< In this episode, I’m joined by Jess Dineen, who is both a PhD student and a neurodivergent consultant, speaker, coach, and founder of NeuroNatives. We discuss the strengths and challenges of being in academia with autism, how autistic people can support and advocate for themselves, and how individuals and universities can better support neurodivergent people. Whether you are autistic yourself, or you want to be more inclusive and supportive of your autistic colleagues, Jess shares both lived experiences and evidence based strategies that will help. Links I refer to in this episode Connect with Jess on LinkedIn and find out more about her business Neuronatives . Transcript Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast, and this week I have another special guest with me. This week I am joined by Jess Dineen, who is the CEO and founder of Neuronatives. So, hi Jess. Jess: Hi Vikki. Great to be here. Great to be on the podcast today. Vikki: I'm so excited to have you here. Why don't we start off as usual people, just tell people a little bit about who you are and what Neuronatives even is. Jess: Sure. So, Neuronatives is a consultancy training company to raise awareness, and make workplaces more neuro inclusive. The whole idea of the business is very much to back what we're saying with science. So really using journal articles, research papers to support what we're talking about. And also backing it with lived experience as well. So I myself late diagnosed autistic and A DHD , and so a lot of what I talk about is based on my lived experience and also kind of client's experience as well. Vikki: Yeah. And what do you aim to do with the organization? Jess: The aim eventually is to run tailored consultancy. So starting off, you know, right at the top, kind of strategy, getting workplace, companies being more neuroinclusive. So thinking about their long-term vision, their hiring policies, you know, everything from recruitment to retention to then how you are managing your team. Um, thinking about your workplace policies, and then down to individual manager training. So how to get the most out of your employees and support them. 'cause the stats are there, you know, the more inclusive your workplace is, the more productive your workplace is, and the higher retention rates it's gonna be. Jess: So that's the aim. And also alongside that we hope to offer more coaching as well. We're quite a small business and we're right at the beginning of the journey but taking very much a tailored approach and not just framework, not a tick box exercise, to make real change for neurodivergent individuals. Vikki: For sure. Yeah. And why does that feel so important for you right now? Jess: I think being late diagnosed myself and the amount of. Kind of effort that I had to go to advocate for myself. And even at the start of the journey, getting diagnosis, getting the forms done but then also in the workplace what I needed. Jess: When I asked for adjustments, you know, to go from working five days in the office to a few days in the office, I cried 'cause I was acknowledging that I needed that support and that that was okay. I don't want other people to have to take all that time to figure that stuff out. I want to be able to it already be in place. Jess: And I think also the amount of stress employees have who are neurodivergent around, you know, advocating themselves, having these conversations, knowing where to start. It should already be happening at recruitment or even hiring stage, um, these conversations as to how to work with me or, you know, what best practice looks like. Jess: So neurodivergent individuals are often already tired just by living life. So to have to advocate for themselves and then advocate for themselves in work, is just another layer of, of complexity and stress, especially if you are autistic. From my personal experience, the kind of social nuances and, how you perform or how you're masking at work is another barrier I guess. So I'm trying to remove barriers, I guess is my, is my, long and short of it. Vikki: Perfect. And as you know, but just for the listeners, we are gonna mostly focus on autism today. So I know you have expertise across both autism and A DHD, but we've had an episode with Dr. Alex Conner on before. So we've talked about A DHD quite a bit and because of my own proclivities, it tends to come up quite regularly throughout the episodes. Vikki: Yeah. And, but I wanted to really get somebody in who has expertise in, in autism specifically. Sure. Yeah. Obviously everything you talk about will apply to both and don't feel like you can't talk about ADHD stuff, but I'm really excited to have somebody with specific expertise and experience in autism, to talk about it. Yeah. So maybe let's start there actually, for people who are less familiar. What actually is autism? Jess: So autism. So it depends which lens we look through. So you might look through the medical model. So if you go to the DSM, so the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders, a word I hate is very much called a neurodevelopmental condition. Jess: So usually diagnosed in childhood, hence neurodevelopmental during the developmental period. Um, and it's where, um, so this is all kind of the clinical terms, not necessarily reflecting my opinion, how it should be viewed. But where someone might have challenges, significant challenges in social interaction, communication, and that could be also difficulties and communication skills, social behaviors that significantly impair daily functioning. Jess: And they do vary from one person to the next, so they might have kind of special interests or all sorts of different things. There's different areas in which you can be diagnosed, but often it looks and presents differently between males and females, and a lot of women are being diagnosed later due to a kind of broadening of the criteria, but also more visibility of what it looks like in women. Jess: The word kind of deficit disorder is something that I do not agree with. I'm very much against the medical model , but as if you wanted to look for kind of a diagnosis that, that is what it, you would find in the kind of clinical literature. Vikki: And how would you prefer to define it? Jess: I definitely would prefer to define it as kind of differences in communication styles, differences in social interactions and behaviors. I wouldn't say I am deficit. I would just think I'm maybe more, for me personally, more direct, more assertive. I hate small talk. I do it because I know that that's what I'm supposed to do, but I don't like it. I think it's also remiss not to say that everyone is unique. So all autistic individuals are different. So you might find someone like myself who, you know, reasonably social and you know, can have a conversation and make eye contact, but it does time me out. Jess: So I guess, older, older kind of literature would say, I'm high functioning and then the older literature might also say someone's low functioning if they're not able to do those things. I think it's, I'm just functioning. You don't see me on the days where I'm not talking and I'm burnt out and I don't leave my bed. Jess: So I think I definitely have challenges. But I would say there are more differences in communication styles and some people love my approach and love my style. Vikki: Perfect. And I know you work across a whole range of different companies and organizations, but thinking specifically about academia, I know you are doing a PhD yourself. Yeah. What challenges do you see autistic people having when doing PhDs and in academia more generally? Jess: I'm actually in my second year of doing a PhD now, so I think I've managed to see a bit of what I've experienced and then others around me and those I've worked with and I think the kind of number one challenge is communication, and expectations. I think in academia we have all sorts of tools. We have email, we have teams or Zoom, you know, whichever the university uses . And I think it's really good at the beginning to start off with, you know, what communication style does your supervisor like? Is it an email, is it teams message or a teams meeting? Jess: Is it a face-to-face meeting? And what are the expectations? I think challenges that I've come across is what are the expectations in terms of communication? What is their role? And some supervisors may be very clear and some may not be. And so I've had to learn the hard way as to what is expected of me and what methods work for my supervisors. But I think also in academia, there's quite a lot of unwritten rules and unwritten kind of structure and hierarchy that is not necessarily apparent to autistic individuals, especially, you know, someone like myself. It's very easy to make those mistakes. So I think it's being aware of those and if you're able to ask someone in the team or if you're able to get that awareness that's really important. Jess: So that's the one. I think second is again, expectations, but more in a kind of deadlines, you know, what's expected of you by when, and agreements as to what that looks like. Sudden changes or sudden like, you know, asked to do a presentation or something really unexpectedly or things like that are very uncomfortable, very, very stressful for those in my experience who have autism. So knowing what the semester looks like, knowing, you know, if you are on a scholarship, what you're teaching, having advanced notice of when you're teaching it, what content you're teaching, not getting it, you know, like three days beforehand. Vikki: I was really interested in you talking about the sort of unwritten rules. Yeah. And I think some of the stuff around how seriously to take particular comments I've seen , people with autism struggle with in academia mm-hmm. Where supervisors make a sort of slightly throwaway comment about, oh, it might be good to add that analysis or whatever. Yes, yes. Um, and to be honest, it's confusing for all students when that happens. I agree. I agree. But if you particularly struggle with sort of the unwritten side of things as it were, yeah then figuring out, does that mean I should do it? Was that an idea? Was that an order, was that a suggestion? What, what did they mean by that? I've certainly seen people come unstuck with that sort of thing where, and you can tell me whether this is something that's accurate or just sort of what I've seen with my clients, but I see that, that my clients with autism tend to fall on the side of taking it as an actual instruction and definitely doing it. Jess: Yeah. That's a really great point. Vikki: Rather than a Did they mean that, I dunno. Kind of, yeah. Jess: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And I think the one thing that I've learned from that is thinking about having a summary of what was discussed in the meeting and what are the action points. So then you can kind of nail down like what you know. The supervisor said this, did they actually mean that? 'cause they have to sign that form and get it back to the senior team, whatever. So a challenge would be, like you said, is taking what they're saying is gospel or literally, then doing a lot of work. And actually that wasn't needed or what wasn't the case. , I remember back when I did my master's, me and my supervisor, and we had to publish the paper actually but she'd asked me to go and look at some journals that might be suitable. So I went away and did a table, the impact factor, the name of the journal, the submission diff, like how it all worked, the, maybe the referencing style. Jess: And I think she just meant a cursory glance. But I had gone and done an Excel table and when we had our next meeting, I was like, this is the table what you asked for. And she was like, oh, and she didn't mean that. And so it was just quite amusing 'cause I was like, okay, like I really need to kind of double check with her and, you know, she does that with me now, is double check what we've agreed to. Vikki: Yeah, for sure. I guess the other one that I've seen a little bit is, and again, I've seen this with people who don't have autism too, but where people get quite fixed on this is how I want to do this study. Mm. And then I think it's an interesting balance between how you sort of, um, what's the word? How you sort of respect and honor the fact that it's their PhD and that this is, this is what they want to do. And sort of understand the fact that there might be less cognitive flexibility in terms of looking at other options and seeing that different ways could work. Vikki: Yeah. Versus your kind of supervisory responsibility For sure. Sort of advice. Yeah. That might work. I'm not sure, but it's high risk or it's not angled at the journal I thought we were going for. Or I wonder if you me, whether that's something you've experienced or seen. Jess: Yes, yes. I think, task switching is challenging for both, you know, those with autism who might have mono tropic interest, where they're focusing on one thing at a time or where those who have ADHD kind of, this is what I wanna do, I'm not, so what I'm doing right now and this is my hyper focus, don't you dare shift my attention. And so I think. For sure. I think that has definitely come, come up with me and clients where you've set up, but this is my intention, this is the gap in the research. This is where I'm going and this is what I'm doing and I'm gonna answer this question. But then whether it's miscommunication or new things come to light where there's a change needed. Jess: And I've recently gone through one where I've gone from doing a systematic review to now, including many more studies in my systematic review. So from 18 to now 41, to then being like, oh, let's, let's do a meta analysis, which will create much, you know, richer research, rich insights. However, it's kind of, for me personally, it's been really hard 'cause I dug everything, you know, dug deep and, and kind of really went down and got all the information and spent almost a year on the systematic review to then be like, actually this isn't right. Jess: This, we need to change. And I think. It's really difficult. And I think that's the first thing is I would for any, you know, anyone who's listening, like it's as a student or whether you're a supervisor who's looking to help their supervisee is thinking about acknowledging that it's difficult and acknowledging that change is hard. Jess: And it is down to the, the PhD student at the end of the day, like, this is their choice and their PhD. However, you have a supervisor for a reason, right? You have a supervisor who has experience, who has guidance and can help you , hopefully to success, you know, to, to completing your doctorate. So that's something that is, has been important for me to remember is I don't know what I'm doing. Jess: The supervisor might not either, but it's really important to, to remember that as how challenging it is you want to create your best work. And if that is the best work, then that's important to go on and do. And that's something with clients, it's, it's having that conversation of. Yes, it's difficult and let's, let's hash it out and let's get through it and talk about it but what outcome do you want to have? And where do you want to be and how do you get there? And, and don't get me wrong, that kind of wrestling and that, you know, changing topic and changing direction can bring up all sorts of emotions, anger, fear, frustration , all sorts , lots of procrastination 'cause I don't wanna start with new task, new topic. Um, yeah. And, and kind of strategies that I've kind of gone with is to say, okay, let's look at this kind of big ugly mess and how do we break it down? Like what are the tasks, you know? Okay. First we'll read about meta-analysis. Look at the couple of different kinds of meta-analysis. Think about the different, you know, whether it's random effects or fixed effects, for example, and this is when you're going granular, but, and then breaking down, like, okay, so let's look at all the studies. What kind of analysis did they do? But like breaking it down into steps. And I think that's something that both, I, I guess someone who has a ADHD and autism for myself, I need to break things down into chunks, otherwise it feels massive and I can't get anywhere. So something that has helped me working with clients to say, okay, with your supervisor, if you can get a check-in point, even if it's 15 minutes, every two weeks, have some goals and these breakdown steps and check in. Jess: And that way you don't have to wait till the, you know, monthly or bimonthly supervisor meeting where you haven't got to where you said you'd get because you're so overwhelmed. So it's realizing that I guess one size doesn't fit all when you're supervising. For the students who are neurodivergent, they will need different things. Um, but on the flip side, your students may be bounds and leaps ahead with the right guidance because they're like, oh yeah, no, I'm know what I'm doing now. Like, I'm, I'm focused and I'm interested and, you know, I can get a loads more done than perhaps, you know, a neurotypical student might do. Jess: I think it's really important to remember that you are, as an autistic individual, you may have strengths that are, you know, way above and beyond, you know, a neurotypical person. There is such a thing as that call, a spiky profile that you may have come across, where you know your executive function, you know your different skills, whether it's organization, memory, time management, you may have, you know, uh, drops, you know, where it's maybe not so good but then huge peaks where your skills outnumber, you know, the neurotypicals on your team. So be very much looking like a, a spiky profile. Um. And, there's quite a few occupational psychologists who do a lot of work in that area around neurodiversity as well, that I recommend looking into Almuth McDowall and Nancy Doyle, and many more names, but they focus a lot on kind of strengths-based coaching. What are the person's strengths? What are they really good at? Some clients it might be attention to detail, so really researching to the nth degree on one area and knowing all about it and being able to tell, you know, the supervisor or teach a topic, whether it's a class, all about that specific area and bring so much passion to the topic because they're so interested in it. Jess: But then also you are coming at something with a different angle, a different perspective, because your brain looks different. There are studies that show the brain looks different under an FMRI scan. So the different parts of the brain are, I don't wanna say different again, but look visibly different. And so remembering that your brain works differently and often your perspective is different, is a huge strength. Jess: So another strength that I've come across with clients I work with, but also within myself is often those with autism, have experienced an awful lot of difficulties, in which case they often have a deep level of empathy and understanding, and can really relate to a lot of people in many different ways. Jess: And these are just the things off the top of my head from my experience and my work. But, you can find lots of different strengths of all the different neurodivergent types, on national Institute of Care guidelines or whether you wanna look at the NHS but then there's an also lot of research papers that talk about the strengths of neurodivergent employees. For example, dyslexia the British Dyslexia Association has masses on the strengths of both dyspraxia and dyslexia. but yeah, I could go on about those all day. But if it's so important when you are working with students or supervisor, your supervisees to think about yes, the challenges, what are their strengths? Jess: How can I encourage them and empower them to not feel, oh, just because I have a, a hidden disability, or I'm neuro divergent that I'm behind or I'm worse off than everyone else, which is not the case. Quick interjection. If you are finding this episode helpful, but you are driving, walking the dog or doing dishes, just remember this. When you're done, head to the PhD life coach.com and sign up for my newsletter. We've all listened to a podcast and thought this is great. I should do something with it, and that didn't. That's where I created the newsletter to help you actually apply the stuff that you hear. Each week you'll get a short summary, some reflective questions on one simple action that you can take right away. You'll also get access to a searchable archive of all the past episodes so you can find the exact one that you need to help with your current challenges. Plus all newsletter subscribers get a free webinar every single month on a topic that affects all PhD students and academics, and you'll always be the first to hear for when my membership opens to new members. So once you're done listening, or even right now, go sign up for my newsletter and make sure you don't miss out. Vikki: So important and I love, I think that notion of the spiky profile and thinking about both at the same time is really useful because I've certainly seen with supervisors, and remember, and we'll talk about this later, listeners, you know, supervisors might have autism too. Vikki: This is not just about PhD students having autism, but certainly if you are a neurotypical supervisor and you have a neurodivergent student, sometimes it can be really confusing, right? Because you're like, Jess is brilliant, she knows her stuff so well. She's so on top of everything. I don't understand why she's having a freakout about talking at a research group meeting or whatever. Vikki: She knows this stuff back to front, inside out. I can't shut her up about it in meetings. This makes no sense. I don't get it. And so I think really recognize, because if you don't understand that, it can be so confusing to understand why someone's having such strong emotions about something. Yeah. That you know they're perfectly capable of 'cause they're so good at that other Jess: Mm. Absolutely. And I think that's the kind of misconception of, especially from my experience, women who are late diagnosis, that they've learn to mask and they've learn to manage all of this. And it gets to a point of burnout and significantly impaired, daily functioning where women just can't, basically can't manage anymore. Jess: And I think that's really important is having that curiosity and that open communication to say, these are my strengths and these are the areas that I find difficult and this is what happens. And I think having a psychologically safe environment, even though it's an overused term, but somewhere where you can say, Hey, this is really difficult, or this is causing me a lot of anxiety. And being real and honest I think super important to be able to acknowledge it and hit get it out in the open and move on. Because I think the supervisory role isn't always an easy one 'cause you're both, you know, an academic and you're pushing the student further ahead, but then you're also acting in some sort of pastoral capacity, whether you have officially given that term or not, but you are meeting the student, you know, most regularly compared to anyone else. Jess: So you will see that kind of ups and downs. So, it's really important to have that kind of open conversation and that also then takes awareness of both the supervisor and the PhD student. I think that would be my recommendation is reflecting a lot and thinking about what you want to share, but, and explaining why. Jess: 'Cause I think the supervisor's not there to fix everything 'cause it's very much a independent journey, but they want you to do your best. So you're trying to helping them understand how you can get there. Vikki: Yeah. I've done a few episodes recently where we've talked about mental health, we've talked about doing challenging research. We've talked about doing PhD with chronic illness and other disabilities and that sort of thing. And in all of them I try and find this balance between what can you do as an individual so you've got something that's kind of a bit empowering, that I can grasp hold of this and change my own situation. Vikki: Yeah. Whilst also at the same time recognizing that you are not responsible for the environment, that universities have a duty of care to support students with different needs. Yes. So I wanna kind of talk with you about both of those. So let's start with the individual students. So if there's a people listening, which I know they a hundred percent are, so people in my audience who have autism themselves, both students and academics, what can they be doing that can improve their own situations? Jess: Yeah, that is a really great question. I think first and foremost, acknowledging that you are neurodivergent and you are not neurotypical and getting rid of neurotypical expectations of yourself, knowing that you will not necessarily work nine till five. You will not sit down at your desk, nine till five. Jess: You may do, but you most likely won't. And so it's not acknowledging that, you know, some days you may have, you know, this kind of idea of a spoon theory where, you know, your maximum number of spoons might be five and some days it might just be one spoon. And this is really difficult to do. But acknowledging today, I have one spoon, so I'm gonna do one little bit. Jess: If I have five spoons, I'm gonna crack on and maybe do a lot more. So first of all, neurotypical expectations. Get rid of them. Secondly, I would be very careful about your environment. What is draining and what is, you know, not draining is probably the better way of saying it. So if you're studying or if you kind of force yourself to work in an area that is really draining, whether it's sensitivity to noise, to light, kind of comfort, you know, the chair you're sitting on your workspace, you know, be really careful about like where you put yourself. Jess: 'Cause as, as an autistic female myself, I'm very sensitive to light, to noise, to my surroundings. I can't work if people are in the area and that they might be watching me work and they might not be, I don't do well in a shared office, in a shared environment. I don't get anything done 'cause I'm too worried about like, oh, how, how does my face appear? Jess: Do I look friendly? Do I look grumpy? Am I like fiddling with my feet? 'cause I'm trying to concentrate, you know, that's not socially acceptable. So finding an area where you can be comfortable, I think is that you are in charge of that. Whether that is, you know, in the floor of the library or whether that's a home in your bedroom or whether that's your kitchen table, that's something that, a practical nature is useful. Jess: One other thing you can do is, and I know it can be tricky, but applying for disabled students allowance. So if you are diagnosed, you can then use that, and get support, whether that's physical support. So in terms of, you know, clearly laptop or kind of software that can help you, it might be you're able to access coaching, or you're able to have, you know, a new desk and chair that's more comfortable. Jess: And that works on an annual basis, so you're able to get that each year as a student. And if you are a supervisor listening, you should be able to get access to work. So your access to work through the government enables you to, the government's hope is to stay and work and to keep you employed. Go check it out 'cause it is really useful and it also works for those who are self-employed as well and you're able to get access to that. Vikki: Um, and again, and obviously just for listeners listening, this is kind of UK centric in the specific Jess: Yes. Apologies. Vikki: All good. But just to clarify that for my many listeners who are not in the UK Yeah, most places will have similar versions of that. Jess: Yeah. So that would be, get someone to help you to sort that out if it's difficult for you to do. So I think in the last one is probably being kind to yourself. 