< One of the most paralysing thoughts in academia is “I don’t know what to do”. Whether it’s about your next career move or how to analyse your data or what argument you want to emphasise, we can get stuck in the “don’t knows” for weeks or months. In this episode I help you break “I don’t know” down into “I can find out”, “I can’t know”, and “I get to decide”, so that you can plan a route forwards. Perfect for anyone who is bored of feeling stuck in indecision! Links I refer to in this episode If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on how to use a “ do know don’t know ” list. Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast and this week we are gonna be talking about a phrase that comes up in my coaching program all the time. And that is the phrase I don't know. You probably hear yourself say this a lot as well in the context of all sorts of things. I don't know where to start. I don't know if I can get this all done. I don't know what argument I'm trying to make. I don't know whether to go to the conference. I don't know if I'm ready to apply for promotion. I don't know if I'll pass my Viva. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And the problem with that phrase, and we've touched on it in the podcast before, the problem with that phrase is that it is just infinitely paralyzing. When we tell ourselves we simply don't know something, it becomes almost impossible to decide what we're gonna do next. And what we usually do is when we think, I don't know, we think therefore I can't decide what to do, then we end [00:01:00] up feeling some really uncomfortable emotions, right? We feel overwhelmed, we feel anxious, we feel worried, whatever it might be. When we feel negative emotions, we all know, or at least any of you who have been here, when I've been talking about procrastination, when we feel uncomfortable emotions, the tendency is to try and avoid them. So what happens is we tell ourselves we don't know something then we feel uncomfortable emotions, and then we avoid those uncomfortable emotions by doing something different, whatever it is for you, I'm a scroller, I have to say. So we avoid our uncomfortable emotions by scrolling and then at the end of the day, we still don't know. We're still no closer to knowing, but now we're also beating ourselves up about the fact that we've wasted the day procrastinating. If that sounds like you don't worry. This is totally, totally normal. It happens all the time, whether you are a PhD student or all the way through to full professor or anything in between. There are so many things that it feels like we don't know and that we should be able to know [00:02:00] that it can be really, really overwhelming. What I'm gonna do in this episode is help you break down that sensation of, I don't know, into four different types of, I don't know. And from there, once we've identified which type of, I don't know we are in, it's a lot easier to start planning a way forward. So what are these four categories that I've identified? Well, the first is, I don't know, but I could know. So this is, I don't know if that journal accepts qualitative research or I don't know if it's possible to apply for that job when I have a PhD, but I don't have postdoctoral experience or a publication or whatever, or I don't know what the word limit of my PhD thesis is. So these are issues where there's something that actually is identifiable, [00:03:00] that is objectively true in some sort of meaningful way, and which you are able to find out at the moment. You may not know it right now and you may not fully see what routes there are to you finding it out, but it would be possible to find it out. So these are usually to do with rules and regulations or specific ways to do things where there is a set way to do it. How to perform a particular analysis for example. Whether an archive has the thing you want to find there. If we identify this as a, you know what, there actually is a objective truth here somewhere, then we can spin our brain off into, okay, how do I find out? Who might know about this? Where can I go to figure this stuff out? What do I need to do? What are the steps I need to take to identify the answer? To move from, I don't know, [00:04:00] to, I do know. Identifying that there actually is an objective answer out there makes it so much easier to then start brainstorming about how you can figure it out and how you can move forward. The second category are things where we don't know and we will find out, but we can't know right now. So these are things like, I don't know if my PhD is good enough. I don't know if my article will get published. I don't know if my promotion will be accepted. So there is an answer. It's just not accessible right now. And the problem with that is where there is an answer and it's not accessible right now, we can often feel quite discombobulated, right? We can feel quite uncomfortable where we're having to work towards something that [00:05:00] we don't know if it's going to work. This can also be true if you are doing analysis and things where there's maybe not a right way. Maybe you are developing a new methodology or something like that, and you are having to kind of figure it out. You will find out whether this way of measuring whatever it is you're measuring is working or not, right? Say we're doing lab work, for example, you will find out at some point whether you get a meaningful result, but you don't know yet. And in these situations, what we get to do is we get to accept that there are gonna be some uncomfortable emotions associated with the not knowing bit. Often we want to know because we want to take away those uncomfortable emotions, that sort of feeling of certainty and confusion and stuff, we're often not used to tolerating that, and so we sort of convince ourselves somehow that if only I knew this was gonna work, it would be fine. Or if only I [00:06:00] knew whether I was gonna get the job or not, it would be okay. What we often then do in these situations is we look for reassurance, right? If we are not sure that our paper's gonna get accepted, we, you know, go on our co-authors or our bosses or whatever to reassure us that they think it's good enough. We get 20 different people to read it so they can reassure us that it probably will be good enough. And in actual fact, none of those things really help 'cause they can't tell you that it's definitely good enough. They can only give you their advice, and in many ways it just doesn't actually fix the uncomfortable feelings at all. The magic here is accepting that we don't have to fix those uncomfortable feelings. That we can tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing whether we are gonna pass or not, whether we're gonna get the job or not, whether we're gonna get promoted or not, that we can tolerate that uncertainty and therefore we can live in a world where we don't know that yet. Now, how do we do that? [00:07:00] Part of it is about being kind to ourselves, so it is not sort of spiraling and making it very dramatic the consequences of it not being okay. Part of it is having faith that whatever happens, future you is gonna figure it out. So one of the things I often say, whether it's work related things or home related things, is we cross that bridge when we come to it. So well known phrase for a good reason because when we try and sort of cross all the bridges before we even get to them, you don't know what problems you're solving. And so many ways what we end up doing is kind of solving every eventuality, which is awful, right? So we end up in this situation where it's like if that article gets rejected from there, then I'm gonna submit it to this one. But if it gets rejected there as well, then it's gonna be this one, but then I'm gonna need to shorten it or lengthen it or change the framing of it, or whatever it might be. But then if it does get accepted, then this is gonna be a, you know, you can hear from my voice how exhausting it is to try and cover off every eventuality, and that's what [00:08:00] happens when we get ahead of ourselves on these paths. We don't even know what bridge we need to cross, yet we're trying to plan for all of them in the mistaken belief that we think it will help us feel better. It doesn't, we have to be able to stay here and say, at the moment, I can tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing. I can reassure myself that whatever happens, I will figure it out when I get there and that it's okay not to know at the moment. And what we then get to do is we get to say to ourselves, okay, if I can't know at the moment, whether this is gonna be okay, if I can't know at the moment what the outcome is going to be, how do I want to behave in that period of not knowing? What sort of person do I want to show up as? What kind of thoughts do I want to be saying to myself? What kind of actions do I want to be taking? And from there, we get to look after ourselves during this period of [00:09:00] unknowing, and then we indirectly make it feel more comfortable because suddenly we are moving in a way that is coherent with the person that we wanna be, that feels authentic, that feels like our future self, even though we don't know. As an example, if you are coming up to your Viva or a promotion interview or something like that, and you don't know if you're gonna get it or not, what do you want to have done between now and then in the not knowing? What actions do you wanna take? How do you wanna reassure yourselves? What emotions do you wanna be trying to induce in yourself to support yourself through that unknowing and to have as positive as possible an influence on that outcome? Because that's the thing we have to remember. One of the reasons that we don't know what's gonna happen is that there are so many variables, and some of them you are in control of, not all of them, [00:10:00] right? Which is why no one can ever reassure you fully. We are not in control of what the interviewer says, what the viva examiner says but there is a bunch that we are in control of, and that's the bit we get to focus on when we stop trying to fix the uncertainty with certainty, and instead try and support the uncertainty with kind of care and sensible actions forward. So we've got, so far, we've got the, I don't know where it's possible to know, and I'm gonna go and find out. We've got the, I don't know yet, but I will know in the future. Okay. Where we get to decide what we're gonna do in the meantime. The third type of, I don't know, I want to talk about today is the, I don't know, and I'll probably never know stuff. This can be some of the hardest to get used to because it can really spin in your brain and there's [00:11:00] no point in your life at which you will know for sure, and the problem is, this is, to be honest, most of the big questions in our lives. Was it the right thing to take this job instead of that job? Will it be the right thing to move countries or to not move countries, to stay at the same institution, to pursue this line of research instead of that line of research? Now, we'll obviously get some subjective information in the future when we see whether we like where we are, whether we're enjoying the research and all of those things, but we'll never know for sure whether it was the best decision or not because we didn't take the other decision. You can't decide whether staying in this country was a better decision than moving to a different country because you didn't do the other one. You don't know how it would've worked out if you had done the other one. It's the same as big personal decisions, you know, is this the right [00:12:00] person to marry? Is this the best possible person to marry? Well, we don't know 'cause we didn't live all the other lives. So what we get to do here when we identify that this is something where there is no knowing, then we get to make our decisions from that place. And I have a whole episode about how to make decisions that you love, in fact, I have it as a workshop that I run for universities as well. So how to make decisions that you love. So if you are thinking, okay, there's decisions I need to make that I will probably never know whether it was the right decision, best decision, or whatever, then I would really recommend that episode. Now some of these become an I get to decide problem, which is my fourth category of don't knows, which I'll talk about in a second. But not all of them will. Some of them are gonna be things like I don't know if my supervisor rates me or not. I don't know if my head of school likes me. These sorts of things [00:13:00] you are probably never gonna know. Maybe something will happen at some point that will convince you one way or the other, but usually when it comes to other people's opinions of you, things like that, we are never going to know. And so it's really useful to practice being okay not knowing, and again, this is an example of where the trying to find out in order to reassure yourself can make it worse. So this is where we end up being needy with people. Do you like me? Do you like me? Can I come to this? Do you want to come to that? You my friend, are you really? Do you love me? All that stuff. None of that makes you more attractive, right? None of that makes people wanna spend time with you. But that's us trying to shore up our own sort of self-esteem by feeling more certain about these things. When instead where we can identify that this is a, I'll never know for sure problem then we get to [00:14:00] ask ourselves, how do I look after myself? How do I look after myself when I'll never know for sure whether this was the best thing I could have done and whether I'll never know for sure what these people think of me. Again, we then get to say, okay, how do I look after myself in that environment? What do I wanna say to myself? What emotions do I wanna induce in myself? What actions do I want to take? What sort of person do I want to be when I'm not sure? This is something, especially the, what do people think of me? Think This is something that I struggled with a lot, especially growing up, but even into a long way into my adulthood, to be honest. I think it is part of having a, not really a DHD diagnosis. But lots of tendencies in that direction. People have lots of opinions about whether you talk too much, whether you interrupt too much, whether you do this too much, that too much, whether you don't do this. Yeah, you get lots of opinions. I don't have super strong rejection sensitivity. I do to some extent, but not as bad as some people with A DHD have [00:15:00] it but as I got to understand. This all better and understand myself better. One of the things I decided was I'm just gonna assume people like me it 'cause it just struck me that it doesn't really help to behave in any other way. Now, does that mean I force myself on people? No, absolutely. I vaguely read a room. You know, if you are not making tons and tons of effort to spend time with me or to talk to me, that's fine. Uh, you know, happy days, whatever. But I'm not gonna assume it means you hate me. I'm gonna, you know, my baseline assumption is that people like me and also that if you don't, that's okay too, because there's a lot of people... I was about to say, there's a lot of people I don't like. I don't think they're actually, I don't think that's actually true. There are a bunch of people I dislike. There are elements of a bunch of people I [00:16:00] dislike. I don't think I'm someone who really dislikes lots and lots of people. But there's people, right? We all got people. And so if I'm allowed to dislike people, then people are allowed to dislike me too. So that's one of the ways that I've kind of managed that uncertainty of not knowing what people think of me, is to kind of act as though I assume people like me and to try not to ruminate too much if evidence to the contrary comes up. Is it easy? Not always, but as a general rule of thumb, that has really, really helped me. Now that's the, I don't know, and I'll never know stuff. And then the fourth group is the, I don't know, but I get to decide group. And to be honest, this is the biggest group of all. There are some things that we'll never know. There are some things that we'll know in time we can't know now, and there are some things where there's a truly factual answer, but the vast [00:17:00] majority of things fall into the, I don't know, but I get to decide category. And this is essentially anything to do with choosing a direction moving forward. So this can be what research to focus on, how to make your argument, what to do first. Most of the, I don't knows, that you have in your life are I get to decide things. I don't know if I should do this or I should do that. I don't know if I should apply for promotion this year or next year. I don't know if I should change institution. These are all I get to decide problems. Will we ever know if it was the right decision? No. Is there such a thing as a right decision? Probably not, but we get to decide. And when we really grasp that, suddenly we get to start asking ourselves, how am I gonna decide, on what basis am I gonna decide? What do I want to prioritize? What's important to me right now? What sort of person do I want to [00:18:00] be? One of the biggest causes of, I dunno what to do, is getting conflicting opinions. So particularly as a PhD student, but even into your academic career, one person's saying, oh, you should focus on this. And someone's saying, focus on that. Or someone saying, include this stuff or exclude that stuff. You're like, I dunno what to do. I'm getting different advice. That is the perfect example of a, you get to decide problem. If people have got different opinions on it, that is like living proof that there's not one right way. That if that one person was in charge, they'd have done that and if that person was in charge, they'd have done something completely different. And you get to decide. So those are my four different types of, don't knows. I don't know but there is an objective answer that I can find out. I don't know, but I will know at some point in the future. I don't know and there's no way to ever find out and I don't know, but I get to decide. If you can pick apart your particular problem, I want you to think [00:19:00] now, what do I keep telling myself I don't know about? Pick which of those it is. And then you get to explore what your route forward from there can be. Before we finish, I'm gonna take one example that people often find difficult to put into one of these thing categories, and that is, I don't know if I've got time to do this. So let's work it through. Is it a, there's an objective answer to this? Possibly. So the first step would be to figure that out. Is there an objective amount of time that this thing takes? So is it fixed scope, fixed quality, and therefore a kind of predictable amount of time? Is there a way of knowing that? Often there's not, right? Often there's a variety of different scopes and qualities, and sometimes we work faster than others when we're up against the deadline or whatever, but [00:20:00] you can go, you know what, actually it takes me two hours to process each person's data. I've got 200 people, I've got this many hours. Actually, this just isn't possible. So it is useful if you are asking yourself, I don't know if I have time to do this, to say, okay, is there a way that this is actually quantifiable that I could work out whether it is or isn't possible. Now, usually it's hard to say it is possible, but you should be able to work out whether it is objectively not possible. This is always particularly relevant for those of you who are balancing PhD with other full-time part-time work. If there's not an objective answer, we get to say, is there, is this a problem where we will know at some point? Well, yes. When we hit the deadline and we either have or haven't done it, we're gonna find out then whether it was possible to do it or not. However, because of the way our silly little brains work, there will still probably be a part of you that are saying, oh, but if I had done this, then it would've been possible. [00:21:00] If I'd just worked hard, if I'd stayed up later, if I'd been more focused, if I'd procrastinated less, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. So is it gonna be possible at some point in the future to know whether you did do it or not? Yes. Absolutely. We will find that out in the future. Will you ever know for sure whether you could have done it? No. That falls into the, I don't know whether it would've been possible and I can't know because I can't do all the versions of it, so I don't know whether it was possible or not. The only way I guess we get a definitive answer is if you do get it done and then you know it was possible. So then what we get to say is, okay, I either need to accept that i'm gonna find out at some point, and I need to decide how I'm gonna behave in the meantime or we get to decide whether I'm giving it time or not, and I would always recommend you go this way. Most people go for the, okay, I'm either gonna stress about the fact that I don't have time to do this, [00:22:00] or I'm just gonna have a go and see how I get on. So that's the deciding. It's a, I'll find out at some point if I have enough time, and in the meantime I wanna work hard answer. Okay. There's nothing inherently wrong with that way of doing it. The problem is it does often lead to burnout. It often leads to overwork. It often leads to other stuff getting neglected because you're putting everything into this one thing that you don't know whether it's possible or not. I would always encourage you to consider, I don't know if I have time to do this or not a I get to decide problem. The reason for that is most tasks don't have an objective amount of time that they take, and most lives don't have an objective amount of stuff that has to be done. Now you might feel like it does. Okay. Often there's a lot of things that we do with our lives that we just take for granted as have to be done, where actually it's, it's often [00:23:00] not true. You know, if you are somebody who has to walk for an hour every day, there's lots of people who don't walk for an hour every day. If you are somebody who has to cook, cook all their kids' meals from fresh, there are lots of people who don't cook all their kids' meals from fresh. Many of these things are decisions. Okay. The reason I really like going for the, I don't know if I have time as being an I get to decide problem is because what you then get to do is you get to decide, okay, how many hours do I have access to that I am willing to give this, that I am able to give this, what am I able or willing to stop doing in order to buy myself some more hours? How fast or how limited in scope or quality am I willing to do this in order to get it done? And then I get to decide whether I want to do that or not. It might be that sometimes you get to decide that you wanna put more of your own resource into it, that you wanna work more hours than you normally would in order to get this thing done, in which [00:24:00] case we then get to decide how we look after ourselves. Or it might be that you get to decide that you are gonna limit the scope of it, or you are gonna limit the quality of the piece of work that you are doing, or that you get to decide, you're gonna have to just be decisive on your first idea and go with it. For example, rather than exploring all the different ways this could be written. We get to decide how long things take. So I would always encourage you to make the, I don't know if I have time for this problem as an I get to decide how much time I'm giving it and therefore what it's gonna look like by the end. If you have other examples, if you can think of, I don't know, questions that you have that you can't fit into one of those four categories, I want you to let me know and I will help you out. So all of you who are already on my newsletter know this, but if you're not, you can sign up for my newsletter on my website, and then every week you'll get [00:25:00] an email from me, which tells you about the podcast, but also gives you the opportunity to reply to me, ask any questions, follow up, tell me anything you disagree with. I'm an academic. I love nothing better than people disagreeing with me about things. So if you can think of a problem where you are saying, this is an I don't know problem, and I don't think it's any one of those four. Let me know and I will reply to you and I'll talk about it in a future episode. I hope that helps you see a route forward from that kind of place of confusion. Thank you all for listening, and I will see you next week.

