Welcome and thank you for joining me on this adventure. For the newbies, you can catch up on previous post: first blog post, second blog post here, third blog post here, fourth blog post here, fifth post here, sixth post here, seventh post here, eighth post here, the ninth post here and the tenth post here.

This was a week of two halves. Having spent part of my last weekend tinkering around with the proposal, I managed to produce a clean draft version with all sections drafted. On Monday morning, I pressed the ‘SOS’ alarm bell and sent the draft around to colleagues and friends asking for ‘harsh reviews’. I enjoyed having Monday-Wednesday off from thinking about the proposal as other people read it. The thing with asking for feedback is that you never really know what you are going to get. Do you get a feedback sandwich or do you get a feedback salad? Knowing that my proposal had a number of weakness in need of improvement doesn’t make it any easy anticipating what others think of the work. Even with its weakness I hoped they will tell me how “great” it is but this is not how effective feedback works. Receiving feedback is a vulnerable process because there is the tendency – at least for me sometimes – of getting into my own head thinking that my work really sucks and maybe I shouldn’t bother further. During my Postgraduate Certificate programme on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education we learned about the value of feedback and the effective ways of giving such. Knowing the theory doesn’t make it any less vulnerable when you are on the other side.

Receiving feedback is where the imposter syndrome feeling can get acute. This week I learnt to sit with the feedback I received. The first hours after reading feedback comments always generate a kaleidoscope of feelings in me. But the feelings stabilise as I read, re-read and read again each feedback comment. Some gentle, some very sharp and some very funny – but all of them aimed at helping me to see where and how I can push my thinking and writing further. I’m thankful for the uncomfortable feelings that receiving feedback elicited in me this week.

At end of Week 5, I achieved the goals I set for myself last week: I managed to finalise all sections of the proposal into a clean draft. I sent this draft around to my informal review committee of colleagues and friends for feedback. As my teenage daughter was on ‘studie week’ holiday from school, I got to spend some wonderful quality time with her cycling through the farmlands and woods for the first half of the week. It allowed me to take a break while I waited for some feedback. In the second half of the week, I got into a mental tunnel in which the proposal was once again ‘all-consuming’ of my mental space. I went through the emotionally rollercoaster of sitting with feedback comments I received. I then managed to work through some of the feedback comments in revising the draft proposal. There is still work to be done but every little progress helps.

Goals for Week 3: Submission date is getting eerily closer and closer. Next week’s goal is send a fresh revised draft on Monday morning to another set of my informal review committee for feedback. I will then take the week away from the proposal as I travel to the University of Bern in Switzerland for an invited presentation and lecture – and also meet an old friend in Basel. What I hope to do for the proposal is to make the GANTT chart of the project timeline and attempt to make an illustration of how the Work Packages align for achieving scientific and societal impact. By the end of next week I would hopefully have assembled the last batch of feedback that I can work through in the last week of March/first week of April. The clock is ticking but still we press on….

The adventure continues…see you next week Friday for the next instalment of the #NWOVididiaries blog post.