(Episode 108) The art of being you: Research presentations as your authentic self
In this episode, host Dr. Emily Goodall enjoys a conversation with Duncan Yellowlees, founder of a training company specialising in helping researchers elevate their communication and presentation skills. They explore how embracing creativity, authenticity, and joy can transform the way research is presented, leading to stronger connections, more innovative ideas, and a sense of belonging in academia.
Key Takeaways:
🎠Your personal voice matters: Research isn’t just data; it’s done by people. Bringing authenticity into presentations makes them more compelling.
đź“– Storytelling makes your research stand out: It's a powerful tool to connect with your audience and make complex ideas exciting and engaging.
🌍 Pressure to conform: Academia often imposes unwritten rules on how research presentations "should" be done. We discuss the challenges researchers face in presenting authentically, the biases at play, and how we can advocate for more diverse presentation styles.
💫Bringing joy to research culture: A positive, supportive research environment thrives on creativity and connection. When researchers bring joy and fun into their work—whether through laughter or creative methods—they unlock new perspectives and generate a sense of community.
Stay tuned until the end to hear Duncan's top tips for delivering more engaging, authentic research presentations that truly reflect who you are!
To find out more about empowering your research presentations, visit Duncan Yellowlees Training, or connect via LinkedIN or BlueSky.
Transcript
Welcome to the Research Culture Uncovered podcast, where in every episode we explore what is research culture and what should it be? You'll hear thoughts and opinions from a range of contributors to help you change Research Culture into what you want it to be.
Emily Goodall [:Hello to our listeners and welcome to Research Culture Uncovered. I'm Emily Goodall, a researcher developer from the University of Leeds. For this episode, I'm delighted to be joined by Duncan Yellowlees, founder of a training company specializing in presentation and communication skills. Duncan has worked with researchers and academics for over 10 years, helping them find their voice and creative ways to engage an audience with research. I think it's fair to say Duncan is well known for enthusiasm and the passion he has for storytelling, so this episode is going to be enjoyable. Duncan, welcome to the podcast.
Duncan Yellowlees [:Hey, Emily, really happy to be on here.
Emily Goodall [:Just to start off, can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you built your business around helping researchers elevate their presentation skills?
Duncan Yellowlees [:Yeah, I did mechanical engineering as an undergraduate degree, but I've always loved theatre. I was a theatre kid. Those everybody's ever met me, it's clear I was a theatre kid. And so when I finished that degree, decided I didn't want to be an engineer. I wanted to be the Brian Cox of the history of engineering. I wanted to be on telly telling people about the stories of the history of engineering, like a young Fred Dibnah, if anybody gets that reference. That's kind of what I wanted to do. So I thought I should go and learn a bit about that.
Duncan Yellowlees [:And I went to do a history of science masters, which included a science communication module. And I realized that I was really interested in how we communicate stuff, the mechanisms around that, how you get people to pay attention to things, how you get that sort of, kind of connection going. And the history was fascinating. And history of science and philosophy of science is wonderful. And all scientists should have to do a module on the philosophy of science. I. I finished up that degree and went, what do I do? I've got an engineering degree, a history master's, and I like theater. Not a traditional box for me, really out there, but I found a job working at a science centre, the Centre for Life in Newcastle, which was a fantastic first job for me.
Duncan Yellowlees [:I was writing and developing science demonstration shows, so for family audiences. So we set lots of things on fire. We fabulous chemistry, color changes and all sorts of that, that kind of stuff. And I was writing those shows and developing those and training our performers to present them. Then we started doing kind of offering public engagement training to the local universities up here. And I started training researchers in public engagement work and outreach work. And then when I got bored of having a boss, I set this company up because I realized there's a need here. Researchers as a standard part of the training don't get communication and presentation skills.
Duncan Yellowlees [:It's not a thing that's baked in and yet it's an expected part of the job. Particularly when you hit PhD level, you're expected to start going to conferences, to start going to events, to sharing your work. If you want to stay in academia. Presenting is a real cheat code shortcut to academic progression and reputation building and personal profile building that many people don't take advantage of, partly because they don't think to, but also they're not told how to. And also on a more mission driven level, academia seems to take, seems to take these wonderful, interesting, excited, passionate people doing this incredible, fascinating, important research and then when it comes to talking about it, it's all incredibly boring. And that's not who the people are, it's not what the work is and it's not what audiences want to pay attention to. So we started, you know, I started this company, it was just a way to pay the bills. But increasingly it is about how can we make academic comms both externally in a sort of public engagement kind of outreach or policy engagement way effective for perhaps research projects that are doing community based stuff or collaborative research with, with the public.