Short one this week - I am using a current example from my own life to talk you through how to look after yourself when it all goes wrong. I talk through how I decided what work I am and am not going to do, and how I am looking after myself in the process. It’s short and the audio will be less crisp as I’m recording on my phone but I think it will be useful for many of you. Transcript Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. Um, I'm not gonna lie, I nearly didn't record this podcast. Um, a lot is happening over here and I am not gonna go into the details on the podcast. But suffice to say that life is complicated right now, if you're concerned. I am fine. I don't want you to be worried about me, but there is a lot of stuff going on that means that things are more difficult than I would like them to be. Um, and I need a podcast for this week, and so when, when I found out all the things that I've recently found out, I had to stop and think, right? What am I actually doing? What do I need to do? What can I do? Defer. What can I decide not to do? Essentially, how can I look after myself while I navigate all this other stuff? And for a moment I thought, right. I have a podcast episode that I've already recorded, intending to cover off the one of the Christmas period podcasts. And I thought, you know what? I can just move that forward and share that with them. Um, and so I was like, okay, we'll do that. That's fine. But then I thought actually for two reasons, I didn't wanna do that. Firstly, from my perspective, I don't want to disadvantage future me. Okay? I am super proud of the fact that I have already recorded one of the podcasts for the Christmas period, and I didn't want to then put myself back behind that if I. Used that one. Now. I was proud that I had the option, right? I was proud that I had something in the bank that I could use, but I didn't want to mess up my carefully lay plans to be ready for Christmas. I also thought that actually it might be useful for you guys. To hear a little bit about how I am navigating managing my workload while things are challenging. And actually that decision was reinforced when I sent a message to my membership, explaining to them how I was gonna handle it and what implications it might have for them. And I got a lovely email back from one of my members saying how much she values that I not only coach them, but I model. Like in my own life, how I navigate things. So I thought it was a really good opportunity. So this episode is about what to do when the bad stuff hits the metaphorical fan. Um, it's gonna be short. Um, you can already probably hear I'm recording on my phone because I'm away from my usual setup. There's not going to be a YouTube version of it. So this, and I'll explain in the podcast why all that is so. The first thing is pause and breathe. Okay. I am a few days into the situation unfolding, and I haven't made all these decisions immediately. Sometimes we think we have to like just. Immediately cancel everything or immediately decide that we're doing everything or whatever. I gave myself a little bit of time to pause and breathe. I decided that there definitely would need to be some adjustments, but that I could take a little bit of time to figure that out, and I would always want you guys to do that too. Just take a second to have a deep breath, a few deep breaths, and give yourself some time to think about it. Um, the second step always is to gather a small network of support. And I'm saying small because sometimes when difficult things are happening, some of you will want to retreat into your shell and not tell anybody at all. Others of you will feel a kind of urge to tell lots of people. Um. I was probably in the latter half where it was like, I kind of wanna talk about this stuff. Um, but actually sometimes having a large network of people just adds, you know, trying to help you can add to your cognitive load. So I basically told a few people what was happening, people that were able to help me either pragmatically or emotionally. And I haven't talked, I've got lots of very close friends that have no idea of anything happening. Um. But having a small network of support is easier to navigate and it means that the sort of, you get the things that you need. Um, one tip for when you're asking for support, partly, you know, we have to balance our own feelings of guilt and whatever that they're doing. This, I try to. Acknowledge that that's okay to feel like that, but it's also okay to ask them. Um, but one practical tip is, um, ask people to take the cognitive load, not just give them tasks. So as a really small example, I'm away from home at the moment, so, um, my dog is with my mom and my sister will be taking the dog to the field. Now I could be messaging her with details about what time 'cause he gets a secure field 'cause he's a naughty barky boy. Um. I could be messaging her with details about what time the field is and how to get in and what the code for the padlock is and when to pick him up and blah, blah, blah. I'm not, I've just told my sister to talk to my mom. They can sort it out between them. So do your best to ha wherever you can to hand over cognitive load as well as needing to sort of navigate the, like, give out the tasks yourself. Next step is cancel anything unnecessary. Now, thankfully this week I actually had a relatively light week. I do do workshops for other universities as one-offs. Um, and I didn't have any this week. I have a small number. I have my usual member member sessions, and I have a small number of one-to-one sessions, but I didn't have any other workshops. I don't know, I don't think I would've canceled them, but have a look through. I did have a few other bits and pieces that I was intending to do that I have let people know. That. Um, so to go immediately canceling anything that you can truly go, yeah, that's just not necessary this week. When you are considering the rest, when you're considering what you do wanna do and what you don't wanna do, really avoid all or nothing thinking. There can be a real tendency to either tell yourself, I've just got to keep going. There's too much to do. I can't, you know, I can't cancel anything or to tell yourself I absolutely can't do anything I need to just. Cancel everything now. Sometimes nothing might be the right answer. For some of you, depending on what's happening and everything, doing absolutely nothing might be the right answer for me this time. I don't think it is the right answer. I think I, I am perfectly capable of doing some things and in some ways it's quite nice to return into a little bit of normality for a period and do the things that I do normally and that I get, like I get nice feelings from doing and whatnot. Um, so for me, nothing was not the right answer. And remembering that it's not an all or nothing thing is super important because then you can kind of pick and choose in a intentional way what things you want to do. And for me that means balancing up two things. It means balancing up what is kind of most important, what will cause the most disruption if I don't do it, for example. Um, but it's also thinking then about what things do I have cognitive space for and what things do I. Get some benefit from doing. Okay. So at the moment I'm actually recording this, sat in a coworking session with my members. Um, and I, I love seeing my members. My members are great people. They always make me feel better. I love being with them. And so it's actually really nice to be, to be doing this. So thinking about what things actually give you those little bits of joy and what things you don't need to do. The other thing I would really encourage you is to think about your future self as well as your current self. So I gave you an example of that at the beginning of the podcast. Okay. So I, um, I could have just used a, um. A prerecorded podcast for today, but that would have penalized future me. 'cause I would've then need to think of something different to talk about for the Christmas podcast, for example, that I've had planned for a while. Um, and I decided not to, I decided to be kind to future me and do this now. Now, does that mean that I'm doing a slightly half-assed version of a podcast? Yeah, absolutely. There's no YouTube. The sound's not gonna be great. It's gonna be shorter than usual. Is it gonna be super useful for you? Yeah, I think it probably is to be fair. Um, and. So it, it, it does the job. And I think, to be honest, I think it does the job in a good way. And I'm really pleased that I'm not adding to my list of now having to think of more things for the holiday, for example. The other thing is once you've decided what things you are doing or what things you aren't doing, think about whether there's anything you can either reduce or preempt. So for me, I've sent a message to my members saying, look, at the moment I'm intending to go ahead with all of our sessions. I enjoy talking to them. It's about, it's a load I can manage. Um. But I have also given them a heads up that it's possible I may change my mind about that. It's possible I may need to cancel some sessions and I've given them some, um, practical information about what that will look like, that I'll essentially delete it from the calendar or I'll send them a message in Slack that I might not be able to access the membership site to send a, um, send a specific message. So by doing that, I sort of. Preempt the fact that something unexpected might happen, if you see what I mean. And it just means that I know that they're kind of aware and it means that, um, I will have less logistics to sort out if I do decide that something needs to change. And you can think about how that applies to you. For example, you know, maybe there are deadlines you still want to try and hit or something, but you can then, um. Make sure that you, you know, if you've told people that there might be a problem, then it's much easier to quickly send your supervisor a message saying, yeah, it turns out that was optimistic, not gonna hit it, or whatever, than it is to have to explain it all in that moment. Um. Final thing is just be really kind to yourself. Even this sort of planning, even trying to think through what you do and don't want to do can take a lot of cognitive load at a time when you don't have much to go around. So keep it really simple. And my final message is don't forget that you are a body. You are a human body, a human being body, as well as just a brain. Um. I just took a break in the, um, body double session to have a big stretch on the hotel room floor and I feel a lot better for it. We've been really mindful to make sure we are drinking water and trying to eat some food and all those sorts of things, so when it is all going down for you, don't forget those basics. Looking after your body, I am keeping it really simple this week. So that is your podcast. I suspect it will be something that is useful for some of you when, when these things happen. Um, thank you all for being there as usual, and I will see you next week.

< We’ve talked before about celebrating tiny wins, so now we’re talking about big wins. If you feel uncomfortable celebrating papers being accepted, finishing your PhD or getting a job, or any of the other big objective successes, then you’re not alone. In this episode we’ll talk about why this can feel so uncomfortable, how we can expand our definition of “celebration” and how we can ensure that we recognise and remember these important events. This is particularly relevant for you if that sounds much too embarrassing and social awkward to even consider! Links I refer to in this episode If you liked this episode, you should check out “ how to be kind to yourself ”. Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the PhD Life Coach Podcast, and this is really building on an episode I did a few weeks ago about celebrating tiny wins, and if you haven't listened to that one, don't worry. This one entirely stands alone, but this is sort of the other end of the scale, right? Because I think all of us can benefit from learning to celebrate our tiny wins a lot more. Those day-to-day things that we either take for granted or disregard as easy, where actually we have that opportunity to fill our lives with positive reinforcement and praise for doing the small things, but we then also have this question of what to do about the big things, what to do when we get a job, what to do when we get a paper accepted, when we get a promotion, whatever it might be. at the moment I'm doing a lot of work helping my members and other people who attend workshops that I run to identify their strengths. And one of the things that comes up over and [00:01:00] over is that people are really worried about being too big for their boots. They're really worried that people will see them as big-headed or arrogant and conceited. And so many of them find it really difficult to identify their strengths, and many of them find it really difficult to celebrate their big wins. They somehow feel that by celebrating their wins, that means they're diminishing other people or they're making other people feel uncomfortable or any of those things. And so this episode is really about how can we celebrate big wins in a way that doesn't feel like we are getting too arrogant and we're making other people uncomfortable, or how can we at least reframe that so that we're comfortable celebrating our big wins. So one of the things I always teach my members is that when we have little anxious thoughts, um, not big anxious problems, but like little anxious thoughts. It's useful to put 'em on the table in [00:02:00] front of us and ask us before we do anything else. Is there any truth here? Okay, so we're gonna do that with this one. Is it possible that you do sometimes get a bit too big for your boots, as it were, that you do sometimes behave in a way that is perceived by general people, not by just one person? By is perceived generally as a bit arrogant, a bit conceited. Is that true? Okay. Now I'm gonna put a rule on this. We don't count childhood. When we are kid, we're all idiots, right? When we are kids, we don't know. We almost all have probably been told at some point, oh no, don't say that. Or whatever. So this is', I don't want you traipsing up some memory from when you were 10 years old and going, oh, Mrs. Knight told me that I'd get too big for my boots. Screw Mrs. Knight. Mrs. Knight was my Class five teacher. Screw Mrs. Knight. She doesn't get to live in your brain anymore. You were a kid. You were finding out what was okay, what wasn't. So we're not gonna use those [00:03:00] memories. But if in your adult life you can genuinely think of times where people who care about you have had a quiet word and said, dude, maybe tone it down a little bit. You're kind of going on about yourself much more than you go on about other people , we're gonna touch on that very briefly at the start of this episode. And the reason I'm doing it very briefly is because I don't think that's most of you in my experience, the people who are perceived as too arrogant and conceited usually aren't the ones asking, how can I celebrate this without appearing too arrogant? They're not the ones asking it. And that means they're probably not the ones listening to this episode. The vast majority of you are probably worried about this in a kind of hypothetical. I don't want people to judge me way, but with no grounds for thinking that they actually do judge you in that direction. But let's touch on it. And when you're thinking about this, I want you to remember this is not just somebody who like feels bad 'cause they haven't succeeded this in the same way as [00:04:00] you have, or that you know, you've reminded them of something they haven't done in their life. The definition of arrogant is unpleasantly proud. With overconfident, with being conceited, there is an element of dismissing other people's wins as well. So this is not just about you celebrating yours to an excessive or unpleasant amount. It's also that you dismiss other people's achievements as well, if that still feels like you. I have a few small tips. The first one is don't generalize your wins too far. And this is true for all of us, right? Is that just because you've got one paper published, it doesn't mean you are the greatest thing ever. It doesn't mean that it's gonna be easy forever. It means we get to be proud of this one thing. So we get to make sure we are not generalizing too far. We need to make sure that we are feeling and expressing gratitude for the things and the people that helped us along the way. Usually when people are unpleasantly proud they're sort of taking all the credit without [00:05:00] recognizing how other people have contributed. We wanna make sure that we're all so celebrating other people's wins. And again, this is true for all of us, however loud we are about our own wins. We wanna be that loud about other people's wins as well. And finally, if this is something that you struggle with, I want you to take some tips from this episode where we think about quiet ways of celebrating, because sometimes if you are somebody who feels you have something to prove, you are somebody who has often been told that maybe your own self celebration is a little bit much. It can be useful to practice some quiet celebrations, not to manage other people's emotions, but to see what that feels like. So if you feel like you genuinely actually are in danger of being a bit arrogant and self-absorbed, then those are some tips for you, but we're gonna move on now 'cause I think for the vast majority of you, that's not the case. For the vast majority of you, this is something that you are worrying about that probably isn't based in much [00:06:00] other than either your own brain or like the occasional comment you've got from somebody who probably had other motives anyway. So the first thing that I would remind you, which is always, always true, is that other people are allowed to have thoughts and feelings about you. If you are behaving in a way that you think is appropriate, if you are celebrating in a way that you think is appropriate and that is in line with who you want to be and comes from your best self, other people are allowed to have opinions about that. That can be hard to stomach sometimes, but it's true. Everybody isn't. You are entitled to your opinions about people. You can think that people around you should behave differently than they do. It doesn't necessarily mean that we then have the right to make them change or anything like that. So we get to remember, yeah, there it is possible that by saying, I'm celebrating this, somebody will get upset about it. And that's their responsibility. Okay. [00:07:00] As long as we're comfortable that we've behaved in a way that's in line with our own personal, like code of ethics, our own personal ways of being, other people are allowed to have that, those emotions and the reason that has to be true is sometimes us just existing can have those impacts on each other. Okay? We all know, and I agree with the kind of the sensitivities around this, we all know, you know, companies who give you the option of opting out of Mother's Day celebrations, for example, if that's something that is really upsetting for you, for whatever reason. It doesn't mean that we can't celebrate our mothers. Those of you who have had children, there will be people who will be upset when they see other people having children, having families, because that's something they weren't able to do. For those of you celebrating professional success, there will be people that will find that upsetting because it will remind them of the things that they haven't done. We can be compassionate, we can be understanding, but it doesn't mean we have to not celebrate ourselves. [00:08:00] People are allowed to have emotions about whatever they have emotions about, and we don't have to micromanage ourselves in order to eliminate that entire possibility. Because apart from anything else, it's not possible. You just existing means that people will have opinions about it. If you never celebrate anything, people will have opinions about that too, right? There is no way of avoiding other people having emotions, so we get to check in and say, is this an okay way to behave as far as I'm concerned? And then we can just be compassionate to other people's responses to it. Now, why is it even important to celebrate? Well I think there's a bunch of reasons it's important to celebrate. We wanna make sure that we are getting a nice reward for the hard work that we put in. Now, I'm a big believer, this is why I talked about tiny wins first. I'm a big believer that we should focus on enjoying the process as well as [00:09:00] waiting for that end goal. But we can give ourselves a lot of positive reinforcement by then celebrating that end goal. What I see in academics and PhD students so much is the second that thing has been achieved, we somehow discount it in our heads and move on to the next thing that we haven't done. And what that does is it doesn't give us any positive reinforcement for having achieved the thing that we've achieved and if we don't get positive reinforcement, it's much, much harder to work towards these things in future. So we wanna be positively reinforcing the process on a day-to-day basis by celebrating our tiny wins, but then also celebrating the actual achievements so that we get that bigger scale positive reinforcement as well. The second reason I think it's important to celebrate is so that our wins are just as memorable as our losses. I want you to think about how much time you have spent, thinking about times where you failed or where you got embarrassed 'cause you did something wrong or you didn't live up to [00:10:00] your expectations or whatever it might be. I want you to think how much time you have spent ruminating on those experiences, I bet all of you can think back to times in your childhood and the ones that will be very vivid, that have popped into your head many, many times, are the ones where something really embarrassing happened. Where you were ashamed, where you were, you know, where people were judging you, where you were getting to hold off. Those things live rent free in our heads so often, and we reinforce them by rehearsing them over and over again. One of the things that celebrations can do is make the wins more memorable too. So that when we are feeling a bit nervous, we also have vivid memories of times that we've celebrated. Celebrations also give us the opportunity to learn from our experiences, and I'm gonna tell you more about that in a second when I give you some ideas about how we can celebrate. But when we just move on quickly past our [00:11:00] wins, without truly celebrating them, without truly analyzing them, we often miss the opportunity for a lot of learning and self-improvement as well. Finally, I don't want you to underestimate the extent to which you can serve as inspiration or example to others. So for everybody who sees your win and goes, oh no, I've never achieved anything like that. I, you know, I feel bad about myself now because they celebrated their win. There's somebody else going, oh is that possible? Is that possible for someone like me? And this is particularly, this is true for everyone, right? But it's particularly true if you come from demographics that are traditionally underrepresented in academia. Every time you see somebody who looks a bit like you or comes across a bit like you achieve something, you get to go, oh this is something that's an option for me. This is something that could happen. Somebody else who [00:12:00] looks a bit like me or sounds a bit like me or experiences a bit like me has done these things. Maybe I could do this too. Now I'm gonna give you an example there. And this is a combination of tiny wins and celebrating success. So when I was a academic, you have all these sort of admin, leadership service type jobs and one of the ones that I have for quite a long time was a sort of welfare tutor. Now, this was back in the day, right? This was way before the university had kind of minor counseling services, but beyond that, there really wasn't the focus on wellbeing that there is now. And so a lot of that really fell on academics. And I took my job as welfare tutor probably a bit too well, but anyway, that's a story for another day. And we're also personal tutors, so we have people who don't necessarily have problems, but they're allocated to us throughout their undergraduate degrees and we're like their first point of pastoral care. Anyway, so I was welfare tutor, I was personal tutor, and that meant I got thank you cards, right? And I loved my thank you cards because frankly, I am not organized enough to ever write. I write [00:13:00] thank you cards for my Christmas presents. Thanks, mom. I definitely do that. But beyond that. I rarely get round to it. So if anybody ever thinks to send me a thank you card, I absolutely love it. And they used to say really lovely things and so I used to stick them on my wall and I didn't stick them on my wall to show off. You know, some people may have thought that, that I was saying, oh look, students love me. I stuck them on my wall because when I was having bad days, I would notice them and I would remember why I do what I do. So it was very much positive reinforcement of tiny wins for me. I'm sure some people had opinions about it, but I knew that I benefited from it and I knew that some people probably had opinions about it, that I was trying to demonstrate how popular I was with the students. That's fine, they can have opinions. But the bit I had underestimated until somebody said it to me was the extent to which they also served as inspiration for my students. So I had a gorgeous personal tutee who I loved. She was a really, really lovely girl. And she didn't have many particular problems [00:14:00] as we went through and stuff, but she was good at turning up for her personal tutorials, which anyone who's personal tutor will know that's not necessarily expected. So I knew her reasonably well anyway, when she was ready to graduate. And it was her final post, final personal tutor meeting of her degree program. She came to see me and she'd got a card and that was really, really lovely and she said to me, I remember coming in here for my very first personal tutor meeting, and I looked at all those cards and the first thing I thought was that I'm gonna be well looked after, because if all these students are saying thank you, then I'm gonna be well looked after. And the second thing I thought was that I can't believe in three years time I am gonna be giving her a thank you card having done my degree, it feels like such a big thing. I can't believe I'm gonna get there. But seeing those cards reminded me that I will. And she said, and every time I come from my personal tutorials, I look at the cards and I think I'm going to give you a thank you card. When I finished my degree [00:15:00] and it became her, like it was her symbol that she was going to get there, and I had no idea. They had never been put up with that intention. But that little mini celebration of myself, that little mini, I'm proud of the impact I've had, that little mini, I want to remind myself of this, when things are tough was also unbeknownst to me acting as inspiration for somebody else. And anytime you celebrate anything, that is also true. So if I've sold you on, then it might feel a little bit uncomfortable, but there might be benefits from it. What are ways that we can celebrate without this sense that we are bragging about ourselves. So the first question I want to ask you is, what would be a really you way to celebrate? And you might be going, the you way to do it would be not celebrating, but if we look at you and the things that make you different, the things that make you interesting, the things that make you, you, what might be a really you way to celebrate. As an example, I was celebrating a good [00:16:00] launch last summer. I went for a flying trapeze lesson. I can't think of anything more me than going for a flying trapeze lesson. It's something that people go, what really? At your age about, it's something I'm not. I'm o, I mean, I say I'm okay at it. I'm okay at flying trapeze compared to the population. I am not okay at flying trapeze compared to flying trapeze people, but compared to most people, I've done it a few times. I can vaguely. Do it. Um, if people want me to, you have to have to reply to my emails and tell me you want this. If you want me to, I will post a video on Instagram at some point and you can see my best catches anyway. I booked that, that was a very me thing to do. That might, that is probably not a very you thing to do, although if it is, I recommend it. It's incredible. So what would be a very you way to celebrate? Are you a crafter? Could you make something to commemorate your success? Could you, you know. Do a little embroidery or make a piece of art or something like that. I [00:17:00] also did that. I don't even know where it is now actually, which is bad. I'm looking around my office madly. I made a piece of art to celebrate the people that entered my very first round of the quarterly membership, so I did that as a little mini celebration 'cause I love craft too. What could be things that just make you stay in that moment a little bit longer and commemorate it in some way so that you are sort of spending more time on it at the time, and so that it's something that you think about more regularly than you would if you haven't got something that exists like that. And the nice thing is it can be different every time. I tend to do something different every time, 'cause you know my brain. But you might find that you wanna be somebody who has a little tradition that maybe you do a little mini cross stitch every time you get a paper published or you add a crochet tile to, to a blanket every time you get a paper published or something, um, they might have to be quite big. 'cause otherwise that's gonna take a while to make a blanket unless you're a genius, but you get [00:18:00] my point, right? You can set up little traditions where you do something like that. I've seen people get their abstracts printed onto mugs and things like that so that they remember when they got their first paper published, for example. Could you start or continue some sort of collection? So if they're, you know, I don't know by yourself, a little Lego figure for every time you get a new paper or each time you get an achievement of some description. I keep my, I Haven hadn't even thought about this celebration, but it's totally true. I have a whole row of champagne bottles in my lounge. People always think I'm an absolute alcoholic, but they represent many different achievements generally in my life. So I've got one from when I got my undergrad degree. I've got one from when I got my PhD. I've got a couple from two different PhD students. So my first PhD student and then another PhD student bought me a bottle of champagne. So I'm gonna keep it. I've got it from when I got my professorship, that was a little tiny one 'cause it was during the pandemic and so I was on my own and one of my best friends came and put it on [00:19:00] my door step and then retreated an appropriate distance with a party popper. So that was a mini one. And so I always remember that that one's my professorial one 'cause I drank it on my own. Could you start little mini collections of something that you only get when you've got some sort of big achievement? And these don't have to be big, expensive things, right? In fact, often it being something little that kind of accumulates over time can be a really nice way of doing it. Essentially what we're trying to do is you celebrate as the verb that means to recognize and make special. It doesn't have to be shouting about it to other people. If you find the idea of telling other people really uncomfortable, then you know, I think we should probably coach on that. But we can start from these kind of quiet personal celebrations. The other thing is they can be a route to sharing, right? 'cause it's very different matter what you think. You're scrolling LinkedIn and you're saying, I'm happy to announce blah, I'm happy to announce blah, and you're going, yeah, whatever. [00:20:00] Anyway. Or then somebody posts, um, I dunno. Here is a cushion I made to celebrate getting promoted, whatever. It's such a different vibe, right? People are gonna engage with that in a Oh, it's beautiful. You are so clever. Oh, and by the way, congrats on that. It's gonna change the nature of the interaction. Others of you, you might be like, I'm not crafty. I don't make things. That's okay. Let's make it memorable in other ways. So maybe you love hiking. Okay. Maybe every time you get a big celebration in your life, paper, published, promotion, whatever, you hike a new hill. So some new summit that you haven't been up to before, maybe you take with you the paper. So you have a photo of yourself at the top of a hill with the paper pointing at it grinning like a maniac. So that you've got a memory and a photo where you are doing something very you to celebrate it. Maybe, you know, you're a canoeist, you go to a new river every time you get published or something. Anything that makes it memorable, [00:21:00] recognizable, where you are commemorating it in that way. Now, I also mentioned that the other really important reason to celebrate is so that we can properly learn from the experience, and this is not to take the joy out of it, right? I don't want you to be like, oh, this is a learning experience. But we dissect our fails. What should I have done beforehand to avoid this? What should I have done during it? How could I have been better? How can I be less crap next time? I want you to bring that level of forensic analysis, but I want you to bring it positively to your wins. This is something I do in the coaching sessions all the time, and I can see people get uncomfortable with it because it feels weird to talk about it, but I promise it is super, super rewarding and that is I want you, when you have had a paper published, when you have got promoted, anything like that, I want you to ask yourself, what strengths did I bring? Then enabled this to happen. If it helps you feel less uncomfortable, also [00:22:00] express gratitude for the support that you got. But I want at least as much time on what am I grateful that I did? What strengths did I bring to this? What difficulties did I overcome in order to achieve this? What can I take from this to move forward? Okay, and I want that. What can I take from this to move forward to be two different elements? Firstly, how can I replicate what I did? So where did I use my strengths? Where did I overcome difficulties in a way that I liked and in a way that feels sustainable so that I can replicate that? How can I basically reinforce that this is evidence that I know how to do this thing? The second bit that I want you to do though is I also want you to notice where you achieve this in ways that aren't how you want to achieve things in future, because some of us are still a little bit stuck in that I achieved it, but I beat myself up, I [00:23:00] worked hours that weren't sustainable, but I hated that were unhealthy, I thought in unhealthy ways, et cetera, et cetera. Right? So we also get to learn from, if I achieved it in ways that aren't how I want to achieve things in future, what can I learn from those lessons? Okay, but don't go straight to that. Strengths first. Okay. Strengths first. What you're proud of first. And I want you to talk to somebody else about it or write about it or speak into a voice note recorder about it. Anything that really kind of emphasizes that stuff so that it really reinforces it in your mind. You then, if you have got a kind of planning and review process, like the one that I teach in my membership I want you to insert this into there, okay? I want you to have some notes. These are strengths I used when I achieved my last thing, so these are things I want to do more often, and you can build that into your planning and review process. Finally, and I suspect most of you [00:24:00] are a long way from this, but finally I wanna reiterate the same advice I gave the people who were actually in danger of appearing a bit arrogant, which is we try not to associate our wins with our self-worth. So what I want you to be doing, I want you to be celebrating the wins for the fun of achieving those wins. For the fact it was a challenge and you met the challenge and you made it happen. What we don't want to do is take lessons of, this is evidence I fit in academia. This is evidence I deserve to be here. This is evidence that I am a worthy person, because the downside of that, if you use objective achievement as evidence that you are a worthy person. If you have. A period of time where you have fewer objective achievements, then you are gonna use that as evidence that you are not a worthy person, that you don't deserve to be in academia. You all deserve to be in academia. You are all capable of being in [00:25:00] academia. So we wanna separate those two things out so that we are super happy that this thing's happen. 'cause isn't that fun and exciting and it's out in the world and I'm doing my thing. Yay. And yeah, it showed some of the strengths that I have. But it's not the reason I deserve to be here, and it's not the reason I'm a worthwhile person. All those things, I have intrinsic worth. I don't need to achieve things in order to have intrinsic worth. And so I want you to make sure that when you are celebrating, we're staying in the, I'm celebrating this fun thing that I've put out there that I'm really proud of, not, oh, finally, I'm good enough. Finally, people might believe that I'm enough. Again, if that side is something that you really, really struggle with, then that is a little bit of evidence that maybe you need some coaching and you could consider looking at the membership in the future. My final tip, and this is true for everybody, the best way to feel comfortable about celebrating yourself is to celebrate everybody else at the same volume you celebrate yourself. If we all [00:26:00] celebrate each other's successes, if we all spend more time feeling proud of others, reminding them of their strengths, emphasizing, commemorating, making memorable their achievements, then partly it just makes it such a nicer place to be. And then it also makes it much easier to celebrate our own successes 'cause it all just feels like the same tone, right? We are people who celebrate, so celebrate each other's successes, celebrate your own successes, and let's make academia feel like a much more fun and pleasant place to be making these achievements and making our contributions to the world. I hope that's useful. Let me know what you think. If you have any questions or wanna let me know what you think, you can always reply to my newsletter, or if you're not signed up, you know how to do it. Go to my website, PhD life coach.com. You'll find a sign up for my community button right there on the front and I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you all so much for listening, and I will see you next week.