'cause I kind of mentioned at the beginning, I think especially if you have a late diagnosis or you are entering, you're just starting academia again, it's watching what you say to yourself in your head and which is very much easier said than done. Jess: Um, but often it's thinking about, you know, the shoulds I should have, could have, you know, and you talk to yourself the most. So it's trying to be kind and, and look at what you have managed to achieve. Jess: Having goals each week on things that you can try and meet, um, realistic goals are really helpful when you have days that you are not achieving or you are not completing something and due to maybe your energy levels. Jess: The last one would be just keeping an eye on yourself and looking after yourself. So it's easier said than done of course, but eating well, trying to get as much sleep, rest, exercise as the usual. Jess: I took myself out for a short walk earlier today 'cause I was stressed out and overwhelmed and that really helped getting out in the sunshine, seeing, seeing some nature. Yeah, I'm not great at it, but trying to put in these routines, um, it does help as well. Vikki: Definitely. Here's something that I've always found difficult in both when I was supervising, but also now with with clients sometimes as well. How do you find the balance between accepting things are the way they are and there, there are some things that you are never going to change and mm-hmm versus the things that with support and development, you could learn to do, if you see what I mean. I know we never, I'm not talking like we're gonna develop a way autism and we wouldn't want to, that's not what I mean. Vikki: But like I see some students who have autism being quite like, I can't do any of those things. Yeah. I have autism. I can't do them. And I see others being a bit more like, okay, if you want me to do a presentation, I'm gonna need this, this, and this in order to make that possible and I need some padding either side of it to allow me to decompress and blah, blah, blah. Vikki: Where do you find, especially, you know, maybe I'm just thinking about it as a supervisor again, but where do you find that balance between encouraging somebody to consider ways they could be supported to try something versus not pushing them to do something that's not what their brain yeah. is set up for, or whatever? Jess: Yeah. I think it's a tricky one. My initial answer would be it really depends on the individual and it depends on whether it's a matter of confidence and, you know, believing in themselves or whether they will most likely have a meltdown or a shutdown down as a result of that experience. Jess: You've got to be very careful understanding the difference, I think. And it might be that they are able to build up small steps so that they then avoid a shutdown or avoid a meltdown, or it may be that that's not possible. And I guess it depends on the individual and what their goals are. Jess: I think, you know, as students come to you for coaching, it's like what are their goals and finding realistic goals and where they want to get to and what those small steps in between look like as kind of wins. And in terms of accepting, there may be some things that they may always get really tired in social environments that may never change, but it's can we minimize which social environments they go to? Jess: Can they join lectures online? Can they get the support in terms of maybe more counseling from the university to talk through things or kind of like you said, like what buffering and what padding can be put in to help them. Jess: Or it may be that might not be something that they'll ever grow in and that might stay. Just like someone who's maybe nonverbal, may never be verbal, may always, use for example Makaton or another sign language to express what they're saying. Jess: So it's very unique to the individual. It's not a hard and fast rule. I think it's as a supervisor, as as a coach, it's thinking about, I guess what is the goal for them? Where do they want to get to and how, what, maybe working together, what are achievable steps to get there? Because only they will know themselves and what they're capable and what they're really just saying. No, I can't do it, but actually they can. Vikki: Yeah, and that's the difficult bit, isn't it? I think sometimes, especially if you're late diagnosed and you've spent time telling yourself you should be different and things, I think sometimes the person doesn't necessarily know which it is either. 'Cause I can see it happening both ways round, right? Mm-hmm. Vikki: That, especially somebody late diagnosed being like, no, no, I can, I can learn how to do this. I can handle this, da, da da. 'cause they don't wanna accept that they can't. Yeah. Yeah. But then on the other hand, people being quite fixed at, no, I definitely can't when actually it's sometimes, not always. Yeah. Sometimes the lack of confidence that you talked about. Yeah. Actually with the good support they could. And so I think that makes it kind of extra complicated 'cause it's not like the person with autism has this absolutely clear perspective Of exactly where their boundary sits with that. Jess: True. Yeah. That's true. I'm afraid, I don't have the hard and fast rule with that. It is a unique and engaging on the person, how much you can push them and encourage them. And you're very much saying it from a place of, I think you have this capacity, can we try it together? Jess: And they might say no. Or they might say, actually no, Vikki, I'm gonna take a shot. Let's, let's try this or like four sessions later, they might say, actually Vikki, I realized I said no to this, but actually I think I might try it. And it might just be building that trust with you to find that they might try that again. Vikki: I really like this sort of figuring it out together, having that kind of, whether it's a supervisory relationship or coaching relationship or wherever this sort of help, let's figure this out. Let's think about what that would look like, what might make that possible. One of the qualities, so I talk about being your own best boss quite a lot, and one of the qualities that we talk about a lot in that is curiosity alongside compassion. Curiosity, coming from a compassionate perspective, but being like, oh, I wonder if this would help, or I wonder if we'd be better off just saying, we are not doing those things for a while. For sure. Yeah. Or having that kind of thing of let's figure things out. Let's be open and honest and see what we can do here. Jess: Yeah. I think you quite right. It, it's a relationship, you know, it's a professional relationship, but it's still a relationship and it's one way you can kind of explore things and think, okay, what is possible? Jess: You know, what, what happens if we try this? What, you know, hypothetically, what would that look like or what would come up or maybe where have you done this before? Vikki: So we sort of started there talking not only about what people can do for themselves, but also how supervisors can support students with autism. Yeah. Um, let's, let's build on that a little bit more so how can anybody who is neurotypical in the university environment so this, whether you're a student or a supervisor, how can they support and make the most of working with people with autism. Jess: Yeah. That's really great. And I think even the fact that the supervisors are asking, you know, how can I make the most of this? How can I empower or support my supervisee is the first step you really want. Jess: But I think what I would kind of initially say is, you know, if the university has any sort of neurodiversity awareness training, go to them, you know, learn, I think is the key thing is to learn, you know, what might it might look like. Jess: And then secondly, acknowledging that each person's experience and diagnosis looks different or, or you know, that how they are neurodivergent looks different. So I'm autistic, but you know, you might meet somebody else who's also autistic and we may come across differently. And I think in the reason I'm saying is that it's important for a supervisor to think about, maybe starting like a How to work with me document. Jess: And that might look like, you know, preferred communication styles. So again, talking back to what we said before, like shall we have an email chain or shall we have an email with a summary and then we have a teams meeting and maybe we have videos off or videos on. They have may be transcription if transcription's allowed to kind of record what's being said or allowing note takers into the meeting. Jess: So it's that kind of thing would be included in the how to Work with me document and then setting clear expectations as to this is how often we'll meet, this is what we're gonna be covering. This is my remit of what, you know, I don't want, maybe either doesn't want to talk about anything personal. Jess: They might not want to be asked, you know, what they got up to the weekend. That's okay. So those kind of I guess rules of engagement is the maybe a nice way of putting it. And then also being prepared to continually reflect on what's working and what's not working as well and trying to create a space where that can happen. And all this is best practice and, you know, in an ideal world, and it's understanding that supervisors are usually squashed into their other lecturer duties and head of whatever they're doing. So it's trying to create something that's simple and effective rather than an extra burden of time and energy. Vikki: Yeah, definitely. And I think it's really important to recognize that the environment in which people are supervising is, is not always easy. But I also think that. You know, this stuff should make everyone's life easier. In fact, so much of what you said today just really strikes me as just universal good practice, right? Yes. And I know that's kind of the principles of universal design and all that, that most of the things that are set out for people with disabilities or neuro divergences, um, will, it will benefit anybody. Vikki: One that we haven't really talked about that I think is quite useful is thinking about sort of giving space for somebody to have an initial reaction. 'Cause one of the things, especially, we were talking about changing stuff mm-hmm Before, yeah. One of the things that I've noticed, both in supervision and in coaching, is that sometimes somebody with autism will have quite a strong initial reaction to a change. Vikki: Yeah. But that if you, as the person who's either suggested the change or that supervising that situation or whatever, can manage your own emotions about their reaction. And stay kind of calm and present. Then often with some time, and the amount of time can vary hugely. Right. Vikki: Whether they need to go away and come back tomorrow, or whether it's a five minute, have glass of water and go stretch your legs or whatever. But learning to manage your own emotions in that moment and not feel apologetic or defensive or all of those things, and just kind of giving it space for a second. Jess: Yeah. Vikki: I think can then really allow that person to have their legitimate reaction. But then also afterwards to choose what their actual response is. Jess: Mm-hmm. I mean, yeah. And I think that that then comes back to the how to Work with me document as to if there are changes. Because, you know, in an ideal world, PhDs go to plan. Everything follows, you know, step one, step two, step three. Best chapters are written up, done. But you know, nine times out of 10, that's not the case. Whether the data collect was incorrect or whether, you know, the systematic review turned into systematic review and a meta analysis. Jess: But I think it's then saying, okay, if changes are made, how would you like 'them communicated? Yeah. Would you prefer 'them over an email and then we'll discuss in a meeting? Or would you prefer me to bring up in a meeting at the end? And then you can go and we can discuss it. And again, we're not gonna be able to cover every eventuality in a how to work with me document, but acknowledging that part of being autistic is you may not cope with change or you may not manage that in a neurotypical way. Just as if you are excited about something, you may impulsively say something that's great or you may say something that wasn't very helpful and you need to apologize. I think it's acknowledging that, that that impulsivity is part of an ADHD diagnosis. And that it's not someone just being rude or, you know, having lack of self-control 'cause it's a legitimate executive function. Like it's, it's something that's not, it doesn't go so great always. Jess: Um. I think it's, uh, those things are important to consider. Vikki: Yeah. And that's where I think, so I do supervisor training, not specifically on this area. That's way beyond my scope of practice, but general supervisor training. And one of the things that we talk about a lot in that is not projecting your own reasoning for behaviors onto other people's behavior. Vikki: 'Because often if somebody is late for a deadline, say if the supervisor's, somebody who take deadlines very seriously, they assume that means Jess isn't taking this seriously. Or whereas we know that regardless where you've got, ADHD, autism, or nothing at all, sometimes you miss deadlines even when you are taking it very seriously. Vikki: And similarly, I think, you know, like with the impulsive thing, sometimes somebody who's very neurotypical, quite reserved. All those things might, well, I would only say that if I was being really rude and disliked the person. And so one of the things we spend quite a bit of time thinking about is how you can almost have that kind of flexibility to recognize that there's a likely, especially if you know that they've got diagnoses, there's likely to be a bunch of reasons why they just said the thing that that came out grumpy. Jess: Yeah, sure. Vikki: And it's hard, right? It is. Even if you're neurotypical, you're tired and you're busy and all those things, it's hard to always do that. But even if you can do it in retrospect Yeah. Vikki: Where afterwards you're like, yeah, that might have been impulse rather than anything else or whatever. I think it would really help. Jess: And I think, you know, as, as I said, I'm doing a PhD and I'm still learning and I'm still, you know, getting things wrong and, and, you know, apologizing or, you know, saying things and being like, should anyone, is anyone bothered by that? Like, I don't know. Should I send an email? Jess: Should I send a teams message? Am I overthinking it? And this is where it's, it's great if you have, you know, a couple of supervisors and perhaps they all have maybe different roles or different strengths. You know, that some might be more pastoral and some might be more academic. Jess: And maybe you have the opportunity to sense check with maybe the pastoral type supervisor, you know, how did that go? What do you think? And, you know, this is all an ideal world, but, it can be quite nice when the team is a bit more blended and even if, you know, someone might not be necessarily that pastoral focused, it might have someone else in the team that can support. Jess: And yeah, it also, that added layer of complexity is if perhaps, your supervisory team, someone is neurodivergent and maybe very different, you know, in how you work. Um. So, yeah. Vikki: Or very similar, right? And this happens personality wise as well as neuro divergent wise, is there's, there's obvious challenges if you've got someone who's neurotypical and somebody who's got autism, for example, they may have misunderstandings. But I do think there is also, I have been personally in situations, not with PhD students, but with like undergrads and that sort of thing where I, there's me and my enthusiastic non-diagnosed ADHD self and they've actually got ADHD and every meeting, it's just like, we could do this. Jess: Oh yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So many ideas. Vikki: And if you haven't got awareness around that, and similarly, you could have two people who are autistic that are just absolutely fixed on this is how we are doing this, this do, do, do, do. And then something comes along and no one's got the kind of capacity to be flexible about it. Vikki: So I think. It's not always when you're different. I think there's danger in similarities too sometimes. Jess: And I think your supervisor training, it sounds really important because I think a lot of, from my understanding, a lot of supervisors, and this is just my experience, I don't think they have a lot of training and I don't think that's provided. Jess: So it's very much they have to figure out as they go along. And, you know, they want their PhD student to finish within the allotted frame of time and they want them to meet the goals. There's a lot of pressure on them to help the student get there. So I think it's not the easiest role for them either. Jess: And I think often the student doesn't, if they've not been around the university set, they may not know that or appreciate that. So it's another thing to bear in mind and say, this supervisor may only have, you know, five hours a month to actually support you if that. Vikki: In my experience, most supervisory training focuses on procedures, right? It's like, what forms do you need to fill in, when, what requirements of you, what's the minimum rules of engagement, right? The you have to meet once a month and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. Vikki: And some universities do provide others, as I say, I, I provide much more detailed supervision, which really gets into how your thoughts and emotions influence the way you supervise and how expectations of supervision can be so different between different people. Vikki: Yeah. Not just with neurodivergences but also with people who come from different countries who have different experiences with their own supervisor previously as to what they expect a supervisor would provide. Um, yeah, I think it's a huge issue and I think it's something that invite universities should really be investing a lot more in than they do. Jess: Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is, I'm, I can only speak for the clients that I've had and the clients I'm working with, but then also for myself, you know, I'm, you know, a heterosexual white woman, I don't have that kind of intersectional lens. I'm not able to talk from that. And I think that's something that is, is also huge in understanding, you know, and listening to autistic voices from an intersectional lens, whether that be, you know, gender identity or whether that is race. And that's something that I'm painfully aware of when I do my training is, you know, there's only so much published research as well from those different intersectional lenses. So, that's really important to think about and consider, um, as well. Vikki: And probably I assume variations in diagnoses rates as well. I mean, you mentioned gender differences in diagnosis, but I would be amazed if there weren't differences in diagnosis rates amongst different ethnicities and races. There are with most things. Jess: Yeah. Mainly also due to stigma and understanding, and how it looks maybe as well. We're so far behind in that sense. And that I mean, they've only just decided that you can be diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. I think it was like 2012 that, that was possible. And then to have a combined diagnosis. Just there's so much progress still yet to be done. Vikki: And we obviously wanna, we wanna avoid, 'cause I do think there is a tendency for people who have a kind of passing interest in this stuff to sort of notionally diagnose the people around. And I don't think that's helpful either. No. I'm a big believer that if you self identify as having any of these things, then I'm down 'cause you know Yeah. You, if you identify, you know, you Yeah. You know yourself. There's a lot of barriers to getting officially diagnosed, but for sure different to diagnosing someone else. Vikki: Yeah. But one of the questions that I encourage people to think about is how would I behave if I knew they were autistic, for example. And asking yourself, are there ways you can just do that now anyway? I would give them really clear instructions after a meeting and I would make sure I pre warned them if there was something coming up that might be surprising. Vikki: You could just do that for everybody without ever mentioning the A word. Yeah. You know? Oh, definitely Never telling them your suspicions, but instead of just assuming that they're stubborn or whatever. Just do those things and Jess: Yeah. And I had that with a client the other week was, I had people coming up to me after the training I did all during one of the breaks, and their question was, you know, what do I do if they're not diagnosed or I suspect they are, how, what do I do? And I'm like if you are managing someone, you will understand what the strengths and challenges are of all your employees and who you're working with, and then you will help them play to those strengths and support them in their challenges. Jess: So how to work with me guide and I keep talking about it, but it is just a what works for that person and it doesn't matter if they have a diagnosis or not because from a practical, everyday working style, not necessarily from a legal standing, but it is, it's so important to treat someone as individual. Jess: And if you're not doing that already, start doing it because your team will all work differently regardless of whether they neurodivergent or not. So it's, you get to know your team and like you said, if, if you think that they may be that, that, that way ask and just say, don't say, are you autistic? Say, how does that work for you? Jess: Like, do you enjoy that kind of setup? Does this space work for you? Just from a curiosity, decent human being perspective. It's not always rocket science then I think people can be really worried that, you know, they have to give someone a diagnosis before they can start asking questions. Jess: But it's how you ask the question and it's what kind of questions you're asking in terms of, you know, I noticed that you were quite quiet in the last meeting, you know? I want to make sure all employees voices are heard. You know, if you've got any thoughts, feel free to send me an email with them. And you're not singling someone out in terms of you think they're autistic, but you are, you are just kind of asking them, how did that go? Vikki: Yeah. So you've started touching on this already, but what can people do at a sort of institution level to make things more inclusivefor people with neuro divergencies. Jess: Yeah, so I think a lot of organizations already have like an equality policy, so a DEI policy. And in those policies they include disability, but they don't explicitly talk about hidden disability. So neurodiversity, , to start with having a visible neurodiversity policy on the website, on their job, saying we support, you know, an inclusive and neuro inclusive environment. Jess: Doing training on how to be inclusive in recruitment, how to, support managers, you know, to train them as to how to work with neuro divergent employees. What would be wonderful would be mapping the workplace of all the, you know, campus. You know, what, what areas are quiet, you know, designated space. Jess: Just like often have a prayer space. You know, are there quiet spaces for neurodivergent employees or students? The canteens are an absolute nightmare for me. The lighting is a nightmare for me personally. For many people that I speak to, they can't stand, just the space, they're very sensitive. Jess: It's very draining. For many people I work with, they often have like a watch, like a Garmin or something, and their body, they have a body battery or some sort of thing where if they're on campus, it goes from maybe 90 down to five. And it's all of those things that are intangible that, that really affect. Jess: So having some sort of sensory map as to say these are the areas that are high traffic, these are the areas that are quiet. Even if it's color coded would be useful and allocating space. What else? Uh, training everyone from, you know, people at reception, you know, there's a lot of sunflower lanyards floating about on campuses now, which is great, but what does that actually mean? Jess: How can you support employees or students, down to maybe the catering teams to, the academic staff that support staff to the librarians, helping everyone understand what that might look like, and do regular ones and mandatory. I think a lot of this kind of stuff, unfortunately, is optional. Jess: But you have, you know, one in five or one in four are neuro divergent, you know, the stats are there. The NHS England and, and NICE guidelines is there, you know, , whether they realize they they're neurodivergent or not, or whether they're disclosing the neurodivergent or not, they need support. Jess: I think it's from, you know, if you talk about the life cycle of an employee starting right, recruitment and kind of advertising, you know, using clear, simple language in the job description, not having, you know, must be a self-starter and must be, you know, all these kind of lingo that might not necessarily be relevant to the job role just copied and pasted on from a previous job role. Jess: And that that will discourage people from applying all the way through to, okay, now you're managing someone. You've never managed someone who's neurodivergent before, what's available to a, the manager and to b the employee? And how can you support them? Can you encourage 'em to apply for access to work? Jess: What is that? Help the employee understand . Start having a conversation as to what reasonable adjustments can we make? That should have also been discussed in that kind of initial period as to what kind of things might they need? Jess: And that's a conversation with HR. The first step is awareness and training. And then after that it's digging deep into kind of strategy and policy to really integrate it across the organization. Vikki: It really resonates with my episode a few weeks ago where I was talking to Kyrstina Francois about doing PhD with physical disabilities and illnesses. And one of the things that she was really talking about is how it's exhausting and often very difficult to have to suggest your own accommodations because especially ...so she has illnesses and conditions that have come on over the last year or two. Vikki: So it's not something she's always lived with or anything like that. And they're like, what do you need? And she's like, I don't know, what can I have? And that strikes me as quite similar to some of the stuff you are saying here, that having almost packages of if you are running a conference you need to do these things for your neurodivergent members. If you are running a module, you need to do these things. If you've got a PhD student, these are the options that you could put out like say for them to choose what might be useful or whatever. Jess: Mm, for sure. And I think what works for some neurodivergent students might not work for others. So for example, if you're dyslexic, using dyslexic fonts or installing a Chrome extension, that makes everything into a dyslexic font as readable. You know, using apps that can make your screen a yellow color and providing high contrast helps you to see better and read better, but all of these things, it's, it's, it's providing that kind of, the training and documentation to, to help, you know, supervisors and, and lecturers and, and also students know that that exists, you know, a lot of this stuff is free. Jess: Inclusive teaching is a huge area that I looked at when I did my fellowship to the Higher Education Acacemy, you know, how can we be more accessible and inclusive. And I think Covid was a, you know, although a horrible experience, it meant that a lot of lectures had to be done online and a lot of things were recorded. And I did my masters during that time, and that was brilliant for me because as someone with ADHD, I was able to get up and walk around and move about whilst listening. I was able to pause things, go back over things. I think it's, knowing that different approaches work for different students. Vikki: Perfect. Now, if people have been interested, engaged, inspired, all of those good things by the stuff you've said today, as I'm sure they will be, where can people follow you and find out more? Jess: Sure. So, I'm quite active on LinkedIn, so you can first head over there and drop me a message or you can follow our company page. We also have a website, neuro natives.com , feel free to contact us there, with any inquiries, whether you want, coaching, whether you want, training and awareness sessions, or whether you want something more tailored, we can do whatever you need. I'm afraid I don't have Instagram, don't have Facebook too distracting , so you'll find me on LinkedIn, and also our website. Vikki: Yeah, perfect. And I will put links to your LinkedIn in the show notes and to your website. Thank you Jess, so much for today. That is super, super important and it was, yeah, wonderful having you here. Jess: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to talk through all of these things and I hope it's been useful for the audience and yeah, it's lovely chatting to you as well. Vikki: Thank you everyone for listening. I'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics time.

