Lightning Strikes Twice
Jeremy Weisz 17:22
So she lost her husband. That’s terrible. Then there was something else that happened.
Dr. Russell Strickland 17:28
Yeah, so I have a hard time not you know, little laughing at because Yo, if you know some of these things, if we don’t laugh, we cry. But, um, so it was it was just a few months later. She was in the south and one of the large hurricanes that come through, you know, once or twice every year, came in right through her town and her house was totaled. See, she basically lost her house. And so she ended up finishing her dissertation, so She lost her husband, she lost her home. Unfortunately, some of the mementos that she had of her husband were there too. So that made it doubly difficult in that situation. But she persevered. She had the determination to go get a motel room close to work. So she said, Hey, I don’t have to commute back and forth every day in house. So that’s one way of of making lemonade out of a bunch of lemons. And she sat there in in a motel room and finished her dissertation over the next few months, and graduated and of course, you know, the insurance was taking care of the house. And, you know, she had insurance that helped financially after she lost her husband. So there were a lot of mitigating circumstances there. But I mean, when you just think about it, if anybody is working on their dissertation and wants to tell me that their life’s just too tough to be able to finish it. I will tell you this lady, Oh, my gosh, she went through all this to huge losses, things that for most of us well For most of us don’t happen more than once in our lifetime if at all, you know many of us may or may not lose a spouse, most of us probably won’t lose a house if we do once in a lifetime is about enough and she gets hit with both of those things in less than a year and still finished her dissertation graduated just amazing, amazing story. I was so so proud of her.
Jeremy Weisz 19:20
Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, like excuses are creeping up in your mind. Think back to this story. And thanks for sharing this. Dr. Strickland, what are some? What do people feel that is powerful about the process that you walk them through? That allows them to go from like all this turmoils happening to finishing it in a motel room, despite all odds, like what, what are some of the powerful aspects?
Dr. Russell Strickland 19:44
Um, I tell you, you don’t know what you’re doing. there’s confusion, there’s frustration when you don’t know what’s gonna happen next. That’s one of the biggest sources of stress if you look on the stress indicators, you know, the things that that really stress Say our most stressful in our lives. Most of them are about not knowing there are a lot of them are major life transitions, but we don’t know what’s going to happen next you got fired, you know what’s gonna happen next, you lost a loved one to death. You don’t know what’s gonna happen next you got divorced, you don’t know what’s gonna happen next. That’s the thing. If you don’t know what’s going to happen, it really is very stressful for you in stressful in a bad way. It’s not this kind of stress that gets you motivated and moving. It’s something that really wreaks havoc with your physiology with your mental, everything. I mean, it’s just, it’s horrible. So what we do from the very beginning is we take this huge process that is so so difficult for people to see through and we carve out a clear destination, this is where we’re going to go. Okay, and it’s a very specific thing that I don’t really have time to talk about right now. But this is exactly where we’re going to go and it’s like punching that destination the GPS. So instead of you just backing out your car out of the driveway, and you start driving When you say, Well, hopefully only when I get there, you know where you’re going, we then act like the GPS and start giving you turn by turn directions telling you what to do this week and what to do the next week and the week after that. Those two things combined, are some of the most powerful things you can do. When we add to that, the fact that you are being held accountable to a real person, every week digit do what we what we talked about last week, is it done yet? That for a lot of people is a huge motivator. I mean, it’s not like we can, you know, take your car keys away from you or send you to your room without supper or something if you didn’t get it done. But just the fact that you’ve got to tell another person who I said I was going to do this and I didn’t do it. Most of our students just cannot stomach that and they will do what they need to do to get the homework assignment. We give them each week done. And that keeps them moving forward.
Jeremy Weisz 21:49
It’s definitely motivating. I mean, if you think of anything if there’s a test, when did people study they say the first the days before, right, so? Yeah, so it’s the same thing. You You are accountable to someone, you know, you have to answer them and you will start to get work done in a big way right before right? Um, you know, I just want to say Dr. Strickland, people can check out other episodes like you go detailed in these processes and methodology, more stories, people can check out the website, they can go to dissertationdone.com to learn more to contact you with questions. I really appreciate you having me.
Dr. Russell Strickland
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jeremy, I appreciate you being here.
Outro 22:34
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