< THIS EPISODE CONTAINS MASSIVE SPOILERS!! Imposter syndrome is top of my mind at the moment because it’s the focus of my membership this quarter. I’m also utterly obsessed with The Traitors and have been loving the UK Celebrity Traitors which just finished. If you want to hear how the final five (and the winner in particular) made me reflect on imposter syndrome, and hear my tenuous links to an academic context, then check out this episode! If you haven’t seen it, and have no intention of watching it, no worries - you’ll still get some useful insight into overcoming imposter syndrome! Links I refer to in this episode If you liked this episode, you should check out “ eight things PhD students and academics can learn from The Traitors ”. I am apparently obsessed…. Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. I'm so excited because I'm gonna talk about my favorite topic, but I promise I'm going to try and make it relevant to PhD students in surviving academia and all that stuff. As usual, the topic, as some of you will know or suspect at least, is Celebrity Traitors. I am mildly obsessed by like social deduction, reality TV type game. So I'm not so into the sort of let's get married ones, although I have watched those too. Not mocking anyone who watches those, but my favorites are the ones where there's a game, there's a puzzle, there's deceit. They're having to kind of figure each other out. There's challenges and just lots and lots of shenanigans. To give you an example of quite how obsessed I am, when I knew Celebrity Traitors was coming out in October, and I was super excited about it, I rewatched [00:01:00] all series of the UK Traitors, all series of Australian Traitors, all series of New Zealand and i'm currently on season two of US Traitors and I'd like to emphasize rewatching now. Any of you're like, hang on Vikki. How do you have time to do that? Is 'cause I have them on while I'm doing other things. I'm a TV while cooking TV while cleaning my teeth sort of a girl. Anyway. So suffice to say I'm a little bit obsessed and we were all super excited about Celebrity Traitors here in the UK because whilst many of the people may not be globally famous, international students you may not know who they were, in the UK, this was quite the lineup. This was not yet average. I'm a celebrity, get me outta here, kind of are you really a celebrity kind of vibe. These were proper celebs and it was super, super exciting. It lived up to absolutely everything that I wanted it to be, and to be honest, all the way through, I was like, where's a little tenuous [00:02:00] connection to academia that I can use as an excuse to do another Traitors episode? Because if you haven't seen, oh, you did already do a Traitors episode, a year or two ago when it was series two on in the uk, the Harry and Paul series. Um, so if you haven't checked that out, make sure you check it out. I'll link it in the show notes for you. But I really wanted there to be some tenuous reason for me to talk about traitors on the show, and I had to wait all the way to the finale, not just the actual final, but the spinoff show, Uncloaked actual finale, where they had all the celebrities in a theater like celebrating their finale and blah, blah, blah, and talking about their experience. It took me all the way to there. Then I saw it, and then from there I was just super, super excited and that is what we're gonna talk about today. So first thing before we go any further, big warning, huge spoilers. Huge. So especially if you are not in the UK [00:03:00] and you are gonna watch the Traitors at some point when it comes out in your country or you are not up to date. Massive spoilers. I'm gonna talk about the winner. Um, so winner or winners, um, in case you haven't turned off yet. So if you do not want to know what happens in Celebrity Traitors, you have to save this episode for another day. Short version. Everyone feels like an imposter and it's not true. There you go. That's the short version. You can now leave without having any spoilers. My second request is at the end of this episode, I'm gonna talk about what I'm waiting for next, which is Irish Traitors, which is gonna come out in the UK any minute. We've been promised it in November. I'm super excited. If anyone spoils it for me, I will cry and I dunno what else, but you'll make me sad. So don't please do not spoil it. I'm aware that it has already been broadcast in Ireland. It is probably already been broadcast [00:04:00] in other places. I am super in love with the host, they're amazing, and I'm just really, really excited about it. So please don't, spoil it, please. Thank you. Appreciate it. Right. So what was the moment? The moment was when the winner, alan Carr was being interviewed have immediately after he left the castle, so this wasn't like live in the finale. He was being interviewed immediately after he'd left the castle as he had just won. Celebrity Traitors and Ed Gamble was asking him about his experience and whether he thought that he was gonna win, and he conceded that um, I love this so much, that apparently his agent had booked jobs for him during the second week of the filming because they'd all assumed that he would be knocked out by then. And so he was starting to hint at this sense that he hadn't expected to do well. You know, this sense that he wasn't gonna be good at it and things and my little brain was like, Ooh, [00:05:00] imposter syndrome. Um. But then it went further and he said, and I've got it. Actually, I recorded it into my voice recorder so I have a transcript. It's possible I have too much time on my hands. Go with it. It's all good. And he said when Stephen Fry talks, or David, now David is, David Olusoga, who's an academic, a celebrity academic who is on the show and got into the final five. He says, I go quiet. I'm not worthy. I'm not intelligent, but I've learned maybe sometimes you do need to question stand up for yourself. And Ed said, well I think you winning has absolutely proved that and Alan said "idiots can do well". Some of you'll know that I'm not considering, I am actively going to do merch that you guys are gonna be able to buy. Um, idiots can, well might be one of the greats. 'cause I feel like it kind. Sums up what we all need to hear sometimes. And when I heard this, my heart just went out [00:06:00] to him. So for context, those of you who are not based in the uk, I have no idea how globally famous Alan Carr is. Probably not at all 'cause I get the vibe he's very British, but he's. Like big, big, chat show, host, presenter, um, you know, he would be hosting like Saturday Night Live or something like that if he was in the US. He's hilarious. He is also one of the guest judges on RuPaul's Drag Race. He's had tons of different series of his own. He is a big name. This is not a sort of C list celebrity. And the fact that when he's then around other celebrities and particularly celebrities who are well known for being very intelligent, he is having this sense that he doesn't have anything to say. And if you've seen it, he actually like almost shrinks in on himself. He's like shoulders round and his head goes down. He almost like folds in like, I don't have anything to say when these intelligent people are there. And I just found it fascinating. This man's job is [00:07:00] talking to other people as well as being a comedian in his own right. And it just really struck me that if someone like Alan Carr can feel like that, then anyone can feel like that. It actually reminded me of another story, which is not quite imposter syndrome, but it made me laugh. And if there are any parents out there, I feel like you'll appreciate this. I saw Michelle Obama being interviewed about her daughters and the interviewer said something like, they must be so grateful to have all your wise advice and help. You know, that's such a privilege to have you as a parent. And she just started laughing and was like, are you kidding? She's like they think I'm an idiot. They don't listen to a word I say. I try and give them advice and they laugh. And then I say, people pay me millions of dollars for my advice. And they're like, yes, shut up, mom. And I'm just like, I'm done. This is great. If my stepchildren don't take me seriously, it's fine. Michelle Obama's kids don't take her [00:08:00] seriously either. Loved it. Anyway so it just really struck me that imposter syndrome can hit anybody at all. And from there I thought, you know what, Vik, you could probably stretch just that thought to a whole episode. But is there anything else in the Traitors that has something to say about imposter syndrome? And it made me reflect on the final five. So those of you familiar with Traitors, the people that get through to the final really are kind of treated as winners in their own right? Yeah. It's the next step to be the one who wins the money. But if you make it to the final five, then that means you've done. All the missions you've seen off like 15, 20 other people, you are to all extents and purposes a winner. And particularly in this celebrity version where, you know, they were doing it for the money was for charity, not for themselves. Then really what these people win is exposure. If they are in need of further exposure in their career and things like that. Making it to the Final Five really, really counts as winning in this context. [00:09:00] And I looked at the photos of the people who made it to the final five -more spoilers coming up- and it just struck me what a range of people it was. What different approaches they had taken to the game. How personalitily, is that a word? I don't think that's a word. How personalitily and demographically they were very different from each other. Yet somehow they had all succeeded in their own way and they all seem to adore each other. That's one of the things, if any of you don't watch The Traitors 'cause you don't like the nastiness watch this version, 'cause they're gorge. They all adore each other. It didn't make them bad at finding traitors. It had to be said, but they just all adore each other. So we had Alan Carr, the eventual winner who is giggling [00:10:00] and blushing. The dude couldn't even say, I am a faithful with a straight face without starting giggling yet somehow he still got away with it and won the entire competition. Okay. He is bumbling. He is hilarious. He is the exact opposite of cool, calm and collected, yet he was the one that carried out, well, two proper murders in plain sight, plus another one where they met on the chess board overnight. Obviously, as you do, and so managed to show that somebody who appears to be just a silly guy who's got no idea what's going on, actually was running the entire show under the surface. Then we had Cat, Cat Burns the singer, who was the other traitor, and I think Cat Burns was pretty famous around amongst young people, amongst the youth , but she's not a household name by any stretch until now. [00:11:00] She is now very much a household name, and Cat Burns is literally the opposite of in terms of demeanor of Alan Carr. She is calm, she is cool. She keeps her head. She can kind of fly under the radar a little bit, but people really like her so they don't criticize her for it. She talked quite a lot about being autistic and about feeling socially awkward and needing time to herself and not being sure whether she was gonna be able to play these sorts of social deduction games when she usually finds people exhausting. And she came all the way to the final and she did absolutely amazing. And in fact, pretty much everyone who came out beforehand had nothing but amazing things to say about how she was, the type of person she was and what an incredible job she was doing as a traitor. In fact, she was many people's pick for the [00:12:00] winner. Then we had David Olusoga, who is an academic. He's not, again, not super famous before this obviously a celebrity, but not super, super famous before this, he's got various TV shows where he talks about clever history related things, and he is. cool, calm and collected, but in a very different way from Cat. Cat is cool as well, right? She's a musician, she's young, she's fashionable, she's very, very on trend, um, in the sorts of way where she doesn't follow trends. She kind of sets trends. David is very intellectual, very deep thinking. He's quite quiet. He wasn't as insightful as he thought he was gonna be. I think it's fair to say, but he got this far, right, and he was one of those people who really took his time to think things through often. I think we think that cleverness is kind of a, quickness is the first one to understand something. He was much more of a, I need to [00:13:00] carefully ponder this kind of man, and he was amazing. He was probably I don't know my age, a little bit older, that kind of vibe. Lots of sort of slightly older people in this, which I think really, really added to the sense that this program was for absolutely everybody. So he took a very, very different route to the final. He'd been kind of accused a couple of times, but then managed to talk his way out of it. Again, not in a smarmy way, just in a kind of calm and considered way, presenting sort of feasible alternatives. He got a little bit of luck with the draw. That's a whole other story that we don't have time for, but it's good. So he, again, a third really different character. And then we meet Nick Mohamed, who I adore at a level that is probably slightly unhealthy. You may have seen him in Ted Lasso. You may have seen him on Task Master. He is glorious. I adore him. He is how somebody [00:14:00] manages to be like the sweetest politest way. The only way I can describe it is his mom must be so proud of him. In the very first thing before even the challenges started, they had to dig for a shield in their own grave, and he went and dug Celia's grave for her because, he didn't want her to have to do her own digging. So he looked for a shield for Celia before he'd even found his own shield. This is the type of man he is. He's then ludicrously talented. You know, he just, oh, I play the violin. Who knew? He's a comedian, he's a magician. He's in the magic circle. When it got to the puzzle bits, he was just like, just let me, and did all the puzzles and like two seconds flat and. At the same time, he's just gloriously sweet and kind and humble, and I adore him, but he's very different from all of the others. Super intelligent like the others, but just very sort of personable and [00:15:00] understated. All about the personal relationships. Really insightful. It still baffles me that he messed it up at the final stage. He got almost too clever at the final stage. But he has just secured himself as the nation's darling. I think it's fair to say. And then finally last but certainly not least, was Joe Marla, huge rugby player, he's got big beard, he's massive, he's got cauliflower ears. He's hilarious. He is the king of the kind of one-liner put down that he has just enough twinkle in his eye to get away with. And he played the game completely differently to any of them. He was, as you would probably expect, unbelievably competitive, unbelievably determined, really insightful, could totally spot not just what people were doing, but also what the people who made the program were likely to have chosen. So he came up with a whole big dog theory. And he really [00:16:00] went hard on several of the traitors, and in fact, he knew who the traitors were. He just got super unlucky at the end. But he was a very, very different person. And it was just looking at physically, they're very different people. Joe Marler is a man mountain, Nick Hamed is miniature . You see them together, they're a whole range of ethnicities. They range of genders, they range of sexualities, and you see them all together and you're like, there's no way. How can you have one competition that all five of these very different people essentially excel at and where they all love each other and where they've all got completely different strengths that they're bringing to it? And yet they all belong in something really important. And I think that's really important for us all to recognize 'cause I think sometimes we have this conception that there's a particular way you have to be to succeed in [00:17:00] academia and that there's a particular type of behavior, the particular personality style, a particular intellect style, a particular demographic, sometimes too, and. I think this just really personified in that setting something that I see in academia, which is that that is simply not true. There are things that are traditionally more rewarded. That is for sure, and I'm gonna talk about some unconscious bias stuff in a minute, because this imperfect in traitors or in academia. But there is a whole variety of ways to succeed. There is a whole variety of personalities right at the very top of academia. There is a whole variety of personalities and skills that are succeeding and doing really well in academia. Remembering that what we really need to be is the best version of ourselves and bring that to academia, I think can be a great way of reducing and in time overcoming, our imposter syndrome. I get to [00:18:00] be the very best version of myself and bring that to academia. Now even amongst those that didn't make it to the top, so let's count the final five as like the professoriate, right? That they made full professor, they got tenure. That's the equivalent. There was a whole load of other people that participated in the game, participated in my academia metaphor, who didn't make it to the top, but had incredibly successful games. I mean, no one is going to forget Charlotte Church on her knees, in her white dress digging the grave, trying to look for shield covering herself in mud. Plunging her head into the well to listen to the music. If anybody threw themselves into that game, it was Charlotte Church. Everyone will remember her for that. Everyone will love her for that. Even though she didn't go all the way to the final five, she had a hugely successful game. Celia Imrie, I [00:19:00] said to my sister, what would I do if I told you this before? I can't remember. Might, should have done anyway, going with it. I said to my sister, Celia Imrie got called a queen and an icon in traces, and I said, what do I need to do to be called a queen and an icon? And the Lindsay said, I think it's too late already, Vikki, which I was hurt by. But Celia Imrie is, she's got 30 years on me, I reckon in 30 years I can do something to be called a queen and an icon. Anyway, I digress. Celia Imrie, amazing actress, known for being like super posh, super amazing actress friends with all my Judy Dench and all that lot like literally girl dreams. Who knew she was hilarious? Who knew that she was going to absolutely carry it there. We had a castle full of comedians and Celia Imrie was the one that on multiple occasions made people laugh more than anything else. If you're not familiar with the fart incident, you need to check it out online 'cause I'm not even gonna describe it 'cause it's too [00:20:00] good. And you need to see the video version if you haven't already. Um. My favorite was her honesty and authenticity. When it came, they were doing quizzes about who was the most, you know, who's leader of the pack and all that stuff. And they said, who's the most two-faced? And this is the one no one wants to receive. And Celia just shoved her hand up and goes, oh, I think that's me. I tell people I like them all the time, and I don't really, just the best thing I've ever heard in my entire life. I love her. She didn't win. She should have win. She was robbed. Alan, I'm not forgiving you for that one. But she went in there with people thinking she was one thing, demonstrating that she was something else and massively, massively winning in a metaphorical sense, the game in the sense that the entire country adores her. And once this goes international, it has already, I'm sure to some extent. Everybody is going to completely adore her and just again, demonstrated a completely different way of [00:21:00] succeeding in this game. Now, was it perfect? I adore the traitors, but it has issues, issues that I believe are not specific to traitors, but that actually reflect the world that we live in, which is that there is a really, really troubling tendency across the entire traitors franchise for the people that are, eliminated initially to be disproportionately people of color, people who are not straight or not cisgender , people with disabilities. Essentially, people who are different in some way to others, and I don't actually believe that in the vast majority of cases that people are consciously saying, I am gonna eliminate the people who are different to me, or I don't want those people here. But what I think is happening, which happens in life as well, is this unconscious bias where if somebody is different to you, you give them less benefit of the [00:22:00] doubt than if they're more similar to you. And I think this is what happens a lot of the time in the traitors is that if somebody, so for example, we've had people who have later told us they have autism things being eliminated first. For example, when if at the beginning of the game you've got very little to go on. Somebody behaving in a way that seems a little odd to you, can be enough reason for them to go. Now in celebrity traitors this had another level to it. 'cause it had a level of celebrity hierarchy to it as well. 'cause I think it's fair to say that whilst it was a way better lineup than any of us anticipated, there was still a range and a range, not just in degrees of famousness but also in terms of who you were famous with. And I think it was apparent that the people who were either slightly less famous or who were more famous to younger people, so people who were famous through YouTube and things like [00:23:00] that went earlier than people that were kind of household multi-generational names. And I think that's mirrored in academia too. I think there is a tendency that if people conform to the what might be considered the sort of norm, I guess, or the historic norm , people who conform more closely to that or people who have hierarchy and prestige on their side are given the benefit of the doubt more, or it's assumed that they fit and therefore these other people who are a little bit different maybe don't fit so much. And I think unfortunately, the same sorts of biases are very much true in academia. This is not the episode for a whole, how to deal with that. Maybe that's an episode I'll do in future. It's something that I'm addressing in the membership at the moment. What to do if people treat you like you're an imposter. I will translate some of that into a future episode. Give you a little glimpse of the sorts of things we do inside the membership. But the [00:24:00] short version is that we don't beat ourselves up for experiencing it. Sometimes we can kind of gaslight ourselves that it's not real. Let's not beat ourselves up. That is evidence of intrinsic biases, unconscious biases in. Academia, there absolutely is. There's evidence of conscious bias in academia, so if you are experiencing it isn't just the figment of your imagination, however, what we do get to choose with support and love 'cause this is not straightforward. We get to choose how and if we internalize that, whether we make that mean that yes, we actually don't belong in academia and how we choose to respond, to what extent we choose to advocate, to what extent we choose to ignore. We get to make those decisions from a intentional place so that we show up as the best versions of ourselves as well. And importantly to recognize how we get support to do that. Because I do not believe that this is something that is for the people who are being discriminated against to solve on their own. These are structural [00:25:00] issues that we all should be trying to reduce. So. Celebrity Traitors is not perfect. Academia is not perfect, but both are settings where a whole variety of different types of people can and do succeed. This has given me the perfect excuse to whitter about Celebrity Traitors to you all. I did a workshop last week. We got talking about Celebrity Traitors in the break. 'Cause it was the day of the final that evening. So at that stage we didn't know who'd won. We talked for so long, I forgot to start the next session and we had to run over. Oops. Anyway. It was super exciting. I hope you enjoyed listening to me squealing. I hope most of it was audible. I'm told that sometimes I'm only audible to dogs when I get excited. I hope all you can hear everything that I wasn't squeaking too badly. I hope you're excited about watching Irish traitors if you are based here in the uk and it is coming out to you soon too. No spoilers. Anybody. Please don't make me [00:26:00] cry. If you have any questions about imposter syndrome, make sure you're on my newsletter. You can just reply to that, ask me questions, and I will answer them in future episodes. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week.