< One of the most common comments I hear from PhD students is that reading always takes longer than they expect. In this episode, I share four elements that you need to take into account when deciding how much time you are going to give an article, book or other piece of writing. By being more intentional in considering these elements, you can be much more accurate in how long each piece will take to read and often read it in less time. This is crucial for anyone at any stage of their research career – not only will it help you to manage workflow and hit deadlines, it will also improve your understanding of the literature. Transcript This week's topic really came out of a coaching session in my membership. So in the membership, students have the opportunity to come to what we call open coaching, which is where they can bring anything that they're finding challenging at all, and I will coach them on it. And I had a student come who was struggling to know how long it took to read a paper. Okay, and this is something that comes up all the time, and so I thought, you know what? We'd had such a useful discussion about it there in the session that I thought it'd be a great opportunity to share with all of you listeners as well. So when you are planning out what reading you need to do, I want you to think about how you decide how long it'll take to read an article. And in most cases, one of the things I get told more than anything else is I'm really bad at judging how long it takes. And there's a few underpinning beliefs with that statement that I think it's really worth us questioning. So "I don't know how long it will take to read this paper" really has the underlying belief that there is a set amount of time that it will take and that you have very little control over it. And I wanna remind you that neither of those things are true. There isn't a fixed amount of time that it takes to read any particular paper, and you have a huge amount of control over how long it takes. So what I'm gonna do in this episode is explain to you how people usually do it and why I think you'd benefit from doing it in a different way. And the specific suggestions I would make that are gonna massively speed up or at a more kind of complex level, make you much more in control of how long it takes to read a paper. 'cause this also isn't just about speeding up, right? This is about spending time on the right things. So we're gonna make it faster, we're gonna make it more predictable, which it's gonna make it so much easier for you to organize your time and to get stuff done. So let's get started. Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. I am Dr. Vicki Wright, the PhD Life Coach. I'm an ex professor and certified life coach, and I help PhD students and researchers to overcome overwhelm and imposter syndrome so that we can actually get our work done and enjoy the process. We are gonna dig in to how we can take more control over how long it takes to read a paper. And for those of you who are in the more kind of arts and humanities where you're studying from books and archives and all that stuff, this can get extrapolated out to any length of document that you are talking about. So when I say article, just insert whatever word is appropriate for your discipline. Okay. Now I want you to spend a moment just thinking, how do I currently estimate how long something will take? Do I estimate or do I just start reading? Do I decide this is the thing I need to read? Let's go or do you actually try and estimate? A lot of people don't even try and estimate. They start reading. They have two versions of an article. They either haven't read it or they have read it, they don't read it, or they do read it. And that's kind of two binary options. Hint. In this episode today, we're gonna think about how there's a lot of inbetweens there as well. So they either just get reading or they take a rough guess on how long it should, whatever should means take, based usually on two things. I want you to see if these are the same two things for you. What I see with my clients, the two things that usually get taken into account is how long is the article or book? How complex is the article or book? If it's long and complex, we're gonna take a long time to read it. If it's short and simple, we'll take less time to read it. And it sort of feels as though that's intuitively true, right? That has face validity. It kind of makes sense that if something is long and complicated, it's gonna take us a long time to read it. And if it's simple and short, it's gonna take us a short amount of time to read it. I think this is where we're falling down. This is where we're wasting time. This is where we are making it really hard for ourselves to judge how long things take. So I'm gonna share with you four other things that I think we need to think about in order not to work out how long it will take to read this article. But in order to decide how long we are giving this article, okay, I want you to notice the difference in how I described that. On one hand, is this quite passive, sort of, I wonder how long it will take as though there's some truth out there, which is how long it takes. And over here is how long I have decided to give to this article. These are very different. It is much more empowering to think about how much time am I giving to this article than how long will it arbitrarily take? Now in order to decide though, you need to be taking into account the length of the article and the complexity of the article. Definitely. But I'm gonna share with you four other things that I think you need to also take into account so that you really know what options you've got, and you can then make decisions from there. Once you understand those options, you'll often be able to read an article much, much more quickly than you are at the moment. And if it takes as long or even longer than it currently does with my approach, you will know exactly why and you will have chosen that rather than it just ending up taking a long time. The reason that most people think that they're the most important variables is because what most people do when they're reading an article is they start at the beginning and they read all the bits until they get to the end. And they go more quickly through the bits that are simple that they understand and they go more slowly through the bits that are more complex, that need to be taken in more. And therefore, if that's the approach, if that is your definition of reading something, then yes, absolutely. The length and complexity of it will be the main variables that predict the amount of time it takes. And usually what happens is the length of it shouldn't catch a by surprise 'cause hopefully we can see how long it is. Although with electronic versions, that's not always as clear. Um, but the complexity sometimes catches us out. There's more of it that's more complex than we thought. Therefore, we go slower. Now the twist that I want you to make in your thinking that will then open up all these tools that I'm going to share with you is that we don't need to read, in fact, we shouldn't be reading by picking up an article, starting at the beginning, going to the end, and that's it read every time. What we should be doing instead is making a conscious decision about why we are reading that article. So as well as length and complexity, the first of the four things that I want you to take into account is purpose. We need to be thinking about the purpose of us as an individual reading that article at this time point. Okay? And the at this time point is important as well. And I'll get to that. One of the things I get my members to do in our coworking sessions, if they're reading, if that's the task they've turned up to do, is to actually write a sentence before they start reading the article. Write a sentence or two sentences about what it is they're specifically intending to get outta this article. Why that article? What do they want from it? Because think about it, right when you read an article. Sometimes it's because that topic is absolutely central to what you are doing in your thesis and you need to know everything about it. Other times you read it because you are gonna be using a similar method to that person. You know, they were investigating something completely different, but they did the same data analysis strategy that you are going to use. Other times you are looking for something to back up a kind of passing point that you are making in your general introduction. So, as an example, many of you know I used to be an exercise scientist. So kinesiologist, those of you in North America. And so let's think of that as an example. If I'm reading for a exercise intervention that I'm doing to look at the effects of exercise on some biomarker, then some articles will have done exercise interventions on that same biomarker using similar, similar methods to me, and I'm gonna wanna know that paper inside out, back to front, every detail of it. When did they do their measurements? Exactly? How did they measure that biomarker? Absolutely everything. Especially the method and results particularly, I wanna know in absolute depth. However, when I'm writing this up, I'm gonna need a paragraph at the beginning of the introduction. That's going to be something like the generic physical inactivity is associated with a number of adverse our health outcomes, including type two diabetes, reference, obesity, reference, cardiovascular disease reference, and whatever else, right? Reference. And I just need references to fill those in. I'm also potentially gonna read papers where they measured that biomarker, but not in the context of exercise or they did the same exercise intervention as me, but with different markers. Now. I need to reference all of those things. I need a reference for my exercise intervention. I need a reference for how I measured the biomarker. I need a reference for how I analyze the data. I need references for all of this stuff. I need reading for all of this stuff, understanding but how I read each of those articles is gonna be completely different depending on why I'm reading it, which purpose it's having. Now, even if we backtrack in time, maybe I don't know yet exactly what my study's doing, then the purpose is to get a feel for the types of exercise interventions that have been done in relation to this biomarker, or to get a feel for what biomarkers have been shown to be modulated by this intervention, for example. So sometimes it's not as simple as I need to know this specific thing, but my specific reason for reading it might be to familiarize myself with what else has been done in this specific bit of the literature. So our first job always is to know why we are reading it. A valid reason is not background. If you find yourself going, oh, I'm reading it for background. I'm reading it. 'cause I don't know enough, I'm reading it. 'cause I don't understand enough yet. I need a broader understanding. That's too vague. We don't want that. I want you to get as specific as possible. Why is this the article that made it onto your desk, onto your screen? Why is this the article that's on the to-do list for today? I'm reading this article because so and so has a strong reputation in this field, and they're working on a similar population that I'm gonna be working on, and I want to understand better how they justify that decision, for example. Get really, really specific about it, because we cannot judge how long it's gonna take to read this article if we don't know that. Now you may remember, I said at this time point, this is not just about why am I reading this article? It's why am I reading this article at this time point? And the reason I emphasize that is because often what we think when we read something is that we should read it thoroughly enough and make good enough notes that that is our only time reading it. 'cause that's efficient, right? That's the efficient way to do it. Only read it once, get everything you need from it and then you are won't have to read it again. Won't that be efficient? You'll have this wonderful note system. That's not efficient because the problem is every time you read that article, you should and probably are reading it for different reasons to last time and even more complexly you are reading it with a different brain now because when you read an article when you are final year PhD student, those of you who are there already know this. When you read it as a final year student, you read it in a completely different way and with completely different understanding than when you read it for the first time. So we are thinking what is the purpose of reading this for me at this time point with what I am currently trying to do. That's what we mean by purpose, and that is gonna really influence how long we are gonna take over this. Because in my example, if I'm reading this so that I can say physical inactivity is associated with type two diabetes incidence, for example, then I am not spending a long time reading that article. This is not a controversial point. There's about a billion articles that I could reference to do it. I want a nice meta-analysis. I want a nice systematic review. Something like that. We have a quick look. Is it published somewhere good? Does it seem to be methodologically sound? Does it make the point? I want it to make. Boom. It'll do no prizes. Forgetting the absolute perfect one. Do I need to read every single aspect of it? Exact. Every single bit? No. I'm just backing up a point at the beginning of my introduction, okay. The purpose is simply to be able to back that point up. If the purpose is to understand the methodology. Do I need to read all their introduction? No. I need to know what they did and what they found, and then I need to read in detail the method. So I'm gonna direct myself to that bit of it, which means that I've now got a much better way of estimating how long this will take. 'cause if I know I need to understand how they designed their exercise intervention. Translate that out into your discipline, then I'm much better able to guess how long it's gonna take me to figure that out. Whereas if I'm trying to read the introduction or the results and all the discussion and everything as well, and dah, dah, dah, who knows how long it will take? 'cause it depends how much I understand the things they did. Quick interjection. If you are finding this episode helpful, but you are driving, walking the dog or doing dishes, just remember this. When you're done, head to the PhD life coach.com and sign up for my newsletter. We've all listened to a podcast and thought this is great. I should do something with it, and that didn't. That's where I created the newsletter to help you actually apply the stuff that you hear. Each week you'll get a short summary, some reflective questions on one simple action that you can take right away. You'll also get access to a searchable archive of all the past episodes so you can find the exact one that you need to help with your current challenges. Plus all newsletter subscribers get a free webinar every single month on a topic that affects all PhD students and academics, and you'll always be the first to hear for when my membership opens to new members. So once you're done listening, or even right now, go sign up for my newsletter and make sure you don't miss out. So purpose is one of the four. That then relates to the second of the four things I want you to take into account. And the second is centrality. And what I mean in this context by centrality is how fundamental is this article to what I'm doing? Now you may say, how do I work that out? All of them are important. It's not true. If I asked you to write an abstract that sums up your whole thesis and that you were allowed to give me three references that inform your thesis, you would be able to narrow that down. It's tricky, but you would find articles that probably are a very similar topic, a very similar methodology, very similar philosophical underpinnings, dah, dah, dah, and that are very central to why you did what you did. In fact, many of them may be, this is what we know so far. Paper A or whatever, but they left this gap. They uncovered this unknown bit, which is what my thesis is now gonna do. Those articles are super central to your thesis. The articles that are central to why you use that particular method. That's a little bit more peripheral because now they only have the method in common, but they might be different topics, or they might just be a methodological paper or whatever. They're slightly less central. The articles that are just sort of backing up introduction points or providing a bit of extra context or whatever. Those are less central. Those who watching me on YouTube will be able to see. I'm making kind of target type circles in front of my face. So we've got the articles that are right at the bullseye, and then we've got the articles that are further out from the center. We need to be reading the articles that are more central to our work in much more depth and much more detailed understanding than the ones that are much more peripheral. So is this an article that's central to what I do? In which case I'm probably gonna read it slowly. I'm gonna read it many times for many different purposes, and I'm gonna know every bit of it inside out, versus is it much less central or is it simply serving one point, or is it kind of a nice to have but not crucial in which case I'm gonna read it in less depth and I'm gonna read it more quickly. So the purpose, why are we reading it and the centrality of it both are gonna influence how long we are gonna decide to take on this article. The third thing we are gonna take into account is how familiar we are with the type of work we are reading. Because, and this was one of the things that came up in the coaching session, is that many of you will be working at intersections between disciplines. I was super interdisciplinary, so I was often working at the intersection of psychology, neuroendocrinology, immunology, exercise sciences, kind of a smush between those. So as you can imagine, some papers, if you gimme an exercise intervention where it's got some simple biomarkers, I can read that inside out, back to front, understand every bit of it very, very quickly. Not a problem. I am an exercise scientist at heart. If you give me an article where, instead of how it's still an exercise intervention, but instead of being a simple biomarker, they're doing some complex immunological measurements of some description. Gonna take me a little bit longer if you give me a pure, you know, say, 'cause I often was looking at articles where I was looking at the impact of, I don't know, some particular hormone or whatever in vitro on an immune outcome. So a much more pure neuroendocrine immunology study, then I'm gonna be much less familiar. I'm still all right, you know, but I'm st I'm much less familiar with the techniques being used, with what makes a good study versus a weak study, with what controls there should be, da, da, da. My expectations are much blurrier. And the reason we take this into account is because it is reasonable to expect you to take longer to read something that you are less familiar with the topic area than if you are more familiar with it. Now we do always have to remember that purpose though, because sometimes when something's less familiar, we expect ourselves to understand every single word of it. And it may be even if it's quite central to what we are doing. If for example, my purpose is not to replicate their methods, then perhaps I do need to understand exactly why they chose those immune markers, exactly why they chose those hormones, exactly why they manipulated it the way they did. But I probably don't need to fully understand media that they used and why the incubations were the length they were and why they did that wash routine or whatever it is, right? I probably don't need to understand all of that 'cause I'm not doing that. So even where we are less familiar sometimes what we get to do is decide that, you know what, I'm not big on this stuff. That's not my specialty and it is not that central to what I'm doing. So that bit I can skim or that bit I can pull out the key bits that I need, but I don't need all of the detail. So I want you to notice I'm giving you four things, but they all super sort of overlap and interact with each other. So we've got the centrality, the knowing the purpose, we've got how familiar we are with the discipline and the kind of the content of this sort of a paper. And then the fourth one is really about our expectations of ourselves because one of the things that became really clear in the coaching session yesterday is that clever people expect themselves to understand everything. And if you are working at the intersections between disciplines. At the beginnings at least, that may not be realistic. So if you are reading, in my case, an immunology paper, a pure immunology paper that is related to what you are doing is outside of your familiarity and you understand the purpose of it because it's gonna relate to the measures you are taking or whatever. We also have to tell ourselves what level of understanding am I expecting myself to get on this read? Because like I said, we are gonna be reading these articles if they are central, and if we have a key reason to do so, we are gonna be reading these articles more than one time. And it may be that at this time point, it is not reasonable for you to expect yourself to understand every nuanced element of the article, even if you will need to eventually. So this is a bit different from when you decide, you know what? I don't need to know that nuanced stuff. 