Kate Henry [00:00:00]:

Welcome to Honing in a Podcast for Creative Thinkers, where we’ll hone our skills, explore our passions, and nurture our dream projects into being. Hey, everyone, it’s Dr. Kate Henry. Welcome back to Honing in, and I have some exciting news. I’m going to start releasing two episodes of Honing in each month. Some of these are going to be solo episodes like today, where I’m exploring a topic or a tool or an approach, or sharing about my experiences with something and sharing updates on my projects. And sometimes I’m going to share two interviews a month. So you can look forward to a few solo episodes between now and the rest of the year and to some really wonderful interviews that are coming down the line.

 

Kate Henry [00:00:54]:

The topic for today’s solo episode came from something I discovered when I was researching for a workshop I recently ran about hitting the reset button when you’re feeling stuck on your projects. I was thinking about and researching why we avoid tasks and why we have challenges moving on with our projects and why we feel stuck. And I came across this concept of self efficacy, which, which is, you know, at its most basic definition, our belief in our ability to complete something. I’ve of course, come across this concept before researching productivity and time management, but I hadn’t done such a deep dive into it and looking at the history of it until today or I guess until this last few weeks, because I also wrote a longer newsletter about self efficacy, which I’ll link to in the show notes if you want to do a little bit of a deeper dive that I’m going to do today on the podcast. Podcast. I was instantly intrigued and wanted to learn more about self efficacy because I know that there are some things that I do have faith that I can complete and I do complete them. And there’s other things where it feels pretty rocky for me and it’s challenging to feel like not only that I can complete them, but that I can show up and make the choices to actually get them done. And these are some things that from the outside folks looking in might think, wow, Kate certainly has the skills.

 

Kate Henry [00:02:24]:

She has the know how she has the capability to do this, and it must be really easy for her. But actually, for me, it can be hard to show up and get it done. So I was curious about why do I feel self efficacy sometimes and why do I not feel it? Why don’t I feel, you know, capable or confident? Since this is a project about how creative thinkers engage with their projects, I want to take some time to start off talking about self efficacy as a concept. But then I really want to hone in on a few examples of how it shows up or doesn’t show up in my projects again. If you want to dive deeper into self efficacy, check out that newsletter that I published, which is in the show Notes. Self efficacy is something that Canadian American psychologist Albert Bandura published about in 1977. Bandura has this essay that’s quoted by all the folks who talk about self efficacy, and it’s called Self Efficacy Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change. When we think about self efficacy, it’s again, thinking about an individual’s belief in their capability to take the actions to help them complete the goal.

 

Kate Henry [00:03:43]:

Another way to think about this is how we engage with challenges or how confident we feel in our ability to complete difficult tasks. And there’s four key ways that Ben Dura talked about this. Four key aspects that contribute to our self efficacy. The first is mastery experiences. What he meant by that was, when we find personal success, when we have experiences of success, experiences of completing the tasks, actually observing ourselves, you know, improving at the particular things we’re doing, or seeing our choices to complete tasks, then we actually complete the tasks, we’re feeling like we have more mastery. Hooray, that’s excellent. We feel more confident that one kind of makes sense. The second one that Bandura talks about is what he calls vicarious experience.

 

Kate Henry [00:04:37]:

And this is when we observe people who are similar to us, whether this is age or class or race or experience or training, et cetera, when we experience people similar to us succeeding at similar projects. So, for example, here, you know, I completed my dissertation while living with chronic health conditions and chronic illness and chronic pain. And I have heard from other folks who have chronic health conditions that it felt very inspiring and motivating and helped them to feel more confident in doing their dissertations. This is something that folks have shared with me, that seeing my experience was motivating for them. Similarly, for me, I like to cook. I’m kind of a baby beginner cook. And if I’m watching a chef show or seeing, like, a Michelin star chef do something super magical that I don’t even know what it’s called or how to pronounce it, that’s maybe gonna inspire me, but it’s not gonna have the same sort of vicarious experience to make me feel like I can do it. The third thing that Bandura talked about is social persuasion.

 

Kate Henry [00:05:47]:

This is another one that I’m like, oh, yeah, this makes total sense. Why this would encourage self efficacy. And this is having encouragement from Others. This isn’t just folks being like, yay, we believe in you. You can do anything that you put your mind to. But more specific encouragement, like, I know that you can actually complete this. I’ve seen you complete similar things to this. Things that can, you know, actually persuade and convince the person who’s trying to make the choices and do the tasks and achieve the goal that this is real encouragement that can help them to feel more confident.