< This week I’m confessing my dirty secrets. Have a listen and compare your screen time to mine! I talk through why I’m unhappy with my current phone usage, why I’m not beating myself and what I’m doing instead. If you’ve ever felt like you can only change by “being more disciplined” or “criticising yourself into wanting it enough” then this is an important episode for you. I might not have a success to report back yet in terms of reducing my phone usage, but I’m feeling very proud of how I’m going about this challenge! Links I refer to in this episode If you liked this episode, you should check out “ how accepting where you are is the first step to getting where you want to be ”. Transcript [00:00:00] I hadn't decided that I was gonna talk about this, but I've decided I'm gonna, I feel like it's something that lots you gonna empathize with and I. I'm gonna tell you some secrets that I'm hoping my mother won't listen to and what I'm gonna do about it. So let's go. Welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast, and I am talking mobile phone usage. I'm recording this on the 3rd of November. It'll be coming to you in what, a week's time? Something like that. So it's a weird time for New Year's resolutions, right? But. I've just, I've reached a point where I have so many things that I want to do and where I really want something to change with my phone use, and I'm gonna share with you today [00:01:00] why that is. I'm gonna share numbers, which makes me want to cry, but I'm going to tell you anyway. I'm gonna share numbers. I'm gonna share my screen time numbers and all that sort of jazz. I'm gonna tell you why I think it's. A problem why I am bringing a lot of compassion to myself. So I'm gonna try and demonstrate how I'm practicing what I preach with all of this stuff. And I'm also gonna tell you what I am doing about it. And whilst I don't believe in sort of external accountability, I do hope that by sharing this with you and potentially updating you on my journey as I go through it, it might be interesting for all of us, so let's crack it out. Let's crack my gorgeous little phone here out which wastes far too much of my time and let's go to screen time. We are going to screen time, see all app. So we'll go week. Why not last week's average, I don't even [00:02:00] wanna say it out loud. Last week's daily average was six hours and 54 minutes. Before that it was 5 44, 6 11. So it's that kind of ballpark of which last week, apparently I spent 12 hours on Instagram. I'm just. Outraged. In fact, when you throw in Facebook as well, it becomes 15 and a half hours. I'm not gonna count WhatsApp, WhatsApp's talking to my friends. Talking to my friends is important. This makes me wanna vomit, genuinely makes me wanna vomit. I am somebody who feels like she has a hundred thousand things she wants to do. There's things I want to do for my business. There's things I want to do for my health. There's hobbies, there's interests, there's friends. And I don't tell myself I'm too busy as much as I used to, but I do tell myself I'm too busy [00:03:00] and I'm doing that, and I'm gonna bring a whole load of self-compassion 'cause I'm feeling the judgment in myself. Even as I talk to you about this today. I'm not unusual, right? I am pretty confident if you guys open up your screen time now, there'll be a whole bunch of you. There'll be a whole bunch of you, probably parents who are going, what, how on earth. And there'll be others of you going, mate, you should see mine. Okay? So I'm well aware there's a whole range of this. I'm also well aware that this isn't by chance, right? These things have been designed specifically to engage us, to draw us in, to keep our eyes on their information so that they get our information and so they can sell us stuff. So I am not holding this up as a me being weak or me being stupid or lazy or any of those things. I genuinely don't make it mean those things about myself. And I [00:04:00] have been quite careful in curating what I look at. So some of you, yeah, I'm sure you've all heard the phrase doom scrolling, and I'm sure a lot of you do engage in it. I do a little tiny bit. So I follow this. Have you seen the, there's, there's a brother and sister on Instagram who are very liberal and their parents are very right wing and they interview them essentially so I do scroll things like that sometimes. I'm not gonna give you links. You can find them if you are going to spend more time online. So I do doom scroll, things like that from time to time. I do look at the news from time to time, but it's mostly not that right. I've quite carefully curated, particularly my Instagram feed, so that it is essentially hobbies that I like and dogs, lots of dogs. The problem is that I'm spending far more hours looking at pictures of dogs than playing with my dog or looking at people doing circus tricks than [00:05:00] practicing my circus tricks or looking at people doing calisthenics than doing my calisthenics or looking at people doing art than doing my art, et cetera. Can you tell, I have a lot of hobbies. You hopefully know that about me already. And so whilst i'm not blaming myself and whilst I'm not kind of beating myself up in a sort of, you're so weak and stupid sort of a way, I do also wanna take control over this because this is not what I want my future self to be like. I wanna be able to do some fun stuff. You know, when I'm, if I'm laying on the sofa, showing my husband cute dog videos, I wanna do that. Sometimes It's cute. We laugh together, we enjoy it. It's fun. But if I'm designing my dream day, my dream day doesn't start with an hour scrolling, and my dream day isn't punctuated by scrolling all the way through the day, and it doesn't end with an hour scrolling. [00:06:00] So that's one big reason. This is not what I want my future to look like. Another reason is I've become increasingly aware of when I grab my phone and I grab my phone when I haven't made a decision about something else. So when it's not clear what else I want to be doing and I grab my phone when something gets difficult. So I do genuinely, you know, I'm being really open with you here, right? Because I think you guys value that. But I think it's useful to know that somebody who gives you lots of advice doesn't have it all figured out. I notice that if I'm saying, oh, should I do this or should I do that? Should I write it like this? Or write it like that? I grab my phone and the only explanation is I'm grabbing my phone to avoid the mild, and it's only mild discomfort [00:07:00] of not knowing what I'm gonna say or not having decided what I'm gonna say or not having decided how I'm gonna do something. And the other thing that scares me is how often I go on my phone to do one thing and then 15 minutes later, get back to what I was doing and realize I never did the thing I intended to do on my, you know, I'm going on my phone to check the weather for tomorrow or something, and I come back 15 minutes later and I've, you know, I've answered something on LinkedIn. I've liked somebody's, whatever, and I've, you know, just double checked my emails for no reason whatsoever. It is just so unintentional, and when I spend so much time talking to you guys about time blocking and being intentional, and I do that stuff right and I'm much, much better at time blocking than I used to be. But those interstitial spaces, those [00:08:00] gaps between the blocks and sometimes in the blocks, I'm not gonna lie, but mostly between those blocks are pretty full of phone time, and I think it becomes a crutch. I think it becomes something to look at, to avoid thinking about anything else. You know, I pull it out in queues. I pull out on the train. I pull out when I just finished driving before I go into the house. I'm told that might be an A DHD thing, right? That trouble with like transitioning from one area to another. And so again, I see that with kind of curiosity rather than judgment, but it does slightly freak me out how, if you ask me how many times I've picked up my phone in the last hour, I wouldn't be able to tell you. I have no idea. Half the time I don't even notice I've done it. I've [00:09:00] decided I want it to change, and I'm a big believer that one of the best ways to make things change is to make it easier for yourself. I used to think that the key was to be better. I just needed to be more disciplined next time. I just needed to be stronger next time. And in reality, I don't think that's true. In reality I think we need to make these things easier, especially when we're up against something that is technically designed to draw you in. And that is, you know, filled with a perfectly curated a load of stuff you're interested in. Of course, we need to make this easier and so I wanted to share with you what I'm gonna try and I'll give you an update and we will see how we go in the future. But the things I'm gonna try, I already got myself a little. I already got myself a Fitbit. Joby. Garmin, that's the word. Which means that if my phone isn't with me, then I [00:10:00] hear it go off 'cause it buzzes on my wrist. And that's helped a little bit, but my phone is still almost always with me. And so I decided that I needed to try something a bit more extreme than that. And I am trying, and I'm telling you right now, ain't doing a review 'cause it hasn't even arrived yet. But I will share, I'm trying one of these Brick joby, the little, little devices where you can tap it and it bricks your phone. You can decide which apps it blocks, and then in order to, um, un brick it, you have to tap it back on the thing. And for me, that is a, it's not a barrier, right? I could just walk back to the brick and unbrick it whenever I wanted. For me, it gives a definitive decision that I'm not using my phone for a period of time, and it is also forcing me to think, encouraging me to think, I should say, encouraging me to [00:11:00] think about when do I actually wanna check my phone because this is one thing in my life where I get a bit all or nothing, and I go, well, I, why would I want to spend any time scrolling? This is ridiculous. It would be stupid to block an hour of my day to scroll, Instagram. Why on earth would I do that? Completely separate from the fact that I usually do that before 7:00 AM. Um, so. What I'm hoping, and the way I'm planning to use it, is to make it so that I'm much more intentional about whether I'm intending to use my phone during that time period or not. I'm not gonna set any automated things. You can set it so it comes on at particular times a day and all that sort of stuff. I'm not going to do that at first. I'm gonna experiment with it a bit, but my intention at the moment is to use it to physically tap, I'm gonna allow WhatsApp still come through 'cause [00:12:00] connecting with my friends is very important to me. That's not the bit that I'm worried about. Spending too much time doing chattering on WhatsApp, that feels worth it to me. I'm gonna block the things that lead to unintentional scrolling. I'm gonna block Facebook. I'm gonna block Instagram. Thank goodness I never started TikTok. Thank goodness Elon ruined Twitter for me. That used to take hours of my life too. But that's gone. I am gonna block Rightmove as well. I'm not moving house guys. I moved house like three years ago. I have a very bad Rightmove habit of just looking at houses that I'm never gonna afford and I don't like covet them. I just make plans as to, oh, I'd put this in there and I'd put this in there and Oh, that wouldn't work 'cause I couldn't possibly not have two studies or whatever. So I'm gonna block Rightmove as well. And I'm gonna try and be really intentional and I'm gonna try and kind of experiment with it. 'cause I can already feel my brain overthinking of well, exactly when will you block it and what exactly when will you not and [00:13:00] dah, dah, dah. I'm gonna try and be experimental with it. And the other thing I'm gonna be really clear about, and this is the bit that I'm naturally very good at, is what do I want to do with that time? Because I think it's one thing to tell yourself to stop doing something, but you also have to decide what you are going to do with that time, and I am really excited to actually go a lot more analog. So often what I do is I'm looking on Instagram for inspiration to do some fun art or crafts or something. Well, I've got a ton of art books. I've got a brain, I've got a ton of art materials. I don't need a phone to do that. I watch people doing circus tutorials. Well, I've got a load of circus toys. I know some stuff. I've got some books. I've got friends who do this. I can. You know, I can figure out that stuff. Calisthenics, I don't need, I don't need some guy off the internet telling me how to do pushups. I have been physically active my entire life. I have a [00:14:00] PhD in sport and exercise sciences, which was, it wasn't specific to that. I used to teach anatomy for God's sake. I know how to do this stuff. I know how to broadly, not at specialist level, whatever. I know how to broadly structure exercise programs. I know what I need to be doing. I need to actually be doing it. I tag loads of healthy videos and then I spend so much time scrolling, I eat toast. It's craziness. I have a load of recipe books, I can use them, and so my goal is to swap my screen time for actually specifically using stuff I have already, and this is where, other than buying the Brick, it kind of fits into this sort of less spending thing as well, right? This kind of being more sustainable. So my intention with it is to use this as a way to be [00:15:00] more present, as a way to use the stuff I've got and to actually do the things rather than watch people do the things. The other reason, and this actually directly relates to you lot, and I'm not gonna tell you the details, but on Friday I decided that I wanted a strategy day. I wanted to really think about my business and what I was gonna do next and how I would serve you guys next and what that would look like and everything. And I decided that I needed to get away from it all. And one of the joys about being your own boss is that you can decide to do whatever you want. And so I booked myself into a very lovely spa for the day. And I took a notebook and a pen and I designed and then printed out some reflective questions. And so in this spa, they don't let you take care, or at least they discourage you strongly from taking your phone into the spa itself. So I locked my phone in the locker for the whole [00:16:00] day and I took my notebook and a pen, and I scribbled so many notes. I nearly finished my entire notebook, of ideas, of things that I think would help you guys. Things I want to do over the next year or two, ways I want to support the community, a whole load of freeways. That I want to support the community. I'm going to say. So many ideas about so many things, and because I have a coach too, I discuss them with my coach tonight and we've narrowed them down and I have a plan and you guys are gonna get to hear about them soon. But let's just say getting a little bit more analog and getting a little bit more connected and being more intentional and stuff like that might be coming your way in the PhD Life Coach world. So keep a little eye out. You'll hear more in the new year. But it just really reinforced to me that my brain's got some quite good stuff in it if I [00:17:00] stop spending hours watching a lady's shrimp mantis called Ludo, he's so cute. I'm gonna miss Ludo. I am gonna still have to check in on how Ludo's doing. But anyway. If I spent less time filling my eyeballs with things like that, or why apparently skinny jeans are now coming back in again, I'm too confused, looking at those things. If I spend less time doing those things, my brain actually comes up with a lot of good ideas and insight and clarity and energy. So yeah, this is my plan and I'm trying it now because as my coach always recommends Karin Nordin who I've recommended before, um, now is the perfect time to practice New Year's resolutions. So I haven't decided. I might have a screen time goal next year. I don't know. I haven't decided yet, but now I'm gonna practice and I'm gonna see what's useful and I'm gonna see, [00:18:00] okay, if I'm not gonna wake up and scroll for too long. What am I gonna do instead? What works well? Do I wanna get up and work? Do I wanna get up and exercise? Do I wanna get up and chill out? What do I wanna do? I'm not sure, but I'm gonna experiment and I'm gonna see what happens when I'm not just filling my brain with whatever the machine sends my way. Lemme know whether this resonated with you or not. I wasn't really intending to talk about it, like I say, but it was been top of my mind, and so I thought I would share it with you guys instead. If you have already been on this sort of journey, message me. I am often, I say, you know, I'm not looking for tips and whatever, but particularly if you've ever used Brick and you've got suggestions as to how to set it. The only sort of advice I'm not interested in is don't use Brick. It's a waste of money. Or don't do that. Do this instead. I've bought it now, I've bought it and I'm going to experiment with it. So I don't want to hear that [00:19:00] advice. But if any of you've got tips about setting it up, tips about how you've used it, other ways that you've reduced your phone use, uh, let me know because I intend to really give this a massive shot and keep you guys in the loop about what I've been spending my brain and energy and intention doing when I haven't been doing that. So let's see I hope as well as hearing a podcast about phone use, I hope you are also hearing the tone that I'm speaking not just to myself, but about this. I'm not trying to fix myself. I'm not criticizing myself for being where I'm at, and this is unusual, right? I used to, but I'm really not. I'm curious. About how I'm gonna do it, curious about how it's gonna work out. I'm feeling creative [00:20:00] about what I'm gonna try and what I'm gonna do instead. I'm feeling enthusiastic, and enthusiastic is a really big value for me. I'm feeling really enthusiastic about trying this, and I'm open to kind of collaboration and interest and all those sorts of things from other people too, so that I can explore options and I'm pretty confident that at some point I'm gonna, you know, scramble downstairs in the middle of the night 'cause I'm desperate for my fix and un brick my phone or whatever. I'm sure it'll go wrong at some point, but that's okay. I'm not gonna make that mean anything about myself either. And so hopefully hearing me work this through with you like this, as you can tell. I mean, this is even less scripted than usual. Um, hopefully hearing me work it through like this might help you think about how you could address some of the things you're trying to change in your lives. We don't have to be more disciplined. We don't have to criticize ourselves until we have to do it. [00:21:00] I just think, I think being kind to ourselves, thinking how we can make it easier and seeing what happens. Being optimistic about the possibilities is such a more fun way to do this. I'm gonna keep you posted. Let me know if you have been inspired or if you have any advice for me. Thank you all so much for listening, and I'll see you next week.