'cause it's not central. It's not the purpose why I'm reading it. This is a bit different. This is stuff that you probably will need to understand in detail that probably will be central to your work, but you don't have to get yourself to have that 100% understanding of every detail right now. And that's because it's really hard to understand every nuanced detail of something where you don't have pre-knowledge or pre framework in place. When we're reading stuff from within our disciplines, the reason it's faster is because we intuitively know what the words mean. You know, the technical words, we're familiar with them. We don't have to translate them out. We don't have to think about it, and we've got a whole kind of background of knowledge and understanding on which to hang this new information. Whereas when you are reading something that's outta your discipline or in a discipline that you are sort of just going into or collaborating with, you don't have that framework. You don't have that base understanding of what the technical words mean, of where this fits or whatever. And if you try and understand every level of a paper all at once. A, it's super hard, super frustrating, but b, it takes forever because you're trying to hang details on a very wobbly framework. So if you understand, okay, this paper is gonna be central, I understand why I'm reading it at this time point, I'm not very familiar with the topic. Therefore, my expectation for this read is for me to get a superficial understanding of the key main points, for example . That then intersects with our kind of purpose for reading, but we are really saying, you know what? With my current level of familiarity with the current stage I'm at in my PhD, what we're aiming for is a rudimentary understanding and your brain will tell you no, but you need to know it all. No, but what if the examiner asked this? What if you can't back up that? That's okay. We've got time. PhDs are a long journey. We are gonna read this article again, but if on this read through our fundamental purpose and understanding of ourself and our own understanding is that we need to get a sort of overview of the key points. They're making a kind of framework on which to hang the rest of our understanding. That's what we need to focus on this time, and that's where we get to decide, okay, I've got an hour to pull out as much kind of basic understanding as I can. I'm not gonna worry about all these nuanced different definitions. I'm not gonna worry about exactly why they did X, Y, z. I wanna know what did they do? Why did they do it? What did they find, for example? So we're bringing into it a layer of compassion, understanding for ourselves that we can't expect ourselves to understand every single detail on this particular read through. So those are the four things. So we already identified two length, complexity. But we're gonna take into account how central it is to what you're doing, exactly what your purpose is for reading it, how familiar you are with the topic area already, and how much kind of compassion and understanding you're giving yourself as to what level of understanding you're expecting this time. From there, we get to decide rather than find out, 'cause this is an active choice, we get to decide how long we are giving to this article. Now the one bit that then adds on top of all of this is your note taking strategy. Because the thing that takes a lot of time often is not just the reading, it's the note taking. And when you are note taking, you need to take into account all those things I just said, why am I reading it? How central is it? What do I know already? All that stuff you need to be taking into account when you choose what notes you are taking. Often we think that the purpose of notes is to have a shorter summary of that article for us to refer back to later. That is not the purpose of notes. This is why AI note taking will never replace your human brain unless we learn to use it a lot better than we do at the moment. The purpose of your notes is not to have a precised version of the article. The purpose of your notes is twofold. And again, you need to decide which of these you're doing at any one time. One purpose of notes is to focus your attention and help you process your thoughts on paper. This version of notes, you could just bin it after you've read the article. The purpose is not record keeping. The purpose is to help you keep track of what you are thinking about while you are reading that article in order to better understand the article. As an example, I love to draw a flow chart. I love, especially if I'm doing some sort of, it's like an exercise trial or that kind of thing, or even an immunology protocol. Love to draw a little diagram that shows the protocol, the timings, when measures were taken, all that stuff, for example. So one purpose of notes is to just allow you to see your thoughts, to pour them onto the page, to see them, to keep track of what you're reading and to facilitate the reading process. Those are valuable even if you never, ever look at them again. The other form of note taking is to keep a record of what you read that is relevant to the point of why you are reading it this time. It is not to provide a summary of the entire paper. It is when you've decided the purpose of why you are reading it, how central it is to what you're doing. Then the bit of notes that you are gonna actually file somewhere and keep, is only going to be related to the reason you are reading it this time. So if we're reading it this time, because you're working on your methodology, you only need to make notes on your methodology. And I can hear you. I can hear you screaming at your phones or whatever you're listening on this game. Yeah. But that's so inefficient because then I'll have to read it again later when I need the other stuff. Yes, you will. Yes you will. And I promise this is still more efficient. The reason this is still more efficient is because you don't know exactly what you'll need next time when you read this again in three months time. So you are now trying to second guess what it is you might need in the future, which means you are much more likely to over note, to write far too much. You are also much more likely to be noting in order to keep track of what they're saying. Rather than noting to keep track of what you are thinking about what they're saying, which is what notes should be. Even the notes that you are gonna keep. I want your notes to not just be they did this method, using this for these reasons. I want your notes to be, they did this method in this way for these reasons. I'm a bit concerned about why they didn't have a control for whatever, or whether their exercise intervention was long enough, or, I really liked the way they included two baseline measures or whatever, right. So the notes you are taking on the specific bit you are reading for a specific reason that you have identified 'cause you are in control of your PhD. You make notes on that, the intersection between their thinking and your thinking, where that overlaps in that gorgeous Venn diagram. That is what we are noting. Not everything. We are noting the bits we need right now that are what you are thinking about what they've done. When you read this again in the future, you are gonna be reading it with a different brain. So your brain circle is gonna be different shape than it was. You are gonna be reading a different bit of it for different reasons. And so the intersection between their thinking, you are thinking it's gonna be somewhere else, it's gonna be a different place. You can't do it now. That's why these dreams people have of what I need to do is just to get a complete, like library of all my reading with all my notes, and then it'll be super easy to write. No, you, you don't, it's not even desirable. It's definitely not possible. It's not even desirable. You need to be reading the things that you need to read, making notes of the thoughts you are having about the stuff that you need to be reading, how it has implications for your work right now. This also is a little bonus for you, is a massively useful way to transition from writing about the work of others in a kind of narrative reporter way versus writing your thoughts about a field in a thought leader, senior academic sort of a way. If your note taking is always the intersection between your brain and their work and never just a faithful replication of their work, then you are always building that habit of asking, what do I think about this? And from there, that helps. Knowing how you are gonna do your notes helps you inform. How long you're gonna spend on this article, because if you know that what you need is a detailed outline of their methodology, you can have a think about how long that will take for you to write out, for you to pick out, turn into something that you can record. Whereas if you've got to take notes on everything, how long does that take? Who knows? It also is an added, added bonus. This massively helps with overwhelm because one of the worst things about reading is its ability to spiral in 50 directions. You think you're just reading this article, by the time you've read the whole article with a vague kind of, I need to know it purpose and made all your notes. You've got 40 other references that you need to go and look up now, and you're suddenly like, oh my goodness. If every paper I read gives me 10 new references. I'm, how am I ever gonna get through this? This is just gonna extrapolate wildly, Hey, we don't need to do that. Because if we are reading it for its methodology, we don't need to look at all the different background articles. If we are reading it because it works on similar population to us. We don't need to read all the articles about how they did their analytic strategy. Okay. We read for a purpose for reasons that we have chosen, to a level that we have chosen and take notes in a way that enable us to do the thing we're trying to do at the moment. And from there, it's so much easier to decide how long it takes, and then people will say, okay, yeah, I decide how long it takes. And then it takes longer. And my answer sounds so flippant, but hopefully you guys know me well enough to know that I mean it from a good place. Don't. My answer is don't. If you decide you are giving this article an hour, and at the end of the hour you're like, oh, I need more time. Don't. Get it done to the level you are able to get it done in the time you've been given. What that means is if you gave yourself an hour and you decided what you are doing in it, it means you've started reading it in more detail, at a greater depth, at a level of understanding that you don't have, that you've gone off and looked up their references or whatever it is. You've deviated from your plan. Don't. Give yourself the hour and do as much as you can in that hour. You can come back to it another time if you need to. If you need to read it for more depth in a later date. If you need to read it for a different reason at a later date, come back to it. Happy days. But this is how, by taking control of it, identifying exactly what we're doing and deciding how long it takes, that is how we stay on top of our workloads. That is how we actually stick to deadlines. Now, some of you, I'm doing a lot of like objection answering here. I can hear your voices in my head. Some of you might say, oh, but that takes out the joy of lit reviewing that, you know, I love to just immerse myself in the literature. Then that's great. We get to decide that. If you decide, actually, what I wanna do is spend an afternoon, two days, a week, a month, who knows? Immersing myself in the literature with the purpose of having fun, chasing rabbit holes and not having to be intentional. Great, do it, but decide that intentionally, because if your purpose is to dive into the literature, enjoy swimming around, enjoy following rabbit holes, then what you can't do is at the end of that period of time, moan about the fact that you haven't got a structured lit review out of it. Moan about the fact that you haven't "got anywhere". Because that wasn't the purpose. The purpose was the pleasure. The purpose was enjoying following these little trails down through different bits of literature and stuff. So even that. You can still do it. Just choose it as the purpose and therefore focus on enjoying the process 'cause what I see people doing is they tell me I wanna be able to follow the literature. I wanna be able to go down rabbit holes. I really enjoy it. That's why I get to distracted. But they simultaneously beat themselves up for not making enough progress, not being focused, never getting anywhere. You don't get it both ways. You get to decide, am I reading this thing because I'm intentionally trying to develop the method section of my thesis or whatever. Am I reading this thing to generally enjoy swimming around in the literature? Am I reading this thing because I need to learn about this particular approach or this particular argument? Why am I reading it? Use that to decide exactly how you do it. Taking into account the state your brain's at where, what time it is in your PhD, exactly what you're doing, decide how long it's gonna take, and then spend that long on it. I say that like it's easy, your brain is gonna argue with you. Your brain is gonna say, oh, but I should probably write these bits down. Oh, I should probably take a bit longer. Just know that that's gonna happen. And remember, you don't have to listen to that bit of your brain. You can go, yeah, yeah, I know you think that, but this is what I decided. I decided that I'm reading it for this purpose to this level of depth, for this amount of time and making notes on these things. And that's what we're doing. And I know you've got a bunch of concerns about it, but that's what we're doing. I want you to try out this week. Let me know how you get on. If you are not already on my newsletter, why not? You get summaries of all of this stuff and you get access to the PhD Life Coach podcast archive, which is a completely searchable resource that has everything I've ever done in the podcast summaries, take home messages, they're categorized. You can control F and find whatever you are struggling with at the moment. So if you're not already on the newsletter, make sure you head over to the websites. Sign on up. I will send you that and every week you'll get a reminder about the podcast and of course my free monthly webinars as well. Hope to see you all at one of those soon. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics time.

< In this episode, best selling author Sophie Hannah shares her “Book Ahead” method for managing multiple projects when you already feel behind. Born in the midst of a particularly busy year of writing, the first iteration of the Book Ahead method not only got the job done, it also changed how Sophie felt about herself, her other projects, and one of her long-standing “bad habits”. If you feel like you’ll be behind forever and want a technique that doesn’t just involve simply working more, then this is the episode for you! Links I refer to in this episode About Sophie Hannah and the Dream Author coaching programme Pre-order Sophie’s new book, No One Would Do What the Lamberts Have Done – UK , North America ; available at other good bookshops! Transcript Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast, and I am joined by another guest this week, and I am, I always say I'm excited, but I'm particularly excited because this is a good friend of mine as well, and international bestselling author, Sophie Hannah. Welcome. Sophie: Thank you. Thanks for having me on. I'm very excited to be here. Vikki: It's perfect. So Sophie and I met because we did the same coach training and kind of moved in the same circles for a little while. Sophie has a coaching program for aspiring and current authors called Dream Author. Um, and we'll link to all that stuff in the show notes and well, we were having a conversation right, about how you manage all your different projects 'cause i'll get you to tell the audience a little bit more about yourself in a minute, but you're always juggling so many different writing projects and I just find it fascinating and that's where this whole conversation came about, I guess. Sophie: Yeah. So, last year I was juggling, I am always trying to do too much. Like way too much. I have this. And it's not a bad thing. I think it's actually a good quality. I have this kind of form of extreme optimism where if I want something to be true, then I just decide it is, and then I do everything I can to make it true. Sophie: So if there's lots of things I fancy doing, I just think, well, of course I can do all those things. And I don't often have realistic thoughts about what I'm actually capable of. And in many ways this causes problems. It certainly caused me a few problems and a lot of stress when I've committed to, you know, four things at the same time and then I find I can't deliver on time. Sophie: But actually there is, I have found, and I've only really realized this quite recently, there is also an advantage to assuming you can do too much and committing to do too much. And the advantage is that even though you do often stress yourself out in the process of trying to sort of handle this massive workload, you also train yourself bit by bit to be able to do more. Sophie: And this was a big eureka moment for me just a few days ago because I had got to the point where I thought, right, I'm not going to, in future, take on too much. I'll only take on what I can handle. And then I realized that what I can handle easily now is so much more, such a vastly greater amount of things because I've taken on too much in the past. Sophie: So then I thought, right, I need a middle ground. I need a middle ground between don't take on more than I can handle and sort of don't take on more than I can handle in a way that means I never grow my capacity to handle more. So that's where I'm at with it now, and where I'm at right now is, I do want to take on too much, but deliberately and calmly and without stress and with a plan to not necessarily make it work entirely, but make it work as well as it can work all while feeling no stress. But this is very much a 2025 development and learning, because in 2024 what was happening was I was taking on too much, Not really seeing any advantage that there could be in doing that and just feeling all the stress. Sophie: So I had committed to write three books and write and deliver from start to finish, three books between November the seventh, 2023, and January the 30th, 2025. So on the 7th of November 23, I knew that I had to start and finish three books in 15 months. And that felt quite scary to me because also they had to be good Vikki: and we should probably put in context for everybody as well. I mentioned your dream author coaching program. The books is obviously what you are famous for and you know where you've built your career and all of that stuff, but you are also running a huge coaching program. You are also doing retreats, you are also doing talks for a whole variety of different places. It's not even just writing these books, right? Sophie: Yeah. Oh. Oh, not at all. I mean, my coaching program at any given time contains between 1300 and 1500 people typically. So I am the coach for more than a thousand people now. It works a bit like a gym membership in that if everyone came in to use the cross trainer on the same day, the gym would soon encounter problems. Sophie: Not everyone asked for coaching on the same day. So it's totally manageable, but it's a lot, a lot, a lot of work. So yeah, when I thought I have these three books to write in 15 months. The, the thought in parentheses was as well as all my hours of coaching. So it felt like a lot, and it was a lot. Sophie: And what I found was that in 2024, roundabout, no February, late February, 2024, I was not as far ahead as I knew I needed to be in order to meet that deadline. And I started to feel down about it. Depressed. Uh, not depressed. I mean, I'm, I'm quite a jolly person, so I never feel seriously depressed, but just as though there was this weight of stress and almost like having to accept failure on the doing things on time front. Sophie: And I just kept thinking, I'm behind with this book. I'm behind with this book. And I was taking for granted that because I was behind with that book, which was book one of the three, the first I was gonna write. Because I was behind with that one, I thought, well, obviously I'm then gonna be behind with the next one, and then I'm gonna be about even more behind. Sophie: So I saw it as a kind of domino effect of behind ness and then I was listening to a session with a life coach, an American life coach called Tiffany Han. I was in her program, which was called the Gentle Productivity Club, which was brilliant, and it was all about how to be productive but also not exhaust yourself. Sophie: And she asked a question in this coaching call, which was something along the lines of have a think about what hasn't occurred to you yet. Like what haven't you thought of? What brilliant thing have you not thought of? And maybe you'd never think of it unless you think of it now, I can't remember how she phrased it, but it was just a completely open invitation to kind of say to your own brain, what is it that's not occurring to me? Sophie: That it would just be brilliant if it did occur to me. And what occurred to me as if by magic was the idea that just because I was behind with one book did not mean I had to be behind with any other books and that I could get ahead on the next book while being behind on this book. So I thought, huh, okay, so where are we? Sophie: It's, I think it was March. I had planned to totally finish book one by, let's say end of February. That's right and I had, I had finished it on time, but then it came back with loads and loads of notes and I saw that a massive rewrite was gonna be needed. Vikki: So listen, before you carry on Sophie listeners, I want you to remember that like big ass author here, getting billions of edits, same as we moan about when they come back from our supervisors and stuff happens to the best of us. Sophie: And actually, you know, one does want it to happen because, you know, whenever I get my edit notes and then I reread the book, I think, oh cripes, the first draft really was flawed and it's supposed to be flawed. Sophie: And the edit process is so lovely when you see it as just like, ah, now I get to make it good. First I got to make it just exist. Now I get to make it as brilliant as it can be. So I, I love doing the whole edit process, but I saw that it was gonna take quite a long time, and I had planned to start writing my next book at the beginning of May after a nice break between books. Sophie: And I thought, no, no, no, that ain't gonna happen because this book is gonna take me probably until the end of May now to do all the edits. And then I thought, okay, but what if I could get ahead on the next book while being behind on this one? What might that look like? And I thought, well, I'm still in March. Sophie: I could start the next book a whole month early and start it while I'm still editing the other one. And so not only would that enable me to practically get a bit ahead on the next book, but it would also completely shift the way I thought about myself and where I was at productivity wise, because suddenly just as if by magic, if I did this, what I came to call the ahead and behind method, I realized that I would not be able plausibly to think of myself as someone who's behind with their work, because I wouldn't be only behind, I would also be ahead. Sophie: That would be great. And like being ahead in one way and behind in another way, kind of cancels each other out. And then I could think to myself, well, I'm right on time, really. If I'm ahead, I'm behind. I'm kind of doing okay in terms of deadlines. And unlike almost everything I've tried to implement where normally there's a few teething problems, the minute the second I started trying the ahead and behind approach it just worked at an almost miraculous level. My thoughts and feelings and general kind of vibe in my mind about both books was massively elevated very quickly. Not only did I love getting ahead on the next book, which I will explain how exactly I did that. I loved that process. I was like, here I am. I'm a month ahead. Sophie: Look at all this brilliant stuff I'm doing so early. Aren't I good? Aren't I diligent? But also enjoying that so much had a knock on effect on the behind book, which no longer felt like quite such a burden because I was like, where every time I sat down with the behind book to work on that I was like, well, look, only this morning, I was really enjoying myself with the ahead book. Sophie: So do I really wanna give this book the label, the Behind Book and feel bad about it? Why not just think of it as another book I'm writing and try and enjoy it? So it just worked amazingly well, but it only worked well because I found a way to do the Ahead book that was compatible with doing the Behind book. Sophie: So the Behind Book was my main work of every day, apart from when I was coaching, but you know, when I had my writing time, it was the behind book that I was. Working on writing. And so I was sitting in my usual position with my laptop on my, on a cushion, on my lap, typing away for a certain number of hours. Sophie: And I thought, well, I don't, I can't be doing that with two books at the same time. I just can't. That would feel oppressive and like, uh, I was overloading myself. So I thought, well, okay, how can I do the ahead book in the most different way possible so that it really feels like a different activity in a different part of my day. Sophie: And I can't exactly remember how I came up with it, but it, it felt to me as though, like the answer was just obvious and there, and so what I did was reach for my phone every morning. So the first thing I do every morning is I get my phone, which is charging on the bed side table next to me. I do Wordle, the New York Times game. Sophie: I share my WORDLE scores with my mom and my sister and my son-in-law. And I thought, right instead of them putting my phone down, I will keep it in my hand, open a new notes file and just record myself. 'cause there's a little button you can press if you're in notes, where you just record yourself speaking. Sophie: And I will record myself speaking some words of my ahead book into my phone. And then later on I will look at those notes, type those words up. But that will just be a secretarial task, the writing, the creating is gonna happen in bed before I've even put my glasses on, dictating into my phone, and I'm gonna make it deliberately feel like a fun thing rather than a work thing by choosing an amount of words to aim for every day that feels so easy and doable, that it's just like can't possibly fail. Sophie: So for me, the number I chose was 400 words a day. And I tried it out. The first day I went to my notes file, press record, started speaking a bit of the book, a bit of the ahead book. I'd got to 400 words in no time. Once I'd done a couple of, well, maybe three or four chunky paragraphs, I then copied and pasted those words into something called word counter dot net, and I saw that I'd done like 470 words. Sophie: I was like, great. Done. And it just works so brilliantly. And there's so much more to it than that. But basically the way I was able to do it so effectively was to make the ahead book. I actually now call it the Book Ahead Method, and I'm determined to do it now from now on for every book even when I'm not behind on another book. So I'm, I'm just gonna do the book ahead method 'cause I just loved it so much. But the key, when I did have that other book that I was late with, the key was to do the book ahead book just in completely different way. And it just worked brilliantly. I was able to then do everything, feel great about it, lose the stress, and most importantly just not feel at all behind because there was something very important that I was ahead on. Vikki: I love this and I love the one little gap I'm gonna fill in. 