Duncan Yellowlees [:How can we help those communications but also how can we make internal academic communications more enjoyable and better? Because how nice would it be to go to a conference and every single talk was absolutely awesome. What a world that would be. Wouldn't that be great? So yeah, that's what the kind of mission is, that's what we're trying to do. And if we ever get there, I will happily retire from this job and go and do something else. But I suspect there's more than enough work to keep me going for a while.
Emily Goodall [:Thank you for that. I think it's, it's great that you started out in the Centre for Life up in Newcastle. When I did my PhD, I volunteered at the Think Tank in Birmingham and I had the most awesome time. I did things I didn't think I would do, which now as a parent making slime is just, is just part of it. But back then I was like, this is interesting. So no, I think those kind of opportunities are really important and I would always encourage researchers to go and do outreach work because it's an interesting audience, it's A really different type of audience.
Duncan Yellowlees [:It's one of the places I say to the groups we work with all the time, one of the nice things about academia is if you go looking, there are opportunities to stretch your communication skills and practice and hone your craft a bit if you decide you want to get good at this stuff. And you know, all universities have a public engagement team. They're always desperate for researchers to come and do stuff and come and do activities. And it's really fun, it's really enjoyable. It takes you away from the traditional habits and structures of academia and lets you kind of stretch your wings a little bit and play. And you're working with young audiences who. Or not always, but often with young audiences who can throw you real curveballs, force you to get rid of the complexity because it's not appropriate for them. And yeah, it's a real opportunity, I think, to do more of that stuff, but also for people to access research.
Duncan Yellowlees [:You know, research still has as much as all of the efforts over the last decades to change it, that sort of ivory tower thing that's from an external perspective that still exists. And yeah, I think the more researchers can get out into the world, the better, for want of a better term. So yeah, I'm glad you worked at Think Tank and I say science center and you get it. You know exactly what I mean. Fun times.
Emily Goodall [:I think one of the best questions I ever got asked and this was when I was doing a patient engagement event. They asked me, why does a motor neurone look like a string of sausages? Best question ever. It took a bit of scrabbling in my brain to think right back to, back to basic neuroscience. How do I then take that really complex theory and then put it into something that a general audience can understand? And that is a skill. And that is why I think everyone should be going out and talking to different audiences.
Duncan Yellowlees [:Absolutely. And it's a, it's a skill that resonates through your academic career. And I see this all the time. People go, oh, you're going to talk to a group, 10 year olds or a general public audience or a patient group or something and they go, great, fantastic. I need to simplify it down or make nice and simple, make it clear. We'll make it accessible, there'll be metaphors and examples and it'll be great. And then as soon as they go back into an academic conference to their peers, all of the complexity comes back up, all of the impenetrable stuff comes back up and they, they do this really interesting thing. Where they kind of assume that because I'm a biologist, say, and I'm talking to other biologists, all biologists know the same biology.
Duncan Yellowlees [:And like, clearly that's not the truth. Right. Every research is so niche that everybody has their own little bit. And most of the time you're talking to audiences, you don't actually know that much about what you do. So being able to break it down, being able to simplify it, and then hanging on to those skills when you come back into academia, I think is hugely important for, for people to enjoy what you're doing and understand what you're talking about.
Emily Goodall [:So one of the main things that I know you're passionate about is storytelling. It's not something that we traditionally associate with academic presentations. But why do you think storytelling is so powerful in research communication?
Duncan Yellowlees [:Partly because it's not done, so it stands out. I mean, storytelling is just the way I see it. It's a subset of tools you can use for engagement. And in the same way that slide design or body language or whatever is a subset of tools you can use to engage your audiences. If we aren't making use of all of the tools we have available when it's appropriate to use them, then we're missing out, we're losing out on some of the things we could be doing to make our presentations, make our talks more engaging, more impactful, more effective. So teaching storytelling skills is really interesting because it's even more so than straight up, like body language or presenting skills. It's not taught in academia. I class our storytelling workshop as it's the bit people didn't know they wanted to know, but everyone goes, oh, that's really helpful.
Duncan Yellowlees [:Yeah, that'd be great. Stories themselves are inherently engaging and powerful. They're one of the oldest forms of codifying information that human beings have. We're fairly conditioned to pay attention to stories. And when you're little, an awful lot of your communication and the way you learn to speak, to read, to think about is story based. That stuff is really kind of ingrained and hardwired into it. So it's very, it's very effective. Not to mention the way storytelling is designed around manipulating emotion and curiosity to get you to pay attention and care about things.