< If you’re bored of reading people’s “I’m happy to announce…” posts on LinkedIn, where they only seem to celebrate big wins like “I got a new job” or “my paper’s published”, then this episode is for you. I’ll tell you why big wins aren’t as motivating as they could be, why we should look out for tiny wins, and why sometimes the sillier the win, the better! Join my tiny win revolution and share your silliest wins today! Post on LinkedIn or Instagram, tag me, and use the hashtag #tinywins, and I’ll pick my favourite post in November 2025 and give you a free 30 min coaching session! Links I refer to in this episode If you liked this episode, you should check out “ why we should be more proud of ourselves and how to do it ”. Transcript [00:00:00] Hi everyone, and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. Now where I am in South Cambridge here. Autumn has hit. It is gray. I'm looking outta my patio windows over there. It's drizzly, it's gray. The clocks have already changed and so it is dark really early, and frankly, it's all feeling a bit murky now. I'm not someone who gets massively affected by winter. I use it as an excuse to kind of cozy up and do more inside hobbies and things like that, but. It is tough to stay positive when it's a bit murky. Now, I know I've got listeners all over the world. Some of you might be struggling with other things. I have Australian clients who are moaning about the heat. That's legitimate too. All fair. But however you are feeling this November, I think we all need a little bit of a boost. A boost to kind of end this year strong so that we are not sort of just dripping into the end of the calendar year. And I [00:01:00] think that boost comes from celebrating wins. Now you might listen to that and say, I don't have any wins. There are no wins. Or you might listen to that and say you've been spending too much time on LinkedIn, where everyone is happy to announce whatever it is they're happy to announce. Okay? That's not what we're talking about today. We are not gonna be talking about celebrating wins, like finishing your PhD or getting a paper accepted or getting a job. These are all legitimate to celebrate, right? Let's do it. But that's not what we're talking about today. Today we are gonna be thinking about celebrating tiny wins, so tiny that they seem utterly inconsequential to anybody except you, but they feel like a win for you. And these are my favorite sorts of wins. So today we are gonna be thinking about why big wins aren't all there cracked up to be, why they're not sufficient to keep us motivated and engaged with our PhDs and even our lives, [00:02:00] frankly. And why celebrating Tiny Wins is a much. Much better idea. I'm also gonna finish 'cause I'm feeling generous. I'm gonna finish with a bit of a challenge for you. I'm gonna tell you what I am gonna be trying to do throughout November of 2025. If you're listening to this live, and if you want to join me, you can enter a prize draw where you can win a one-on-one 30 minute coaching session with me completely for free. So make sure you listen to the end so you find out how to enter. So, first of all, let's clear up what's wrong with celebrating big wins. And the first thing to say is. There's nothing wrong with celebrating big wins. If you have big things happen, I want you to celebrate them. In fact, in the membership, one of the things I do is really help people how to celebrate big wins. That sounds really silly, but often we just sort of go, yay, that's nice, and don't feel quite as excited as we thought we would, and we don't really know how to go about celebrating it. So that's something I teach separately. Maybe I'll do a podcast on that at some point. But the problem with big wins [00:03:00] is firstly, they only happen from time to time. Right? It's not like we're waking up every day going, Ooh, another papers accepted happy days. These things happen every few months at best, right? They can feel really few and far between and that means that they're not enough to kind of sustain us on a day-to-day basis. Another issue with only celebrating big wins is that the joy of celebrating a big win never lasts as long as we think it's going to. So often people tell me, oh, I'll feel more confident once I've got my first publication. I'll feel better once I've got a full draft of my thesis. I'll feel better once I've got my PhD. But what actually happens is once we have achieved that thing, that thing we've been striving for, for ages, that thing that we've been telling ourselves will make everything feel better. What actually happens is we generally take it for granted pretty quickly. We often [00:04:00] discount it in some way. Oh, I was lucky. Oh, not many other people applied. Oh, it's a lower rank journal. Oh, my supervisor helped me loads all that stuff. Right? We discount it because it's somehow not in line with our perception of ourselves. So sometimes it's actually more comfortable to discount it than it is to accept, actually, maybe I am capable of doing things . So we take it for granted. We often discount it, and because we are. Ambitious, interesting, curious people. We are usually pretty fixated on the next thing pretty quickly. In fact, there's a book, I'll link it in the show notes. There's a book called The Gap and the Gain, which I think I've talked about before, where it talks about how people are especially highly educated, highly intelligent people like you lot, tend to look at the gap between where they are now and where they want to be, much more often than the gain IE where they are now compared to where they used to be. And only [00:05:00] celebrating big wins is real reason for that. You'll find you're happy for a day or two, and then you are looking to the next thing. Another reason why only celebrating big wins is not great is because. A big win often doesn't actually generate any momentum. A big win often comes with a bit of a crash afterwards. So if it's getting a paper published or something like that, often you are submitting your thesis is a big one. Often you've had this really big push of effort to get it done. You get it done, and then whilst you're celebrating, there is also this sort of energy and motivation crash afterwards where it's actually hard to start the next thing. It is almost like, I love reading, right? And it's almost like when I read an amazing book, it always feels a bit at the end of like effort to start the next book. 'cause I loved that book and all I had to do was pick it up and just get straight back into it sort of thing. And starting, even just starting reading a new book feels like a bit of effort and I [00:06:00] often have a little bit of a lag after a good book, before I start the next one. Now, when it's stuff that you are actually creating, that's even more pronounced. And so these big wins are wonderful and we all want them, right? But they don't necessarily generate men momentum to do the next things. So I am a massive fan instead of tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny wins. And when I say tiny, I mean. Tiny, tiny, tiny. And in fact, when we do our quarterly review, so in the membership, we always do a planning session at the beginning of our three month period together and a review session at the end, one of the things that I encourage them to do is share the smallest wins they can think of. Things that feel unbelievably stupid, unbelievably tiny, and specific to you but somehow are really important to [00:07:00] you. An example that I always give when I'm getting people to do this is. Literally, every time I put my electric toothbrush on a charger, I'm like checking me out being a functioning adult. Look at that. Now, for those of you who just don't even think about putting an electric toothbrush on a charger, you just do it. You'll be like, uh, what? Why? Why would you celebrate that? I am somebody who has spent three, four months probably at times, brushing my teeth with a electric charger that is not charged. So it's essentially just a chunky manual toothbrush because every time I look at it, I go, oh, I should charge that. Clean my teeth, put it down, don't charge it. Now that hasn't happened since I've been married 'cause my husband's an absolute superstar and if he notices it needs charging, he does it. But I still, if I clean my teeth and then notice the little red light and I go, I'm going charge it, I put it on the [00:08:00] charger. Look at me. I dunno why I break into Geri Halliwell there. That's not a reference that will resonate with many of you. Anybody old enough to remember? Look at me by Geri Halliwell. It's a pop classic. Anyway. Focus in Vikki Toothbrushes. That wasn't the point. Tiny, tiny wins is the point. Yours could be anything. My husband loves Bin Day. This could make him sound very strange. I promise. He's adorable. He loves bin day. It's so he's, it's so satisfying. You just put the bin out and they take it away and you got an empty bin. It's so satisfying, and it sounds silly, but I bet the vast majority of you go, oh, gotta put the bin out. He goes, it's bin day. I'm gonna put the bin out and off he goes, right? These, celebrating these tiny wins, especially when they're really specific to you and the things that you find hard, they give you a boost way more than big wins. When we decide that we are gonna celebrate [00:09:00] tiny wins, what it does is it makes us look for those tiny wins. And I wanna be really clear, this is not gratitude. So when we're talking about wins, we are not thinking about the things that we're so lucky to have in our lives. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of evidence that that's really useful too. But I want this to be things you've done specifically. So not, I'm so grateful my partner did this is, I'm so lucky to have a warm house or whatever. No, nor that, sir. The stuff that you've actually. Done. And when we decide we're gonna celebrate those things, we start noticing the tiny things that we do for ourselves. We're slightly more likely to do some of those. I charge my toothbrush much more regularly now 'cause I know I'm gonna have a little celebration when I do it. We're much more likely to repeat them and it reinforces the sense that you are someone who does these things, that you are someone who has tiny wins. So you are much more likely to go into the next thing with that energy as well. I'm gonna give you some more [00:10:00] examples. So over here I've got my chat document from. So in the sessions that we run in the membership, everyone's in the chat, chattering with each other, sharing their ideas and thoughts. So we had things like, I replied to an email I was anxious about without overthinking it. Um. I asked people in my shared office to keep the chatter down a little bit, which I found really difficult. I'm proud, um, for following through. Um, somebody said I ordered a bunch of candles and stuff in advance the other day, said that I have birthday presents sorted for anyone whose birthday's coming up. Anybody who struggles like she and I do with remembering birthdays and so on. Genius. Love it. Somebody else found the changing rooms in their new place of work so that they could cycle to work. Um, somebody called five utility providers in one day 'cause they were trying to sort out house stuff, which I think is amazing. Somebody celebrated spending more time with their cats. Somebody celebrated actually spending the full two minutes cleaning their teeth rather than cutting it off early. Lots of things and some of these things you'll be like, [00:11:00] well, I always clean my teeth for two minutes. That's fine. That one's not for you, but for other people, that's huge. And the point is we celebrate the ones that are relevant to us. What I love when I do this with the members, is it also sort of normalizes finding small things hard because if we celebrate when we achieve small things, that kind of implicitly tells us that these aren't things that we should just be able to do as normal adults. It normalizes, the fact that actually some of these hard things are hard for people. Some of these tiny things are hard for people but they are worthy of our celebration, and we feel so much better when we do it. It also makes the people around you feel better because suddenly they can celebrate their tiny things. People always sort of pause a little bit when I ask for tiny celebrations, but then once some come up in the chat, people start noticing quite how tiny they are. For you, it might be things like taking a bag to [00:12:00] the charity shop that has been in the boot of your car for six months. That'd be, I think that's a medium sized win. That's not even a tiny win, but things like that, right? It can be. I opened the document that I'm meant to be writing, that I've been putting off opening for the last two weeks. I opened it and looked to what I needed to do. It can be as simple as that. So this can be life stuff, this can be PhD stuff, whatever it is. It doesn't matter. We are gonna be spending November and hopefully going forwards, celebrating our tiny, tiny wins. So my commitment to you, I have decided. So you may have noticed I don't do much on Instagram. I'm at the PhD life Coach, if you wanna follow me. I don't do loads. Um, I have a kind of fixed, um, like, what's it called, the posts. God, I sound like such a grownup. The posts the main really bit. I have like a fixed one of those, but I do use stories, right? So my commitment is that for the month of November, 2025, I am gonna try and post at least once a day, a [00:13:00] tiny win. I'm gonna say what the win is. I may say why it's important, who knows? And i'm gonna use the hashtag tiny PhD wins. I know hashtags is not really a thing now, but it makes it easy for me to find stuff. I'm also gonna post some posts on LinkedIn, sharing my tiny wins, asking for other people's tiny wins. If you wanna join me in this tiny win revolution and have the potential to win a one-to-one coaching session with me, what I want you to do is either follow me on LinkedIn, look out for those posts, and share your tiny wins when I post or share in your own Instagram stories or reels, tag me and use the hashtag tiny PhD wins. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pick my favorite tiny wins. Okay, so the way you are gonna stand out, is it by being something that is so tiny or just really cute that you've done it, or that really resonates with me because it's a tiny win that I would find [00:14:00] difficult too, or that is something that we wouldn't normally share, but that I can see is a big deal. Anything like that? I am gonna pick my favorite and my favorite will get a one-to-one coaching session at the beginning of December at a time that works for you. We'll do 30 minutes on whatever PhD type topic you want. I do have another sneaky reason for doing this, and I'm gonna be open about it and I'm gonna ask for your help. That is my podcast is pretty amazing. I think there is so much really, really good content on it. I keep hearing from you guys how useful you find the podcast, how much things have changed for you, how you know you're using it all already, da, da, da. I want it to get to more people. It's already getting to a lot of people. I'm somewhere in the 125,000 download area now. I love that. Which is amazing and super exciting. But there are a lot more PhD students in the world. There are a lot more [00:15:00] academics in the world and I would love for more of them to find and listen to and find my podcast useful. So I'm partly doing this 'cause I want us all to share oh, tiny wins. 'cause I think it'll be super fun. I'm also doing it because I want people to find my podcast. So anything you can do that also helps share your favorite episodes or anything like that, please, please do. Tell your universities about it. Tell them to link to it on their virtual learning environment or whatever it might be. Right? It's all, the podcast stuff is all free. It will always be free. So please do help me share that. But let's share these tiny wins. So make sure you're following me on Instagram at the PhD life coach, so that you will see my silly stories, and you can share yours. If you share them, I will repost them on my stories and everything. So let's have a tiny win revolution and start celebrating all the little things that actually make our days feel so much better and [00:16:00] get the stuff done that we want to do. Thank you all so much for listening, and I will see you next week.

< Sometimes it can feel like the only thing that matters is whether you are “on track” or not. We measure our self-worth in progress, we report to our supervisors about where we are against our plans, and the only answer we can think of to “how’s it going?” is “busy”. In this episode I talk about why you are so much more than a Gantt chart and how believing that can change the way we interact with our supervisors, our friends and families and, most importantly, how we treat ourselves. This is perfect for anyone who is fed up of feeling behind all the time. Links I refer to in this episode If you liked this episode, you should check out “ how to cope with annoying comments at Christmas ” (even if it’s not Christmas!) Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast and this week's topic, I'm gonna tell you the truth. I hadn't planned anything for this episode and I, I was kind of working towards my launch and I'd cunningly planned out which episodes I was gonna talk about when in the run up to the launch, which was last week, as you'll remember. And I then realized I hadn't planned today. I was in this quite unusual position. I'm getting quite better at kind of planning all these things ahead. I was in this unusual position of sitting there going, Hmm, I need to record a podcast. I wonder what to talk about and my brain throws out 47 million things as usual, and I start getting in my head a little bit about what would be most useful, what haven't I spoke about for a while, you know, what will be the thing that they really need that will really help them right now? And then I reminded myself of the most important thing in everything [00:01:00] I do, which is the students that I work with. And so I thought back to the coaching I'd done literally yesterday, so I had two different coaching sessions yesterday. I run them at different time zones, so they worked for people all around the world, had two coaching sessions, and I thought, what was particularly interesting. What was particularly universal? What got everybody going wild in the chat going, oh my goodness, this is me too. This is me too. And a couple of different things sprung to mind. And as I pondered those things, I realized that they were all part of the same problem. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is kind of true for almost everything that I coach on. And a little phrase sprung into my head, and that little [00:02:00] phrase became the name of this episode, which is that you are more than a Gantt chart. So in case you're not familiar, a Gantt charts are those graph things that kind of show where you'll be by when during this time block i'm gonna work on this stuff until October, and then in October till November I'll be doing this stuff and so on. And they're a crucial part of project planning, right? But people get really stressed out by them because they get really stressed out by how on earth am I meant to know how I'm gonna do things, in what order, and how fast and whatever. And then they get really stressed out by being behind. So I coached somebody who'd had a period of illness during the quarter and was beating herself up about being behind the curve as she put it. I coached somebody else who was, finding it really difficult. She was very much at the end of her PhD and people kept asking her how it was going and when she'd be finished, and she was finding those questions really hard to answer because she felt like she kept saying, oh, [00:03:00] next month. Next month. And they were like, hang on, you said that last time. And she was really judging herself about that. And then I looked at my podcast episodes, right? If you guys are familiar with the podcast, you'll know this. But for everybody else, I've got like a hundred and something. I don't even know how many 'cause I do them in seasons, but like 150 probably episodes at the moment. And in my little podcast host thingy, I can rank them by most popular. And the two most popular are two of the very, very early ones, which is kind of understandable. You know, gotta love a thorough PhD student. Going back to the beginning with the, I going to listen to them all attitude. So I kind of get that. But then after that, which are the most popular? How to plan your academic writing, how to read academic papers more quickly, how to get ahead when you are behind, how to make your week more effective. What to do if you feel stuck. They're all about progress. They're all about sticking to your plans and smashing through and making [00:04:00] progress. Now, I'm not gonna tell you not to listen to these episodes. They're really good episodes. Make yourself a little list, go listen. But today I want to talk about why I think it's so important to remember that you are so much more than a ganja, and I'm gonna have three sort of demonstrations of this. One about why it's important for your self-worth. One about why it's important for your interaction with your supervisors, and one about why it's important with your interactions with your friends and loved ones. Okay? So let's go. Why you are so much more than your Gantt chart. So let's think about the first one, how you think about yourself, not just in terms of kind of self-worth, but also in terms of imposter syndrome, which is what we're focusing on in the membership this quarter. And in terms of actually enjoying this PhD process that you're putting yourselves through, that you leapt on into enthusiastically. And [00:05:00] when we solely think of ourselves as somebody who is on track or not on track, somebody who is where they're meant to be in their Ganttt chart or not, where they're meant to be in their Ganttt chart. Or their Ganttt chart is in a drawer over there somewhere that they haven't looked at for four months because they know they're not on track, and therefore they don't even want to look at it anymore. If that's you, I get it. Okay. I used to do that too. In fact, I'll tell you, I'll tell you why I'm feeling particularly good about this at the moment, so I have a wonderful coach called Karen Nordin, who I've waxed lyrical about many, many times on the podcast. If you don't follow her already, you should. She is at Karen Nordin, N-O-R-D-I-N, on Instagram. She's a behavior change expert. She's got a PhD. She's brilliant. Love her, and, i'm in her change academy and one of the things that I set myself as a goal this year, which she set herself too, actually, is 3 million steps. And when that breaks down, [00:06:00] it breaks down to like 8,200 a day. Now do not come at me, right? I'm a sports scientist. I know better than anyone that arbitrary numbers, like 10,000 steps are made up by manufacturers of pedometers. Don't come at me, but I know that my walking has dropped off massively, had dropped off massively, certainly since the pandemic, and especially working from home. Right. I spent a lot of time, you guys will see me with this background. I spent a lot of time in this room and I wasn't aiming for any kind of particular arbitrary number, but I wanted to increase it. 3 million steps seemed nice. And then those of you have been around for a while. Well, no. I broke my ankle in June. I was pretty much on track. Not entirely. Certainly wasn't doing it perfectly every day, but I was pretty good. I was pretty much on track and then I broke my ankle and that sucked. And I could have said, I, oh, I'm gonna sack that off, 'cause you [00:07:00] know, I had a six weeks where I was barely walking. I'm gonna sack it off entirely. And I really spent some time, and this is where you can see that I've worked on myself through my own coaching and things, that is exactly what I would've done. I would've either forgotten this existed and not been tracking it at all, which was my usual thing. Or I would decide it was rubbish, decide I couldn't achieve it, and therefore not think about it because it made me feel bad about myself. And this time I thought, you know what? The version of me that I want to be is someone that when things go wrong, I kind of recalibrate, and crack back on. And I don't mean sort of forcing myself to do a hundred million steps in order to try and hit an arbitrary target that's got squished in the middle of the year, but there's no reason I shouldn't be building back up to and then trying to do at least the daily average that I'd been intending.[00:08:00] And so I've actually spent the last few months still tracking my steps, and I don't just mean looking at them in my app. I mean, I have a little Google Sheet with them all in where I can see how many I've done each month and that sort of thing. And actually reflecting on it and learning from it. I've continued doing that even though my June and July stats really annoy me. I am learning to tolerate that because it has meant that I am actually engaging in that walking behavior more than I thought. Now. I'm also diving in on weekends a little bit more, too extra steps and I'm, it's possible I'm gonna put it out there. It's possible I might even hit my 3 million, but that is not the point. The point is that I'm staying with it because I haven't made it mean something terrible about me. Now you might say, yeah, but you had a good reason. But I know lots of you guys had good reasons. The person I coached had a great reason why she was behind and she was still beating herself up for it. When we put our entire [00:09:00] self-worth on, whether we are on track or not, suddenly that's a very fragile place to be, 'cause there's a whole bunch of things that could take you off that track. I went back to, I want to be somebody who walks more than I am at the moment and walks more than I have been for the last few years. And so as I've been able to, I've gone back to that core reason for setting that goal. And this is what I want you to think about. I decided this didn't mean anything about whether I was an undisciplined person, whether I should have pushed myself, whether I should be making up for it now, I didn't mean mean any of that stuff. I just make it made it mean there was a period of time when I wasn't walking as much, but now I can walk more. So let's go. My self-worth as somebody who exercises, somebody who gets outside is unaffected by the fact that I had a blip where I broke my ankle. I want you to really ponder [00:10:00] how does getting behind or not reaching the goals on your Ganttt chart affect the way you think about yourself as an academic? Because if you are somebody who makes that mean that you are maybe not good enough to be here, or that your supervisor will probably be regretting appointing you or that other people are on track and therefore you are not as good as them. If that's you, I get it. I'm here with you. I understand. But I really, really want you to notice that. Notice that you are equating yourself, your self-worth, your ability to do things with some Ganttt chart you decided on. And you don't have to, your self-worth, your abilities are measured by so many other things than just whether you are on time or not. Another reason we know [00:11:00] that to be true. Here's a little bonus for you. Another reason we know that to be true is your Gantt chart, your plan. You might not have a full Gantt chart, but you take the metaphor. Your Ganttt chart was designed by a version of you that didn't know what was gonna happen and didn't know as much about your research as you do now. Often we design these things at the beginning of our PhDs or at the beginning of the academic year. I didn't know I was gonna break my ankle and that wasn't on the Bingo card for 2025. I actually, I actually have a 202 5 Bingo card. That's a story for another episode. I'm sticking to that too. Very exciting. It wasn't on, I didn't put brief ankle tick. When you designed your projects, you didn't know the things that were gonna come up in your personal lives. You didn't know that the piece of equipment in the lab was gonna break. You didn't know how difficult it was to recruit participants. You didn't know that the British Library search engine went down for however long it went down. You didn't know any of these things. You didn't know how long things [00:12:00] take. You put in there. Really have Oh, right. Introduction between middle of January and the beginning of February and went, oh, that's actually way harder than I thought. You are holding yourself against the standard that you set when you knew less. Now, does this mean we should have thrown out the window? No. Plans are meant to inspire action. That is what they're there for. They're there to help us prioritize. They're there to help us make decisions, to force us in some ways to make decisions. But they are also flawed because they are supposition. They are things that are gonna change as we learn more and we experience more. So pinning your self worth to something that was designed when you were less knowledgeable than you are now is simply not fair on you. Please, please don't do it. The second time that you are way more than a Gantt chart is when you're meeting with a supervisor. And I've been talking about this, so over the last quarter in the membership we've been talking about improving your relationship with [00:13:00] your academic supervisor among other things. And one of the things we've talked about is how to have more effective meetings with your supervisors. And one of the biggest problems I see when I talk to my clients is people who have regular meetings, that's great. Love a regular meeting, but who use those predominantly as progress updates. I've done this bit and next I'm going to do that bit, and the supervisor goes, well done. Or maybe you need to hurry up. Or any version in between that. If you are only using those meetings to tell them where you are up to and to then tell them like, commit to for accountability, what you are gonna do next. You are missing so many parts of that interaction. You are more than your Ganttt chart. So what I want you to be using those meetings for are three things. - Moving your actual project forward. -Learning, developing your own learning and understanding,[00:14:00] -and developing a collaborative relationship with your supervisor. Those are the three purposes of any communications, whether it's meetings, emails, whatever you need to move your project forward. You need to develop yourself as an academic, learn more, and you need to build a collaborative relationship with your supervisor. If you are solely updating them on what you have done, what you haven't done, and then making further commitments, you are barely doing any of those things. You are using them as a checkpoint and checkpoints are just not that helpful. So when you think I am more than a Gantt chart, I want you to think what conversation can I have with them that will actually move this project forward? What hurdles are in my way? What am I finding it difficult to make a decision about? What am I worried isn't clear at the moment? How do I get them to help with that? What do I not know how to do? Whether it's about evaluating your own work or actually conducting a particular technique. What do I need to learn in order to move my project forward? Or just in my kind of professional academic [00:15:00] journey? What do I need to learn? How can I get that? And how can I build a collaborative relationship with my supervisor? Now that doesn't mean being friends with your supervisor. Some of you will be, some of you won't be. That's not a prerequisite. But having a collaborative relationship is, and one of the examples of that is if you focus on what's interesting or curious or like unusual or hard to explain in your research, and you have a discussion about that stuff. That's where you are doing the real stuff. That's what your supervisor came into academia to talk about, right? No one became an academic because they love Ganttt charts. If you love Ganttt charts and that's all you wanna do, go be a project manager and you'll be amazing. Trust me, we need people who can run clinical trial unit and keep all this stuff on track. If that's your baby, perfect. There's a billion careers out there for you. But most people didn't come into academia because they love Gantt charts. So if in those meetings instead of saying, oh, I'm, [00:16:00] you know, I said, I'll have done the draft, but I haven't. And then everyone feeling a bit bad about it, if you come into the meeting going I know I said I was gonna have a draft, but I've come across this thing and I just dunno how to explain it. Like in the data, I can see this, this, or in the archive, I can see this, this, or I found these two different arguments and I just can't work out how they fit together because one's saying this and one's saying that, and you know, and then suddenly you are having an intellectual discussion. That's what we wanna be doing. That's what we wanna spend our meeting times, doing, not updating a project manager about why we are not where we said we'd be. Okay. So that's the second reason. We are more than a Ganttt up because it helps us to have more effective meetings and communications with our supervisors if we remember all the things we are on top of that. We're an academic conducting a piece of research. We're a learner, we're a human being. If we remember those things, meetings so much better. Then the third sort of [00:17:00] circumstance that I want you to remember, your more than a Gantt, chart, is when your friends and family ask you how it's going. Now, I have a whole episode on this, which has got a title that slightly puts people off. It's called How to Cope With Annoying Comments at Christmas. There's nothing specific about Christmas. I might change the title of it at some point but it is about why it's so triggering when somebody asks us, how's it going? When are you gonna finish? What are you gonna do after your PhD? In fact, I'm just gonna tell you a story. So in my membership, they people come on for one-to-one coaching, right? They appear next to each other, but then in the chat they're all like cheering each other on sharing their experiences. If you're not watching YouTube. I'm doing like typey typey hands at the moment next to my face. Dunno why. Anyway, go with it. Um and somebody said, you should produce cards, Vikki, that just say, do not ask how my PhD is going. Give me money or food. And I'm just like, you know what? I think I can make a fortune selling those. And then when somebody asks you just [00:18:00] hand over, gimme money or food. Anyway, I have advice beyond that, but. When somebody asks you how something's going, if you are thinking of yourself solely as a Ganttt chart, that your worth is only if you're up to date on your Ganttt chart, then suddenly it's like, oh no. They wanna know when I'm finished and I dunno when I'm gonna finish 'cause this has happened and I thought I'd be finished already and I'm not. And all this drama spins off. Right? But it doesn't have to because you are more than a Gantt chart. What that means is we can remember a, as human beings, we are allowed to not share our heartache with anyone we don't wanna share our heartache with, which is, this is Mama Vikki, giving you full permission to lie. Okay. If somebody says, how's your PhD going? Your PhD's going crappy and you can't be asked to get into it because you don't like this person, or because you can't be bothered to explain or in a public place and you don't wanna cry, you can just say, fine. You can say fine. Great. Thanks for asking. How are things with you? You do not owe everybody [00:19:00] your truth. I'm not saying hide it. I'm not saying lie about it like because it's something shameful. You don't owe everyone your truth. You can choose what you share with who. So first thing, if you can't be bothered, just lie about it. Second thing though, is to ask yourself, what is that person actually interested in beyond me and my Ganttt chart? Because if it's a fellow researcher, they're probably interested in your actual findings. They're probably not interested in the timelines. So they're prob when they're saying, how's it going? They don't wanna hear, oh, I've handed in my results section on time, but I'm a little behind on my discussion. They don't wanna hear that they wanna know what are you studying, what have you just found out? What's the new data showing? What have you just uncovered? What's the new thought that you are grappling with right now? They wanna know that stuff and if they're your friends and family, they might wanna know that stuff, depends on your friends and family, but they definitely wanna know, are you enjoying it? Are you enthused at the moment? What are you finding overwhelming? Which bits do you like? Which bits [00:20:00] don't you like? They wanna know that stuff. They're not there to check up your positioning on your Ganttt chart. They're asking how it's going. So you get to decide to recognize I'm a human being who is way more than a Ganttt chart, which bit of that is this person interested in? And you can share that bit with them. So those are my reasons, my three situations where I think it's super important for you to remember that you are so much more than a Gantt chart. I wanna finish by saying this is no shade to Gantt charts. I think it's actually really useful not just to decide when you are gonna have done things by, but the most important part of a Ganttt chart is to notice where you've got conflicts and where you're trying to do too many things in a single block of time. So I actually love a Gantt chart because I think deciding what things you are doing in a period of time and what things you are not doing during a period of [00:21:00] time is a really important part of prioritization. I know prioritization is something we'll struggle with. That's a topic for another day. But a Gantt chart helps you to think those things through. It helps you see where you've got three bars all happening in the same month, and assess whether that's plausible or not. So this is no shade to Ganttt charts. I love you Gantt charts. You're not perfect, but you can be very useful. But you are so much more. So when you're listening to this on a Monday morning, you're thinking, oh my goodness, I'm already behind. I want you, in fact, I might even, should I make a sticker? I think we need stickers. Let me know. Reply to, if you're on my newsletter, reply to the email that you'll get about this podcast and tell me that you wanna buy a sticker that says, I'm more than a Gantt chart. Um, we are gonna do it. Merch is definitely coming. I hope you find today useful. I hope it reminds you quite how much more you have to offer this academic life and how I want you to be focusing on all of those things, not just on the extent of your progress. Academia is not a productivity wheel, even [00:22:00] if it feels like that sometimes, even if the sector feels like that is the only thing it cares about. We are here to do important interesting research and to enjoy the process and to love working with other clever people who are interested in the same things. So let's focus on that stuff and let our Ganttt charts just sit over there as one of many tools we use to make that all happen. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week.