'cause I remember it from when you first told me about this is the, where it came from, because I remember you talking to me about a bad habit that we have in common, which is scrolling on your phone when in bed in the mornings. Vikki: And we had talked before about like, how do I stop doing it? Da, and I remember you saying. I've decided I just like being in bed on my phone and if I'm gonna be in bed on my phone, I might as well do this rather than that. And so I love the way that you were, rather than sort of being like, must be more disciplined, must get up, must go and work at my desk like a proper person or whatever. Vikki: You're like, I keep doing it. I obviously like it, so i'll stay here and I'll do this. I'll write my new book from here in a voice note. And I love that. Sophie: Yeah, and I think one of the reasons this method works so well for me was that, as you say, I attached it. So I, I knew I wanted to do something, which was the 400 words a day, and I deliberately attached it to a firmly ingrained habit. Sophie: So we both know having done our coach training at the Life Coach School, when something is just a firmly ingrained habit, it becomes easy to do, like brushing our teeth or putting our glasses on in the morning. It just happens because we expect it to happen 'cause it's a habit and I knew that. So I thought, okay, this habit that I've always thought should I try to get rid of? Sophie: Because lots of people disapprove of picking up your phone first thing in the morning and not getting straight out of bed, but kind of lounging around. You know, all of those things. You can hear lots of people saying why you shouldn't do them. But I just, you know, having observed myself for 52 years, I just do lie around in bed in the morning and reach for my phone and stay on my phone. So I was like, why not really use that fact? And that firmly ingrained habit to produce something absolutely amazing and have fun in a slightly different way. I also knew that if I incorporated the ahead book writing into my kind of stolen, rebellious time of lying around in bed in the morning then it would make the writing feel like part of the fun bit stolen from my working day, not part of the dutiful, doing the work bit. And I knew that for a contrarian like me, who, if you're familiar with Gretchen Rubin's, the Four Tendencies, which I'm sure lots of your listeners will be, she basically divides everyone up into four categories. Sophie: Upholders, obligers, questioners and rebels. And every time I do a quiz, I come out as a rebel. So I knew that if I did my, you know, it's, I'm writing the book, I shouldn't be writing at the moment, you know, and I'm writing it when I'm lying in bed, when I should have got up. I knew that would add to my enjoyment and motivation, and it really worked. Vikki: I love that. And it also means that it didn't steal time from the other book, right? Because I'm sort of trying to hear what I think the listeners might be thinking and stuff, and one of the things I can imagine is them saying, yeah, but surely you got more behind on the book you are behind on if you are giving time to this book. Yeah. And I think this idea of stealing time that you weren't using for other work is, is hugely important. Sophie: Yeah, that is such a good point. So at no point, not even on a single day, did any time that would otherwise been spent on the Behind book get stolen? All of my ahead book writing happened when I definitely would not have been writing my behind book anyway. Sophie: So lying in bed, I mean, typically before I did the book ahead Method, I'd spend half an hour to an hour lying in bed just looking on Rightmove, Instagram, Facebook, X and BlueSky. Um, at least 20 minutes looking at things people had written that I thought was silly and getting cross about those things in an enjoyable way. Sophie: And I was like, okay, so I can do that for five minutes and spend 15 minutes writing a bit of my ahead book and then I started to branch out. So sometimes I would do my ahead words, uh, when I was walking the dog, or you know, if I was in the hot tub near where I live in Cornwall, there's a hotel with a hot tub that I like to sit about in. Sophie: And sometimes I would just have my phone. I'm such a rebel. I take my phone into hot tubs and my mom outrageous. My mom can't bear it. She's like, whatcha you doing? It might fall in. I'm like, but it fallen and so far it does not fall in. And I would just record my book ahead, words in my phone in the hot tub, and then I get to stare out at the nice view. And you know, so I, but I always made sure it came from time. That wasn't time that belonged to the Behind book. Vikki: And you've touched on this already, but the other thing that kind of really stuck out to me is the impact of changing your self-concept with all of this stuff as well. Because again, often I think in academia, we think about work in quite a, sort of a boxed way, right? Vikki: That I've only got the, I've got these hours to get stuff done, and if I'm doing other things then I'm not. But it sounds as though even within those hours that you are working on the behind book, you were working more effectively and more enjoyably because of the mindset shift. Sophie: Completely because the overall picture and story was no longer a negative one. It wasn't the case that I was behind on Book one and therefore behind on Book two. And no doubt, by the time I got to book three, I'd be even, I'd be so behind, I might as well be, you know, in another time zone. That was no longer the case. The minute I started doing the ahead method and it worked. I was like, I'm, I'm ahead as much as I'm behind, which effectively means. Take all things into consideration. I'm pretty much on time, perfectly on time. What could be better, you know? And, and I just, yeah, it, it changed everything, but it wasn't a kind of hard one. You know, if I make an effort, maybe I can feel, it was like instant. The minute I started, everything just changed completely and even I started not to care or worry or stress if the behind book even got a bit more behind. I was like, yeah, that's fine. That's meant to be the behind. Who cares when that's finished? It'll get finished at some point. But the most important thing is that on my ahead book, I'm way ahead and, and the whole process actually it really did kind of come true. 'Cause what happened was. By the time I finished and handed in the Behind book, I had about 55,000 words of the ahead book. I then read through those 55,000 words 'cause I thought, right, what do I do now? Does do I carry on with my ahead method now that there's no other book taking up my main working day? Sophie: And I thought, well, no. Now I should make this the book I'm writing. I read the 55,000 words and they weren't really. I couldn't have just like said, right there are the first 55,000 words, I'll just write the rest. Because they were fragments and scenes, they weren't stitched together at all. I'll say a bit more about that in a minute 'cause that is quite important. Sophie: But even so, having read them through, I thought, I know this book so well. I know what it's about. I know what all the main things are. I know the characters so well. So I kind of started from scratch writing a first draft of the book, but it didn't feel like a first draft. It really felt like a final draft because all the invention had been happening as I wrote the 55,000 words. Sophie: So to turn that into a coherent book was way less work and effort, and that was a surprise, like when I read through the 55,000 words and thought. Oh, this is not really a book. Like this isn't even three quarters of a book that I just finish off now. This is a load of amazing material that has to be turned into a coherent book. Sophie: And at that point I was like, ah, this is gonna take eons. And it just didn't, it all just fell into place because so much of what was important was there already, and I, I just knew the thing inside out and because I'd had that experience of writing it in such a fun way, turning it into the proper book felt like fun as well. Sophie: And just editing it then felt like, felt like the whole process felt like really good fun. Now, this is where I need to tell you a really important bit of the book ahead method. So, because you want to make it feel like fun and not like your main work that's occupying most of your working day. What you don't wanna do in the book ahead method is allow any perfectionist thinking to creep in. Sophie: You don't wanna think, right how, how best to start this scene. No. The minute you start thinking what's the best way to start? Or you know, what's the best opening for chapter one already you are into serious work thinking. So I just decided that what I was gonna do was that at the beginning of every book ahead writing session, I was gonna think to myself, okay, what is something that definitely has to be in there? Sophie: No matter what else happens. So in the case of my ahead book, which is called No One Would Do What The Lamberts Have Done, it's about a family that does the unthinkable, an ordinary family that does the unthinkable. And I deliberately don't say what the unthinkable is 'cause I want people to read it and find out. Sophie: But I knew. There were certain things that had to be in there. There was, for example, an argument about resemblances that a mom and a son had to have. So I thought, right, there's just no way, no way on earth that book is not gonna contain the resemblances discussion because it's an important clue. So I thought, right, start there. Sophie: So I literally started in the middle of a scene, and it's a mum and son arguing about this, based heavily on an argument that my family actually had where I said, Hey, who does? We were watching a movie and I said, Hey everyone, who does she remind you of? And my son said, no one. I was like, no, no, she does. She does. Look. Look at her. Who does she remind you of? He said, she doesn't remind me of anyone. Mum. I know who you are thinking of. It's so and so. I was like, wait, if you know, I'm thinking of so and so. That has to mean she reminds you of so and so as well. He was like, no, it doesn't, she doesn't remind me of anyone, but I just knew she, it turned into the most absurd argument and that argument had to be in the book. Sophie: So I just started with that argument and then the next day I was like, okay, what else definitely has to be in there. Well, there has to be the bit about the song that the mum sings to the dog. They've got a pet dog who is very important in the story. He's like a member of the family, and he has a day song and a night song that his mom, his human mom sings to him. Sophie: They both have to be in there. So every day it was like, okay, what else is super important and has to be in there. So what I ended up with when I read those 55,000 words was just loads of small bits with no edges, as it were, just centres of scenes almost. But they were all the most important scenes that I ended up with because every morning I think, what's the next most important thing that's definitely going in? Sophie: So actually it's like just a brilliant way, as it turns out, I didn't know it was going to be, I was like, okay, well this'll have to do, but it turned out for me anyway, to be a brilliant way of getting all the essentials down there. And kind of pushing my perfectionist tendency out of the way going, no, no, you don't get to be fussy about grammar and how are we starting this chapter? Sophie: You just get to move aside and we're just going to the heart of something that really matters for the book, and we're just writing from there without any care in the world, and it just really worked. Vikki: Yeah, because I think there's something about that lack of a sort of linear approach that also presumably made it feel more different. Vikki: Than what you were doing in your other book too, because I can imagine if it was like, read what the 500 words I wrote yesterday and write the next 500 words, then it becomes a bit more like, Ooh, what does need to come next? Sophie: Yeah. It was so, not only was it completely different from the behind book approach, it was also completely different from anything I've ever done before. Sophie: And from the kind of person I am, I, I had to just say to myself, there's only one way this is gonna work. And this is if you do, if you approach this in a way that someone like you would just never approach anything. But that was very liberating. Mm. Right. I'm gonna forget, I'm, you know, miss, I am literally Mrs. Linear approach. You know, you can't get more linear than me. Most of the time I'm the kind of person who goes, right, well, before we go to the supermarket, we've got to plan our route and we've got to make our shopping list. You know, I like to get organized, get ahead of myself. And I just thought if I try that with this. I'm just gonna kill it stone dead, because my brain will be like, wait, we've already got all these linear responsibilities over here with this book. That had to feel completely different and fun and more like playing wordle. Like, oh, a fun thing I do in the morning, you know? Let's see. What words appear today? Vikki: How would you, so I've got some ideas for this, but I'm interested in your perspective. So this is a PhD. Podcast as you know. We may well have listeners that write fiction that are like, oh my God, this is amazing, but I wanna translate it through into the sort of work that PhD students and academics are likely to be doing as well. Sophie: Absolutely. And I, and I can do that because my father was an academic, my husband was an academic for many years. My son-in-law has just finished university, so I'm very, very familiar. I've got loads of close friends who are academics, so I, so yeah. Ask me about how it really, so how Vikki: would you envisage if, if people listening are like, okay, right. I'm behind. I, you know, my thesis is due at the end of the year. Um, I am meant to have handed in a draft of the first two chapters. Um, how would I even consider getting ahead on chapter three because it's, you know, I need my references and I need my data. And it's structured. It's not outta my head the way fiction is. Sophie: Yeah. Well, I think from an academic point of view, there's loads of ways you could actually use this. So you could use it in relation to chapter three. If you are behind on chapter one or chapters one and two, but you could also, you know, let's say you are doing a PhD on, um, you know, the philosophy of freedom from versus freedom to which is a big moral philosophy question and that's what your PhD is on. Sophie: But you happen to know that your next brilliant academic work is gonna be on, um, should a dog be allowed to be Prime Minister, let's say. Yeah. There are philosophers who argue all kinds of strange and extreme. I, I know of a politics, a former politics professor who genuinely, seriously believes that six year olds should be given the vote. He argues this in all seriousness and I was inspired by this to decide that dogs should absolutely be allowed to be prime minister because let's face it, what could unite the country more effective? You couldn't, no one could disagree with the dog's policies 'cause dogs aren't able to have policies. Sophie: I mean, fantastic on so many levels. Anyway, let's say that's your next philosophical work that you are planning. You could start doing the ahead method in relation to that. You are like, okay, what might I want my introduction to say and what are my key arguments that I'd want to put forward? Sophie: So whichever feels most useful or inspiring to you, you could do the ahead method with, you could even say, okay, I might only be on chapter one or two of my PhD right now, but one day I am gonna win the Nobel Prize for my academic writing and the book that will seal the deal, my great master work that everyone will read for centuries to come is gonna be on this topic and I'm gonna start doing the ahead method with that. Sophie: So it's whatever feels like it works for you. Now, I'm guessing with a PhD student, You might worry about being behind on chapters three and four more than you'd worry about your great masterwork. So you should choose the thing which, if you got ahead in relation to it, would most effectively offset the feeling of behind in relation to whatever you're behind on, if that makes sense. Sophie: So it's probably more likely to be chapters three and four. But who knows? It's just whatever works, whatever. Whatever changes things so that you think and feel differently about where you are in relation to the work. Vikki: Yeah, no, definitely. The example that jumped into my head is, usually people write the introduction to their thesis and the general discussion of their thesis last, right? Vikki: They have either they write up as a series of papers or they have a more traditional kind of lit review, methodology, and then a series of results, chapters or whatever. I. And one of the things that struck me was that those sections, yes you have to do separate reading for them to some extent, but often those sections are about contextualizing the work that you've done. Vikki: They're about interpreting the work that you've done. And I could definitely see a situation where your kind of current role is writing up one of the results chapters of your thesis. Yeah. But that you started brain dumping bits of text that you might use in your general introduction or your general discussion because like you say, you don't know the exact results you are going to find, but you know you need a section about the limitations of your studies. Vikki: You know, you need a section about possible future directions. You know, you need a section about where your work fits in the context of other people's work. And while some of those things might need you to go away and figure out the actual details of them later, the kind of notional ideas of stuff you need to say often is in your head. Vikki: Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you can, as you say, put aside that perfectionism, being able to say like, you know, I'd need here to refer to the paper by somebody or other whose name I've forgotten, but that's okay. It's the one where they did this. And then keep talking. So as long as you can kind of put aside that perfectionism of actually knowing the exact details. Vikki: 'cause as you say, that's secretarial, that can be added later. Yeah. Um, I think you could get hugely ahead of those chapters. Sophie: Yeah. Yeah. And your ahead writing could be a series of notes and just things to remember. Or it could be, you know, if you think of a particular line you really want to say that, that brilliantly encapsulates an argument you want to make. It can be that as well. Vikki: Yeah. And I think doing this, even if your main body of work at the moment is reading, getting ahead of the writing I think is useful. I mean, I'm a big proponent of writing when you're reading anyway, but having that kind of thing that if the majority of your time at the moment is reviewing the literature, having that time where you wake up in the morning and you just. Vikki: Write stuff verbally about the, what you recall reading yesterday and why it was relevant and why you think it might not be relevant and those sorts of things. I can imagine it also being a really good way to process your thoughts about the stuff that you're reading at the same time. Sophie: Yeah, completely. But I mean, there's so many ways it can work and, and just, we haven't covered this yet, which I think is important in another way, which is just thinking, It's not just this anymore. 'cause I think when you've got a novel that you're working on or a PhD that you're working on, it can start to feel like an oppressive thing. Sophie: Looming over you. That just blocks out everything else. The minute you start doing something else, creative or intellectual that you care about, then that looming scary thing suddenly becomes not the only thing. And it has to kind of take its place in an overall picture that contains other things you're working on. Sophie: And that is so powerful just in and of itself because it's like, oh, what about this over here? You are not the only thing in my life, PhD or novel. And it's very empowering. Vikki: Definitely, and I think you can also make it feel more like what you imagined PhD might be like too, because I think often people come to their PhDs, especially people that come to their PhDs not straight after their masters. Vikki: They've made kind of a conscious decision to come back to it. It's a topic they love. They sometimes have a slightly romanticized view of what that's gonna be look like, right? Or, you know, I'm gonna be doing this intellectual work and waning around thinking high thoughts and dah, dah, dah. And suddenly their supervisors are saying, can you gimme a Gantt chart? And you're like, what? That wasn't what I envisaged. And I feel like you could create some of that, that sense of it being what you envisaged. Sophie: If your main work project at any given time is say, a Gantt chart, then you can use your ahead writing time to do the kind of writing or PhD work that you looked forward to doing, but just in relation to a different bit of your PhD. Vikki: Yeah, and that's where I want everyone to be really clear. We are not saying that this has to invo involve voice notes in bed in the morning. 'cause I can hear some people going, you know, oh, but I, my brain doesn't wake up or whatever. That's not the point. The point is that it's really distinct from how you normally work. So for some of you, so I have a good friend, who will say writes books, and he loves writing longhand in a beautiful notebook. And so it might be that maybe your real PhD work, you're in there, you're doing your data, you're typing away on your laptop and things like that. Vikki: But in the ahead part you've got a beautiful notebook and a fountain pen, and you only do it in slightly glamorous looking hotel foyers, but once a week you go off and do that or whatever. Right. Sophie: Yeah, and I, I massively would love to write something in a beautiful notebook. Uh, I, I take all my notes in a beautiful notebook, but that Yeah, precisely. That's the kind of thing you are ahead method of writing can be whatever you want it to be. There's loads of people who would absolutely hate why around in bed talking into their phone. I mean, like, some people would be like, no, I've woken up. I want to get up and have a shower. It's attaching it to what works for you that matters and making sure it's different from your main task of work at that time and more fun feeling. More, more sort of easy and light feeling. Vikki: Yeah, definitely. Sophie: You then get to witness yourself doing work on your PhD and having fun. Or I get to witness myself writing a novel and having fun. That reminds me by proving to me that actually writing novels can be fun. So then I look at the other novel I'm writing, I go, well, what if you could be fun? You haven't been for a while, but like, what if you could be? Sophie: And it all just has a knock on effect where you end up having much less stress and much more fun. Vikki: I love this. Sophie: If you try the ahead method and you love it, you can then do it even when you are not behind on something else, and that is what I decided to do. Sophie: I love the ahead method so much. I thought, well, why not just write all my books this way? Why not just write. I'd like to go down from 400 words a day to 300 to make it even lighter and easier feeling. But I am seriously planning to write my next book at the rate of 300 words a day, all via the book ahead method, even though I won't be behind on anything else. Sophie: So that's why I changed it from ahead and behind to, yeah, I giving names and titles to things. So originally when I introduced this in my Dream Author coaching program, I called it Ahead and Behind. But then when I decided I was gonna do it anyway, even if I wasn't behind, then I changed it to the Book Ahead Method and I am gonna do it even when I'm not behind on other things. Vikki: Love. Amazing. Thank you so much, Sophie, for coming on. It is super useful. Tell people a little bit more about what you're up to at the moment and what books they should be looking out for. Sophie: Well, I am finishing my next Poirot novel. So one of the things I write is the new series of Hercule Poirot novels at the request of Agatha Christie's family. And I'm just putting the finishing touches to the latest one of those and preparing to launch the book I've mentioned already, which is called, it's a very long title. No one would do what the Lamberts have done, which I call Lamberts for short. And then I'm apart from that, I'm coaching and doing lots of swimming, which I always do. And planning the next stages of the dream or for coaching program, which is about to develop in various ways. Vikki: Can't wait to hear about that. We will put links to Dream Author and to where you can find out more about Sophie and her writing generally in the chat. Thank you so much, Sophie, for coming on. Thank you everyone for listening and I'll see everyone next week. Take care. Bye-bye.

