to be smooth. And it's going to be bumpy and there's going to be ups and downs and rough patches and some mistakes are going to be made. But that's how we get better. We can't jump from the start to the finish line. And we have to make sure that this journey and this process is led by indigenous researchers. Yeah, absolutely.  Fantastic. Thank you so much, James. That sounds like the beginning of an amazing story in a sense. This yarn that just keeps on going on and will inform research practice here at the university but everywhere. Thank you. You're welcome.


Okie dokie. Firstly thanks very much to Eza for bullying me here today. She's been the one of the main focus or one of the main drivers of some of this work so she said you've got to come so thanks for that. I'm going to be talking today about an area that is a bit probably obscured or a lot of you I suspect. So before I launch into some of the kind of results and things we've found and I should say I've got some results I've also got sort of broad ideas. I wanted to talk and spend a little bit of time on some context stuff. There's a couple of reasons for this. One New Zealand's about as far away from where we are here as you could possibly get and the other reason is the archaeology is a bit obscure as I said. So I was genuinely asked when I came to UCL if this was our archaeology is the Lord of the Ring stuff. It's not it's a little bit more ephemeral than that but we're going to talk a little bit about that. So the point of that is not just to sort of give you the background on New Zealand but it's also hopefully to link some of the questions that we're asking with broader themes globally which I actually think in a weird way while New Zealand is a very late prehistory while it's a very different prehistory it does connect quite nicely to some of the themes that you see around the world. So I'm going to start even broader than New Zealand very quickly and talk a little bit more about the Pacific because this is the really jumping off point. So New Zealand down the bottom now south west of this big kind of shark thin shape thing you can see there. The other corner is being Rapa Nui or Easter Island as many of you will know and the Hawaiian Islands up at top. Now this area is what most people call Polynesia. So in here you have societies within this region are ancestrarily linked, ancestral cultural connections of course that means they've got very similar genetics, very similar linguistics and to a large extent the degree to which these societies are similar or different from one another is to do with the settlement process in the region. So very, very, very quickly there's about three broad pulses of settlement. The first comes out to the first red arrow you can see there the dotted line and that's in the Pleistocene that settles Australia, Ugini, all that sort of thing. The second pulse doesn't occur until around 3,500 BP with the Lepida people and that's the first truly oceanic movement of people. That sweeps along the top of Ugini. I'm just going to do my weatherman impression. It sweeps along the top of Ugini coming out as far as Samoa and Tonga and that takes about 500 years so that's a long way in a very short time. Once they get to Samoa and Tonga they stop for about 2,000 years and this is what I mean by it's kind of interesting to see how these things relate to continental environments. So once they get to Samoa and Tonga there's a pause of about 2,000 years and there's the development of what you might call an ancestral Polynesian society which then explodes out over the rest of this triangle in about 300 years and this triangle is about a quarter of the Earth's surface so we're not talking about small distances here it also gets to South America and comes back as well. So it's very rapid. Now the nature of that settlement is again very similar to what you see elsewhere. It's what you might call a Neolithic package I suppose, what we call a transported cultural landscape. So people are taking plants, animals, ideas, beliefs, all that sort of stuff with them to new islands. And the other thing I suppose this is the real jumping off point and the reason I talk more broadly about Polynesia is that you can see that an awful lot of this movement from west to east is happening in that tropical band. And if we think about this in terms of some of Peter Bellwood's ideas about the movement of horticulturalists and agriculturalists the speed of that settlement probably shouldn't be that surprising in that it is going along relatively similar climatic ranges. I hastened where there are fairly serious differences locally here but in general terms there is this kind of similarity. But you can see I think you can probably see the point I'm about to make. You can see the big exception to this is down here. This is a massive jump and this is a north-south jump against the grain climatically so to speak and this is what Bellwood would refer to as a high friction move. So this is a difficult move to move down across things like that. Now for us what this means of course is that we have to consider exactly how these people with a culture that's adapted to a tropical environment has made this jump. I mean and this isn't the equivalent of say moving along the same latitude perhaps over ground because there is no transitional point here. People come from southern cooks and they move 2000 miles down to New Zealand probably took about a month so that one month they're in a tropical environment the next they might be in a temperate environment. So this is a pretty big pretty big change. And you can also see one last footnote New Zealand sits across because it's very long and thin. New Zealand's approximately the same land mass as the UK but it's longer so it sits across those different bands so we might expect some differences. So in terms of what we kind of think we know in New Zealand there are some serious problems. What we do know is that that movement south lowers productivity so of the 20 odd species of plants that Polynesians take with them to other islands six or five or six depending on who you listen to actually get established in New Zealand and the yield of those plants is around about half as much as it is elsewhere. You just can't get the yield off them as much. The concentration of this yield is very much up here. This is a distribution map of hillfort sites effectively which are associated with agricultural land so you can see there's a big concentration up there. And the final thing to say is that the very bottom half of the South Island is too cold for a domesticated species so there's no water culture there whatsoever. So there you see quite a clear reversion to hunter gathering and foraging. Population wise all these things of course are interconnected. The lower yields mean that generally speaking the estimates are a bit dodgy but generally speaking New Zealand population is considered to be much lower than the per kilometer squared readings or numbers that we get from elsewhere like Hawaii or places like that and it's not just lower it's much lower. But in terms of our models of what population actually looks like we just sort of steal them from Polynesia and generally speaking it's the logistic model where there's water culture and below this line here which is the non-water cultural region down here we assume some kind of collapse associated with the loss of faunal resources which is the mainstay of the economy down there. Now you might expect when I was talking about with friction you might expect there to be a concentration of people in the north early because that's the most similar to the environments that people came from but in fact what we find is that there's an awful lot of settlement down here which is the constant where the where the large game resources concentrate but again hasten to add there's some problems with I'm sure there's some problems with preservation and recovery bias here. And so these these settlements are based around exploitation of wild game basically hunting out patches and then moving on and what happens in terms of the area that I'm quite interested in in terms of the water cultural zone is that because most of the data is from here what happens is people just pick it up and dump it over up in the North Island and that doesn't seem particularly useful. So that's a sort of starting point we have generic models from Polynesia that aren't necessarily that useful we have a lot of derived models from other regions that might not be that useful in terms of understanding the development and the actual establishment of food producing systems and we have no real empirical checks of either of them. So with for his sins and Riko Prima has been working with me a little bit on some of this population stuff so we're trying to deal a little bit with trying to address what the actual population models look like and rather than it's just these sort of broad