PhD Supervision, dealing with feedback anxiety: 5 tips to survive criticism on your work!
Why don’t you just send them the draft? Your supervisor is always saying, “Send me the draft, I’m happy to look at your work, I’d love to see it”, and you’re like, “It’s not ready yet! Let me twiddle with it for another six months or until you stop asking me about it!”.
You’ve got to stop doing this because it’s holding you back. You could be getting feedback on your work much more regularly. This will give you reassurance you’re on the right track, ideas about tweaks and improvements, or help you course correct if you’re wandering off!
Now – okay, okay, before you all come at me in the comments saying, “But I have sent stuff to my supervisor and they never get back to me!”, that’s not the problem we’re tackling in this blogpost. If that is an issue for you, I have another blogpost with some advice, click here to read. This blog is for the people whose supervisors are pretty decent folk, who are always offering you the opportunity to send them stuff and you’re not taking them up on that!
Hey, if we’ve not met before, I’m Dr Elizabeth Yardley and I help PhD students stop getting in their own way and finish their doctorates. I’ve been doing this for 20 years now and the not sending drafts to your supervisor problem is one that I have experienced myself as a supervisor. It drives me mad, because if you can get over this as a PhD student and start sending them drafts on the regular, you will get your PhD done quicker! You will. It really is that simple. You can spend ages trying to figure something out on your own that your supervisor would have set you straight on in a few minutes.
But, so many people don’t do it because they just have this block!
Perhaps you don’t feel that what you’ve written so far is “ready” for your supervisors to look at.
Maybe it isn’t structured well, the grammar is a bit dodgy, it’s missing some references.
Okay, fine.
But is it in such a terrible state that your supervisors would not be able to make any sense of it? Probably not.
So, why can’t you just send it?!
Feeling ick about receiving criticism
One of the reasons might be because you feel a bit ick about receiving criticism on it.
Critique is the lifeblood of academia.
You’ve sat in a seminar or written an essay in which you’ve criticised someone else’s work, you’ve highlighted the positives, the negatives, the strengths, the weaknesses. Their sample’s not big enough, they haven’t defined that concept thoroughly, etc.
Academic life is all about criticism and you’ve just got to accept that.
Even the most-high profile, highly cited people get their work massively criticised. In fact they get way more criticism than the people who never publish anything – because they put their work out there.
Sucking this up involves realising that criticism is not a personal attack. Feedback on your work is not feedback on you. I know, I know - PhD students pour their hearts and souls into their work. Each draft represents countless hours of reading, thinking, and writing. So, when you hand it over to your supervisors, it feels like you're exposing a piece of your soul! But in academia, critique is directed at the work, not the individual. When we've critiqued others, we've focused on ideas, arguments, and evidence, we’ve not questioned the person's intrinsic worth!
Maybe you’ve had feedback from your supervisor before and it’s been rather harsh – all about what you didn’t do well and nothing saying what you have achieved.
Some supervisors are terrible at giving feedback.
They pick, pick, pick at all the stuff they think you didn’t do great, and neglect to tell you about the stuff you did do well. You come away thinking your work is rubbish, you might as well give up! But if you could hear your supervisor chatting to their colleague about your work, they’d be like, “It’s good / very good / excellent. A few things to improve, but yeah, decent!” But you don’t get that feeling from reading their comments on it. Argh!
So, how can we move beyond feedback anxiety?
1. Shift your perspective and see feedback differently
One of the first steps to overcoming feedback anxiety is to shift your perspective. Rather than seeing feedback as a critique - because sometimes that word makes you want to vom - see it as a collaboration.
Your supervisor is not an adversary but a partner in your academic journey.
Remember, your supervisor's primary goal is to help you succeed. Their feedback is not about tearing you down – even though it might feel that way sometimes - but about building your work up to its highest potential. They have the experience and knowledge to guide you. Their feedback puts you on the superhighway to finishing your PhD rather than taking the back roads.
There are supervisors who don’t give any feedback to their students, which is a much worse problem to have. I lose count of the people who contact us here at Degree Doctor telling us some shocking stories about supervisors! So, the people who take the time to give you feedback do so because they care about your research. And you know what?They’re not perfect either! They might be a bit harsh. They might not be great at telling you want you did well. But you can work with that, it’s better than no feedback.
2. Manage your expectations - this isn’t about perfection
Understand that your draft is just that—a draft. It's not supposed to be perfect. Expecting perfection from yourself is unrealistic and sets you up for disappointment. Instead, aim to produce the best draft you can at the moment, knowing that it will improve with feedback. That will involve sending drafts that you aren’t 100% happy with or confident in. That’s fine. Your aim in receiving feedback is to get that draft a bit further along the road, not necessarily to get it finished. Pick particular elements of it you want to work on and don’t necessarily go for a huge chunk of work – which brings me onto the next point.
3. Ask for feedback on smaller chunks of your work
Submitting a draft can feel overwhelming, especially if you anticipate a lot of feedback.
If you’ve given your supervisor a huge draft of 20,000 words, there’s likely to be a considerable number of comments on that, which can take some getting through!
To make it more manageable, break your work down into smaller chunks.
Focus on completing one section at a time, ask for feedback on smaller chunks of your work. So, maybe sections of your literature review rather than the whole chapter. Perhaps the first 2,000 words of it rather than the whole 20,000.
4. Be clear about the “what” and “how” of feedback
What specifically do you want feedback about? If you don’t tell your supervisor specifically what you need help with, they’ll get your draft and they’ll give you feedback on everything – structure, content, the whole nine yards!
If you want them to ignore the bad grammar and missing references and just focus on assessing whether you’ve understood a particular concept, tell them that.
If you want them to ignore the fact you haven’t included any theory yet, and just focus on how you’ve structured a particular section, tell them that.
Also, think carefully about what format you’d like your feedback to be in.
There’s a tendency among some supervisors to do MS Word tracked changes on every draft their students ask them to review. Your work comes back covered in comments, amendments, changes. The document has been chopped and changed, the text is all different colours, argh! This can feel soul destroying!
Be open to discussing other ways of getting feedback with your supervisors: an email with a few bullet points; a voice note; a screencast video where they talk you through your document; a face to face meeting.
Feedback can be what you want and need it to be, because one size fits nobody and you’ll probably need different types of feedback at different stages of your PhD journey too. Talk to your supervisors about this, because it makes like easier for them as well as you!
5. Act on the feedback, once you’ve digested it
Once you've received feedback, the next step is to turn it into actionable steps.
When you receive the feedback, read through it once and then take a break before reacting. This can help you process the comments more rationally and less emotionally.
Then be strategic and logical about what you do with it.
Organise the Feedback: Categorise the feedback into different types—conceptual, structural, and stylistic. This can help you tackle revisions systematically rather than having a big long list of corrections you need to do.
Create a Plan: Develop a revision plan based on the feedback. Prioritise the most critical changes and set realistic deadlines for each task. Start with the most significant issues and gradually work your way through the list.
Seek Clarification: If any feedback is unclear, don't hesitate to ask your supervisor for clarification. Understanding their perspective fully will help you make more effective revisions.
Reflect on Your Progress: After making revisions, take some time to reflect on how the feedback has improved your work. Take a look at the draft you send to your supervisor – look at how much you’ve improved it. Recognise the value it has added and how it has helped you grow as a researcher and writer.
Remember, receiving and responding to feedback is an integral part of the PhD journey. It’s through this process that we ultimately produce work that we can be proud of. By changing our perspective and taking practical steps to manage our anxiety, we can turn feedback from a source of fear into a powerful tool for success.
So, just send that draft, go on, do it now!
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