Mr Hugh Kearns and Ms Maria Gardiner from the Staff Development and Training Unit at Flinders University have been working with academic staff, PhD students and groups outside the university to "cure" such behaviours and their efforts have won a prestigious national award a Carrick Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning.
The pair have developed a unique approach to dealing with what they call self-sabotaging behaviours.
"We have taken the latest in psychological and educational research and are applying it to high-performing populations so that they can perform even better," Ms Gardiner said.
"We have developed what we call Cognitive-Behavioural Coaching as a tool that produces genuine change in people."
Mr Kearns said that he had taught courses for 15 years and seen numerous trainers in action.
"While people benefited from and liked these courses, I was always a little disappointed that they did not make fundamental, lasting changes in their behaviour," he said.
"The courses seemed to be just touching the tip of the iceberg.
"Most people know that they shouldn't procrastinate or overcommit, or that their expectations are impossibly high.
But the reason they do it is what lies underneath the tip of the iceberg; the doubts and fears that most of us have 'Is this good enough?' or 'If I say no people will be upset with me?'
"You have to target what is underneath the iceberg: then you get profound and long-lasting change".
As an example Mr Kearns cites their work with a PhD student who had produced excellent research, but for the past six months had been unable to write up her work, saying she felt stuck and unfocused.
"We worked with her underlying beliefs and found that she had thoughts like 'what I write must be great' and 'I'm never going to be able to explain this properly'.
"We gave her tools to change this way of thinking", Mr Kearns said.
The student's feedback was she was now more aware of why she might procrastinate: "I have made more progress in the last two months than the whole rest of the year," she said.
Along with PhD students, researchers are also adopting the approach to greatly increase their own research output. In the past year, Kearns and Gardiner have been invited to five different universities, and will visit the University of Western Australia and Griffith University in coming weeks.
In July they addressed the leading research directors in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Australia on how to increase research performance.
Apart from their work in universities, Mr Kearns and Ms Gardiner have also been applying their approach in the area of doctors' wellbeing. They are consultants to Rural Doctors Workforce Agency and the Adelaide to Outback GP Training Program, where they teach doctors how to be more productive and less stressed. Their work is widely acknowledged as assisting in the retention of rural GPs in South Australia.
In addition to their practical work, the pair have over 40 publications and conference presentations in this area, including their recently released Effective PhD Candidates book series, which are requested by staff and students from all over Australia.
Their most recent publication, with Roger Sexton and Kelly Marshall - The role of support initiatives in retaining rural GPs - is to be published in the Australian Journal of Rural Health in August.