generic models. I think a lot but given the audience I'm going to assume that most of you are familiar with the SPD method and our carbon which and retail and any revenue developed so I'm not going to talk specifically about the details necessarily but just some of the results. So what we did first just sort of broadly divided up New Zealand into optimal sub-optimal and non-water cultural zones we were interested to see if that temporal banding that we talked about here had an impact on population and we expected that it would and we then compared it we used a model testing approach that I haven't shown here compared it to just a basic logistic fitted logistic model and what we found broadly speaking was that horticultural zone logistic growth was pretty fair. I should hasten to add this isn't what I'm talking about. So in where there's horticulturalistic logistic growth is a pretty reasonable model but in the south it didn't work at all and we sort of expected that. So then we used the fermentation test and so what this does rather than compare our data with an idealized model what we're doing here is appearing each region with the underlying growth treated across the whole country. So what we're trying to find out here is to what extent does a one particular region vary from the overall growth around New Zealand and you can see if I start with the south you can see that our observed data vastly overshoots the expectations of the model in that early period and undershoots represented by the blue the bottom here in the later period and this 1450 date lines up almost bang on with the decline of large or big game resources in the south. So we're quite we're recently happy with that we felt that that was a there's a reasonable connection to be made there with food producing or the nature of of where you're getting your food but in the north whereas most archaeologists would argue that it's just logistic we found that when you use the fermentation test you can tease out a little bit more data than that. So in the first instance I just say that there is you can see that the early period there is in the blue both the central and northern regions is undershooting the expectations of the model. So perhaps you could argue that this is an opportunity cost for establishing for not going after the big Kentucky fry chicken down in the South Island and seals and all the rest of it but actually trying to establish a more solid base of resources but you can see very much in the later period this is completely different than most of the growth is on trend with the model or exceeding it and one more thing that we just mentioned very quickly is that it's quite interesting to note that in the north that that initial boom that red area that you can see in the middle there fits quite nicely with some of the oral traditions that we have that suggests that that's the concentration of early growth and that actually there's a sort of recolonisation of the central zone by Māori groups after that and we're actually picking that up in the central region a little bit as well I think with this red area here which is suggesting that growth is exceeding the expectations of our model. So we can maybe connect that to some of the oral traditions of say of internal population movements which is not only sort of refining our understanding of population but also perhaps lining up quite nicely with some of the oral traditions which in New Zealand are quite solid and quite nice. We've done a little bit more work that focuses on sort of sub-regional patterns as well but I've decided not to sort of talk about that but broadly speaking that sort of breaks down even the classifications that we have here and it suggests that you know that local variation is quite important as well so beyond region or even a finer scale in region. So just to wrap up very quickly I've only got a few minutes left the ADU may speak and as I said this is very much in development and basically this is born out of the problem that we have in New Zealand which is that we have this model of settlement that is largely based on something that isn't really appropriate but we don't have an awful lot of sites that we can say but this is what's going on we certainly don't have almost any early horticultural sites they are there but they're very rare and so rather than trying to establish what's going on there by using the very small data points that we have talking to ESA we sort of started thinking about using agent based modelling to get at this issue by just trying to sort of theory build I suppose or model build using ABM so it's very simple it's just a question of how groups of people might settle high friction unfamiliar environments given certain parameters and so what we hopefully hopefully do is sort of compare the variation the different models that we come up with and also try and then compare that to the what archaeological data would you have so it's a relatively simple method and we're in really you know it's very early stages yet but it's just focusing on the clustered resources which is very much the case in New Zealand it's a lot of areas that you can grow crops a lot of areas that you can't and we're just asking a simple question basically if somebody moves into a new environment and they satisfy they're happy with what they can see what happens if they invest heavily in that area they put all their eggs in one basket and what happens if they perhaps do that process get some crops up and running and then decide to move on and try that on the sort of a loop and of course each have got costs because if there's some kind of stochastic process that they're not aware of or climate goes bad or just that they've chosen the wrong place if they've invested heavily there's obviously a massive problem with that however if they move on they've got the problem of transportation and trying to reap those gardens so it's just as I say very early stages but that's what we're sort of trying to get at so I will with that finish up thanks very much


There was a lot of Ted Talks going on then. How I use stand up as a keynote speaker. I fell in love with stand up comedy in the mid 80s and I'm still a devout fan four decades later. As a teenager I was drawn to the storytelling, imagery and rhythm. It was clever. It was controversial. It was honest. It made me laugh. It made me think. It made me question. Stand up comedians were oratory savants. I would never have guessed that 35 years later I would find inspiration from George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Steve Martin and use their unique comedic genius to help me level up as a corporate keynote speaker. Fast forward to Bill Burr, Dave Chappelle, Louis CK and Brian Regan and I continue to consistently study stand up comedy to this day to help me improve my storytelling, my improvisation, my timing, my tone and my physicality when I'm on stage. Stand up comedy has made me a better professional speaker. I would say rehearse the out of it because you're going to get frazzled up there. Everybody thinks oh this is good material but you also forget about the other part of delivering it. Having confidence, being likeable, having timing, having a cadence, figure out who you are, figure out what the audience thinks you are or how they perceive you. Bombing is not failure. It's just data. It's going oh okay I gotta retool that. That didn't work. Something wrong there. I missed the word there. So you gotta treat the act almost like ingredients in a cooking, in a dish, you know like oh that I put too many eggs in. Take an egg out. You gotta treat it like that and just almost be a robot and just keep going. I like to explain to you how life works at least from a comedian's perspective. First there's a setup and then there's a punch line. Your setup is your talents, your resources, and your opportunities and most of the time we use our setup to ensure that the people around us are moving in a direction that serves us which means the punch line occurs when you change that direction in a way they're not expecting. How many people here know what your setup is?  Your setup is about what you've received but what if I ask the question what is your punch line? Because your punch line is about what you're called to deliver and if you only know your setup and not your punch line you'll make the mistake of trying to add more setup. If I could just get another degree, if I could just get married, if I could just lose weight but what you really need is to know your punch line. Again because to know your setup and not your punch line is an uncomfortable place to live. Your setbacks are part of your setup so you can deliver the punch line you're called to deliver. Much like a slingshot the further you've been set back the further you're going to reach but what are you gonna aim for? Everyone has a setup and everyone has a punch line. You need to find your punch line and deliver it.


Welcome to May's ECR webinar hosted by E-Life, the series that aims to give early career researchers a platform to discuss issues important to you and your research career. Today's speakers will discuss mental health initiatives that could support you and your fellow researchers. The webinar will begin with the panelists sharing their stories, then in the second half we will be putting your questions to them. To ask a question you can type in what you want to ask in the question box on the go to webinar function panel or you can tweet us. We are at E-Life community using the hashtag ECR Wednesday. Finally, I would like to let you know that we are recording the webinar and we will make it available on YouTube in the near future. Now I'll pass over to Brian to introduce the panelists. Thank you Elsa and hello everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our early career researcher Wednesday webinar discussing the very important topic of mental health support for early career researchers. My name is Breanne Kent. I am a postdoc at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School and chair of the E-Life Early Career Advisory Group. I will be the moderator for today's webinar. Just a word about our host, E-Life is a nonprofit organization and open access journal that is working to improve all aspects of research communication in support of excellence in science. The role of the early career advisory group is to influence and support E-Life's work to catalyze broad reform in the evaluation and communication of science. And in particular to represent the needs and aspirations of researchers at early stages in their careers for a research culture that is healthy for science and for scientists. This webinar series, ECR Wednesdays, is just one of the initiatives that E-Life has launched to help support the early career community. I would like to welcome our three speakers. We have with us Joe Franchetti, engineering engagement manager at Trainline, Susanna Harris, PhD candidate at UNC Chapel Hill, and Michael Chen, who's the managing director of It Gets Brighter and graduate student at the University of Oxford. Thank you all so much for joining us today. Over the next hour, our speakers will discuss mental health and science with a particular focus on mental health support for early career researchers. Please follow us on Twitter at E-Life community and with the hashtag ECR Wednesday. Mental health is a growing concern for early career researchers. There is greater awareness of how the acute pressures from the hyper-competitive job market publish or perish culture and sometimes isolating nature of research contributes to the unacceptably high rates of depression and anxiety among scientists. With this greater awareness, there is also an increasing number of initiatives aimed at helping early career researchers improve their mental health. Today, our panelists will speak about imposter syndrome and perfectionism, ongoing initiatives that support mental health in academia, and how the medical student well-being index could be adopted in graduate schools. We will now open the floor to our speakers. Up first is Joe Franchetti. Joe is the engineering engagement manager at Trainline. She has worked in various parts of the tech industry, from startups, agencies, charities, and to large organizations. She is passionate not only for teaching good use of the web, but also for improving the diversity and inclusivity of the tech industry. Welcome, Joe. Take over. Thank you so much for the lovely intro. Can you all see my slides there? Excellent. Okay, so thank you so much. That was such a great intro. I'm Joe Franchetti, and yeah, I'm a tech engagement manager. So my job is to make sure that the developers who work at Trainline have a great developer experience. And also to encourage developers to do things like public speaking, which obviously takes a lot of courage and can cause a lot of issues like imposter syndrome. I am also, as you said, an organizer and coach at Codebar, so I spend a lot of my time talking to people who work in the tech industry, from developers to designers to managers to people who work in product, a whole range of people from different seniority levels and different walks of life. I've started to notice some trends and these are trends in people who are not only starting their careers, but have maybe been in their careers for a long time. And these are trends in behaviors and beliefs and in complaints amongst skilled and highly intelligent people in general. So this is me and honestly, the first thing that made me start researching these issues is because I was feeling them so intensely myself. In fact, they became almost crippling to me on occasion. The issues that I see regularly are imposter syndrome and perfectionism. These can both lead to general anxiety. So I'd like to give you a brief introduction to these concepts, along with some just information about how to recognize these in yourself. So let's get started. Let's talk about firstly imposter syndrome. With this, you may have heard called imposter phenomenon or imposter experience. Imposter syndrome describes the feeling that you haven't really earned your accomplishments.  Imposter syndrome kind of downplays how universal this feeling is amongst intelligent and skilled people. It's not a disease and it's not an abnormality. And it isn't always tied to self-esteem or anxiety or even depression, but it is very prevalent in highly skilled people. So where do these feelings come from? Other skilled or intelligent tend to believe that their colleagues and their peers are also skilled and intelligent. And this can sometimes cause you to judge yourself against others and to do so unfairly and harshly. And this judgment can cause you to believe that you don't deserve the opportunities and the qualifications and the accolades that you've earned, or in some way that your skills aren't worth as much as those of other people. And this can sometimes be coupled with the belief that the qualifications or the accolades that you have earned somehow aren't worthwhile anymore or they aren't praiseworthy. I don't know if you've ever had the feeling that you've striven to achieve something and then once you've got it, you felt like it came a little bit too easy, or that someone made a mistake in awarding it to you, or that maybe it isn't enough and you have to instantly start striving towards the next thing and the next thing. This syndrome doesn't let you feel any pride or joy in your accomplishments. And another problem with imposter syndrome is that our fears can be intensified by something known as pluralistic ignorance. This is the thing where we doubt ourselves in private, but we never voice our doubts because we believe that we're alone in thinking this way, because no one else talks about their worries either. This can be especially exacerbated by things like social media where people tend to present only their best achievements and their successes. People rarely publish their mistakes, their self-doubts, or their own foibles. So it becomes really difficult to know how well we're doing in comparison to our peers, whether or not they find certain tasks difficult, how often they get stuck or how often they need help, and whether or not they ever doubt themselves. So there's no easy way to dismiss this feeling that we're not doing as well as the people around us. So with a view to sharing how prevalent this issue is, I'd like to share with you some famous and incredible people who also suffer from imposter syndrome. So first up is Maya Angelou who wrote 11 books and won so many awards, but she still felt like she hadn't earned her accomplishments. She said they're going to find me out. And then the seemingly confident and talented Emma Watson said that she's afraid that people will find out that she's a fraud and that she doesn't deserve any of what she's achieved. And if you can believe it, even Albert Einstein experienced imposter syndrome. He described himself as an involuntary swindler whose work didn't deserve as much attention as it received. Talking with other people about imposter syndrome and the way that I felt it is the best way to start recognizing these fears for what they are and how you're feeling them. They're they're normal, but they're immaterial and they're certainly unfactual. And whenever I'm worrying that everyone around me is more intelligent than I am or knows more than me, or that I feel like I don't belong. I like to think of this thing that I call Schrodinger's imposter syndrome, which is the idea that somehow I have convinced myself that my peers are all far more intelligent and more accomplished and more brilliant than I am. And you know, I'll never belong amongst them.  