< In this coaching episode, I’m chatting with a part-time, international student who is juggling full time work, a family, a disability, and a PhD that started many years ago. Predrag contacted me for help with prioritisation and time management. Regardless of your own situation, this discussion will help you think through how to balance your different commitments and how to structure your time when everything feels important. Links I refer to in this episode If you found this episode useful, you might like this one on how to read academic papers more quickly and this recent one on how to make better notes . Transcript Vikki: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast, and today is another one of my coaching episodes. So if you haven't come across these before, I occasionally do a shout out to my newsletter list asking people are interested in coming on the show for coaching so that you guys can hear what coaching is like and hear somebody else working through something that they're finding challenging at the moment. And I did a shout out a little while ago and Predrag got in touch. So welcome Predrag. Predrag: Hello. Vikki: So what I will do in a second is I'll get Predrag to introduce himself to you all, and then we will launch into this as though it is a normal coaching session that I would do with one of my clients in my membership. Vikki: So Predrag, maybe you could tell people a little bit about yourself and why you got in contact for coaching. Predrag: Hi there. Hi there. Hi everybody. So my name is Predrag and, I'm doing my PhD right now that I started many moons [00:01:00] ago, so 20 something years ago. Then I made a break about 15 to 20 years I went to industry. Then I went back to academia. Right now I work fulltime as a faculty lecturer here in Montreal. So I teach and I'm trying to do some research. So anybody who worked full-time knows how tough it's to do the PhD or any kind of study when you work full time. So that was one of the reasons why I heard about Vikki and I'm a regular follower everywhere. Predrag: The second reason is that I study in my second language. I live in Montreal, so I have to speak French, which is my third language as all. So, it's not easy. I have to say. Then a couple more reasons. I have a speech impediment, so it's not easy to teach when you have a speech impediment. So I have to overcome all that. And the fourth reason is that I'm fairly old, let's say, to be doing PhD. So I'm over 50 years old. So all of that combined, I [00:02:00] realized I need some kind of help. So there we go. I'm here. Vikki: Perfect. Perfect. When Predrag got in touch, he explained that he'd heard me talk or people on the show talk about various elements of this, but never all at once, which I think is a really, really fair point. And actually one of the reasons he just sounded like a really interesting person to talk to. But one of the reasons I was particularly keen is because I think one of the things that I haven't talked much about on the podcast is studying internationally, working internationally, studying in a second language. Vikki: And obviously it's not something that I have direct experience of as an individual though I do as a supervisor. And I thought that whole element of it would be really, really useful and so interesting to so many listeners. So tell us a little bit more about how all of those factors you mentioned kind of combine. What, what does it look like at the moment and, and why does it feel so challenging? Predrag: [00:03:00] Well, you can think of it like this, so you have, if you have to do anything, you have like two or three or four or five obstacles, and I'm used to having like at least two or three more extras. So it's more work, more time, more physical and mental energy as well. So at some point you get used, however, it's at some point you get very exhausted, let's say. Predrag: So I'm, uh, I'm reaching a certain point in my life when I am, I don't have that kind of energy as before. So I'm trying to give that final push and finish my, my PhD in the next couple of years. So actually next year if all goes well. So you mentioned second language. Yes. The second language is, it's an obstacle, however, even when I came to Canada in two, 2000, actually 25 years. Very cool. So I spoke English a little bit. So I improved it, of course, when, when I came here. So writing, reading everything in English is not a big deal for me. [00:04:00] However, it is not my, my, my other language. So. That's another obstacle as well. Vikki: Yeah, no, absolutely. And how does that affect the actually doing your work day to day? Predrag: More time. More time. I need more time. And I need, especially 'cause I have speech impediment, which is connected to my, to my second language. So I had to expand my vocabulary. I have to learn to speak slowly. I have to think first and, um, speak after that, of course. So especially 'cause I teach, and when you teach with uh, students, you must have a good accent. I hope that they have a good accent here. So you must have a good accent. You, you must have a good, good, uh, vocabulary. Predrag: And uh, you have to be ready to explain the same thing in at least two or three different ways. Because if somebody doesn't understand it one way, maybe he's gonna understand in second and so on. Vikki: Yeah, no, that's fascinating, isn't it? [00:05:00] Especially the pressures. On you in terms of being what the students need? I always think it's, so, I used to oversee teaching at my old department and it was something we'd hear, you know, we had very international staff and it was something we'd hear from students from time to time. And I always got a bit cross, to be honest, because with the students, I mean, because from my perspective, there's the responsibility on the person speaking the second language to be as comprehensible as possible. Vikki: But I think there's a responsibility on the listener, especially a listener who wants to work in international settings, to learn to understand different accents and to learn... Predrag: exactly. Vikki: To listen and not just go, oh yes, that's not good enough. I can't understand. And I, I feel like we don't often put a lot of emphasis on that side. Predrag: Actually, I agree with that. I'm not sure what is the situation over here in the uk? Here in here in Montreal actually [00:06:00] have a lot of students like from overseas, from from everywhere. So when I started my masters in 2001, I heard people speaking English from all over the world. And I said to myself, Hey, I'm not that bad. My English is actually like fairly okay. So that boosted my self-confidence and I started reading more in in, in, in English and reading helped a lot. Vikki: Yeah. No, definitely. Definitely. And I think it's because I think anybody listening to you is gonna be like, what's the problem? He's got amazing English. Um, but I think this notion that it just makes things feel more effort, that you have to think first, that you have to, you might be a little slower than you would be if you were speaking your own language and things like that. I think people underestimate the sort of cognitive effort, even if you come across as very fluent. Predrag: I just imagine, you know, if, uh, if English was my first language, I can, uh, you know, right now, actually right now I can, [00:07:00] but, but, but, but before I couldn't. If, for example, if I have to go to, to a store and argue about something, explain myself, it was tough. Vikki: Yeah. Predrag: You know? So I had to accept it as is. Vikki: Yeah. I remember talking to, we were at a conference and I have a lot of Dutch colleagues and we were talking to a Dutch guy and he was, and his English is superb. Vikki: Um, and he was talking about the cognitive effort associated with speaking in English all the time. We're like, but, but you are amazing. You are so, so fluent. He's like, no, you don't understand. I'm really funny in Dutch. Predrag: Exactly. Yes. Vikki: He just make me laugh. It's like, I can't do that in English. I can't play word games in English. Predrag: It's like I have, I have a second personality when I speak English. I have a third personality when I speak French, so I, it's almost like I'm not the same person. Vikki: Yes. That's fascinating, isn't it? Okay. Right. I could talk to you about that [00:08:00] side of it for forever, but I want to make sure that we focus in on the things that are really helpful for you. So the big challenge was how all these things interact with each other, right? Yes. That you are working full time, you've got these other things that are making it more challenging than it already could be. So how is that affecting you at the moment? You mentioned some exhaustion, but how, how is it affecting you? Predrag: Affecting me? 'cause I would like to finish, you know, I started my PhD. I'm not gonna hide. I started it in 2003, so I didn't finish it in, uh, in the first, uh, in the first round. Let's say I moved from academia to industry in 2008 because we had, uh, kid number one kid number two. So on. And it was about time to find a real full-time position elsewhere. Predrag: So I moved in 2008 industry and I stayed until 2023. So I worked in food industry, in, uh, medical devices, uh, cannabis even. So I [00:09:00] worked Predrag: mostly, in the regulatory affairs, quality assurance, food safety, food quality. And so I was, I was everywhere. Then a couple years ago, uh, I got an opportunity to come back to the department here. Predrag: I applied, I was, I was accepted, and fortunately my old supervisor is still here. So the very first week he came to my office and he said, oh, I believe you promised me something 15 years ago. Vikki: I love that. Predrag: I, i, I know what, what, what that is. So here, I'm, so basically I have to finish my PhD and, uh, I don't have time. I work full-time as a lecturer, so I have to use my summers as much as I can. Because when I teach, I teach, uh, for example, in, in the next fall, I'm going to teach six, six courses. Vikki: Okay. Predrag: Which is like a full, full work time load. And I try to be realistic, realistic with, with myself. I'm not going have any time to do an experiments and research anything. So I have to try to finish as much as I can now and then [00:10:00] over the holidays if I can, and maybe next summer, if everything goes well, I should be submitting my thesis by the end of summer next year. Okay. So working full-time as I try to work full-time. Predrag: I believe I have a good, uh, student evaluations for my teaching. So I was even nominated for the, for the Faculty of Art award, for teaching. Vikki: Amazing. Congratulations. Predrag: I was, thank you. I was very happy about that. Yeah. So students, I believe students like me, I like do it as well. So there we go. Vikki: Okay. So when we're thinking about actually sort of structuring out the time that you have, are you saying that during term time you do no work on your PhD or you can't do experiments or tell me, so talk me through that a little bit more how that, how that works. Predrag: So let's, let's take for example, from September to December. Yeah. I, I had to teach, I have assignments, I have exams and so on. So I do almost nothing. Yeah. To be honest, I did, the only thing I can do is maybe [00:11:00] read some, some paper here and there. I cannot do experiments because I have to plan for experiments and it takes me least a couple of days ahead. So reading papers, maybe trying to finish, because I was fairly lucky. Predrag: Let's say in last year I was doing my literature review so I didn't have to do experiments. However, it took almost, I wouldn't say a year, but let's say seven or eight months. So that should be out any time now Vikki: Mm-hmm. Predrag: So after that, uh, uh, unfortunately or fortunately, I have to start experiments, so that is going to be ideally next week. So, okay. Uh, organizing everything during, during semester is very difficult because I have to think, uh, about all the courses that I have to teach. And I also do student advising. So if, if uh, any student has any question about their, uh, their path, which courses they have to take, they're, they're gonna come and see me. Vikki: Okay. So one of the things you said there sort of pricked my ears up 'cause it's something that comes up with my clients quite a bit, [00:12:00] which is that you said you wouldn't do PhD work between September and December, but you might do some bits of reading, you might do some bits of writing, but Predrag: there's not really much time just to keep myself in shape and I don't have time. So basically, yes, I'm still doing my PhD, but at a very, very slow pace. Vikki: Okay, so one of the things that I want us to spend a little bit of time thinking about is how we can make that as intentional as possible. Because what I see a lot and people do that, you know, a lot of people aren't in your position, but they are taking some holiday or something like that and they say, I don't really want to work during my holiday. I need a break. I need some time off. But I might do a bit of reading. And the problem is you may have heard past episode about making half assed decisions. The problem is when we say, I'm not really going to, but I sort of might, we put [00:13:00] ourselves in this position where we are likely to end up unsatisfied. One way or another because on one hand we're telling ourselves, so in your case, on one hand we're telling ourselves that actually what you genuinely need to do is get your head down and get your six courses taught, advise all your students and not have to worry too much about your PhD. Vikki: But on the other hand, you are also telling yourself that it would be good to do maybe some reading or writing. Okay. And you can just end up disappointed either way that if you only teach. Oh. But I didn't really get to any reading or writing and I said a word I thought, you know, I sort of said I might and I didn't or the other way round I really needed to get my head down and do the teaching but I interrupted it with PhD stuff. Predrag: Yes. Vikki: So do you recognize, and before we go into what we do about it, do you recognize that that this kind of Predrag: hundred percent Vikki: vague plans? Predrag: Yes. [00:14:00] Yes. Vikki: How does that affect you when you do that? Predrag: Well, lately, let's say maybe next six or, well, in the last six or seven months, I try not to beat myself down. Vikki: Mm-hmm. Predrag: So I said, okay, I, I'm hired to be a teacher, so I'm gonna be a teacher. If I have time during semester, I'm going to do some readings and experiments, but only if I have time. Which is not always the case, which is almost never the case. Of course. Vikki: Yeah. So what would it look like? What could it look like to decide really intentionally what, if anything, you are gonna do over that teaching? And we'll think more in a minute about how we handle between now and term starting, but for that term period, what kind of options have you got, I guess, to make that really intentional? Predrag: My main problem was that I'm not going to start to write anything. I'm not going to start an experiments if I don't have at least a full day.[00:15:00] Vikki: Okay. Predrag: Which I don't, which I don't, I teach every day. Vikki: Okay. However, put experiments to one side. Okay. Why is that true with writing? Why do you need a full day for writing? Predrag: I, I'm not sure if it's mental, but I have to talk myself. Okay. I need to put myself in the writing mode, and for that, I need a couple of hours at least. I know that you talked about it in one of the, at least one of the podcast. Of course. So, but honestly, I, I could, you know, there, there I have a time period during the week when I teach, I have like four hours. Four hours is more than enough. But still I have, I'm gonna come into my office, I'm going to open my PC and, and say, okay, I have four hours. I, I actually can do, can do anything. So, but, uh, no. Vikki: Okay. So there's a challenge. So for the writing side of things, there's a challenge around this belief that you need bigger blocks of time. Okay. Predrag: Yes. Vikki: And we can, we can poke around as to whether that's true because I. I can go both ways on [00:16:00] that, in that I strongly encourage clients to figure out ways that they can do small chunks of writing in smaller chunks of time. Okay. And we can talk about how to do that, but that is not necessarily appropriate when you've got this huge cognitive and organizational load of six courses to run. So let's say we could say that unless there's a full day, you won't do any writing. How about the reading side of things? Predrag: It's very similar. I like to look at reading, like, uh, that's an activity that I'm gonna do not during my, like, regular time. Maybe the evenings or, or, or on the weekends. Like when I'm relaxing, let's say. So Vikki: why is that? Why then? Predrag: To be honest, I don't know. I also connected when I'm in the office, I should be productive. I should do, you should see something when I finish. Okay. Reading, reading is more, oh yes. Especially because I [00:17:00] live, uh, I live in Montreal downtown, and my office is like, uh, 40 kilometers, away. So I, I usually take a bus and I have about three hours per day of a commute. Vikki: Oh, wow. Predrag: Okay. So I try to use that for reading, actually. Vikki: Okay. Predrag: So I try, I try to fill my reading. Vikki: Reading for your PhD or reading for your courses. Predrag: Actually more for PhD. However, when it is a semester time, no matter how prepared I'm for the lecture, I, I'm going to, okay, maybe I should do this, maybe I should, maybe I should go over it once more and so on. So it, it's like a fear. I'm never ready enough, uh, to teach. Vikki: Yes. Ah, so many good things that we can coach on here. This is good. So first thing and this isn't about being really black and white about things, so it's not saying either, you must be using all your commutes to do your PhD work all the way through term no matter what. [00:18:00] And it's not saying you're definitely not going to do any PhD work. What I would really encourage you to think about is, is there a portion of time each week, let's say, or each two weeks, where you could say, on my Monday morning commute, or on a Friday after lunch, or on a Wednesday after lunch or whatever, I'll spend two hours in PhD student mode and we'll think about how to use that time effectively in a minute, but so that you can say, you know, during my teaching period. They say that whole semester, the only time I'm a PhD student is two hours on a Tuesday morning and I start work early on a Thursday, or I work late on a Thursday, or whatever works for you. Right? So that you are not constantly going, oh, I could probably do some [00:19:00] PhD, but I'm really tired. Um, or you're not going, I must be doing this consistently all day, every day in order to stay on top of it. I just wonder what those little sort of almost dates with your PhD could look like through a teaching semester. Predrag: I believe that's doable. It's feasible. I have almost every day. I teach every day, but not all day, of course. So on a couple of days during the week, I have, let's say half a day off, off, let's say. Predrag: So maybe I can, I can dedicate that. My obstacle is that I have to convince myself that if I have four hours, that's enough. That's enough to do something. Vikki: Yeah. And why does feel hard to believe? Predrag: Well be honest. I believe I'm slow. I need more time to be efficient, so, uh, which, which is not always the case, you know, and I need, actually, I need more time to prepare myself to do the [00:20:00] work than do the actual work because once I'm, once I'm in the mood, I'm, I'm fairly fast. Vikki: Okay. And what does in the mood mean for you, for this being efficient? Predrag: So, for example, for DI had to format, uh, my latest paper and I was reading for a couple, couple days how to format it, and I formatted it in like one hour. Vikki: So once you know what you're doing, you are quite fast at cracking on that. Predrag: Exactly. Vikki: But you believe it takes you a better time to figure out Predrag: Yes. Never, never forget, please, that I've worked in industry for 15 years, so over there quality comes after efficiency. So I'm used to work very fast and quality is important, but not as important. Vikki: Okay. So would you in industry have said that four hours was insufficient time to get on with a task? Predrag: I wouldn't have a choice.[00:21:00] Vikki: Okay. So what then happened Predrag: here? Here? Okay. If I don't read my paper this week, I'm, I can read it next week. Vikki: Mm-hmm. Predrag: There are no hard set headlines. Over there. I, I had, yeah. Vikki: And how did that make it easier to get on with? Predrag: I care a little bit less about the quality of my work. Vikki: Mm-hmm. Predrag: Here, I, uh, any, any material, any report, any paper that's, uh, that I had to finish, I try to be like as good as possible. Vikki: Yeah. And this is, this is so good. This so many people will really resonate with this. I hear this all the time that this. So it's a slight perfectionism that I've gotta do it really well. It's important. It's gotta be good quality. All of this stuff. It sounds so worthy. Right. It sounds like who could argue with this is important work and it's important to do it. [00:22:00] Well, we can't. We can't argue with that. And then when you add on top of it, given that I'm doing this in another language, given that I'm coming back to it after a long time, given all these other circumstances, I'm slower. Again, how can anyone possibly argue with all this stuff? Makes total sense. Right? And adds up to this very strong story that you can't do anything useful with four hours. Predrag: Yep. Right? You are. Vikki: I just don't think it's true. Now, I don't think if you've been teaching all morning, I don't think you should expect yourself to get four hours PhD work done in an afternoon. No way. You know, there's only so much brain to go around on any of these days and teaching's tiring, right? Especially teaching in a second or third language. The third language bit is blowing my mind. You're having to think of that as well. Um, so this absolutely isn't about, and how can I use all of those four hours?[00:23:00] Vikki: I just wonder whether when you've got four hours, whether we can make a plan. That means you can do an hour's PhD and it feel nice. It feel like your little respite in a busy lecturer, you know, where you get to be a proper academic instead of rushing from course to course where it almost becomes something rather than something else you've got to wedge in. It almost gets to become, oh, I get to go and do the good bit. Now I get one hour of doing the bit that I came back for. Predrag: Yeah, I agree. So, for example, uh, in the next fall, I completely, uh, set different expectations for me. So like in the last fall, I said, okay, I'm going to teach five or six courses. I, I don't mind, I can, I can publish at least one paper and so on. And so, but for this fall, I said, I said to myself, okay, I do not expect any paper, I mean any, any work mm-hmm. On the, on the phD. So to be honest, anything I do will be excellent. Quick [00:24:00] interjection. If you are finding this episode helpful, but you are driving, walking the dog or doing dishes, just remember this. When you're done, head to the PhD life coach.com and sign up for my newsletter. We've all listened to a podcast and thought this is great. I should do something with it, and that didn't. That's where I created the newsletter to help you actually apply the stuff that you hear. Each week you'll get a short summary, some reflective questions on one simple action that you can take right away. You'll also get access to a searchable archive of all the past episodes so you can find the exact one that you need to help with your current challenges. Plus all newsletter subscribers get a free webinar every single month on a topic that affects all PhD students and academics, and you'll always be the first to hear for when my membership opens to new members. So once you're done listening, or even right now, go sign up for my newsletter and make sure you don't miss out. Vikki: Perfect. Perfect. Because you said that you wanted to keep it ticking over. You wanted to kind of keep your mind in the [00:25:00] PhD game, and I think that's really, really sensible. As long as we can do it in a way that it's not a nag in the back of your head. It's like, almost like, I dunno whether they have them in Canada, in the uk um, people who have had children, during maternity leave get keeping in touch days. So they have a few days during the leave where they can, where they come in and they're kind of just kept up to speed with stuff. Whether you can almost think of it as, you know, you are keeping in touch hour or you're keeping in touch day, even if it was only a few during the semester. So that you, you kind of keep that notion that you're a PhD student and this is something you're academically engaged with, but without it having this productivity pressure on it. Predrag: Yep. I understand. Vikki: Okay. So tell me more about reading not being productive. Predrag: So anytime I start reading something, I'm, uh, I'm constantly tired. You know, [00:26:00] I, I'm not sure if it comes with age or something. Uh, anytime I start reading after a couple of pages, I've, I, I feel sleepy. Vikki: Mm. Predrag: So I have to walk around, I have to move around. I have to take my, my coffee and so on. So if I read one paper within an hour or two hours, I should be, I should be happy. Vikki: Yeah. Okay. So tell me more about how you read a paper. Predrag: Okay, now I started changing that as well. So I heard your not the last podcast, but two or three before that. So, uh, before I would be reading from like everywhere. Mm-hmm. Everything like a, like a book. Yeah. Now I start with abstracts. I go to conclusion. Then if it's really interesting, I go into, into methods and for example, when I was doing my literature review, I would be reading everything, like especially introduction and so on. 'cause [00:27:00] I needed ideas, how to construct my, my review. So mm-hmm It all depends on the goal. Depends the how am I gonna read. Vikki: Yes. Perfect. I love that you've experimented with some other things. Oh yes. So I will link to that podcast in the show notes for people. 'cause by the time this comes out, that will have been a month or two ago. Um, so one of the things I think always be clear about when you're reading is why you are reading that article now. Yes. Um, and one of the ways that you, because I hear this all the time, right, that especially for academics, I don't think it's so much the case with full-time PhD students, but where people are academics, whether they're just an academic or an academic and a PhD student, this notion that reading should be squished into evenings and weekends 'cause it's somehow. Luxury rather than the job. Um, is really, really prevalent. And one of the things that you can do to make reading feel [00:28:00] productive is to set yourself a task. So rather than the task be read this article, which can feel a bit wooly, it can feel, you know, and can be a bit sleepy inducing, right? If we're just working our way through it. If the task, if you are really clear on why you are reading it at this stage, not it's just an important paper, but at this stage I need to understand what my options are for my methods for my next study, or I need to understand what we already understand about this technique or whatever it is, right? Then you can set yourself much more discrete tasks. And one of the ways I like to think about this is if you are telling a student to read this article, what could you ask them to do? So rather than just read this article and them go. Okay boss. Alright. Whatever you say. But if you could say, read this article and summarize its key findings in five sentences. Or read this article [00:29:00] and pick out the key methodological decisions that they made and why. Do you see what I mean? Or, yeah. Read this article and summarize the findings in the first three graphs or whatever. Yeah. Um, giving yourself specific tasks like that make it much more engaging than just reading. It makes it feel productive 'cause you've got a thing that exists afterwards and it makes it easier to fit into a small amount of time because if you've got an hour and you've got a very specific task, it's like, okay, I can do that task in an hour. Mm-hmm. Therefore, it's worth me trying if you see. Predrag: Yes, yes. Vikki: How does that feel? Have you ever experimented with anything like that? Predrag: Uh, nothing like that. However, like, like I said, I started to modify my reading methods, so I might incorporate, uh, this, like I said now. So I'm going to establish a goal [00:30:00] and then, uh, based on the goal, I'm going to apply the reading methods. Vikki: Yeah. And are there ways, I mentioned about making it feel lovely as well, so that it's a bit of a respite rather than something else you are wedging in. Are there ways either environmentally or like in your location or in how you're speaking to yourself that you can make those times feel really nice? Predrag: I wouldn do it in the office, to be honest, because my office is always open, everybody's coming in and out so it's always noise in the background. So I would be doing it either, either on the bus or at home. Vikki: Okay. Are there places on campus that you like going other than your office? Predrag: I can go to the library. I don't like spending time in library because its, again, too many people. It's very silent, but too many people going, uh, in and out. Vikki: Are there any places I can find some where you're like, Ooh, I like it there. [00:31:00] It's a nice place and it feels calm. Predrag: I, I've never looked for one, for one spot. I might though. Vikki: Because it can be a nice way of differentiating, right? Predrag: Yes. Vikki: If you are, if you are constantly cycling between different tasks and in your office, students come and find you and your emails going off and all those sorts of things, it can be nice to think about whether there's somewhere so, like on my, when we were very lucky on my old campus, but my old campus we had an art gallery and there was a botanical gardens and things like that. Vikki: So it was quite easy to be like, I'm just gonna hide for a couple of hours 'cause I've got something I need to do and take your laptop, take your book wherever it was off to one. And it felt quite pleasant. You weren't sort of feeling like you were just hot housing yourself on something different. It felt, it felt almost a little bit like you were slacking off except you were doing the work that actually they you to [00:32:00] do. Predrag: That's actually actually very nice. Vikki: So it'd be worth maybe having a little explore as to what that looks like. 'cause I'm really reluctant to encourage you to just try to wedge PhD stuff on top of everything you're already doing. So during term time, I would only try and do any of this if you can do it during office hours and you can make it feel like a nice break rather than just another task. Predrag: I see. Vikki: Okay. So we've talked a little bit about this fall semester coming up, where you've got the very heavy teaching load, but you also mentioned that you've got some time now and into September where you are looking to get some experiments done. So tell me a bit more about how you're feeling about that. Predrag: I'm feeling excited because I'm, uh, I, I was always like a hands-on type of guy, so doing some actual experiments in the lab. And, uh, actually my PhD is, it's a mixed bag, so [00:33:00] I'm going to do some computer simulations. So again, office work and I have to validate my computer simulations with actual experiments. Predrag: So I have to do some HandsOn experiments, which I'm gonna be doing as of next week. So I have to get in that mood again. I haven't done any experiments since 2005, 2006 maybe, so I have to go to my old lab. Everything is still over there and I have to learn how to use them again. Vikki: Okay. Predrag: So it's going to be a learning curve and, uh, again, I'm afraid I'm gonna need more time, uh, like when compared to some, like, regular students, but still. Vikki: So what's your strategy for. getting back in there getting familiarized Predrag: one experiment at a time. I'm not going to hurry. So even I have like four, five weeks, and uh, based on preliminary idea, I should be finishing that in two weeks, learn everything again. So should be [00:34:00] fine. I have to organize myself, I have to learn again. Knowledge is there, the will is there. So I have to finish everything before my classes start late August. Vikki: And would that be then all your data collection? Predrag: Ideally, yes, because I would like to do it as much, as many experiments as I had. Yeah. So I'm gonna have, uh, data that I'm gonna use later on for writing. Vikki: Perfect. So the idea would be that by the time terms starts you'd have collected all the actual data that you need. And then the remainder of the work would be analysis and writing. Predrag: Exactly, yes. Vikki: Okay, perfect. And how are you looking after yourself this summer? Because it sounds as though there's a potential for you to work hard on lab and experiments and all of those things and go straight into a hefty teaching semester, [00:35:00] Predrag: actually, uh, up, although maybe middle last year, so let's say some, beginning of the summer, 2024, I took care of myself very well. So I went for a run three or four times a week. I went to the gym two or three times a week. I was in a fairly good shape. Now, in the last year, I've, I'm not looking after myself very well, so I tried to eat healthy, which is not always the case. I stopped going to for a run. I stopped going to gym. So I try to incorporate all that, which is very difficult when, you know, to have time. Vikki: It's interesting that that was your interpretation of looking after yourself. Predrag: Yes. Vikki: Because all that stuff sounds great, right? Looking after our physical bodies. Brilliant. Love. Um, and it can really help, right? It can help us feel healthier and all those things, but it can also just be another pressure, right? That we, we've got to fit in. You know, I'm not, I'm not doing enough on my PhD and I'm not running either and I'm not doing this. How are you incorporating rest [00:36:00] or play or just unstructured fun into this? Predrag: To be honest, if I catch one movie a week, I consider myself lucky. I have a wife, of course, and , she has like a regular work. She has her evenings off, her weekends off, and she's expecting us to do stuff and, uh, for reason she's not very happy when I have to work on weekend. So trying to find balance is very different. Vikki: Yeah. What would help, do you think, what does it feel like you need at the moment? Predrag: I'm gonna repeat myself time, time again because I, well, Vikki: on the basis that time is the one fixed entity. The only way we get more time is doing less of something, essentially filling our time differently. What does it feel like your mind, body, or spirit's craving [00:37:00] at the moment? Predrag: Maybe better, better organization of my time and, uh, lower expectations for some items or actually for all items. I don't have to do my, my teaching. I like it, but it doesn't have to be hundred percent. Perfect. Yeah. So if I, if I, if I want to exercise and don't have to exercise six days a week, maybe two or three would be enough. Vikki: Yes. I love that. And a short amount, right? Yes. Three runs of 10 minutes a week are better than no runs. Predrag: Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I agree. Vikki: What makes it hard for you? Because you know that's true, you know that's true of all your different things, right? Yes. But what makes it hard for you to accept that good enough is good enough with all these things? Predrag: Let's say that all my life, I, I try to be as good as possible. So I try to be a perfectionist. So if I say, okay, if I have half an hour [00:38:00] for a, a run, it's not enough. I'm used to like 45 minutes, hour at least. So half an hour is plenty of time to get some sweats to get exhausted. So I know. Vikki: So what kind of gets in the, say the thoughts come up? Oh, no, no. That's not enough time. Predrag: Let's say the first negative part. Okay, I don't have an hour now. I'm not gonna do this. So I had to overcome that first rejection and yeah. Vikki: And we take that first rejection at face value. Predrag: Exactly, yes. Vikki: Perfect. So, and this is just a really good example, right? So many clients, so many of the listeners identify as being perfectionist and have these exact things. It's not worth starting reading a paper if I don't have four hours. I can't write anything if I don't have a full day. It's not worth running if I don't have an hour. All of these things, right? And it's really, really common and it's grounded in some really, like [00:39:00] on one level worthy kind of, I wanna do my best and this is important stuff. Vikki: And then potentially some kind of societal pressures around productivity and all that stuff. Yeah. But one of the things, one of the techniques that I found clients find quite useful is instead of thinking about perfection in each element of your life, is thinking about what a perfect version of what you are currently trying to do is. Vikki: And by perfect, I, I still mean within the realms of realisticness, but on the basis that, you know, because if you were a full-time PhD student with no job, no children, no partner, no nothing, there would be a certain, you know, you'd have other challenges, don't get me wrong, but there'd be a certain amount of time you could spend on your PhD, but you have got many roles that are important. Vikki: You know, you've got, you as a human being, you as a [00:40:00] partner, you as a father, you as a teacher, you as a PhD student, even aside from any of the others. So what would a kind of gorgeous. I'm making like round shapes with my hands on the video here for people listening, what would be like a gorgeous, holistic version of this where you look at it and you're like, you know what? I am not perfect in any one of these things, but this is adding up to weeks and months that feel pretty good. Predrag: Can we talk about priorities? So, okay, at a certain time you don't have the same priorities. So, uh, I was in the best shape of my life maybe eight years ago when I had like a stable, not that demanding industrial position, and I could, I could exercise. Predrag: I, I was in a perfect shape. Then we had some issues at work. We had inspections, audits, and everything. So completely that [00:41:00] because my priority became to answer the inspector. So it's very similar situation. Now, I would like that my priority number one is PhD, which is not unfortunately, however, I have, I have an issue. Okay, I have priority, but I don't have to put hundred percent of me into that. I can put 70%, so that still leaves maybe 20, 30% to do other things, which I don't. Vikki: Yeah. Why do you think you don't? Predrag: I feel bad, you know, if I have priority number one, I feel bad if I don't dedicate myself fully to that. Vikki: Why? Predrag: I, uh, I don't know. It's like, it's me. It's me personally. It okay? If, if I have to do something, I'm going to give hundred percent, because otherwise I'm not, I'm not able to do it. I'm not good enough. Vikki: But so at the moment, I know you said [00:42:00] that you'd love PhD to be number one priority, but it can't be. But you've still got, you as a human, you as a partner, you as a father, you as a worker. So what's number one priority then out of those four? Predrag: Family first. So that's, uh, I always say my, my wife, my kids, family. After that, I would say work, because I got hired to do one thing, so I should be doing that thing as good as possible. And after that, myself, I'm fairly healthy, actually not in the, that I would like to be. So my health is not priority number one for now. Predrag: After that, my entertainment, let's say, so if we can go to cinema, we can go to theatre, but not as often as a, as as I would like. Oh yes. Before when I was doing my master's, I, I read [00:43:00] a lot, a lot. Right now I don't remember the last time I read a book. Vikki: Hmm. So one of the things I think is really interesting with priorities is it is absolutely useful to know if push comes to shove this is the number one thing. However, I think the notion that there's a singular focus is unrealistic for most people. And I think one of the things that can really help with that is deciding which bits of your life are in maintenance mode at the moment, and which bits you are pushing on. Vikki: And then being clear,. This is where the kind of role-based time blocking that I talk about in the podcast a lot becomes useful. And then thinking that what your kind of macro priorities are [00:44:00] doesn't have to be true in every single hour of the day. So let me explain better what I mean. You could decide. And so it sounds as though your health, your sort of physical health is in kind of maintenance mode at the moment. You are right. You, you're healthy enough, you're not pushing to like really, really improve your fitness, but you are right, you're there or thereabouts. And during your, um, teaching semester, maybe PhD's in maintenance mode, it's like ticking along, but I'm not pushing on it. Vikki: Whereas over this next six weeks, it sounds as though PhD data collection will be in kind of push mode. Yeah. So I think it's useful to kind of almost have it as like little slidey dials that you can move up and down and understand that not all of them can be at the top all the time. Now, one of the ways that can be useful to do that is if you imagine those are all scales of one to 10, right? Vikki: And I think we identified like five and you can add whichever [00:45:00] ones you want to, right? But just as a in indicator here, say you've got you as a person, let's bundle family together. 'cause it sounds like you're treating that in the same thing. I don't think people should necessarily treat it as, because I do think relationships and kids maybe need separate attention, but let's put family and then we've got PhD and work. Vikki: So like, let's say four at the moment for simplicity's sake. If you rated all of them out of 10, then that's 40 points. Okay? Now trouble is we can't be at 10 for everything all the time. So let's say like six out of 10. So four sixes, 24, you've got 24 points to distribute amongst those six sliders. Okay. In your kind of day to day life, and it can be a useful, so like during this summer period, where are you putting those 24? Vikki: You know, maybe you're dialing up on PhD, you are dialing down on work a bit, maybe you're dialing family up a bit, if kids are off school or whatever, [00:46:00] dah, dah, dah. And you kind of think where you're doing and then in term time what happens in term time. But what you can't do is miraculously bring up more points. You're just moving them between roles. Does that visual sort of help think about Predrag: Exactly. I'm going to use the same analogy because, because I'm an engineer, so if you have a finite amount of energy, you cannot create energy or power, so you have to distribute that energy wherever it's needed. Vikki: Yes. I love that. I think the, so one of the podcasts that I want to write in that month or so's time I'm gonna do it, is about finding analogies that work for you because they're based in things you really properly understand. Yes. And so I love that you bring that to an engineering analogy because I can see that go even further. Vikki: So partly you can't create energy, you've gotta think about how you're distributing it, but you can also think about where you can remove friction or resistance or whatever, so that the energy is used [00:47:00] effectively. So I think really thinking about this as your life is an engineering machine essentially, and you can't change 'cause you have 24 hours in a human body to put in at one end of this. Vikki: And you've got your different roles, your different bits of your life that you want to put time into, and you can decide how much of you goes into each of those. And you can think about where's create, where's draining, you know, where are you losing energy? Where's making things harder than it could be, but essentially, which ones are you diverting more into? And that will change in different phases of your over the next year. Predrag: Exactly. And they constantly, I'm trying to find these to do, for example, one task in a more efficient or shorter time period. So like they say, you know, if you want to do something efficiently, give it to a lazy person. So I, I [00:48:00] guess I'm lazy. I'm always trying to do one task in a, in less and less time. So that's another, Vikki: gimme an example of that. Gimme an example, because sometimes, that helps and sometimes not. Predrag: I have an excellent example. Uh, a couple years ago I worked, uh, for a food industry here in Montreal and they were doing some kind of data analysis of temperature loggers for, uh, cooking. And we had a technician, she was working on that, let's say, almost full day, one day per week. So I, I said, okay, that should not be that hard, you know, it's like a, it's like a manual analysis in Excel. So I remember, okay, Excel has has packers, so maybe I can program Excel to do it on its own. So basically from seven hours a day, we went to 15 minutes a day. Vikki: Amazing. Because , that's a brilliant example of where, you know, you can identify a task that's being done manually or being done unnecessarily and automate it or speed it up in some way. Okay. Definitely looking for [00:49:00] those sorts of things. Great shout, be careful though that you are not trying to engineer out the academic process. Vikki: Okay, so one of the things I see with people, and again, I think I've talked about this on a previous episode, but one of the things I see a lot with people who want to be more efficient is they start saying things like, um, so when I start writing, I need it to be a good first draft so that I don't waste lots of time rewriting it. Vikki: And the problem is, what that can do is make it really easy to procrastinate, getting going and can actually make it hard. It's a little bit like, so I used to do all these team building exercises with post grads and stuff, and um, one of the things that the engineering post grads were actually really good. Vikki: So they'd have to like build a self-powered thing out of paper plates and straws or whatever that we used a hair dryer to like blow it along or whatever. And one of the things that the engineers were better at than most of the others, wasn't necessarily coming out with a good [00:50:00] design. It was that within 10 minutes they'd cobbled together something just to have a little look at how it went. Vikki: Whereas some of my more theoretical academics, an hour later hour into the exercise, we're still planning and hadn't touched any of the materials. Sometimes the efficient thing to do is actually to dive in and have a go doing it this way, have a go doing it that way, accept that you might rewrite it a few times, accept that you might read that paper multiple times for different reasons, but enabling yourself to actually kind of get going on it. Vikki: So just be cautious that you're not trying to engineer out the academic process. 