Making a Survey That Doesn’t Suck (and Embracing Vulnerability in the Process)
Just start.
Lower the stakes.
The things you do move you forward.
These are all affirmations I’ve written for myself over the last few months.
Hoo boy, is it ever easier to write an affirmation than to internalize it!
Even though I’ve had these words of self-compassionate motivation in front of my face every day, I’ve still put off the public writing that I have been promising myself I’ll start.
While I could use a whole chunk of web space writing about why that is (internalized perfectionism, high-achieving mindset, fear of vulnerability, etc etc), I am finally putting my typing fingers where my affirmations are and just starting.
I hope this will be the first in a semi-regular series of writings that I put out into the world to share how I’m working through my own lifequake of the pandemic era. For a longer backstory to earlier phases of that lifequake, you can read my last public writing from earlier in 2021. The tl;dr version is that after a confluence of upheavals and unhappiness, I booked an early ticket on The Great Resignation train last December, and am now reassessing what I want to be doing with my life.
As part of that reassessment, I am trying to live my values of TRANSPARENCY, VULNERABILITY, and COLLECTIVITY, and in that spirit, I sent out a survey this past summer to professional contacts, asking them how they perceive me and my work. I found the answers helpful and thought-provoking, but I was surprised to notice how much the process of putting the survey together and sending it out was helpful and thought-provoking in its own right. And I was moved by how many people wrote back to me to say some version of ‘I don’t feel like I know you well enough to answer this, but what a cool idea this is!’
So yes, I will write a piece about the results, but here I want to share how I put together the survey in the first place.
Background about me: I have a love/hate relationship with surveys. They’re boring and unimaginative. They also deeply satisfy my “tick off the box” anal organizer side.
More background about me: I have an impish pirate punk love of defying expectations.
Last bit of background about me: I like to create room for things that are both playful and thoughtful.
Given all that background, it may not surprise you that I wanted to make this survey experience
a) an easy lift
b) not your average form
c) potentially fun, and
d) a door-opener to introspection.
Starting with Why am I doing this? is a baseline I use for new things. In this case, the answer to that was
to get a more accurate sense of how my peers perceive me and my work.
I’ve worked steadily in museum education for a dozen years, encompassing a lot of different programs, audiences, roles, and institutions. I’ve made imaginary creatures on the floor with kindergarteners and digital games on apps with teens and scent collages on tables with adults. I’ve led anti-racism training workshops and managed budgets and gotten strangers to dance with artwork and revolutionized hiring processes and made zines about empathy and connected a lot of folks with art objects and digital tools and plenty of other folks.
I’m proud of all of that, and at the same time, it’s a wide-reaching portfolio. I wanted to know what stands out about me to others, and I wanted to give people a variety of ways to respond.
First up were some tick-boxes, which I used to distinguish between qualities (general attitudes and traits people associate with me) and skills (particular areas of aptitude and talent people have seen me demonstrate).
I generated lists of each of these using my own own self-assessment, free-writing, and master coach Maria Nemeth’s Standards of Integrity exercise (in which you identify admirable traits in others that resonate strongly with you) that I did during a program with the Radical Support Collective in the early months of COVID-19.
For both qualities and skills, I let people tick all the boxes they wanted and included a “write in” option. My idea was not to over-determine people’s choices. Then, on a suggestion from Mike Murawski (who previewed an early version of this survey), to get a sense of what truly rose to top of mind for folks thinking about me and my work, I asked people to pick which one thing from the list most represented me.
Then it was time for survey fun. I used to ask teachers to evaluate courses I taught at the Brooklyn Museum by writing a newspaper headline about the course, and that always brought in lots of creativity. So here I invited people to contribute a headline of an article they might imagine seeing about me.
In similar vein, I’ve always loved the promise and possibility of designing your own job title, and that’s led to many great conversations over the years. So I asked people to create an imaginary job title for me.
I wanted to give people the option to write me testimonials, though I sent this to many more people than I’ve worked with closely, so I wanted the pressure to be minimal on this question. I moved it to the end of the survey and thought I was done.
Before sending, I shared these plans with several trusted friends and colleagues, as well as the Mapping Your Path accountability community I was working with over the summer of 2021. On a suggestion from that community’s leader, Anne Ditmeyer, I added in a question borrowed from the Reflected Best Self Exercise asking people to share a time they saw me at my best, and brought that one up to the top to start the whole survey off with some positive framing.
And when that was done, I wrote an expectation-setting introductory invitation, knowing that I’d be sending this to both long-time dear colleagues and met-you-in-passing-at-a-conference peers.
I’ve embedded the entire survey here, so you can see what it looked like in the end.
Here’s the vulnerability part…
I don’t aim to present this like it all came easily and smoothly. I thought about this idea and talked it over with people for several weeks before putting the survey together. The whole process was weighty with feelings of excitement and curiosity, as well as some anxiety and fear.
To be honest, the fear didn’t mire me down too much. I’m confident in my skills and the awareness that I can offer value to the world. Where I did find fear, though, was in the vulnerability of opening myself up to a range of admired peers. My instinctive inclination, despite all the Brené Brown and white supremacy culture combatting, is to be independent and individual and impatient and “strong”. It’s an ongoing project (that I’m deeply invested in) to shift my mindset instead towards collectives and communities and slower timelines; to see these as a truer model of strength.
Like I said up top, I’m leaning into TRANSPARENCY, VULNERABILITY, and COLLECTIVITY in this phase of life (re)discovery. I am making a conscious effort to attend to my body and my heart these days, along with my head that’s so used to taking the lead. So here I am, owning and sharing not only the process of putting this survey together and sending it out, but also the emotional and psychological ramifications that went alongside.
I paid attention to where my anxiety about sending this survey out was rooted, to where I felt it in my body. And instead of seeing that as weakness and roughly pushing past it, I slowed down and addressed it using interruptions to my ruminating thoughts that therapists and meditation teachers have offered me over the years.
What was I afraid of?
What was the worst thing that could happen?
How would I handle it if that worst case scenario came to pass?
What could I do to help me acknowledge my anxiety instead of tamping it down?
How could I appreciate my inner voice of worry instead of seeing her as an enemy?
To embrace the excitement and abide with the anxiety, I decided to send this survey out right before a three-week vacation without high speed internet access. That offered me enough space to relax into time away and removed my ability to constantly check response rates.
I also decided I would publicly share the process of putting this survey together. Enough people responded to the idea of this survey with admiration and interest that sharing it out promised to be its own positive feedback loop for me.
So here I am, sharing it. And I fully intend to come back and write about some of the responses, too.
In the meantime, I would certainly encourage any of you reading this to engage in a similar process if you’re re-thinking professional moves in this time of Great Upheaval. There are lots of us out here, and we don’t need to be thinking alone.
For anyone who’s read all the way to the end, I’m going to add one last tidbit, which is a Creative Prompt Coda. This is a way I’m planning to end all my written reflections going forward, since I love a good prompt. I’ll pull from various sources, and offer these up without further explanation, for you to think about and/or act on as you see fit.
Creative Prompt Coda from Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas: Ask people to work against their better judgement.