But these two things can't exist alongside each other and be true. My logic is valuable and therefore likely so is my disbelief in myself. And we may never be able to entirely banish the feelings of imposter experience, but we can have open and frank conversations with each other with our peers with our seniors with our mentors and with our mentees and our friends even and build confidence in the facts. You are not alone in feeling this way.  So the second thing that I'd like to talk about is perfectionism. Now I was given a piece of advice when I was preparing for an interview that I'm sure a lot of you have also been given and it was this.  Yeah. So this piece of advice was given to me by my boss at the time and it's the kind of statement that makes eyes roll across the board. Interviewers and interviewees alike knows that it's a cop out answer. The view is you're not really revealing any weakness because employers want to hire perfectionists. The idea is that perfectionists do great work. They do perfect work. And it never occurred to me as I sort of naively accepted this piece of advice that I would learn to know the truth of the statement. So if you look it up, it says that perfectionism in psychology is a personality traits characterized by a person striving for flawlessness, setting high performance standards accompanied by critical self evaluations and concern regarding others evaluations, which sounds great. If I was an employer, I'd want to hire someone who strives for flawlessness and sets high standards and cares about others evaluations. They sound like a really high achiever. But perfectionism can often be a blocker to achievement. Imagine that you're constantly striving for perfection, not greatness, not excellence, actual perfection. You can't help but set yourself up to fail. Achieving perfection is not something that happens very often. And the problem is the perfectionist measure our own self-worth by how capable we are of achieving perfection, by how much we can accomplish. And if we don't accomplish these things, it can be very harsh on ourselves. The trouble is that for perfectionist, performance is intertwined with our sense of self. So when we don't succeed, we don't just feel disappointed in how we did, we feel shame about who we are. And perfectionists also engage in this thing called catastrophic, or you might hear it called black and white thinking, where everything is either perfect or it's terrible. And even the things that most people would call good enough or even great fall into the terrible category. And it can lead to things like a decision paralysis or an inability to get started on a piece of work because you can't get it exactly perfect. So it's better just to never start or never finish rather than actually getting the work out there. And the problem is that perfectionist employees have a tendency to push themselves far too hard to try and achieve this impossible dream of perfection, which can lead to anxiety. It can lead to overwork and it can lead to burnout very quickly. So what can we do as both perfectionists and friends of perfectionists to try and make our industries a safer and kinder place to work?  But schedule in time when you're trying to attempt it again in the future. Sometimes you just can't tackle a problem.  Allow yourself the time away from it. Schedule in start time again in the future. So setting deadlines and goals is really important to perfectionists. Too much freedom for us can be quite stifling. So given a blank canvas will procrastinate or will start in a band of multiple projects. Set achievable goals, which will allow you to strive for excellence while removing the paralyzing nature of open ended tasks. Remember that perfect is the enemy of great perfectionism isn't about high standards. It's about impossible standards. Aiming for great is far better than aiming for something that's impossible. And you'll likely be surprised that not only will no one else notice the imperfections that you think are so blurringly obvious, but they'll actually think that your work is great. And also remember that you are your most, your own most harsh critic. Most people don't expect perfection from others. People just think that they do. It's okay to release imperfect work. It's even okay if somebody notices a mistake in your work. You can thank them, you learn from it and you can both move on with your lives. And the thing that has helped me the most when I've spoken about my experiences with perfectionism and with imposter syndrome is talking about it to other people. Every time I do, people tell me about their own experiences. And with the tendency for intelligence and achievement amongst highly skilled people is perhaps unsurprising that so many of us suffer from perfectionism and imposter syndrome. But the more we talk about it with our friends and our colleagues and our managers, the less stigma we'll feel around dealing with it and helping each other through it. Because we all occasionally go through rough periods and we don't have to downplay it. We can turn around to each other and validate each other's experiences. You know, tell each other, yeah, this is hard sometimes because the more open and communicative we are about mental health, the more pleasant a working experience we can create for everybody. And the reason why I'm so passionate about these things is because I went through years of suffering through depression and anxiety caused by imposter syndrome and by perfectionism. And I don't really want anyone else to go through those things because I think that by talking about it, we can increase awareness and learning about mental health. And make our industries wonderful, empowering places to be because we all deserve to be there. Thank you very much for listening to me. Great. Thank you so much Joe. That was wonderful. Great way to start our webinar. Up next is Susanna Harris. Susanna is a PhD candidate at UNC Chapel Hill studying how beneficial bacteria stick to plant roots and support plants grow. In 2018, Susanna founded the PhD depression LLC to open discussion of mental illness in higher education through creation of stories and resources. Welcome Susanna. Hi, thank you so much for just having me on here. I think that's it's just such an honor and then, and I'm coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Right. So what I want to talk to you about today, I think what Joe was saying, it really resonated with me because, first of all, yesterday actually I was thinking about perfectionism and definitely what she was saying about imposter syndrome of feeling like maybe things came too easy or maybe, you know, how tricked everyone definitely, definitely hit home. And what I want to talk to you all today is about this project that I started just over a year ago to try to highlight some of these stories of people who are dealing with everything from imposter syndrome to mental illnesses like depression and anxiety. And really the reason that I wanted to do this was the idea that we are surrounded by other people who are having these same feelings. But although we see these statistics, we don't actually normally see the people behind those statistics. So this was a paper that came out in February of 2018 that they basically found that about 40% up to 40% of graduate students were reporting symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder.  