Why you should submit grant proposals

0:00 Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. As clinicians, we spend a decade or more as trainees learning to take care of patients. When we finally start our careers, we want to build research programs, but then we find that our years of clinical training did not adequately prepare us to lead our research program. Through no fault of our own, we struggle to find mentors, and when we can't, we quit. However, clinicians hold the keys to the greatest research breakthroughs.

0:40 For this reason, the Clinician Researcher podcast exists to give academic clinicians the tools to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. Now introducing your host, Toyosi Onwuemene. Welcome to today's episode of the Clinician Researcher podcast. I'm your host, Toyosi Onwuemene. What a privilege to be talking with you today. Thank you for tuning in, for listening today as we talk about the number one reason to submit grant proposals. And I want to invite you, if you are thinking about negotiating your academic career, to join us in Academic Negotiation Academy.

1:24 We are now enrolling, and if you want to sign up to be on our waitlist, please check out the information and sign up on our website, clinicianresearcherpodcast.com. All right, so today I'm talking about reasons to submit grant proposals. And I will tell you that once upon a time I hated submitting grant proposals. I really just did. Number one, it just took a lot of time. And it's like, well, you know, all this time I could be writing manuscripts. I'm submitting grants, and this grant may not even be funded. So grant writing can be hard. And especially when it comes to like the final push towards submission, it really invests a lot of time.

2:08 I remember a couple of years ago during kind of like one quarter where I create a strategic plan for the quarter and my intention, you know, I set an intention for the quarter. I'm like, this is my intention for this quarter. And my intention for that quarter was to begin to allow grant writing to fall into the background of my life. So, you know, every time I would go to write a grant, it was like a big event. Like, all of a sudden it was like I stopped talking to people. I stopped taking showers. Okay, I didn't stop taking showers, but it was just this thing of like everything, all the energy, all the focus went into like writing this grant. And it was like, oh, grant needs to be submitted. And this is about like that was such a big push.

2:50 And to be honest, that hasn't gone away from me yet. But what I did end up succeeding in doing at the end of that quarter was just creating a schedule where I was writing my grant. I was writing, I was working towards a proposal every day. And so as part of my writing structure, I write every day. And I really enjoy writing manuscripts. Oh my goodness, I love to put our research into context and summarize it and create a great story and look at it and say, oh, that's a good contribution. So it's so much fun. Proposals are a little bit harder because I'm taking an idea that's just like out there and creating something new and that's hard.

3:30 And sometimes it just feels like your brain is working so hard. So that I don't I haven't always enjoyed as much. Though at the end when you come to the place where it's like, oh, this looks really good. It really feels good. But in the beginning of pulling out your hairs and trying to figure out where things go, that can be kind of frustrating. But at the end of that period, what I was able to do was to create my grant writing as part of my daily structure. So it's like I write manuscripts as part of my daily writing and I write grants. I continue moving my proposals forward as part of my grant writing. And what that allowed me to do was really to really allow me to think longitudinally about my grant so that at the end of it, I hadn't just spent two or three fully intense days thinking critically about the grant.

4:14 But really it was a multitude of weeks and that really compounds over time. So you want to think about why do you even do all this work? Why do you get into this place where it's like, oh, my goodness, focus, intense time, putting these grants together. Is it even worth it? And I want to talk to you today about the number one reason to submit grant proposals. Why you should submit grant proposals. And then really the number one reason, the most important reason to submit grant proposals is that people who submit proposals get grants. Yeah. People who submit proposals get grants. You don't get the grant if you don't submit the proposal.

4:56 And the converse is true. People who don't submit proposals do not get grants. And so those two things are true. And yeah, I hear you saying, yeah, I've submitted so many grants. I don't remember how many have been funded. And I can hear the pessimism and I get it. I've submitted more grants than I've had funded. But every time a grant is funded, that's a big deal. It's a big payoff. It's a big payday, right? But the reality is that if you don't submit proposals, you can't get grants. And if you don't get grants, then it's hard to justify funding your research program. And when you get grants, then you're able to give your research program life and gather resources that allow you to move work forward.

5:43 So money to support your program is important. Most of us will do that by applying for and getting grants. And for others who have a rich uncle to support their research program, good for you. I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to those of us who are submitting grants and we're trying to think about why do I keep doing this? So I'm going to talk to you about five ways that submitting proposals gets you grants. Five ways that submitting proposals gets you grants and why you should keep doing it and why you should have a structure for doing it consistently and routinely. Okay, number one is you overcome submission shock.