< Most PhD students and academics spend a lot of time telling themselves they’re not doing enough, they’re behind or they’re not good enough. Even if you truly believe that’s true, constantly having those comments in your head makes everything feel more difficult. When I talk with clients about intentionally choosing other thoughts, they often struggle to come up with thoughts that might help more AND that still feel true. In this episode, I give you nine examples that you can pick up and play with today! Links I refer to in this episode What to do when you get contradictory advice How to coach yourself (and why you should) Why what you do matters (and when it doesn’t) Transcript I want you to imagine I've got some magical tool where I'm able to look inside your head and see what thoughts you say to yourself most often. What would I see? Think about the last time you were sat at your desk or wondering about your research. What thoughts would I see in your head? If my members are anything to go by, it's probably things like, I'm not good enough to do this. I dunno what I'm doing. Other people are so much further ahead than me. This is too confusing. Those sorts of things. Do you recognize that in yourself as well? If so, you are in the right place. Don't worry, this is completely normal. PhDs and academia do something to our brains that mean that we just develop this habit of speaking to ourselves like that. And one of the things that I often work on in coaching is how we can choose other thoughts. Now I wanna reassure you, this is not gonna be toxic positivity. This is not gonna be, everything's great and I can do everything and I'm the best, I can do anything I set my mind to. We're not doing that, okay? But what we are gonna do is identify some really specific thoughts that might help you more than the ones that you're focusing on at the moment. Now when I say this in coaching in my membership classes and stuff, people are often like, yeah, but what thoughts? I don't even know what would help at this point. So that's what this episode's about. I'm gonna share with you nine thoughts that I think will help you to enjoy your research more and to get more done than you are at the moment. Let's make your brain a more pleasant place to hang out. I'm Dr. Vikki Wright, ex professor and certified life coach, and I'm here to help make your PhD and academic journey feel just a little bit more fun. So this week we are gonna be thinking about nine things that you can say to yourself more often. Now, the first thing I wanna really clarify here is it's really important you only choose thoughts to emphasize your head that you at least cognitively believe. Let me explain what I mean by that. Often people say to me, I know that's true, but like in the inside, in my heart, I don't always believe it. That's fine. If you feel like that about the thoughts, no worries. We will practice thinking them, we will practice believing them. It almost doesn't matter too much if deep down they don't quite feel true yet because that's what the practice is for. However, if I say any where you think, you know, I just don't actually believe that, that's okay. We don't have to think those ones. This isn't an exercise in making you believe things you don't already believe. This is an exercise in helping you give at least as much space to the useful things you believe as you do to the unhelpful things you believe. We all have a whole variety of thoughts in our head that often contradict each other. That's why our heads are such complex and joyous places to be. And what we seem to do is somehow think that we should spend lots of time, or that it's inevitable we spend lots of time thinking the thoughts that we believe that make us feel rubbish. And put very little effort into thinking the thoughts that we also already believe, but that we just don't think about so often. So I'm gonna emphasize nine that I think are really useful, that I have seen help the clients in my membership over the years. But I also want you to identify some of your own. If you have other thoughts that help you and that make you feel good and make you feel empowered, happy days. In fact, I'd love to hear about them. If you're on my newsletter, you can just hit reply to any of the newsletters. Let me know what thoughts you are going for, or if you follow me on Instagram at the PhD life coach DM me there. Let me know what thoughts work for you. Now, if you are gonna make up your own, at the end of this episode, I'm gonna give you a few tips as to how to make sure there is helpful as you think they'll be. So make sure you listen to all then. The first one is always so important when we talk about it in our classes, and that is that your thesis needs to be defensible. It does not need to be perfect. There is no absolute definition of correct. It needs to be defensible. Now, those of you who are academics, the same is true about the methods of any paper you write for publication. It needs to be defensible. Defensible either to the examiners of a Viva or defensible to the reviewers of an article or defensible to your grant body who you're applying to, whoever the kind of assessing body is. There's no right answer. Often we tie ourselves up in knots thinking there's a correct version of this, that if only we can identify the correct argument or the correct analysis, everything will be okay and we'll know, we'll be certain. It's not true. Put 40 academics in a room and they will very rarely agree with each other. There is no right version. Your work needs to be defensible. Does it mean there's not some other cool way you could have done it? Of course not. There's a hundred different ways you could do any study. You just need to be able to defend why you chose the way you did it, why you made the arguments you made. And show that you understand the implications of those choices. That's what you need to do. It doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to be fit for purpose. Somehow thinking about it like that, this just has to be defensible. It needs to be fit for purpose releases just a little bit of that pressure we put on ourselves and enables us to move into, can I justify why we did it this way? Yeah, totally. Let's go. Let's do that convincingly rather than panic about whether we chose the right way. The second thing I want you to tell yourself more often is that you've done difficult things before and you can figure this out. Often when we're in the midst of like a really hard, difficult thing, we just think there's no way out. This is the one, this is the one I can't do. This is the one I have no way of getting past. But you felt like that before. And the joy for me working with PhD students is, I know that's true. I know for 100% that's true, or you wouldn't be doing what you're doing. Either you've got an excellent academic track record or you've got a really cool and interesting background in some other industry that's enabled you to come in and do a PhD. There's various routes to PhDs, as we all know, but all of them involve achievement in your past life. And one of the things I've noticed with my clients is that we're really good at forgetting that achievement. We're really good at writing it off, either not thinking about it or attributing it to luck or attributing it to the support we got back then, or whatever it was. You have done difficult things before and you're gonna figure out a way to do the thing you are doing at the moment. Now, one thing I will say, this is where my membership comes in useful is. Some of you will have developed unhealthy ways to get difficult things done. Some of you might be looking back and going, yeah, I've done difficult things before, but I did them in unsustainable ways. I did them through beating myself up, working stupid hours, neglecting my health, all of those things. Now, if that's you, you really need this podcast and you need to jump on my waiting list for the membership next time because that's a fair point. If you are looking back and going, you know what? I did do difficult things, but not in a way that I wanna do them anymore. That's where you need some support to work through that, and that's something I work through with the clients all the time. But even in that situation, reminding yourself that you are someone who is capable of feeling this feeling of confusion and moving through it to achieve the task can help you in this moment to think about how you wanna address this particular problem. The third one, and this is one that has been my mantra for probably the last six or seven years since I kind of thought of it and came across it, and this is the notion is anything gets done one step at a time. As many of you who've been listening for a while now, I have a brain that likes to shoot off in 47 directions at once and expect somehow to be able to do all of them at the same time. Now. I'm getting better at that, but it is still my natural tendency, and so I probably use this phrase. 5, 6, 7 times a day, at least, one thing at a time. In fact, it's the latest piece of advice that my very expensive coach has given me, which is slightly ironic that I'm paying a lot of somebody, a lot of money to tell me things that I do usually tell myself. When it comes to my business, one thing at a time. I can develop different elements of my business one step at a time. You will do your research one step at a time. If you hear your brain going, and then I need to do this, and then I need to do that, and then I need to do that. I want you to pause, breathe for a second, and remind yourself one step at a time. What's now's job? What's the one thing that would be most useful if I moved it on? Now, what's one thing? Everyone does this one step at a time. In fact, I'm gonna give you a sneaky one bonus bit here just based on something that we discussed in a group coaching session yesterday. So one of my clients was talking about, she was starting some data collection in the laboratory, and then she had a couple of papers that were also on the go. More of a review paper and more of a database paper. And she'd been advised that it might be useful to put one of them to the side, and she felt like that was a failure. She felt like that was sort of her not being able to handle more than one thing and she felt like she might would find it difficult to come back to that later. Now, we talked about some of the benefits of doing things one thing at a time, or fewer things at a time. And we talked about how actually if you're gonna put something to one side, you can say, you know what? That's not now. So she decided that one of these papers could go to one side. We talked about things like, what do you actually call that? You know, do you call that dropping it? Do you call it abandoning it or do you call it putting it on the side for now until I can give it my full attention, for example, just the way we describe it makes a difference. And if we're putting it to one side, intentionally, we're popping it out there on the shelf. We can also do that in a structured and useful way. So we talked about what could she do with the data, with the current state of the manuscript to make sure that it's super easy to come back to later. So when we remind ourselves that we can and have to do this one step at a time, we can also think, okay, these other things that I'm deciding are not now things. How can I put them to one side mindfully so I don't feel like they've been abandoned, and so that I know that I've structured them so they're easy to come back to later. That makes this all feel a lot easier. Thought number four that I want you to cultivate is one that members have asked for. Oh, no. We'll come. We'll say that in the next one. Thought number four that I want you to cultivate is for when you are telling yourself that you don't know something. I don't know how to do this. I don't know what to write. I dunno what order to do this in. I don't know what analysis to use. I want you to remind yourself this isn't a don't know problem. This is a, I haven't decided yet problem. Okay. The difference, and I've talked about this a couple of times on episodes recently, so check those out. But the difference is if you don't know something, it means there is a factual truth out there for you to go and find. So this might be, I don't know how to run structural equation modeling or whatever. Okay. There's gonna be decisions in that too, right? But you might not know the technicalities of even how to start that. That's fine. I accept that's a don't know problem. That's a go and find a book. Go and find an expert. Look up how to do it problem. But the vast majority of these things when it's, I dunno what auditor to present this in, I don't know which analysis to pick. I don't know which argument to make. These are decisions. 'cause this relates back to that first point, that there's no perfect way to do a PhD or to do your research. There's no right answer here. It's not that you don't know the correct answer, it's that you haven't decided. And if you frame it like that, suddenly the power is back with you. Because if you realize that the only thing standing between you and moving forward is making a decision, then you can start asking yourself, how do I support myself to make a decision? What options have I got? How can I make it easier for me to make this choice? What advice do I want to seek in order to make this choice? But ultimately, it's your decision. Okay, that can feel scary. I get that. It can feel scary, but ultimately it's empowering 'cause it is not this kind of vague cloud that you don't know. It's something you get to pick and you are capable of picking. Quick interjection. If you are finding this episode helpful, but you are driving, walking the dog or doing dishes, just remember this. When you're done, head to the PhD life coach.com and sign up for my newsletter. We've all listened to a podcast and thought this is great. I should do something with it, and that didn't. That's where I created the newsletter to help you actually apply the stuff that you hear. Each week you'll get a short summary, some reflective questions on one simple action that you can take right away. You'll also get access to a searchable archive of all the past episodes so you can find the exact one that you need to help with your current challenges. Plus all newsletter subscribers get a free webinar every single month on a topic that affects all PhD students and academics, and you'll always be the first to hear for when my membership opens to new members. So once you're done listening, or even right now, go sign up for my newsletter and make sure you don't miss out. Now this fifth one is gonna feel like a funny one and I'm gonna explain it 'cause it came straight out of a coaching session and that is lazy, useless people get PhDs. Okay. Lazy, useless people get PhDs. Now, I wanna clarify things before you all come at me. I am not saying that PhD students and academics are lazy or useless. Any of them. I am not saying you have to be lazy or useless to get a PhD or a research career. What I am saying instead is that most people who've done a PhD, are doing a PhD, have at least at some points, if not often, told themselves they're lazy and useless. Okay. When you've had one of those days where you just can't get into it, you're procrastinating wildly, you're beating yourself up about all the stuff you should have done and you're looking at everybody else just carrying on and getting their work done. Side note, they're probably not, but anyway, do, do, do. They're working away and you are just not all of us have told ourselves we are lazy and useless. The joy of having been in this sort of career as long as I have is that I have seen all those people who call themselves lazy and useless, go on and get their PhDs, go on and have the careers that they wanna have. Lazy, useless people get PhDs. I will extend that to say people who believe that they are lazy and useless, get PhDs. Now. I am not gonna endorse you continuing to tell yourself that you're lazy and useless, okay? Not gonna allow it. You are banned. But if you have those thoughts, you can still get a PhD. Number six is about feedback. Now, whatever stage of your academic career you are at getting feedback can be really challenging. Maybe it's from your supervisor on a first draft. Maybe it's from dreaded reviewer two, maybe it's from your grant agency's feedback on your application. Getting feedback can be tough. So this thought has two components to it. The first is that it is okay to be upset by feedback. There's something in this kind of, I don't know, like positive culture thing that you sometimes see online that we should just go, oh, all feedback is information and this is fine. It will help me grow. And it's like, that is true. Okay. I stand by that. But we're humans. We are not robots. We are emotionally invested most of the time in the things that we're doing. It is completely normal and completely okay to be upset if the feedback is not where you thought it was gonna be. Okay. It is nothing wrong with you. It doesn't mean you have to fundamentally like change the way your brain works, become a different person. There is nothing inherently wrong. Emotions just give us information. There is nothing wrong with getting upset. In fact, allowing ourselves space to experience those emotions, allowing ourselves a little gap to be like, yeah, I'm just upset about this. I don't need to reframe it yet. I'm just upset. 'cause I thought this was in pretty good shape and now there's a billion tons of work to do on it. That's okay. Not expecting yourself to get the feedback and go, okay, I'll work methodically through each comment at time. No, go and have a sulk about it. That's fine. No big deal. What we are gonna do though is we are not gonna make it mean a million things about us. 'cause that's where we go wrong. We get upset about it and then we extrapolate it out to mean that we don't deserve to be here and all that stuff. We're not doing that. The second part of this though, is that I want you to remember that feedback is information and you get to decide how you are going to use it. So it's okay you have an emotional response to it. All good, no problems, but you also get to decide how you're gonna use it. For some of you, this is gonna be about prioritizing. I have members who are right in the last few stages, you know, last month or two of their PhDs, and they're having to decide which things they have time to change, which things they have time to action. Which are things that are just gonna have to ride and we'll see how it goes. That is completely normal to have to prioritize that, that other times this is about getting contradictory advice. You know, most of us who've been in academia for a while will have received reviews from journals where reviewer one says, oh, you should include much more about x. And reviewer too says, oh, you should include much less about X. And you're like. And if you see that as annoying and contradictory, it gets incredibly frustrating. Whereas if you see that as, oh, that is information. That could tell me different things, right? So that could give me the information that, you know what I'm probably hitting this about, right? If some people want a bit more, some people want about a bit less, that's probably about right. Or it could be telling you that you know what, you're not hitting either. That people either want much more or they want less, and we need to make a decision as to which is better for the paper. And only we get to decide that, right? We get to take that feedback, we get to combine it with the information we have in our heads. Go back to the intentions that we had for this article and make a decision from there. So feedback is information. You are allowed to get upset about it, but you get to decide what you do with that information. I actually have a podcast episode about handling contradictory feedback if that's something that you struggle with. So do go check that out. Thought seven is that what you do matters. And in fact, this is so true I did a whole episode about it recently. What you do matters no matter how. Esoteric and random your topic feels what you do matters. Pur, pursuing information for the good of the world or for the just joy of knowing new things is important. What you do matters. You are making a contribution, and it is okay if it doesn't always feel like that. Every stage of your academic career. There'll be times when you feel like what you're doing isn't making a difference, but I want you to remind yourself. Especially in the current climate, in academic world where everything can feel like a struggle sometimes, the work you are doing is important. Intellectual curiosity and exploration is important for the world, the population, the future, the past, everything. You are doing something that matters. You are making your contribution to it, and it matters. You matter. Number eight is one that often comes about later on in the PhD journey. And again, I've talked with clients about this this week, and that is that moment where you are returning to chapters you wrote early on in your PhD with the intention of sort of finessing them, improving them, ready to be actually submitted with the rest of your work. And what often happens is you read them and you're like. Oh my goodness. I thought these were in a better state than that. I thought these were nearly finished and actually they're a bit rough. And that can be really disheartening because what is common is for people to focus on the fact that, A, they've got lots of work to do, and B, that if their work's not as good as they thought, then they must not be very good. Those are the things that are most common that I see come up all the time, and they miss something really important. What they miss is the fact that you can identify flaws in your previous work means one thing. It means that you are now better than you were back then. It means you are more expert with more nuanced understanding and better skills than you were when you wrote that. Looking back at old work and thinking, oh, I could do that better now is nothing but a celebration. That is a beautiful thing. That is you visibly seeing your learning and development in front of you on a page. I want you, instead of going, oh, I got so much work to do on this now to go, I know how to make this better. I'm now better than when I wrote this. Let's go. Let's bring this up to my current standards of knowledge. This is an exciting thing. It is not a sign you wasted time writing it. Writing it was how you got as good as you are now, but the fact you can see that it's not perfect, that's a wonderful thing. Let's make it better. And then the ninth one, I'm gonna get feisty. The ninth one is one that, to be honest, is the area of coaching that I struggle with most because one of the things with coaching is you are supposed to stay at least semi neutral about the circumstances that somebody's telling you about. You're not meant to like jump in the pool and get involved and sort of be like, oh my goodness, this is terrible, or whatever. Number nine is it is okay to expect feedback from your supervisor even if they're busy. I was a supervisor. For a really long time. I get it. I trained other supervisors. I worked with hundreds of collaborators, and I get it. Supervisors are crazy busy. They have so much on, they are so overwhelmed, they're so overburdened. If you are listening, I see you. I get it. I was there for a really, really long time, and if any of you supervisors listening are starting to feel guilty, I wanna contextualize what I mean by delays here, because I saw collaborators all the time. My colleagues feeling really bad 'cause it had been a couple of weeks, three weeks that they hadn't given feedback on an article and feeling really, really guilty about it. That's not what I'm talking about here. Students, if you expect to get it back within a few days routinely, you are probably underestimating the workload of your supervisors. However the number of times I work with clients where they say, and obviously I've only got the client side of it, who knows what the other side is, but where they say that they submitted something four months ago, six months ago, last summer, whatever it is, and they haven't heard back. And when they chase, the supervisor says they'll get to it. I'm sorry. It's just not okay. I'm gonna go right out there and say it controversial. I don't care. That's not okay. You are not doing your job as a supervisor. Your supervisor is not serving your needs if they are taking months and months and months to get you feedback. Okay, now. Don't get me wrong, you need to be in careful communication with your supervisors so that you can try and time the feedback that you need for appropriate moments so that you know it doesn't coincide with them prepping for a big conference or right in the middle of their marking period or whatever. So giving some warning as to when it's coming. Great. Agreeing some boundaries around how long you're gonna take over getting feedback back. Great. In fact, I think I might do a future episode about feedback because there's, I think a lot we could all do better to make the whole feedback process a lot more efficient. But if you are just not getting feedback, that's not okay, and it's okay to be cross about that. We'll talk in a second what you can do about it, but I think a lot of supervisors think that students are often a bit entitled as to what they want. In my experience, it's the opposite. I hear clients all the time justifying why their supervisors are just far too busy to give them feedback and it's okay. 'Cause they are, you know, they're really important in their field and they've got a real lot on, and I knew that when I agreed to work with them. And, you know, it's, it's okay. And I'm like, it's not okay. It's not. That isn't good enough. You need feedback. Even if it's quick and dirty feedback, even if it's, this is roughly on the right lines, that's not, try this next, let's go feedback. If that's your situation, I want you to talk to an academic, some other academic in your unit to figure out what is normal in your discipline and what is okay and what's not. The trouble is universities don't always have good systems for dealing with supervisors who don't do this stuff. Often it's a known thing that particular academics are rubbish at giving feedback, and somehow no one can do anything about it. But you don't have to think it's okay. If you're a supervisor listening, my biggest tip for you is be honest with your students. If you've missed the boat and you are feeling really guilty about the fact that you haven't given feedback for a while, just speak to them. I'm really sorry. I should have got this back to you sooner. I haven't, which is the most useful part for me to move forward now. And stop asking for polished drafts before you give feedback. I was ranting about this on Instagram this week. If you saw it, I apologize, repeating myself, but stop asking for polished drafts. I'm gonna talk more in the feedback episode about why it's a terrible idea, but it's essentially like decorating a house before you've actually checked whether somebody likes the layout of the house. Don't do it. It's a waste of everybody's time. Give quick and dirty feedback. Allow somebody to move on with a bit more information. And students if you are getting neglected by your supervisor, you deserve better and it's okay to say so. Now, if you are one of the unusual students that's sending a manuscript for comments on a Friday and getting pissy that you're not getting it back on Monday morning, take a little look in the mirror. Let's not do that. We have to accept that everybody's working in a really pressurized environment at the moment, and there will be times when your supervisor drops the ball. They're not the people I'm talking to. I'm talking about the people who just routinely don't reply. Who routinely say, I'll get to it. I'll get to it, I'll get to it, and never get to it. Those are the people I'm talking to. So there is nine things that I want you to keep telling yourself much more often than all the other unhelpful things that you are telling yourselves. Let me know which one's your favorite. If you're on my newsletter, just reply to that. If you're not, why not get signed up? One things that people on my newsletter are going to get, and this is brand new at time of recording, is a gorgeous Google Sheet summary of every podcast I've ever done. The key points from it and the links to where you can find it so that you can use Control F and search, find whatever topics you're interested and find me wittering on about it. So it's like your ultimate archive of all things PhD life coach. So make sure you're on the newsletter so you don't miss out on that. Now, I promised at the beginning that if you were gonna come up with thoughts of your own, that I would give you a few pointers. First one, I'm gonna ban the word just from it. So if the thing that you are saying to yourself is, I just need to get on with it, I want you to take a second look and see if there's a different way of saying it. The reason for that is that saying just makes it feel like something's easy and it's not true. Okay. When we are saying, I just need to stop procrastinating, there's no just about it. Stopping procrastinating is a tough thing to do. So, be cautious around that. I want you to make sure that you are not secretly insulting yourself in your attempt to motivate yourself. So if you are sort of saying, get off your bums, stop being so lazy and get it done. Let's not speak to ourselves like that, not routinely, not if we're trying to change the way we speak to ourselves. You know, every now and again as a kind of, if you're doing it from a lighthearted, affectionate place, not so bad. But if you are trying to break a habit of beating yourself up all the time, let's not do it by insulting you. I want the things do you choose to be around, how capable you are, how achievable this is, why this matters, why you are the person to do it, and that it's okay to have emotions, but we don't have to make it mean a whole load of stuff about us and our futures. Your research is really important. Let's tell ourselves these things more often and actually enjoy getting it done. Thank you all so much for listening, and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics time.