'cause there's some bits that just are slow. Predrag: Yeah. I still have to adopt, I still have to adapt to that because coming from industry where everything is was like, go, go, go. You have to be efficient. You have to be fast. Predrag: So on. I came back to academia and everybody's so relaxed. Yes, we can do it tomorrow. We, yes, we're gonna have a meeting. Like, so I still have to get used [00:51:00] to that. Vikki: And it doesn't mean being ... you know the whole, we'll have a meeting about that in two weeks time, drives me mad. I wasn't good at that. It doesn't mean being lethargic, but it means that thinking and trying stuff out is part of productivity. Predrag: Okay. Yes. Vikki: It's not just the bit where you are producing the end product. You know, it's the pilot testing essentially. You know, if you try writing it one way, try writing it a different way, that's your pilot testing. Predrag: Yes. Actually, the thing that you mentioned that, uh, few seconds ago, that my first draft has to be as well as possible because I'm gonna spend less time after that. I'm guilty as charged. I'm like that. Vikki: I thought you might be. Lots and lots of people are. And from what you've said, I'm not surprised at all. But I want you to, you know, translate that out to an engineering context and it's like, I'm not going to try building anything until I know for sure it's going to definitely work and we'll [00:52:00] need minimal tweaks to it. Predrag: Yes. Vikki: It's probably not how people come up with innovative designs and how people try things out. Predrag: Yeah. I agree. Vikki: It's sort of thinking what are the kind of, okay, so this, this comes to my, some of my opinions about AI, right? That for me, using AI to do crap tasks that none of us care about. Brilliant. Let's do it. If I can get that to rename all my PDFs by the name of the author and a date, instead of having to do it manually, happy days, let's go. What I'm not gonna abdicate to AI is reading and interpreting the paper, because I want my human brain, because what I care about is the intersection between that paper and my human brain and how those overlap and interact. Predrag: Yep. Vikki: And what ideas it gives me. So I'm not gonna give that intellectual work to AI. And the same, I think, is true in efficiency. Let's think about how we can be as efficient as possible in the crap bits. In the, how can I upload student [00:53:00] marks to the virtual learning environment more quickly than the crap system they give me or whatever, but not, how can I get through this thinking process as fast as possible. Predrag: I completely agree. Vikki: So going back to this notion of, you know, taking your analogy of having this engineering piece of kit and we've got the same amount of energy and we are thinking about how we distribute it. Vikki: The other element of that is that when you have the parts of your life that are currently in maintenance mode or in lower priority mode, is that if you can think about what time you're allocating to them, it can be number one priority for that hour. So often we think that if something's not a priority in our life at the moment, that not only do we not allocate too much time to it, we also don't sort of give ourselves to it a hundred percent when we are doing it.[00:54:00] Vikki: And one of the things I think is just really useful to remember is, so for example, during your teaching term term, your PhD's not gonna be your number one thing. However, if you chose that there were two hours a week that were PhD time, you could be 100% in on PhD for those two hours. So that during that time, if your brain's going, oh, I could just check those emails, it's like, no, no, for the next two hours, PhD is 100% my priority. Vikki: Yeah. And so those little dials where we're putting up, you can use a kind of macro version of that to decide what proportion of your week you are giving to different things. But you can also use a little mini version of it so that if on a busy day when you're in the lab all day, you only get an hour with your kids when you come home before their bedtime. Vikki: You can be all in being best dad ever for that hour. [00:55:00] And that's the bit I think can be really useful for the kind of perfectionist bit of your brain is it's like if I've got an hour with my kids, let's go. I am not thinking about my PhD, I'm not planning my class, I'm not checking my emails on my phone. Vikki: I am dunno how big your kids are, but I'm down on the floor, I'm on the sofa, whatever, all in on whatever I'm doing with my children. Predrag: Yes. Vikki: How does that feel to kind of know that even in a kind of short amount of time, you can be number one priority on any one of these things. Predrag: It's not finding enough time and finding enough energy to do it. It's, I believe it's less, less of an issue than, uh, being mentally satisfied. Okay. If I have an hour to spend with my kids, with my family, that should be family time. I should not be answering my emails. I should not be, I should not be thinking about which experiments I'm doing tomorrow them. So it's like more mental obstacle than I else. Vikki: So tell me more what you mean by that. So the thoughts come up, you mean, you know? So [00:56:00] what do you do then? So you're playing with your kids, you've suddenly realized you are thinking about tomorrow's lecture or whatever. What do you... Predrag: I believe I'm doing the worst thing, uh, that I could be doing. And these, I'm trying to do two things at the same time. Vikki: Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things that often happens, and I do this right, this is, it is a very, very common human thing, is that we think that, so say we decide we're spending time with kids, that our brain goes, oh yeah, yeah, but what about this thing? Vikki: The biggest mistake we make is not that that thought comes up, it's that we take it seriously. That if you are playing with your kids and a thought of tomorrow's lecture comes into your head, that means that you now need to, it's like, oh, okay, brain, I'll think about that then. 'cause you offered it to me. Vikki: I want you to think about all these different thoughts that pop in as like canopies that you can either take or not take as they go past. Because in that moment, [00:57:00] I mean, you can do whatever you like, but the most sensible thing probably isn't to try and do both. 'cause you'll probably end up doing both badly. Right. And feel dissatisfied. Predrag: Yes. Vikki: Is to go, oh, that's interesting. My brain's started thinking about tomorrow's lecture. Okay. Yeah, yeah, I get it. But we are gonna be thinking about that on the bus tomorrow, you know? Is there anything I need to quickly jot down so I don't forget it? If it was a sudden, oh, I'd forgotten that thing. But other than that, yeah. Yeah. It's okay. Brain I've, I've got that. We're thinking about that on the commute. It's all good. You've got an hour and a half all the way. We're gonna think about nothing but this teaching right now we're building Lego or whatever. Yeah. So even if your brain brings these things up, it doesn't mean you have to act on it. It doesn't mean you have to now go, oh, I didn't manage to focus on my kids. I didn't manage to focus on my PhD or whatever. It's like, okay. Yeah, of course. Well, you've got tons going on in your brain. It's no surprise. And you're doing all this in a country that's, you know, different from where you grew up and is everything different language you're doing? [00:58:00] Of course these things are gonna come up. But you get to go. Yeah. Yeah. But not now. Right now this, right now I'm doing this. Yeah. Predrag: Sounds easy, but, Vikki: oh, it's not easy. Predrag: I, I can try doing it. Vikki: Yes. Yes. And that's the key. It is not easy to allow thoughts to come and go like, that is not easy. Right. This is how, you know, I've never really done the whole meditation thing, but it's, it's why people find that so, so tough. Right. This is, it's not easy, but it's something to try. It's something that you can return to, I think is probably the best way to describe it. And you'll notice if you can persist with that a little bit, you'll notice they come up a little bit more less vehemently. They come up a little bit less often. And this is why, you know, we work on all this stuff in the membership , so that you kind of get that structure for practicing all this stuff. Vikki: But you just [00:59:00] notice that you are less convinced by these stories. You're a little bit better at not thinking about 'em for a little bit longer, staying on task a little bit longer. And that is all progress. We are never going to get to a stage. The goal is not to get to a stage where you are like single-minded. Nothing else enters my mind when I'm with my children. Nothing else enters my mind when I'm teaching. It's just. Not plausible, but we can get to a place where it's like, no, no, that's not what we do now. We do this now. Okay, good, good. How is, how is that, how are you feeling? Predrag: Interesting. And, um, I believe I got something that I expected, like some ideas, ideas how to organize actually to change the, how I think. Not radically of course, but slowly. Vikki: Perfect. Perfect. And hopefully it's enabled you, because I know you're a long time listener, which is amazing. Hopefully it sort of allowed you to kind of connect some of the things that you've heard me talk about on the podcast, but [01:00:00] to really bring them into, to your life and your scenario. So hopefully that gives you some things that you can, you can try and practice and work on. Predrag: Definitely. Vikki: Okay. Fantastic. So much fun talking to you, and I think that will be so useful. We have so many listeners and members who are part-time studying overseas, a lot of the things that you're talking about, so I'm sure there'll be lots of people empathizing with that. So thank you so much for coming on Predrag: and thank you. Vikki: And thank you everyone for listening. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next [01:01:00] time.

< Whether you’re a PhD student or an academic, we need to be thinking about how to make mentoring more effective and enjoyable for everyone involved. This week I’m talking with author and university leader Dr Maria Lamonaca Wisdom about her new book, How To Mentor Anyone In Academia. We chat about why mentoring can be so challenging, how we can set ourselves up for success whether we’re the mentor or the mentee, and what we’d change if we were in charge of university systems. Links I refer to in this episode If you found this episode useful, you might like this one on how to have a great relationship with your supervisor . Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast and I am joined by a guest again, and this time I'm joined by the author of a new book, which we are gonna be talking about today. So welcome Dr. Maria Lamonaca Wisdom, who is the Assistant Vice Provost of Faculty Advancement at Duke University. So welcome, Maria. Thank you, Vikki. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for this invitation. We are excited and I've got your book! Anybody watching on YouTube can see me flashing it at the camera. It is how to mentor anyone in academia. So why do you think we needed a book on how to mentor in academia? Why did that feel important right now? Sure. Well, there's, there's several reasons. One is that I think mentoring is always messy and complicated because mentoring involves two or more human beings interacting in a professional relationship and human relationships are [00:01:00] inherently messy, so that's one reason. A second reason is that the professional and academic landscape for those now in the mentee position in higher education is incredibly complicated, and it's far more complicated say than it was for me when I was a graduate student a few decades ago. And I think one of the problems we run into in mentoring is this ingrained assumption that, you know, the mentor is modeling the professional trajectory for the mentee, and the mentee will follow in the mentor's footsteps. Oh, and by the way, the mentor has to give lots and lots of advice and know all the answers. That model isn't working so well right now. I mean, it hasn't for a while, and I think it's just getting worse. And so I think there's that second, reason this mismatch between what mentees need now and mentors feel like they should be giving. And I'll finally say the third reason I think why this book is hopefully necessary is that I don't need to [00:02:00] explain to this audience how busy academic mentors are. I mean, they're stretched in a million ways. There's a million claims on their time. It only just seems to be getting worse as university resources contract and resources thin out. Mentors don't have time to, you know, take a semester long course in mentoring or even, I mean, we sometimes have trouble getting faculty in the door for a two hour session on you know, thinking about their mentoring so you know, what is going to be the most time efficient, effective way to get them the information they need when they need it. There actually are a ton of resources on mentoring. Mentoring is a field of study that's existed for at least 30 years, and if you were to Google mentoring in, you know, in a search engine, an enormous amount of stuff will pop up. Can you go to chat GPT and get it to summarize best practices on mentoring? Yeah. But you're gonna get just a lot, a lot of stuff and not curated. So, ultimately, my hope was to have to create sort of a friendly, accessible guide that mentors could keep on their bookshelf. [00:03:00] Um, and, you know, not some ground pathbreaking, new research on mentoring. There's plenty of that and it's great, but I mean, my book really is meant to synthesize a lot of the best practices and here are the things, you know, I recommend that you pay attention to right now. I think it helps mentors think about mentoring in a way that's easy to grasp and understand and it encourages mentors to think about coaching in new and different ways and in ways that are fresh and interesting, and hopefully that will resonate with mentees. So, so that's the reason. Those are the three reasons I've written the book. Perfect. And yeah, just to, to reiterate, you know, my audience as you know, is majority PhD students, but a lot of academics as well. And I see all the time my interactions with listeners and then my members , the issues around mentorship, whether that is your direct, sort of advisor, mentorship from them, or whether it's the people around you. Issues around mentorship are some of the most challenging things that people face from both sides. Right. You know, I coach academic members of [00:04:00] staff who are having issues with the people they're mentoring and vice versa. And I think anything that helps give people tangible things that they can think about, tangible steps that they can take to improve some of these relationships, I just think is, is hugely important. 'Cause it's these relationships that are, they're fundamental to everything we do, right? Absolutely critical. And there's research that links, you know, success in academic programs and success in careers to the quality of mentorship one receives. Yeah, for sure. And whenever I talk to people about their books and things, I also love to get to know a little bit more about the person behind the book. Right. So what's been your most meaningful experience of mentorship? Either you mentoring somebody or somebody mentoring you? Yeah, that's a really, a really wonderful question. I mean, I've had so many people throughout my career who were so [00:05:00] inspirational to me, and I think maybe, I think this is actually one thing that is maybe a, a takeaway it, it is in the book as well, is that I, when I think about people who were important mentors to me, many of them were not mentors in the most formal way where, you know, we would, have a conversation. We would, we would say to ourselves, okay, we're, we're mentoring now and we're in a mentoring relationship, but I can think of so many people who were teachers or my choir director in college or you know, or maybe professors I just had for a single semester. And looking back, I think when I think about people who shaped me the most, it was often those folks who were not formally mentoring me. You know, I can think of peers who were really inspirational to me. But the formal relationships are also really valuable. And I think particularly having, getting mentorship from somebody who is in a formal relationship to you as a PhD advisor or as a boss or supervisor, I think because it might be even more [00:06:00] difficult to mentor well and effectively in those power relationships. I think when you do find that kind of mentoring in that sort of relationship and you feel like your professional growth is being supported, it feels particularly special and rare. And I think too, and I think most recently, what's inspired the book directly is, you know, now, and I guess it's helpful maybe to explain for listeners is my current role at Duke University, I mean, I, I am a certified professional coach and that's a hat I wear on top of my role as an academic administrator at Duke, you know, developing programs for faculty. Much of what I do is coach faculty. So when I'm coaching people, I am their thought partner and I'm helping them to think through problems in a sort of semi-structured way and help them to think creatively and differently about things so they can solve problems, meet goals. Before I did that, I came to Duke in 2017 and for the first three years, my role, I hadn't trained as a coach yet, and I was asked to serve as sort of a free floating academic advisor for doctoral students in the [00:07:00] humanities and social sciences. And this was a new, this was intended to be an innovation, at least in American universities. There isn't usually somebody outside the PhD program who serves as any kind of advisor. So, but there I was and I was working with roughly 400 humanities doctoral students and it was just drop in advising. And they could come and talk to me about anything related to their academic professional trajectory. So often it was about things that they didn't wanna talk about with their advisors. And here's the funny thing, when you asked me what was most impactful for the book in terms of a mentoring relationship, I was actually unable to think of myself as the mentor for these students, yet they were coming to me and I was supporting them and giving them, you know, designing workshops for them. But I think ultimately that was actually really beneficial. Because I didn't think of myself as their mentor. I was freed up not to act like a stereotypical mentor. I didn't feel like I had to know all the answers. I didn't feel like I had to advise them. I was doing a lot of listening, asking a lot of open-ended questions. [00:08:00] And it was that, those realizations that made me seek out a certification in coaching because I realized that that's what I was doing with them. I was coaching them, I wasn't advising them. And then looking back, it's always thinking about, you know, who are you mentoring even informally. So I think, again, it's really those, those were the relationships that inspired me to write the book. Actually after I got certified to coach the university asked me to design a two week course for doctoral students. And the course was called Best Practices in Mentoring. And as I discussed in the book that that was sort of the birth of the book. I would teach this course to graduate students in the summer and they'd find it very engaging. And suddenly people started to ask me to give talks, and then I started writing about it, and then suddenly the Chronicle of Higher Ed said, can you write about this? And one thing led to another, and then the book contract. So, and I think that's an maybe important thing for graduate students to understand. The way the book is titled, it sounds like how to mentor anyone in academia. It's, it's for people in these formal mentor roles, but that's actually only partly true. I mean, first of all, we can all be mentors [00:09:00] to everybody all the time. I mean, you know, so I, I want people to feel empowered to, to think of themselves as a mentor and be a mentor, even if they're not in that formal role. Many graduate students, especially as they advance in their programs, start becoming more of formal mentors to other students, right? I've worked with graduate students for example, who become, they, they end up informally supervising undergraduates in these, in these labs, in stem. And so many times, you know, we're both mentor and mentee at the same time. So when I wrote the book, I was mindful of that. And so, I think mentees or anyone who identifies in the mentee role, like a graduate student would, would gain a lot from the book. I think it would help them to think about maybe things from their mentor's perspective, because I speak to a lot of pains that academic mentors experience, and I think there's a lot to be gained from bringing empathy to any relationship, especially difficult ones, and trying to see things from the other person's point of view. But at the same time, at the end of every chapter, and there are nine chapters in the book, I have a little section at [00:10:00] the end called Takeaways from Mentees. So for example, I have a section on how mentors can navigate power dynamics and relationships. You know, mentees can feel very powerless in, in formal mentoring relationships, but at the end, I suggest to mentees, okay, well here are some things that you can do if you feel like, you know, power dynamics are getting in the way of you having a productive relationship with your mentors. And I think honestly, you know, I mean, what a lot of mentees want better and more generative mentoring relationships. There's only so much we can do if we sit around and wait for other people to change. You know, there are techniques we can employ to try to, you know, manage up or mentor up, so to speak. They may or may not be effective, but I think for people to feel fully like they're in control of their own professional trajectory and their mentoring relationships, they need to take stock of what am I not yet doing that I could be doing to improve the tenure of this relationship? Or what am I not doing that I could be doing to [00:11:00] get more of my professional needs met? I think that's a really important part of the equation. You know, there's been a lot of talk in the academy about, okay, we need to train faculty mentors. We need to help them up their game. Um, I mean, this isn't just me talking. I mean, these conversations are going on at education's all over the country, all over the world, maybe. But, you know, change happens notoriously slowly. In higher education. I talk about that a little bit in the last chapter. So I think for a mentee who only has maybe two or three years to, to work with a mentor, they're going to need to do some things now and, and it's much easier to change our own behaviors and mindsets than it is, uh, you know, that of another person we're working with. A hundred percent. And I think, yeah, I think that notion that we're all mentors and mentees at pretty much every stage of our life is a really important one. Right. Because I think often, like you say, more senior students underestimate the extent to which they're role models to the people that are junior to them. But I think we also underestimate [00:12:00] how much their academic advisors or supervisors are likely to also be mentees to more to more senior academics who are supporting them to develop their career and things. And so I think having this sort of almost dual role that at most stages in our life, we are both of these things, or we have the potential to be both of these things, I think is a really useful way of, of thinking about it. Absolutely. And you know, I think our tendency to think that we can't mentor somebody or won't mentor somebody, I have a term for it. I think I coined it in the book and I call it mentor imposter syndrome. And it is basically the false belief that we cannot help somebody else. We can't be helpful and like one example is, I see it so much, happening among, among disciplinary lines because one of the things, you know, I, that's, that's I find a little odd is that different disciplines try have been, you know, I think people have been trying to solve, if you will, the problem of academic [00:13:00] mentoring through disciplinary ways, right? So the folks in the humanities will be like, okay, here's our white paper on mentoring in the humanities and the folks in the sciences here's our white paper on how to be a good mentor and the sciences, so on and so forth. And if you look at like, all these studies and white papers that are out there a lot, they're saying a lot of the same things. They're just saying it to different audiences. So if we think about that, that if we, if we accept or play with this idea that that good mentoring actually is, the ingredients for that recipe are actually pretty similar from one discipline to another, then maybe it stands to reason that somebody, let's say in mathematics could actually help somebody in English literature, in some really profound ways, even if they're simply listening, asking questions, helping support them in problem solving, connecting them to other people who could serve as resources, that those are all really important components of mentoring and they have nothing to do with disciplinary background. A hundred percent. I think that comes back to your point of really figuring out what we mean by mentoring in the, and really [00:14:00] expanding that definition of mentoring anyway. 'cause the disciplinary boundaries kind of make sense in the model where you are going to come and be me. You know, if you are trying to figure out how to be a sports science professor, great. You know, find a sports science professor they'll mentor you through. But if mentoring as it is is far broader than that, then it starts to be a bit more plausible that lots of different people from different types of backgrounds, different expertises can help you overcome these different challenges. Right. And I do get pushback sometimes from folks who will say, well what about, you know, if I'm training somebody in the lab and they have to learn how to do the experiments, like of course, right? I mean, there's always going to be times and places for mentors to, to be more prescriptive and to give advice. Um, you know, another example of this is if you're, let's say, you're in an organization and a new hire comes in and this person needs to learn the unwritten rules of the organization. They're never gonna fi They might, but, you know, they can try to [00:15:00] figure them out themselves, but they're gonna flounder for maybe six months to a year and maybe make some dumb mistakes. And so, yeah, there are times in situations when there needs to be a mentor who is an expert in something to, to show that person the way. But I argue in the book, most, a lot of mentors do it way more than they need to be. Speaking from that expert role. And that expertise can be a variety of things, right? One of my most useful, very short term mentoring experiences, but that led to pretty much everything I'm doing now came from somebody completely different discipline to me. Very senior member of staff at my old university who essentially I was gonna be asking for funding to establish a coaching program within the university. So whilst I still worked there and I'd got the opportunity to go and, um, like propose this to the tops of the top at our university. And the person that was mentoring me was mentoring me essentially on [00:16:00] how to manage that person. How to make this something, not how to present what I was wanted to do well, but how to present it in a way that this person was likely to see it as useful and it appeal to them. Um, and it was one of the most useful mentoring conversations that I've ever had, and it led directly to them choosing to fund that, which then in turn led directly to me in leaving the university to set it up separately, which is maybe not what their original intention was, but, that was so useful. And that person didn't have expertise in coaching, didn't have expertise in my discipline or any of those things, but they had expertise in working with that one specific person and they were able to help work with me so that I could make it something that was likely to land and, and it did. So I think, yeah, the, what people have expertise in is can be very, very wide. Yeah. Yeah. And I think some of us, again, we tend to [00:17:00] underestimate how much we do know and how much of it might be valuable to other people. A hundred percent. Now, I did wanna ask you, so there was one, the very sort of first part of the book, you talk about mentoring with backbone and mentoring with heart. And I thought this was a really, really interesting concept. And I'm gonna ask you about it in the context of mentoring first, and then I'm gonna afterwards tell you why it struck me so much. But just give people a little bit of an outline about what you mean by mentoring with, with backbone and heart. Yeah. So one thing I'll mention is, I really wanted the book to be simple. And that's sometimes a hard thing to convince academics that there's value in things that are simple. You know, academics crave complexity for a lot of reasons. But I mean, mentoring is a really big, messy concept and there is no universal consensus on what mentoring means or what it should be. And this is true. I mean, if you were actually to look at the literature on mentoring, you would, you would actually identify hundreds, if not maybe thousand or more [00:18:00] definitions of what mentoring is. So I think sometimes the more complicated something is, the more simple we need to go. It certainly works in coaching and I think it applies to other areas. And so I was thinking about what is a very simple schematic I can use to help people think about coaching. And I found it, um, the concept of backbone versus hard is not unique to me. And I give credit in the book to Mary Beth O'Neill, who has a book called Coaching with Backbone and Heart. And it's really for coaches so that when you're coaching somebody, you have to, to have a certain rigor to what you do, but you also have to be empathetic. And when I read that title, I realized, whoa, this sums up many of my conversations with faculty mentors. And by that point, I'd had a number of conversations with faculty who felt like their mentoring wasn't going well for various reasons and the reasons were different, but I realized that those mentors seemed to be falling on some kind of imaginary spectrum in my head. So if there were two kinds, I think so that so many mentors were floundering or having trouble in their mentoring relationships because they had never taken the [00:19:00] time to build a solid foundation for that relationship. Right? When they started working with a new mentee, there was no conversation where they sat down and said, okay, how are we going to work together? What are our expectations? What are the learning goals? How will we know we've been successful together? There was none of that. And then often, at various points in the mentoring relationship, there were no clear norms for giving feedback. So mentors didn't know when they could give people feedback on their work, what they could say, what the mentee would find inappropriate or off-putting or offensive. And so all of that, to me, or at least in the way I'm developing this, suggests a certain lack of backbone. Um, at the other end, were maybe mentors who were very big on process and feedback. But they were maybe going about it in a way that wasn't terribly thoughtful. That they weren't maybe taking into account how the mentee might be feeling. They might've been sort of these mentors who are , you know, nose to the grindstone, it's all business all the time. And that approach fell apart if the mentee was having a bad day or if there [00:20:00] was a death in the family or maybe the mentor was just so pulled in a million directions, they just were not being fully present to the mentee. You can't build a relationship with somebody if you're never present to them. And so to me that suggests a lack of heart. And so that's, so when I talk to mentors about mentoring, I usually will introduce that, that schema or that spectrum. And often again, everything is, you know, people respond differently to different things. But that concept has proven pretty productive and generative in my coaching conversations, and that's why I use it there. Definitely. And I think one of the things I like that you emphasized is that those things aren't mutually exclusive. Right. I think sometimes people do see them as two ends of a spectrum, and you have to either be more at one end or more at the other end. But I thought it was interesting some of the models that you use where people could be high in both, where people could, you know, I think you talked about a high challenge and high support, for example. Oh, right, right. That's the challenge. Support matrix. Yeah. Where you can have [00:21:00] a good amount of backbone, a good amount of structure and things, and a good amount of empathy and appropriate levels of, um, kind of contact and caring. Yeah. Absolutely. For listeners here, we're referring to it's like a, a grid, right? And so we, we, another way of thinking about mentoring or how we calibrate especially with supporting mentees who are maybe easily discouraged or maybe they're first gen students and they feel like, oh my gosh, I can't hack it In this environment, the mentor needs to be especially thoughtful about the level to which they challenge the student. And this is not about, you know, watering down one's expectations. This is about continuing to hold the mentee to high expectations while also matching it with a, with an appropriate amount of support. And that is a very delicate balancing act. And, no grids or schemas or, or are gonna make it an easy task. It's challenging, but I think that's, that's really the thing is that there's, there's no one right setting right on, on the mentoring hearts like, you know, dial that works for every mentee in every [00:22:00] situation. And when I present the book, I've gotten some great feedback on the idea of how do you balance challenge with support or backbone with heart? And, and I've, you know, had some experienced mentors point out, well, you know, in the very beginning of a relationship it might be we need a little bit more backbone, and then maybe later on it, there may be reasons to, to lean more into the heart quality. So it depends, right. And sort of choosing that balance for the particular situation and adjusting it is necessary. Yeah. Yeah. Quick interjection. If you are finding this episode helpful, but you are driving, walking the dog or doing dishes, just remember this. When you're done, head to the PhD life coach.com and sign up for my newsletter. We've all listened to a podcast and thought this is great. I should do something with it, and that didn't. That's where I created the newsletter to help you actually apply the stuff that you hear. Each week you'll get a short summary, some reflective questions on one simple action that you can take right away. You'll also get access to a searchable archive of all the past episodes so you can find the exact one that you [00:23:00] need to help with your current challenges. Plus all newsletter subscribers get a free webinar every single month on a topic that affects all PhD students and academics, and you'll always be the first to hear for when my membership opens to new members. So once you're done listening, or even right now, go sign up for my newsletter and make sure you don't miss out. Now, I alluded when I asked the question that I had other motivations that that may, that stuck out to me. And the reason for that is one of the things that we talk all about a lot on this podcast, but also my membership is this is notion of sort of self-management, is being a better boss to yourself. And one of the things I've noticed within individuals is that they, either think they need to have a lot of backbone with themselves and be really strict and like hold themselves to very, very high standards. Or at the other extreme, they'll be very indulgent. Oh, it's okay, I can do it tomorrow. I'm quite tired today. I don't need to do it, da da da. And we spend [00:24:00] quite a lot of time trying to find a boss, as we call it, that sits in an appropriate place in between those two things, um, that enables them to support themselves to do challenging things in a way that feels kind of supported and looked after. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how you could see that kind of backbone and heart metaphor applying to how we mentor ourselves as well. Yeah, that's, that's great. And I think that that's also a very strong, I hope people will see it that way. A strong message throughout the book, especially for mentees, is, you know, I think at one point in the book I offer what I call the $10 million question to mentees, which is something like, what does it look like for you to, to take control, take ownership of your academic? I take ownership. That's your, thank you. Alright. I liked the question so much so I've got it written down. Yeah. What would it look like for you to take ownership of your progress, you know, or your professional trajectory in the context of this [00:25:00] relationship. So, so yeah. So taking ownership, and it is hard because when we think about taking ownership, then we do have to think about the level of rigor we hold ourselves to, and the level of maybe understanding or grace we give ourselves. I will say in my experience of working experie with academics, both faculty and students, I personally find that people tend to be too hard on themselves rather than too easy. I have often said that in fact when I coaching faculty or grad students, they often need more help not working than working. Because everything in their experience has drilled into them. They need to work, work, work, work, work. So, so that's, that's one thing. And you know, how do we pull people back from that, the overworking ledge, right? It's a great question. And I think my solution or my approach in coaching tends not to be like, oh, you know, go have a bath, take a rest, get a massage. Or nothing's wrong with those things. But I try to encourage people to tap into what, what gives them energy, what makes them [00:26:00] happy, what makes them joyful. And much of the time when they're able to do that, they actually work better. And they work more effectively and, but they're working in fewer hours. And hopefully they will also take the time to think about, well, what gives me energy outside of work? What makes me joyful? How can I make time for those things? And I think the concept of flow is really important. When we're in a state of flow, we, it's like time stops. We just forget what we're doing and so sometimes it's a question of like, what is the kind of work that is going to get you more into a flow state? And I think another strategy, and this is something in the book, um, there's a book called The Inner Game of Tennis that a lot of coaches love. You may be familiar with this one, right? I'm not, but again, it's so funny that you're picking these bits out again. That is, um, the inner Game of tennis on my notes. Okay. So the inner game of tennis, it's an old, it's funny, you know, sometimes I think we should just all sit down and take a year and read all the old books that we haven't read yet before we read anything new. So there's a book by Timothy Galway, the Inner Game of Tennis that was written in the seventies. And Galway was kind of interesting guy [00:27:00] because he was an expert in adult education, I think, and he also taught tennis at this like exclusive club in California. And he was able to write a book that drew on both those things. And he observed that when he was teaching anyone how to play tennis. The real game was not being played on the court, but it was being played inside the head of the player. And he said, all of us have two players inside of us. Player One and Player Two, and Player One is the critic. Player One is always judging what we do. It's always telling us that we suck at everything. And he doesn't use that word, you know, he is always telling us that, you know, it's just not good enough. We need to do better. And when we listen to Player One, guess what we, our performance suffers because we're so obsessed with being perfect and doing it well. And he said, but Player two is the player who just naturally knows how to play and loves to play. And so he said, if you are teaching anybody anything, it's not just tennis that, you know, one of the best things you could do as a teacher is to help them access Player Two and to spend as much time being Player two [00:28:00] as opposed to Player one. And so that's another concept I use with people I coach and mentor is, you know, what, who are you when you're Player one? What are what? How are you feeling? And what are you doing as Player One? No, definitely because I think so many of these skills that we develop when we're thinking about how we relate to others, right? We are thinking about how can we be curious about what's going on without being judgmental, for example, right? You know, one of the first things of mentorship is that you don't just rush in, tell 'em they're stupid and what they should do instead. Yet so often that's what we do to ourselves, right? It's like, oh, I procrastinate. I need to stop being lazy and I need to just get on with it. Just, just is banned, the word just is banned in my membership and just get on with it. Yet when we're developing these mentoring skills, we are learning how to ask interesting questions about what might really be going on, how to think through all the different options there might be, how to validate those different options, et cetera, et cetera. [00:29:00] And these are all the things we need to do with ourselves as well, right? And that's where I think this work is so interesting is. A, as we said earlier, I truly believe that everybody is both mentor and mentee at most points in their life, if not all. And even if people listening are like, no, no, I'm really not a mentor to anybody, you absolutely can practice your mentoring skills on yourself because I think if you can get that bit right, a life's gonna feel so much better. But B, I think it makes you a more effective mentor. You know, for me, the worst mentors are the ones that are highly critical of themselves. Highly overworked, overstrung, all those things, and sort of kind of believe their mentees probably need to do that too. You know, if we can't manage this stuff for ourselves, it makes it really hard to then be [00:30:00] a compassionate and empathetic mentor. Right. I think, one of the coaching moments I felt most passionately about I mean, when, in, in the chapter where I discuss feedback I ask, you know, coaching moment, time out, you know, I ask mentors to reflect on, well, how do you receive feedback? And so often a lot of the mentors are so uncomfortable with getting feedback on their own work. Of course, there's no way they're gonna be comfortable giving mentees feedback because they maybe have maybe some issues. I mean, this isn't therapy, this is coaching. But, maybe they've never really fully appreciated how difficult it, it just, the whole concept of feedback is for them so how can they develop a comfortable culture for giving feedback when they have all these hangups about it? Yeah. And also, I really enjoyed the chapter about can't remember quite what you called it, but about looking after yourself while being a mentor, that kind of self-supportive side of things. And I thought there was some really useful bits about how it's really hard to mentor effectively if you are burned [00:31:00] out yourself. That to have this sort of time for a reflection, it's really hard if you essentially right at the end of all your own coping capacities as well, which I think sums up quite a lot of academia at the moment, which is obviously a challenge to everybody involved. Yeah. And I think it's really kind of a, a radical thing to think about, right? Because, you know, there are a lot of, now, over the past few years, at least in the states and we have the national Academies of Science, engineering and Medicine, and they've developed all these trainings and curriculum. I'm also certified to teach that curriculum, these are great trainings, but they always, they emphasize competencies, you know, it's like, okay, well, you know, communication and, giving feedback to your mentee. But what about the competency of wellness? You know, I think, I think there's competencies that mentors need to have that we don't always think about and then if we really take the competence of wellness seriously, I mean, that affects so much of who we are. You know, we bring our whole selves to mentoring. So if we're really gonna up our games as mentors, it's not just about, you know, taking a few [00:32:00] trainings and honing a few competencies. It is a lifelong process, I think, of constant reflection on who am I? How am I showing up to other people and how can I be most helpful to them? These are not easy questions to, to think about. No, for sure. And I was actually gonna take you back to the question that you asked. 