Duncan Yellowlees [:And fundamentally, if you're just doing a presentation that has a bunch of stats and a load of graphs in, that's quite hard to pay attention to. But if you wrap it into a story or the meaning of the data into a story, then you can access some of those curiosity based tools, access some of that imagination in your audience, all of which helps them pay attention to your graphs and your data. And we don't teach storytelling as a isn't this lovely to have thing. You know, isn't it fun to do storytelling? It absolutely is. And up the more creative end of workshops we've run, we've used storytelling as a way to explore creative presenting and bring more creativity and fun and joy into things. But fundamentally, at a research communication level, it's a set of techniques that can aid you in engaging your audiences. And if your audiences aren't engaged, there's no point doing the thing. If everybody's asleep or bored or looking at their emails or whatever, there's no point being there.
Duncan Yellowlees [:You're wasting your time, you're wasting everybody else's time. So all of our workshops, including the storytelling stuff, is about, here are tools, here are techniques that can help you get that engagement so that whatever message you're trying to get across, whatever data you want to communicate, whatever teaching you're trying to do, whatever your goal is, you can only achieve that goal if your audience is paying attention. So here are the tools and techniques that let you get your audience to pay attention. And storytelling, the techniques in there are a hugely powerful subset of those tools and ones that don't get used in academia at all very often, Although interestingly, it sort of depends on discipline. Down the arts and humanities end, they are much more. You're more likely to find natural storytelling, if that makes sense, like unprompted storytelling being used through social sciences. We still get some of it, but we call them case studies and we do them very dryly and boring. But what you're doing is telling stories and then through into the physical sciences, it becomes harder because the work doesn't map onto into storytelling in the same way.
Duncan Yellowlees [:But there are certainly things you can do to. To make that kind of engagement and make it. It's about making the work accessible, making audiences curious, making them wanting to know more. And storytelling is full of tools that help with that side of it. So that your graphs. I can. I can bear to look at your graphs because I'm interested and I care and I want to know what's going on. Right.
Emily Goodall [:I think research presentations are often seen as really objective, but they are also quite personal and they require that connection with the audience, which you've already touched on. But do you think this personal element is influenced by research culture and vice versa?
Duncan Yellowlees [:Absolutely. Here's a little bit I sometimes do for audiences. Research has this really weird thing. You say it's supposed to be objective. This idea that the work stands on one side and then across the other side of the room. For it is the interesting, engaging, quirky, funky, unique, emotional human being who is doing the work. And never the two shall come together. Because nominally and again, this is the history of science.
Duncan Yellowlees [:Chops coming in. Normally, the whole system is. You write a paper that allows other people to replicate what you have done so we can prove it in inverted commas, for want of a better term, to be the most accurate understanding of whatever it is we're looking at. Now, nobody does that because nobody gets funded to replicate papers anyway. So the system's broken. But the idea that the research, and I think that's where the idea that the research has to stand on its own comes from. So somebody else who isn't you can replicate it and do it. And there is something laudable in that.
Duncan Yellowlees [:But when it comes to presenting and communicating, if you don't put the personal in again, you lose a whole bunch of those engagement tools. You as a human being are more interesting than almost anything else you could conceivably put in front of your audience. And if you try to not do that in an attempt, attempt to keep the work objective, you make it really dry, you make it really boring, you make it really hard to engage with. And whereas human beings are really easy to engage with, we like people because we are people at a sort of analytical level, you, the human being, comprises another set of tools like storytelling that you can use to interact with the audience and engage with the audience. On a more cultural level. Presentation are an intersection of your personal self and the work in a way that writing articles and writing papers aren't, because you are on stage doing the thing. It's coming. It's with your voice, it's with your tone, it's with however you want to do it.
Duncan Yellowlees [:And I think we should celebrate and pursue that and allow that to be the case. Right? Science is, is not, or science or any sort of research is not just a bunch of information that stands on its own. It's done by people. And we know this, we recognize this in our research methods and how we design things. And we try and work out biases or go for multidisciplinary teams because we know that multi perspectives make better research. Right? And yet when it comes to communicating, it is still this weird idea that it should sit separately. And here we go in a not dissimilar idea to the concept that sciences should be apolitical or research should be apolitical. When in fact it never has been and never will be because it's done by people and driven and funded by people and driven by those sorts of things.
Duncan Yellowlees [:So I think the research culture of this idea that the work has to stand on its own is one of the big contributing factors to the fact that we have very boring presentations because we take the person out. And that, I think, is harmful in lots of different ways, but certainly leads to quite boring talks, if that makes sense.