6:24 Okay, let's say that again. You overcome submission shock. And what do I mean by submission shock? I really kind of maybe mean grant writing shock, but I'm talking more about submission shock because the moment you go to submit a grant, all of a sudden it becomes clear all the pieces and the components that need to go towards writing the grant. And it's like, what? I need a letter from my chair? And oh, does it take two weeks for the chair to write my letter? Oh, I don't have two weeks. And then you struggle, you struggle, you know, you get the letter written on time, you get the grant submitted. Yes. But the shock of all the components that all of a sudden come to life to make this grant proposal real, just you get over that.

7:08 You know, and usually like, you know, by the time you submit this next type of grant opportunity, it's new and a lot of components kind of like are the same between opportunities, but somewhat different. And so it's helpful because once you overcome kind of like what's called, I think the sticker shock of, oh, this is what it takes to submit this proposal. If I had known I would have given myself three extra weeks. And the next time you're submitting a grant, you're not imagining that four days will be enough. You know that you need three extra weeks and so you build it in. And so the first submission shock is really just you overcome the surprises that come with the multi-component nature of grant proposals and all the documents that need to come together to make the grant the grant that you're submitting.

7:57 And so the more you do it, the more you can kind of get over it. So it's kind of like, you know, that first day in the hospital on rounds where, I mean, it's your first day as an intern, you don't even know what the bathrooms are and you are actually struggling with navigating your environment more so than you are actually trying to integrate knowledge into caring for patients better. So it's the same thing in the sense that you are kind of getting over all the, you know, putting together documents in a certain way and making sure you're using the right language and finding out, okay, what's the right template for this letter? Like all those things kind of like are distracting from the actual work of creating a proposal.

8:38 And the more you do it, the more all those things become routine and they're no longer a distractor and you can really focus on the body of the grant. You can really focus on creating the proposal rather than kind of figure out the mechanics of submitting. So it's important to do because over time you get over first submission shock. You know what grant is due. You know that there's a whole cadre of documents that needs to come together and you're not surprised anymore and it doesn't cause you to stumble. Okay, so the first thing is you overcome first submission or sticker shock. Number two is that your thoughts about your research become clearer. Every time you have to stop and explain to someone why you're doing what you're doing, who's doing it, why it makes sense to submit this proposal, you get more clarity about where your research program is going.

9:26 You get more clarity about some of the pitfalls in your research program. You get more clarity about your work. And I will tell you that clarity is so important. It's so important as a clinician researcher because sometimes, and I don't know about you, I'm writing a grant that's fuzziness in my head about like, so why is this important again? And I have to get, I have to wade through that fuzziness, do the work to just pass through to get clear about why this work needs to be done and to put it down in this document. And over the course of doing that, the thoughts I have about my research program, where it's going, how important it is, become clearer. And when you have clarity, wow, what a gift it is to yourself.

10:09 Because getting clarity on your research program is the same thing as turning on your lights, turning on the lights in a room full of clutter. In the one, you have to kind of group your way around and make sure you don't stumble and fall. In the other scenario, you're like, oh, I can see where the clutter is now. I can move quickly. So the more clarity you have around your research program, the more you can do, the faster you can move, the more you can accomplish. And so every grant proposal gives you that opportunity to clarify your thoughts about your research program. And then you see where you see more clearly where the next steps are. And so submitting proposals forces you to think more clearly about your research.

10:51 And that's actually a gift to you. Okay. Number three, you become a thought leader. A thought leader is someone who leaps in their thinking. Yes, you become a thought leader because you're thinking, you're thinking about this problem over and over and over and over again. And you're thinking about all the gaps and where you can insert yourself and fill gaps. And because you're the person who's at the forefront of thinking about this research and pulling together literature to support your proposal, you become someone who is thinking about it and you really do become a thought leader. Now if you're repurposing all these things and submitting grants and submitting manuscripts, if you're getting your preliminary data and putting it together into manuscripts that are being published, then you're also announcing to the world that I am a thought leader because I'm actually writing about this and publishing about it.