'cause I'm aware partly I chatted over 'cause I was so excited that I had written it down too. But I also, I want you to give some ideas for the listeners because I'm actually, again, people who aren't signed up yet for my newsletter. I always have three take home messages, two reflective questions, and an action from each podcast. And I'm with your permission, I'm going to steal this question for one of the reflective questions because I think it's brilliant. So I'm gonna say, again, I'm gonna ask you for some tips that might help people. What would it look like for you to take ownership of your academic and professional growth in the context of this mentoring relationship? So what sorts of things do you think mentees can do to take ownership of that growth? Such a wonderful question. I would say probably the beginning [00:33:00] point is for the mentee to have a clear understanding of what they need and what they want. Which it is just complicated in itself because there are plenty of situations where a mentee may not fully understand what they need, but we gotta start somewhere, so, right. And so, you know, if you need somebody to talk to you about, let's say, writing grants or getting funding, what is it you need? And so I think it's really identifying, first of all what those needs are, and then thinking about what can I do? Who can help me meet those needs? And then how can I communicate to that person that I need help with this? So I guess it's really three parts, right? Identifying the need. Identifying the likely person and then actually the communication or making the ask, which I think for some people is the most terrifying thing. There is a tool in there that I did not invent. I have a link to it in the book. It's called a mentoring map. And there are, there are examples that exist for both faculty and for graduate students. I mean, there are really available online, and again, there's links in the book. But if you, if you're a graduate student and you have a mentoring map, the mentoring map has, it is like, if you look at it, it's like [00:34:00] a bunch of squares and they're all sort of linked to each other and you, the mentee is in the middle, is a bucket of need. And so it could be like, you know, here's, here's someone to help me with writing skills. Here's somebody to help me with maybe the soft skills. Here's somebody to, you know, he's a confidant and can provide a safe space. And so it starts with asking the mentee to list all the needs. And then, then we start brainstorming about who are the people both known to you and maybe less well known, who could maybe serve as mentors, either as formal mentors or informal mentors. And then we get into things about how do you make the ask. So there are different ways to approach this, right? If it's a formal mentor, we may need to think ahead of time about how can I frame this ask, you know, what's, maybe I should practice this with a friend. You know, how to ask without sounding too needy or, or anything or resentful or anything like that. Um, so there's that. And then if it's not, if it's an informal mentor, that's even more complicated sometimes because that might involve something like cold emailing somebody you've never met or finding a third [00:35:00] party who could introduce you. Definitely. And that made me think of your backbone and heart thing again 'cause I think when you are doing something that feels challenging, like contacting somebody you don't know, for example, I think having that kind of backbone and heart with yourself is so useful too, right? That on the backbone side, right? How can I make as best case as I can as to what this should look like and what I can learn about doing this well? So having that kind of structure so that you don't send an email that's accidentally rude or accidentally over the top or whatever. But then also the heart side of how can I be kind to myself so that if they don't reply or if they say no, I don't end up telling myself loads of stories about how it's because I'm rubbish and I wasted their time. Right, right, right. And I talk in the book about self-limiting thoughts, you know. I think that's actually the most common self-limiting thought I hear when people are not willing to reach out. And [00:36:00] I, I think, you know, I think also students may be intrigued to know that I have worked with very senior people who are afraid to reach out. I mean, I think all of us on some level, we never get over being in middle school afraid of that rejection. But I think one way to think about it, like for example, this concern that, oh, they're gonna ignore me and I'll feel awful. I mean, this is actually a way of bringing in some backbone to it because it involves some metrics. But if you imagine, let's say you say to yourself, okay, well for let's assume, I don't actually know what the rate is, but for every cold email I send out, every two I send out, one will get answered. If you can tell yourself that upfront, then suddenly when only half your emails get answered, it's like, oh yeah, look, I was right. You know? And it, that suddenly is not about you anymore. Yeah, a hundred percent. I have to remind myself this and reminding yourself that for everyone who didn't reply, because they think you should never have contacted them in the first place, there will be a whole load that don't reply because they are overwhelmed, because they keep intending to and [00:37:00] not getting round to it, or because they now feel bad 'cause it's been too long and they feel stupid replying this late. That's right. There's all kinds of reasons. Right. And there's so many reasons. Okay, so I'm gonna take you in a different direction now 'cause towards the end of the book, as you know, you talk more about change and you particularly talk about kind of some of the structural stuff that underpins all of this and the things that institutions can do to support mentoring. So I have a question for you. If you were in charge of the universe and you could make one change at kind of senior university level, so a new rule, a new policy, a new procedure, you can't just suddenly make everybody motivated to mentor as their favorite thing. But if you were in charge, you could change one rule or process or policy. What do you think would have the most impact on improving mentoring? That's, to me, that's [00:38:00] easy. We need to change the rules around tenure and promotion. I think that so much of this is generated by, you know, again, faculty, they don't, they don't have a lot of time and inevitably they're going to put their focus and energy on the things that are going to give them job security and stability. And I think many mentors would love to spend more time and energy thinking about mentorship, working with our mentees. But the books must be written. The grants must be written. The presentations must be given. The classes must be taught, and that's important too. But I think what's happening right now, we have this funny thing where we're kind of, we're saying one thing but doing another in higher ed, which is we're telling mentors, oh, you must be better mentors. You know, this is so important for student retention and success and we're not giving them much incentive, you know, to take time away from that, all important work of, of teaching and or, and in many [00:39:00] institutions it's just research, right? You know, research one, that's what it means. It's most of what you do is research. So what that means is, and I think for people who don't fully understand this, that at a research institution, you are not gonna get tenure if you don't have a really impressive research program. You just aren't. Even if you're the most amazing teacher in the world, you know, 'cause I've heard people talk about, right? The basis for tenure and promotion being sorted. This, they call it through, at least at our institution, they call it three legs of a stool. You know, but, but it's a very uneven stool because the research leg is the biggest fattest leg. And then there's teaching and then the thin stool is what they call service, which is another sloppy category. But mentoring is, is like, is this the fourth leg of the stool? I don't know. You know, so again, we, I think what we need to do something about this misalignment structurally. A hundred percent. Because not only does that change what people are incentivized to do, but it does also change ultimately who gets promoted as well. Because one of the things that never fails to baffle me is that universities will design promotion structures that promote people who are particularly [00:40:00] good at hitting those targets, right? And so at the moment, especially in research intensives, like you say, they're gonna promote people who are really good at getting grant funding and who are really good at chugging out papers or books, right? Depending on the discipline, and that's great, but then if you start moaning that those people aren't loving, caring members of the community and aren't spending lots of time looking after their students and all those sorts of things, it's a little bit like, well these are not the people a lot of the time. Some of them are, don't get me wrong, they just need more time and they just want to not have so much pressure on the other stuff so they can do that well, but others are just not good at that stuff and we've just promoted the wrong people. Whereas there's a whole bunch of other people who maybe aren't quite getting as many grants, aren't quite publishing as many papers often because they are spending their time in the mentoring stuff, even though it's not kind of valued and it's not promoted. If we promoted them to [00:41:00] tenured professor, then they would be the people who are actually good at doing this stuff and actually could be doing it and leading other people doing it well. Drives me mad. It's so frustrating. It is. It is very frustrating. I guess it is tough. This is now getting you into technical questions. This is my senior leader hat coming back on for, or change is. How do you measure that stuff? If you were going to have mentoring, effective mentoring as part of promotion criteria, how do you measure it? It's such a wonderful question. Because, you know, I think, you know, we think about when, you know, you ask me like, well, who are your most impactful mentors? I mean, I had to think about it and I think in a lot of cases it wasn't clear to me even like the effects of mentoring right? Until years down the line. Like, oh yeah, that talk I had with so and so, or I'm glad that person made me take this class. Um, you know, it, it would not be scientifically [00:42:00] sound to to link any student's successful career outcome to one factor, right? Including mentoring, because there's so many factors. So we really can't look at that. I mean, it helps, but it can't be the only thing. Um, I think so often it comes down to, um. A lot of subjective measures. I mean, including, and especially the mentee's own sense of how helpful the mentor has been in the moment. Um, what, what's different for the mentee? Because they've worked with the mentor. Um, and I think because the measures tend to go back to the mentee and then, um, we have to collect that information, it, it can be very difficult to collect that information, right? Because, you know, especially if the mentor has power of the mentee, the mentee is less likely to complain to higher ups. I didn't get what I needed, um, yet. I think another way, which maybe takes us away from this more delicate situation of power dynamics, which individuals is to think about what does it mean to have a robust mentoring culture and [00:43:00] what are the hallmarks of a healthy mentoring culture? And I think that's easier to measure, right? So how many hours are mentors spending with, in working with mentees? Um. What are the trainings and support programs available for mentors? What are the opportunities for informal mentorship for mentees? And so I think if, you know, we're thinking structurally and having our leadership hats on, it may make be more effective to work at the level of culture, then trying to tinker with the quality of individual mentoring relationships which, which among other things can make faculty mentors incredibly defensive. Well, it it, and that's the challenge, right? I think in the book you describe it all as a wicked problem because it is one of these just so complex. 'cause you know, I've seen like supervision awards and all this sort of stuff, which is lovely until the point that you find out that some academics tell their students to nominate them 'cause I need it for my promotion and whatever. Yeah. And other supervisors just wait and see whether they're lucky enough or don't [00:44:00] even have time to think about it or whatever. And then you have situations where the problems are actually on the student side rather than on the advisor side. And so then an otherwise amazing advisor is having complaints against them that are more, sort of originating from the student. It's, yeah, it's incredibly difficult. And I think you're right, that's sort of trying to create a culture where this is what we do, that looking after these people is what we do, and that that's supported and that there's time for it is right and another indice, I think would be just how often does the department convene even to have a conversation about mentorship or is it even an a bullet item on the agenda of the department meeting? I mean, that's something that surprised me initially where I talked in the book about this, where I occasionally get, you know, invited into a program or department to talk about mentoring and it's like huge event. It is like the Macy's Thanksgiving parade, except it only happens once every five years. Right? So it's like, oh my gosh, we're gonna talk about mentoring. [00:45:00] But it's like, well what's keeping you guys from talking about mentoring regularly? Like you do with teaching or research or anything else you do as a faculty member? Yeah, no, for sure. And as we mentioned, the book's got nine, I think, isn't it? Different sections. One of those with, well they were all fascinating, but one struck me was thinking about mentoring across careers that go beyond the kind of traditional academic career. So maybe tell me a little bit more about why you picked that as something distinct to talk about why that felt so, so salient. Yeah. Well, I think more and more mentors are being called upon or expected to mentor mentees who aren't going to follow in their footsteps and that's generating a lot of frustration on both sides, both for mentors and mentees. I first started working with graduate students at Duke, before I started working with faculty, I initially heard about it mostly from the perspective of, I, I don't think I'm gonna get a job in the academy, or, I don't want a job in the [00:46:00] academy, and I don't feel like I can tell my advisor about this because they're gonna write me off or think I'm not serious or at worse sabotage me. And so real fear of, of being honest with mentors about one's career objectives, and then in cases where, you know, for mentors, some, it's about like, well, how can you make, make your mentees feel safe, even coming to you to talk about different career objectives? What, how do you feel about those careers? Right? But then the ones I think who really got it, who understood that, okay, there's only gonna be four jobs in our field this year, you know, nationally, so what are we gonna do? I think often that mentor imposter syndrome flares up most acutely for mentors who feel like, oh my gosh, you know, I'm gonna have to help this person figure out what to do. That's not being an English professor. And I don't know anything about these careers and oh my gosh, so often the refrain, right? We weren't trained to do this, I guess, from the mentors. And, and I think, you know, I'm hoping in the book to try to just reassure mentors. You might need to do more than you're currently doing, but it's not probably as much as [00:47:00] you're, you think you need to do. Right? Which is, which a lot of it is simply, you know, what are the ways you can be helpful to somebody if they wanna do something you don't understand at all? And well, there's actually a lot, right? And so again, it goes back to more of these coaching mode, more than this advising or answer giving mode, which is listening. You know, providing that, that support and understanding, asking thoughtful questions, helping to be a problem solver, helping to connect that student maybe to someone in their network who knows more than you do. You know, you may not know much about museum management, but maybe your next door neighbor manages the museum, right? So there's things that you can do. And also, again, help encourage them to build a larger network. So, so they have that infrastructure or help them find career services on campus, right? So I think those are the kinds of things. I talk about mentoring also the function of what I call connect, being a connector. Yes, it becomes really important for mentors, right? In these situations. So I think those are some of the, the issues that that crop up on, on both sides. And we talk about mentoring for careers that are not academic ones. One thing that struck me when I was reading it [00:48:00] that um, I'd love to hear your perspective on is I think there's also an extent to which the mentors need to manage their own emotions about the situation too. Because often the, in my experience on all sides. You know, I've been, I've been an advisor, I've been a mentor, I've been a student obviously, and now, now coaching all these PhD students and academics. And one of the things I see a lot is that it is not just a lack of knowledge that the mentors are dealing with, it's that they're a bit disappointed that the person doesn't wanna stay on in academia because they love sending their people off into the different research groups around the world or whatever. Or they're somewhat embarrassed that, you know, have I put them off academia or they're judgy, that they're actually like, Ew, why would you want to do that? You are selling out and that sort of thing. And so I wonder whether you had any thoughts about, well, whether you see that sometimes it's their sort of [00:49:00] emotional reactions that drive behavior and what we do about it. Yes. Oh my gosh, yes. There is, there's so much emotional entanglement in between relationships, probably because, you know, there's this, such a tight association with, you know, that somehow what you, your mentee does is a referendum on you and your career choices and your career trajectory. And I think it's really essential for mentors, develop a kind of self-awareness where if they're having feelings about what the mentor is mentee is deciding to do, they need to step back and think about what, where are these feelings coming from and what's this really about? And so all those things, right. Disappointment, maybe this person is convinced that their mentee, you know, is the answer to all the problems in the discipline. And they're gonna save the discipline because of their amazing dissertation and suddenly this person's gonna go into banking. Or they're gonna stay in the lab and help you. Right. I've seen that as well. Right, right, right. And actually I was wanting, you know, some of these coaching moments can be a little provocative and, and one of, I didn't, I don't know no, nobody's, nobody's written me hate mail yet. But one of the pricker ones I felt was one [00:50:00] where I actually imply or suggesting that maybe mentors might be dealing with some disappointment about their own careers and the reason I feel bold enough to say this is, you know, I was a, tenured faculty member at a small college for 11 years, and towards the end I felt trapped. And, because, I mean, for me, I, yeah, I ultimately, I'm not, I'm not making a statement about tenured careers, but for me, it being tenured at this small institution just increasingly wasn't a good fit. And there were a couple situations where I had not people I was mentoring, but colleagues who, who, who left. And I suddenly realized, oh my gosh, I feel kind of jealous. I mean, oh my gosh, this person has freedom. I don't feel brave enough to do this. But there could even be situations where, you know, when you think about like faculty, you know, I, I actually use this metaphor in the book. I talk about academic careers being like roller coasters, not so much the ups and downs, which are real, but then once you're midway through the ride, already built it in, it's very difficult to get off. Right. Especially after you're tenured because, you know, here you now you've sunk, what a dozen years into this career, and frankly, you're not really trained to do anything else. I [00:51:00] mean, you know, it gets harder and harder to switch gears or, or even go to a different institution with tenure. I mean, it's gonna create all kinds of issues around how you think about career stability and risk taking. And, you know, and I, I'd argue too, tenure tends to attract folks, including myself initially, who are risk averse because tenure, what, what's safer than tenure? I asked this in a sardonic way right now, No, for sure. For sure. And then to finish off, I'm gonna get you to tell people where to where they can find you on all of those things. But let's finish with what is the most surprising thing that you would recommend that mentors do? Something that people go, oh, I had never thought of that. Well, I don't know if it's surprising. I mean, it shouldn't be surprising, but, if I could only say two, uh, two words to mentors, it's stop talking. Please stop talking . You know, and I, I, I just, oh my God. I mean, we just talk too much. And, and, and honestly, it's not something I would even have thought to have said [00:52:00] until I trained as a coach and it was just completely eye-opening. And you know, I'm the kind of person who like, like people will say like, you know, if I'm in a group of people, I do tend to be kind of quiet and, and do more of a listening. I mean, I just naturally fall into that. Even I realized, oh my God, I spend way too much time talking. Right. Especially in one-on-one or if I'm trying to be helpful to somebody. But, you know, if mentors did nothing else, but just talk a little bit less after reading this book, I will consider it a huge win. And because everything else flows from active listening, even in professional coaching, I mean there, a lot of coaches love their tools and techniques and frameworks, and there's a place for those. But I like to call active listening, the Swiss Army knife of coaching because you can help anybody solve just about any problem through listening with presence. Amazing. Thank you so much. I'm gonna flash the book up for people watching on YouTube. Again, how to mentor [00:53:00] anyone in academia., Remind people where they can find out more about you and about the book. Well, I would, I guess I would direct them to the Princeton University Press website, skills for Scholars series. So you just Google Princeton University Press and the title of the book, my little page will pop up. I'm also a member of something called PUP Speaks. So we're a Speakers Bureau, where we're Princeton University press authors who are available for, you know, talks and workshops and things. So if anyone's interested in, in something like that, they can contact Prince University Press through the Pup Author website. Perfect. And I will link all of that in the show notes as well. So thank you Maria, so much for coming on. Thank you everyone for listening, and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your [00:54:00] university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

< Pretty much all PhD students have a vague (or very strong) sense that they’re not taking “good enough” notes. Yet for most of us, we’re not really clear what good enough notes would actually be like, and often have really unrealistic expectations about what function our notes should serve in the future. In this episode, I don’t give you new systems or softwares to improve your notetaking - instead, I talk about how notetaking is your first opportunity to practice being an academic who is IN the field, not just reporting ON the field. I’ll give you some specific notetaking activities to try and a pep talk on how important it is for the world to hear YOUR academic voice. Links I refer to in this episode If you found this episode useful, you might like this one on how to read more quickly and this one on why we should stop focusing on being more efficient . Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. And today for once, I'm gonna start by telling you what this episode is, not by the fact that you've clicked on it. You'll know that I'm gonna be talking about how to make more effective notes and. This is a, this is a whole topic, right? This is a topic that you probably have had sessions on at your university. You will definitely have seen people going on about, on Instagram and YouTube and all these places where you get tons of really, really helpful advice. Um, helpful. Helpful, sometimes helpful, sometimes less helpful. Yeah, but helpful in theory advice. This episode is not gonna talk about software. I'm not gonna talk about whether you should be writing your notes by hand or in long form documents, or in software that has nodes and connections and the ability to find your entire second brain and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you are doing those [00:01:00] things, if they are working for you, happy days. Great. Probably we'll still get something out this episode, but it's probably not specifically for you. I'm not gonna teach you a specific system. I'm not gonna teach you a specific software, and I'm not going to tell you you have to do it like this. You may be like, well, why am I here? Well, why you are here is because none of those things are the problem. All of those things are just a massive distraction. All of those things are an excuse to spend your time watching YouTube videos on how to make good notes instead of actually making some notes. So what we're gonna do, that was harsh. I'm feisty today. It's okay. Let's go with it. So. What we're gonna do instead is we are gonna think about what is the problem with how we're doing it at the moment, and what are the mindset shifts that translate into techniques. Don't worry, this gets super tangible, but what are the mindset shifts that we have to make that are not just gonna make your notes better? They are gonna help you establish yourself as an academic in your own head, [00:02:00] establish yourself as someone who has academic viewpoints, someone who has thoughts and messages that they want to put out there in the world. And we often don't think about that starting at notetaking. But today I'm gonna explain to you exactly why notetaking is the bit that is the foundation of all of that, and how your approach to note taking tells me a lot about your opinion of yourself in academia at the moment. So let's go. So I want you to think about the last time that you were taking notes and what you thought the purpose of that was. Now, if you've listened previously to the podcast, you may have heard the episode about how to take notes more quickly. If you haven't after this one, I strongly recommend that you go back and listen to that because there is, there's a little tiny bit of overlap, but it really backs up a lot of what we're talking about today. There's also one about how to be more efficient or something like that. How to stop thinking about being efficient and be more effective. It's called something like that. [00:03:00] If you've got the archive, you'll find it easily. If you haven't, why not sign up for my newsletter? You'll get the archive. You'll be able to search and find all of these episodes. Anyway what do I mean when I say that how you take notes tells me about what you think of yourself as an academic. What I mean is the biggest issue I see with note taking, particularly for people towards the beginning of their PhD, but to be honest, it progresses all the way through is that you think the purpose of note taking and therefore the purpose of you as a person is to accurately understand and be able to summarize what other people have done. Most people start their note taking journey with reading an article. What did they do? What did they find? What did they say that means? Okay? Really focused on what the other person did, said, thinks. And then in some way, our job, we often [00:04:00] see our job as collating that. Taking what they say, taking what they say, taking what they say, pulling it together into a piece that explains what the field thinks. And if that's what you do, it's okay, but it's not the whole job. What that makes you is a kind of reporter on academia, and that's what you have to do right through undergrad and master's and to some extent the beginning bits of your PhD, particularly if you have taught courses as part of your PhD, um, you often are doing that, right? You are collating what everybody else says and presenting it as some sort of coherent like overview of the field. The fact is, as an academic, what we want you to do is we wanna know on the basis of all of that, what do you think? What's your take on it all? And often what [00:05:00] happens is that you note take like a reporter, you write your lit review like a reporter reporting on that field, and then you get feedback from your supervisor that says, yes, but what's your argument here? Yes, but what's your viewpoint? You're like, I don't know. I've just read a whole load of stuff and written it into a really nice essay for you. Okay. And you're like, I dunno, I'm just little me. The reason you still feel like just little me, the reason you still feel like an imposter, the reason that you don't feel like an academic a lot of the time is because you are not building that practice into your note taking and stuff, right from the very beginning. You are seeing yourself as a reporter, right through to the point where somebody tells you you've gotta have an argument, and then you are panicking about, well, what is my argument? I don't know. So this is why I am not gonna teach you specific softwares and techniques, but instead teach you an approach [00:06:00] that, yeah, it'll get good notes. That's fine. That's almost by this wayside. What it will actually do is help develop your thinking as an independent academic who has got something to offer your field, because you do. I don't even know you and I know that you do. Those of you, I do know members listening. I know for 100% sure you guys have really important, interesting things to offer the world. We just have to convince you of it too. So, and this is the bit that you will have heard slightly if you've listened to that one about how to read more quickly, the point of note taking is not to make a true and faithful representation summary of what somebody else did. That is not your job. If you think that's what note taking is, you may as well let AI do it. All of you who are using AI to summarize your papers for you and stuff, if all you want to do is get a true and accurate summary. I mean, accurate can be a bit of a mixed bag, but often AI will be able to do [00:07:00] that for you. That is not your job. When you are reading an article, when you are taking notes about an article, about a book, your job is to think about the intersection between their research and your brain. If you think about it like a big Venn diagram with two overlapping circles. You've got the stuff that they know and are presenting in that article, and then you've got the circle stuff that you know, and we've got this overlapping section, which is where the stuff that they're writing about in that article meets the stuff, you know, in your brain. That's what we need to be writing about. What thoughts are you having while you read this? What is it making you think about? What is it making you realize? I have a few little questions you can ask yourself. Things like, what did this remind me of? This paper reminded me of an article by so andSo, where they argued something [00:08:00] completely different, and that's interesting because blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, what did it make you wonder when you read this article? What did you, okay. Well that was interesting 'cause when they did that, they found this, but I wonder what would've happened if they'd controlled statistically for X. I wonder what would've happened if they'd asked them this. I wonder what would've happened if they'd added an additional condition. I wonder why these were the documents that were saved and not other documents, whatever it might be, depending on your discipline. Right? What does it make you wonder? What are you still unclear about that should be going in your notes? I've read this and they've now clarified that. However, I am still unclear why blah, blah, blah, blah happens. What are you still unclear about? What have you now realized? Where has your thinking progressed to because your brain met this article. Okay. Where did it click and fit with something that you've read before [00:09:00] or that you understood before? What did it suddenly explain in a way that you'd never thought about that like that before? What do you now believe to be true based on what they said or what are you still unconvinced by and what do you want to further explore? What do you want to delve into a little bit more? Now, tip here. This does not mean reading one article, saving 40 more PDFs of references that they referenced, and now you wanna look at all of those. Now, that's not how this works. What I want it to be instead is what specifically do you want to further explore? What's one thing that now that you've read this, you are dying to look up somewhere else? It's all about where does your brain meet this paper? Because you are not reading this because you are a reporter who is going to report on this field. You are reading this because you are [00:10:00] part of this field. You are an academic in this field. Whatever level you're at, I don't care. You're a Master's student, whatever. You are an academic working in this field. That means you are part of this field, which means that your viewpoint of this literature is what's important. And we get to practice that right now from the very beginning. And you might be going, oh, but Vic, I've been doing this lit review for the last year and I haven't done this. Now I need to go back and do this for all of the No, no, you've done what you've done. You've read what you've read, which means your brain is now in the state, it's in. You have the knowledge that you have now because of what you've done over the last year, two years, whatever. All good. Not a problem. But the next thing you read, try and practice some of the things that we're talking about. Ask yourself those sorts of questions. Now we start from where we're at, not from where we wish we were. So we're thinking, where does our brain meet [00:11:00] this? Now the only way that works is if you are clear on why you are reading that article. And for that I want you to go back to that other episode about how to read more quickly 'cause I really talk through how the purpose of reading an article will vary and why that's really important for how you read it, but essentially know why you are reading it. Are you reading it 'cause you're gonna use the same method. Are you reading it? 'cause it's super similar to what you're gonna do? Are you reading it? Because it gives background into why this is a big thing in the world. Why are you reading it? And by the way, because my supervisor said so it's not a good enough reason. You need to know why you are reading it because then you are reading it in different ways. If you're reading it 'cause you're using the same method, you will focus on the methods and the results. You won't focus on the introduction and the con and discussion quite so much and the notes you take will be your thoughts about the methods, not your thoughts about how they back up their argument 'cause they're probably using it for something completely different. So get clear on your why and then remember the note taking is your [00:12:00] thoughts about that article where the two intersect. If you are thinking, this is the problem where I do my podcast, I plan what I'm gonna say to you, right? I have my little points down here that I wanna say, and then I know you guys so well, but I can almost hear your little responses coming back to me. I spend so much time with my members listening to them talk about all this stuff that it, it kind of comes to me through the ether, what you're gonna be saying. You're gonna be saying, but I don't know anything. But who am I to judge this stuff? That's why we practice. Okay, because at the moment, this is just for your notes, no one's gonna read this stuff. And if you don't practice in your notes, the first time you start thinking about where your brain intersects with all of this, and what viewpoint you have is gonna be in a draft that your supervisor reads. And that's scarier, right? We wanna make it not scary, and I'll coach you through it so that it doesn't feel so scary. But that's a higher stakes time right at the moment. We get to practice [00:13:00] in our notes. What are my thoughts on this? Knowing that no one else is gonna read them, knowing that it's only for us, and that we'll come back to it later, which I'll talk about in a minute. So we've got other opportunities to rethink and consolidate our learning and whatnot. This is where we get to practice. So this is, especially for those of you who are going, oh, but I don't know what my viewpoint is. Brilliant. Perfect. Let's develop your viewpoint. Let's start experimenting with it in our notes in this lovely low stakes situation. The second tip, so that's my first one. The second tip is I would really separate out thinking notes from keeping notes. Most people don't distinguish this. Most people think of them as notes. Maybe you think about like rough notes and polished notes, but I don't even want you to think like that. I want you to think of them as thinking notes and keeping notes. Thinking notes can be destroyed at the end of your [00:14:00] session. You might wanna keep 'em, you might not, but they're literally, that's not the purpose of them. Thinking notes is what helps you to kind of stay focused while you're eating, to help you feel like you're actually doing something. You're not just staring at words while they drift around your head. They are what help you keep track of things. These are scruffy, these are little rough notes. These have got arrows. These don't make sense to anybody. They won't make sense to you in a month's time, but they help you keep on track. You might jot down words you wanna look up, you might wanna jot down things that surprised you or whatever, right? These are just to help you think. Okay. You can use those prompts and those are on my email. I'll, I'll send you a list with that in. You can use those prompts to stimulate what am I thinking? But the point of those notes isn't to keep them. If you ask me which notes are more important, [00:15:00] thinking notes or keeping notes, and I'm going to go as far as to say, thinking notes are more important. I would rather you made good thinking notes and really got your thinking going and binned them than you make beautiful records of what you've read that summarize other people's thinking without really thinking. And if you guys are writing 'em up in better handwriting, we are gonna have words. 'cause that is 14-year-old stuff. We aren't doing it. Okay. We don't need to make it neat. We don't. We don't need to make it beautiful. Any of you who enjoy doing like color coding and stationery and all that stuff, take up art. Let's do art as a hobby. We do not need to make our work more complicated by insisting that it's beautiful as well. I've been there. Let's not do it anymore. So when we're talking about keeping notes, we are not talking about just making those other notes pretty, we are talking about turning them into something that is actually a useful record to retain, and I'm gonna give you some tips about how to do that in a second.[00:16:00] But the way this works, we do thinking notes first, then we do keeping notes afterwards. Free yourself from the pressure of your notes, having to make sense the first time. We are thinking, we're pondering, then we're turning it into something that's short, that's easy, and that is not colour coded. Um, so that we can keep it afterwards and keep it wherever you like. I don't care if you're using a notebook or word or Google or obsidian or whatever. Keep it wherever. The third thing then is what are these keeping notes? What should we be doing? Now, some of this I've already show told you. The keeping notes need to refer to the reason why we're reading it. So they should be focused on the reason we're reading it at the moment. They should be focused on what our thoughts about it are. What I want you to do though, is I want you to do that for each article that you read. I read this article because it changed my thinking like this. It made me realize that da da. Okay? And I want you [00:17:00] to write them in sentences. You might wanna make a quick summary of what they did and what they found. Just for your sake, a couple of lines. I used to like a table. If you were like comparing experimental trials for example or something like that, I used to like a little table that told me how many participants I had, what type of exercise regime they were put through, what the outcome measures were, blah, blah, blah. I used to like that sort of thing. Maybe you want a bit of a summary, but the key thing is sentences about what you think now because of reading this article. That's the bit we keep. Now the bit that everybody misses is they think you go from, let's make notes about paper A, paper B, paper C, paper, D for a hundred papers. And then we go, let's write a lit review. And we go, oh, that's scary. I don't know what to write. I don't know what I think. Where do I start? This is hard. Let's make a plan. Oh no, that's a hard plan's too hard. I know what I'll do. I'll read some [00:18:00] more and we go back off into the literature in order to read some more. If that's your problem, I also have an article about why you shouldn't read while you're writing, so make sure you find that episode somewhere if that's your problem, I also have an episode about why you shouldn't read while you are writing, so make sure you check that one out, but it's because we are trying to make this enormous jump from notes on individual articles over here through to coherent lit review that somebody else can write. Let's not do that. So what I want you to do is I want you to pick five papers that you've been intending to read that are all on similar things. I want you to do short notes on each of them and remember short notes, but not summarizing the article. It's focused on what you think about the article, what you know now. Then, after you've done the fifth one, before you do anything else, I want you to read your notes about those five. And I want you to consolidate them into a mini [00:19:00] paragraph about what you know now that you've read those five articles, I want you to compare and compare, oh, I realize this here, but I realize that there, how does that come together? Are they the same thing? Oh, that backs up my, oh, that doesn't back up my argument. Turn those notes for five articles into a paragraph, two paragraphs about those five articles where you don't just summarize them, where you pull it together into a coherent. Now that I've read these five, this is what I know and what I'm thinking. Okay, the key then you do that again next week and then you, so then you've got two where you've got, this is what I think based on these five, this is what I think based on these five. Now we consolidate those and we write something slightly else. That's now what do I know having read those 10 things and consolidated it down. Do you see how this starts building towards having something that will resemble a [00:20:00] lit review in due course and is centering you as the academic in the middle of this? Because what I would get out of reading those five articles will be different than what you get out of reading them and what your supervisor would get out of reading them and other people. And that is exactly what you should be doing. It should be unique to you, and we practice it by doing it in these low stakes ways, in ways that no one's ever gonna read. Now, when I say this will build towards a lit review, I want you to hear me very clearly. I am not saying you use any of that text. Sometimes people who bang on about efficiency on the internet will say, and if you do your notes using my amazing system, you can then just pull it straight through and your lit review is practically written. No, we're gonna rewrite it 'cause we're writing that for a different purpose. We've then got the reader in mind. We are then making sure that we can get [00:21:00] our viewpoint across to our designated reader. We need to write that in a different way. That's fine. We don't, we're not gonna just cut and paste this stuff. That's not the purpose of it. The purpose is to develop your skills, to develop your understanding, for you to figure out what your viewpoint is so that by the time it's your turn to actually write the lit review, you know what your viewpoint is and all you've gotta do is just write it. Because the problem is most of us, the problem is not writing a lit review. The problem is we don't know what point we're making and we dunno how to figure out what the point is. So we are deciding why we're reading something. We are remembering that all of our notes should be about the intersection between that article and our brain. What do we know now that we didn't know before? What are we still wondering? What are we still unsure about? What are we querying that they did? What do we wanna check? All that good stuff. We are gonna separate the notes we take while we are reading the thinking notes from [00:22:00] a very short version of the keeping notes that we're gonna make. The keeping notes are gonna be about our thoughts. They're gonna be written in actual sentences and they're not gonna be beautiful. And then we are gonna try and consolidate. So we are gonna put time aside after we've read a few to summarize what I now know is this. And all of this is making you more effective at notes, but more importantly is making you more effective at thinking, and it's convincing you what I know already, which is that you are an academic and you deserve to be here. When we are doing this when we're practicing, when we're expressing our opinions, when we're testing our opinions by reading other people's work and clarifying against it and thinking, Ooh, actually I'm now a bit more convinced of this and less of that. That's interesting. Let's document all that stuff. This is why you will then come back to these articles, read them again in the future, and go, oh, [00:23:00] my thinking has come on so far since I last read this. This is being an academic, you are an academic. It is very difficult sometimes to conceptualize ourselves as an academic. And that is what I really wanna help you to do over the next few months, is to really think about how you can feel less of an imposter, more of an academic, and more like you're in control of this story. And for those of you who like Easter eggs, that might be a little Easter egg for what you can expect from the membership next quarter. So I hope that was useful. I hope you're feeling super motivated to go away and read some articles and try all this stuff out. Do not regret what you've done in the past. We just start from here and we move forward. Let me know how you get on if you're not on my newsletter already. Why not? Please join. It's all good. Go to my website, PhD life coach.com. Click on the big orange button in the middle and you'll find it there. Everyone on my newsletter also gets invited to my [00:24:00] monthly webinars, which are amazing. Next week is gonna be super good. If you listen to this live, make sure you check that out. So thank you all for listening, and I'll see you next week.