And what was so interesting for me is that I looked into the history a little bit more and found that these numbers weren't actually surprising. A lot of papers had been done and published about this exact issue. And it found similar things where between 25 and 40% of graduate students all around the world in different studies were showing these kind of concerning numbers and rates of mental illness or severe mental health distress. And what was interesting about this is that the Nature Biotech paper, what they did, which was a little bit different, is that they actually found that if they asked people for their symptoms, if they just had them explain what issues they might be having, that's how they really got to the core of if someone was having some sort of mental health distress. And part of this is because when we talk to people, they'll often say something like, I'm not depressed. I'm in grad school. And this was actually a quote from me when a few years back I went into my doctor and I asked her for sleeping medication because I was having really hard time sleeping. And she said, I don't think your issue is sleeping. I think rather it might be anxiety or depression. And I said this that, you know, grad students are under a lot of pressure. And so I think this is one of the things that we have to start challenging this idea that not only should grad school be difficult, but it should almost be. There's a lot of part of it that sounds a bit like hazing rituals that sounds like we do not need to support our students. So the reason we came up with pH depression, the reason that it's called such is that I am a grad student who has dealt with depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember even before I was willing to call them those things. And so when these statistics come up, that paper actually came out for me while I was at a conference. And I looked around the room of about 200 people and thought there's no way 10 people in this room would understand where I'm coming from much less 50. And I realized I wouldn't notice myself in that group of people either. So there was this disconnect between the statistics we were seeing and the concern and then looking around our own environments and understanding that the people directly around us might be dealing with those sort of things. So we founded the pH depression, which was basically to fight the stigma around mental illness and higher education and we want to do this through conversation. So we talk about uncomfortable topics that started as a an Instagram handle and we've since grown from there, but we talk about things like imposter syndrome. We talk about the fact that 50% of people who start a PhD are never going to finish their PhD and this is across all disciplines and it's a similar number around the world. And talking about self care and self love and that it is not neglectful to your PhD to support yourself as a human. And in fact, it can make you more productive and a better graduate student. These are the things that we don't talk about in person that we don't feel comfortable bringing up, but really could be helpful to graduate students all around the world. So this is just a highlight of some of the people who have shared their stories. We started out and our main goal is still to share stories to show these images of people who are dealing with mental illness as they are going through graduate school, dealing with different mental health crises. And what we found was really interesting. So we have a diverse community of storytellers from totally different backgrounds. This is our current following just on Instagram where we have about 16,000 followers. And we can go ahead and look at who our audience is and it's actually only about 43% in the United States. So this has become a bit of a global movement, which is really amazing to see. And we have an idea of who is looking at this. And what's really interesting is that people around the world are resonating with what we're talking about. Which is depression, anxiety, imposter syndrome, things like OCD. These are the things that our storytellers have brought into their stories. And what's really interesting is that not only are these symptoms or these issues really common, they all have this central theme where people are hurting and felt alone. And they felt a lot of shame for these struggles and feeling like a fraud. And the resolution to most of these stories, if they are at a point where they feel like they have a resolution, is that they got help and it made things better. It was not a situation of they got help and they wanted to drop out of school or they got help and they want everything to be easier. They got help and they feel that they are in a better place now to be a graduate student than where they were before. And I'll leave this here for a moment. But what's been really inspiring to us, what has kept us going with this project, we often get questions of like, well, most of our team is they're made up of graduate students. They're everyone's volunteer on our team right now. And how do we make the time for it? And we often get these messages from people. We get them pretty regularly a couple times a week. Where people say that reading these stories really helped them, that they were able to recognize in themselves some part of the storyteller's journey and that we sometimes see this where people will say that they have actually sought professional help based on those stories of other people getting that help. And what we like to say is that mental health really affects the success in grad school. So in grad school, no matter what you're doing, things are going to fail. And you're going to feel bad. But the thing is, is if you just feel bad, you're going to end up making mistakes and feeling guilty, which might make you work more and could cause burnout, which might cause you to freak out and avoid work. And then eventually you get back to work. And this is quite a lengthy cycle. And what we think is that with the right support, when things fail, a student might be able to take time off, whether that's mentally or just taking some time out of lab, and that this will actually enable them to jump back into their work and be more successful in the long run. And so we go by the system where there's five stages of getting help for a mental health issue. First, someone needs to recognize that they might be experiencing a problem or that things could maybe get better with some help.  And this is actually a very difficult process. There's the stigma and shame around it and even just recognizing that maybe things could get better and maybe I want that. Then the student or the person in question, academic of any level needs to find those resources and actually start putting them into practice to change their situation. And then finally, a really important aspect of this is actually maintaining these behaviors. So what we think is really important is to break the stigma around these sort of things. And where pH depression is aimed is at these first points, but we are trying now to reach out and find ways to provide resources and help students along this journey. So the questions, the questions that we get a lot are, you know, how can I help how can I help pH depression or how can I help a friend. And we say, you know, watch for signs and symptoms, ask questions and form yourself. There's a lot of great resources online of how to spot symptoms of mental illness. Share and support these resources, but also check in with your friends and check in with yourself. If you're not in a good place or if you're maybe in a not so stable position, you're not going to be able to help the people around you. And this is our idea of you can't pour from an empty glass. You can't help others if you yourself are needing more help. So I will turn it back over to you, but I'm very excited to talk with you more about how all of this is going and just where we can go from here. Great. Thank you so much, Susanna. And just a reminder to the attendees that if you have any questions for the speakers, you can write your questions in the question box here or tweet to us on Twitter. Now I think something that you highlighted Susanna is that it gets things get better. And so that leads us to our next speaker, Michael, who is the director at it gets brighter. Michael is also a candidate in global health science and epidemiology at the University of Oxford. It gets brighter is a nonprofit organization that supports young people who are experiencing mental health issues by sharing video messages of hope and support. Thank you for joining us today, Michael. Thanks so much for the wonderful intro, Brianne.  