< In this episode, I talk with Gabriela, a student in my PhD Life Coach membership. She is taking a few weeks off to get married and is struggling with getting distracted, worried that she’ll feel guilty while she’s away, and that she’ll dread coming back. Listen as we work through ways to address these challenges. Whether you are taking a big break like Gabriela, or you struggle to switch off even for the weekend, this episode will help you! You can also hear more about what it’s like being a student in my membership. Links I refer to in this episode If you like listening to coaching episodes, you might like this conversation with final year student Swagata , about overcoming overwhelm and overwork in the last few months of her PhD. Transcript Vikki: [00:00:00] I'm just jumping on here quickly to give you an update before this episode even starts. So today I am talking with Gabriela, who is a student in the PhD life coach membership at the moment, and she has a lot on her mind at the moment. You are gonna hear all about it in this episode, but I also wanted to give you a sneaky preview before we start the whole story. So Gabriela was preparing for some time away from her PhD for reasons that you'll hear about, and the day before she left, she put a message into the Slack channel. So we have a Slack channel for all members. She put a message into the Slack channel was saying, "hi all. This is just a quick message to let you know that I've officially sent the most upToDate draft to my supervisor today, and while it might not be as completed as I'd hoped for, I am incredibly proud that I've been able to send it on time and without compromising my non-negotiables. I'm ever so grateful to Vikki and my coworking lot. Whether you came once or you are a regular, these sessions are one of the best part of my resubmission period, and that is something I would never have thought of saying six months ago. I will miss you guys and [00:01:00] see you all in six weeks." So if you wanna know where she's off to and what challenges she was overcoming in order to get there, you've gotta listen to this episode and if at the end of this episode you're like, oh my goodness, I need some of this help too, then you are in luck. If you are listening live, the PhD Life Coach membership is open for new clients this week, so this is going out on the 20th of October, 2025, and that's a Monday. You can join between now and Friday. So if you wanna be part of that community, if you wanna be getting this sort of support so that you can achieve your goals the same way Gabriela has then go to the PhD life coach.com, click on the membership and you can sign up straight away. If you are listening to this at some other time, don't worry. We open once a quarter. You are always welcome in, so go and check it and I'll hopefully see you in the membership soon. Hope you enjoy today's episode. Gabriela is amazing. You will love her. Vikki: Hi everyone, and welcome to their PhD Life Coach podcast and we have another coaching episode this week. Now many of you will [00:02:00] know that I often ask for volunteers to come on the podcast to be coached about something that is useful and relevant for them at the moment, but they might also be relevant for my listeners. And often I give that opportunity to people who I don't work with in any other context. But today is a special, special occasion because today I am chatting with Gabriela, who is one of my PhD life coach membership students. So, hi Gabriela. Welcome. Gabriela: Vikki, thanks so much for having me. Vikki: No problem. It is a pleasure. Those of you who don't know, my PhD life Coach membership is a quarterly membership program where students get access to a ton of coaching resources, online resources, communities and coworking opportunities as well. And Gabriela is in for her second quarter now. So we have worked together for, what's that, four, four and a bit months, something like that and so I know her background quite well, but what we're [00:03:00] gonna do today is you'll give everyone a little bit of context just a brief story of where you are at at the moment and what you want some coaching on today. And then we'll go at this as though it was a one-to-one coaching session like we do in our group sessions. Except you get a bit longer because we're on the podcast. Okay? Gabriela: Awesome. Vikki: So tell people a little bit about where you are at at the moment. Gabriela: Right. So I had the dreaded sentence by every PhD student. I had my Viva last November and my PhD was deemed passable, so my Viva was accepted and I passed my Viva. However, I got resubmission and in my institution, resubmission means that you have to take a year long basically for your corrections, and they are more than major corrections, which means that I have to go back to labs, reanalyze my data, entirely rewrite my literature review, and I [00:04:00] have to resubmit it. It's basically like I'll be submitting first time, but this time I'm not allowed to have any other outcome, but minor corrections, PhD, and fail or fail. Gabriela: So this was absolutely not on the cards. I have done my. PhD since 2021. So I'm at on my like five years. It's a very long time. I had two months of a bit of a break to decide what I wanted to do, and at the end of that break I joined a membership. And one of the first things we talked about with Vikki was to make a decision. So I've made a decision that for some unknown reason, I'm going to go for it for another year. And so here I am however life keeps going, and I didn't want to stop plans, which I have already put in motion. It happens that I'm getting married, during the time we're recording, this is going to be less than three weeks. And [00:05:00] today I was hoping that we could talk about how to engage with these big life events, which are so important to us, and in my case, leads to a whole other, opportunities within my family life. And yet do it while we're in the PhD system and we are during our program, especially when we have this feeling of like lack of closure before we move on with our life. So I was hoping that at this stage I'm going to be done and dusted. My PhD is going to be submitted or at least resubmit it. But I just, life happens this way and I am still here. I have some stuff done. I've got deadline before my break for the marriage. I've got some deadlines I have to hit. But then I'm basically off for month and a half. And what I worry about is that while I'm going to be during my honeymoon, I'm going to basically like [00:06:00] thinking about it, and I'm not gonna be able to immerse myself completely knowing that when I come back, I have to drop into this mayhem I left behind. Vikki: Yeah. Perfect. Thank you. And I think. For people listening, you may not be in the exact same situation. You may still be pre Viva. You may not have something like a wedding and a big honeymoon and things happening, but I think so often people have this sort of parallel things happening in their personal lives, and particularly this idea of wanting to take time away without it getting spoiled by thoughts of the PhD, without it being super stressful before you go and afterwards I think is really, really relevant to, to lots of people. So yes, excited to chat this through with you today. Vikki: Before we do though, just because when you say time of recording, this is three weeks before your wedding, which is very, very exciting and the membership are looking forward to getting photos. Vikki: You will be [00:07:00] our second wedding actually. But this is also actually gonna come out just before the membership opens up again to other people. So you talked about making a decision and things like that. I thought it would be useful, just give a little bit of background as to why you decided to join the membership. What was it that sort of, you hoped you would get? Gabriela: So this is very out of character for me because I am very much so just get on with it. I'm going to deal with it on my own terms, um, and kind of don't bother other people. Just move on with your life but I was thinking to myself this way, I've done it my way and it didn't work my way. Gabriela: And the supervision and support I got from my institution was lacking for multitudes of reason, I decided not to blame anyone. I just wanted to find another way of doing things. And I've been actually directed [00:08:00] to an achievement coach in my institution first, and we started working together and I was like, do you know what? Gabriela: This is really good, but I'm kind of still feeling lonely within my cohort who moved on or they don't experience the same struggles, or they are in a completely different journey. So for example, they're being wildly published or they've got a massive grant or whatever. And I needed someone to maybe validate my feelings a little bit, maybe to find like this camaraderieship. Gabriela: So my institution was, uh, running this monthly updates on Vikki's like free workshops she was doing and still doing, and I was like, do you know what? I've seen her before on one of the conferences. I think that she was actually straight to the point and not really like, fluffy about some stuff and like, just believe in yourself. It's all gonna [00:09:00] be good. So I was like, she seems like she seems like the right person to do it. And I gave it a shot and I submitted like a little form if I can join the wait listers. I've done another meeting with Vikki and I was like, after those two meetings, I really felt like something progressed within me, even not with with my PhD within me. Gabriela: I kind of found myself again and kind of be like, oh, okay, so it's okay that I feel this way. It's been such, I know it's like incredible, right? It's okay to feel the emotions you're feeling, but I just think that the way you said it to me for the first time, it's like, it's okay. I just felt at home and I decided to, to, to progress with it and I found my community and, um, you mentioned coworking sessions. Gabriela: They're the ones which are like the community spirit is really there. You're not alone. You can, you can say, oh, the software really doesn't work, or my Word document is just keeps [00:10:00] closing on me and I'm losing stuff and, and you know, we cry and laugh and meme together. Vikki: And just to really clarify for everybody and just to give you the credit that you deserve, the co-working sessions, there's only two official co-working sessions per month that I run. The rest are all entirely led by my members, of which Gabriela is one of my super, like, super organized, super doing loads of them person. So they are community led and I actually really like that because it means that they are that bit more informal space. They are a bit more, you guys set them up when you need them, when you want them, use them however, and I know different people do different length work blocks and all of that, and so you get to kind of really, really adapt them. Vikki: The reason I wanted to touch on that is partly 'cause I think it's useful for listeners to hear from somebody who's made a decision that they might be trying to make at the moment. But I think also this notion that you have chosen really, really [00:11:00] intentionally that "No, no, I do want to do this". 'cause when we met, you were in a bit of a, I want to do it, but I don't want to do it and so I should do it, but I'm not really doing it. Vikki: And you were in that kind of slightly annoying, I think you were annoyed by it in Betweeny place where Gabriela: a hundred percent Vikki: it's like, Ugh, I've gotta do this thing, but I'm not doing the thing. And this is just feels very stuck. Tell me a little bit about the progress that you've made since then, because I think understanding how you have already changed so much will really help you to then believe that we can change this next bit. Gabriela: Um, so the first thing I've done, I kind of divided my. Months, according to quarters, um, when I've joined you, you, you do this quarter kind of setup and it really [00:12:00] works for me, uh, first because I'm, I'm a person who likes planning. I'm a person who loves to have agenda, all of this detailed stuff. Gabriela: And I felt like if I'm going to have these smaller goals I'm trying to achieve throughout the next year , it's going to feel a little bit more achievable. So that was my first. That was my first, like big progress I've made because before then I was just looking at this clump of stuff I have to make with no particular direction and no particular plan. Gabriela: So that was the first, Vikki: and, and you didn't wanna open your laptop, right? I don't wanna call you out. I remember our very, you were like, I did not open my laptop. Gabriela: Yeah. 150%. I was there. I looked at it like I had to change my setup because I physically couldn't bring myself to sit in a place I received the news that I am not deemed submittable or whatever. Gabriela: So I changed my setup and I [00:13:00] was not opening my laptop. So that is a good, the good thing to to, to mention, I just started to follow the plan. It's, it's not, it's not been super smooth by the way. Like, I, I wanted to submit basically like two chapters a quarter to say like, yeah, kind of two chapters a quarter or at least a draft of each chapter, um, uh, each quarter. Gabriela: So. It's not been exactly this way. But I've came back to dreaded labs, which was a huge mental block, uh, I experienced, uh, which we also coached on with Vikki on one of the group coaching. I came back, I asked for help. I continuously update my supervisor about my progress, which was not the case in my previous submission. Even if it's a small email to say I'm still working on my data analysis, you're going to have something by the end of next week. I'm still doing this every single Friday. So she's got kind of clear progress [00:14:00] report. I rewrote my literature review. It's patchy and I still have to add stuff, but I received feedback from my supervisor in the beginning of August, and she's pretty happy with how the things are going. Gabriela: It's more streamlined, which was one of the biggest confusion during my viva. It was actually what my PhD's about, because I had to combine three failed experiments and three failed routes into one big PhD and now I just focused on the one which is the closest to, to being a good project. So that has been done. I submitted recently my methods and yay, it's patchy again. And I was dreading it. And I also asked Vikki for a bit of an advice. I, I, I've done it. I just sent it. We'll see what they're going to say. So yeah, and I drafted my results and I drafted my discussion, but this is something which I'm going to have to really, really work on, on the other side of honeymoon and, [00:15:00] and my marriage break. Vikki: Perfect. And I know that feels like that's not central to the stuff you asked a coach on today. Mm-hmm. But one of the things that academics, PhD students, everybody, at every level has a habit of doing is taking for granted the bits you have done and immediately looking to the next bits. And what that does is it gives us this perpetual sense of not getting anywhere where in reality, and as you say, we've talked about this in group coaching before and I know the community's super proud of you too. You've made an enormous progress both in terms of the amount of work you've done and in terms of the difference in how you're showing up to do it. Gabriela: Thank you. Vikki: In this four months. Gabriela: Yeah. Vikki: And taking a minute just to go, I've come a really long way is actually a really lovely way to then look forward. [00:16:00] Yeah, because we get to say, okay, if I go back to past Gabriela who was considering whether to join the membership or not and told her where I am now, I think she'd be super, super proud. Gabriela: I think that I wasn't even imagining it if I have to be absolutely honest. I, I've, you know, I've done some like soul searching on the beginning of this year where I want to really achieve and where I want to be, and it's, yeah, I, I have to be honest with you, in, in the beginning of my, of the year, I was just hoping to not approach it from the PhD level I was thinking of approach it from an MFI level and submit, um, anything by July to have it over with. But once I started working within like membership and I started working with my new supervisor, I've seen that [00:17:00] maybe it's still worth to, to put forward the PhD and just see what they say basically. Vikki: Perfect. So tell me a bit more about what you are worrying about. You've got this three weeks, then you've got just over a month, isn't it? And then you're back. Yeah. So tell me more about your concerns. Gabriela: I think it's comes from two places. One concern is that I'm not going to be fully present, fully immersed in this one, once in a lifetime event. It's just not fair towards me and it's not fair towards my family. It's not to, you know, then my husband is not going to be fair towards him. And then the second, like streamline of worry is that I have so much to do when I have to come back, you know? I'm gonna come back and I'm not expecting from myself to like immediately jump into it and just produce, produce, produce, which means that I'm going to have a little bit of downtime, which means that I'm going to have to readjust my schedule again and kind of get back into the swing of things [00:18:00] and then I basically have like, I dunno, let's say four weeks I have to complete. So I'm trying to be conscious of the future Gabriela, and I'm trying to be conscious of the Gabriela who's going to enjoy her marriage and her and her honeymoon, and I'm trying to make the both of them happy with what I'm doing right now, but what it does to me currently is kind of just this overwhelm that I'm not doing enough and that I'm not focusing enough, and that maybe my work is not up the up to standard, which I was holding myself to. That's, that's basically where I'm, where I'm at right now. Um, and I'm trying to remind myself that I can only do what I can within the time I have. Like, it just become like my mantra, basically. But it is this, it, this is this s nagging feeling, which I can't switch off. So that's, that's kind of part of my problem. Vikki: Perfect. And like I said, I think this is really, really sort of adaptable to lots of different [00:19:00] situations that listeners will be in. So we've got these kind of three time periods, haven't we? We've got now to the wedding. We've got the wedding and honeymoon chunk and then we've got this period of time afterwards and you sort of slightly divided that. And I think it's actually quite sensible into a bit of a kind of gear back up as it were. Vikki: If people are watching on YouTube, I'm making like ramping up things with my hands. I'm aware that doesn't work on podcast. So you, you may well have it, you're not gonna come back. Land your airplane, wake up the next day and then go, right, seven hours work, let's go, kind of thing. So we're gonna have a little bit of a ramp up period, but essentially we've got these three blocks of time. And I love this notion. I love that you are using this notion of thinking about what does the Gabriela who's on her wedding and honeymoon need, and what does the Gabriela, when you come back need? The one I think you're neglecting a little bit at the moment is, what does Gabriela right now need? Okay, so let's have a little bit of a [00:20:00] think about for these three weeks. What do you need from yourself, from other people? Gabriela: From myself, I need to keep showing up, but while I am actually physically present for my work blocks, I need to be able to focus on the work rather than daydream or go into my little tangents about like, I don't know, research some stuff for the wedding and, and all of this. Gabriela: Yeah, all of this around because I have actually blocked some time in between my working blocks to finalize plans, and I have a week before the wedding to like completely immerse myself in this, like I'm getting married feeling. I need to be able to, rather than putting another, I don't know, another day of work on myself, I need to really make these hours, which I'm putting [00:21:00] currently work for me and what I need from others. And I'm definitely happy with what my supervisor is providing me with right now. And I've got additional support through university and through the community. . I just would like people to keep showing up for the coworking sessions. So I've got, so I've got someone physically with me going through it. Um, so yeah, I think, I think that's, that's mainly what I would say I, I need. Vikki: Okay. Cool. So this notion of being there and being focused while you're working, tell me a bit more. What are you expecting that to look like? Gabriela: More being in the actual PhD mode and less being, I'm gonna call it scatterbrain, but [00:22:00] it's maybe unkind words to use to my towards myself. I just feel like I have never experienced fully immersive like focus flow right now. Mm-hmm. It's like there's always this sparks which are coming off this focus flow and I am immediately drawn to them because they are more attractive and they're something I'm, I'm authentically and purely excited about. Vikki: Yeah. Gabriela: While the work I'm putting in my PhD requires from me to hype myself up. Yeah, it's just the focus. I can be incredibly focused on stuff towards, you know, the, the Happy Life event, but when it comes to PhD, I feel like it's kind of draining my energy more. Um, so I would, I would love to be able to submit next Friday this really nice chunk of literature review, which is not perfect, not edited, not grammar, spell [00:23:00] checks, nothing. Just content. It exists. That's what I want. Okay. It exists. Vikki: Cool. So I'm gonna take you in for a little bit more detail. So you want to turn up, I've got a 90 minute coworking session where I'm gonna work on my thesis. You wanna get straight in? You wanna work for 90 minutes and use all that time? Gabriela: Yes. Yeah. Vikki: What if that's not gonna happen? Gabriela: When it's not going to happen, then I'm sitting a little bit longer in front of my computer and hoping that, maybe if I run out of things to look at or run out of physical energy to focus on more than one thing, I will just be able to focus on this, on this one thing, which is my literature review and open, open mind. Vikki: But what if you don't need to? [00:24:00] Take it, take me through. So you're, you're working, you, you're like, right. This is a section of my lit review i've got to write, we are writing, I'm doing the keyboard fingers for people who can't see me. I'm writing away, I think, "Ooh, ribbons on the chairs. That would be nice. What color ribbons might I have on my chairs?" Vikki: And you shoot over here and you get onto Google and you start looking at different color ribbons. Okay. Gabriela: That's pretty much it. Vikki: Yeah. Okay. So what do you then do? How long does it take you to realize that you are doing something that's not what you were intending? Gabriela: Pretty much immediately. Vikki: Um, okay, so you notice. It is not that 15 minutes later you're suddenly like, oh my goodness, I'm looking at wedding things. What am I doing? It's pretty much immediately, Gabriela: it's pretty much immediately. Vikki: Okay, now that's good. Okay. Because often people don't necessarily even notice what they're doing and the [00:25:00] fact that you are already using time blocking helps with that because you know that this is a time period that you've put aside for writing and you are recognizing very quickly that you are not writing. Might not sound like a big thing, but that is actually a big thing. So you've noticed. What's happening in your head while you are looking at these ribbons over here? Vikki: It's basically like Gabriela: this little, this little finger, which is like, you should really not be doing this. You know that you're going to have time to do it. I don't know, like on Saturday or on Sunday, and right now it's the time you've got yourself into position. And mental space to actually be doing this. And because I work around my fiance, that means that I have got no one else in the house to care for, or, I dunno not, I'm not being distracted [00:26:00] basically by anything else but my brain. So I feel this, all of this comes into my head when I'm