Emily Goodall [:I think there's an element here that some researchers may feel freer to present in engaging and unconventional ways, while others may worry that they're not being taken seriously. What biases do you think are at play here? And how can we create space or encourage more diverse presentation styles so they can bring that personality back in?
Duncan Yellowlees [:Yeah, so this is huge. This is a few years ago, I started noticing that people would come up to us after our workshops and would say things like, yeah, I really enjoyed it, it was fantastic, but I don't think I could actually do it, or I don't think I could pull it off, or I can't be me when I'm presenting. And that one, I can't be me when I'm presenting, really struck a chord with me because as I said at the start, we take these interesting, creative, diverse, wonderful, exciting people, get them to do interesting, creative, wonderful, diverse work, and then for some reason tell them they can't be interesting, wonderful, and creative when they talk about the thing. And I'm not sure if there is. Nobody's explicitly saying, no, you can't do it like that. There are places and specific examples, but there's also a cultural habit, a kind of cultural sense that you have to do it the same way everybody else does it, and you can't be different. I work an awful lot with PhD researchers and kind of ECR folks, and the pressure they feel to conform to what they see as the way it's always done is huge. And sometimes they will have supervisors who are telling them, yes, you have to do it this certain way, or yes, you have to do it the way everybody does it, because that's how it's done.
Duncan Yellowlees [:And they rail against that because instinctively know it's bad, bad communication. Right. Most academic talks are rubbish from an engagement perspective. If you want people to be creative and different or be creative and try new approaches and do things, they're going up against the status quo. And these are big old institutions. The status quo is ingrained very, very, very deeply. And. And so there's.
Duncan Yellowlees [:There's risk to doing it. It makes you vulnerable. Not everybody wants to try things differently, that's absolutely fine. But those who do face a question of how vulnerable do I want to make myself, how open to criticism for being different, how much do I want to choose to push back and how much of myself do I want to put in there? Now, as soon as you get into that bit, that space, how much of my personal self do I want to make vulnerable? You intersect with all of the other big biases and big issues that exist in the academy and in academia generally. All of the racism and ableism and sexism and all of the big, big issues. You know, for example, we know from various bits of research that women are taken less seriously than men just are as standard. The history of academia, particularly in this part of the world, is very white, it's very male. The positions of authority are older, right? To some extent, if you don't look like a middle aged white man with elbow patches on your tweed jacket, that's not, you know, and I know that's not actually true anymore.
Duncan Yellowlees [:But there persists this feeling, a sort of miasma of that this is how it has to be, that PhD students particularly feel great pressure to conform to. And what I try encourage people to do is to conform where they feel they have to or they can't be bothered to fight the fight. It's up to every individual to decide when to push and when not. And sometimes it's just easier not to. You don't need that hassle in your life. There are other times when, like if it's a lab meeting or a small group meeting with people you know quite well, if you've got a supportive supervisor, encourage this creativity and push in those places you feel safer because that way we change things. It's quite interesting that over the years I've been doing this, when people have tried the stuff we teach, it almost always goes down really well, right? There may be one or two of your old elbow patched professors in the corner who are grumpy that it's not been done the way everybody else has done it. The majority of the audiences find it refreshing, find it interesting, find it accessible.
Duncan Yellowlees [:I had, I was running a workshop this week and we do an exercise in the afternoon where they create little presentations and they present back. So we get like a mini conference of the group's work variously. And at the end of it, when we're kind of discussing it, somebody put their hand up and said, last year we went and did this almost exact thing like a little symposium we went away and we all shared our work and it was great. And he went. To be honest, I fell asleep. I was mostly snoring. Through that thing we did last year, what we've just done today, I've learned more about what you all do in this slightly silly storytelling led approach than that proper thing that where we were supposed to share what we do. And so audiences want this stuff.
Duncan Yellowlees [:They want it to be interesting, they want it to engaging, they want it to be different depending on the audience. They may also want it to be detailed and in depth and all of those things. But the fear of being different, of pushing against the status quo, particularly if you personally, that intersects with any of the other big things that can make you vulnerable in a system that stops people trying and stops people doing interesting things, when actually, more often than not, the result is positive. This is my little corner of the cultural fight, right? Let's try and, you know, make it acceptable to, I don't know, come on stage in a hot pink pantsuit and fantastic high heels, feeling your wonderful, confident, glamorous best, or conversely, you know, make it okay to say, you know what? I don't like standing up and talking to people. So I'm gonna have a chat, I'm gonna sit on the front of the stage and we're gonna make this a discussion session. Right? There's, there's. There's so many different ways to communicate your work that can allow you to express yourself in a way that is comfortable for you and truly engaging for the audience, but it means breaking away from. So this is what a professional researcher looks and sounds like, which is nonsense.