11:45 But you really do become the thought leader just by doing the work of thinking, doing the work of creating the proposal really from scratch. I mean, you're never really creating from scratch, but you're really bringing this idea to life. And so there's really no greater expert in this specific thing than you because, well, you've been thinking about it a lot for the last six weeks. And if you've been resubmitting and resubmitting or repurposing different aspects of your grant, you may have been doing it for the last year, two, three, four years, you really, really start to become the thought leader because you're thinking about it all the time. You're articulating it all the time and you become really good at doing that.

12:26 So you become a thought leader. Number four is that like wine, you get better with age. The more you write, the better you get at it. The more you write, the better you get at it. You know, people talk about, and I think it was Malcolm Claddwell that popularized a 10 thousand hours concept of you investing time, investing time, investing time, and getting the benefits of that over time. And you know, in general, you need feedback to really get good. But even the kind of person you are as a clinician, you have this kind of built in self feedback loop, right? You write this grant and you submit it and you're like, oh, that wasn't my best.

13:08 And the next time you go to repurpose the content for the next grant or you go to resubmit it, there's the sense of like, OK, how could it be better this time? And so you're always kind of moving forward and improving your work over time. And if it's the same idea, especially if it didn't get funded the first, second, third, fourth time and you're resubmitting it again, it's just getting better. It's getting finer. It's getting sharper. It's getting clearer. And so it's really getting it's really getting better with age. And then the next grant you write is just not as much of an investment as the very first grant you wrote and vice versa. And over time, you become really, really good at grant writing. And what's important to recognize is that grant writing is a skill.

13:52 It's a skill. And like all skills, grant writing can be developed. And so the more you do the skill, the more you practice the skill, the more feedback you get on the skill, the better you get at it. And so, yes, like wine, you get better with age. OK. And that's not age as in your chronological age. That's ages in the age of time you invest writing grants. So you can't say I wrote two grants when I was 32. And now I'm trying to write grants of age of 45. And therefore, my age should make me better. It's the age of time that you've invested in writing grants. OK. Number five is that you experience the effects of compound interest.

14:37 And if you understand anything about finances, I feel like that's one thing people are always talking about is the power of compound interest. It's the same thing. Every time you are writing a grant, every time you're submitting, so not just writing, but actually taking the proposal all the way through and submitting, you are making an investment. You're making an investment in your research career. You're making an investment in your thought leadership. You're making an investment in your program because you're constantly really thinking about it. And over time, so initially it just doesn't feel like much is happening. And sometimes you're so frustrated that you're putting in so much and there's so many rejections.

15:18 But over time, you start to experience the effects of compound interest. There's not just that the grants over time are getting better and now more people are saying yes, we'll fund you. But there's also over time, the research you've been doing, the manuscripts you've been submitting for publication are coming together. And maybe over time, you start to get one grant here, two grants there. Then all of a sudden, people look at you differently. You resubmit. It's like, this is a person who's gotten a grant before. This is a person who has this body of work behind them. And all of that starts to add up to more. And so you start to really experience the effect of all that compounding of your expertise, of your knowledge, of your successes. They all come together and they help you just do better.

16:01 And so over time, what you see is that people who succeed in submitting proposals and getting funded tend to be the people who continue to succeed in getting funded because all of a sudden, they've figured out what works and they have a body of work to support them and they've been funded before. And so people say, well, if they've been successful before, they'll be successful again. And so you experience the effects of compound interest. So let me just summarize those five points again. Number one, you overcome first submission or sticker shock. Number two, your thoughts about your research become clearer. Number three, you become a true thought leader. And four, like wine, you get better with age.

16:43 And number five, you experience the effects of compounding. So those are five ways that submitting proposals gets you grants. And over time, when you submit, you get grants and the person who doesn't submit does not get grants. All right, you know somebody who needs to hear this today. You know someone who's saying, I don't want to submit another grant and you need to share this episode with them, I ask you to please do because how awesome would it be for more clinicians to get funded? Clinicians have amazing and incredible ideas. I do believe that all of them should see the light of day, but they won't see the light of day unless someone's submitting a proposal that gets funded and the work can be done.

17:26 So please contribute to the success of clinicians who are making the transition to clinician researcher by encouraging them by sharing this episode, just one person share with just one person. And if you've been following our show for a while and you haven't subscribed or left us a rating, please do because the more this show is rated, the more people can find us and the more clinicians have the opportunity to succeed as clinician researchers. All right, it's been a pleasure talking with you today. Thank you for tuning in. I look forward to talking with you again next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor.

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