< Feeling like you know absolutely nothing is perhaps the worst part of doing a PhD. You know you need to become an expert but often you feel like a complete imposter. One great strategy is to identify areas of your life where you DO feel more competent or confident and consider how to transfer that learning to your PhD. This could be a past or current career or even hobbies and life experiences that you often overlook. In this episode, I’ll talk about why this is so helpful and how to use your expertise to make your PhD progress more easily Links I refer to in this episode If you found this episode useful, you might like this one on how to overcome imposter syndrome . Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to season four of the PhD Life Coach Podcast . I am so excited that we have even reached season four. There are now 138 episodes and at time of recording over 112,000 downloads. So thank you so much to all of you who have been a part of that. If you still know people that aren't listening to the podcast, why not? Make sure you send them an episode. It is super exciting to be returning for another year of the podcast and I am really, really looking forward to all the things that we have lined up for you. Today we're gonna be thinking about something that comes up in so many of my sessions. So at the moment I have 83 people in my membership. They're all PhD students who are looking to overcome procrastination, get the stuff done, and relearn how to enjoy their PhDs. And one of the things they talk about most often is feeling like a bit of an imposter. Feeling as though [00:01:00] they don't deserve to be there, that their supervisor is somehow gonna, you know, find out that they're not good enough to be there, that they don't have the capacity to learn to do all this stuff. Maybe you felt like that too. Maybe there are times when you are just thinking, wow. Everybody else knows what they're doing, or at least they know what they need to learn to be doing. And I just, I don't belong here. I'm not part of this. This is not something I'm capable of. And if you felt like that, I want you to know that you are in really, really good company. Most people feel like that at some point in their academic career. And one thing I know more than anything is that it's not an accurate reflection of your capacity to be an academic, okay? The fact that you feel like that doesn't actually relate to your actual abilities, your actual skills, the actual place you're at the moment, or your capacity to become more in the future. [00:02:00] It seems to be completely independent and more driven by the circumstances you find yourself in, the experiences you've had in the past and the way you interpret all of that. The problem is when we tell ourselves we're an imposter and we tell ourselves that the reason we're finding something difficult or the reason we don't know something is because we don't deserve to be here because we're not good enough to be here. What it does is it shuts down all of our creativity, okay? Suddenly it turns from something that is solvable, is figureoutable, into something that is just a kind of inherent trait weakness on your part, and then we can't do anything about it. It's like you've might seen these challenges where they give some people puzzles that are solvable and they give some puzzles that are insolvable, and if they tell you it's an insolvable puzzle, most people will just stop. Most people won't even bother to keep trying [00:03:00] something that they've been told is impossible. And if you are the one telling yourself you're not good enough to do something, then it's really hard to believe that you are gonna make decisions, that you are gonna prioritize, that you are gonna learn, that you're gonna figure it out. The other reason that imposter syndrome can be so sort of paralyzing is that it sees you as a really unidimensional person. It really focuses on this particular context, so the academic context and your current state of being, and take those two things and make it mean that you don't deserve to be here. And we've already talked about how it doesn't allow for the fact that you are gonna change over time, that you are gonna learn and develop, but it also doesn't account for the skills and expertise you've got in other sectors of your life. Now, you may say, I don't have other sectors. I don't have skills and expertise, but it's [00:04:00] simply not true. All of you have experiences in other places or in other types of bits of life that you have expertise in. It might be previous or current jobs that you have alongside or before your PhD. It might be hobbies, it might be your personal circumstances. It might be the way you look after, you know, say you've got a chronic illness, your skills and expertise are in managing that condition, perhaps looking after other people, parenting, looking after elderly parents. All of us have got expertise and experiences in other parts of our lives that imposter syndrome doesn't really take into account. And that's a problem as well. And the reason that's a problem, again, is twofold. One is that, it doesn't sort of recognize that actually we are a sort of rounded human person and that if we [00:05:00] can be an expert in that area, maybe we can be an expert in this area too, but it also prevents us transferring expertise from one setting to another. This is something that actually, many moons ago I used to do some research about, about how skills you learn in one setting can be applied to others. And the main take home of that research was they can be, but you have to do it intentionally and in a kind of reflective way 'cause it doesn't just happen automatically. And when we are telling ourselves we're imposters, we don't deserve to be here, that perhaps there's this other place where, yeah, I, I fit over there. I don't fit here. Then we often don't take the time to think about what do I know from that other bit of my life, whether it's a career, whether it's hobbies, whether it's personal circumstances that I can apply to what I'm here doing today. And so that's what I'm gonna speak about in this first episode of season four, is how you can [00:06:00] use expertise that you have from other parts of your life to improve your own experience of your PhD or indeed broader academia if you're not a PhD student anymore. Now, I think the best way to illustrate this is to give you a couple of examples, right? So those of you who have been around for a while will know that I have a bit of a kind of circus hobby. Okay? So I used to do aerial silks quite a lot, and now I'm more doing sort of poi and generally trying to throw things around poi mostly, little bits of juggling and Diablo and stuff. And you might think that there are no parallels between circus and doing a PhD or surviving in academia. But actually those of you who listen regularly will have heard me draw parallels quite regularly. So as an example, one of the parallels I draw is between tight rope walking and procrastination or staying focused, because [00:07:00] often we think that we need to stay focused all the time, and that focused people don't lose focus. Same as we often think if we don't know anything about circus, that tightrope walkers don't wobble. But it's not true. Tightrope walkers do wobble. People who are highly focused do lose focus. The difference between experts, whether that's in the tight roping world, or whether that's in the staying focused world, the difference between experts and beginners is when and how quickly they notice that they're wobbling, either physically or in focus and how expertly they can correct that. So a beginner tight roper doesn't notice they're wobbling until they've really, really wobbled and then often is either too late to correct, doesn't know how to correct or massively overcorrects and falls off the other side. Whereas an expert type roper notices the little wobble, but [00:08:00] knows exactly what to do just to bring themselves back to in balance again without it being a big drama. So to the non-expert eye, you don't see them wobble when they have. And it's the same with focus. People who are very good at staying focused, they do sort of go, Ooh, squirrel, and then they bring their eyes back to what they were doing, they don't make a big deal of the fact that they just saw a squirrel. They just bring it back to where they were. So that's an example of an analogy from my circus world. Now. I find it really, really useful to draw analogies from my circus world because it's a world that I understand. Now, I don't wanna overstate this guys. I am not an expert in any of this by any stretch, but I know quite a few people who are. It's a world that I enjoy. It's a world that I enjoy learning about, and so when I think of parallels from that world, they seem very visual. They seem within my kind of comfort zone and they [00:09:00] give me a fresh way of looking at things. You know, I talk about plate spinning in one of my courses about what to do when you've got too much to do, for example. And that's another circus trick. We think about juggling quite often and that kind of skill acquisition associated with building up the ability to do that. And how often in PhDs we think we can just jump straight to the hard bit without the sort of buildup and so on. When we can translate it to something we're familiar with, and that feels lower stakes often than our PhD academic life, then suddenly it can bring clarity in a place that you hadn't had clarity before. Now I've used this, this kind of finding analogies, finding expertise from other areas and applying them to your academic life with clients as well. So as an example, I had a client who was very into hiking. They were into hiking. They loved that [00:10:00] kind of route finding, and in fact, they taught others how to do it. They taught others how to navigate. They led climbs and led walks and so on. So this was a world that they loved, that they felt highly competent at and they had a lot of experience at. And we then sort of translated that to the academic world. The idea of way finding through a project. That actually there's not necessarily one correct route that the route you choose. Depends on who's on the hike with you and what conditions there are, and how everyone's doing and all of those things, and how sometimes the route that you planned needs to change. And that doesn't make it a failed hike. It means that you are changing your priorities about where you're trying to get to and why understanding what the, the people, the people in your group are trying to get out of a hike would help you to design what type of hike to take them [00:11:00] on. So all of these things about tailoring it, about responding to setbacks, about considering morale as well as physical ability about prioritizing, whether, you know, are they there for the waterfalls or are they there for the physical challenge, or do they want particularly Instagram worthy photos, or are they trying to build their fitness, or why are they doing this? All of those things we can apply to PhDs, and if you are not in that world, then that won't feel intuitive to you. But if you are somebody who loves the outdoors and loves hiking, then suddenly it kind of makes sense. It's like, oh, I'm plotting a route through this landscape. I'm where I am now and my, you know, submission or viva is somewhere over there, the other side of this landscape, and I can plot my route through this landscape. I'm capable of doing that, and suddenly, if you are someone who's capable of navigating that and making those decisions in [00:12:00] a kind of geophysical landscape, then you can start going, okay, well how would I do that? And how can I translate that to what I'm trying to do here where it's more of a metaphorical landscape. So that's another example. So we've got kind of circus as an analogy. We've got hiking as an analogy. There's also then more professional analogies, right? So lots of you will have either had jobs before, or will have jobs alongside doing your PhD, maybe within academia or outside of and actually taking translations from those can really help too. In fact, some of the biggest imposter syndromes that I get are people who are really big wigs in their like professional area, either previously or still now, but who are relative beginners in academia. And I think it comes across because it's such a contrast that if in your professional life you [00:13:00] are used to people thinking you are great and knowing what you're talking about and coming to you for advice, then suddenly being the one who doesn't know anything can be a real challenge, right? Because you're like, whoa, it has been a long time since I felt this much of a beginner. Now, just as a little aside, any of you're thinking? I don't really have any, I don't have another job outside and I don't really have any hobbies. This is a really good reason to take up some hobbies. I'm a big fan of hobbies for work-life balance, and I've got some podcasts lined up about that stuff soon. But being a beginner again in something is a brilliant thing to do and learning how you navigate beginner ness in something like circus, for example, um, can translate hugely into navigating beginners in academia too. But yeah, so these people who have, they have their amazing careers where they're really well respected and suddenly they're beginners again, in academia that can be really, really hard to manage. One of the things that can really help is really [00:14:00] reminding them that all that skills and expertise they have in their professional setting, they can use this in the academic setting too. Now they might have to translate it. Settings work very differently, right? You know, if you are from corporate America, or you are from a small charity in rural Lincolnshire, it might translate very, very differently. But thinking about how do I handle things like that there and how would I handle it here? Or even if you are senior enough that you advise other people, so you have junior people in your either current or past job. Thinking about how you would help them navigate the uncertainties of that setting, again, can create really good parallels for you to bring into academia. I'm gonna give you two examples. So one example I haven't worked with directly, but I love the analogy 'cause I think it really helps lots of people and that is about being a high class chef. So working anywhere where you've got a very kind of [00:15:00] regimented kitchen. So there are so many lessons that we can take from chefing and those of you maybe cooking's your hobby, right? It doesn't even have to be a job. Maybe cooking's your hobby and you are really good at this too. But, in sort of high class French cooking, they have this concept called Mise En Place, with apologies to everybody who has a good French accent, which basically means everything in its place. And one of the things that happens at the end of a chef's shift is that they reset everything back to where it was at the start of the shift. So that's cleaning down, that's restocking fridges, um, recreating basic sources if you have sources that are always in the fridge that you can use and things like that. Getting everything back so that it's exactly where it was and exactly where you need it to be when you return to work tomorrow. That is one of those examples of something that people do in that profession. Or if you are an organized home cook, you may do there as [00:16:00] well. Actually translating through into your PhD, how can you make sure that stuff is back in the metaphorical fridge, that things are processed and put away, that things are back where you need them to be when you start back up again. A second example of a professional setting. I have had several clients and still do, had several clients who have medical careers either before or alongside their PhDs. So they're doctors, their nurses, their physios, their healthcare practitioners of a whole variety of things. And often they're doing their PhDs alongside their clinical duties and often the things that we struggle with in an academic or PhD setting are things that they're handling all day every day. So I recently had a conversation with a client who was struggling with prioritization. They had lots and lots of things that they "needed" to do. They had to do, um, in their mind, or at least that they had choices about doing. [00:17:00] And they were really, really struggling to pick because all of them felt important, and I encouraged them to really reflect this back to how they would handle it in a medical setting. And they said, you know, in a medical setting, I would accept that I can't do all the things and I would prioritize based on urgency, based on need, based on where I can make the biggest impact and so on and so forth. And that I would have some acceptance for the fact that there are some bits that I can't do to the best of my ability 'cause I've got to prioritize these other people. And so therefore I do what needs to be done and nothing more. And they're not saying that that's easy, but that they get it. And they accept it and they know how to process it. And we talked a little bit about how they would support more junior members of staff. Because when you start out in healthcare, you have the same thing, right? You wanna help everyone, you wanna do all the things. And you, it's hard to realize that you can't. And as they were thinking through how easy that was for them in their professional setting [00:18:00] and what they would say to their junior healthcare practitioners who were struggling, they were increasingly able to see how they could apply that into their PhD and academic world. Now that one doesn't work for me. Right? The idea of being in a hospital and having 20 patients, all of whom need me to varying degrees for very different things, I find deeply terrifying. I have no idea how I would, you know, I'm a first aider, so I can do like basic sort of emergency, okay. Those ones are quiet and dying. Let's go that way, sort of assessments. But in terms of in a ward, the idea terrifies me. So that's not an analogy that works for me, but for my clients for whom that's their setting, that's where they feel like a kind of, um, you know, a functioning professional. That's where they feel at their best, whatever the opposite of an imposter is. [00:19:00] Then being able to see that in this setting and being able to say, okay, there are parallels, there's things I can take from here and apply there is hugely empowering. So I want you to think, I want you to think through professional experiences. I want you to think through hobbies and side hustles and all that good stuff, or your actual personal life. So I think. Parenthood is a great example of this. Some of you might be in amateur theater or high level sports. So I come from a sports science background and some of our best students were the students that were also high class athletes. We called them dual professionals where they were a student and they were essentially a professional athlete and some of them got distracted by it. But the ones that could translate through from one to the other, that they could see how the training they did in their physical lives could translate across to the training that they [00:20:00] needed to do in their academic lives. They were some of the best students that we had. So what is it for you? Where's a context that you feel like, you know what? I mostly know what I'm doing, or at least I feel comfortable 'cause I want to take you back. I am not good at circus. I cannot tell you how not good at circus I am okay. If the average person saw me, they might be like, eh, okay. If anyone who does circus, I am not an expert circus, but it's still my little world that I love and understand. What's your little world where you feel like you kind of get it? You kind of can see it, and I'll set you the challenge of drawing some analogies, drawing some stories, lessons that you can take from that world and apply into your PhD or academic world. Now if you're listening and you're not on my newsletter, you need to jump on my newsletter 'cause I will set these sorts of challenges every week in my newsletter. So you get one email a [00:21:00] week, you get a little summary of what I say in this podcast. You get two reflective questions that you can work through and ponder about, either in writing or just thinking about 'em when you go for a walk. And I'll give you a specific action and that is something that will help you to actually apply this stuff that we're talking about in these podcasts say that you don't just listen to them and go, oh, that was interesting, and then never look again. So if you're not on it, go to my website, PhD life coach.com, and there's a big orange button right in the front where you can join the newsletter and you'll get prompts like that. What is your little world that you could take and apply and how could you use that to help you develop a sense of expertise in your academic world too? It's worked so well for me, worked so well for so many of my clients, and I'm excited to hear what you guys all come up with. So do. if you are on my newsletter, just drop me a message back. Let me know what analogies you came up with, what applies out into your world. [00:22:00] Anyway, that is the first episode of series four, and I can't wait to be with you for the rest of the academic year. Thank you all for listening and see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

< Today I’m coaching Gillian who is a member of The PhD Life Coach membership! She has been making great progress on her procrastination during Q2 of the membership, but asked for coaching around making time for herself. She lives with her parents and young son, and finds that she spends all her time in daughter mode, mum mode, and PhD student mode, and hasn’t been “just Gillian” for a while. She also finds the different roles blend together which can make her feel like she’s doing everything and nothing at the same time. Listen in as we work through her challenges and come up with a plan! Links I refer to in this episode If you found this episode useful, you might also like this one with Marie on How to plan your week . Transcript Just jumping in quickly with two things that I wanted to tell you. The first, this is gonna be the last episode for season three. So if you're listening live, it is the 4th of August. We will start up again properly on the 1st of September, so there'll be a few weeks without a new episode, but you've got my entire back catalogue. The second thing is, again, if you're listening to this live, quarter three of the PhD Life Coach membership is open. If you want more support with your PhD, you wanna feel like you're not battling through this alone. If you still procrastinate, if you wanna figure out how to have a better relationship with your supervisor, if you wanna feel part of something with other people who have the same challenges as you, make sure you check it out. Go to my website, the PhD life coach.com. Click on the membership. You'll find all the details. You get access to online group coaching, mini workshops that are live. You can get asynchronous coaching where you send me questions and I'll send back a private podcast where I answer those questions. There's self-paced materials. There's everything you could possibly want. The members organize coworking. I organize some coworkings. It's amazing. Check it out. Today's episode is with Gillian, who is actually one of my members. So it is a coaching session with one of my members. And if you wanna experience anything like that, you need to join the membership. Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach and we have another special coaching episode and I am particularly excited to be joined by Gillian because not only has Gillian volunteered to be coached here today on the podcast, she is also one of my members in the PhD life coach membership. So welcome Gillian. Gilian: Hello. It's lovely to be here, Vikki. Vikki: It's fabulous to have you here. So why don't you go ahead and tell people a little bit about why you got in touch, what it is that you think would be useful to get coaching on. Gilian: Okay. So, when I saw the chance to be coach one to one, I thought it would actually be a good chance for me to try and open up a bit because I don't tend to actually take much time to talk about myself. I see it as something that's maybe a sign of weakness and it's something that I know I'm trying to work on. And then I started thinking about what would be better or what could make my life better if I could just do something about it. And that's when I thought, actually, for me, taking time just for me is something that I don't really do. So I have PhD time, I have mommy time, I have, you know, time looking after parents, but I don't actually, there's nowhere in my diary where I do something just for me. And so, yeah, I reached out and, and here I am. So I'm hoping to see if I can get a bit of a better balance in life. Vikki: Perfect. And I think it was such a useful topic when you suggested it. 'Cause I think some people will be in your sort of situation where they're trying to do parenting, their caring whilst doing their PhDs, others, um, I've got lots of listeners, lots of clients as you know, who've also got full-time jobs alongside their PhDs and things like that. And others, it's just their PhDs become so all consuming that it feels like there's never space for themselves. So tell me a little bit more about why it feels like a problem for you. Gilian: Well, I think part of it is when you were saying about you're quite right, we're not not feeling there's enough space that part of the thing with the PhD is there's always this looming, mysterious figure almost over your shoulder going, you've gotta get it done by this date. And then in my mind I get to these negative thoughts coming and going, but what happens if you get ill? You could, you're okay now, but you could get behind. You must try and be ahead, but you know, you're behind, I mustn't stop. And the other thing is of course you can get stuck down that rabbit hole because I do, we all care about what we're researching. So sometimes you could have something you are looking at on a Friday afternoon where you think, Ooh, this is really good. And before you know it, you can be picking up a book you've been looking at again whilst you are ignoring family. And it's an easy excuse, isn't it? I can't come out tonight. I'm working on this for my chapter. So it's an easy out, but it's not a healthy thing to do because I still have two and a bit years to go. That's not a balance. Vikki: Yeah. And I think that's so insightful to recognize that there's different reasons why this might be, that part of it sounds like it's a little bit sort of fear and anxiety driven, of kind of must do more, must be further ahead, must not get behind. But there is an extent to which that sometimes it's a temptation driven thing. You know, we get all fascinated with our work and actually it's that we are drawn into it rather than it being out of fear. But both can have consequences, right? Gilian: Yeah. And that's the thing and. I think I was pretty aware, maybe that was at the forefront of my mind. My son last week he had something where he was hoping I'd be able to take him to it, but I had to coax it outta him and I said, well, why didn't you say something? And he went, well, your PhD is just more important. And I went, no, it's not, it's not more important than your happiness. This is not a PhD versus you. That's when I thought, oh no . So for about 12 years before I started my masters, I taught at secondary schools and I'd left that to have a better balance with my son and then realize that in an odd way, this is not somebody externally putting these pressures on, it's me, but I'm doing the same thing to myself, so I'm still not available to him in the way I should be or could be. You are always gonna get pressure points. I'm not saying, I mean, PhDs are not easy, but I realize I'm not as available as I should be and I'm shutting 'em out, and that's not something I want to do. Vikki: Yeah, no, definitely. And I think what often happens, and I think this will be interesting for us to dive into, what often happens is that people don't really define what as available as I "should" be. We don't really define what that extent of availability is, and so we always have this kind of general feel that we are not doing enough for our kids, or we are not doing enough for our PhD or for our parents, or for our other job or whatever it may be, without really defining what that would look like anyway. Gilian: Yeah. Vikki: So do you have an idea as to how available you should be for your son? Gilian: I don't, um, I don't think it's necessarily, I haven't really fully set, but I am aware that I am the sort of person where if there's an interesting online thing on a weekend or whatever, that I would be prioritize, I'd go, well, I'm going to that then and you'll be okay, uh, because you've got granny or grandad or, or whatever. So, I think because I have very blurred end of the week boundaries or lack of that, then there isn't a sense of for most people, if you've got a parent who's going off to work once they. Where they're home now so I can access them. But there is this strange thing when you obviously are doing, um, I'm quite a distance from the university I study at as well. It takes over two hours to drive there. So, most of my work is done here. So home and work and all of that blends. And I think that's part of the problem is, you know, when I'm available, it's not as clear as when I used to go and work in a school. Vikki: And how do you decide which it is? Gilian: Um, I don't think I have actually, that's what I realized is so damaging. I don't think I have actually actively thought about being a bit, I tend to, if there's been, um. We more of our time together, it's been if we've gone away on holidays together, and now when I look, I think it's no wonder that he probably really likes the holidays because then I down PhD tools and it's fully family time. Gilian: I haven't really thought about separating the two, the PhD world from my home world, they have collided in a messy, um, Vikki: I think that's gonna be really interesting to explore because if you are already doing it with holidays, 'cause I don't want you to think that's inevitable. Okay. I have clients who really struggle with not working when they're on holiday. So it's not inevitable that you down your PhD tools and don't do it that. So you are already setting some boundaries. So I think it's gonna be really interesting to explore why you set those boundaries with holidays and to start thinking about what boundaries might look like at home as well. But before we get into that, I mentioned at the beginning that you are already in my membership, and one of the things I think is interesting with this stuff is to sort of think about what are you already trying to do. So perhaps tell people a little bit about why you decided to join the membership and whether there's any of this stuff or other stuff that you've been kind of trying to work on already. I know you've only been in a couple of weeks. Gilian: So I joined the membership after coming to one of your monthly, the free workshops, which was amazing. And then it was one of the first things I'd been to where your advice was actually, there was a support for actually saying it's okay to, to have worries and things, but also you've gotta have that compassion, but also let's look at how we can try and make things better. Gilian: You can't just go, it's okay and leave it 'cause that's not what your membership's about. And I, I came away from it and I was buzzing. And that was a workshop to do with procrastination. Which after that I had this huge to do list and I realized that a lot of the problems was my own fear because I hadn't broken things down. That I'd got far too much on it, that I'd got things on it that I didn't need to look at for another six months, but that I still just had. So I had things in the wrong places. And after that, I just knew as soon as, so I, um, had to wait for the, the next round of the membership to be available to join. But I knew that I wanted to be part of it. And, it's been so lovely being part of the community actually, to realize that I'm not the only person who struggles with so many different things. Procrastination, self doubt, organization, and that these aren't necessarily skills that you go into a PhD just knowing. 'Cause that's the other thing I found with a membership is I think so many of us came to PhDs just thinking, we should know this because the way that it, they're not really discussed in a lot of institutions. There's just this suggestion. You should have an innate understanding of juggling. What is the biggest project for, for many of us, it's the first huge project that you will have undertaken. Obviously some people come from different backgrounds, but in a lot of us that is, it's a huge undertaking and you need skills and that's what's been great since joining the membership. It has been brilliant in terms of. I've been looking more at procrastination than family time, actually. Uh, and I think that sort of stems for one thing, does lead, you know, they connect. Gilian: But I realized that even though I was on time for things, I was getting a lot more stressed than I needed to be because I hadn't shown compassion and I hadn't broken stuff down. And so that's why I thought with the chance of this, I said actually, if I can use what I've known from joining and actually just being a bit more willing to think about myself, which is uncomfortable, and I don't think I'm probably alone in that. A lot of us don't take time to think about ourselves and give ourselves compassion. Yet we spend quite a lot of time with others, maybe showing them compassion. So I thought actually it would be good to try and, um, yeah, get to know myself a bit better and to try and see that I can get a bit more balance. Yeah. And just make things be better. Vikki: Yeah. I love it. And I just wanna reflect that, I want you to recognize that you did take a big compassionate step in joining the membership because accepting that some support would help and accepting that you are worth putting some time into and that you are worth putting a bit of money into. Vikki: You know, I try and keep it affordable, but it's obviously, it is a financial investment for people. You took that first step of putting yourself back in this picture by taking that step of joining as well, which I think is important to recognize. Often people are like, oh, and now I need to learn how to, you know, put myself forward, look after myself. But you are already doing those things by putting yourself in that sort of a situation. Gilian: Yeah, I hadn't really thought of it that way, but yeah. Right. That it's, um, and it's lovely being part of that community as well. I think I was saying, I think I said yesterday to you, in an online thing, I said, I've found my smile again. I didn't realize how much of a rut I'd gotten. And even by being, you know, so by being able to come along to things of the membership, to be part of that community, is massive. Um, all of us trying to kind of make things better and help each other, which is great. Vikki: That's always lovely, lovely to hear. And I think you're really, really also insightful to recognize that procrastination and learning to manage that procrastination as you have been this quarter will help with this separation of work and non-work time. I wonder if you could just tell me a little bit more about your thoughts about why managing your procrastination will help with that. Gilian: I think because for me, a lot of the tasks that I was procrastinating on were, partially because of not breaking them down. And partially that was as a result of self doubt of wondering whether I was really good enough and, there's always been that thing of, am I, do I deserve to be here? It's not coming from anybody else. There's not anything negative , everything my supervisors have said and others, it's all been positive. So it is just my own self-doubt. However, that would mean if, for example, I had a paper that I needed to finish recently, I delayed starting it because I felt I wasn't good enough to write the paper and why would they want to listen? And it was, through being part of the membership and then looking at procrastination techniques that I actually was able to get started. Once I could get started, then I was able to get it done. Otherwise, before joining the membership, that paper would've been something where I would've still been struggling with it over the weekend when my son would like, you know, isn't at school and that's when it's valuable time to spend together. Gilian: But actually within the last week I actually did the not worrying about doing your very best in everything because you can't possibly do that and always say setting time limits. And I had a second paper to do it and I thought, I'm not putting it off. Gilian: And I broke it down and I said to myself, right, I'm gonna spend no longer than six hours working on it. And I actually managed to do it, and get the draft sent to the right people as well ahead of time. And when we talk those intrinsic wins, it felt like an intrinsic win because I hadn't procrastinated, I'd trusted myself and, me prior to joining, that paper wouldn't have been planned. It would've been something just left hanging over me. Vikki: I love that. And I think that is one massive way that learning how to manage the procrastination is gonna help with this work life thing. Because if you can be more intentional about when you are working and know exactly what you are doing in that slot and know that you've got tools, and now we we're always gonna procrastinate you, you and I know I still procrastinate. Other members still procrastinate. It happens. But if we know we've got tools there that when we notice we're procrastinating, we have ways of addressing it and minimizing the impact. Like we talked at the webinar yesterday about then suddenly we can get work done in the slots we allocate to it. Which as you say, then it makes it much easier to have freer weekends 'cause it hasn't just sort of drift. We haven't put it off and put it off and put it off and drifted it into the weekend. Gilian: Yeah. Vikki: I do think there's another way though. So one of the things that we have talked about before in the membership is how procrastination is often about emotion avoidance. And I want you to tell me a little bit more about what emotions you experience when you are doing your PhD, but feel like you should be with your family or when you are with your family, but feel like you should be doing your PhD. Gilian: For me, it's normally a sense of guilt, so if I'm working on something for the PhD and I know it's past six o'clock or something, I feel that I'm not spending time. With my family and, and being with them. And then if I'm with my family doing something, maybe we're watching a film, there's a sense of guilt creeps in just going, wow, there's still work that could be done. And then maybe depending and possibly slightly dread, as well. Not so much with the family, but with the PhD side of thing of just, there's still so much to do that of which I think is a very common