 

Kate Henry [00:06:23]:

And the fourth thing that Bandura talked about, this one feels a little more challenging to just quickly summarize here, but he talked about emotional states and like sort of regulating your emotions and your, you know, mental state. So for example, if something is requiring a certain type of energy and you feel like, oh, I don’t actually have that energy right now, you might not have as high self efficacy and confidence that you’re going to complete it. And sometimes this is legit. Like when I have brain fog. It’s hard for me to remember words when I’m writing. So it’s not unrealistic for me to think, oh, it’s going to be challenging to remember jargon. But it doesn’t mean I can’t write. It doesn’t mean I can’t do other things.

 

Kate Henry [00:07:08]:

This also brings to mind this concept of like is what we are feeling or experiencing emotionally something that’s going to prevent us from truly accomplishing the task we want to accomplish. For example, when we feel really excited, it can feel the same way to our body and our nervous system as feeling anxious or feeling afraid. So I thought that was an interesting thing to note here. As we’re thinking about how do our emotional states or the way we feel our emotions or our mental experiences affect our self efficacy and our belief in our capability to take an action in order to complete a goal. This is a good time for me to just pause and say that I don’t think struggling with a project, having trouble completing a task means that you don’t have enough faith in yourself or you don’t have a high enough self efficacy and you just need to believe that you can do it and then you’ll do it. There’s real obstacles that are sometimes insurmountable. There’s real systemic material and other kinds of obstacles that mean that projects are going to be inaccessible for certain folks in certain places and certain times. Just one small example of this, like folks in the US right now have lost funding for their creative and their research projects.

 

Kate Henry [00:08:37]:

So we may have all of the, you know, belief in ourself and our capability and everyone else believes we can do it and we can emotionally regulate ourselves, but if we don’t have access to the resources we need in order to complete a project, we’re not going to be able to complete the project. So I just want to encourage us to be realistic around what is accessible to us with that being realistic. Like, you may be able to do this, but it’s not about just having confidence or having the resources. We want to be conscious of not falling into an optimism bias, a belief that we can totally complete this. We want to be careful about not combining that optimism bias with the planning fallacy, which is where we don’t really consider how much time or effort is going to need to go into something. We might feel like, I have the skillset, I have the training, I want to do this. I’m going to knock it out immediately. This is how I thought that it would take me two weeks to do my comprehensive exams and it took like a year.

 

Kate Henry [00:09:43]:

Right? So this is. We don’t want to be so overly confident that we’re not realistic around the effort that’s going to need to go into something. But having a higher self efficacy can make the process perhaps a little bit easier for us. I want to shift and talk about how this has occurred or hasn’t occurred for a few different projects. So I’m going to talk about four projects, the first of which is this podcast is Honing In. I prepared to do Honing in by actually interviewing people in my newsletter for a while. I would create a Google Doc with questions and ask folks to answer the questions in the Google Doc, which in one part was to have that be accessible for folks so they could take their time to thoughtfully answer the questions. And then we would meet and record ourselves reading it, which again, for accessibility purposes.

 

Kate Henry [00:10:39]:

And it’s just fun to hear people talk about their stuff through their own voice. I felt like it was the right time for me to start Honing in when I did because I had enough connections and my network was big enough that I could connect to really cool guests. And I also had a big enough and engaged enough audience on my newsletter that I figured that would translate to the podcast. I didn’t start honing in because of metrics or wanting to get famous. My real motivation for this is wanting to introduce this, these awesome creative thinkers to other folks and, you know, support them in the way that I can through this platform. But, you know, I also felt confident enough to do it, but it wasn’t so high stakes that, you know, I needed to Take like a podcast host training or something to do it. There’s things about it that are kind of hard, but I guess not as much hard as time consuming. And the most time consuming is coming up with good questions for my guests.

 

Kate Henry [00:11:42]:

I do this for a few reasons. Well, one, the first reason, again, for accessibility purposes, I want to share questions. Maybe not all the questions that I end up asking, but I want to share some starter questions with my guests ahead of time for accessibility purposes so they have time to prepare and think about and reflect on them. This never means that the episode feels like, totally canned. It’s not fully scripted, but I want people to feel supported. I also really like when you can tell that a podcast host has done a little bit of research and they know the person that they’re interviewing. And, you know, I just think that’s a more engaged episode. So I don’t develop all the questions I end up asking, but I develop enough that I feel prepared and so I can have my guests feel prepared.

 

Kate Henry [00:12:31]:

I feel capable. I feel like I can make the right choices. Even though some things take a little bit of time, I can plan for that. I. But I think the key thing that helps with honing in. Well, there’s two key things. I think the first key thing is that I have gotten positive reinforcement. People are telling me they like the podcast.

 

Kate Henry [00:12:50]:

The metrics is not why I’m doing this, but I’ve surpassed 500 downloads in the six months. This feels really good. And then the second thing is that I have awesome accountability and support with my podcast editor, Amelia Hrube and her team at Softer Sounds. So having the accountability to know that I need to get an episode to Amelia a few weeks before it’s going to come out, to give her and her team time to edit it and make it sound awesome for you, that is a wonderful thing that sets me up and helps me feel supported. So accountability is not necessarily an aspect of self efficacy, but it is a super motivator for me, at least. Where the podcast comes in. I’m going to go back in time, you know, do, do, do, do, do, do, do that back in time. Sound and think about the blog that I wrote from 2018 and 2019.

 

Kate Henry [00:13:44]:

This blog was called the Tending Year, and it was a successful experience. I talked about it a bit in my first episode for Honing in, and it was something that I started because I needed to sort of. What’s the right word? I needed, I guess, to just make a project out of the personal development that I was doing at the time I was totally overworking, leaning into workaholism and by having a blog where every week I needed to research and experiment with and publish something about my experience for a productivity or personal development or time management tool was a really healthy way for me to develop new approaches to productivity so I could learn how to live as a chronically ill person, so I could do my dissertation so work would not be the only part of my life that just like sucked all the air out of the room. Publishing every week was a lot. You know, it was tough to do that effort while I was completing the dissertation and just living my life and having fun and having a long distance relationship with Chris at the time, now we’re married, but it was a lot of work. Some of the self efficacy things that helped were I had models. I was a baby blogger and I was new to it, but I read a ton of blogs and I listened to a ton of podcasts and I had really good models for making effective short form writing. And that helped me to set up my own system that always had a takeaway at the end and that also was engaging for my audience.

 

Kate Henry [00:15:24]:

I got good feedback. I got motivation from folks. Some of the people who have become long term coaching clients are people who were reading my blog way back when I started it on a Tumblr page. So I had that external motivation and I felt intrinsically motivated for this. It really was benefiting me personally. Even if there were some times where I felt stressed or it was a lot of hard work, it was an extra project that I was doing to, you know, develop my personal skills and to, you know, create something that I could contribute to the world as well. There was also accountability for this, which I talked about that on Honing in. I’m going to talk about it a bit more later.

 

Kate Henry [00:16:09]:

But accountability was really key for me. Having a schedule. When I had to complete something, it helped to limit the decision making for me. I knew that I had that system that I had to hit where I wanted to share things every week and I had to be really strategic about that. So the blog was another successful example of self efficacy. I guess when I was learning how to do something that was outside of academic writing. That was before I officially launched my business. All right, let’s talk about the biggest project that I’ve perhaps ever completed.

 

Kate Henry [00:16:50]:

I mean, I started my business. That is a huge ongoing project I’ve been doing for many years. But the dissertation was big. If you’ve written one, you know what I’m talking about. If you’re writing one now. You know what I’m talking about. And I think even for folks outside of academia, you can think about a dissertation just as a humongous project. It’s high stakes, it’s high weight, and it’s a really weird, specific genre that we’re never going to write again.

 

Kate Henry [00:17:19]:

So I coach a lot of folks on finishing their dissertation. My particular niche of coaching is that folks, you know, hire me when they’re like, I got to finish my project, this deadline’s coming up, I need to get really specific about my plans. Help, what do I do? And I love coaching folks on dissertations. And I find that the reason that people, or one of the reasons there’s so many reasons. Everyone’s an individual with their own lived experience. Experience. But one of the reasons that folks have struggled with their dissertation, it’s not because they’re not all impressively smart and incredibly talented and have huge toolboxes full of skill sets. An issue is that folks are often running into challenges with factors outside of their control.