The statistics are about 75% of mental health issues arise before the age of 24 and 25. So, in that period is often a period when people are starting graduate school in most countries, and I think that it's a really critical time to, first of all, raise awareness and stimulate conversation as our other two panelists have talked about, but also to kind of take action and refer people to resources where they can get more help. Yeah, so the the it gets brighter project started kind of through inspiration from this initiative called it gets better phrase that was used just earlier, and the it gets better project. The idea is to kind of show people young people in particular who are experiencing feelings of doubt or hopelessness who are importantly LGBTQ plus that things do get better for them as they grow older and feel more comfortable with their identity and a society has become more accepting as well in the process. And the idea behind it gets brighter was really inspired by the gets better project where we essentially asked people to to share their stories of how they have they have gone through mental health issues and how they are living full and fulfilling lives with a mental health condition. And we asked them to share their stories in the video format. And then we then disseminate these videos to help young people who are experiencing mental health issues often for the first time. And one of the things about mental health is that a particular depression is that when people are going for it through at the first time there's this kind of this phenomenon called generalization of the narrative, which is the idea that oh you know I'm feeling depressed now. And therefore, you know, I have always felt depressed in the past and I will always feel depressed in the future. And in the process people kind of lose sight of the of the light, and there is there is light in the future. There is hope. And our mission is to show people that things do get brighter for them. So, so yeah I have open here our website. And you can see we have a collection of videos from all across different ages, genders and and profession so our goal is to kind of create a video library that has something for everyone who visits our site. And in particular, since we are talking about mental health and early career academia and research. We actually have a, we have a tag on our site for student. So if we do a quick search with that. I have a backup version on YouTube. I can't seem to find the video I was looking for, but there's this video I found on our website from someone named Belinda Platt, and she is a researcher, and she's generously shared her story through it gets brighter. And she's one of hundreds of people who have. So we'll just play this video real quick. Depression and anxiety are not only the focus of my research, but also a topic close to my heart. I had my first panic attack when I was 12 years old on a family holiday. Out of nowhere I thought I was dying. I felt close to fainting. I locked myself in the bathroom and just screamed. Eventually it passed, but worrying about it have me again, then I started to get symptoms of epiphoobia. I avoided situations where I might get anxious and couldn't easily get home, like being on trains, planes, buses, and I was scared of being away from my closest family.  At uni I used the counseling service, which really helped me. Things were better for a few years. And then last year when things got harder, I've picked up the courage to go for psychotherapy. I've learned that anyone can get anxiety and depression, even people who know all the theory. I told some friends and colleagues that I was having therapy and realized just how many people I know have also done so at some point. I realized that for someone who has a genetic vulnerabilities to disorder, I was actually doing pretty well. I found some skills that helped me when I was feeling anxious, like making a playlist of music that calms me. I learned not to be hard on myself and to reward myself every time I did something that was hard for me, however easy it seemed for other people. It took me a year, but I also learned to accept the fact that I have anxiety. I'm now feeling stronger than ever. I want to encourage other people going through something similar to seek help. Tell your friends how vulnerable you actually feel. Go to your GP even if you're not sure what's wrong. And remember it's not something you'll make worse by talking about or seeking help for. And once you do come out of the other side, share your experiences so we can help to reduce the stigma of mental illness. Even if it encourages just one other person to think about seeking help, it will have been worth it. It really does get brighter. Alrighty. Yeah, so yeah, thanks for watching the video everyone. Yeah, so that's just one example of one of the video messages on our site. By telling these individual stories, we hope to basically give people who are experiencing mental health issues a way to access a resource with a pretty low barrier to entry. Because one of the big issues that people encounter that Susanna and Joe have brought up already is that when you're going through something like depression or anxiety for the first time, the last thing you often want to do is to reach out for help. You know, people kind of tend to turn inwards in those situations. And by making these resources available online in a digital format, I think that they can become a lot more accessible, not just to people locally, but also around the world. So we've really been trying to leverage digital technology to connect people and share these stories. And hopefully also give them tips and have people creating these videos, share, you know, what was the key thing that made things brighter for you? What was that turning point? What did you do? Did you go to that yoga class or did you listen to that playlist of music that really cheered you up? And coming up with these kind of concrete recommendations and also forwarding people on to resources such as the, you know, Suicide Prevention Hotline or the recently launched Shout in the UK. Resources like that that are kind of higher on the on the scale of intervention, but maybe necessary. So yeah, that's kind of a summary of what we do that gets brighter. Great. Thank you, Michael. That was an excellent overview of a really wonderful initiative that gets brighter. So thank you to our speakers. We are now going to turn to the Q&A. So please any of the attendees tweet to us if you have any questions, let us know which speaker you'd like to answer your question or fix for everyone or post in the question box beside on the on the right hand dashboard. So to get us started, I have a question from Michael. What is the use of social media or other digital tools affect mental health and how can we best leverage these tools to improve mental health? Yeah, it's a really interesting question. Yeah, these these kind of digital platforms and social media in particular, after a double-edged sword. So what's interesting is that social more social media use can be correlated with both positive mental health but also negative mental health issues. For instance, when when people are going through depressive phases, they often send fewer messages on texting or social media platforms. At the same time, these platforms also can contribute to the sense of fear of missing out of FOMO and also contribute to imposter syndrome because people do present quite a curated version of themselves on these platforms, right?  