No longer feeling happy about or even lost interest in your PhD degree? Our guest, Adepeju, shares why emotional intelligence is key to happiness during PhD!
A successful man is always asked… what is the secret of your success? No one inquires into what the secret of failure is. It is always obvious, so why bother to ask?
Now, what do you think the secret of success is? What would you call the secret of PhD success? Most importantly, what would PhD success mean for you? Happiness? Fulfilment? Or just another milestone?
Whatever it means to you, one thing is certain, it isn’t a walk in the park. It’s a roller coaster journey of different phases and facets of life, albeit an exciting one.
The emotional stages of a PhD degree
Oftentimes one starts with excitement and is highly motivated with all the potentials and ready to begin this new chapter of one’s career.
Then honeymoon phase with so much to do, so many thoughts, hopes and aspirations, here one tries to pick up skills, know-hows knowledge among other things. This stage also is when you would like to make connections, establish yourself as a PhD candidate, gather sources, probably have a mentor or two and generally hope to get the hang of the whole process even in the face of uncertainty and self-doubt.
The third phase is the phase of disappointment and evaluation. Here at this point, reality comes in, and a chasm between the ideal and the real emerges. You realize that the journey is not as exciting as you have envisioned. There are a lot of pitfalls that are discouraging enough for one to want to quit.
The entire trip is physically demanding, mentally taxing, emotionally draining and one may be dissatisfied with the progress. It is a kind of re-evaluation stage – an opportunity to pause and make some adjustments and affirmations.
And the last stage, this final stage is the high efficiency stage, when performance is top-notch, your energy focuses on fulfilling your tasks and timing resulting in obvious accomplishments, recognition and acknowledgement.
To get to this peak performance stage, a PhD student needs to have lots of emotional intelligence to perform at such a level. Emotional intelligence is a tool that has been found to help cope in stressful and brain tasking situations and, in this case, relationships with colleagues and supervisors alike.
Is emotional intelligence important while doing a PhD degree?
The father of emotional intelligence, Daniel Goleman, describes emotional intelligence as the ability of a person to perceive, use, comprehend, manage, and navigate through the emotions and behavioural attitudes and feelings of others without prejudice and can adapt to their environment.
Over the last two decades, the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) has grown in popularity as a measure of a person’s knowledge, skills, and abilities in the workplace, profession, school, personal life, and overall success. Therefore, emotional quotient (EQ) has been reported to rank higher than intelligent quotient in day to day activities.
If I had known earlier what I am sharing now, there’s a high chance the PhD process would have been a lot easier.
Did I consider the solitary nature of the process, the significance of the supervision team, my abilities, skillsets, strength, and the amount of reading, researching, writing and redrafting to be put forward?
Definitely! However, I was rudely shocked and rocked out of my boat, but I finally found my feet before it was too late.
When one considers issues that arise during a PhD, it’s easy to see why this skill is so important. Therefore, I will be enumerating some ways in which I have been able to stay afloat with the five key elements of emotional intelligence.
How to develop emotional intelligence during your PhD?
First of all, you can improve your self-awareness by asking for constructive feedback from like minds, start to write a journal to keep tab, re-evaluate your goals, and learn how to express feelings in the right manner and in the right places without necessarily having to clamp down on the emotions.
Major on self-regulation as it is not enough to only be self-aware. Hence, there should also be an improvement in the ability to cope with stress, ch