Sometimes you read a book and get a flash of insight - that “ah ha!” moment - about yourself and the ways you interact with others. That happened to me when reading “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.” It helped me to understand and justify my interest in (this won’t surprise you) EVERYTHING related to geriatrics or palliative care. Also hat tip to Matthew Growdon for recommending the book.

Today we talk with Bob Arnold, who has a long list of recommendations for books that have the potential to generate an “ah ha!” moment. The podcast is ostensibly focused on becoming a better mentor, but as you’ll hear, we discuss techniques that can help you cope with anxiety, stress, your spouse…the list goes on. In reality, insights from these books can help you be a better teacher, a more curious person, as well as a better mentor or mentee.

Bob urges you to buy these books from your local bookstore. To that end, we’re not including links with the titles below. Please shop locally.

As a bonus, Lauren Hunt, frequent guest on GeriPal, heard we recorded this podcast and wanted to add a couple books to Bob’s list (she saw Bob give a talk about these books at the NPCRC Foley retreat). Her list will strongly resonate with women in academics. See below for Lauren’s two additions to Bob’s list, with her personal commentary.

Enjoy!

-@AlexSmithMD

Bob’s booklist:

Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Somebody: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
Ethan Kross, Chatter: The Voice Inside Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It
Eric Barker, Plays Well With Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong
Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing From Complex Trauma
Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do
Claude M. Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do
Marcus Buckingham, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader's Guide to the Real World
Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won't Get You There
Adam Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success
David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
Douglas Stone, Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well
Douglas Stone, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
Kerry Patterson, Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High
Kerry Patterson, Crucial Accountability: Tools for Resolving Violated Expectations, Broken Commitments, and Bad Behavior
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
James Clear, Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
Michael Bungay Stanier, The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever
Peter Bergman, You Can Change Other People: The Four Steps to Help Your Colleagues, Employees--Even Family--Up Their Game
Doug Lemov, The Coach's Guide to Teaching
Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College
Doug Lemov, Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better

From Lauren:

The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It by Valerie Young

I was inspired to read this book after reading a post on the 80,000 hours blog. I had heard of course heard of imposter syndrome in the past but I didn’t make the connection to myself until I read this article and saw my thoughts printed on the page. You would think that after several years of a number of career successes, the imposter syndrome would have abated for me, but rather I found it getting worse! I thought that I should know more of what I was doing by this point in my career, but instead I often felt like I had no idea what I was doing!

So I came across this book and found it very helpful. Young defines people who have imposter syndrome as those who have a “persistent belief in their lack of intelligence, skills, or competence. They are convinced that other people’s praise and recognition of their accomplishments is undeserved, chalking up their achievements to chance, charm, connections, and external factors. Unable to internalize or feel deserving of their success, they continually doubt their ability to repeat past successes.”

I certainly related to the point that instead of successes alleviating feelings of fraudulence, the opposite happens, because it increases pressures to uphold one’s reputation. The pressures can be intense, leaving one wondering if it’s all worth it, and prompting fantasies of leaving the charade behind.

One thing I really liked about this book is that it places the imposter syndrome into the context of a patriarchal, misogynistic, racist society and organizations that create cultures that cultivate self-doubt (ahem academia). Imposter syndrome is a rationale response to a crazy world. We exist in a society and culture that actually judges women to be less competent at work (the studies she details are SUPER disturbing). It is not surprising we would internalize these norms. Also that being underrepresented in a field creates pressures not only to represent just oneself, but an entire gender. She focuses on women, but these concepts obviously apply to people of color and other disadvantaged social groups. And of course men can have imposter syndrome too.

Another part I liked about the book is digging into the notion that one’s success is due to luck, or being in the right place at the right time. She dispels these notions by pointing out that, first of all, luck is always present, even for people who are enormously talented and second, being the right place at the right time, having the right connections, and having a winning personality can sometimes actually be the result of skills or abilities, often the result of hard-work, hustling, and efforts to develop one’s socioemotional capacity.