Things like that can really take a toll on mental health. So I think one of the keys is figuring out how these digital platforms can be used for good rather than for high. And I guess it gets brighter itself as a digital platform and we really pay attention to kind of how we curate our videos to make sure that videos send a positive message and create kind of this positive feeling in the viewer. And that's kind of human creation is something that's really important, I think, which services like Facebook and Twitter don't necessarily do. So I think that actually, in reality, we should have more kind of positive mental health regulation, perhaps some of these social media companies. But that's my personal thing. The next question is for Joe discussing. So if you if the question is if you find yourself suffering from perfectionism or imposter syndrome. What are some of your favorite resources for the, for someone to reach out to or or to identify where their issues coming from. There's a bunch of great resources online for just for reading about things like some of the things I mentioned about perfectionism like black and white thinking and catastrophic thinking and a few things to sort of check off the list. As far as things that can that can help you out. You mentioned social media and it's interesting because it is one of the things that can lead people to a more sort of depressive state because you see these people that are leading this great life in comparison to the real life that you're perceiving. Plus, we quite often follow people who are in a similar industry to us and we have a tendency to look at them and say like, oh my goodness they know everything whereas I only know this base level, and we forget that they're experts and they're journalists. And so I remembering to limit your time on social media and limit your time with things like email and measuring out a lot of work hours and rest hours are things that are phones allow us to do these days are operating systems both Android and iOS both come with settings where you can you can either turn off access to apps in certain hours, or you can grayscale out the apps that you don't want to be using during certain hours if you want to limit your time on Instagram or Twitter, or you want to stop yourself from reading your work emails in the middle of the night. These are all things that you can, you can set management methods in place, which I think are really important for managing those tendencies that people with imposter syndrome and perfectionism both have to do too much work. So, yeah, using using the tools that your technology gives you a great and also using things like timing techniques like if you heard of the Pomodoro technique, where you you chop up your day into 20 minute with break periods in between and you know that you're going to focus on work for those periods and have the break period so it stops you from doing things like procrastination or just general failure to concentrate for a long period of time, which is sometimes difficult for people who are in that depressive or that panic state. So, having actually a lot of sets of of your day is really helpful. Is that an answer to your question? Yeah, no, I think that's that is great advice for people who are find themselves suffering from perfectionism and imposter syndrome. The next question is for Susanna. And actually this comes from me because we had a little bit of discussion over Twitter about the medical student well being index and whether or not this could be adopted in graduate schools, do you want to say Yeah, so the medical student well being index I kind of stumbled upon because I was I was looking for were there ways for for students to quickly analyze if they might be at risk for certain things if they might be struggling with burnout or imposter syndrome or even things like anxiety and depression. And what was really interesting is that there exists this platform for medical students and medical medical faculty, where they fill out a handful of questions, and it not only pops them up with a kind of a dial looking thing you can think about it as you know the engine in your car when it gets overheated pops up with that for the things that they might be at risk of, and then also gives this whole list of resources for them to go and find. And it's really, really useful I pulled it up and I'm not a medical student I'm a graduate student but the resources were not specific to medical students necessarily there are a lot of things about meditation and mindfulness. And I think something like that could be very easily adopted actually for graduate students. And something that we are looking into right now, where all of these stories that come to us. They have more in common across the globe, then they do with students who are coming from the same undergraduate university so even though they're in the same university. They have more in common with their peers around the world. And so I think, given this information. There is a space that we could really be doing a service to our graduate students to actually monitor their own wellness and well being because in general grad students are really hard working we really want to be successful. And having the opportunity to use something like that, I think could benefit a lot of people and not just find out, you know where there might be a problem but it's really, really important to also have options for them for those resources. Yeah, I think that's great and I think it is definitely promising and that we could use that model in graduate school it feels like there's no reason why we shouldn't be implementing that same model in graduate school. So another question is, and this could be for anybody. Have you noticed that imposter syndrome is more common amongst minorities, for, for example, women or people of color. Does this come from societal judgments and how can we combat this. And I think this is a really important question because I also see from women and stem who often feel like they're chosen for a panel or they're chosen for an award or they're chosen for a job, because they need a woman. And so I'm sure this is the case for lots of different minorities as diversity in science, particularly diversity in stem is growing in in awareness and importance. So does anyone want to speak to that about that. I'm happy to jump in on that. So I heard this statistic of the day that said that two thirds of women in stem feel imposter syndrome. Yeah. And when you hear that you're just like, goodness, we need to be talking about this more. But the other thing if you research imposter syndrome, they was discovered by a woman who was feeling it and sort of went around her she was working in a lab.  Maybe we need to start doing some research in this. So it's definitely something that affects women. I don't know the numbers for other minorities, but it definitely the feeling that you're different from everybody else and that you don't fit in is what leads into this feeling of imposter syndrome. So I can very much believe that if you are the minority group, your feelings of imposter syndrome would be increased. And as far as things that we can do to make it better for minorities. I think we talking about it is super important. Having the kind of support groups that Michael and Susanna have would make such a difference. And when I started my career in tech, I had zero support, I had no idea who to talk to about these things and not only that I was afraid to talk to anybody because I thought I was the only one. So really amplifying this message and socializing the idea that many people feel this way, and that's okay. And, you know, yes, it is hard, but we can all get through it if we help each other out. I think it's just the most important thing that we can do and also socializing reaching out for help. It took me a very long time to figure out that I really needed to go and talk to a therapist. And once I did, it was revolutionary for me, but it took me over a year to accept that fact. Thanks. So we have another question for anybody on the panel. And it's a tricky one. Is quitting a job or PhD ever the answer? I'll jump on that one. We have had a number of people tell stories who have left with a master's or who have left without any terminal degree. And they're, I mean, it's a mixed bag. They feel bad about it, but they realize that what is success to them, like what