A mentor helped someone finish their dissertation by offering emotional support alongside scholarly feedback. When self-doubt and the strain of work and family threatened to derail the project, the mentor reframed obstacles as solvable problems, keeping momentum alive.
He was also, I find for me in my process, was an excellent complement to my dissertation chair. Also being able for him to take a look at some of the things that I was doing. But in addition to that, it's just the mental journey. There is a mental journey to this. There's a dynamic to this process. And we always talk about the dissertation journey. It's not about just the writing. It's not just about the research. It's about when you hit the wall. It's about when you feel like, "You know what? I don't know why I started this to begin with. What was I thinking? Why am I investing all this time?" You're not with family. You're missing out on different things that's going on. Many people like me, I was working and doing this simultaneously with a very demanding job. So you start to question, and when you start to run into roadblocks and headwinds, that's where I think his genius shines, helping you to think through in terms of the way that you're looking at this. Okay, if you see a roadblock, and I could share what it is, and he'd be like, "Let's look at it this way." And he would start to re— what I call the reframing, the whole reframing process.