looking at these ribbons. Vikki: Yeah. Perfect. So you will know. But just for the listeners, we talk a lot in the membership about having the boss version of us who decides what's happening and who makes these decisions. And then the implementer version of us who has to actually do it. So boss you is kind of planning out when they should be working and things and then implementor you is going, Ooh, ribbons. And then it sounds as though boss Gabriela wanders past and goes, hang on a minute, dude. That's not what I put on your schedule. What is implementor you saying in response? How are you kind of justifying that you're carrying on doing it? Gabriela: Okay, so my go-to about the wedding stuff is, this is going to be once in my lifetime. This is like one thing I give myself to being [00:27:00] unreasonably attached to these ribbons. You know, um, because they matter. Yeah. And I know this is so silly, and I probably won't remember the ribbons on the actual day, but at the moment that feels like this is something much more important for my future than, doing my work. Vikki: Perfect. If that's true, why are we not time blocking ribbons or whatever? Gabriela: We are time blocking ribbons. It's just, it's just, when I'm doing my PhD, I always have this feeling that I should be able to do stuff which I want for the wedding. I know this is, you call it a toddler, right? It's kind of like that. Vikki: In a loving and compassionate way. Gabriela: Yeah, but it's true, right? Because it's unreasonable. I'm an adult woman. I shouldn't be like, I just want a candy, so I'm going to eat it before dinner. Like [00:28:00] it's, Vikki: I mean, you're a human being, so we all do that, right? Yeah. Gabriela: Yeah. Vikki: Let's not, I mean, you know, we're teasing you about being a toddler or whatever, but we all do this, okay? There's nothing, we do not need to sit in judgment. Especially when you've got something as huge and exciting as a wedding coming up, right, it is completely understandable that you are very distracted by it. Now, people often ask me. If you don't wanna be like super strict and awful to yourself and be like, no, no, no you must work and you don't wanna be all indulgent and just say, oh, well, doesn't matter. We'll just do the ribbon instead. What's the place in between that? And the place in between that is not shaming yourself for being distracted. The place in between that is reminding yourself what you decided. Okay. It's completely understandable, especially [00:29:00] when you know, you've got cognitively difficult work to do on your PhD. There's a whole bunch of, and I know you've worked on it lots already, so it's a bit better than it was, but there's a whole bunch of negative emotions around the PhD and stuff, and the sense that you shouldn't be having to think about it at the moment, it's not at all surprising that given a choice between sitting in that or sitting in ribbons, that it's much more tempting to be over there. We don't have to beat you up for that. Gabriela: Yeah. Vikki: Okay. What I want you to do, and actually I'm gonna suggest that you look at this on a week by week basis between now and the wedding, is I want the bit of your brain that thinks you need to finish off PhD stuff to get in the same room as the bit of your brain that thinks you should be able to focus entirely on your wedding and look at ribbons whenever you want, and I want you to help them come to a [00:30:00] decision. Because once we've come to a decision about what is genuinely reasonable when I'm being level-headed and compassionate. Compassionate to the me that wants to be excited about my wedding, compassionate to the me that wants to get my PhD to a place so that it's, you know, so it's easier for me when I get back. It's compassionate to all those versions of you. Because you could do either way, you could just say, oh, I'm not doing anything more on my PhD. I'm in full wedding mode for the next three weeks, or you could decide, weddings organized. I'm not gonna faff with anything else, I'm just gonna completely focus on work or any version in between. Gabriela: Yeah. Vikki: What I want you to get to is a place where you've agreed that with yourself. So that then if you are in a PhD block and your brain is going, oh, but I should be able to look at ribbons. You get to go. "Yeah, you can. Between [00:31:00] three and six tonight, I've scheduled you three hours of ribbon time. We agreed. This is PhD time. Come back." Gabriela: I, I see where you're getting at. I think, I think I do remind myself about it, but I think I'm a little bit worn down by how long I've been at it. That's, I think is like something which makes me very moody. Yeah. If I, for, for the lack of better word, it's a moody. Yeah. Yeah. So. I, I worry a lot about the ability to handle myself because I have thoughts that like, oh, when wedding's out of the way and honeymoon's out of the way, and I'm like, super chill about it because I'm, I'm, you know, I'm in this still honeymoon zone and everything's fine. Gabriela: I'm totally going to go back and smash it in the six weeks. [00:32:00] But then I also know that reality of it might look a little bit different. And I'm trying to prepare myself. I don't know if it's a good thing, but I'm trying to prepare myself for, a bit of a, you know, like as you said, downtime. A bit of a disappointing, no, not as much as I wanted to do during day days. Gabriela: Um, and I think what I'm thinking about is this decision making alarm is like. Yeah, it's like even, even even stronger, even harder. Um, and I'm making decision and I'm tired, you know? So that's kind of the circle of Yeah. Circle of weariness I'm at, at currently. Vikki: Yeah. And that's really understandable, right? It's been a really long. You know, it is like getting to the end of a marathon and then being told you've gotta go back again. It's like you, you've got got yourself to the viva and now this is all additional time. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: So it's [00:33:00] understandable, but I think that consideration needs to be in the planning room as well. Gabriela: Yeah. Vikki: So it's like I'm tired of regulating myself at the moment. Yeah. I've got this exciting thing and I'm tired of having to do that too. So then we also start to think, okay. What is actually reasonable to ask of myself at the moment. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: Yeah. How can I make it easier that I don't have to regulate myself quite as much? Gabriela: Yeah. I think you've done, yeah, I think you've hit the nail in the head in here. This regulation is what's exhausting me. That's absolutely it. It's like I'm, I'm parenting myself too much. Vikki: And that's, it is tiring. We need to keep doing it, but we need to be reasonable in what we're asking. Gabriela: Yeah. Vikki: And some of that is gonna be reasonable in terms of how many hours you ask yourself to work for. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: But some of it is also being reasonable [00:34:00] in terms of what level of focus you're expecting. Because I actually think if you could get to a stage where you do some work. And you do go over here and look at some ribbons, and then you notice you're looking at ribbons and you go kind of, okay, no ribbons. We're going back over here. It's all right. We'll do that later. But the fact that you got distracted and you spent 10 minutes looking at ribbons doesn't have to be a big deal. So I'm distracted at the moment, my wedding's coming up and I'm tired of tired regulating myself. Of course, I'm gonna wander off, but that's okay because I can bring myself back too without it adding extra hours. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: This is something that you mentioned before we came on to record, this idea that if you haven't focused enough in one time block, then adding more and more time on the end. And the problem is that means implementor you doesn't believe boss you anymore. 'cause boss you says you need to spend three hours working in your PhD this morning, but actually implementing you turns [00:35:00] it into five hours because you haven't met your required amount of actually being focused or whatever. Gabriela: Yeah. But then I don't believe my implementer me either because they don't do the work within the time allocated to them. It's like a self defeating kind of exchange notoriously between the implementer and the boss. Vikki: Um, so yeah, so, so one of the things I suggest with time blocking is even if you realize I intended to do 90 minutes on my PhD and I've done 15 minutes on my PhD, I recommend you go on to the next time block anyway. If you were then scheduled a break, go take your break. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Vikki: If you were then scheduled time to do wedding organization, go do it. Because if we have this perpetually moving schedule. Where actually if I didn't do [00:36:00] my 90 minutes well enough, then I won't take my break. Then I won't have the time doing my wedding stuff. Then I won't have this other things that I've organized. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: Then it doesn't reinforce the need to do the things when you're intended to do them, because you give yourself the option to do them later. And it means that you almost don't believe that you'll have time to think about the wedding later 'cause often you kind of take that away from yourself if you haven't been good enough. Gabriela: Yeah, I, I think it's, it perpetuates as well in like someone asking me like, oh, you know, how is your day going? And I'm immediately going it like. Oh yeah, it's fine. I'm technically here. I'm technically in front of my computer and technically working on my PhD, but I'm not really doing anything PhD related. And I think even like saying it out loud to someone or like writing it to someone, it also feels, I don't know, like it just [00:37:00] makes it too real. And then I feel like, okay, I really have to put like rubber to the road right now. I have to write it down. But as you said, it's kind of eating away from the time I blocked for something else. And it's just, yeah. Vikki: So I would just, if you set yourself 90 minutes to do your PhD, you are trying to do as much work as you can in that 90 minutes. And if 50 minutes of it was spent getting distracted, okay, but the time block still stops at the end of 90 minutes and you do what you were planning then. Gabriela: Okay. Vikki: Yeah, because it then it does reinforce the kind of, I've actually only got this bit of time. I used to have this conversation a lot with academics who used to work late and work on weekends and things like that too. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: There's nothing that will make you less efficient than knowing you'll make up the time later. Gabriela: Yeah. I, I get, I get what you're saying last, last week, I've. [00:38:00] Kind of bumbled about for most of my week. And then on Friday I had this big block scheduled and then a little bit of like a tiny block on the end of the day, which I usually don't do because I'm kind of a work life balance mastering trying to, at least. Gabriela: So, but I had some Friday evening by myself and I was like, okay, let's do it. And I produced a lot during that time because I felt I had this mindset of like, I didn't work as much as I should or would normally, so I'm going to do it right now. And there was nothing else I would be doing. I just wanna do this. Gabriela: So I get what you're saying with the, the motivation of making up the time, which I already bumbled about. Vikki: I think it's different to say, you know, I'm actually, I'm gonna slot in an extra couple of hours on Friday. Because you know what? There were some bits that I missed and I can smash out a few bits [00:39:00] there. I think that's fine. I think it's the, i'll let this session run a bit longer because I didn't focus as much as I wanted to. You know, I said I was gonna go for a walk, but I didn't really do anything, so I'm not gonna go for a walk. It's that kind of thing I want you to avoid because actually that structure, that sense of I've only got this period of time to do it, is part of what gets us going on the things. Gabriela: It's almost like punishing yourself comes more naturally than rewarding yourself. So you just go into this, um, this self-fulfilling prophecy of, oh, I didn't do it, so I'm gonna do it. So I'm, yeah. Vikki: And it just means you don't trust any of your time blocks anymore. 'cause you don't walk in your walk blocks and you don't chill out in your chill out blocks and you don't, you know, you don't do wedding planning in your wedding blocks. Gabriela: Yeah. So. Do you think that's going to be the thing? Which is going to help me to feel a little bit more immersed in the happy event. Vikki: So this is, so we've really focused so [00:40:00] far on this period, running up into to it. I have one last comment about that and then we'll think about while you're Gabriela: okay. Of course. Vikki: The other thing on this bit, running up to it is I want you to be a little bit more decisive. So what I mean by that is if you are genuinely saying, I had time blocked 90 minutes to do my PhD, but I don't feel like doing my PhD, it's the right decision not to do my PhD, and it's the right decision to look at ribbons, as my little analogy for all things wedding. Vikki: I want you to write that down. Turn off coworking. Go and look a ribbon somewhere else because this half-assed, I'm sort of meant to be working, but I'm not really working, but I'm feeling guilty about the fact I'm not working 'cause I should be working. It's just the worst of all worlds. [00:41:00] I would rather you just left. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: You just said, you know what guys? Brain's not in it, not doing the PhD. I'm gonna go and look at ribbons. Love you all. That's easy. Okay. And go sit on sofa and do it. Okay. Yeah, because at least that way you'll feel like you've had your wedding planning pleasure properly. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Vikki: I'm sitting on the sofa, I've got a hot drink, I've got my laptop. I'm looking at whatever I wanna look at. Yeah. Is when we end up in this neither or space that it's just really unsatisfying. Gabriela: Yeah. 'cause Yeah, of course. 'cause you're not really focused on either of them, so your brain doesn't even register that you're doing it a hundred percent. Vikki: And that doesn't feel like I deserve a wonderful wedding experience. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: That feels like, oh, I'm so useless. I'm still looking at ribbons when I'm meant to be writing. Gabriela: Yeah.[00:42:00] Vikki: I suspect that when push comes to shove, if you say, I need to make an intentional decision about this, I suspect that nine times outta 10 you'll decide to continue with your PhD. Gabriela: Yeah. It's, it's probably a Right. Vikki: Making that conscious decision Gabriela: mm-hmm. Vikki: Is important. Gabriela: It's probably correct assessment because even the physical action of picking myself up and going back downstairs and sitting on the sofa and stuff like that is already, you know, I'm already here so I might as well like do the PhD. So I get what you mean. Vikki: So we've really focused so far on that period running up to the wedding, and it might feel like we've not thought about the others, but actually the exact same principles apply. We get to choose really intentionally what is the kind of, I was gonna say, right, right [00:43:00] is never the right word. 'Cause that implies there's only one version. We get to choose really intentionally what we want that time to look like, okay? Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: And then from there, what we get to do is decide when other thoughts come up. How am I gonna manage that? So I assume that you have a, you have decided that you're not gonna do any PhD work while you're away. Gabriela: That's correct. Vikki: Is that fair? Gabriela: That's, that's correct. Vikki: So, okay, perfect. So what are the worries that you think will come up while you're away if you don't have the fear? Oh, I will find myself starting to do some work. What are you actually worried will happen? Gabriela: I worry about the mindset itself being like, oh, this is awesome. I'm really enjoying it, and I totally deserve it. However, there is this massive chunk of work I could have been doing during that time. Okay. That's what I worry about. Vikki: Okay, perfect. So what we get to do, this is why it's so important to focus on this first [00:44:00] bit. 'Cause the more you can look back on this period, as you know what I did the best I could, the easier everything else is. Even if this doesn't go perfectly, we can still do it, but it's easier if we've done this bit is in that period, you are, I'm gonna tell you now, sorry to be disappointing. You will have those thoughts while you're away. A hundred percent. Yeah. You will have your brain back here thinking about this Gabriela, and what she should have done, and you'll have your brain in the future about what it's gonna be like when you're back. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: Okay. The fact that your brain goes there isn't a problem. What we get to choose is what you say to yourself, how you respond when your brain goes, oh, I should have set myself up better. I've got so much to do when I get back. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: What sorts of things do you think you could say to yourself in that situation? Gabriela: Mm. I think one of the things which I would [00:45:00] try to convince myself of is that I've done things in a short period of time. So even if I think that the work I have waiting for me. Is a a, a big chunk of work, I can still manage to finish it on time. Vikki: Mm-hmm. Gabriela: Um, another thing is that once I come back, I'm going to have more feedback from my supervisor because she's, kindly agree that she's gonna work on my literature review while I'm away so I can have the kind of appropriate direction when I come back. Gabriela: So I'm not going to start from scratch. I'm going to have a nice layout of where I'm going with it. And that I've done the bit I said to myself that I will, because I believe strongly that I'm going to submit that literature review next Friday. So I've done it. Gabriela: And [00:46:00] maybe it's not been as completed as I hoped to be, or maybe I was thinking that I can do even more, but I didn't compromise on stuff, which I really didn't want to compromise on, which is spending time with my family, spending time with fiance, exercising, eating properly, et cetera. Yeah, so I think that's Vikki: perfect. So really reminding ourselves of the things we have done, of the things we're capable of doing, of the support that we've got, is all really, really important part of reminding yourself that this will be okay. I'm gonna offer you a more flippant one that I think is also useful, okay. Which is reminding yourself, this is not my business right now. Vikki: Okay, so what I want is I want you to start by reassuring yourself with exactly the things, you know. I did what I could do beforehand. I trust myself to be able to [00:47:00] handle what's there when I get back, I'm gonna have support, I'm gonna come back to the community. I'm gonna have, you know, all my different bits of support. Vikki: I, I've done hard things before. I want you to reassure yourself with that first. But if your brain is then going, yeah, but you could have done more. But it's still a lot left, which it probably will, right? 'cause we have a tendency to do that. I want you then to switch to maybe, not my business right now. Gabriela: Okay. That's gonna be a hard one. Vikki: Yeah, yeah, I know. But it's a really useful one to practice because the thing with, like logic and reasoning is you can argue with it. Okay. You can say, you know when you offer, yes, but you did everything you could. Yeah, but you didn't do that bit, did you? You know, you can have that little argument with yourself about whether you did enough before you left. You can have that argument with yourself if you allow yourself to about whether you are capable of it when it comes back, and we don't know because, you know, you haven't done it yet. It's still [00:48:00] uncertain. But if we can get to, no idea not my business. My business is to have a wonderful honeymoon. Vikki: Yeah and reminds it's okay that you're stressed about it. Of course you are something, it's gonna happen. But that's future Gabriela's challenge. I trust future Gabriela. She's gonna be great. Now we don't wanna like pressure future Gabriela now by being like, she'll be able to do everything. Let's just dump it all back. We wanna make it as while you are still in the bit where you can influence it. Gabriela: Yeah. Yeah. Vikki: We want you to support her as much as you can. Right. We want you now to be like, how can I make this and clear and straightforward for her to come back to as possible. And we'll talk in the membership about how you can set yourself like a little plan for when you get back so that you're not coming back to a, Ooh, where do I start? So that you kind of send yourself a note in the future, as it were to come back to, we'll go through that in one of the sessions. But when you are on holiday, you can't do anything [00:49:00] about what you did in the past. Gabriela: Yes. Vikki: Yeah. And you've decided you are not gonna do anything to help yourself in the future other than get resting and having a great time. But as in, you're not going to do any of that work. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: So it's literally not your responsibility. Gabriela: That's going to be a challenging one, but, um, yeah, I can, I can definitely argue with myself. My then husband might be like, what did I marry into? But Vikki: not my responsibility. Not my responsibility. What am I doing? I'm doing this. My time blocking today says snorkeling, hiking, and then relaxing with my husband. Gabriela: Yes. Yes. That's, that's it. That's, that's exactly it. Isn't it crazy that we're always like, I think PhD is like this one thing which always makes you attached to it so incredibly much. It's not like you're leaving [00:50:00] the office and like, okay guys, see you in two weeks. It's like, it's always with you. It's always. You're always working in the background. Vikki: Yeah, but this is whereby being more intentional. We can actually wrap it up. We can, I want you to go away feeling like may, you know, maybe even you, you write a note to yourself and you seal it in an envelope and you put a bow around it. Vikki: It's like wrapped up, literally wrapped up on my desk for when I get back, and it's gonna have a motivational message in it to tell you that you believe you can do it. It's gonna have some clear instructions at first steps, some expectations, da, da, da. So that you're coming back to something. Yeah. Then you can say, I, I planned for this. Vikki: This is how I've designed my entire year. This is why I invested in the membership. This is what I decided to do, is so that I can have this time. And if it pops up, it doesn't have to be a big drama. Oh no, I'm ruining my my honeymoon by thinking about my PhD. You don't, there's not ruining it, [00:51:00] doesn't matter, but you can just remind yourself, no, no, it's not my business. My business right now is do I want this drink or that drink this food or that food? Gabriela: Okay. That sounds really reasonable when you say it. I might, uh, yeah, I might, I might say it to myself a few times with your voice before. I'm gonna translate this to my voice. Vikki: Well, you can have this on podcast. You can listen to the whole thing. Gabriela: Yay. Vikki: And it will come out probably just about right. I think. Gabriela: Oh, that's amazing. Vikki: Anyway, great. So much. Thank you so much for coming on Gabriela. I really hope that was useful. I think it's something that challenges a lot of people, so, um, I think it's really useful for other people. So thank you for being so open. Gabriela: It's always useful, Vicky, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna lie to you. It's always useful. Vikki: Good. Thank you so much and 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 [00:52:00] 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.

