RWL 234
Advice to my 20-something self
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! I closed out my Health Systems class and submitted grades - so summer officially begins for me now! I spent much of the week setting up my site visits for my students who are out doing internships. I’ll be traveling around Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine visiting various organizations that are hosting the interns. It’s great that COVID restrictions are lifting just in time.
As promised, this week I have the results of the survey, in which 16 of you answered the question, “What advice would you give your 20-something self and why?”. I took all of the responses and put them in this PDF, and then I treated them as if they were typical qualitative data. As many of you know, I mostly do qualitative research, so this was a fun little exercise for me.
Step 1 was to do “open coding”, which means that I read each response looking for common themes. If you look at the Google Doc, you will see lots of comments off to the side where I jotted down words that I thought might evolve into codes.
Step 2, which starts on p. 4, involved “axial coding”, which is when you define your codes more clearly, and then cluster quotes together by code. So what emerged were four axial codes -
Avoid the Easy Path
Slow Down – Self-Knowledge
Self-Confidence - fear of "OPO"
Family
I clustered quotes from step 1 under each of these four categorical codes to see if there were solid themes, which I think there were. There were a few other possible codes that were not sufficiently supported, so I left them out of the final thematic analysis. As a group, you stepped back and really thought about life holistically, and not professional advice, which I admit surprised me. The codes that had insufficient support dealt more with leadership and professional development - but not enough of you talked about them to justify further thematic development. These might be good future survey questions.
So once I had completed the axial coding I went into step 3, which was thematic analysis. I tried to weave together your thoughts and develop these categories into themes. I do this on pp. 6-8 of the document. I’ll let you read those for yourselves if you’d like.
I think the overarching advice you wanted to give was to slow down and be reflective, which was its own code, but also wove its way through all of the other codes. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with me - I hope you found this exercise fun - I know I did. I’ll post another question next week.
I’ve assembled links that I thought were relevant to this exercise for this week. I hope you enjoy the analysis and the links. I’d love to get your feedback - feel free to write or comment on the Substack comment function.
(Photo above is of my younger self - at age 19 - the day before I left for Basic Training. My future wife, now of 29 years, is standing next to me. Oh, how many things I would tell that kid!)
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Read
What: Today, Life lessons: What advice would you give to your younger self?
https://www.today.com/health/life-lessons-what-advice-would-you-give-your-younger-self-t156396
Why: After I posted the survey about advice to your younger self, my friend C.A. shared this article that was based on a research study that asked people what their advice to their younger self would be. According to the article, “It turns out we think about this stuff a lot, with a third of adults pondering the subject “spontaneously” at least once a week.”
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Watch
What: Glamour, 70 People Ages 5-75 Answer: What's Your Biggest Regret? (5 min)
Why: This video is clever in its simplicity - it is a series of about 10 second clips of people sharing their regrets. It’s fun how they progress through respondents based on age. I do wish they had left out the individuals who said they had no regrets - given the shortness of the clips, that’s not a particularly interesting statement. But most of them are interesting, and many of them sound like the responses I received, maybe with a little less nuance because of the time constraints.
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Listen
What: Advice to My Younger Me, CURATING YOUR BEST LIFE WITH GAIL GOLDEN (23 min)
https://tomyyounger.me/episode-116-curating-your-best-life-with-gail-golden/
Why: I didn’t have a podcast set aside for the theme of advice to a younger self, so I Googled around as I am wont to do when I do not have an appropriate piece to finish off a themed newsletter. I was pleasantly surprised to find the podcast, Advice to My Younger Me, which literally could not be more on topic. The only challenge then was to look for an appropriate episode to share.
I think I found an excellent ep. This interview focuses on the idea of conscious curation” of your life. You can’t be great at everything - pick a couple of things to be great at, and accept being mediocre at everything else. I feel like that is great life advice.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
See you next Friday!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Associate Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
'It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.' - Gandalf (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)