thing for many people to feel at all sorts of stage. But that sense of, um, am I gonna get through this? What if I don't get it done in time? So, um, yeah. So those two kind of come together. Vikki: Yeah, because when we are feeling emotions that we don't like, so in this case, guilt and dread and things like that. There's a bunch of things we sort of almost automatically do. One of them is spiral, like you mentioned, that suddenly the guilt becomes, oh my, I'm a terrible mother. They're gonna hate me. Or, or, oh my goodness, I'm never gonna finish my PhD or whatever. It might, we know whichever direction it is. We tend to spiral, but we also tend to then avoid the tasks. Right? Vikki: Anything that we are having thoughts about that make us feel guilty, we then tend to avoid it. So tell me a bit more about how feeling that guilt or that dread affects your ability to either get on with the work or to enjoy the time with your family. Gilian: I think, when it's with the work, I think the dread actually, because it, it's there, it's a distraction, that then slows you down. Um, so whether I'm trying to, um. Do close analysis or whether I'm trying to read secondary things. If you've got a voice in the back of your head going, oh, and if you're trying to look at one text and you think there's another 20 I really should have already looked at, it's actually your own mind is sending you off in directions that you don't need to be in. Gilian: And then I think when I'm spending time with a family as well, that part of the distraction the other way is that without meaning to sometimes there are con the amount, I've lost count of the amount of times I've been asked. So, you know, what are you gonna do when you finish PhD? Have you not finished yet? Gilian: When are you gonna get a job, a real job? Those sorts of things. So you've got that with members of family where there's that pressure as well. So you're thinking, well, actually I'm sat here watching a film, but with what you're saying, I, I ought to be going off back to the office and doing some more work because if you are not viewing this as a real job, I need to get a real job and I need to get this done to get a real job. And so it sort of devalues, um, you both need to complete the PhD so there is value in it, but it sort of devalues the process. Yeah. Without meaning to Vikki: Yeah. And ruins the time with your family, right? Because suddenly it becomes you're thinking, I shouldn't be doing this, I should be doing something else. And that makes it hard to relax and enjoy the time with them too, I assume. Gilian: Yeah. I guess it's just, there's always these constant things just playing on your mind. I suppose, it's like with anything, isn't it? If you go and visit somewhere, but you are aware that you've only got an hour to be there and then you've gotta dash off and you've gotta make a train in time, it just plays on your mind. And it's the same thing of if you are watching a film, and there's also that guilt of, have I done enough? Because if this, if my PhD doesn't count as real work, then do I deserve to watch a film because this, you know, my work isn't worthy. And, you know, films and things and family time. I mean, they're for people who've put in effort. So there's all these sort of, all the bad thoughts going around in circles. Vikki: Well, let's grab that one. Films are for people who have done enough work. How, how do you feel about that thought? How true does that thought feel to you? Gilian: Well see, I, I associate that I have a real difficulty with yeah, feeling that I actually deserve to have free time or spare time, sort of, of, because I see those things as, almost rewards for having, you know, worked hard. Even though being able to spend time with family is, you know, that that should just be part of being healthy, really mentally healthy, having time, whether that's going out walking or playing games or watching tv. I mean, time together is important. You can't just shut yourself off. But sometimes it would be easier, , you know, with guilt that you can make yourself cut off from other people. You realize that you haven't got those connections , because you're pushing people away. So, Vikki: and these, these deep seated thoughts that you need to have earned rest and earned time with other people and earned fun stuff on your own as well. Right? Because we are gonna talk about that. This is not gonna just be about finding a balance between time with your family and time with your PhD because one of the things you mentioned in your initial email was that actually there's this whole chunk of time, for just you, Gillian, as a person, that isn't happening at the moment. Vikki: These deep-seated beliefs about when people deserve those things can be really, really hard to shift. Right? That starts getting into kind of therapy territory of where does that come from and how can we unpick it and those things. But what is really useful from a coaching standpoint is to be able to go, I recognize I have these beliefs. They come from somewhere. They're longstanding beliefs. However, I don't have to live my life by them. I can believe in a deep down right in my chest way that I don't deserve rest or that unless I finished what I was gonna do, I don't deserve family time, but cognitively I choose not to reinforce that. Cognitively I choose to follow my plan, which involves rest and family time, regardless of what I've got done. How would that feel? Does that feel possible to separate out for you or does that feel like something that's just way too difficult? Gilian: No, I think it does feel possible. I think it wouldn't have been something possible, before I started coming to different coaching things with the membership, to be honest, that I needed, I needed to make those first steps. Gilian: But, actually I've made the first step of acknowledging it is something that I need to work on, which is a positive thing. Because before joining the membership, I hadn't even thought about the fact that I don't make time for me and I don't make enough time. So it is, you are right Vikki, it is a mixture of both. I don't make clear out time for my son and I don't make any time really for, so if I do make any time, it's not, I don't ever think about just myself, that it's always me doing either the PhD. I see the PhD as time for myself. Except for realistically, I mean, I'm doing it full time. Gilian: It is the equivalent of a job. And you wouldn't say to somebody else? I wouldn't say to myself if I was back, in my previous profession, I wouldn't have gone, well, I mean even enjoyed teaching all week, but that, that was you time that teaching in the classroom. Hope you really enjoyed that you time, I'm sure it was relaxing. Gilian: You wouldn't say it. And yet with a PhD, because you get that, well, it's something you're passionate about, it's something you love, which of course we are. It, it's, um, separating that and realizing that actually I need to allow time for me. Because I will be a better researcher, like, because I'll have some balance and actually some space away from things. Vikki: So i'm gonna pause you on that one just because I don't even want you to reinforce that thought. I don't even want you to reinforce, I deserve time to myself because it will make me a better researcher. I believe, and I would really encourage you to kind of reflect on this. I believe you deserve time to yourself. Full stop. Even if it had no benefits for your research whatsoever. You are a human being and so you deserve time to yourself. Yeah. Because there's something about this weird productivity world that we live in that starts, but you know, you see it with like people who talk about sleep and sleep research and things. You know, Ooh, get good sleep because it'll help you be more, you know, get enough sleep, it'll help you be more productive tomorrow. It's like, no, just, just get enough sleep. 'cause enough sleep's awesome enough. Sleep feels great. Let's do that. Even if I do no more tomorrow than I'm doing today, let's just do it feeling better 'cause I had a good rest. I. And this is why you will know from the membership. But for the listeners, this is why I Vikki: really discourage you all from setting external rewards and self-care things for after you've done work. So for having a, if I can get this piece of writing done, then I can go for a walk, or if I get this piece of writing done, then I can go for dinner with my friends. Vikki: Um, I really discourage those sorts of motivators because they firstly make the task itself feel intrinsically like something you've got to bribe yourself to do as though it's got no worth or enjoyment of its own. And it makes those things contingent on having been productive enough. I think you should go for dinner with your friends regardless, I think you should sleep enough regardless. I think you should hang out with your son enough regardless of how much work you've done. And the irony is you probably will end up working more effectively. But that's not the kind of ultimate end goal. The ultimate end goal is to have in your life the things you need in your life to thrive. Gilian: Yeah. But actually it's about coming out from behind the shadow, you're, more than what you're creating. Vikki: Hundred percent. Yeah. Gilian: Yeah. Because I'll still be me, whether I, you know, whether I had a PhD or not. It's still me. Vikki: So let's get a little bit pragmatic about it now as well. I think we've done some sort of mindset chat, which is always, you know, that I always like to try and bring together both the mindset sety stuff and the kind of pragmatic steps. So. I think this is a little bit of an example. There was an episode that I suspect you will have listened to 'cause you have always listened to the podcast about making half-ass decisions. Vikki: That often what goes wrong is where we sort of decide something. And it sounds to me, tell me if this feels true for you. It sounds to me like you've only made sort of decisions about when you are working, when you are with your son, when is it okay to drop work for your son? When is it okay to leave son with his grandparents or whatever to so that you can work. So tell me a bit more about how you make those decisions and what kind of boundaries are in place? Gilian: See, I think, um, for me that is another challenge. So we, my son and myself, we both live in the same house as my parents. So in terms of. We don't have the separation that some people would have and also my parents both work from home as well. So we've got three adults working different jobs from home in one. So the space is quite a mixed use space. It's more of a workspace than a home space a lot of the time. So there is that difficulty of, um, boundaries. Um, but in terms of, I realized that in terms of practical, I have realized that I didn't have an end of week shutdown process at all. Um, so therefore things were just rolling from one week to the next. So I'd be aware that obviously the week would end and that there'd be the weekend and those sort of typical things that a lot of parents would've to do. So, you know, taking to sporting activities or whatever, way off doing stuff. Gilian: But there wasn't actually a sense of closure or a sense of recapping of the week. And therefore, if I'm not setting boundaries for myself, then it's not any surprise that, there's not that clarity for my son either and that he's not aware or, or is trying to work out, you know, is mommy available now or am I disturbing, or, you know, so, I'm aware that I need to be working on those sort of boundaries. Vikki: No, absolutely. And we can think, we'll have a think in a second about what sorts of things that might be, and it doesn't have to be absolutely hard and fast rules. You could decide I never work after six, I never work on weekends. I always go to every sporting event my son ever has or whatever. You can decide those sorts of concrete rules if you want to. Vikki: But there is also a version where they're kind of rules of thumb. In a normal week, this is what it looks like. However, in these sorts of occasions, there might be a bit more PhD time. In those sorts of occasions, there might be a bit more son time, these sorts of occasions there might be a bit more me time, whatever it is. Vikki: So we don't have to have hard and fast rules, but when we are not intentional about it, it sort of ends up being a bit of a mush and you end up being disturbable when you thought you were gonna work, but your son comes in and asks for something and you haven't got a good enough reason to say no. So you go with it. Vikki: And then other times you do just a bit of work in front of the telly or whatever it is, and we end up in this slightly grey mush where nothing feels very sort of intentional or separate from each other. What would make it hard, before we start thinking about the kind of exactly what things you might put in place, what would make it hard or what does make it hard for you to enforce any boundaries? Gilian: I think in terms of being disturbed, I think I need to have, um, more, uh, sort of a bit more self-compassion and actually be aware that my work does have value. So therefore, if I have blocked out time saying, I am working on this and I need you to be with granny and granddad who are perfectly capable of looking after you, that you need to respect that this is my job and that I'm telling you I need to do this. Gilian: So I need to have that self value of what I'm doing on one sense , which I know sounds strange when I'm saying I'm working too much, but it is that, that sort of side of things of actually value in what I do. Um, but on the other side , so it is quite tricky because our lounge is also where my parents do their work from as well. So there's not a very, uh, I quite like, like to divide space and it would be quite nice to, to feel that I was finished on the night. But it's quite, can be quite difficult because I'll be going quite often down into a space where somebody else is doing their work as well. So, so boundaries, setting boundaries is quite hard when we all work here. Vikki: Your son's at school? Gilian: Yes. Vikki: So you have time, is it PhD time while he's at school? Gilian: Yes. Yeah. I think as a lot of parents, I think summer holidays are probably the hard, they're both joyous aren't they, but it is six weeks that is, harder when your children are there. Vikki: I'm gonna suggest we focus in on term times for now. Gilian: Yeah. Vikki: We can talk in future coaching sessions in the membership and stuff when it comes but I think it's useful. 'Cause sometimes these are the stories I want you to notice. These are the stories where we complicate ourselves. And I do this with exercise. Other people do this with exercise too. It's like, oh, but I couldn't do that in the winter because it will be rainy and it'll be too cold. So to do it, it's like, yeah, but you could do it now through till September. How about that? And then we'll worry about and then do later. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So sometimes these kind of, I need a solution that's gonna work for all eventualities prevent us from finding solutions that work some of the time. So I would think, right, let's not even worry about holidays right now. Holidays are gonna be a mishmash until we come up with a different strategy to think about those. They're gonna be a bit of a mishmash, all working parents experience it. I'm just gonna be super kind to myself, but let's think about term times. So is he at school full-time? Gilian: Yes. Vikki: Yeah, so you've got the kind of full-time days. Do you find you're able to get on during that time or do you find you're called out for parental duties and stuff with your parents? Gilian: Yeah so I find that I've managed to get a reasonable pattern 'cause I'm quite an early riser anyways, so I find that I can be up and happily working at quarter past six in the morning because it's quiet and there's no disturbing until about nine o'clock when other people then start to wake up. And I think then I can get disturbed because both of my parents are at home and they can't go to the shops on their own or whatever. So if they need something, there'll be a knock on my office door and then I will go and do that. Gilian: But generally, yeah, I do manage to get, things done. And I have tried to work on, saying when I'm in meetings or things to, to block out space to not get disturbed. Vikki: See, this is a fascinating one. I think this is gonna be relevant for people, even if they don't have kids or if they're not living with parents or any of these things is what is different to you? So you told me before we started recording here that you'd got your do not disturb sign. Everyone knew they couldn't come in 'cause you were recording, you were doing this thing. And you've just said also that you tell them when there's meetings and things like that. What to you is different that you are willing to enforce boundaries around i'm on a podcast. I am, you know, getting coached. I am in a meeting. You must not disturb me versus I'm doing an hour's close analysis. You must not disturb me. Gilian: I think it's, I'm honestly better at saying it if somebody else is involved. I've noticed that. So it would be me saying, don't disturb. I don't disturb because Vikki's kindly giving her time to coach me. There's somebody else. So, it's important that you leave me alone. It's always when this, if it's a group thing, you know, somebody else is giving up their time. Say, let's respect that. Vikki: So why should your parents, your parents, respect my time who they've never met more than they respect your time. Now, I'm not saying your parents don't respect your time. Let me rephrase that. But why are you willing to put a boundary in place outta respect for my time, rather than putting a boundary in place out of respect for your time? Gilian: Yeah, I think it is, honestly, it probably just comes down to just lack of trust in what I'm doing. So just thinking, well, I'm, you know, my stuff isn't good enough, as if it doesn't matter as much, and then so I can see when other people are doing things and I think, wow, that, that PhD sounds amazing. That sounds amazing. But I don't see it in my own. I think, oh, that sounds amazing, but mine's just okay. I'm not putting in the boundaries because I'm not respecting what I'm doing enough. Vikki: And do you want to respect it enough that you can put some boundaries in place? Gilian: Yeah, I do. And I actually think that I've started to appreciate what I've been doing more since I've joined the membership. And as you rightly said, I haven't been there that long. So I think it will, it, this is not, it's bit like procrastination will never be fully fixed, but at least this is gonna be a process and starting to build up. Gilian: I'm not gonna just wave a magic wand and suddenly change my behavior just overnight and go, well, that was perfect but when I can start spotting what I'm doing and then thinking, right, I actually need to set boundaries, then it's a step on the way to actually caring more for myself, which would be a good thing. Vikki: So definitely, and I think it's another one of those examples where you might not at the moment have the deep seated belief that what you are doing is super valuable and important. I think you do have that belief to some extent, but it may not be a completely like I'm therefore willing to do this, but you can still choose to act as though you did. Vikki: You can still choose to say, you know what? I have moments where I'm not convinced that what I'm doing is as important as what other people are doing, but it's what I'm doing, so I'm gonna act as though it's as important as anybody else's job. And I think sometimes when we act like that, the belief comes afterwards. Vikki: You know, usually you'll know we talk about the self-coaching model in the membership. Usually we think about our actions being driven by our thoughts and feelings. So it sort of goes thoughts, feelings, actions. Sometimes if we've got really deep seated beliefs, sometimes we start from the actions. We start from thinking, I want to behave as though my PhD has real value to the world and feel determined. Vikki: And so your action is that you block in some time where you are not disturbable. Well, my old coach always used to say she had three young children when she was running a business. And she always used to say that if no one's bleeding, you cannot disturb me. So it was like, if anyone's bleeding, it's fine. Come in, come get me, whatever. No one bleeding. It's all good. You can, you can wait till later. Go and ask your father. Vikki: But sometimes it can be useful to act in line with how we want to believe things are and how we hope our future selves will believe. And we start to act in that line already, even when we're a bit wobbly in here at the moment, about whether it has true, true value that makes it enough to put these boundaries in place. Gilian: And I could actually see potentially, what was that you were saying about them not wanting to be disturb, but probably with me, it's actually a case of my son's quite self-aware. So actually, probably being able to say if you catch mommy's sneaking, you know, sneak in the old book notebook out and stuff, um, when, when we're supposed to be, when I've said we're gonna play a board game or whatever, well yeah, you have the right to call me out on that because you matter too. Vikki: And that's where I think being really intentional could be really useful here. But before we talk about, I want, I'm aware we've thrown around the world boundaries quite a bit and people have different definitions of boundaries, and I wanna make sure that you and I are both on the same page with that, but also that anyone listening is, so for you, what do you mean when you talk about a boundary? Gilian: I think for me, if I talk about in terms of that, it needs to be something where there's a clear understanding of what you are crossing. So if I'm setting a boundary saying I'm working, that there's a clear understanding that if you're gonna disturb me when I'm working, that there's got to be a reasonable reason for you to be doing that. Gilian: Not just talking about a game of football or something random. So, yeah, it's about something where both sides, well, I, that, you know, both sides of something, but yeah, boundary is a really tricky word, doesn't it? Because it can mean a lot things, Vikki: And I'm really glad we had that conversation because I wanna tweak a bit of your definition, if that's okay. Which is, for me, a boundary is something you put in place about what you will do. 'cause even your child you don't have control over what he does. As much as parents would love to have full control over what their kids do, you don't, you don't have control over what your parents do. You don't have control over what anybody does. Vikki: You have control over what you do. So in this case, a boundary would be something like, if you disturb me when the sign on my door says don't, for example, if you're gonna go with signs or whatever, I will just ask you to leave and carry on with my work. I'll give you a kiss on the head and you can go and carry on with what you were doing. Because this is mommy's work time, I won't have a conversation with you unless you're bleeding. I will dismiss you and get back to my work immediately. So it is not, you can make requests to the people around you. So you can say to your son, to your family to say, you know, when it says this on my door, please, it would really help me if you don't test my willpower with all of this. It would really help if you didn't. But the boundary is you saying if you come in, I'm not engaging, I'm not going to the shop while I'm on one of those sessions. Shop's for later. I'll do it one later, but in these blocks of time, I won't engage with what you're asking me to do. And you can do that in a super loving way. It's not like not talking to you, please leave. But it's saying I'm in a session right now. I can't. Same as you would if somebody came in now. I mean, I would be understanding, but I'm gonna assume if somebody came in now, you'd be like, shut out. I'll talk to you later. You can do the same thing when it's your work. Gilian: Yeah. So yeah, it's about deciding and setting those boundaries for, for me. Yeah, that makes sense. Vikki: And that can be in both directions, right? It can also be, if I'm in time I've set aside to be with my family, I'm not going to pick up my PhD. I'm not going to also just have a quick scroll to look up something that I've just thought of or whatever. But it's always about your behavior. Gilian: Yeah, that makes sense. Vikki: So how could you be more intentional? So this kind of fits also with the role-based time blocking stuff that we've talked about. There's an episode about it, if people wanna check that out. How do you want to be more intentional? How could you be more intentional about when you are in phD role when you are in mom role, when you're in daughter role, and when you are in human being, individual person role? Gilian: I think that you're quite right. Time blocking is something that I've started looking at, but it's not something that I've had too much chance to work with. But I have found that when I've done the time blocking that it is easier for me to make boundaries, with the procrastination, working on procrastination because, even the sense of a boundary of, no, no, you cannot wander off and go and Hoover because that would be easier. You've gotta just stay put, you know, um, and get going. It's gotta be the same sort of thing that if I'm in boss mode when I'm working out my week, that I actually block out family time. Gilian: And I think that's what I haven't done is blocked out the time that you actually need to just have that self-care, it needs to be a mixture, mixture of self-care and family time, because I think I'm not alone in that. Um, I've only since joining the membership started thinking about putting in proper breaks in the day. Gilian: And I think I'm not alone in that. I haven't sort of thought to myself, right, well let's set aside this chunk of the evening. This is the equivalent of it being blocked out rather than for meetings, but this is blocked out for me to just step away and do family time or at some point hopefully, I dunno, okay, maybe I'd like to go and, you know, go see friends or something, but that I can make the choice. Vikki: I don't want it be, we're gonna talk about this. I don't even want it to be go see friends. Go see friends will be lovely. We're gonna talk about, what would it be if it was literally just you, something that is just you. Gilian: I dunno what I'd do if it was, I'm not sure I can get there yet. Vikki: What did you used to enjoy doing? Pred kids, maybe even as a kid yourself. What hobbies and things did you love doing? Gilian: I like gonna the theater and I like gonna museums and art galleries and things like that, so. Vikki: Okay. How far away is your nearest museum or gallery? Gilian: Oh, about, well there are local ones to do with planes and things, but more traditional ones about 45 minutes, I think, to the nearest one from here. Vikki: Cool. And when did you last do something like that? Gilian: I, no, um, since, well, my son's 10, so since before he was born, so. Vikki: And how about things at home? Are there any sort of do at home hobbies? You like or used to like or would love to get into but haven't done? Gilian: Um, because really for me, I, I really obviously enjoy reading because of the, the nature of, I do a literature degree, but honestly, by the time I finished reading for the day , it's not something that I have the energy for. I cook sometimes yeah, that's one of the things I like to do if I'm avoiding doing stuff. Vikki: Okay. So, and is that for you or is that for other people? Gilian: Um, if I cook it, so I cook for family. Vikki: So even if you enjoy it, that still doesn't count. This is gonna be one of your bits of homework and because you're a member, I'm gonna follow up, is to think about, you know, what do you, are you on social media or anything? One of the things I often ask myself is, what do I look at on social media? Gilian: No. See, I, I'm actually one of the lucky ones where I don't really scroll. I'm not, I'm perfect. Vikki: Don't, don't start right. Not gonna use that for inspo. I want you to think, and I want everyone listening to think of this, I want you to have one thing that you like doing if you go off somewhere on your own, like if you are looking for sort of day trip or morning trip type thing, and one thing you like doing, if you're just at home on your own in the house, okay? Vikki: And if there aren't answers to things, that is partly why you are not making time for this. It's partly some of these beliefs about not deserving it, but it is partly that it's really hard to make time for yourself if you don't actually know what you're gonna use that time for. Vikki: Yeah. And so the, one of the first steps is thinking even if there haven't been things in the past, thinking what would be fun. I might learn to juggle, I might learn to do Rubik's cube, I might learn to paint, I might, whatever it might be. Okay. I might go for walks. I might look at birds, see how many birds I can find in my garden or whatever. Vikki: Right? Coming up with an idea as to what it might be and doesn't have, you haven't gotta pick a hobby forever. That's not what I'm saying, Vikki: but like picking some, if I was gonna take some time for myself over the next couple of weeks, it'd be fun. What? What? Might it be fun to have a go at trying? Gilian: I might try looking at some videos to do with sign language. Because it's something that I could reasonably because we're not fully out in the sticks here, but it's not the, whilst I enjoy going to museums and things, it's not the easiest to get to stuff. Yeah. But, videos, there are videos to do with sign language and it's something that I've always been interested in. So it's something that I can have a look and try. So, Vikki: perfect. I went to this, it's called Camp Wildfire. Recommend. It's basically Adventure Camp for adults. And I did sign language choir. It was so cool. We learned the signs to sing, um, stronger by Christina Aguilera and it was amazing. It was so cool. It becomes so much easier. It's all the part of this intentional thing. And people often think that being intentional is about always being productive and being efficient. And it's not. You can be intentional about your hobbies. It's so much easier, like you said about seeing your friends. I want you also after we finish recording, to think of one friend that you want to catch up with, one specific one because it's one thing to say, oh, I should see my friends more, or to say, I want to go for coffee with her. Yeah. The more specific you can get about what making time for yourself would look like, the easier it is to then schedule it and then to say, look, son's at football or whatever. I'm gonna have coffee with that one friend. Well, I'm not gonna stay and watch this time, love staying to watch, but I'm gonna take 45 minutes to go do that. Now I know the logistics of that might not work out, but. take the principle of it. Gilian: If you've got something concrete that you're planning to do, then you can put it in rather than just so vague that you can put off. Vikki: Yes, exactly. Exactly. How could you then share some of this intentionality with the people around you? Because this is gonna be a bit of a change for them, right? If they're used to being able to come and go, mom always being available, daughter always being available, whatever is gonna be a little bit of a change and people react to that. Right. And one of the things we can do is to try and be as transparent as we can or as we're willing to about why you are doing it and what it actually means. And I'm just wondering whether you got any ideas. Gilian: I think in terms of not working as much on the weekends, I think because it's been impacting on my son, but also means for the sake of whatever has or hasn't been done, I still deserve a break. Everyone needs a break. That probably just an open conversation saying I'm actually going to be working hard on taking a break. Gilian: So if you see me, you know, sneaking, going and grabbing my laptop and scrolling, clearly looking at work stuff. You know it because I only, if I have my laptop, I'm doing university stuff, so if you see me sneaking for that then you are allowed to, Vikki: don't put too much responsibility on them. This is still your behaviour mission ok? You can ask for support. Gilian: Yeah. Probably stuff outta the way. Vikki: Yeah. Explaining to them why you're doing what you're doing. . I was wondering about whether, whether you could almost have a clear timetable, and I don't mean, when people talk about time blocking, they think they then have to time block all the hours and I, I think that's a really dangerous place to start. Vikki: I think starting with some time blocks is really useful and being able to say, right in these two hours a day or these three hours a day, please just don't bother me. In the afternoon. I'm more flexible. I'll be doing stuff, but I'm more interruptible. If you need me to go to the shop, that's when I'll go to the shop and stuff. But between eight and 11, please, just unless there's an emergency, let me crack on or whatever. Vikki: And saying to your son, then, you know, but look at this. This five till seven slot. Five till seven is all you. All you. Mommy will have finished work by five and it's whatever we want to do together. That's our time. Vikki: So that you're not saying to him, leave me alone. I'm working. Leave me alone. I'm working. You are saying, no, no. Remember, this is mommy's work slot because five till seven's you. Five till seven is all about you and we, yeah. So whatever you wanna tell me, I'm gonna hear all about it. Tell me everything. Everything you've got between five and seven. So that they can kind of see these are the times when I'm interruptable to go and do jobs for the parents. These are the times that I'm proper set aside for fun, social wonderfulness. Here's some grey time that I'll work, but I don't care if you come in and these are my deep focus hours that please just let me have. Gilian: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, because I completely agree with you, with blocking that I could end up wasting a lot of my weekend trying to micromanage myself, but actually saying generally, you know, leave between six and nine and then between sort of two and four and unless there's an actually actual emergency, then yeah, please treat me as if I'm not here. Vikki: And, weekends. Remember, you don't have to be black and white, all or nothing about weekends either. So I always recommend that people are intending to get to a place where they only work on weekends in proper push to deadlines and stuff. I know that's not always possible if people are part-time and things, but if you are used to your weekends being a kind of extension of your week, it might be a lot to go from that to, I do not work between Friday and Monday, but you can choose intentionally about each weekend as well. Vikki: So one of the things that I've really developed in myself and has helped me a lot is that now if I need to work on the weekend, I will say to my husband, I'm gonna work this weekend. Saturday morning, I'm in the study that I'm doing my thing. And then we'll have the rest of the weekend to not do it. Vikki: So I used to sort of be like, oh, I need to do some work this weekend, but not now. I'll do it later, I'll do it later, I'll do it later. I should really be working, but I'm not. And then it's sort of the weekend becomes this kind of half-assed thing where you are neither working nor doing fun things. Whereas if you can say in advance, okay, it's not ideal, but I do want to do some work this weekend. I need to do two hours or I need to do four hours or whatever. I'm gonna try and do it in that block, which means the rest of the weekend is free for all the other fun stuff. So even in that, you can be super intentional about it. Gilian: And I think the things have been working on, you've been coaching on the procrastination. Gilian: That those then dovetail in because if there is something that genuinely needs to be done or maybe meetings from across the globe that happen to be on a week of, but they usually only one to two hours. So that doesn't give me the excuse of going, well, I mean that's, that's one hour, but I mean, I could just go and do an extra hour. Vikki: So it's basically a work day now, sorry. Gilian: Um, and I need to not allow myself to, to opt out quite so easily, so I need to be better with the boundaries and actually write that is, I have, that is blocked into there. That will be how long I'm allowing for it. And then the other time is weekend and step away. Yeah. Vikki: Perfect. So the last thing I wanna ask you is what thoughts could you kind of cultivate, choose, and remind yourself of for those moments where your brain is going, "oh, I probably should go and spend some time with my son", or, "oh, but I probably should go and do my PhD." What thought? 'cause we can kind of preload those, right? Vikki: Because we know these moments are gonna happen. You are gonna go away from this hopefully feeling like, yeah, I've got a plan. This is great, but we all know that a week down the line, or even sooner, at some point you're gonna be like, "oh, I know, but he, you know, he's, he didn't have a good day at school. He just needs some mummy time." Vikki: Whatever. Right. What thoughts can we preload in your head that you are going to use in the moments that kind of make you go, oh, maybe I not gonna stick to my boundary. Gilian: Yeah, I think if it's, maybe if it's a case of about not being disturbed that maybe I need to, say to myself, it doesn't matter what other people are doing for their PhDs or not doing, you are here, you are doing it. Enjoy it. Yeah, remember that you're here, here, that you are here, enjoy it. Make the most of it. So you know, it does have value. Vikki: I'm doing this for a reason. My PhD has value. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Gilian: And so, and then when it's the other way around, you know, when it's family time, if it's creeping in, just tell myself, I'm more than a PhD and that. I'll still be there whether it does or doesn't get done. Yeah. And that family matters as well and I matter. So, you know, doesn't matter whether I've got that chapter finished or not got that chapter finished, but we all deserve that time. We deserve that time to be happy and to be doing what we want to do regardless of whether you've had a great PhD day or not, it's life is still there. So. Vikki: Perfect. I love that and I look forward to continuing to support you through it in the rest of the coaching sessions in the membership. So thank you so much for coming on, Gillian. I hope that was useful and what you wanted it to be. Gilian: Oh, it was brilliant. Thank you so much Vikki. It's given me a lot to think about and, um, yeah, really excited to try some different things. Vikki: Definitely, and I'm sure it will have inspired lots of people who are in similar situations themselves. So thank you everyone for listening . Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics time.