< In this episode, I welcome Dr Ilana Horwitz, author of the new book, The Entrepreneurial Scholar. Being entrepreneurial isn’t just about starting a business — it’s about thinking creatively, seizing opportunities, and applying academic skills in innovative ways. We explore how PhD students and academics can develop an entrepreneurial mindset and connect with people outside their field to unlock new possibilities. Plus, we talk about how academic careers can be enriched by embracing flexibility and finding new ways to contribute to society, whether through collaboration, commercialization, or interdisciplinary projects. Links I refer to in this episode Find out more about Dr Ilana Horwitz here . The Entrepreneurial Scholar website (Ilana’s book) Transcript Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. I am really excited to introduce academic and author Professor Ilana Horwitz, who is an assistant professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology at Tulane University. So welcome, Ilana. It's so wonderful to have you here. Ilana: Thank you so much for having me, Vikki. No problem. Vikki: So we are here to talk about your new book, which at the time of us recording this now is not quite out and I believe you are expecting an exciting parcel today. Ilana: Indeed. I think I'm gonna get a box of books that, uh, when I, when my first book came out, actually, that was probably one of the most exciting moments. You open up that book, it's like giving birth to a child and I'm so excited for that feeling again. Vikki: So good. Make sure you record it. Get your, Ilana: oh, I do plan on it Vikki: record your unboxing video. Perfect. But by the time you guys are listening to this, it will be out, it is called The Entrepreneurial Scholar and I've just been binge reading it and I've learned so much already. So let's start, before we dive into the book, tell people a little bit more about you. Ilana: Great. So as you mentioned, I work at Tulane University, which is New Orleans, Louisiana, and I'm a professor of Jewish studies and sociology. But my training is actually from a school of education. I went to the Stanford Graduate School of Education and my PhD is in sociology of Education and also I'm a sociologist of religion. Ilana: So my work is really at that intersection and I write a lot about the role mostly in the United States about how religious upbringing and social class and gender and race and ethnicity influence people along the life course, particularly in their educational trajectories. Vikki: So fascinating. And we ended up having a bit of a chat before this. I got very distracted looking at your first book, which I'll get you to give us the title of in a second on that topic, which just looks fascinating. So I may need to get you back at some point to talk about that stuff. Ilana: Sure. So my first book is called God Grades and Graduation- Religion's, surprising Impact on Academic Success. And it was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. And that book actually came out of my dissertation. And it is a book primarily about how being religious in the United States is associated with academic outcomes, both at the K 12 level and then in higher education. Vikki: That's so cool. I'm so glad I asked that because I obviously didn't know it came out of your dissertation. I think for doctoral students, hearing that the work they do doesn't have to just sit in a thesis somewhere and never get read again. That, you know, people do convert and get it out there so that people are reading. I think that's really exciting and fits with this notion of being an entrepreneurial scholar, right? Ilana: Yeah, absolutely. When I actually, we'll probably talk about this, but I had no intention to become an academic. Uh, and when I did decide to stay in academia, I really made a commitment to myself that everything that I wrote was going to make it into the public in some way, shape, or form. Ilana: I really was resistant to the idea that my work would just like sit behind a paywall and collect dust on bookshelves. And so every time I do, I write anything academic, I also write a lot of public opinion pieces about it or engage in public scholarship. And so yeah, the book is one of the ways in which I sort of executed on that commitment to doing work that reaches beyond the ivory tower. Vikki: Amazing. That leads perfectly into how did you end up writing a book? You said obviously have that sort of mindset that you want to get out and make a difference and have an impact in the world as well as your, within your academic work itself. So how did you end up writing a book about entrepreneurship in scholarly world? Ilana: Vikki, it was the most unexpected book imaginable. I really had no intention to write this book. It really happened by accident, and it actually kind of happened in a way that I think what entrepreneurship teaches us. And that is, it came out of a moment of failure and of a moment of public scholarship. Ilana: So here's what happened. At the end of my doctoral program, I was already, beyond having to take classes. I was in my sixth year, but I decided to audit a class taught by Sam Wineburg. He's a historian of education, but he's also very committed to public scholarship. And he was teaching a class about how to do publicly engaged work and not surprising the final assignment for the class was to write an op-ed. So most students in the class decided to write about their research, and at that point I was really spending a lot of time kind of reflecting on my own PhD journey, which was very unusual. I came from a background in the business world and working at some startups and then in research and evaluation. Ilana: And I didn't start my PhD until I was 30 and I just took a very different approach to it. And I noticed that although I was very stressed out and I didn't have a job and I was sort of experiencing a lot of crises in the way that my classmates were also experiencing, there was something about the nature of academia that I loved in a way that my colleagues found really debilitating. Ilana: And so I decided to reflect on this in this op-ed. So I submitted it to Sam, and Sam, um, was really encouraging and he was like, this kind of has two threads. You need to pick one or the other and go with it. And I picked a thread and basically like it failed. I won't go into sort of the details of, you know, what I was arguing in that first version, but I submitted it to several public outlets and it failed sort of repeatedly over the course of a few months. Ilana: And it was really discouraging and eventually, and I gave up on it to be honest. And then Sam, who I stayed in touch with after I graduated, he was like, you have to put it out there. Like there was really good stuff in there. Don't give up on it. And so for two years, Vikki, I sat on this op-ed, uh, and I, and it was on my to-do list and every, you know, week or so, it would move to do next todo list and I would never do it. Ilana: And it was the summer of 2021 and I was actually just about to start my position at Tulane. It was like middle of June and I was starting in two weeks and, 'cause I had a postdoc between, finishing my PhD and starting at Tulane and I was about to go home and then I was like, you know what, Ilana, you have childcare right now, you have like an hour. Why don't you take out that op-ed and see what you can do with it? And so I like finally found it in my files online and I read it and I went back to one of the original vision, like the direction that I didn't take. And, and I just sent it off. Ilana: I sent it to Inside Higher Ed where I already had published something and they replied right away and they said, this is great. We'll take it. Wow. And the title of that piece was called why PhD Students Should Think Like Entrepreneurs. And it came out a few weeks later and I got a few emails, you know, from professors. I got some emails from directors of graduate programs, from some from therapists. And then I got the most unexpected email and it came from an editor at Princeton University Press. Peter and Peter said. I just read your op-ed, this is great. Do you wanna write a book on this topic? And I was like, are you for real? Ilana: Are you, are you sure? I was like a nobody, I mean, I had like not started my position. My first book hadn't come out. I hadn't been in the New York Times yet. Like nothing that has happened to me since had happened at that moment. But he said, we have been looking for someone to write a book like this, but no one has that kind of background in entrepreneurship and the business world to have the credibility to write it. So we think you're the right person. And that is how this book came to be. Vikki: I love that. And what I love most about it is you started by saying that it was kind of luck and those sorts of things. And I just love how there were so many bits of that story that if you had responded differently to them, you wouldn't have ended up where you were. So that final piece, the fact that that guy was looking for that and he know, read your piece that bit. Might be luck, but all the way from what you chose to write about the fact that you tried to submit it. The fact that you coped with that failure, you, the fact that you kept in touch with the professor, that you were memorable enough that the professor reminded you that you really should think about this stuff. You went again there. All that resilience and everything. There's so much that led up to this happening and I just think that's such a useful story of how people create their own luck. Ilana: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right and I actually start the book with that story because I think it's an perfect illustration of a key point that I make in the book, and that is to be, to think entrepreneurially. Ilana: You need to ask yourself, who am I? What do I know and who do I know? And the lesson that I learned in that op-ed is when I tried to write it the first time when I picked a thread, I was writing from a sort of place of something I didn't know a lot about. I was so writing it for a K 12 teacher audience. Ilana: And when people read it, they were like, it's clear that you've never taught in a K 12 setting. And that's true. I had never been a full-time K 12 teacher. And when I revised it, I really leaned into my own experience working in entrepreneurial settings and in the business world. And that is when it was able to shine because I was speaking from something that I had experience in. Ilana: And you're right, the fact that I kept in touch with Sam and the fact that I reached out to Inside Higher Ed to publish it where I already knew somebody. Like I leveraged a lot of my own skills and connections, and that is a really big piece of entrepreneurial thinking. And ultimately, like with entrepreneurial thinking, you put stuff out to, into the world and you don't know what's gonna be come of it. Ilana: And I think this op-ed is the best illustration of that. Like, I had no idea that this would ever, I didn't plan for this. And that's I think how some of the best things happen. Vikki: Absolutely. So you've touched on this a little bit already, but just for people who haven't thought about , in this context, what do you mean by entrepreneurial? Because often I think when people think about this, they're thinking about startups, they're thinking about side hustles, all that stuff. How are you applying that to academia? Ilana: My definition of entrepreneurial thinking is as follows. It is the ability to generate an idea. So instead of a product, right, you're generating an idea that is the product that scholars put out into the world. It is the ability to generate ideas with very limited resources while navigating an environment of high uncertainty. And that is really the way entrepreneurs go about their work. I think there's this idea that, oh, entrepreneurship, people wanna make money and so they come up with a product. But oftentimes, what ends up happening is someone sees that there's a solution to a problem, and then it becomes an entrepreneurial venture. Ilana: And I wanna be really clear that when I say and use the term entrepreneurship, I am not talking about trying to monetize our ideas. And I'm not talking about any sort of like academic capitalism because I think that's where I think people get hung up on the word. And I make a distinction in the book about sort of good business practices, which are often around management, but entrepreneurialism isn't about good management, right? Ilana: That's about efficiency and having good systems in place and that stuff is important. But entrepreneurial thinking is really about, I'll say it again, being able to generate something new like an idea with very limited resources while navigating an environment of high uncertainty. Vikki: So good. And I was particularly excited to see your background 'cause one of the things that I see amongst my PhD student and even academic clients is this belief that entrepreneurialism in its sort of more traditional sense is the kind of realm of the engineers and the scientists and things. And often my humanities and social science and arts students a bit like the world doesn't care what I'm doing. I'm doing this little niche thing, nobody cares. I think it's interesting, but that's not always enough to keep me going on a gray Monday afternoon like it is here and to have somebody who comes from the sort of academic background that you come from talking about entrepreneurialism, I thought was just a really, was a really eye-opening. Vikki: And obviously, you say in the book that the people you speak to go across a range of disciplines, but they skew that way because they're the people that you are in your community's. I wonder if you explain a little more about, about that. Ilana: Yeah, so this book is based not only on my own experience, but also interviews with about 45 people from a range of backgrounds and institutions, so I would say the vast majority are still in academia, but they were people who I got to, when I put out calls and I said, who do you think of as entrepreneurial in their work? And so some of these people got nominated and some of them are people who I also think of as being entrepreneurial, although they themselves wouldn't necessarily have used that word. Ilana: And then I also talked to some people who either left academia to pursue some sort of entrepreneurial venture or never were in academia, but are entrepreneurs in other ways, because I wanted to really try to understand some of those mindsets and dispositions that help them do their work but certainly my own background having worked in a couple of startups and then in the business world, and my own lived experience. I immigrated to the United States and my parents were very entrepreneurial , that also helped me inform, uh, this book. Vikki: I love it. And honestly just for the, I mean the stuff that you put in it is amazing, but then having all of those interesting people giving their little pearls, I found myself just writing down, look up so-and-so, look up so-and-so look up So andSo as I was reading, 'cause there were so many bits. I did also spot friend of the podcast, Alison Miller, who has been on talking about academic writing before. So I was like, oh, I know her. Ilana: Yeah. That's exciting. That's always lot of fun. Vikki: So I wanna know how this goes down with academics. When you tell academics that they should be more entrepreneurial or that they might benefit, let's avoid the word should, they might benefit from being more entrepreneurial. How is that generally received? Are they excited or does it feel like another thing they've gotta be good at or Yeah, what do people think? Ilana: Yeah, it's a little too soon to tell 'cause the book hasn't come out. So I don't actually know what kind of reactions it's going to yield. When I did the op-ed you know, I think most people at first don't recognize that they think in entrepreneurial ways and so if they're willing to sort of like go past the idea of, oh, entrepreneurship is icky, entrepreneurship is about making money, entrepreneurship is about, sort of Silicon Valley and all the things we might hate about it, if they're willing to look past it and really, uh, reflect on what I mean by it, they can see how they can embrace that in their own work. Ilana: And I think one of the key things that I want people to take away from this book is that I want people to reclaim their sense of autonomy and see themselves as having more agency in their work. I know you talk about the idea of being your own boss, and I talk a lot about that too because one of the things that I noticed is like people lose a lot of their sense of agency while they're doctoral students. And I can understand why that happens, right? You come in and you're basically working with your advisor and all these other brilliant people and you're at the bottom of the totem pole and you feel like you have nothing to offer 'cause everybody else has already come up with an next great idea. Ilana: But there's something about academia, you know, that beats that agency out of you and that excitement out of you and makes you feel completely at the whim of the system. And the system of graduate education is not working particularly well, at least here in the United States. And there's a lot of challenges with it. But like we can't keep bemoaning the system. We gotta work with what we already have. And so I'm trying to get people to reclaim their sense of agency in a system that's broken. And I think if they're willing to hear that, that can feel really empowering. Vikki: Yeah. Definitely. My clients are often torn between wanting to be independent and being told they need to be independent but at the same time feeling as though there's a right answer that their advisor or supervisor wants to get them to. And so they find it often very difficult and quite scary to put their ideas out there. And so I think creating an environment where that's exactly what they're doing and what they're intended to be doing is amazing. I loved there was a section you had with, um, Sophie von, am I saying that right? Um. I was a professor of education who was talking about seeing all the things you do as a graduate student or as an academic, as a re, as a opportunity to learn rather than as just another thing to do. Vikki: So I'm gonna write this in order to learn how to do that, and I'm gonna go to that conference in order to learn this stuff. Rather than that kind of tick box exercise that often people are like, oh, I need one of them to pass. I need one of them to graduate. I need that for my cv. I really like that idea of grabbing autonomy over your career and your learning and grabbing those opportunities. Ilana: Yeah, absolutely. One of the key things that I try to convey in the book, and this was something I didn't understand going into the PhD program to be honest, there was a lot that I didn't understand about the whole enterprise. I didn't have any family members who had gotten doctorates and I was a little clueless, but one of the most sort of illuminating moments, and I talk a lot about this in throughout the book and including in the introduction, is that during my orientation when I got to Stanford, one of the speakers, Eamonn Callan, who's a philosopher of education, he said, your job is no longer to be a consumer of information. It is now your job to be a producer of knowledge. And I think for me, that very simple advice changed my entire relationship with academia and the educational enterprise because it was true, Mike, my whole life, I'd been asked to be really good at consuming information and regurgitating back what I learned. Ilana: And I actually, to be honest, was never particularly good at that. And I was not really that intellectually curious. I did all the stuff that you're supposed to do through high school and in college, but it was always about like checking the boxes. And actually after college I said I never wanna like be in an academic setting ever again. Ilana: It's very ironic that I ended up as a professor, but when I started my doctorate and I realized like, oh, I am no longer actually being evaluated on my ability to regurgitate information. In fact, no one is ever gonna look up my grades again. And now everything that I do is for the purpose of my own curiosity and figuring out the answer to a problem or a puzzle that I have, and I get to determine what that problem or puzzle is, how I wanna solve it, when I wanna work on it, and how I wanna put it out there in the world. And I think that was so liberating for me to view myself in that way. I mean, like, I get to play detective all day long, that's my job. Ilana: And then I get to write about it and tell people what I learned. It's super liberating. But I think you need to really, uh, sort of see yourself as agentic in that process and not do things like just check the boxes. In fact, if I had just checked the boxes, I would've never taken that class on public scholarship and I wouldn't have taken a bunch of, I audited so many classes, I was like, I'm at this university and I just get to do this for free. Ilana: Like, why not? So I really took advantage. I took classes in improv and in public speaking and things that weren't directly related, but have helped me in so many ways. But you gotta take agency over the journey. Vikki: I've written, remember one of the bits you noted that you found that really liberating, but that many of the people around you found it quite scary. So if listeners are thinking, you know, oh yeah, but that sounds exciting, but that sounds terrifying too. What would you say to them? Ilana: I think the reason it's terrifying is like, let's think about the person who often ends up in a PhD program. There are people who have been so good at school their entire life, like they've really , figured out how to do what in sociology of education, the three Rs of the hidden curriculum of schooling, the rules, the routines, and the regulation. Ilana: And they've done it so well and they're like experts in schooling. Those are the people who end up in PhD programs quite often, right? That they're so good at it, that they're like, oh, I should go pro. And actually being a pro at schooling doesn't translate well in academia necessarily because you have to have a lot more agency in the process than you had before. Ilana: And you have to be willing to chart your own path, to network with other people to ask for help. And another thing, this asking for help piece is really difficult because if you're a person who's been like a pro student and have like figured it out and gotten to the top of the game, it's really hard to ask for help. Ilana: And it's also really hard to feel like you aren't the expert anymore, right? That you aren't the best in the room. Now there's all these other people who are better at sort of school than you are. They know more than you and it's very humbling. And it's also debilitating. And so I think for a lot of people sort of losing that structure of schooling. Ilana: And I think in the US because we have these couple of years of coursework and we have the comps or some version of that, there are these couple of years where there is a script. And then the script gets taken away. And that is the moment when I think things fall apart for a lot of people and for me, because I never really liked the script of school, script of schooling I was like, this is awesome. I was just like in a playground. Vikki: Yeah. I empathize with that a lot. My mom has a running joke that I've been telling people what they should do since I was a child and that it gets less obnoxious as I actually know stuff. But as a child it was pretty awful when I was telling everyone what to do, now slightly better. Vikki: Um. So, but what, what do they do? I'm gonna push you back though on Yeah. What do they do? Those, those, so if listeners to this are going, I think that's me. I think I'm a people pleaser. I'm someone who's, I learned how to tick the boxes, how to prepare for exams, how to, you know, hit all the mark schemes and everything. And now I don't know, what if that's me, what do I do? How do I develop these entrepreneurial skills that you talk about? Ilana: Yeah. So one thing I think is really important is to view scholarship as a community sport. And I think in the humanities, particularly, this is challenging because a lot of humanities folks do very independent work. They do solo authored monographs. Whereas in the social sciences, at least in sociology, I can co-author a lot of things. And so if you are listening and you're like, oh, well I can't sort of collaborate with people in my actual scholarship, you can actually collaborate with people in things that aren't necessarily your writing. Ilana: So thinking of scholarship as a community sport means really thinking like ex maximally about who was in your network and trying to grow that network. So I'll give you an example. Like when I got to Stanford, I have an amazing advisor, and I was really grateful for all of his guidance and feedback along the way, but you know, there were things that he was really fantastic at and knew a lot about and could give me direction in a lot of things. But then there were things that he was more limited in. And so I never viewed him as sort of like the sole person who was helping me. And I developed a network of both mentors and collaborators who have been really pivotal. Ilana: And so one of those people, for example, was Professor Lee Schulman, who just recently passed away, but he had been at Stanford for a long time. He was an emeritus professor, but he came to campus on a regular basis and I happened to meet him, actually through synagogue, and I was really interested in his work and he was very invested in the doctoral students at Stanford who were interested in the intersection of education and Jewish studies because it was something he was personally interested in. Ilana: And he was like, you know, I'm happy to meet with you. And most people would be like, oh, that's so nice that he said that. I'm not actually gonna take him up on that. And I totally took him up on that. You're like, I'm, I was like, here. I'm like, and we started having coffee. He loved when people would come to his office and he had this espresso machine and he would make, you know, me a cute little coffee and we would sit and really like my dissertation idea and the data that I have all came out as a result of one of the meetings that I had. What happened was we were just chatting and he would tell me a lot of stories and he happened to mention that he was going to a meeting at a local foundation to talk about some research. And I said, wow, I'd love to be a fly on the wall at that meeting. And he was like, oh, lemme see what I can do. And two days later, you know, he emails me and he's like, I got you a seat at the table. Come Vikki: amazing. Ilana: And so I show up and it's this amazing room of scholars and some funders. And one of the people who I ended up meeting was this guy at Notre Dame, professor Chris Smith, who was talking about this data set called the National Study of Youth and Religion. Ilana: I had never heard about this data set and he mentioned, he was like, oh, he's like, we did this big study, we followed a nationally representative sample of teens in the United States for a 10 year period. And we have this over sample of Jews. And we hired, um, as sort of someone to do something with those data. Ilana: And nothing ca really came of it. So if anyone in the room knows of any doctoral students who need a good underutilized data set, they should reach out to me. And I was like, uh, hello me. And so right away I reach out to Chris and I was like, I really would love to have that data. And this, this fundamentally changed the entire trajectory of my PhD. Ilana: I then got access to those data. They were incredibly willing to share it. And I ended up doing a dissertation that I hadn't even sort of thought about, all because I put out a lot of ideas and sort of questions out into the world, and a lot of like, relationships out into the world. Ilana: And one of the things about being entrepreneurial is like, you never know what's gonna stick and what it's gonna yield. And I think one of my biggest pieces of advice for people is like, you can think of yourself as like, you're, you're in charge of making dinner tonight, right? Ilana: And so you might pull out a recipe and say like, here's X, Y, Z ingredients and I'm going to make this particular recipe. And some of us view our research in that way. I'm gonna follow x, y, Z steps and I'm gonna get to something. And I view it differently. I view research as a, a much more sort of uncertain enterprise. And so I'll say, oh, I need to make dinner tonight. Here's X, Y, Z ingredients in my pantry. Let's see what I can make out of this. And I actually don't know what the final product is gonna be. And I encourage people to sort of think of the work that they're doing as having this uncertainty and leaning into that uncertainty because there are sort of surprises that come along in that process that yield really, really, um, unexpected and often great things. Ilana: And if we plan too much and then there's failure or something goes awry, we kind of fall apart. But if you know that there's gonna be failure, like, and you know, there things are gonna fall apart, and then you can sort of work with the surprises that come along the way, you're probably gonna be more successful because you'll have less of a crisis when things do fall apart. Vikki: Yeah, and that was one of my the favorite parts of my book actually. So for the listeners, the book's kind of divided into four big chunks, isn't it? I think of different kind of qualities and one of the areas was navigating uncertainty. And it's something that I really see my clients struggle with a lot. Vikki: The kind of, I don't want to waste time doing things that don't work out. There's this real sort of false sense of efficiency that if you know what you need to read in advance, then you know how long it's going to take. You'll be able to work your way through that. If you know what you are writing, you'll only read the things you need to read in order to write that. And I really en enjoyed that section, how it sort of turned on its head, that actually uncertainty is what's gonna lead us to something interesting. Ilana: Right. Um, absolutely. And I think another thing listeners can ask themselves is, is to navigate this uncertainty, you need to really ask yourself, okay, who am I? What do I know and who do I know? And what I mean by that is like sometimes. We have, um, we can lean into sort of skills that we have and look to other people to help us with skills we don't have. So let me give you an example. When I ask myself, like, okay, well who am I? What do I know and who do I know? Let me focus on the, what do I know? So for example, I am a mixed methods researcher. I do both quantitative and qualitative analysis. I can work with big surveys, data sets, as well as with qualitative interviews. But I am not the best quantitative social scientist out there by far. I can certainly understand all this stuff. I can do a lot of the basics, but it's not it's not something that is my strongest suit. And so I collaborate with people for whom that is their strong suit. And as a result, I'm able to put out publications and put out ideas into the world that I couldn't have generated myself. And it would take me, I'm like pretty strategic in thinking about like, well, it would take me x amount of time to figure this out on my own and maybe that's a good use of my time right now. Ilana: Or maybe I collaborate with such and such person who really has a strength in that. And then together, right, we can put out something into the world that's faster and better than either one of us could do alone. Right. 