Duncan Yellowlees [:I don't know. Slightly soapboxy there, Emily. Sorry, but that's basically the various biases and habits create fear of being different. But because it being the same is boring, what we get is more and more boring, and that's what we see.
Emily Goodall [:How do you think we can advocate for more interesting and different styles as mentors, supervisors, or even as an audience member? How can we encourage that?
Duncan Yellowlees [:The big stuff comes top down, as all culture change needs to, because the people at the bottom of the power tree don't feel like they can. But in the instances where we've worked with, say, a lab group and the head honcho professor has decided that this stuff is important, and the approach we teach is the approach they want to advocate for and support their group doing, you get massive uptake from folks newer in their career who are like, this is almost a sly of relief that goes, you mean I can be, I can Be fun. I can be interesting. I can do creative stuff with it. Yeah, absolutely you can. Of course you can. Let's. Let's go.
Duncan Yellowlees [:But that needs to be supported from higher up. So if you are in a more of a position of power and you see something, someone doing something different almost, even if it doesn't quite work right, if they don't quite land it and it doesn't quite, that's. That's fine. They're trying, I think encouragement, and this probably applies across the board. We're pushing back against the status quo. That isn't helpful. Support those people. Make.
Duncan Yellowlees [:Make an effort to go and say, that was fantastic, or I saw what you're trying to do and it didn't quite land this time. But don't give up. Keep trying. That support from people higher up the chain makes a big difference to people being creative lower down. And one of the things you see is that the professors, the more senior people have more freedom to do this stuff with less criticism. Which always makes me a bit grumpy, like, why should you at the top of the tree be allowed to be creative just because you've published more stuff that doesn't track at all? Because how you communicate your work has no bearing on the quality of the work. So we need encouragement from the top, from supervisors and that kind of thing. If you are supervising students and you've got a PhD coming to you with a kind of slightly innovative or slightly different way of presenting their work, encourage it.
Duncan Yellowlees [:Make sure they know why they're doing it right. Creativity just for the sake of. It doesn't help. Everything we teach has reasons behind it. And partly that's to give people arguments they can bring to their supervisor. If their supervisor says, no, you have to do it like this, they can go, well, Duncan said this and this is why, right? There should be reasons for doing these things. But be supportive. Try not to get too stuck in your train tracks and your way of thinking.
Duncan Yellowlees [:A good rule of thumb is that nothing is an absolute. Nothing is set in stone. It doesn't have to look like this. It doesn't have to work like this. You don't have to have slides that do this or this structure or say this particular stuff or have this much data. You really don't. It's about how do we do a thing that's interesting and valuable for the audience in front of us? And you build up from there. So that really matters.
Duncan Yellowlees [:I think if you are in an audience, be a nodder. Audience nodders are the best people in the world. You know them, you know, presentation nodders who sit there and then you see a speaker who's maybe a bit nervous or fumble something and you go, it's my time to shine. And they sit there and they make a bit of eye contact encouragingly and they big nods on the screen. You can't see me because it's a podcast, but I'm nodding on the screen and I'm kind of smiling and encouraging and giving presenters that bit of feedback in the moment that what they're doing is good. If you are somebody who's presenting and you felt in your bones that this is boring and there should be a better way, there should be a more creative way, you allowed to play, you should be allowed to do different things than push. And if we can get all of those elements together, then we will start to encourage this kind of behavior and make it better. But like all culture change, it's a huge project.
Duncan Yellowlees [:It requires that buy in from higher up and not just letting creativity and interest be the purview of senior tenured people because they've got the power that nobody's going to question them. And I don't think that's okay.
Emily Goodall [:What do you think about research poster presentations as a format? I remember I used to run quite a lot of poster presentation workshops. And the thing that I always used to tell people is there's no such thing as the poster police. It's the format that feels less formal. It's more about networking and conversations. I did a session at the University of Sheffield when I was working there. Two weeks later we had a big symposium of posters. It's probably 200 posters in the room. And I walked in and somebody had made a life size sculpture of the plant that they were researching out of tissue paper and toilet roll.
Emily Goodall [:It was a, it was Blue Peter job. And I thought, I need to go and talk to him. And he was brilliant. And he'd made that life size statue. He'd made it just to show people the scale of the plant that he was working with. And there were loads of people around his poster. It was fabulous. I wonder whether poster presentations is the way that you can kind of dip your toe in a little bit because it's less formal.