< Loneliness in academia is so common yet so rarely talked about. In this episode I’m going to get honest about some of my experiences of loneliness, share why I think academia can be a particularly lonely place, and give some tangible tips that you can use to make it all feel a bit better. Links I refer to in this episode If you enjoyed this episode, you might like this episode on the six types of social support you need and this one on how to build your academic community . Transcript Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. Now, I think this episode could end up being a little bit more personal than some of the episodes that I record. We are gonna be thinking about loneliness, loneliness in academia, and life in general, and what we can do about it. But I'm not gonna be presenting it from a, and I've got this all sorted kind of perspective. I'm actually gonna be sharing with you sometimes in my academic career that I was quite lonely, and I'm gonna be sharing with you some of the challenges that I'm having at the moment as somebody who moved away from a place that she'd been for a really, really, really long time, and how that's still not quite where I want it to be. So let's dive into this slightly more vulnerable one together. But I wanna start by thinking about why loneliness is so endemic in academia. You know, people talk about it being a kind of global issue in all walks of life at the moment for a whole bunch of different reasons. But I think academia is particularly prone to loneliness and particularly prone to not talking about feeling lonely. And I think that's for a bunch of reasons. It's a career where you often have to move a lot, right? If you, you know, a lot of people will move at the end of their undergraduate, their end of their PhD, and then at various stages through their academic careers. And it's not always easy to just up sticks, essentially move away from family or establish networks and reestablish them, especially if you're doing it for a short period at a time. Right. I have clients who, you know, they're PhD students, but then they go and do a postdoc here and a postdoc there, and they're only ever in a place for a year, and that's really, really tough. Some of you though might be thinking, well, hang on, I've stayed in the same place, but I still feel lonely. And that's because it's not just about moving. So many of you will know that I stayed in the same place through my whole academic career. So I left home to go to university like two hours away from where I grew up. Um, so not super far from Americans, but you know, that's beyond the commute from British people. But then I stayed there. I was an undergrad, PhD student, postdoc. Lecturer, senior lecturer, reader, professor. And so I stayed there my whole career and people often think, oh, well you must have had a network the whole time. But I didn't because the thing was everybody else left. So at the end of my undergrad, most of my friends went off to do other things, and I had to make new friends as a PhD student. And then at the end of PhD, most of my friends left and I then had to make new friends as a member of staff. And then there's always a sort of cycling of academic stuff in the department. And so whilst I had friends sort of in other bits of my life, that kind of real network that I had at work, we were a very social department. It really did change every three to five years and I really had to reestablish things over and over again. And that was often not that easy. And I'll, I'll talk later about reasons that was complicated. So whether you move or not, academia has this kind of transient feel to it, which can make it really hard to build lasting relationships. It's also kind of weirdly hierarchical, right? Where we're sort of collegiate and all work together, but sort of also hyper aware of the fact that they're a final year PhD student. I'm a first year PhD student, or they're a professor and I'm only an assistant professor or whatever. And often, especially as the junior partner in that, you are hyper aware of the differences in seniority. Often when you are older, you are less, not necessarily older, but more senior, you are less aware of those hierarchies. But you are aware that the other, the, the junior person sees those hierarchies, so that can make friendships difficult. People are also often at very, very different life stages, even if at the, the same career stage. So I, because I did my PhD quite quickly, which if you wanna hear that complicated story, I have a whole podcast episode about it. I did my PhD quickly, and then my postdoc was a permanent position that turned into lectureship. So I was in a permanent job by the time I was 24, whereas most of the other people who were starting their permanent jobs were, with the exception of my gorgeous Jen Cumming, who I always mention, they were all five, 10 years older than me. Most of them were in relationships, many of them were having children. It was a really, really different life stage for me. And often we have that that complicates our friendships within the workplace. And then when you think, you know, I'm talking about all, many, many moons pre COVID. So I'm not talking about the modern times, but with modern times, with the increase in remote working and more and more use of Zoom and things like that, people not being on campus, far more distance learning students and things like that, we're often geographically remote from the people that we work with too and the places that we work, which can mean that a lot of that kind of incidental chat that happens around the building just doesn't happen in the ways that it used to. And I think some of that is by necessity, right, that actually we need to do this sort of remote working. Sometimes it's that we've kind of got in the habit of it. Since COVID, we found that it's quite comfortable to be able to work from home with your own fridge and your own dog and all of those things, right? And so sometimes the benefits of going in just feel a little bit oblique and so we don't do it. Other times there'll be many of you that are still being COVID cautious in terms of avoiding getting infections through transport or through going to crowded places and all those sorts of things. So for whatever reasons, a lot of us have got more used to this kind of remote working. Now, I am not someone who doesn't think you can build relationships online, right? Some of my favorite people in the world, I've barely met in real life that I keep in contact with by this sort of connection , but that does make it harder to make new friends and meet new people. We are then in a world where we work really hard, right? There's loads to do. Often it's loads that we need to do on our own, other than meetings with people that are in a position of authority over us, like our supervisor advisors or whatever. So often it is lots of solitary working, lots of work so it's sort of bleeding into evenings, it bleeds into weekends if we allow it and then that can be tough. Many of you will also be supporting a family, which whilst gorgeous is not the same thing as necessarily having friends outside of the family and having that time just to be yourself. Performance is really drilled into us how important it is we do well. And to add on top of that, if your friends and family are not people who have PhDs or understand academia, it can be really hard to explain to people why your life is the way it is or why you are stressed about the things that you are stressed about. I remember one of my besties works for a really big corporation. Shall remain nameless, but like a proper businessy business and she's pretty high up in it. And I was moaning. I was in some leadership position at the university and there were some dudes not doing what I needed them to do. I can't remember what, it was some crappy form that I needed to make sure people had filled in properly and they were just being really difficult and they weren't doing their role and all that stuff, and my friend was like, I know it's okay. What you should do, you should talk to your boss, and they'll put them under performance review and then they'll get fired if they don't step up. I'm like, oh my dear soul, it doesn't necessarily work like that in academia. Now it might be, if they've been rubbish at their research and all that stuff, it might work like that, but if they're just being rubbish at their administrative roles, I don't think it works like that. And they were like, and she was like, but can't you just tell him he has to do it? I'm like, I'm not his line manager. She's like, how are you going to do anything? I'm like, exactly. So we have this kind, people don't get it. And that's one of my besties and she tries really, really hard to understand, but she doesn't get the unique pressures that there are within a university environment. Yeah. Those of you who are doing PhDs who may be a first generation in your family to do PhDs or where you don't have friends doing PhDs. They don't get it. It's like, oh, you can start work whenever you want and stop work whenever you want. That must be gorgeous. It's like gorgeous or infinitely pressure all the time. So people don't necessarily get it and that can be really difficult when you're trying to make friends receive social support and things like that. There's then also, academia, especially if you're not properly supported either through good supervision, advisors, mentors, all that stuff, it can be a bit crushing to your self-esteem, right? You can get yourself to a stage where, you just think you're not very good at anything and that you're just a bit of a boring person 'cause you haven't done anything except work on this thing for ages and you're not even any good at that. Okay. And that is not a great mindset to be trying to make friends from. Yeah. That doesn't make you go, oh, I know what I'll do. I'll go and shine at a party so everyone wants to be my friend. No, it makes you be like, oh, no one's gonna wanna be friends with this. It's really easy for that to translate across into your social life as well. I've been there. I'm a pretty extroverted person, but that can be really tough. And then for those of you who have moved and are like, yeah, I do have friends. I do. I just live a long way from them. I don't see them very much. That can be really hard too. That's what I'm struggling with at the moment. To be completely open with you. So I lived in Birmingham, big city for 20 something years. And I moved back to, it's a big village, but it's a village. Um, and it's very families around here. And I'm a family now. You know, I'm married, I've got stepchildren, all that stuff, but I'm not bringing up little people or anything. And almost all my friends are other places, right? They're either back in Birmingham. The people that I spent the most time with, or like my old friends from university and stuff, are all over the country, all over the world. I have one bestie that is still here, who I went to school with and is still local but she has an uber stressful job, so she's very, very busy. And the problem is I do have all these friends, but they're not friends that I can do things with tonight. Right. They're not people that I can just say, let's go for a walk on board. They're two hours away and we have to plan it. And they have children and their children have social lives and hobbies and things that fill up weekends and stuff. And it's hard. And then you're like, well, yeah, okay. But you could text them or whatever. You could speak to 'em on the phone, say, yeah, I can and I do, but there is a big difference. It's something that I saw on Instagram, you know, that font of all things, but it really resonated with me that there is a difference between catching up with friends and living your life with friends and those of you, this is an emotional one for me, and those of you who are far away from your old friends will probably feel this too is. You can catch up with those people. You can have a conversation with those people. You can arrange to see them for a weekend, but if that consists of getting up to speed on each other's lives, well, how's this? How's that going? How's your job? How's your kids? How's your partner? How's your this da da da? If it consists of doing that, it's not the same thing as just going to the park together 'cause you see each other all the time. Or like my, one of my besties from Birmingham, we used to just do jobs together. We'd go to like the, you know, the DIY shop, the hardware store for my Americans and get the stuff we needed for our house jobs and we'd help each other with our house jobs and things. Especially 'cause we were both single at that stage. It's not the same thing. If all your friends are far away, even if they're gorgeous and wonderful, I have the most gorgeous and wonderful friends you can possibly imagine. But it's not easy when they're far away, and it's easy to still feel lonely in your day-to-day life. And when everyone is so busy, it's hard to meet new people that become friends. We're gonna talk about strategies, some of which I'm trying and some of which I'm setting myself the goal to try over the summer. But that's what many, many reasons that I think that feeling lonely in academia is really, really, really common. So where do we start? We start where we always start, guys, we start with compassion. Because often one of the problems with loneliness is right, you haven't got people to talk to about it, okay? But often, you know, if you had people to talk to about it, you might not be feeling quite so lonely. And so it can become this slightly embarrassing thing, right? It comes, becomes this thing where you're like, oh my God, people are gonna think that I'm not a nice person or that nobody likes me, or any of these sorts of things. People are gonna feel sorry for me or think there's something wrong with me and everybody else has got friends, and why don't I, and you know it, it can be really hard to not criticize yourself for this and that's where we always start with compassion. It is completely understandable that you feel like this. Some of you might be thinking, I feel lonely, even though I'm surrounded by people all the time, and that is normal too. Loneliness is a completely separate construct from being alone, okay? You can be on your own and not feel lonely at all. You can be in the middle of a crowded place and feel immensely lonely. They're two completely separate things, so if you are like, I've got people around me and I still feel lonely, normal, okay, I'm here. I'm with you. All right? It's completely normal. And the reason that's so important is that if we are telling ourselves that the loneliness is either a personal failing in itself or the result of other personal failings, like being an annoying person or whatever, then it's really hard to snap out of it. It's really hard to take the steps I'm gonna talk about in a second, because you don't feel like you're somebody who people would want to be friends with. So compassion first, it is understandable that you feel lonely. It is kind of a part, not an inevitable part, but it is kind of a part of the industry that we are either studying in or working in, and more people feel lonely than you think. So what do we do about it? I have a few different tips for you. The first is about almost accepting where we're at and appreciating what we do have. That's not to say get over yourself. You're not as lonely as you think, but sometimes we don't recognize the bits we do have. So I have had the biggest flip in my circumstances, right? So when I was in Birmingham, I had, especially for the last like five, eight years I guess, where things got a lot more stable in terms of who I was friends with and all those sorts of things. There wasn't such a turnover. My friends were less based at work, there was less turnover, and so on for the last sort of seven or eight years. I had friends coming out of my ears. I had so many people that I could just live life with, have fun social things with , like my sort of bestie friends. And then I had my layer of kind of gorgeous acquaintances who I knew from my various different clubs and classes and things that I did. And so I had this huge swathe of social support, of friends. I did not feel lonely, but I did feel lonely 'cause I didn't have a partner and I wanted a partner. I wanted to be in a romantic relationship and I wasn't. So I'd still felt lonely even though I had all those things. Now, fast forward however many years, I'm now living in a village where I don't have that sort of friend network around me. I have my gorgeous husband and I have, I'm now close to where my parents live, where my sisters live, and things like that. And I often feel lonely because of not having those friendship groups, those acquaintances, those communities around me at the moment. A really, really important thing to do in a really important thing that I do is recognizing the togetherness that you do have. It's not saying we're not gonna go look for the other bits. We are gonna go look for the other bits. Just like back then I was dating. Now I'm gonna be, I'm on a mission to find new friends, but we can appreciate the bits that we do have, so that we love on them. We recognize where we are getting support, offer support to them, and remind ourselves of the network that we do have. Sometimes that might be your remote network too. So, if any of my old friends listen to this, be warned. I'm on a mission to be in better touch with you all. So it's whether it's a close network geographically, a far away network geographically, appreciating what you do have is a huge first step. The other part of it is recognizing and appreciating the alone time that you have without it having to make you feel lonely. So having time, I now, my life is so much less chaotic than it was in Birmingham because of all these coaching things that I've learned but I have so much more time. I have more time to just not feel like a hot mess all the time. And part of that is not seeing as many people and not feeling as busy, not trying to cram everything in quite so much. And so remembering to appreciate that stuff really helps as well. Some of the things I'm experiencing, not all of them, but some of them are the result of positive changes. They're kind of that flip side of a positive change. Now when it comes to actually expanding our friendship networks, building these relationships, I have a couple of different tips. The first is to remind yourself what you either love doing or what you used to love doing often, especially those of you who have allowed hobbies to get away from you in your PhDs and, and academic careers often you'll say, you know, what's your hobby? I don't know. Sleeping, don't do anything else. Too much work to do. Once I've dealt with the kids, dealt with, they dealt with that to do nothing left. But there will have been times in your life where you had things that you love doing. This is one where I've always been all this. I am like the serial hobby meister. I've always had a hundred thousand things that I enjoy doing and that I've tried to cram into my life. So remembering what those were, figuring out where you can find bite-sized bits of that. Now, remember, it's also worth thinking about the different levels of friends that you need. It is really useful to have one or two local besties so that you have people who you can confide in, who you can spend time with, sort of on the regular without having to make big arrangements and things like that. That's really useful, and they're not easy to find. That's what I've not found yet here. They're not easy to find, but there's also that level of just nice community. So when I was in Birmingham, I had my bestie besties, my people that came to my wedding and all that stuff. But I also had a whole layer of people who I adore who were colleagues that I knew less well from around campus, but who I bump into, have a chat with people that I paddle boarded with, people that I did circus with, people that I did CrossFit with for my shortlived, ruined by the pandemic CrossFit career. People that I did british military fitness with whatever it was, right? All my different hobbies, I had this like layer of people who I wouldn't arrange to spend the weekend with them. We weren't that level of friends, but I blooming adored them. They were great and they were people that I would see regularly that I would do fun things with. I would turn up, I'd go to my adult gymnastics class and we'd mess around, fall in the pits. It was all good. I miss those people. So think about what things you used to enjoy doing or that you currently enjoy doing and think about how could you reintroduce one of those things into your life. Now you might be saying, I don't have time, Vikki. I'm too busy. Everyone has time. Everyone has time. I know it can be complicated, especially if you've got children, especially if you don't have family close by. But even if it's one thing a month. Having something like that that you can do where you see people you like. Now we are not necessarily looking for besties here. We are just looking for people who we enjoy spending time with, where we are someone other than our PhD self or our academic self. I, for what it's worth, have signed up for a life drawing class in Cambridge, so I'm going to go and learn how to draw rudey nudey people cos why not? I used to enjoy doing art classes, so there we are. And right now, 'cause of my stupid broken ankle, I'm not in a position to do a lot of the active things that I'd planned this summer. So I'm going to do that instead. Happy days. What more can you want? The second thing, and I stole this callousy from, again, somebody on Instagram who I'm afraid I can't remember her name. I feel bad about it. I feel like it's also quite generic advice, but I found it really, really useful, which is if you wanna make friends as an adult, you have to go to the same places regularly and be open to having conversations. She calls it putting in the reps. You have to put in the reps. So I want you to think, where could you put in the reps? Now this might be going to a coffee shop at the same time each week. So every Friday morning you work two hours in a coffee shop instead of at your own desk, for example. Or it might be at the pickup or the drop off of your kids at school if you have that. So I, I don't have children that I take to school, but I help run a local or guide unit girl scouts from my North Americans. And so I'm starting to get to know some of the parents there and some of the other leaders, for example, things like that. Where can you put in the reps where you keep turning up and you keep having the bits of inane conversation that especially you introverts out there probably go, oh God, don't make me. But how can you put in those reps so that there's an increased possibility that at some point you might find somebody that you're like, oh, they're nice. And that's where we then have to manage our minds because our minds are gonna tell us there's no point. They're gonna tell us we don't have time. They're gonna tell us other people don't want to that. How do you translate that into being friends anyway? What do you do next? Da, da, da. You have to be willing to put in the reps, willing to stick your neck out slightly. Because that's when you know you have little tiny conversations. If it's someone that you're a bit like, okay, they seem quite nice, quite like them, da, da, da. You figure out what things you might have in common, you then suggest, you then tell people where you'll be. Now, this was a brilliant one. So instead of saying, do you want to go and do X with me? You tell people, I am going to X, come along if you're about. Completely different vibe. You are doing it anyway, so I'm gonna go, so one of my plans where my foot's a bit better, I wanna start open swimming. And I'm on a relatively new build estate and we have a, a ladies WhatsApp Chat. Who knew that existed. But anyway, somehow I'm on it and I've decided that when I'm well enough that I can go open water swimming, I'm gonna drop a message in there and say, I'm going open water swimming next Wednesday. This is the location, this is the time. Let me know if anyone wants to join me. We can either share lift or I can meet you there or whatever. I'm going regardless. Let me know. Because that way you are doing something cool. You might meet somebody when you are there and you are giving other people the opportunity to opt in to do this stuff with you. This all sounds like stuff that takes brain space. It all sounds like stuff that might be potentially quite awkward or difficult if you are quite introverted or quiet or whatever. But loneliness is awkward too. Loneliness takes brain space too. However busy you are, you deserve people around you. You deserve not to feel lonely. You deserve to find people that understand you, and it's okay to take a bit of time to do this even if you feel like you have a hundred thousand responsibilities right now. Now, one option I can offer all of you who are PhD students is my membership. So many of my members talk about how it's a wonderful sense of community. They are all over the world. They drop into their co-working sessions together. They hear each other talk in the coaching sessions, they chatter with each other in Slack. So if you haven't checked that out, yet, we open for new members on the 4th of August. Quarter three starts on the 11th of August. It's going to be amazing. So if you are feeling lonely in your journey and you want the sort of support that only comes from people who really proper get it because they are having it too, check on the membership. I hope I will see lots of you there. Thank you all for listening. I'm on on a mission over the summer to build new community and make more friends, and it's gonna be fun. I'm gonna do it doing lots of reps and lots of fun stuff, and I will keep you posted. Keep me posted on your journeys too. Thank you so much for listening everyone, and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

< If you put off having difficult conversations or get frazzled just thinking about it, then you need to bookmark this episode! I am going to give you my three step process for preparing for a difficult meeting. You’ll learn how to manage your own worries, strategize for success, and leave feeling proud of yourself. Links I refer to in this episode If you are preparing for a viva or oral defence, check out this episode for more specific advice. Transcript Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast, and this week we are thinking about difficult meetings. We've all had them right where you are, just dreading having to tell your supervisor you haven't done things that you said you were gonna do or waiting for your annual review meetings or whatever it might be, where you find out whether you've progressed enough to go into next year all the way through to meetings where you're just worried it's gonna be a bit uncomfortable. Right? They're a lots and lots of reasons that meetings can feel uncomfortable. You are worried about actual tangible outcomes from those meetings. Maybe you are worried about what might be said in those meetings and your emotional responses to it. You might be worried about other people's emotional responses to what's said. You may be worried it's embarrassing or awkward or upsetting or a whole load of different things. And all of those worries are completely legitimate. We've all been in meetings where it has been super uncomfortable and we've not enjoyed that situation. So it's not a big surprise that when we are looking ahead to a meeting that we anticipate might be difficult, we're sort of not filled with joy. The trouble is what we often end up doing is rehearsing all the ways it could go badly. So we then end up having a horrible time between now and then, and often end up not being as prepared as we could be 'cause often when we experience uncomfortable emotions, we procrastinate. Right? Or we end up super over prepared so that we've come up with a sort of defense against absolutely anything that they could possibly say. And we go in there with that kind of mindset, or I've gotta stand my ground, I've gotta convince them, I've gotta do whatever. And that doesn't make the meetings go well either. So often these kind of self-protective mechanisms that we understandably do, end up making the meeting more uncomfortable or more confrontational than it needs to be, and certainly not as calm and helpful as it could be. So in today's episode, we are gonna think about what you can do instead. What it is that we tell ourselves that make these things feel so complicated and how we can focus on different things in order to make these meetings feel less uncomfortable or be better able to tolerate the uncomfortableness in the run up to and in the meeting itself so that we can achieve our goals and more move on to more interesting and exciting stuff. Now this topic today is actually a taste of some of the stuff that I'm going to be teaching and coaching on in quarter three of the membership this year. So if you're listening to this in real time, you still have enough time to get on the waiting list and to join before we begin on the 11th of August, we open for people to actually like pay and stuff from the 4th of August. So if you enjoy today's episode and you want more advice about managing the relationships with your supervisor, how we can make that work better, get the things that you need, and managing your relations beyond that, whether that's building community, which we're gonna talk a bit about next week or whether it's networking and collaborating across different universities and disciplines, if you need support with all that stuff, make sure you're checking out the membership. So go to PhD Life Coach.com, click on the membership button that's at the top, tell you all about it. And depending on when you're listening to this, you can either jump on the wait list in which cage, you'll get some freebies or you can just join if you're listening in the first week in August. If you are listening to this, I know some people find my podcast and then kind of binge all the past episodes. If you are listening to this going, oh no, it's not August anymore, I missed it. You can join every quarter. So. Four times a year, we have options and each quarter has a different focus but if you particularly wanted this focus on building relationships and all that sort of stuff, it's okay. 'cause when you join, you have access to all the past content as well. So never fear, the PhD Life coach membership is here for you regardless. So let's think about preparing for these difficult meetings, and I wanna divide this into three sections, really. I wanna think about really understanding what we're telling ourselves about this meeting, because often that's where this all begins, okay? This sort of assumptions that we are making. We are gonna think about how we plan our strategy. For in the meeting, and I've got a bunch of different things I want to talk with you about there. And then finally, we are gonna think about how we plan for after the meeting, and that's one that we almost never do, but I'll explain to you why it's so important. So let's start with the assumptions. I want you all to think about a difficult meeting that you've got coming up. Potentially something where you're just, it might even just be your next supervisory meeting. Might be something kind of bigger scale than that. Try and pick something that feels like it might be awkward in the future. And I want you to think, in fact, you grab a piece of paper and start listing all the thoughts you have about that meeting, why you think it might be difficult. What are you really worrying about? And as you do that, I want you to really ask yourself, what am I assuming here? What am I assuming about what's gonna happen in that meeting? What am I assuming about what they will say? What am I assuming about what we will say? What are you assuming about what they will think? 'cause sometimes that's just as bad as the things they say, right? Even worse, 'cause we don't necessarily know what they're thinking. What will they, what Are we worried that we are going to think? Okay, try and brain dump as much of that as you can. And whenever you think you've run out thing, write it in actual sentences. As always, when we do our reflections, write it in actual sentences. Let it all fly out of your brain. And whenever you think, oh, I think that's everything. I want you to ask yourself, But what else? What are the assumptions am I making? What am I making this mean? We wanna get out as much as we possibly can. When we let thoughts spin around in our heads, they just magnify inside. And those of you who have been with me for a while will know that one of the first steps of self-coaching is to be able to get thoughts out of your head so that you can see them, so that you can actually look at them in a slightly more rational way than when they were just sort of banging around inside your head. So if you need to pause and go do it, go do it. But make sure you come back to the podcast. And what we're gonna do then is we're gonna look at these thoughts. And you are probably gonna see a whole bunch of drama there, which is completely understandable, right? We always have these full on dramas in our heads. That's fine. There's no big deal there. But we get to recognize them for what we are, and we're gonna ask ourselves, the three questions that I always get my clients and my members to ask themselves about these sorts of thoughts is, are they true? What else is true? And what if it's true? And that's okay. I might even add a fourth one. I do sometimes also ask, do they help? Okay, so these thoughts you're telling yourself. You're telling yourself that your supervisor's gonna think you're an idiot. They're gonna hate you, they're gonna be disappointed that they're probably gonna tell you that they should never have recruited you. All these sorts of things. Is it true? Is it actually, how do you know? How can you describe it in a way that might actually be true? Because for some of these, it might be right, your supervisor might be disappointed about something, that might be true. Perhaps. We'll have to think about how we know that, but it might be, are they gonna tell you they should never have recruited you? Probably and hopefully not. Okay. So we get to figure out which ones do we think are true and whether they're helpful or not. Because sometimes, even if they are true, it doesn't necessarily mean they're helpful. Okay. Telling ourselves, I don't think my supervisor likes me. It's possible. That's true. Okay. Supervisors are human beings. It's possible that, I mean, I think it's unlikely, but it's possible. But is it helpful to keep telling yourself that they don't like you? Does it help you show up in the way you wanna show up? Almost certainly not, Even if it is true. Okay, then we're gonna ask ourselves what else is true? Because often when we're filling our brain full of the drama of what might happen, we are not filling our brain with the other things. It might go fine. They might be keen to help. Uh, they are invested in your progress. There's another thought that's probably true and that would probably help more. Um, I can get through a difficult situation. That might be a thought that is an alternative that feels true, but helps more than the others. Okay? Be careful as usual. We're not aiming for manifestation thoughts, we're not aiming for. I can handle any situation at all. I don't feel emotions. We're not here for that. This could be awkward. We just need to tell ourselves that we're capable of doing awkward things. And then the third one as usual, is what if it's true? And that's okay. It might be true that your supervisor's gonna be disappointed. It might be true that you'll have to completely rewrite this draft or whatever. In what ways is that okay? And by, okay, I don't mean up not upsetting. I don't mean not a bit of a pain. I mean, how will we be okay if that's true? And many, many of the things we tell ourselves, you know, it will be really embarrassing. It's like, yeah, it might be. Maybe it'll be really embarrassing. But how could we be okay anyway? So we are sort of planning just so that we are not going into this with this enormous amount of drama because when we have this enormous amount of drama feels horrible, changes the way we prepare, changes the way that we act in the meeting and after the meeting. So it is not always easy, especially with your own stuff, right? It's always easier to see how somebody else is being a bit dramatic, but you can kind of peer into those thoughts, pick them apart a bit bit and go, you know what? These ones are probably true, but I can deal with it. These ones I need to stop telling myself 'cause they're probably not true. These ones I don't tell myself very often, but actually probably are true and help. So we get to sort of tease it all apart. The next step, step two is that we're gonna start to strategize for this meeting. And no one really teaches you how to do this. And in fact, some elements of this I did quite a automatically. So the sort of pragmatic, what am I gonna say? What solutions am I gonna bring? That kind of stuff. I generally did that. Okay. I didn't find that stuff more difficult. But we're also gonna think about how we want to show up as a person. And this one I definitely did not do. I remember my very good friend, Jenn Cumming, who friend of the podcast, um, who. Sports psychology professor, absolutely genius. One of my, you know, really, really close friends and I remember when we were junior academics together, her saying to me that before she goes into a meeting or whatever, she thinks about the other person and thinks about what they were from that meeting and thinks about how best to present her ideas in order to make them convincing to them. And how does she wanna come across it? I dunno, just being like. Oh my God, this is, gee, do people do this? Because I was very much a steam in there and be as persuasive as I humanly knew how and not a lot else. The idea of I'm gonna hold back so that they think it's their idea, or I'm going to give them space to raise their concerns rather than me just give them all my opinions. Absolutely like completely unknown to me. So if you're like, oh, I don't think about this. Don't worry, I didn't either, but I've learned and it's really good. It really, really helps. So what are we going to think about? Well, the first thing we are gonna think about is when we want to have this meeting, if it's not already booked, because often what I see more than anything is that people put off having difficult meetings. They sort of feel like, think, oh, things might resolve themselves. It might not be an issue. Maybe they'll change. Maybe they'll stop. Maybe it'll blow over all those things. My first tip is to err on the side of early action. If you've got an awkward conversation. It is not likely to get less awkward. Now it's slightly different, i'm not talking about, you know, if somebody's just left the room in a huff, you don't have to go steaming in. Give them time to chill out. Right? But if you are sort of thinking, Ooh, I've gotta tell my supervisor I haven't done this piece of work, or I need to tell my supervisor, I don't understand that, or I need to get feedback on this piece of work, but I'm worried they're gonna tell me it's rubbish, or any of those things, I want you to err on the side of early action. Because usually what we are doing is we are simply procrastinating experiencing those uncomfortable emotions, and most times it will get resolved more quickly and more effectively if we can get on it sooner. So err on the side of early action. The second tip I have here, and this is gonna sound like a funny one as usual, but my second tip is focus on managing your own emotions, not other people's. And by managing emotions, I don't mean not having any, you know, I've cried in meetings, I've got cross in meetings, I've got frustrated in me, you know? We don't have to not have emotions. I don't mean that, but what I mean is often our obsession is not disappointing the supervisor, not frustrating the supervisor, not making the supervisor cross, not making the supervisor, all these different things, right? We are trying to manage their emotions about the stuff that we want to talk about, and the problem is other people's emotions are really, really hard to manage. You can be considerate, right? I'm not saying don't be considerate, but when we're trying to tiptoe around other people's emotions, we often end up making it worse. Yeah. If we end up trying not to disappoint our supervisor, we end up sometimes not being honest and authentic about the problems that we're having, which means they can't help us, which means we get further behind, which ultimately could be potentially more disappointing. I am not saying just steam in there and say whatever you want, but your supervisors, the people you're having difficult meetings with are adults. Okay? They are adults who are more or less able to regulate their own emotions. Some of 'em may be better at it than others, but it is certainly their responsibility to regulate their own emotions, and it is not your job to prevent your supervisor ever being disappointed or ever being cross or ever being upset. So what do we do instead? What we do instead is thinking about who do we want to show up as? How do we want to come across in this meeting? Now, again, this doesn't mean coming across as perfect. I would really, really encourage you that vulnerable can be a really useful way to show up in a meeting and a really sort of effective and healthy way to show up in a meeting where you are able to say, I've actually found this bit really difficult. Now we don't have to go in there with all our drama saying, oh, and I'm so scared this, and please reassure me, but we can go in there saying, I've found this bit really hard and this is what I want the support with. So think about how do you wanna come across in this meeting? Do you wanna come across as clear? Do you wanna come across as calm? Do you wanna come across as thoughtful? What might it be? What we get to think about is how do we present that? Now I just really wanna reiterate this point about emotions 'cause it can get misunderstood and I have a strategy as well. So often people think that if they get emotional in a meeting, then that's the worst thing in the world. And to be honest, people tend to think that crying in a meeting is the worst of the worst because our gorgeously, patriarchal society has somehow convinced ourselves that crying and sadness are bad emotions where anger and. Things like that, frustration are somehow more socially acceptable to express. I don't know how this has happened, but anyway. That's beside the point. I am not saying don't express emotions here at all. What I am suggesting though, is that you a focus on how you want to come across, but b, also don't use your emotions as a way to demonstrate how serious a problem is. I have experienced many, many times from both staff and students to be honest people coming to me and almost having geared themselves up to emotionally tell me how awful this is, how emotionally difficult this has been for them, dah, dah, dah. And that's fine. Sometimes you may feel you want that release, but I want you to think very carefully. And I actually talked to a client about this recently. In fact, it was the winner of one of my, the giveaways that I did to celebrate a hundred thousand downloads of this podcast. I talked to them about it and if you go to a meeting intending to share all of your emotions in order to get them to see how bad this is, for example, I want you to think carefully what you want from that meeting, because if you present emotions as the problem, the problem is I'm overwhelmed. The problem is I'm stressed. The problem is I'm tired. You'll get likely solutions to those