 

Kate Henry [00:18:05]:

So they’re coming to me, or they’re working with their advisors, or they’re setting up writing groups with peers so they can develop systems to make progress despite the challenges. It’s not that they’re not super duper smart or super duper skilled. It’s that it’s hard to write a dissertation. Unless, I guess, maybe that’s literally the only thing you’re doing. I mean, even then it’s. It’s hard. It’s a weird thing to write. My biggest challenge when I was writing my dissertation was living through and figuring out how to write.

 

Kate Henry [00:18:35]:

When I had chronic pain that was affected by, you know, I felt the most pain when I was sitting. And I’m an academic, I was sitting, you know, like where I was standing. But, you know, you can only stand for so long. And this was part of the reason why I started my tending year blog. I wanted to set that goal to care for my health while I navigated my grad school responsibilities. And the dissertation was like the culmination of grad school in retrospect. Looking back now, I do feel like I had high self efficacy for writing my dissertation. That doesn’t mean I didn’t have challenges or struggles or bad days or times where I felt like I was, you know, just treading water or wasting time.

 

Kate Henry [00:19:19]:

I’m sure if I looked back at my tending year blog from 2018 and 2019, there’s probably some blog posts where I was feeling like I just want to give up why am I even doing this? Can I do it? But looking back in general, it was, you know, more on the positive experience than the negative experience for me. And here’s some reasons why. I work really well. When I have models that I can see how other folks have successfully done something and I can reverse engineer an approach for myself by either reverse outlining a piece of writing or you know, just like seeing common moves that people make, then I can know what I’m doing. And that just makes things so much more streamlined. I was also really highly trained at the kind of writing I was doing. Like I had done undergrad studying literature and creative writing. I had an MFA in creative writing.

 

Kate Henry [00:20:16]:

I had a master’s in rhetoric, and then I was doing the PhD in rhetoric. So I had spent a long time writing that style of writing. And even though the dissertation was this new sort of like weird genre, not quite an article, not quite a book, I, you know, knew how to do the kind of work I had to do. I was really intrinsically motivated to do this. So I liked my topic, I thought it was really important. And I got positive reinforcement and encouragement from other folks, both from my really awesome dissertation advisor, but also from publishing a journal article, presenting at conferences, attending summer camps. Not like summer camps, like summer workshops and training. I guess there were summer camps, you know.

 

Kate Henry [00:21:05]:

Anyways, I was motivated by folks who truly believed what I was going to do. I had time and I had space to work on it. I got a fellowship my final semester, which meant I didn’t have to teach. It was a teaching release fellowship that was humongous. That was a huge gift for me to finish up my dissertation again. I had accountability. I thrive when I have external accountability. I had meetings with my advisor.

 

Kate Henry [00:21:31]:

I got to see my friends succeeding at their dissertations. I was talking about it on the blog. There was a lot of scaffolding for the dissertation. And my coaching business actually developed out of me wanting an accountability coach to help me with the dissertation and not being able to find one. So dissertation high self efficacy, even though it was a really challenging and long term project. Now let’s look at a project that is a little bit more challenging. I don’t know if I have the highest self efficacy right now, but I do have some ideas around what I can do to make this a little bit more accessible. Motivating for me to feel like I can make choices to complete tasks to move forward.

 

Kate Henry [00:22:18]:

After grad school, I wanted to take my research, which was on this woman named Lisa Ben. She was a queer Author and musician and science fiction writer. She just was like this Renaissance woman. And I wrote a dissertation about what I called queer rhetorical re education or this. What I think was like, political activism work she was doing in the 40s, 50s and 60s, when, you know, popular media was incredibly homophobic, which, I mean, it kind of still is, but that’s another episode. And I knew how to write about Lisa Ben for grad school really well. And that got rewarded. I got fellowships, I got publications, I got people who were so excited for me.

 

Kate Henry [00:23:02]:

And then when I left grad school, I knew I didn’t want to write like a traditional biography, so I made a website. And I like the idea of a website because it’s public scholarship. It aligns with my values on making, you know, scholarship accessible. But I kind of have stalled out a little bit there. Do I want to write a book project? Do I want this to be something else? I don’t know. That doesn’t mean I’m not confident. I have incredible confidence on my knowledge about Lisa Ben. And this is mirrored back to me by others.