This is a self-help book, so throughout she offers some useful rules and self-talk for responding to imposter syndrome thoughts. She details different ways to respond to thoughts based on your competence type. For example, if you are a perfectionist, she recommends reframing to a “good enough” quality standard—a mantra I adopted from colleague during the pandemic and has been incredibly helpful for me over the past few years. For the rugged individualist who equate true competence equals solo, unaided achievement, the reframe is “competence means knowing how to identify the resources needed to get the job done.”

Another really important idea she raises is that women often have difficult choices to make about their career and its impact on other parts of their families and their other social networks that aren’t as pronounced for men in our society. Sometimes it is difficult to disentangle these questions from feelings of imposter syndrome. For example, is reluctance to take on more responsibility at work or relocate because you feel inadequate or is it because of genuine concern about the impact on your family? Moreover, women (generalizing here) tend to place lower value on traditional measures of work success (e.g. money, power, influence) and greater value on connection and meaning. It can require a lot of soul searching to figure out whether one is avoiding career “success” out of fear or that certain paths are just truly not aligned with our values.

Finally, towards the end of the book, she introduces the idea of “faking it till you make it” and having chutzpah—i.e going for it. Of course, she’s not advocating for a George Santos approach (no lying) but just having a little bit more of a mindset that you’ll figure it out once you’re on the job.

I’d definitely recommend this book if you’ve ever struggled with similar feelings or mentor people who might. She’s got a breezy and relatable writing style that’s easy to read, lots of great real-world stories, and piquant quotes.

The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart

Summary of the book’s premise:

Work activities fall on a spectrum from promotable and non-promotable (NPT).

Promotable activities are those that advance one’s career. They use the word “advance” quite broadly to encompass various outcomes, like earning a promotion, getting plum assignments, increasing compensation, and enhancing marketability for other jobs. Promotable tasks are visible to others and increase the organization’s currency. Some tasks may be indirectly promotable—they help you develop skills that have the potential to enhance your future success or access to future promotable work.

NPT’s are important to your organization but will not help to advance your career. These tasks have low visibility (think committees and other service).

Too many NPT’s can lead to work/work imbalance where promotable tasks get pushed to the side and advancement slows, or work-life imbalance, where advancement continues but at the expense of time in one’s personal life (or both).

Although not exclusively a problem for women, women are more likely to take on NPT’s at work. This is because they are both asked more often and are more likely to say yes when asked.

They propose both bottom-up (women saying no to more things) and top-down solutions (organizations making efforts to divide up NPT’s more fairly and ensuring everyone is pitching in).

Before I read this book, I didn’t fully grasp the idea that an activity would be helpful to the organization but not to my own career. Sometimes requests for participation in these activities come with a veneer or prestige and lots of feel-good gratitude. I personally feel a lot of guilt and worry about disappointing people when I say no to things. Even declining to review an article for a journal is accompanied by some stomach knots (it’s so hard to find reviewers!) I also place a lot of value in collaboration and working in teams, and the idea of working in a culture where everyone is only looking out for themselves is not appealing to me. But I’m also worried at the level of overwhelm I experience at times and perhaps some of you have experienced as well. How do we ensure that we are on sustainable path where we can stay in and build the world we want to live and work in?

The book also got me thinking about what is promotable or not in academia, i.e. what is the currency. I think we all know that grants and publications are promotable activities, but even within that there are hierarchies. Some of these hierarchies I think I understand: a data-based paper in a high-impact journal has higher promotability than an editorial in a lower-impact journal. Some of them I’m not sure about: is an NIH project grant more promotable than a foundation grant and if so why (bc higher indirects?) Also, things like mentorship seem gray to me: senior-authored articles are evidence of independence and potential track to mentoring awards, but people often seem to place mentorship in the NPT category. I think having more transparency and discussion about what is promotable or not would be very useful.

Highly recommend this book for women, men, people in leadership, and employees. It’s extremely well-written, nuanced, and eye-opening.

SPONSOR:

This episode of the GeriPal Podcast is sponsored by UCSF’s Division of Palliative Medicine, an amazing group doing world class palliative care. They are looking for physician faculty to join them in the inpatient and outpatient setting. To learn more about job opportunities, please click here: https://palliativemedicine.ucsf.edu/job-openings

Books on Becoming A Better Mentor (and Better Person): Bob Arnold

GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast