The Encourager Who Rarely Gets Encouraged

I almost didn't write this.

Not because I didn't have something to say. Because what I have to say today doesn't come with a resolution. And I am a person who likes to show up with something to offer — a framework, a reframe, a way through. That's what I do. It's who I am. It's the role I've occupied for so long that I'm not sure anyone, including me, remembers a version of this work where I wasn't the one holding the room steady.

But today I'm showing up without the framework. And I want to be honest about how uncomfortable that is.

This week I learned that two grant applications I submitted to PCORI were not selected for funding. Two. In the same cycle. Both proposals I believed in deeply. Both designed to reach communities I care about. Both built on years of work and months of writing and the kind of collaborative energy that doesn't come cheap.

Gone.

The funding environment right now is as difficult as I've seen it in twenty years of building a research program. I know this intellectually. I know the numbers. I know that even strong science doesn't guarantee support, and that the margin between funded and not funded has never been thinner.

But knowing and feeling are two different languages. And right now my body is speaking the one that doesn't translate into logic. The one that sits heavy in your chest at six in the morning before you've decided what story you're going to tell yourself about it.

I want to tell you something I don't think I've ever written.

I am almost always the person in the room holding space after a setback. I review someone's aims page at midnight, the night before their deadline, because I know what it feels like to stare at a paragraph that won't work and have no one to call. I sit across from junior investigators who just got triaged for the second time and watch them try to hold it together, and I say the thing I genuinely believe: this is not a verdict on your science. This is not a verdict on your worth. You revise. You resubmit. You refine the approach. I'm right here.

And I mean it every single time. That is not performance. That is who I am.

But nobody says that to me.

I want to be careful with that sentence because I am not asking for sympathy. I'm naming something that I think a lot of leaders recognize but never say out loud. There is a particular loneliness in being the encourager who rarely gets encouraged. In steadying the room while absorbing your own losses in real time. In being so good at holding others that people forget — genuinely forget — that you might need holding too.

And you forget too. That's the part that gets you. You forget that you're allowed to need it. You've held the role for so long that needing encouragement starts to feel like a failure of the thing you're supposed to be good at. As if the capacity to give it should somehow make you immune to needing it back.

It doesn't. This week reminded me that I am not exempt from needing what I give.

I want to talk about a moment that I think every investigator knows but nobody writes about.

It's the silence after the news.

Not the resubmission strategy. Not the call to the program officer. Not the debrief with your co-investigators. Before all of that. The silence. The forty-eight hours where you haven't opened the reviews yet — not because you don't know how, but because you're not ready to let someone else's assessment sit on top of what you're already feeling.

I know this silence. I am sitting inside it as I write this.

Here's what I can tell you about it: a story starts writing itself. You don't invite it. You don't even notice it at first. But it's there, in the background, and it sounds like this: maybe the science wasn't strong enough. Maybe I'm not strong enough. Maybe the years I've spent building this — the late nights, the revisions, the teams assembled, the communities partnered with — maybe it's all been leading somewhere, or maybe it's just been accumulating.

That word — accumulating — is the dangerous one. Because it implies motion without meaning. And in the silence, when you're alone with your thoughts and the reviews are sitting unopened, it's easy to confuse the two.

This silence is the most dangerous part of the grant life cycle. Not the writing. Not the budget justification. Not the study section. The silence. Because in the silence, you are alone with a version of yourself who is not your best interpreter of the evidence.

I teach people how to write grants. I've built a whole curriculum around helping scientists translate their work into language a reviewer can fight for. And I will tell you honestly — there is nothing in any curriculum, mine included, that teaches you what to do with this silence. Because it's not a skills gap. It's a soul gap.

I want to tell you what my week looked like, because I think it matters.

Two days after learning about the PCORI decisions, I was at a professional conference. A leadership workshop, surrounded by peers and colleagues, doing the work of showing up, contributing, learning. And in my backpack — printed out, folded, sealed — were the summary statements from both applications.

I brought them with me. I don't entirely know why. Maybe I thought I'd find a quiet moment to read them between sessions. Maybe I thought the proximity to colleagues would make it easier. Maybe I just didn't want to leave them at home where they'd be waiting for me when I got back.

But I didn't open them.

They sat in my bag all day. While I participated in discussions about research leadership. While I talked with junior investigators about their career trajectories. While I was, once again, the person in the room holding space for other people's questions and uncertainties.

Both things in the same bag. The leadership and the loss. The public competence and the private ache. That is not a metaphor. That is a Tuesday.

And I think this is what people don't understand about the people who hold the room. We are not doing it from a place of having everything figured out. We are doing it while carrying our own unopened envelopes. The difference between us and the people we mentor is not that we don't feel it. It's that we've learned to function inside the feeling. And sometimes we mistake that functioning for not needing anything at all.

The same day — the same hours — I published a teaching post. Week eight of a ten-week countdown I've been writing for investigators heading toward the June 5 NIH deadline. A tactical, specific piece about how to rewrite the first paragraph of your significance section so your reviewer engages instead of endures. Concrete. Useful. The kind of writing that comes from a place of authority and expertise.

And someone will look at that and wonder: how did she do both on the same day? How did she write about feeling deflated in the morning and teach grantsmanship in the evening?

The answer is — that is the work. Both of those things at once. That's what this life actually asks of us.

We don't get to stop teaching because we're in pain. We don't get to stop being human because there's a deadline. We don't get to pause the professional self while the personal self catches up. The life we've chosen asks us to hold both. Not one, then the other. Not the polished version during the day and the real version at night. Both. At the same time. In the same body. In the same bag.

That is not compartmentalization. That is integration. And it might be the hardest thing we do.

I've been building a research program for nearly twenty years. I want you to hear me when I say this: I have heard no far more often than I have heard yes. Far more. And every single funded grant in my career — every one — sits on top of applications that weren't funded. They are built on the bones of proposals that someone, somewhere, decided were not enough. Not this time. Not this cycle. Not in this climate.

That is not a failure record. That is a funding record. They are the same document. You just only ever see the final version.

And I think we do real damage in academia — in science, in any field that runs on external validation — by only celebrating the wins. By only posting the funded grants and the accepted manuscripts and the invited talks. By making it look like the path from idea to impact is a clean, straight line, when the truth is that the line is jagged and full of silence and full of mornings where you are not sure you want to open your email.

I promised myself a long time ago that I would not be that kind of leader. That if I was going to talk about the work, I was going to talk about the whole work. The whole human experience of it.

This essay is part of the human experience of it.

I want to close with something that has been surfacing in the conversations around this — in the messages, the comments, the texts from colleagues who recognized themselves in what I was describing.

Several people have talked about reciprocity. About checking on people and not being checked on. About the transactional nature of academic relationships. And I hear all of that. I feel it.

But where I'm trying to land — and I'm still working on this — is something slightly different. I'm less interested in whether the encouragement comes back from the same people I gave it to. I'm more interested in whether I've built the kind of life where asking for what I need is even possible.

Because I think sometimes the silence around us isn't about other people being takers. It's about us never teaching anyone that we're also receivers. We've been so competent, so steady, so available for so long that the people around us have no idea we're carrying anything. Not because they don't care. Because we never let them see.

Learning to need things out loud. That might be harder than any grant I've ever written.

So if you're reading this and you're carrying something right now — a grant that didn't get funded, a paper that got rejected, a position you didn't get, a dream that someone looked at and said not yet, not you, not now — I want you to hear what I needed to hear myself this week:

The sting is real. It is not the whole story. And you don't have to carry it alone.

I'll recalibrate. I always do. That was never the question. The question is whether we let ourselves be seen in the middle — not after the lesson has been extracted, not once we've turned the pain into a keynote or a curriculum or a blog post with a call to action at the bottom, but here, in the raw, unfinished, unresolved middle of it.

You don't need reinvention. You need a return. To the scientist you already are. To the leader you already are. To the person who was doing this work before anyone was watching — and who will still be doing it long after this particular no has become a line on a CV that nobody reads.

We show up anyway. Even when nobody's clapping.

That's the work.

Lisa Carter-Bawa, PhD, MPH, APRN, ANP-C, FAAN, FSBM

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