 

Kate Henry [00:23:32]:

For example, the New York Times, you know, they’re super problematic in many ways, but they wrote a book that was focused on chapters for folks who didn’t get the obituaries they should have gotten when they passed away. And they interviewed me for their chapter on Ben. So that’s a pretty significant, you know, feather in my cap, pat on my back, I guess, as a Lisa Bend scholar. And folks reach out to me from all around the world with questions about Ben. So I have worked really hard to learn about Lisa Benn and, and know about her. And as far as, you know, folks can access that online. They can reach out to me and chat about her. The issue that comes up for me here is not like, I don’t not have confidence in myself as a scholar of Lisa Ben.

 

Kate Henry [00:24:20]:

And people still are like, heck, yeah, Kate, you can do this. But I shifted out of this context of something that I knew how to do really well, which was academic writing for graduate school. I literally spent decades doing it to now doing this, like much more broad and open and fun and creative. Question mark, question mark, question mark. So when I think about self efficacy and how I might be able to increase my confidence in my ability, in my capability of doing really important Lisa Bend scholarship now outside of academia, I think it could be good for me to maybe read and observe other models of this sort of writing and research, seeing how other folks are doing it. Other folks, especially similar to me, who have a background in academia, but who now have pursued public scholarship. I also think that I need to embed some accountability into doing this work, especially for something that’s challenging or confusing or aversive. It can be difficult to choose to do it.

 

Kate Henry [00:25:24]:

So easy to choose to procrastinate. It’s not like I don’t have other things I could be doing. I run my own business. I’m busy, you know. So I know for me, like having some kind of accountability is probably going to help me to keep up that forward momentum and move through those times when I do feel discouraged and I have a lower self efficacy and it would be easier to choose not to do something challenging. I think accountability is going to be really key to this and that’s already something I’ve started to institute and put into practice. So I’ll report back later. Hopefully, you know, it all works out.

 

Kate Henry [00:26:00]:

Fingers crossed. I know you all have belief in me. I have belief in myself. So just going to set up a system for it. I want to close this up today by a Encouraging you to check out that longer newsletter that I published about self efficacy. B Doing a little bit of reflection about how you might think about your projects and make them a little bit more accessible. Thinking about self efficacy or thinking about just like a general, you know, hitting reset on your productivity approaches. Do you need to get clearer about specific tasks that you’re working on and make those tasks more achievable? Instead of just writing, write my book on your to do list for the day.

 

Kate Henry [00:26:47]:

That might be fine. You might be like, cool, I’m going to take some time to work on my book. But if you are not feeling like you’re making forward movement, maybe it’s helpful to just choose a micro task, put it on the to do list and check it off so that you can actually see the progress being made. Do you want some external support? This might look like connecting with folks who are similar to you who are working on other projects and you know, seeing them succeed could create for you that vicarious experience that Ben Dura talked about. Do you want a little bit more external support? Like paying for a coach or a guide or maybe attending co working with some friends? This is something that you could do for free or you could do this in a paid for like a paid access to something. For example, I am a member of Landscapes, which is a co writing group run by the awesome Cody Cook parrot who I interviewed for episode two of Honing N. So check that out and check out Landscapes. If you’re looking for a cool space to write alongside other interesting, smart, fun, creative writers.

 

Kate Henry [00:27:57]:

So is that something that’s helpful for you? If not, are there other ways that you might be able to think about how you can choose to do the tasks when they feel challenging or when you don’t feel motivated, or when you are feeling like I’m not sure if I can actually do this or not? If you want a little extra support working on this stuff, I encourage you to check out my coaching offerings. I haven’t really repped myself yet on the podcast before, but I feel like this is appropriate because today I’ve talked about how accountability can be such a really good support for this. If you’re feeling stuck and you want some support breaking down your project into a task list, figuring out a schedule that will work for you, or if you want that accountability partner, I offer individual coaching sessions that include really detailed and supportive coaching notes. And I also have this wonderful success and accountability coaching package that’s really hands on. This is the thing that I mentioned earlier. Folks reach out to me when they’re like I need to really finish my project or make forward progress and I need a little extra support for that. You can learn more about my coaching offerings@KateHenry.com coaching and I invite you to reach out with any questions about those. I hope that you all explore having self efficacy and I’m sending you all my best wishes as you work on your creative projects.

 

Kate Henry [00:29:28]:

I’m going to look forward to seeing you on my next solo episode and you can look forward to hearing my next interview in just a couple weeks. Thanks so much for joining me. You can learn more about honing in and my work as a productivity coach on my website katehenry.com take good care.