< When you buy something like a car or a piece of technology, you get a manual - it explains what you need to do routinely to keep the product running well and helps you troubleshoot common issues. Today we consider what would go in YOUR instruction manual - what does it take to keep you as a human being running smoothly during your academic experience and how should we deal with common challenges that come up. I help you identify what should go into your “manual” and how this can help us thrive in our studies and careers. Links I refer to in this episode If you found this episode useful, you might like this episode on what to do if you’re behaving like a toddler ! Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. Now I have a confession to make if you've read the title of this episode. I have a complicated relationship with instruction manuals. You see, half the time, especially if I'm left to my own devices, is like instruction manuals don't exist, right? I'm going to get that bit of kit, whatever it is. We just got a new air fryer 'cause we somehow broke the other one. I'm gonna plug it in. I'm gonna press some buttons. I'm gonna assume that I'm clever enough to figure this stuff out in my little non imposter syndrome anyway, and I'm gonna make it up as I go along and that means there's gonna be a whole load of buttons that I'm never going to use. Hello? Washing machine setting 10. Only one I ever use. That's fine. All good. That's half the time. The other half the time, and this is where somebody else is involved. So my husband has similar opinions about instruction manuals. Just they don't exist, just crack on. However, when he says that, I suddenly [00:01:00] become the instruction Manual dictator. No, no. We have to read the quick start guide, darling. We have to do this properly. I dunno what it is about somebody else behaving the exact same way that I behave, that makes me suddenly want to be little miss organised knickers. But it does. So I have a complicated relationship with instruction manuals. However, when it comes to looking after ourselves and trying to figure out how we are doing this whole life thing. I actually think they're a really, really useful analogy. So today I am gonna be telling you why you need your own instruction manual and like broadly what I think should be in it. If you want more help building one, this is something that we are gonna be doing in quarter four of the PhD Life Coach membership, which if you're listening to this, live opens for new members next week. So check it out if you want more support on this. I also have to [00:02:00] confess that, when I'm recording this, it is the morning after I just watched the first episode of Celebrity Traitors uk. And for those of you who've been around here for a while, you all know I am a big big fan of the traitors. I have been rewatching lots of series in preparation to get myself in the mood ready for celebrity traitors. It has got an amazing cast, so I'm a little bit over excited this morning, so I don't think we're actually gonna refer to the traitors in it at any stage, but I just wanted to warn you that I'm feeling kind of upbeat. It may get mentioned in future episodes. If you haven't seen it, I did do an episode a while ago where it's nine things or 10 things or however many things you could learn from the traitors. So if you're a fan too, make sure you check that out and make sure you're following me on Instagram 'cause I will be wittering pointlessly about traitors in a way that does not relate in any way to PhDs, but will be fun and distracting. So make sure you're following me there if you're not ready. [00:03:00] So right. Focus instruction manuals. That is what we're doing today. Instruction manuals. Why do I think you need an instruction manual? Well, I think we often live our lives the same way that I approach machinery left of my own devices, which is we just kind of start using it. Okay? We're born into these bodies. We grow up, we, you know, we're socialized, we're trained with all those things, and we just sort of go with it, and we don't necessarily often really stop and think what works really well for us, what doesn't? People who listen to podcasts like this and people who engage in memberships like mine and things like that, we often get a little bit more reflective, right? We start thinking, oh, it helps when I do this. It's not so useful when I do that. We sometimes come up with lots of shoulds about what we should be doing, but we don't often take a minute to just stop and kind of condense that into something that is actually useful, right? Because we've all [00:04:00] had these instruction manuals where they're like massive. They've got 47 different languages, which is wonderful, inclusive. Love that, but huge, huge documents, loads and loads of detail loads and loads of stuff that you don't need. We just don't need them, right? What we need is something that actually helps us get started, helps us figure out what we need to do to it regularly and helps us if something goes wrong. Those, to me, are the main things, right? Oh, and where to get further support. So let's say four things. How to get started, how it kind of, how we should help it run day to day troubleshooting and where to get further support. And I actually think those are the four things that we need in instruction manual for ourselves. How to get started of a day or when you start your new project or whatever. What I need to run effectively week to week. You know, 'cause we've all got, are you one of those people I'm gonna. Are you one of these people who's like, never taken the fluff out of your tumble dryer, [00:05:00] or I shouldn't tell you, but a certain, a certain sister of mine never realized you had to empty your hoover. I dunno where she thought it was going. I hope she doesn't listen to this. Led to quite a messy mess in the end. So, lesson learned, you need to empty a Hoover. We need to know those things about ourselves. What do we need for our own basic maintenance? And then troubleshooting can be super useful. 'cause if something goes wrong, it doesn't have to be a massive disaster. As long as we know, do I need to turn it off, turn it back on again. Do I need to change something? Are there one or two things I could check to see what's going on? If we know what to do to troubleshoot in these situations, then it doesn't have to be a massive drama, we just follow those steps, and if we know where to go for further support, not only is that useful if we need it, but it's also just kind of reassuring to know it's there, right? That if all else fails, we've got something to fall back on. So what I wanna do in today's episode is think through what each of those [00:06:00] sections might look like for a human being, a researcher, someone like us, if we were to write an instruction manual for ourself, now who is this manual for? Before we get into the details, I want us to really consider who this manual is for , because you might be thinking, Ooh, I can give this to my supervisor. I can give this to my partner, I can give this to my friend, or whatever, and I'm gonna say maybe, maybe. Okay. We don't know necessarily how they'll respond to that. Some of you might know that they'd love it. There are specific circumstances, which I'll tell you about in a second, where I really think we should be sharing these things , but the main person that this instruction manual is for is you. If one person needs to know how to operate this human being, that is you, it's you, that sort of self understanding, that kind of clarity of thought will really help you navigate all the things that are happening in your life at the moment. So this, this manual is primarily for you.[00:07:00] The one time that I would highly recommend sharing it. Is if you are in a position where sometimes you can't advocate for yourself effectively. So if you have, um, let me think. If you have seizures, if you have periods of mania or depressive episodes, things like that. Firstly, you must be getting medical support for this. Do not take anything I say as alternatives for that. But if you ever, you are in a position where you have things where you're like, you know what, there are times when I can't implement this for myself. Then it's useful for the people around you to have these things. If you are in that sort of situation, I want you to go back and check out an episode I did called How to Look After Yourself When conducting emotionally distressing work. I had Dr. Tina Skinner and Dr. Sarah Warbiss on to talk about this. They're experts in the area, and one of the things they talked about was psychological safety plans. So this is for people who either have psychological conditions or it does translate to physical conditions. [00:08:00] Or who are doing work that is very distressing and having a plan in place as to how to look after yourself is really, really useful. This idea of an instruction manual for yourself is sort of an extension of that, where it's not just if you are in something that is sort of an objectively, always emotionally distressing situation. It's accepting that life generally can be challenging and distressing sometimes, and it's taking it further so that it's not just about psychological safety, it's about thriving and enjoying your life too. The other thing I wanna say before we get into the details is I don't want you to take this too, too seriously. I want you to put fun stuff in this as well. So yes, we can think about what to do if you are feeling stressed. So troubleshooting when you're overwhelmed, for example. And we can think in terms of sensible things. We can think in terms of kind things, but let's also think in terms of fun stuff, right? Let's also think about silly [00:09:00] things that help you. So for me if feeling overwhelmed to the point that you can't work, stick her in front of an episode of the traitors. She will definitely feel better if you just stick her in front. That is essentially my, you know, restart the computer button. Put me in front of an episode of Traitors. I will come back with opinions about how they should change the rules, what they should have done instead of what they actually did do. Lots of very smug interpretations that absolutely ignore the fact that I would be terrible in the castle in real life. As a viewer, I'm amazing, so keep it lighthearted. So let's think through what these sections could be. And for me, the first one is that quick start that I mentioned because often when I talk to my clients and my members, one of the biggest things that people struggle with is getting started on something. Whether that is getting started in the morning or whether it's getting started on a new project or getting started on [00:10:00] anything. You know, going to a new art class. I just started a new art class. Did I tell you I like hobbies? So think getting started on anything new can be challenging for a lot of people. And so one of the things that's useful is thinking through what helps you to get started. If you wanna take this human being from not doing the project, to doing the project, what do you specifically need? What is effective for you? So as an example, I would have in there something like the purpose and likely efficacy needs to be clear. So I am very bad as my parents and former employers would tell you at doing something just because I've been told to. Just because of how it's how we do it. It's what needs doing. Yeah. I'm not so good at that. I need to understand why I'm doing it and why it's useful. Others of you, the quick start guide [00:11:00] might be really clear, step-by-step instructions. For example, I need that too. If, especially if there's a lot of steps in something, I need to know where to start. I don't need necessarily lots of detail, but I do need to know where to start. I need, I'm ashamed to say the old diet cake is a very good way to kickstart me. So thinking through, what things do you need to get started? You can think about your physical environment. I don't need a tidy house to get started, which is good. 'Cause otherwise I would rarely get started. I do need a somewhat clear desk. If my desk is chaos, then I really struggle. If in doubt, gimme a piece of paper and a pen rather than a computer. Happy days. Let's stick that in as a quick start guide if you just want to get going on a project. Encourage me to write about it, encourage me to talk about it. So those might be things that would go into my quick start guide. I want [00:12:00] you to think about what would go in yours. Now, I do have a cautionary tale for you. Those of you who spend too much time on self-help Instagram, and if you're here I suspect you might. If you spend too much time on self-help Instagram, what you might be telling yourself is my Quick Start guide is I need to get up at 5:00 AM and do three morning pages before meditating for five minutes, drinking my lemon infused water, walking for 10,000 steps, and doing my stretches and strength-based workout before the day starts today. If you are already doing all these things, happy days, I suspect you don't need my help. I love you. I'm glad you're here, but. For most of you, you don't need any of that stuff. You need one or two bits of it, maybe, possibly, perhaps sometimes, but that kind of notion of a perfect start is holding you back from starting. So emphasis on the quick bit of quick start. What do you need? Another example for me? Quick [00:13:00] start. You want me to get going? Stick me in a shower. Okay. If I get up and get in a shower. Get actually proper up rather than deciding that I can work in whatever I've just thrown on without showering, you are gonna get much better outta me. Okay? So I want you to think about those things. The kind of bare minimum, this is what would lead to a day or a project starting reasonably well. That's our quick start guide. Then second section is general maintenance. What do you need on a daily, weekly, monthly, annual basis to stay functioning broadly? This is not, again, this is not about, if you're on a big fitness improvement or a big self-improvement of whatever, you know, this is not where you're gonna put, I'm trying to read however many books a year or whatever this is what do you need basic maintenance. Okay, so here you might reiterate stuff [00:14:00] about, you know, how often you need showers, things like that. What sort of food keeps you broadly functioning, what sort of social things. Now, for some of you, that will be not too much. Some of you, the maintenance will be no more than one social night a week. Others, it'll be the other way round. Make sure you spend at least two nights a week doing something fun with friends. I'm at that end of things, right? I start to get miserable if I'm not doing things that are hobbies or social. So I need to make sure that even when I'm busy, that stuff gets prioritized in. What else helps? For me, daily knowing what my tasks for that day are, and preferably having that set at least the day before helps massively. A to-do list that actually has everything on it. [00:15:00] Now if you want more information about my to-do list system, I have a whole podcast episode about how to use role-based task management, and that's still the system that I'm using miraculously three years later. I haven't changed it for some new version, which I always used to do. Knowing that all the things I need to do in my business are in the same place, and, uh, kind of categorized and stuff helps me function on a day to day, week to week, month to month basis. I know that when I get overwhelmed, there's a tendency not to put everything in there just to think, oh, I just need to get on with things, and that's when it all goes a little bit wrong. So, in my manual, I would have stuff about my tasks needing to be in there. Part of your regular care also includes things like sleep. So on a regular basis, by roughly when should we be putting this human being to bed? I stayed up late last night to watch Celebrity Traitors 'cause I'd been at my art class and so I couldn't watch it live and I had to watch it before I got back in case I saw spoilers online. Did I mention that I love [00:16:00] the traitors? Uh, so I stayed up later. Last night. I wasn't in bed till like 11, which for me quite late. I am a, tuck me up by nine 30, lights out by 10 kind of a girl. I am also a girl that sometimes feels like she wants to go to bed at eight when she's exhausted. And part of my regular care instruction manual is do not let her go to sleep before nine. 'cause if she falls asleep at half past eight, she'll wake back up at half past 11 and be fairly confused and unable to get back to sleep. So think through what else would be in your kind of regular care stuff. Personalize this. I cannot emphasize enough. Personalize this. If yours says, eat enough protein, get eight hours of sleep a night and walk 10,000 steps and do three sessions a week of strength training. These are all very worthy things and great. Brilliant. Let's try and do those. I am actually trying to do most of these things, but I want you to really personalize this to you. Is it really eight hours? Does it matter whether it's late [00:17:00] or early, or what? When do you need to be in bed? When do you need to get up? How do we look after this amazing machine that is you? Section three is troubleshooting. Okay? And troubleshooting is where we get to identify stuff that's likely to come up. Common things that affect you as an individual. And again, these need to be really specific to you. And I want you to think either about a challenging situation that often comes up. So for me, let's say feeling overwhelmed. Okay? Feeling overwhelmed or having too many tasks, and I'm saying too many tasks in like inverted commas, because how it needs too many, who knows? But if it feels to me like it's too many, that's a common challenge that I need a response to. The second thing you can have in your troubleshooting guide is warning signs. Okay? Warning signs for me [00:18:00] starts canceling social things. If I start going, I just haven't got the head space to see my friends, we have a problem. That is a bad sign, that needs some support, that needs some help. Second one for me, if I start eating toast for multiple meals, we also need to intervene. That never goes good places. Okay? So if I'm deciding, you know, what, toasts good enough for lunch, toast, good enough for dinner, and I'm doing this in any sort of sustained way, then that, I'm gonna put that as a warning sign in my troubleshooting guide. Okay? So first job is we get to identify and let's not overwhelm ourselves. Come out with 5, 6, 7 things that commonly happen to you, okay? And then we start asking ourselves in a loving, supporting, compassionate, curious way. And if you dunno how to do that, you need to join my membership. 'cause this is what we're gonna be working on. What do we do in those [00:19:00] situations? Because for most of us, our solution to those things is I just need to get on with it. I just need to plan an evening out even though I don't need to, I just need to cook a decent meal. Whatever it is, I don't want it to start with the word, just because the fact you're finding this challenging means that there isn't a, just do this solution. 'cause just implies it's easy and we ain't gonna do that to you. You are finding this hard right now. However, what we're gonna do is try and make it feel as easy as possible by having something that's supportive but also helpful. Okay, let's take an example. When I am overwhelmed and I think I've got too many things to do, I need to remind myself that it's okay. I need to remind myself that I've felt like I've had too many things for a long time. I need to remind myself that I am capable of getting stuff done quite quickly when I pick [00:20:00] and I need to pick one thing that I can crack through and get on with. Because there's nothing my brain likes more than some evidence and actually, and some momentum. Once I get some momentum going on a task, I actually smash through things reasonably quickly. My problem is that freeze thing of where you look at all of them. So I need reassurance. I need kindness. Reassurance is that it's okay that you're stressed. Reassurance is not i'm sure you'll get it all done. That. You are liable to get snapped at if you tell me, "I'm sure you are doing it. Oh, you always do." Shut up. Not helping. That's not what I mean by reassurance. Reassurance is, it's okay. You've got a lot of things. No wonder you feel overwhelmed. That's the reassurance. Yeah. But you are capable of doing lots of things. What's the one thing you're gonna do right now? Let's do that. That would be my little thing there. The toast thing is one regular care. Have things that are easy to grab when you are feeling like you can't be bothered to make a meal properly that are [00:21:00] not just toast. So that would be in my regular care section. In my troubleshooting section, it's essentially, I'm gonna say this in a loving, respectful way to myself. Don't believe me when I tell you that I, I just really need toast right now. It's not true. It's not coming from the best part of me. It's coming from the carb craving can't be bothered to think part of me. Two solutions. One, somebody else cook something for me. Two, pick something that's slightly better than toast. I have a tendency to be perfectionist. I suspect many of you guys do too. I have a tendency to believe that if I'm not going to be just eating toast, I should be having a perfectly balanced Buddha bowl with a combination of proteins, carbohydrates, healthy fats, little snacky, crispy things on top of it, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I have made it a lot easier to make those. I'll talk about that another time. But best [00:22:00] case if I'm tempted to have toast for dinner. Well, let's have fish, fingers, waffles, and peas. Okay. Actually, not that bad. Yes, it's oven food. Yes. It's probably got all the preservatives in it but it is better than toast and butter. Okay. It's got some protein in it. It's got some vegetables in it. It's vaguely got some fiber in it. Let's go. So thinking through for each of your troubleshooting things, what would be a kind and compassionate response? What would you want to do in that situation? And then the final section, just a quick one, is further support, which is reminding you who have you got in your life and what are they useful for? Because different people are good at different things, right? My husband. I choose, well, my husband's amazing. He can help me with absolutely everything. Other people, I have some friends that are really good at picking me up when I'm down because they'll make me laugh. They'll take me somewhere ridiculous, they'll distract me. It's amazing. Other friends are really good at helping me prioritize in my business if I'm trying to make a decision or whatever. I've got [00:23:00] people that I can go to and talk that through with. I have people who will listen if I just really need to talk something through without getting offered solutions and things like that. And I can kind of, I'm not gonna name them now, but I can kind of picture in my head who these different people are. And so noting down who are the key people, who are the kind of support system here that if you are struggling, these are the people you can go to and what they're useful for. So that's what I mean by an instruction manual is a guide to running you. We have to build it with compassion. This is not about making a perfect version of you that will always function beautifully. This is about creating routines and kind of emergency protocols to implement that will make this feel much easier. As I say, make sure you don't limit it just to dealing with challenges. I want part of your self-care in there to be around how you make your life feel positive. What do you need in your life in order to thrive? Not just [00:24:00] cope with the things that feel difficult, what's stuff makes life feel really fun? We need all that stuff in there too, so that we can support ourselves to build the best phD academic life we possibly can. If you want some support with that and you're listening to this live, make sure you go to the PhD life coach.com. Click on the membership. You'll find all the details. We are open for new members between the 20th, which is the Monday and the 21st, second, third, fourth, fifth. Is that right? 20th, first, second, third, fourth, Friday, whatever date the Friday is, we're open till the Friday. You can join in that time. It is three monthly membership. You'll be in until the end of January. We are gonna be talking imposter syndrome, and we are gonna be talking identifying your strengths, figuring out how to look after yourself. We are gonna create our own instruction manuals with support so that you do it in a compassionate, non-judgmental, fun, and thriving kind of a way. Come join us again and have a little look. If you get on the wait list ahead of time, you will have access to some discounts [00:25:00] and to some other little freebies as well. So jump on the wait list. Hope to see lots of you there. Thank you all 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. See you next time.