Duncan Yellowlees [:It's less formal. It's also less scary, right, Because I've got a whole bunch of people looking at you and you may feel like they're looking at you and judging you. That's not how audiences work, but that's how it feels. So, yeah, posters I think are really good, but There is still, although it's less formal in its spoken communication element, it's more networky and one to one chatting. There is definitely again this culture of formal structure, right. They all look like this, they have to look like this, they have to do this. Really boring. And the example you just gave there is fabulous.
Duncan Yellowlees [:The other one I knew about, somebody I worked with studied dolphins and went out and like put geotags on dolphins so we can follow them around the sea and stuff. And his posts poster was just a huge picture of a dolphin and he has a little crossbow with a dart on it and you had to play pin the geotag on the dolphin and shoot the dolphin with the geotag. Lo and behold, lots of people were around his poster. Lots of people talking about the work, lots of people chatting. So like any form of communication, the first thing to decide is what your goal is. What are you trying to achieve with this thing? So is your poster trying to exist so that if you're not there, somebody can come along and look at it and understand every possible thing about your research? Fine, maybe lead you down one version or one format. Your big statue plant isn't going to help in that situation. Is your poster designed to be quite a fun and engaging infographic so people can take away the key points of your research fairly quickly, but it doesn't have to be.
Duncan Yellowlees [:You don't have to read an essay to understand what's going on. Great, that's one. Another version is your poster designed to be a few pictures and images and maybe graphs to help you facilitate you explaining the work to somebody else. So it's a. It's a presented thing, It's a live presented thing. That's another different version. Or your big massive plant or your dolphin example. They are phenomenal examples of posters designed to start conversations and gather interest, get engagement and so if you're quite happy talking to people and actually the thing you want to do is meet lots of people and tell them a fairly quick preci about the research and get their contact details to follow up, then those kind of posters are really effective.
Duncan Yellowlees [:So again, not creativity for creativity's sake, but going, what am I trying to achieve? How best can I achieve that goal? If we get rid of all of the expectations and feelings like it has to be done a certain way. So I think posters can be a really fun way to do it. And we're seeing more and more of that creativity in posters, which is starting to help other people who feel like they want to be creative try new things again down the arts humanities end you get some really wonderful stuff is I saw somebody who just had a doing a community project, science project and had got the community to knit the research and then the poster was just like a board with a whole bunch of sort of weird knitted objects on it that were knitted things influenced by the research and that again people come in and they talk about it. But that also in a community project that highlights community input and community feedback and stuff which I think is really cool. Yeah. I think posters are a really good place to play and test out creativity and reassure yourself that creativity is often rewarded. Right. That that fear you have may not actually be true when you try and do stuff.
Duncan Yellowlees [:Although it can be true. It absolutely can be.
Emily Goodall [:I love those examples. That's. I'm going to cut this bit out because I've lost my thread now. I'm doing really well.
Duncan Yellowlees [:It makes us say another presentation lesson. Losing your thread. Laughing, joking makes us more relatable and human and therefore interesting to listen to. So if we don't cut this bit out and you enjoyed this little giggle. That's what happened there.
Emily Goodall [:You recently hosted a session at the Vitae International Researcher Development Conference about the role of joy and fun in research. How do you think these elements play a role in creating better research? Culture, sense of belonging and community.
Duncan Yellowlees [:Huge, huge impact on those things. I think academia is riddled with, as I've said, these sometimes very overt. It has to be a certain way. It has to feel look sound, be done a certain way, but also less avert sort of weird cultural miasmas that make everybody feel like it has to be done a certain way even if nobody explicitly says it. And one of those particularly up the heart hard physical sciences end is if it's not boring, it's not real science that hurts. Science at its. At its core is a creative endeavor and. And we suck all the creativity out of it.
Duncan Yellowlees [:Doing a PhD can be a very lonely experience. You're working on your own, you're not in a team. I some or even if you are in a team, you're doing your own work as well. I sometimes equate it to entrepreneurship and setting up and running your own business because you're sort of left to your own devices but with a bunch of goals and expectations you're supposed to achieve. And that can be really difficult. Difficult. One of the things that brings people together like nothing else is laughter and silliness and it takes the edge of this. This weird idea that yes, you're at work and yes, you're doing important stuff or crucial research or, you know, your, your subject is maybe very serious.
Duncan Yellowlees [:We work with people who, who work on domestic violence and that kind of stuff. Right. I'm not saying every research talk needs to be a barrel of laughs, but allowing space for joy just creates more freedom. We started exploring it when we started exploring creative communication methods. So as a, an extension to storytelling, we, you know, use props and make puppet shows and all sorts of fun stuff like that. And what we spotted was that when people are laughing, they're more creative, they come up with more interesting ideas, but also they come up with more out of the box, abstract, different ideas. And I think the impact on research, if you've got a group of people who are being creative together in a silly, unstressed, unjudgmental way, will inevitably be better ideas and new perspectives and new ways of thinking, which is not why we should do it. I think that's.