that means to them might not be continuing in this program. I think what's really interesting, one of the things that I've been talking about with people is that if you worked anywhere else for five years and you completed many hurdles and you took on a whole bunch of new tasks, you worked with people, you published papers, and you have tons of technical skills, you have good recommendations. That's a huge success. If you can work in one place for five years and do really well, that's a success. And it's really interesting that in graduate school, it's seen as a failure that we don't see the progress as a part of success. We only see that terminal degree as success. And one of the other things that we get back a lot is that postdocs and people who have just graduated oftentimes about four to six months. I don't know why it's that time. But about four to six months later, they suddenly have a bit of a personal crisis where they expected to feel that they finally belong, that they finally measured up, that they finally were successful. And that feeling doesn't come. The issues that they were facing in graduate school follow them along. And I guess I would challenge people to think of what success is and think about what the right career choice is based on what you want and based on how you measure your own success. And to see all of the things you've done in graduate school, not as a waste of time, but as personal training where you have built a lot of skills. And maybe pursuing the end of that degree is actually going to push you out of science in the end or put you in a place where you don't feel successful. So I think there's a really good reasons for leaving in a lot of cases. Yeah, I agree. Just finding the right path for you. And just because you started a PhD and decide that it's not the right path for you, it's not a failure. You've identified maybe something, something better. But I do think that people get stuck thinking I started it. I cannot fail by leaving, but really it's not necessarily a failure to go on. I would love to add, you know, that 50% leaving rate 50% of people don't finish their PhD. I think there's something to be said for dead men tell no tales. The people who leave are not here in academia saying it's fine. It's fine. I left and nobody thinks I'm an awful failure. And so without that feedback without hearing these stories and without even knowing that 50% of people leave. It becomes this really big point of shame. And I'm actually hoping that social media can have a beneficial side to that where people can connect and be like, Oh, they left and they're happy or you know they left and they have a lot of regrets either one is totally valid. Yeah, exactly. And just just jumping off of that. And I think that was a wonderful answer. And there was this project recently, I think in the past couple years that someone started called the CV of failures. Yeah, if you are familiar with this, basically, a professor was thinking, you know, people only show their successes they never show their failures. And I think, you know, like connecting with people in that kind of a space where discussion about failures is an option can really break down the barriers that's imposter syndrome and potentially leaving academia present. Yeah. Yeah, I think that was a great initiative and it was, it was kind of fun to see because again you don't see the failures. Okay, so a final question. So a lot of the initiatives that Michael and Susanna were talking about are really trying to identify others in your peer group or in your networks who are also suffering so you don't feel alone. But what about people who want to use social media as a tool for building support, but who would prefer to remain anonymous because of fear of stigma. Can you recommend any platforms, or any ways to connect for people who want to stay anonymous. So I had this, I had this question come into my DMs recently of a woman who she was dealing with a lot of issues in her department and she wanted a way to connect with people, but she didn't want to have her name associated other people in the department or on Twitter. And she asked and I think it's not a horrible idea to you can create a second Twitter account, you can create a Twitter account that is a list of numbers or a couple things put up a really basic avatar and engage with people that way. And I think that if you're in a situation where you can't be open about what's happening to you. I don't, I don't think I don't see any problem with that I don't see that as disingenuous I see that as understanding the kind of blowback you might get if if you are open about it so I don't think it's a I don't think it's a bad idea. I don't know what do you all think about that. And I agree, I agree and and to add on to that there's this, there are some other services out there as well that offer kind of confidential counseling support. So a lot of universities will have kind of peer supporters who are confidential who you can you can meet with in person or even message. There's this new nonprofit called seven cups that has about they have a community of about 300,000 volunteer peer supporters around the world, and anybody can just log on to the service and have a private confidential chat they also have support groups on there.  Thank you for answering the questions that have come in. If anyone has any further questions please tweet to us after we'll try to answer as many questions as we can following the webinar. But now I invite our panelists to offer final remarks. Joe. Any last words here. I think that we've all been saying you know if you are suffering from any of these, the things that we've talked about today, make sure that you're talking to other people about it, that you're not keeping it to yourself.  So I yeah I'd like to echo what Joe said and and add to it that you know you don't have to be feeling or even ready to take on that label of that. You might be struggling it could just be a case where you think well maybe, maybe things could be better or maybe I could be more productive if I wasn't crashing out at the end of the week or maybe my anxiety about making a PowerPoint is really is really impacting me, and seeing that more as a coaching opportunity you know a therapist is in a lot of ways a life coach and you can even find life coaches, and just like a physical trainer we see having a physical trainer as this great thing to do, where they can have weaknesses that you don't notice they know techniques that you don't know of and they can guide you through becoming stronger in areas that you need that a therapist is just the same thing. And the level of therapy the level of pure support that you need is going to is going to vary, but I agree with a lot of what y'all are saying of that asking for help is not a weakness it's actually very difficult and so feel about being able to do that. So true. Michael. Yeah, I totally agree with what Joe and Santa said. First of all asking for help and also, you know not being afraid to well to connect the people and to look for sources of support but also I think there's a lot that we can do as a community to make it more welcoming for people and to kind of act as an ally, even if you aren't experiencing mental health issues yourself to reach out to friends who you haven't talked to in a while people who you think, you know might be going through something, just reach out to them it can be as simple as a message and, you know, putting those feelers out there really reduces the barrier that someone in need might feel in terms of getting help so I just think, yeah, kind of creating a more inclusive community and using social media and digital tools that are in the 21st century is really important for mental health. Yeah. Well, thank you to our speakers and to everyone who tuned in today and contributed to the discussion. It was a wonderful opportunity to learn more about mental health support for early career researchers. Our next ECR Wednesday webinar will be held on June 27, and we'll be discussing language barriers to scientific communication. We hope to see you then, and we wish everyone a great day. Thank you.