emotions. You are likely to get reassurance. You are likely to get kind of care and attention. If that's what you want. If that is what you're actually looking for, happy days, let's go. But if what you actually want is less work or a longer deadline or less pressure or those sorts of things, then actually it can be really useful to take the logistics rather than the emotion. This doesn't mean not telling them you're stressed. Okay, and what this means is really reminding them that your anxiety, worry, stress, disappointment, all those things, those are your emotions and they're things that you can look after. I can care for myself while I'm stressed and upset and things like that. That's fine. You don't need to look after me. I can look after myself. But the reason this is so pronounced is because I don't have time for X, Y, Z because these things are filling my time. That this thing ended up taking longer than intended, and therefore that other thing has been impacted. Okay. Notice if you're presenting it in that way, you're saying, this is having an emotional impact on me, but I don't need you to reassure me for that. I can look after myself. The bit I need help with is the logistics of how there can be less pressure or less work, or more time or more resource, or whatever it might be in the future. So think very carefully about what you want for the meeting, and think very carefully about how you want to present to give yourself the best opportunity of doing that. Now part of that is understanding your supervisor, right? What I want you to really do is look for win-wins, okay? I want you to really look for the ways that actually, things that would help you would probably help them too, because often we are pretty entangled in these meetings, right? Whether they're your examiners or whether they're your supervisors, advisors, whoever, we are pretty entangled. Often what's good for us is good for them too. So yeah, definitely think about what are they looking to get from this meeting? What are their priorities? What would make this a useful meeting for them? But you don't have to manage their emotions. You get to manage your own emotions, come across in a way that you think is authentic, in a way that you think is appropriate and professional in the way that you want to bring things forward and they get to respond to that. Another part of the strategy is often we get told bring solutions, not problems. And in many situations, that's great advice. So part of your strategy can be being able to say, if I was solely in charge, could make decisions. These are the steps I would take, these are the things I would do. I would drop that, I would postpone that. I would do this first, for example. Okay, so going with solutions demonstrates that you've thought it through, that you're not just looking for them to fix everything for you. It gives you the opportunity to put across the stuff that you think would best suit you, so you can kind of prioritize the things that you think would be useful rather than just what they come up with. And it just gives them the impression that you've planned for this meeting. Right. So when we're thinking about how you come across, one of the things I'm sure all of us want to come across at is prepared. And coming with solutions rather than problems is one of the ways that you can do that. However, and again, this came up in the coaching session that I did recently. The one thing I want you to be cautious of is where the problem is something that is way beyond your pay grade and seniority. Okay. So for me, for PhD students coming to me with a, I'm behind on my recruitment and my data collection problem, I absolutely want them to come to me with potential solutions. This is their project. They're gonna be implementing the solutions. I'll brainstorm with them. I'll help come up with ideas, I'll make suggestions if I've got experience that will help. But I want them to come with solutions because this is their project. I want 'em to at least thought about it. However, if they come to me and tell me that the problem is that someone in the lab has been behaving inappropriately to them or that they've been having bullying emails from a member of staff, or that a, there's not enough funding to fix the piece of kit that they need, you don't need to come with solutions for that. You need to come with observations and implications. So let me know what's happening, let me know what effect it's having. But the solutions to those things are my problem. They're the academics problem, and often they're the people above me's problem, right? So when it's stuff about staffing, when it's stuff about how you're being treated by people, when it's stuff about resources. Please don't think that you have to bring a solution for those things. Your only job in those situations is to raise awareness of the people who can do something about it. Okay, so we are taking early action. We are focusing on managing our own emotions. We're thinking about how we wanna show up at the meeting. We are bringing solutions as well as problems, as long as the problems are things that are kind of within our pay grade, as it were. And we are gonna look for win-wins. We're gonna look for ways that this will be helpful for both parties. Those are my big tips for preparing for the meeting itself. Now, the third thing I mentioned was one that I said almost everybody doesn't do. It just never gets talked about, and this is planning for what you are gonna say to yourself after the meeting. Now those of you who have listened to my episode about preparing for your viva will have heard me talk about this, but it is true across any meeting, any difficult situation. You can apply it to doing presentations, doing conference talks, anything like that. Anything where essentially you are kind of building yourself up to something you're a bit worried about. One of the worst things that make these situations feel super stressful is knowing that if it goes badly, if the person doesn't react the way we want them to, or if we say something, we regret that we are gonna rehearse that for the rest of our lives. Right? We've all done it. Okay. We've all got stories in our head. Where we're absolutely mortified by something that we did or something that we said or whatever, and we go over and over them and use it as evidence that we are intrinsically useless, right? We don't have to do this. We don't have to do it. And what you can do when you are preparing for a meeting in advance of it actually happening is you can decide here and now that however that meeting goes, you will be kind to yourself afterwards. Now, does that mean we don't reflect on it and learn a bit? No, obviously not. We can still reflect on it. We can still decide, ah, it might have been better to do this than that. That's fine. But we are gonna do that in a kind, supportive, loving way. Not a, oh my word, you idiot. I can't believe you said that kind of a way. Right. We can decide that yes, we'll be reflective, but we are gonna be kind, we're gonna be supportive. And importantly, this is not only if you do your best, I want you, and this, any of you who still have exams to do or any of those sorts of things, I want you to remember this. Most people reassure you with, oh, well as long as you did your best, then it's okay. No, we are not gonna reassure ourselves with that because sometimes you won't have done your best. Or at least you won't have done what you think your best is. You did what you were capable of in the moment, but you may not be able to tell yourself that it was your best. And I want you to be kind to yourself even if you haven't done your best, even if it wasn't your finest hour, okay? Even if you did lose it and say something you regret or whatever, I still want you to be kind to yourself, and that is important for so many reasons. It's important 'cause it makes it easy to do things in the future. If you know that you are not gonna beat yourself up for messing things up. You can try literally anything. Yeah, if you know you're gonna be kind to yourself, if you do the worst karaoke ever, you can go do a karaoke, happy days. You can try these scary things because you know you'll be nice to yourself afterwards. You know that your self worth doesn't have to be contingent on how it goes, so it makes it unbelievably easier to be brave. It also makes that post meeting period much, much nicer, 'cause you're not gonna spend it beating yourself up. Now will those thoughts still come up? Probably, but. We know that we are not gonna feed them, we're not gonna reinforce them. And we've got other thoughts to divert ourselves to like it went how it went, and I can resolve what I need to resolve, for example. Then we can actually spend much less time beating ourselves up. And then the third reason that's so useful is it makes it so much easier to fix things. If you did screw something up. So, especially people who've got a ADHD got autism, things that mean that maybe sometimes in the moment you don't react the way that you ideally would react. Okay. The way that you want to, it's not from your best self. Okay? Sometimes we get a bit dramatic, a bit reactive, a bit rejection sensitive, whatever it might be. Now, if we are super kind to ourselves afterwards, not saying that that behavior was okay and that we're just gonna do it willy-nilly and people can put up with this, but if we don't tell ourselves that it makes us a terrible person, it is enormously easier to go back the next day and go, yeah, I got a bit worked up there, didn't I? Really sorry, that's not how I want to show up. I hope you understand. How can we move forward, makes it so much easier. Whereas if you are at home telling yourself that you are a terrible person, that everybody hates you forever, so much harder to go and fix it afterwards. To go and have those conversations. To go and be vulnerable. To be vulnerable, you do have to have a sense of psychological safety that actually I've made a mistake. I'm gonna resolve my mistake to the best of my ability, but I don't hate myself for my mistake. So those are your three big clusters of tasks. Understand where all this worry is coming from, what assumptions are you making, what thoughts are you having, and let's whittle it down to stuff that is true and is helpful. Then we're gonna strategize for the meeting. We're gonna plan how we can what we want outta the meeting, come across the way we want to and look after ourselves in the process. And then we are gonna plan for how we're gonna look after ourselves afterwards. That can be pragmatic too. It's not just about what you say to yourself. It can be things like, if you know you are having a difficult meeting, do not expect yourself to come straight out of it and then get on with writing your discussion section. Give yourself some time for the come down. If you are somebody who just needs to sort of get it outta your system. Go to the gym, go for a walk. Plan to meet a friend. Have somebody pick you up so you don't have to drive home. So you've got somebody that you can moan to. Think about how you can have something afterwards that will help you process the emotions that you've experienced and look after yourself and make it pleasant. Those are my three tips planning for a difficult meeting. If you are not already on my newsletter, get yourself on my newsletter. In fact, if you're not on my wait list yet, why not jump on the wait list for the membership if you're not, message me, find me. I'm on Instagram, I you can respond to my newsletter, all that stuff. Lemme know what it is that's preventing you from wanting to join the membership because I think, and I am biased, but I think that all PhD students should be in my membership. So if you don't think it's for you, just lemme know why. Okay? It's a deal. And then I might try and persuade you why I think it actually is, but it would also just be super useful feedback for me too. Thank you all so much for listening, I hope you found that useful and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

< Today I’m coaching Becci who is writing her final thesis discussion chapter. She told me “I feel like I don't really know what I'm doing and I'm just flailing around in the dark spewing out thousands of words and wondering what my point even is. Up to now, I've found it quite easy to understand what I need to do and what chapters need to look like but this part just feels like a huge and important amorphous blob.” Hear how we worked through these thoughts and came to a plan (and listen to the end of the episode to hear where Becci is now!!) Links I refer to in this episode If you want to hear other people getting coached, sign up here to get a full searchable archive of the podcast - you can filter by “coaching” and find all the episodes! Transcript Vikki: Before this episode starts, I've just got a quick update for you if you're listening to this live. The PhD Life Coach membership is gonna open in three weeks time, which is the 4th of August. That is when we are gonna start taking new members. If you're not on the wait list already, make sure you go there, check it out. Vikki: And join today's episode is a coaching session where I work with a listener, Becky, who is struggling to get her writing done. You'll hear exactly what it's like to be coached by me. This is what we do week, could week out during the membership program. So make sure you check that out and keep listening right to the very end. Vikki: 'cause I also have a little update from Becky at the end of the episode. Thanks for listening. Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast, and this week we have another coaching session. Now, by the time this goes out, there will have been a couple of others in the last sort of six, eight weeks. It's a little bit of a series at the moment. These are all listeners who responded to a bit of a shout out. I did asking for people who had interesting topics that they would like coaching on, and Becci was one of the very kind students who responded. So thank you very much, Becci, for agreeing to come on. Becci: Oh, you're very welcome. Happy to be here. Vikki: So Becci, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you feel like you want some coaching on. Becci: Yeah, so I come from a counseling and psychotherapy background, but also really into the outdoors. So that's what my PhD is all been about. How we can use the outdoors to promote resilience in young women. I'm up to the point where I'm three years in, well, nearly three years in. I have to be finished by October and I'm writing my discussion at the moment, but I'm finding that really challenging. The rest of the time i've kind of felt like a way to write things and there's a structure there already that I can kind of follow and just tweak and think about. But with the discussion, it feels like it's just this blob. Becci: Like it's just bringing everything together and it's like, I have absolutely no clue really what that's supposed to look like. I know there's probably no, like, it's supposed to look like this, but it just feels like a big blob of blah. And it's not that I've got nothing to say, it's just that it's just a mess. So I feel like some coaching would be really valuable for me to get a handle on how to even start looking at this mess and making some sense of it. Vikki: Yeah, for sure. And it's such a common thing, right? That we kind of at the beginning Okay. Do a lit review. Okay. I'm not quite sure what that is, but I can figure that out and stuff. But there is something kind of big and I guess a bit amorphous about, about a discussion. So yeah. I'm sure this is gonna be super useful for so many people. So gimme a little bit more background, the rest of the thesis exists. Is that right? Becci: Yeah, yeah. Vikki: So how long has the discussion been your focus for? Becci: Oh, uh, good question. Probably about six weeks. Vikki: Okay. Cool. So you've been working on it for about six weeks, and if I came and peered over your shoulder now, what would I see on your computer? What sort of exists? Becci: About 20,000 words where I've just like spewed out any old stuff that comes to mind that might be somewhat relevant. Vikki: Okay. So all discussion, but just kind of stream of consciousness. Becci: Yeah. Yeah. And I read, I read through some of it yesterday and was like even, I have no idea what the hell it was on about then, but cool. Vikki: So real kind of brain dump stuff. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: Okay. And was that sort of done like consistently over the last six weeks, or have you sort of had fits and starts? Tell me more about how this six weeks has been for you. Becci: Um, definitely fits and starts. So there's been like some days where I feel like, oh, it's clicked, and I'll write loads of stuff. And then a lot of other times where like I'll write a few words and then be like, I don't know what my point is, and then I go down a rabbit hole of like either looking at other people's discussions in their thesis to try and understand like what that's supposed to look like or just like looking at random research that I think might be vaguely applicable and then being like, oh, I don't even remember why I was looking at this in the first place. So it has been very up and down. Yeah. Um, yeah. Vikki: A lot of starting and then having some thoughts about it. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: And going off in different directions then from there, Becci: yeah. Yeah. And kind of looking and thinking, oh, I think I understand now what I'm supposed to write, and then start to write stuff and then reading it back and going, no, that's not, that doesn't seem right, but we'll just leave it there for now, which I think might be part of the problem perhaps, is that I just leave everything in at the moment. Vikki: Okay. On those days where you think, Ooh, I think I know what I'm meant to be doing now. Mm-hmm. What do you think you're meant to be doing? Becci: Good question. Um, I don't know. It is, I think I get that thought when its like I've written something and they go, yes, that sort of feels right, but I can't quite put my finger on why that feels right. Okay. Which might be why I can't do that consistently. 'cause I don't understand why it is that that feels right in the first place. Vikki: How did it go? So I said at the beginning that often people sort of more intuitively understand what a lit review is and then find the discussion difficult. But let's take you back to that when you wrote your introduction chapter. How did you decide what needed to go in there? Becci: When I was writing my intro, I decided what was gonna go in there because I read a lot. So I would think about like a specific topic that was related to my overall topic or question. I'd read lots and lots of that, and then I'd make lots of notes about what it was I'd read and what felt like it stood out enough that I should write something about that. Becci: And I just wrote, I wrote consistently, but I did like a block of reading, then some writing, then a block of reading, then some writing. I just picked out like the main concepts really. So I found that quite straightforward to do. Vikki: And how did you decide what order to present that in and how to structure it and stuff? Becci: I think I went with like what feels like the most important concept that I need to talk about first. So, because mine is a lot about resilience. That was like, I need to talk about that first, because that's like what underpins all of this. And then I thought, okay, so what's the next most important thing? Okay, so outdoor adventure activities, so now I need to write about that. So I think I just sort of went down what are the most important things? And then also thinking about like, what was my rationale for actually choosing to research that topic in the way that I was researching it. Vikki: Okay. So you had some notion of what needed to be in an introduction. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: And you made some decisions about what order to present in. Because you know, as with anything, there's no right way you chose that. I'll start with this central concept and then do that concept. You could have done that in a different order and it would've been fine too, but you made some decisions about that kind of makes sense. And then once you had a, like a first draft say of your intro, did it mostly stay like that? Did you do dramatic rewrites? Did you restructure? Take me through how that process was. Becci: Yeah. I didn't do any like dramatic rewrites. Um, although I did put in like an extra section recently because it just helped to structure my other chapters if like there was certain information that was in the Vikki: Yeah. Perfect. Becci: Yeah. So that was like one of the bigger changes. And then it has been sort of restructured because when I read through it more recently, I was like the way that I presented certain theories didn't run sort of chronologically, so then it didn't really make sense. They sort of jumped around. So I moved those about, but I didn't do any like major, oh, I really need to rewrite that section. 'cause it's totally like gobbledy gook Vikki: so you'd sort of made some decision, I wanna talk about this stuff and then that stuff. But then within the, this stuff, the stuff about resilience, when you then edited it, you thought actually there's a, people on YouTube can see me gesturing wildly with my hands. But you can see, you sort of like, oh, actually it would make sense to talk about this resilience theory before I talk about that one. So move those around. Okay. Tell me how the discussion feels different to that. Becci: It feels less straightforward. It feels like there aren't specific concepts that I definitely need to discuss. Even though that is, is probably not true, but that's what it feels like. It's like it, it's much less specific in that I can't just go Right. Well it is this, this is really important to my research, this concept. This is really important to my research. Write about those. Um, and also, Vikki: I mean, can't you? Becci: Probably, but I think that's part of my issue maybe, is like trying to pick out what those important concepts are. Because I feel like I'm getting lost in the fact that there's lots of them. Vikki: Why does it feel like there's more concepts in the discussion than in the introduction? Becci: Um, because throughout my thesis have been like building up theory, and now these theories feel very complex. And have lots of different elements to them. And so then it feels like I have to unpick all of those, but that feels like an impossible task to do in a limited amount of words and time. So it feels like what I'm trying to do is like pick out the key concepts, but then I'm like, but then I'm missing all this other stuff, which is also really relevant. Why isn't that as important as this thing over here? Then I like perhaps trying to include absolutely everything, and then there's things outside of my theories as well that I'm like, oh, I should be talking about that. It feels like, because it feels like that's a big important part of it, but I, there's no space for that. Vikki: So are you trying to combine, you say you are developing theories and stuff. Are you trying to combine those theories into some sort of unifying framework or are they distinct from each other, sort of covering different elements of this? Becci: Uh, a bit of both. So I've got like 13 theories that are like very specific. And then I'm hoping to combine all of those into one sort of three framework. There's a bit more usable really for practitioners. But all those individual theories are also important. Vikki: Have you developed that framework yet? Becci: I've developed a version of that keeps changing every five minutes based on whatever idea I've had about what my discussions should look like that day. Vikki: And is your discussion where you're presenting your unified framework? Becci: Yeah. Vikki: Okay. So. What makes the unified framework keep moving? Becci: My ideas about how much I should include and what is useful to include, and then when I think I've got a handle on that, I then think about the type of methodology I'm using and that I should be focusing on this other thing that's not actually in there anymore because I thought it wasn't maybe that useful for people. So it kind of moves around depending on what perspective I'm looking at it from, I guess. Vikki: Mm-hmm. Okay. So the reason just for everyone listening, the reason I'm kind of, burrowing in on this is I think you've actually got two different tasks here. I think you've got the task of deciding your unified framework. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: And you've got the task of writing your discussion. And I think part of the problem is you're trying to do them both at once. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: And I don't think that's necessarily a problem in the sense of, you know, some of the drafting of the discussion might help shape your thoughts about the framework. But at some point the framework needs to be solidified so that you can finish the discussion. Becci: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense actually. And I do wonder whether, part of the problem that I have with this at the minute is that it feels like a big, like a massive part of my thesis and that I don't want to just. If I settle on an idea and go, yes, that's, that's what I'm using, then I want that to be like, right, for want of a better word. I know there'll be no right or wrong, really, but I want that. I like, I want to be really happy with that and certain that like that's how I want it to be. And I think maybe because it feels so important and so big, it's like I can't settle on it because. Maybe looking for like this perfection that isn't ever going to materialize. Vikki: Because what would a right and perfect theory look like? How would you know it's right and perfect? Becci: Um, I dunno, to be honest, and I, I think, yeah, well, I, I am aware that that doesn't really exist. Um. So it's probably a bit, um, pointless sort of trying to look for that. I guess what I'm hoping for I think is like just a feeling of, 'cause I'm quite intuitive about stuff and I can kind of go, yeah, that's, that feels right. And I just feel like I don't have that with this at all. I just constantly going, no, it can't be yet done. Vikki: What do you think makes it hard to declare it done? Becci: Um, maybe like a fear of getting it wrong and it not just not being what I want it to be. Vikki: Yeah. And why would that be bad? Becci: Uh, because at the end of the day, I have to defend it. And if in like a few months time, I'm like, yeah, no, I don't think that's actually right anymore. Then I guess I'm maybe worried about having to defend something that I no longer believe to be true. Vikki: I mean, is that what you would do in the Viva? Becci: Uh, that's what I feel like I had to do. Whether I would actually do that, I'm not really sure. Um, 'cause I haven't really thought about what I would do if that happened. I think, 'cause I've been so focused on not letting that happen. Vikki: and what does defending it mean to you? Becci: Oh, um, what does defending it mean to me? Like, being able to say why I think that is the case and the evidence that I've got to back that up. Yeah. Vikki: The only thing we have to tweak there slightly is just the tense. So defending this in your Viva is explaining why you did it the way you did it. That has no resemblance to whether you still think that is the best way to do it. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: This is why I chose to do it the way it's presented in front of you. And then to some extent you get to see how the conversation goes. Right? Because if they start saying, well actually, why didn't you combine those ones together and have that as a separate element? And at that point you can go, you know what? I've been thinking the same thing since I wrote it. I actually think it might make more sense. That is something I'd love to hear more what you're thinking, you know, and have a conversation about that. Vikki: Because you can make changes after your viva, right? That's, yeah. That's how this stuff works. You get corrections. Now, I'm not saying you necessarily like launch into, by the way, I think everything I wrote is wrong. I've changed my mind. But you can still explain why you did it the way you did it. Yeah. Wait and see what they say. Becci: Yeah, I hadn't really thought about it like that. Yeah, because I guess I, I, ideas change all the time, don't they? And as long as you can explain why you did what you did at the point that they've read it at. Vikki: Yeah. Becci: Then I guess, yeah, that's maybe what the discussion bit is about and yeah, I never really, I think, 'cause I, I acknowledge that I'm gonna have corrections. 'Cause like I hear that pretty much everybody has corrections, so that's like, yeah, there's, things are gonna change in it, but I think i've very much been thinking along the lines of, well, it has to be as close to perfect as I can get it by the time I submit it. Vikki: Um, it has to be defensible. Becci: Yeah. And then, yeah, not really thinking that actually it did change my mind about something and that then came out in the viva, then I can change it and that would be fine. Vikki: So I actually think, I think this is really interesting one, because for a lot of people, their kind of main propositions, I guess, are made in the results chapters, right? And they share their findings in the results chapters, and then in the discussion chapter, they're really kind of contextualizing that to other literature, explaining what it means and things like that. Vikki: Whereas actually there's an element to which for you, your discussion is a little bit resulty in the sense that you are presenting this framework. Becci: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Vikki: And I think that does make it a slightly different thing. And I think part of the issue here is I think you're not distinguishing that that's slightly different than your average, you know, if you've done a big qualitative study. Here's all my themes and whatever. Here's this da, da, da. And then you, you're not presenting a new framework. You're just talking about what this means for outdoor education in the future or whatever. Yeah. Then it's a little different. So I have a question that might help clarify some of this stuff. Vikki: So once you've presented this framework in your discussion, what would be the next steps for either you as a researcher or for people who've read your work in the future, who want to build on your work in the future, to take that framework and do things with it? What would be the next things that people might want to do with a theoretical framework? Becci: Um, applying it to interventions. Which I sort of did in one of my other, well, I did do in one of my other chapters, before I like refined the theories. But yeah. So there'd be, it would be, yeah, applying that to interventions, and perhaps on a, a larger scale than what I've already done within my thesis. Vikki: Um, so they'd be testing it essentially. Becci: Yeah. Yeah. Vikki: I think that is also really important because the next steps of changing a framework or adopting a framework, depending on what happens, is to test it in some sort of intervention way or in some other way, and then to decide from there whether it stands up to that next test or whether it needs modifying or whatever. Becci: Yeah. Yeah. Vikki: Is that fair? Becci: Yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely fair. Yeah. It also makes me think of something that I've not actually considered is that because I've taken a realist approach, a like from a realist perspective, no theory is ever like perfect there. It is gonna be fallible and it constantly should be being revised. So kind of missing the point by trying to do something that's like a perfect theory 'cause that doesn't exist and isn't supposed to. Vikki: Hmm. How does that feel? Noticing that? Becci: Uh, kind of freeing 'cause it's like, I do what I can do at this point with the knowledge that I've got now and actually the point is that it would be yeah, tested and refined further anyway. Or tested and adopted depending on what happened. So yeah, it feels, yeah, freeing, I think. Vikki: And that means you could potentially change things as part of your corrections if it comes up in the viva or the defense as it's known elsewhere in the world , but it also means that you've got the option to write this up as a moment in time, essentially, that at this point, without more data, without this being used in a different context or tested in some other way, here's a pretty good representation of what I think this theory is. Becci: Yeah. Yeah. That's actually really helpful. Um, 'cause it's just thinking about it in that slightly different way, isn't it? This is what I think right now, but yeah, there's limitations to that. I had already thought about the limitations and kind of put that, but then not really, I don't know, viewing the work really through that lens. I think maybe I was like, when it is a limitation 'cause it felt like I should, instead of understanding like that actually is a limitation. Vikki: Yeah. Hmm. I was talking to some, in fact, it might even have been when I was recording another podcast this week, somebody I was coaching this week anyway. We were talking about how it can sometimes be really freeing and inspiring to remember that the end of your thesis is the beginning of somebody else's. Becci: Hmm. Yeah, I like that. Vikki: Somebody else will read your thesis or will read the papers that come from your thesis and we'll go, oh, that's really interesting. But I can see a gap. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: And that gap's where I'm gonna write my PhD. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: I'm gonna take this and apply it in children, or I'm gonna take this and apply it in dance instead of outdoor ed or whatever. 'Cause that's what we've done, right? You've read people's research, you've found it fascinating. You've spotted stuff they haven't done, that in no way undermines the work that they did. Becci: Yeah. It's different. Vikki: And now you build on that. Becci: Yeah. Yeah. I never really thought about it like that before. That's a, a really nice way to think about it. Quick interjection. If you are finding this episode helpful, but you are driving, walking the dog or doing dishes, just remember this. When you're done, head to the PhD life coach.com and sign up for my newsletter. We've all listened to a podcast and thought this is great. I should do something with it, and that didn't. That's where I created the newsletter to help you actually apply the stuff that you hear. Each week you'll get a short summary, some reflective questions on one simple action that you can take right away. You'll also get access to a searchable archive of all the past episodes so you can find the exact one that you need to help with your current challenges. Plus all newsletter subscribers get a free webinar every single month on a topic that affects all PhD students and academics, and you'll always be the first to hear for when my membership opens to new members. So once you're done listening, or even right now, go sign up for my newsletter and make sure you don't miss out. Vikki: So let's go back to a couple of practicalities. As far as you are aware, what bits need to be in your thesis. So in your introduction, it sounds as though you kind of went with, um, sort of concepts like, you know, I need resilience, I need outdoor ed, da da da. Yeah. In the discussion what sort of, almost what jobs need doing. I need a block that does this job. I need a block that does that job. Let's have a brainstorm about what that is. Becci: Yeah. I need a block. I'll start easy. That summarizes what I've done so far and like the main, the main outputs of that. Vikki: Yes. Good. So we need a relatively brief summary of the main outputs. Perfect. What else? What other blocks do we need? Becci: Um, for me, I need a block about how these refined versions of the theories came to be. Vikki: Okay. Becci: Because I haven't covered that elsewhere. Vikki: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So we need a block about how they came to be. What else? Becci: A block about what they are. Vikki: Yeah. A block presenting the framework essentially. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: I am proposing this framework for these reasons. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: Okay. What else? Becci: And then it gets trickier because I think then I'm not really sure. Vikki: Think about other people. So if it's hard to think about for yours, let's put yours to one side. You said that sometimes you procrastinate by looking at other people's chapters. That's great. Love it. What blocks do other people put in their discussions? Becci: I think what struck me about other people's discussions is they're all so different. So it's really hard to say, what they had in the, I guess, there's always something about the like, um, like bigger theories that underpin what they've found. Like essentially why might I have found what I've found based on the theory. Vikki: So something that recontextualizes it back into the literature, whether that's back into the theory, whether it's back into other empirical data. Have you ever seen the, the funnel? that describes. this describes both articles and thesises. Those of you on a podcast listening to this audio, I'm gonna try and explain what I'm drawing. If you're on video, you can see the picture. So essentially, if you imagine like a bow tie on its side, like a funnel with a narrow bit in the middle, and then a funnel back out again. A research article or a thesis should roughly be shaped like this. We start nice and wide, so I'm gonna guess your introduction starts. Something about why lack of resilience is a problem, and blah, blah, what issues it causes for mental health, things like that. Then it probably goes into something about how outdoor ed has been demonstrated as a environment in which resilience can be found. Vikki: So we're getting a little bit more narrow 'cause we're not just talking about resilience, we're talking about resilience and outdoor ed. Then probably go through some theories of resilience or theories of how it, you know, evidence that it can be changed in outdoor ed, da da da. And then you get all the way down at the end of your introduction. Vikki: And obviously with a full thesis, this is a bit more complex than I'm doing here, but in an article, usually you then have a final paragraph that says something like, therefore the current study will blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay? And that's the end of this first bit of the funnel. And then your research is this very narrow bit in between the what I did and what I find is the very specific to you, very narrow. Vikki: And then in your discussion you usually start with the current study found, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like you said, bit of a summary and then it starts getting wider again. It starts recontextualizing it back out into the world. Okay. And then there's a couple of chunks in here, which I'll talk about in a second that you definitely need, and then by the end, you finish with some sort of conclusion that brings it back out to its widest thing. Probably relates back to where you started the introduction. That just sort of zooms right back out again and says therefore this theoretical framework has the potential to improve the way that we build resilience in young women with this benefit or whatever. Yeah. So we start wide. We come on narrow, narrow and narrow. And narrow and narrow. We do our thing, we build it back out again, and there we are. And the nice thing, if you can imagine two of those sat on top of each other, this bottom of your funnel becomes the top of somebody else's funnel and they start coming back in again for their piece of research. Becci: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Vikki: Okay, so we definitely want stuff summarizing. We definitely for you like presenting the theory and how it fits with other theories, how it kind of helps explain things we've seen in the literature. Da, da, da. Can you think of any other chunks that need to go any discussion? Becci: Uh, yeah. Strengths and limitations. Vikki: A hundred percent. Yep. So we're gonna have a strengths and limitations bit. Becci: Um, um, recommendations and future research. Vikki: Future research. Beautiful. And then we're gonna finish. Okay. Becci: Simple as that. Vikki: But I want you to notice, and when you listen to this podcast, you'll be able to go back and listen to this for yourself. And it was certainly true in the email that you sent me. I want you to notice how much you were telling yourself. I've got no idea. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: I've got no clue. It's a mystery. I could even pull up. I won't bully you. Let's see. Here we go. Here's the email. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm flailing around in the dark, wondering, spewing out thousands of words and wondering what my point even is. Becci: Yeah, it sounds about right. Vikki: But it's not true. Becci: No, it's not true Vikki: because you've just told me all the bits that a discussion needs. Becci: Yeah. Yeah. Vikki: The trouble is, I'm sure it feels like that. I'm not undermining the fact that inside here it feels like you're flailing around in the dark. A hundred percent get that, but it's really important you don't tell yourself that's true. Because it might feel like you are spinning outta control, but you know what chunks this needs. Becci: Yeah. I do apparently. Vikki: And when we tell ourselves we don't, it becomes this impossible. I just can't. It's like, have you ever seen the videos online where there's like a little kid and he looks like he's drowning? He's like flailing and flailing. And panicking and panicking, and then the mum goes. Put your feet down. He's, oh, I can't swim. Put your feet down. Can't swim. I can't swim. And then he puts his feet down and he stands up and the water's up to about his chest. He's like, put your feet down. You're fine. And that's not to say his panics not real. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: But it's a little bit like that now, I think that you're, I can't do it. I can't do it. I even know what's involved. I have no idea. I'm just flailing around. It's like, put your feet down for a second. Just put your feet on the floor. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: You know, some of the bits that this needs. Becci: Yeah, yeah. And I think I just keep telling myself that same story, don't I? Of like, I don't know. I don't know. I'm confused. I dunno what I'm supposed to be doing, but I'm writing something so I must have some inkling of what's supposed to be going in. Yeah. And also, yeah, I've been able to say what sort of sections need to go in it, so I do. Yeah. I must have some idea. Vikki: Now, when you think about this 20,000 words or whatever that you've written. And you think about, if we think about those sections that you just came up with as buckets. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: Do you have a feel either off the top of your head or if you went and looked at it for which bits would get thrown into which bucket? Becci: Uh, yeah. Yeah, I think so. Like I'd have to go back and read parts of it to understand where they fit, but, um, for the most part, yeah. Vikki: And do you feel like there are some buckets that you've written loads for that's a bit of a mess, and some buckets that you haven't written for? Or do you feel like you'd have bits in all of them, or, Becci: uh, I think there's definitely like ones that I'd have quite a lot in um, and ones that would be quite sparse. Or maybe not sparse, but like just very descriptive. Which I know just isn't, yeah. It means just isn't finished, basically. Vikki: Yeah. So I think that's a useful exercise to do is to almost give yourself Word documents that are your buckets. Start chucking them out in to the different bits. The other thing I want to really, we'll come back to this thing about decisions in a second, but the other thing I want you and everyone listening to be really clear on is writing is many different things and it has many different purposes, and I think often PhD students get this mixed up. Because usually we think of writing as a way of generating the end product. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: Yeah. Writing is how we are creating the thesis that we hand in, which is absolutely true. You have to do that bit of writing, but writing is also a way of thinking. And a way of understanding what's in your brain, understanding what you don't understand very well. Testing ways of saying things, testing ideas to see if they make sense when you write them down. And that's a beautiful thing. That's a really good way of thinking. But what we often end up doing, and I wonder whether this is what you are doing, you can tell me, is we end up, we are doing that, really we're using writing to think, but we are beating ourselves up that it doesn't look like an end product. Becci: Yeah. I think I, because I do do a lot of like writing to think intentionally, so I've got lots of other documents of just like process notes essentially. Um, and then I think. I just think that the other document that has the title discussion chapter Vikki: Yeah. Becci: Is supposed to look like whatever a discussion chapter is supposed to look like. And when it doesn't, I'm like, ah, that means I don't dunno what I'm doing. Yeah. But yeah, perhaps I am just doing more of the thinking just on a document with a different name. Vikki: I think so. Becci: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Vikki: So how do you go from, at what point do you transition and how, from writing as thinking to creating a piece of writing as an end product. Becci: Um, think about like what makes me then open up a document to name it, like whatever chapter, instead of just like processing it. It would be, usually it would be having some idea of what it is I want to say, and understanding what the structure of that needs to look like to get that message across. Becci: I think what might have happened with my discussion chapter is like getting a bit impatient and just going, yes, I'll figure that out as I go along, but then being confused about why I haven't already figured it out before I've started, if that makes sense. Vikki: Yeah. Now I don't know that it's necessarily impatience, and we'll talk about that in a sec, but I think that a lack of clarity as to whether you are writing the discussion that you will hand in or whether you are still writing to understand the points you want to make. Yeah, I think you've told yourself, you are writing the discussion as an end product. But because you haven't yet decided exactly what your point is or what the structure should be, you are actually writing as thinking, which is absolutely fine. There's no problems with that. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: Other than you're expecting it to somehow end up as a discussion that you can hand in. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: When that's not what you are doing, you're just thinking on a piece of paper. Becci: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think that's exactly what's happened. Vikki: So. In order to get, you said, in order to start writing as an actual product? You want to know the points you're trying to make and remember, that doesn't have to be the point you're trying to make for the entire discussion, but for each of those sections we're talking about, you need to know the point you're trying to make and a first attempt at a structure. Vikki: We're obviously gonna restructure things if we want to as we go through, but a first attempt at a structure. What makes it difficult to go from your kind of writing as thinking thoughts on a piece of paper stuff to deciding what you're gonna say and having an approximation of a structure. Becci: I think having lots of ideas and not being able to discern which ones feel like they hold the most weight. Um, because then it's like, I'm just trying to make too many points. So then I don't make any of them in any particular depth or very well, I just, they're just loads of ideas. Um, and then the structure, I think, again, like if I understood what I was trying to say a bit better, I'd then be able to structure it fine, because I'd be like, well, this is this idea and this is this idea. Becci: But because it's like just all these ideas and I don't really know which ones should hold more weight than others. Vikki: The structure problems comes from the other bit a hundred percent. This is exactly the same as anybody who like me believed that the solution to being able to do everything was to find the right planner and jam it all in when actually the problem was you're putting in too many things, or the people out there who think that the key to making your house less cluttered is to go and buy new plastic boxes, to put things in. Vikki: It's the same thing, if you all got too many ideas, there is no structure that's gonna make all of those ideas come together and make sense. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: So what makes it hard to pick one or to pick a key idea that you want to focus on or a key framework? Becci: Um, I think, again, it's like what we were saying earlier on about trying to decide upon when is my overall framework done? Um, it's just, yeah, not wanting to make a decision because not being totally convinced that any of them are a hundred percent right, but that's 'cause that doesn't exist. And so then I'm like reluctant to get rid of anything. 'cause that might be the one that turns out to be correct. For want of a better word. Vikki: Yeah, a hundred percent. This is, and we, we talk about this in our membership a lot with my clients. This is not a don't know problem. This is an I haven't decided problem. Becci: Yeah. Yeah. Vikki: There is no knowing. There is no. I'm confused. I'm not sure which it should be. This is a, I haven't decided what this framework looks like yet. yeah, and there's lots of reasons for that, right? It feel, especially at the end of a PhD, it feels like a really big deal to like put the capital letters on your theoretical framework and say, yep, this is, this is the framework I'm putting out into the world. I'm hanging my hat on that. It feels like a massive deal. So I don't wanna like undermine that that feels scary. But this isn't that. You don't know. You're just avoiding the emotions that might come with picking one of the versions. Becci: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that extends out to like deciding what points I want to make within the rest of my discussion. 'Cause it's like I, yeah, I don't wanna make a decision about it rather than, it is not like I've got not got any ideas. I've got 20,000 words worth of ideas. Yes, but I just can't decide which ones I want to stick with. Vikki: You are choosing not to decide. Becci: Yeah Vikki: not can't. You're perfectly capable of deciding. If I said, I've got a million pounds in a box for you over here, if you can email me a version of your theoretical framework in the next half an hour. Yeah, I reckon you'd pick. Becci: Oh yeah Vikki: you are more than capable. Becci: I absolutely would. Vikki: You are more than capable of picking. You just haven't chosen that you are going to yet. Becci: Mm yeah. I think that is very true Vikki: and now with small things, it's easy to go. Just pick. It's fine. It doesn't matter. You can make either work. It's fine. With something like this though, where you know you wanna have your best shot at this, what I would really encourage you to do is go, okay. I haven't made a decision about this yet. What process do I want to go through in order to decide? So it's like if you were buying a car, okay, that can be really overwhelming, right? There's so many options. It's a stressful decision, it's a lot of money, blah, blah, blah. You say, okay, my process is. I'm gonna go to these three garages. I'm gonna narrow it down to price range this, features that, whatever else, color, who knows? Um, and then I'll narrow it down to four cars. And on the basis of that, I'm gonna do this. And my priority, when push comes to shove is gonna be price, say. Okay. That's not necessarily a right way of doing it. Everyone would have a different version of that, but that's what I want you to think about for your framework, and it's something you can discuss with your supervisor is what options have I got? Like realistically, how many different ways could this framework look? Becci: Yeah. Vikki: And I have no idea whether there's like 40 ways this could look or whether actually you are picking between two or three nuanced versions. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: What are my options and what process do I need to go through in order to pick? Becci: Mm-hmm. Vikki: Because then you decide, okay, and then I pick, and then I look after the emotions I've got about that decision. Becci: Yeah Vikki: because you will have emotions. You will have these, or what if I pick the wrong thing, or I really like that bit, that was really good. Or whatever, you will. But the truth is there's a whole load of emotions as you've learned around not making decisions too. Becci: Yeah. Vikki: And they feel rubbish. Becci: Yeah. You don't get anything done either. Yeah. Vikki: This can sound like a strange question. Are you going to hand in your thesis? Becci: Yeah. Yeah. Vikki: Yeah? A hundred percent. Becci: Yeah. Yeah. Vikki: So you are gonna make this decision at some point? Becci: Yeah, I am. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Vikki: Because you are going to hand it in, and even if you know one option is that you only vaguely make a decision and so you hand in something vague and that is your decision. Or you are gonna pick one version of this a bit more concretely, and that's what hand in Yeah. You are gonna choose this, so you get to pick when you're gonna choose this. Becci: Yeah. It is what's that process, isn't it? To go through, to pick stuff? And I've had to pick lots of things along the way. So I obviously have ways of doing that. I'm trying to think what my ways of doing that have been because I, yeah, I must have done that. I think what I did right at the very beginning, I had to like pick between, basically my, like my initial theories and ideas that I had about why things work, and I had like probably about a hundred different ones and I had the same thing there of like, how do I narrow that down to being just like, I don't know, less than 10 and I remember going through a process of printing everything off. Cutting them all up and sitting on the floor at my mom and dad's house when I was looking after the cat, and just like organizing them into like different piles and then deciding what I thought about them. Becci: And I don't know how I would do something similar here. And I don't really know how I then decided between the piles, but there must have been some way of doing that. But I'm wondering if I could do a similar sort of thing. Vikki: Yeah. Whether there's some mechanical way of actually, you know, almost drawing. I've got this version of a framework. I've got that version, I've got that version and drawing as many versions as you've got. Yeah, because it's a bit like, you know when you're clearing out your wardrobe or something, right? You are like, oh, but I do wear that sometimes I do quite like it, so yeah, I'll keep it or whatever. But then when you go to your wardrobe to put something on, I bet there are things that with all the gray sweatshirts, I usually pick this one or whatever. Becci: Yeah Vikki: you get to do that. Even with theoretical frameworks and things, it's like between those two, this one just makes more sense to me because X, Y, Z. Okay, cool. Well what about this one up against that one? Well, actually Yeah, I kind of like that one a bit more, and then you think, are there ways I can combine what I like of both of those into some sort of other version, but so, so to holding each, you know, two, rather than being like, how do I pick out of these 10 versions? Picking two? Which make more sense outta these two. That one can go over there. That's the charity shop pile for now, right? Compare this to another one. Which would I pick out of those? Pick two other ones, which, right, and we bring it down to three or four, and then from there we're like, right. What characterizes that one? What characterizes that one? Yeah, and there isn't a right way of picking. You can pick which one fits my data the best, which one fits my philosophical beliefs the best, and which any of those are perfectly legitimate. You just have to be able to explain it. Becci: Yeah. Yeah. And I think I've been trying to, like, I've not been comparing stuff. I've just been thinking about them in silo. So then it's like, well, they've all got some kind of merit, otherwise I wouldn't have done them in the first place. But yeah, that might actually be really helpful to compare them to each other and then decide. Becci: And I wonder if that is what I did right back at the beginning when I had my initial ones, is like I looked through them and compared them and thought about which ones fit the best. Rather than just staring at the same ones and going, well, yes, that's true. And then looking at another one going, yeah, that's probably true as well. So yeah, that comparing them might actually be really helpful. Vikki: Amazing. So do you feel like you've got some next steps that you can take to kind of tackle this? Becci: Yeah. Yeah. I definitely need to firm up my ideas about the theory and the framework before I try and like actually put the, because essentially my discussion is discussing the ideas within that. So it's, if my ideas about that, they're all over the place. And of course the ideas on my document are all over the place. Vikki: Yeah. I wouldn't do any more discussion work until you've fixed on a framework. Because even the limitations, and some of the limitations will be generic because they'll be about the methods that you used and things, but any limitations to do with the interpretation and stuff is gonna depend which framework you're talking about. Future directions will depend which version you're talking about. So, and it sounds as though you've already got a load of text that you can draw on when you're ready to start writing. But yeah, getting that bit really pinned down and knowing that that's a decision. It's not a solution. It's a decision. Becci: Yeah. I think that'll really help to then be able to actually write something. Um, for sure. Vikki: Yeah. You're not in the dark. No. You're not flailing around. You've made complex decisions before. You're gonna make a decision about this one 'cause you are handing it in. Becci: Yeah. And when I do hand it in, it doesn't have to be, this is perfect and my ideas can't change about it ever 'cause that's the point. Vikki: A hundred percent. That's your postdoc work or somebody else's PhD or whatever it might be. Yeah, yeah. Research is the end of one story and the beginning of the next, always. If no one ever did any work to follow up your research, that's pretty boring. Becci: Yes. It's a waste of time, isn't it? Vikki: That's the key. We don't, that's the thing is often, especially as PhD students, we want our thesis to be like the final word on a topic like ta-da. Actually, that's the most depressing thing in the world. No one wants to be the final word in a topic. We want to inspire a whole load more people to be like, oh my goodness, that's so interesting. What a fascinating framework. We could use that in this context. I wonder whether that would work just as well in this context or using this measure instead of that measure or whatever. That's why we want people to take it. Becci: Yeah. That's what I want, is I want it to be, yeah, used in the future, not just sat there looking nice. There's no point in that, is there? Vikki: Exactly. Amazing. Well thank you so much for agreeing to come on, Becci. I know this is something that lots of the listeners will be struggling with too, or will be even anticipating struggling with if they're not at that stage. So thank you for being so open and honest. And thank you everyone for listening and I will see you next week. Vikki: So I mentioned there'd be a sneaky update at the end of the episode, and that's because a few weeks after I recorded this episode with Becci, I got an email from her just updating me. She said, I'm just getting in touch with a quick update. I've now finished my discussion chapter and sent it to my supervisors for comments. Yippee! I know it is far from perfect and I'm okay with that. I'm just looking forward to hearing what my team think. The coaching really helped me to understand. What was in my way and how I could think about it all a bit differently. So thank you. I've also been shortlisted for PhD Student of the year and got a job since we last spoke, so it is celebrations all round at the moment. Vikki: This is obviously a gorgeous message to receive and it shows how much, just a little bit of coaching, a little bit of thought work can really help you take huge steps forward. Vikki: So, massive congratulations, Becci. And hope to see lots of you who are inspired by this on the wait list for the membership soon. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics time.

< Today we’re thinking about the relationships we have with our supervisors/advisors. These are one of the most complex and important elements of your PhD experience yet we rarely consider the nature of the relationships. In this episode, we think about how power is distributed in these relationships and how this affects how we each behave. This episode is relevant for PhD students AND supervisors, even if you think you have a great relationship! Links I refer to in this episode You might also find these episodes on managing your supervisory relationships useful. How to have a great relationship with your supervisor What to do if you have a toxic relationship with your supervisor Transcript Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. I'm Dr. Vikki Wright, ex professor and certified life coach. And if you were listening last week, you will have heard me, slightly before I intended to announce some important stuff about my membership. But I thought this week what I would do before we get into the main topic, which I'll tell you about in a sec, there's a whole load of new people now listening. I wanted to remind you all about what I'm talking about when I mean the membership. So I provide a whole bunch of stuff completely for free for all of you for the podcast and one workshop a month that you can all attend with no expectations, no strings. It's there for the PhD in academic community completely free, so that if you can never afford to buy anything from me, you will always get that input and support. But if you want more intensive support and you're in a position to spend a little bit of money on that, then I have my membership program. This is for PhD students, now masters. I do have some master's students that come along in, you have very similar issues, postdocs. That's fine. I draw the line, if you are an academic who's supervising other PhD students and things like that, then it's not for you. But if you are essentially an early career researcher, it is absolutely for you. And we run on a quarterly basis. Now, I'm not gonna give you the full rundown. You can look it up on my website, the PhD life coach.com, but we run on a quarterly basis. It's a three month membership, you get access to group coaching, you get access to like mini teachings. You get access to a whole bunch of self-paced materials. You get community, the community organized co-working sessions. I organize a few. It's a wonderful, wonderful place. You are gonna hear more about it over the next few weeks because my next quarter starts at the beginning of August, which means it is going to go on sale at the end of July. So this is going out at the beginning of July. We are gonna open at the end of July. The waiting list is already open. The waiting list has no obligation, but if you're on the waiting list, it makes sure you get sent all the information and it makes sure that you get any of the freebies that I'm gonna give away over the next few weeks. So make sure you sign up on that. The bit that I announced earlier last week than I was intending to announce, but there we are. I was excited, was the theme of the quarter. So every quarter we cover stuff to do with the PhD experience. We have open coaching sessions where you can bring anything you're struggling with at the moment, but each quarter also has a distinct flavor to it. So quarter one, we looked at building your time and task management systems. Quarter two, we've worked on procrastination focus and motivation. And quarter three, we are gonna be working on academic relationships. How to improve things with your supervisor, how to build the communities that you need, how to network, and kind of get to know people in your discipline. Okay, so we are really getting into the interpersonal this time. Now, if you are listening and going, oh my goodness, the other stuff sounds really good though. I kind of need that too. Even better because when you join in quarter three, you get access to all the materials from quarter one and two, and we can obviously still coach on that stuff too. So make sure you check it out. I'm not gonna be one of those coaches that hides the prices. It costs 149 pounds per quarter, so it's about 50 a month. Okay, that's Great British pounds. Translate it out. It, it does it internationally. So take, translate it out to whatever works for you. If you have questions, make sure you're on my newsletter so that you can ask them. But I wanted to make sure that all of you were up to speed. You'll get loads more details over the next few weeks. The topic of today's call, though, is inspired by that theme and actually comes from some supervisor training that I did a while ago. So I designed a bespoke supervisor training, and one of the things that I was really keen to think about was the nature of power in supervisory relationships and the implications that has for the ways we behave. And so that's what we're gonna think about today. We're gonna think about where does the power sit in a supervisory relationship? In what ways does the supervisor have power? In what ways does the student have power? And from there, think about how that affects how we work with each other, what we will say, what we won't say, what we believe about the other person and we'll help you draw some lessons there to help you improve that relationship. So let's get into it. I think the PhD supervisor student relationship is one of the weirdest relationships that exists. Now, don't get me wrong, I actually had a really good relationship with my supervisor. I had really good super relationship with my students, although they differed from each other quite dramatically. But it's still a very weird relationship because it's sort of hierarchical, right? Your supervisor is more senior to you. Uh, they are supporting you, helping you to learn and develop and build your career and all that good stuff. But on the other hand, they're not your direct boss. They're not intended to tell you exactly what you must do because there's this whole thing of independence and coming up with your own research and all of that. So you've got this weird thing where the supervisor is senior, but you are expected to take autonomy and make the final decisions about the content. But sometimes your PhD might be attached to an existing project, particularly in the sciences and engineering and things, if it's attached to a grant. When a lot of the content will have been fixed, and other times you've got complete control over it. So you imagine the other extreme might be like a self-funded arts PhD, for example, where you've picked the topic and just found someone who can support you. So that's a very strange balance. You've then got the balance that because PhD students come from all walks of life and all stages of life sometimes. The two are the same age as each other. Sometimes there's an age difference, a dramatic age difference in both directions, right? You could have a relatively new academic, supervising somebody who's come back to do the PhD in their retirement years. You could have a professor who's right towards the end of their career supervising someone that came straight out of their masters. Or you can have people supervising each other who are the same age as each other. There's then also very blurry lines as to how collegiate collaborative slash friendly you would be with your supervisor. Some people maintain a very kind of, I don't wanna say distant, but like formal relationships. Some people don't see each other that much. Some people only see each other in those supervisory official meetings. Others have a much more collaborative experience all the way through to almost acting like friends or maybe even acting like friends, you know, going to the pub together, going, you know, traveling to conferences together, all those sorts of things. And so that can make it a bit weird and blurry too. Across the podcast for the next few months, and within the membership specifically, we are gonna dive into all of that a lot more and how these different characteristics can really make a difference in that supervisory relationship and how to manage it. But the bit I want to think about today is power. So we are thinking here in terms of where does one person hold influence over the other? So let's think first about the supervisor. In what ways do supervisors have power over their students? And I know people listening, you will either be PhD students or supervisors. Sometimes you might even be both supervising undergraduates while also doing your PhD. But put yourself in that position and think what power does the supervisor have over the students? And the answer is generally quite a lot. The supervisor might have power over the physical resources that the student has access to, whether that's laboratory space or archives or money for travel, or any of those sorts of things. You may have access to all of those and be able to control the extent to which the student is able to get to them. You are likely to have access to what I'm calling community resources here, so access to other experts, access to opportunities, whether that's publishing or reviewing or grant applications or any of those sorts of things. You also have some softer power, so students often perceive that their supervisor's opinion on their work is like king, is the most important thing. If their supervisor thinks they've made enough progress, then they've made enough progress. And if their supervisor doesn't think they've made enough progress, then they haven't. And so supervisors have probably more power than they sometimes realize over the extent to which the student thinks they're making good progress, whether they are a good student or not. Similarly, students often get their sense of whether their work is of high quality or not from what their supervisor says about it. Now in the membership, we work a lot on learning to evaluate your own work and getting your own kind of sense of reassurance from yourself so you're not so dependent on that external validation, but in reality, a lot of students are dependent on the supervisor reassuring them that what they have done is good enough. The extent to which the supervisor has power over what is done varies massively, depending on the discipline, the stage of career of the supervisor, and kind of their own personal perspectives. People who have a more kind of functional approach to supervision where the job is to get the student through a project may actually take quite a lot of power over saying, no, no, you should do this study, and then this study, and then this study. And yeah, the nuances are up to the student and the way it's written up, it's up to the student, but the actual direction of the project may well be quite dictated by the supervisor all the way through to others of you who'll be sitting this now. I have no influence over that at all. It's entirely up to them. So that's one that can vary a bit, but it's a place where supervisors can have lots of power in certain situations. Supervisors also potentially have power over their student's future. And I say potentially because I think sometimes students think their supervisors have more power than they actually do. But there is certainly the perception that supervisors have a lot of power over what they're gonna write in your reference in the future, who they'll introduce you to, what they'll kind of push you forwards into. That if your supervisor likes you and if your supervisor thinks you are worthy of opportunities, they potentially have power to put you in places, introduce you to people, give you recommendations that will give you more opportunities in the future. And then finally, the supervisor also has power over all the kind of implicit knowledge that academics tend to know or figure out or assume that often PhD students, particularly PhD students who come from backgrounds where their families and their friends haven't done PhDs before, where they don't necessarily know kind of what's acceptable, what's the norm, what's the way of doing things around here, all that stuff. And supervisors have a lot of power. Again, often not recognized by the supervisor, but the supervisors have a lot of power as to how much of that stuff they actually stop and think about explaining to the student or checking at least that they understand. Can you think of anything that I've forgotten? Do let me know. Those are the kind of areas that I can see where supervisors have considerable power over their students, and so what implications does that have? Quick interjection. If you are finding this episode helpful, but you are driving, walking the dog or doing dishes, just remember this. When you're done, head to the PhD life coach.com and sign up for my newsletter. We've all listened to a podcast and thought this is great. I should do something with it, and that didn't. That's where I created the newsletter to help you actually apply the stuff that you hear. Each week you'll get a short summary, some reflective questions on one simple action that you can take right away. You'll also get access to a searchable archive of all the past episodes so you can find the exact one that you need to help with your current challenges. Plus all newsletter subscribers get a free webinar every single month on a topic that affects all PhD students and academics, and you'll always be the first to hear for when my membership opens to new members. So once you're done listening, or even right now, go sign up for my newsletter and make sure you don't miss out. Well, I see the implications that it has with my members all the time, so students who are scared to contact their supervisors at an early stage because they're worried that the supervisor will think that the work's not good enough, and that they'll therefore tell them that they're not good enough and so they won't contact them with early drafts, for example. They won't risk making mistakes because if they make a mistake and the supervisor sees that it may risk the supervisor's perception of them, which may then shut down future opportunities. May then affect the personal sense of quality of the work. That if the supervisor doesn't think I'm good enough, then I definitely can't think I'm good enough. So it really impacts communication and the ways that people interact with you. That perceived power can also really influence what a student says they're willing to do. So often a supervisor will assume that if a student. Agrees to a particular project or agrees to working particular hours or agrees to any of these decisions, then they're agreeing because they agree, right? Otherwise, why would they agree? Where actually often students are agreeing simply to manage that relationship. So a supervisor asks them to help out on another project in the lab. The student says, yes, the supervisor assumes that's 'cause they're happy with it. Whereas in reality, the student didn't feel they had the power to say no to that. They were worried about managing their supervisor's emotions and so they didn't feel that it was actually a free question that they had to say. Yes. And for those of you who are out there going, you know, oh no, but I'm a really nice supervisor. I always tell people that it's okay. They don't have to do it if they don't want to. They don't believe you often. I know I'm making sweepy statements here. There's nuance, but please remember that even if you are the Lovingest Squishiest gorgeous supervisor in the world, you still have power over your students. Your students still perceive the power that you have over them. And for all the time that you say it's okay, you can always be honest with me. They might believe you and they might try that. And if you then respond in the ways you intend and you have good interactions, then that might carry on. But the students still perceives that power. And I want you to be particularly careful with this, where your supervisees, where students are professionals, you know, they're part-time PhD students. They're professionals in another field where they're the same age as you or older as the supervisor, it's really easy to forget that there is even a power differential there. 'Cause as far as it feels, often you're talking to a peer. Those students often perceive the power differential even more markedly than junior students. And the reason for that is that whilst these part-time students are experts in their professional field, a lot of the time, that often makes them feel particularly novice as academics. Whereas our full-time students, they may feel novice as a student, but that's kind of their norm. That's their reality. The comparison of how confident and how knowledgeable and professional they feel in one context for part-time students really emphasizes how novice and how junior they are in the academic field. If you are a part-time student listening to this, I know I have lots of you, so, hi. Um, I want you to know what you think of that. Is that something you recognize in yourself? I want you to really reflect on it. It's something I have seen a lot in the people that I coach. These things also get even more blurred if you have quite a collaborative relationship, you have quite a friendly relationship, perhaps even a social relationship. Again, it can lead to this situation where the supervisor thinks there's not too much hierarchy there. The supervisor thinks it's quite an equitable partnership when in reality, often the PhD students don't perceive it that way. So thinking about how it affects how you interact with each other, how it affects what the student is willing to tell you, and how it encourages the student to sometimes say things that they don't mean, that they consider to be the right answer. If you are the student, think about how it affects you. How do you behave differently because of the power that you know your supervisor has over you. Now, this episode is mostly about awareness. We are not gonna leap into tons and tons of solutions to this. That's something that we'll talk about in the membership in a lot more detail, but even the awareness on both sides can help even with no other tactics in place. Because once we're aware of this power differential and we're aware of how it's potentially affecting how each of us are behaving, then we can decide whether we are intentionally choosing that. We can ask ourselves question like, is it true they have power over this? Is it true that me saying these things may involve a withdrawal of influence or withdrawal of resources or withdrawal of approval, or whatever it might be. So we get to query whether the assumptions we are making are true. And if they are true, we also then get to decide what do we want to do with that information? How do we want to behave? And sometimes it may be that you decide, you know what? Recognizing the power differential, it's accurate. It is. There is a real threat there that I might lose access to some of these things. And you know what? The way I'm behaving is exactly right. Happy days. That's fine. Let's keep going in that direction. But for a lot of you, you will be avoiding academic honesty in the sense of saying what you mean, admitting when you don't know things and things like that as an attempt to kind of manage the power in that relationship, manage the extent to which the supervisor thinks you're good, and I want you to ask yourself whether that's really helping or not. I get why you're doing it. The power makes it really, really hard. I want you to consider, in what ways would being honest about your perceptions of the research, being honest about what you don't understand, being honest about your opinions about what you wanna do next might actually improve the relationship rather than take away from it. So be aware of how power manifests here. Now we have to remember that there is power going the other direction too. And I think this is something that students are often very not aware of and supervisors are very aware of. And it can impact how all of us engage with each other. So ways that students have power over supervisors are things like if the supervisor is invested in your data, for example. So again, I think this is more common in the sciences and engineering where there's more team approach often, um, and where you're more likely to be working on part of a bigger trial. Um, but often the supervisor needs the data that you are collecting because they will use it for a future grant application. Okay. Often the supervisor needs the data you're collecting because they need a certain number of publications for whatever assessment they've got coming up. And so they could really do with a PhD student coming through with publications to help them on those missions. It's not quite the same in arts and humanities where there's more of a tendency towards single author monographs, single author papers. But it's certainly the case across the more sort of science end of things. Whatever discipline you're in, the supervisor may well be invested in you completing successfully. Often things like promotions and so on are contingent on having PhD students finished. Students not finishing can sometimes be seen as going against the supervisor's record. Now that varies a bit, the extent to which that's true, but there can be a, certainly a perception of that. Sometimes supervisors get really invested in their students continuing in academia. I have known people who are really, really invested in the future careers of their students. And that sounds lovely and supportive until such as a point that you realize that if you don't take the path that they think you should take, that they withdraw support. And I've seen that happen in a variety of different settings. And so sometimes supervisors are really invested in you progressing in academia that might be so that you stay on in their laboratory so that you can continue to contribute to their work. I see that a lot supervisors who encourage their students to stay because you've just trained them up, right? And they're really useful and your lab runs better because they're there and then they encourage them to stay. Sometimes it can be because supervisors take really seriously the notion of sort of being grandparents and great-grandparents out into the academic world. So your student goes off to some prestigious laboratory and then they have PhD students. And then those PhD students go to a prestigious laboratory and do the same again. And like your influence and your network are out there in the field. There's a lot of supervisors that get a real kick outta that. And sounds great, but if you then don't fit their expectations, that can have a negative impact on both sides. So let's think a bit about how that affects how the two of you interact with each other. That the student's got this power, that the supervisor really needs you to do this work and really needs you to complete often. And at the same time, they can't do it for you. At the same time they feel like you have to earn your PhD, but there is some pressure on them as a supervisor to ensure that you do. How does that influence the relationship? One of the ways I've seen is that some supervisors can get a bit controlling. Some supervisors as they start to lose faith or as they start to feel stressed for their own reasons, they start to take more control. They start to get a bit more dictatorial about exactly what needs to happen and things. And sometimes that can be useful, but sometimes that can make the student feel like they're losing control. Right. Sometimes it comes across in a more nuanced way that the supervisor is just a bit stressed about it all that the supervisor's just getting a bit time urgent, is getting a bit pressuring, those sorts of things. So they're not like making the decisions or anything, but they're sort of really saying, you know, you've gotta get on with this client, you've gotta get on with this. And the trouble is that certainly in my experience, the problem with the vast majority of PhD students is not that they don't register that time's getting short and that they've got a lot to do, it's that they really, really register that time is short and that they've got a lot to do. And that is in many ways paralyzing them because of the emotions they're sort coming up in that. So one of the ways that the power that students have gets sort of visualized in a relationship is the supervisor getting really stressed about the things they're outta control of and that negatively affecting the supervisor and their experience, but it also then having this knock on effect and influencing the students too. And that's when it then becomes reciprocal, right? Because the supervisor starts getting stressed because of the things that they're outta control of, that have influence of over them. So the power the student has, but then because the supervisor gets stressed and the supervisor is the one that's higher in the hierarchy, that has the more power, has the influence over all the things that we've discussed. That stress then gets passed back down to the student, and it can lead to a really high pressure environment where communication is really challenging and it is all coming from these perceptions of power, these perceptions of who holds which power, and then these sort of misguided again, I guess, attempts to manage that power. As I say, not loads and loads of solutions for you today, but I want you to think about this in relation to your specific supervisory relationships, whichever side of it you are on, and in the newsletter that you can all sign up to get there'll be a couple of reflective questions as usual that will help you work through. Where you think power is sitting at the moment in your relationship and what impact that has? Awareness with all the things we talk about is the absolute first step towards understanding, interpretation and strategic change. So have a think. Let me know. You can always reply to my newsletters and tell me what you've been thinking. Ask any questions As you'll have heard last week, I do answer listener questions on the podcast from time to time. So get those sent on in. Have a ponder. Where's the power in all your relationships and what impact is it having at the moment? Thank you all so much for listening, and I'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics time.