Duncan Yellowlees [:That will be the impact on research. We should do it because connection and laughter is human. You know, the climate in academia at the minute is very difficult. Jobs are up, you know, for the chop people. It's very uncertain about the future of academia and what's going on. And the more we can build community. There's lots of different ways to build community, but I think laughing together is a really powerful way to do that. And at that talk you mentioned, at Vitae, we played some taskmaster games, and I think we make the tallest tower, but you're only allowed to use one chair, otherwise it would have got completely out of hand.
Duncan Yellowlees [:But we had towers of objects going all the way up to the ceiling. And as soon as I said it and people realized we're doing this. What you mean we're allowed? Okay, sure. The room erupts into conversation and laughter and smiles, all of this positive stuff. And we run those taskmaster games as kind of team building activity exercises we've done in the past with doctoral training groups and that kind of thing, as well as ways to lead into this creative storytelling, creative communication stuff. I don't know. Whenever I do it, I get the feeling that everybody has taken. There's a pause where they go, really is this.
Duncan Yellowlees [:I've come to an academic training, and this is what we're. Okay, sure. And then they dive in and you get this complete relaxing of the feeling they can't be somebody else. They have to be somebody else. They have to be this professional academic at work, whatever that means is looks like. And you, you get more, more authenticity and more real human connection by playing with stuff.
Emily Goodall [:Oh, I completely agree. I've run a couple of grad schools. So the grad school format is where you take a group of PhD students and you take them away for three or four days. And there's so much creativity and play in the tasks that they do. There's always some learning behind it. But I love the idea of doing something more. More physical and fun as a way just to open up those communication streams, I guess.
Duncan Yellowlees [:Yeah. And it brings people together. And as I say, it's those sorts of things, grad schools or doctoral training away weekends and things that we. And we typically run them on. It goes down really, really well. I've had people come back the next year who are, you know, now in their final year and writing up and have. Have other more important things to do going. I'm just.
Duncan Yellowlees [:I've just come for the morning that we're playing the games. And I think that's. Yeah. I don't know. It brings people together. And I think the graduate school staff, I think doctoral training groups play a really valuable role in making particular PhD researchers feel like they're part of a group. And I do feel for folks who don't get the opportunity to be in that or who are working in research groups who aren't that social or maybe dispersed geographically. And it can be very lonely, as I say, and the more we can do to combat that, I mean, it's exactly the same conversation we're having in culturally, in everyday life at the minute about, you know, this community is gone, everyone's on social media and that's all fake and people are lonely.
Duncan Yellowlees [:I think in academia we have interesting institutions that have an opportunity to provide community and togetherness and culture that pursues a goal. Right. The goal is the doing of the research and doing good research. But because they are big schools. Right. Big organizations or a good business. Right. There's a potential there for the modern version of academia to be something that combats some of that cultural isolation that we've ended up with in modern life because of the way life kind of is now.
Duncan Yellowlees [:I think academia could be a really interesting space to try and combat some of that stuff. Never had that thought before, but I quite like it.
Emily Goodall [:I think we just need a bit more fun in higher education at the moment.
Duncan Yellowlees [:Just how. Just didn't like. The work's cool. This is the other thing. Every time I do a workshop and I talk to people about what they do or we do little presentations back and I hear about stuff that people are doing it's awesome. Like, the work, the work people are doing is, is incredible. Everything from, you know, the humanities and arts end preserving traditional thatching in the east coast of Scotland's techniques through to social understandings of Druidism, through creating solar cells out of plankton or something like there's. It's just cool.
Duncan Yellowlees [:And you talk to them and as soon as you give people, you let people relax out of the. I have to be this serious professional academic. You see that passion come through when they're communicating. You see that joy, you see that fun, you see the reason they're doing it and the fact that they enjoy their work. And the more we can provide those opportunities to remember you enjoy the work counterbalances the times when the work is hard because it is hard. And there are times when it's difficult. Hey, if you're studying something like domestic violence is really dark and you end up also being lonely in your PhD journey, I can't imagine how tough that would be. So finding balances to the times when the work is grueling or the work is difficult by providing culture and community with other folks going through similar things, but culture and community, that allows you to relax and not feel like you are at work.
Duncan Yellowlees [:Having to portray this professional whatever and be yourself, I think could be really important and really exciting.
