A PhD journey wants you to cultivate a lot of personal qualities while doing the PhD. Not everyone is able to have the same amount of control on their feelings and further on their state of mind. Research has proved that the ability to have mixed feelings or a state of ambivalence can have a very strong role to play in a person’s wellbeing and even career. When we talk of the skill of quick decision making, incongruence in thoughts is a big deterrent as the person finds it very difficult to stick to one thought however, on another perspective it is a sign of a great amount of intellectual maturity. To explain this better, children have a lot of congruency in their thoughts, they often see things straight and hence make quick decisions. An adult, on the contrary has a complex perspective to things looks at a more complex picture and hence are more ambivalent or intellectually mature. People who have a higher degree of incongruent thought process always display greater tolerance towards challenging situations and uncertainty. Since the course of PhD is filled with uncertainty, this works as a great advantage. Learning to be a researcher calls for getting accustomed to a lot of incongruent situations and maintaining congruency amongst that so that your results show consistency and reliability. In many of the disciplines of research, often there aren’t answers in black and white and what matters is the potential of the researcher to put across an argument.
People who seek stability in life find it challenging to live with in congruency and often look for clear cut boundaries. The absence of not precise and clear cut answers can be sometimes very challenging. However, I thing for intellectual stimulation it is very necessary and can be very helpful in the ambiguous world of research.