Emily Goodall [:I completely agree. Finally, I couldn't let you leave without asking for just a few top tips for our researchers to help them feel more confident doing research presentations as their authentic selves.
Duncan Yellowlees [:A really big one is the attitude you have going in. Traditionally you get, come do a present your research. That's called present your research or present your paper, which is completely unhelpful. It doesn't tell you anything about what you're supposed to talk about. But actually it's up to you what you want to talk about. And this is one of the big things about being able to step away from this feeling of I'm standing in front of these people and they're judging whether or not I am the perfect academic or the professional academic or the whatever it is. I think that's where a lot of the fear comes from. Whereas if you take control goal of what you want to achieve with this talk, right, I've got 20 minutes, I've got 10 minutes, I've got these people, I think they will find these things interesting and valuable.
Duncan Yellowlees [:And I want to achieve people coming up to me and talking to me afterwards and increasing my network. Right, so you've decided on your own goals, you have decided on your content, not because it's just. Here is a list of all of the things that I've done. You go, I'm here to tell you some stuff that I think you'll enjoy, right? I'm here to tell you some stuff that I think you'll find valuable about what I'm doing, how it might apply to what you're doing, why I think it's cool, why it's important, right? That agency. And it's a mind, it's a mindset shift from I'm standing here showing you all the things I've done, hoping you don't judge me too harshly to I'm standing here with some specific stuff I want to tell you because I think you'll like it. If you can get into that space, it frees up an awful lot of those fears because they can go, oh, I didn't find it that interesting. Okay, great, I pitched it wrong or I got my content wrong or whatever. But they're not.
Duncan Yellowlees [:Not. I'm not here trying to prove anything to you. I'm not on trial. It's not X Factor. You're not sitting there with a big button going, you're rubbish. Get off. So that mindset, if you can get into that, that's really powerful. Take control, take ownership of these talks.
Duncan Yellowlees [:What do you want to say? How do you want to say it? And it's. You are the one saying it. You're not on trial here by some weird sort of academic jury. So I think that's really powerful. Practice it. The biggest thing you can do to help your nerves, which is one of the things that makes us feel like we can't be ourselves or we just go to pieces or we can't show ourselves, is we feel nervous. And when you're really get really nervous, just getting the words out is challenging enough. So be kind to yourself.
Duncan Yellowlees [:And if you do really struggle with presenting, you know, get to the point where you can. You can get the words out, right? And then work on the other stuff. You know, it's all very well saying, be authentic, be your true self. Think about this. Whatever, you know, but working out, a. Working out, what that means and is. Is a process in and of itself. But also, if you're just so nervous that you.
Duncan Yellowlees [:You struggle with getting the point across right, be kind to yourself and start at the place. But practice can really help with that. The biggest thing that helps with no is practice. You're. You're not just learning. You're taking an unknown thing that is scary and turning it into a known thing because you have done it before and a known thing is less scary than an unknown thing, kind of when nerves come from. So those two things I think are, are really paramount. The other bit I think that is interesting if you're sort of, if anything I've said today has resonated and you want to try out, be brave, okay? As I said, putting your head above the parapet, making yourself vulnerable by being different, AKA good, is scary.
Duncan Yellowlees [:But more often than not it will be received really, really well by almost everybody. And you might get some pushback from individuals. So kind of mentally prepare for that or how you're going to combat those criticisms if they do come up. But also know that almost everybody else would love it because you would love it, right? You know you would. When you're presenting your research to other researchers, you are the audience. So do it in a way that you would find interesting, that you would want to watch, that you would find engaging. And know that a lot of this, it has to be done a certain way doesn't come from any sense of good practice. It's not a sense of it's done this way because X, Y or Z.
Duncan Yellowlees [:It's often done this way just because it's done this way. Right. A nice example is everybody knows too much text on a slide is rubbish. Everybody knows that. And yet everybody does it and be brave enough to not do the stuff you know deep down is rubbish. And find other routes and other ways. And that's what I can help with, is helping you find those other routes and other ways and other techniques. But if you're not lucky enough to come and work with us, still think about what would I enjoy as an audience member? What do I not enjoy as an audience member? And that gives you, that gives you a bit of a blueprint to try stuff out.
Emily Goodall [:I think that's really excellent advice. Sadly, that's all we have time for today. Duncan, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your insights. It's been really interesting and useful to hear your thoughts and experiences.
Duncan Yellowlees [:Thank you so much, Emily. It's been excellent to be here.
Emily Goodall [:All that's left for us to do is say goodbye to our listeners and hopefully you will join us for future episodes. So goodbye everyone.
Duncan Yellowlees [:Bye.
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