'cause you also have to think about like, who do I know, who are the people who might have this area of expertise? Um, I'll give one other example of sort of how to think about that question of like, who am I? What do I know and who do I know? You might, have an idea that you wanna put out into the world. And I talk a lot in the book about the importance of putting our ideas out there early and often, and not waiting until like we're into it six years and then feel so good about it that we feel like we can share. And I know that is advice that some people disagree with because I think the earlier you put ideas out there, the more feedback you can get from people and it helps you clarify in your own mind what's interesting and what's not , but eventually, let's say you wanna share it, and let's say you're a doctoral student right now, and you're like, well, I'm not gonna get into, you know, the Guardian or the New York Times or whatever publication, right? Ilana: And that's totally legit. Like you probably won't, but maybe you could get into your local newspaper or maybe your graduate school can cover your research. So it's helpful to think about like, okay, well who do I know sort of within my domain, who might be interested in putting this research out? Ilana: Maybe they put it out on their blog or like early on when I was in grad school, I was talking with someone at the sort of Stanford communications office and I was telling them about my research and they were like, oh, that sounds so interesting. Like, we'd love to write something about it. And that was actually like the first piece of media coverage I ever got. Ilana: And you have to be willing to be a little bit wrong and to put yourself out there, like you have to know that if you put something out there, you have to be willing to have people critique it and engage with your ideas. And you have to be willing to say like, oh, actually I was a little bit wrong on that. Because no scholarship is perfect and sort of being, being willing to change your ideas is a very important part of this mindset. Vikki: Yeah, definitely. And I think one of the things we often talk about with my clients is what you make particular things that happen to you mean about you. And one of the things that I loved in the book was you talked about how if your intention is to look smart, then you are gonna delay putting stuff out there. You're gonna delay until you are absolutely sure, you are definitely right. But if your goal is to move an idea forward and find out interesting things, then if someone's got a reason your idea's bad, let's find it out now and move on and change it and tweak it and get it to something that's actually gonna work rather than this kind of trying to protect your sense of self, I guess your, the sense of your own ability, Ilana: right? You have to sort of figure out what is the, the moment at which you feel like your idea is solid enough and you have enough evidence to back up your idea that you can put it out there. Like, I certainly wouldn't suggest doing this, you know, in the very nascent stages. At the very nascent stages, you should be work shopping your idea within circles within your institution, who you really trust and with people you really trust. Ilana: But once you have enough out there, it may not be a perfect story. And only you can sort of figure out for yourself whether it's ready to go out in the world. But there's this children's book, I don't know if you guys have it in the uk. It's called Like, what do You Do With An Idea? It's the same author who wrote, what do you Do With a Problem? It's this great children's book where basically like this little kid, this is the one that's, what do you do with an idea? He has an idea and at first it's like really, really small, but it's like he feels this like emotion about it. Ilana: Like he's excited about it, but he's also a little nervous about it. He doesn't know if he should share his idea with other people because he doesn't wanna get critiqued or he doesn't want other people to say it's bad. And over time, this book, this idea kind of grows and he's nurturing it and he feeds it. Ilana: The book says, and he plays with it. And I love this sort of analogy, this idea of like feeding your idea and playing with your idea. Because eventually the character in that book puts is, that feels good enough about their, that they've nurtured their ideas so much that they're ready and confident enough to put it out in the world and know that they're gonna be willing to withstand the critique that it might, or the reactions that it might yield. Um, but yeah, you have to nurture your idea. You have to play with your idea. You have to sort of marinate on your idea. And, um, and I think with that then there's, this comes this moment which you're like, okay, I'm ready. I'm ready to put this out into the world in some maybe even very small way. Yeah. Vikki: And I'm not sure whether this episode will have come out by the time yours comes out. I think it will. I talked recently with Tony Stubblebine who is the CEO of Medium, and he was talking about academics writing for Medium , and that blogging site being an outlet for these sorts of things. So if you are interested in this, listeners, then make sure you check out that episode too. Ilana: And I would say that the process of writing is actually really important. Mm-hmm. Because even if you're like, well, no one's gonna read it, it's fine. It's okay if nobody reads it because you have gone through the exercise of actually articulating your ideas in a way that is accessible to a public audience. Ilana: And that is one of the key skills like. One of the things that I learned from Sam Wineburg, one of the first exercises he had us do in that public writing class, he said, write a letter to a family friend or a family member , who's not an expert in your field, but you know, has a sort of a, a college degree, right? Ilana: And explain your idea and your research to them. And it was remarkable how difficult this was for people to not use the academic jargon to sort of start from a place where everybody can understand what you're doing and so just the like actual simple act of explaining something can be incredibly clarifying in your own mind. Vikki: Yeah, absolutely. So going back a few years now, but when I was still an academic, there's a scheme in the UK run by the British Association, which is for academics to be media fellows. So you spend a month or six weeks working with a media organization as a science journalist. Mm-hmm. So you full on leave behind your university. Vikki: I went to Dublin in Ireland, to work for the Irish Times for a month as a, as a science journalist, writing on everything. So a few bits to do with my topic, but mostly everything else I was writing ridiculous amounts. And that that skill of being able to take something complex that until you spoke to that scientist you didn't even know anything about, and now you've gotta turn it into something that's digestible and interesting for readers of a newspaper is fascinating. I was taking so many notes when I read this book, the one one bit that was in the disseminating your ideas section that was just so fascinating. Vikki: You are gonna be able to correct me on pronunciation again. But David Labaree, I believe was his name. Uhhuh. Yeah. He was talking about how, now I'm actually gonna quote this 'cause I loved it so much. One way to keep your neurotic self-doubt under control is to bear in mind an important guiding principle for good writing. You are under no obligation to provide a perfectly uncontestable story. And then I believe he went on to say, the confidence to write isn't the same thing as the confidence that your analysis is completely rock solid. And I just. I thought that was so freeing. 'cause so many of the people that I work with are desperately trying to make sure that everything they write is completely unrefutable so that their supervisors don't criticize them, so their examiners don't criticize 'em, so that the academic world at large don't, and I thought that notion that it needs to be defensible, but doesn't have to be irrefutable, I thought was just so freeing. Ilana: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, uh, David Labaree is one of my mentors and certainly my own mentality is very much shaped by his attitude. And, look, there's so much self doubt, and it's really hard to take that advice, I encourage people to find really small ways of being able to do that. And when I say like, you never know what, what you put out and what it's gonna yield in the world, like, here's another example of something that was totally unexpected that happened to me. Ilana: I had been running a multi-year study at Stanford about, um, looking at students who identify as racial, ethnic, and religious, uh, minority students. And at some point I felt like I had enough data. We weren't finished with data collection, but I felt like I had enough data to make an argument, about the way in which an elite university, might be contributing to religious polarization in this country. Ilana: And I wrote this op-ed and I, it's, I think it's an inside higher ed. I think it's called, like how universities contribute to religious polarization or something like that. And I put it out there, it got published, and then I ended up being asked to be a speaker for the Heterodox Academy. Ilana: And then a foundation contacted me and asked me to review a bunch of like, grants. Like all sorts of stuff ended up coming out of this and the thing about thinking entrepreneurially is like, you, you just don't know what something is gonna yield. And I think that there's an excitement to that, that I hope people can embrace. Vikki: Yeah, definitely. Now I have a, the flip side of that to ask though, because there will be some people listening for whom this all sounds exciting and interesting, but a little bit terrifying. A little bit like they, we've talked about them a little bit, but I also know partly 'cause I was one, but partly because I've supervised them, partly because I work with some now, there are the students who want to do everything and so this is like music their ears, right? Vikki: They wanna write for this and write for that and be involved in all the, you know, have the side hustles that you talk about in one of the sections, have all of that stuff. How do you strike the balance between what is the kind of, I'm gonna say right amount, obviously there's no, yeah. What is an appropriate amount of throwing stuff out there versus taking on too much? Vikki: 'cause I've certainly had students in the past where they were doing so many other things, I was a little bit in the background kind of going, um, you you have got a thesis. Yeah, we a thesis there. We should do that too. So how do you help people to kind of find, if they're at the kind of, I don't wanna say too entrepreneurial, but if they're at that end of things, how do you help people find that balance? Ilana: That's a really great question, and you're right, a very valid point that sometimes it's easy to go off in so many directions. And I remember when I was writing op-ed, some of my, um, friends were like, oh my God, you've spent like 20 hours on this. Is this really good use of your time? And at first I was like, yes, this is a good use of my time. Ilana: And I think I got to a point, I don't remember how many hours I had sort of poured into it, but I could tell in my mind that like it needed a break. So you do have to be really strategic about how you use your time and it's hard to give very specific guidance on it, but you have to be able to calibrate like when the stuff that you're doing is actually advancing your networks and advancing your scholarship and advancing sort of your teaching. Like is it advancing your work or are you stuck and sort of spinning your wheels? And maybe it just needs a pause, and maybe you come back to it. Like, I think a thing to know is, you can always come back to something. Ilana: Um, but like, I'll give you an example. Okay. I, of how I, I thought about sort of how do I strategically go about things when I was a doctoral student so that I wasn't spreading myself too thin, but I also was gaining different kinds of experience. So, , at one point I was probably in like my fourth or fifth year, uh, and I realized that I didn't really have any teaching experience because it, the way my doctoral program was structured was that we got funding, but it was to do a research assistantship, not a teaching assistantship. And I was like trying to get ready to go on the job market and I had no teaching background, which was ironic 'cause I went to a school of education and I learned by going to some workshop that like you have to be an instructor of record for it to be taken seriously, especially at more teaching focused and liberal arts universities. Ilana: And I was like, okay, got it. How do I make that happen? The first thing I did was like, I became a TA but that didn't feel satisfactory to me 'cause I wasn't their instructor of record. So then I was kind of like talking with people about this and I didn't really know what to do about it. Ilana: And then one day I got an email from a classmate of mine who had gone to church and struck up a conversation with a department chair at a local community college in a sociology department. And he was, he asked her, he was like, do you know anybody who could teach a sociology class? And she was like, oh, say that. Ilana: And she thought me. And so she emails me, she's like, do you have any interest in teaching a sociology class at the community college down the street? And I was like, oh my gosh, this could be a way to get that teaching experience that I want. But I also, first of all, when I told a couple of faculty members that I was thinking about this, they were like that's a terrible idea. Whatever you do, do not do that because it will take you away from the actual research that you are supposed to be doing. And so I sat with that information and then I also knew it was gonna be a lot of time. And so ultimately what I decided to do was like I was gonna teach this class despite what my, some of my advisors were saying, and the reason I wanted to do it was not just like so I could have this teaching experience, but because I wanted to be able to actually practice saying out loud the concepts of sociology that I was writing about and learning about because I knew it would help cement them and sort of clarify them in my own head. Ilana: And also I was, training as a sociologist of education and the kinds of students who actually go to this community college are precisely the kinds of students who I write about, right? They're first gen, low income students who are often like parents and working multiple jobs. And I was like, if I really wanna write about this population, I should actually interact with them because most of them are not hanging out on the Stanford campus. Ilana: But the way in which I thought about doing it strategically was like. I found a colleague who wanted to also get the same kind of experience and we basically came up with the idea that we were gonna pitch to the community college and we were gonna split the class. Meaning that I would teach half of it and she would teach half of it and we would split the pay. Ilana: But that way we both became the professors of record and we only had half of the work. And so, and in that way, and also a lot of that teaching that I did was at night. Um, and so at night I wasn't gonna be working on my research anyway 'cause I had kids and that like wasn't how I was gonna spend my nights. Ilana: And so luckily my, you know, my husband was willing to take on the extra childcare, um, for me to be able to do this. And it was a great decision. I learned a ton in the process. One of them became my letter writers for when I went on the job market, which was really helpful. And so there was this strategic thinking about like, mm-hmm, okay, you have to think about the cost benefit analysis, right? Like, how much am I time am I putting into this? What am, what is, what is it detracting from? What could I get out of it? How might I be able to think creatively about how to minimize the work, or make the work strategic? And that's the kind of thinking I would encourage for your listeners as well. Vikki: Yeah, I love that. And I love how if you are clear about why you're doing something and what you're trying to get out of it, you can then make those decisions in that strategic way. Because like I could imagine students who, if their supervisors say, no, you shouldn't do this, going, okay, you are right. I'll stick to researching. But I can equally imagine people who say, well, I want to, so I'm going to, but then do it, do the whole thing, do it as fast as possible because I mustn't spend too much time on this. Do it in a kind of stressed way because my supervisor doesn't think I should be doing this really. Vikki: So I just need to get it done and dah, dah, dah, and then not get out of it any of the things that you talk about, like the, the benefits of doing these things. So I loved the way you were really clear on you partly wanted it so that you had that thing on your cv. I'm instructor of record, but also so that you were developing those skills as well, but also recognizing you didn't need the whole thing in order to do either of those things. Vikki: So I think being really clear on why you are doing it and what your, what skills, not what outcomes necessarily. 'cause we don't always know the outcomes, but what skills you're trying to get out of it can really help you to plan that strategically. Ilana: Right, absolutely. And um, first of all, also I got paid to do that, which was also very helpful for me at the time , but it is true, and I've seen this happen a lot, where people spread themselves too thin and then they don't get their, their actual research done. So my biggest piece of advice, is like the motivation to write comes from feeling like you have something important to say. And if you don't feel like you have something important to say, you're never gonna get that research finished ever. Ilana: It doesn't matter how many p Pomodoro writers, uh, timers you set and how early you wake up, like there's a lot of the technical skills that you really need in place, but you also fundamentally, and this is like an existential problem, you need to think that what you have to say is important. And so when you're thinking about like, well, how do I sort of do all these things while also maintaining my research? Ilana: Like, you need to think that your research is really important and all those other things are helping you, but you gotta stay focused on the research as well. Um, but I, there's also a point at which, like, if you spend several hours on your research a day, there's a point at which there's diminishing point of returns and it's better for you to do something else. Ilana: So like I remember, one of the best things I ever did was like, there was a happy hour happening when I was a grad student and I wasn't gonna go because I was like, I should sit in my office and fi, you know, it was five o'clock. I was like, I should sit and try to like bang out another hour of data analysis. Ilana: And then I was like, you know what? There's free food upstairs. I should just go. And, you know what happened at that meeting? I ended up meeting another faculty member who I had never met. There was no strategic intention there at all. It just was like happening. I happened to tell her about my research and I said I was on the job market and that I was having a hard time. It was like a very friendly conversation. And then about six months later, I, it was graduation and I didn't have a job. Like I had no job lined up when I was graduating. I had cobbled together because I'm a pretty entrepreneurial, a consulting gig and some other, and I finagled away to like, stay on Stanford's campus enrolled as a student, but I did not have like a postdoc or a faculty position. Ilana: And, after I, you know, did my walk across the stage and then it was like the, the CE celebration, she comes up to me, her name was Denise Pope, and she said, Hey, Ilana, she's like. Do I recall that you're still looking for a job? And I was like, yes. And she's like, oh. She's like, I think I just found you a postdoc on campus. Ilana: And I was like, you're kidding. And lo and behold, um, the Stanford Center on Longevity was looking for a postdoc of somebody who studied education and did work across the life course. And three days later, Vikki, I had a very amazing postdoc that basically like fell into my lap because I took that time to go to this happy hour to talk to other people. Ilana: And like in retrospect, thank God I didn't spend that extra hour doing my data analysis. So there are times when, and it's, again, it's hard to predict which things will have payoff and which ones won't. But you just like have to put yourself and your ideas and everything out into the world and see what happens. Vikki: I love that and what an amazing place to finish. I would say thank you so much for coming on, Ilana. I really appreciate it. I'm so inspired. I've got all my notes. There are various things that I want to look up to read that you reference and things in the book that, so I've got so much outta this book, so if people are interested, as I'm sure they will be, remind people of the name of the book, where they can find it, where they can find out more about you. Ilana: Absolutely. So the name of the book is The Entrepreneurial Scholar, and the subtitle is A New Mindset for Success in Academia and Beyond. It's intentional that this book is not just about people who are trying to stay in academia, but are recognizing the reality that most people, given the job market right now, aren't gonna stay in academia and it's published by Princeton University Press in their Skills for Scholars series. And this is a really great series. If your listeners don't know about it, this is a series of books that are really related to kind of like professional development. And they're very short. They're like 40 to 50,000 words. Ilana: You could read them in a couple of hours. And there's great books about creating a syllabus and writing a book proposal and leaving academia and sort of the hidden curriculum of graduate school. So I really encourage people to look at all those books in that series. Skills for Scholars. And if you wanna learn more about me, you can go to my website. Ilana: It's www.Ilanahorowitz.com. My last name has just one "O", so it's Ilana I-L-A-N-A-H-O-R-W-I-T z.com. Or you can just Google Ilana Horowitz Tulane. And I will share a coupon code with you for this book, um, so that your listeners can get, I think it's 30% off and feel free to reach out to me anytime. I love to hear from listeners. Vikki: Amazing. Thank you so much. And listeners, keep a ear out 'cause it is possible I might be interviewing some of the other authors from this series as well. I'm super excited. It's an amazing series. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Thank you everyone for listening, and I will see you next week.

< If you are bored of being told “just do your best” and not knowing what that means, then this is the episode for you. We are gonna talk today about why you shouldn't be trying to do your best all the time, what the problems are if you do try and do your best all the time, and most importantly, what you should do instead. Links I refer to in this episode Why perfect plans fail Client Q&A – getting it done when you don’t feel like it Transcript If you have been told, don't worry. Just do your best. It'll be okay as long as you do your best and you feel like you have been absolutely trying to do your best, and it is absolutely not feeling like it's okay. Then you are in absolutely the right place. We are gonna talk today about why you shouldn't be trying to do your best all the time, what the problems are if you do try and do your best all the time, and most importantly, what you should do instead. Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. I'm Dr. Vikki Wright, your coach here for any PhD students or academics who want this all to feel a little bit easier and a little bit more fun. There's a real virtuousness around doing your best. You know, ever since we were kids, don't worry how you get on in the test. Just do your best. What does that mean? I don't know what that means, but if you did your best, then people will be kind to you. You can be kind to yourself, except somehow it just doesn't work like that, right? We end up with these weird definitions of what doing your best even means and means we get praised for getting high marks when we didn't try that hard or we get praised for working really hard and burning ourselves out in a way that's not particularly helpful. And I want us to question this. I want us to ban the phrase, just do your best. There's no, just about it. Just implies it's easy. Whereas our best should be like challenging. And if we don't know what it means, then it's a pointless thing to say. Delete it. Delete it from your brain. And today I'm gonna explain exactly why that is and what we're gonna think instead. The first thing, and probably the most important is it's completely undefinable. ,What do we even mean by doing your best? Is it do the best work you could ever do, given unlimited resources, unlimited time, all the support in the world? Is that best? How are we gonna be doing that all the time? Is it best within the constraints of this specific context? How do we know what that is? How are we even choosing what we mean by our best? What does our best mean if we're unwell? Are we using the same definition of best as we were when we were well? Or are we gonna define a new version of best? What if we're doing a new task that we haven't done before? What does our best look like? The first problem with doing our best as a goal, as a kind of reassurance is it's a completely moving target, and therefore we never know if we've done it, and we never know what we're aiming for. That leads to the second problem. The second problem is that if we never know what our best was, if we don't have a clear definition of that, then afterwards if we didn't get the result we wanted, let's say, you know, we submitted to a journal and it got paper got rejected, or something like that. How do I know we did our best? It leaves so much space to come back afterwards and be like, oh, maybe I didn't do my best. Maybe I should have pushed a bit harder. Maybe I should have started earlier. Maybe I should have spoken more to people. Maybe I could have done a bestier version of best because it's so vague, it's so ill-defined, we don't know if we've done it, and therefore it's impossible to reassure ourselves from that perspective. It reminds me a little bit of doing VO two max test. So if you're not a sports scientist like me, you might not know what that is, but they're these maximal tests where you get put on a bike or a treadmill or something and it gets incrementally harder and harder and you have to keep up with it until you physically can't anymore and they're measuring your oxygen uptake and all this kind of stuff. We do these in sports science degrees, they do them to test athletes and stuff. So we used to have to participate in them in the lab, and they always say, you just gotta go for as long as you can go. And afterwards, the awful thing with a VOT max test is it feels horrific. You feel like you're gonna vomit while you're doing it, and then within two minutes of recovering, you get your breath back, and you're like, oh, I reckon I could have done another 30 seconds every single time, even though you thought you were doing your best. When you come out of it, the other side, you're like, yeah, maybe I could have pushed a little harder. Maybe I could have just stretched out a little more at the end there. And the same is true with your task. If we don't have a clear definition of what our best even means, then afterwards we can still always beat ourselves up for not having done enough of our best. The third downside that I wanna raise with you is that always believing you need to do your best makes it really hard to experiment with things that you don't know. Okay? I'm gonna give you another sporting analogy. I used to do gymnastics, and I remember one girl, a lovely girl that I used to train with when I was at university. She would only do moves that she could do. Always, and she was already doing them beautifully. So it wasn't even like she was perfecting them. But she would only do moves that she could do. And it was because she felt stupid if she didn't moves that she couldn't do. And it's like fair play. You're an adult doing gymnastics. You can do whatever you wanna do. Right? But she didn't make anywhere near as much progress as everybody else because she wanted to be able to do her best in a move. And that for her meant doing the moves she's best at. Whereas I'm over there crashing out of everything, right, and learning all these new things, and none of them were as beautiful as hers, but I was throwing myself in enthusiastically and trying different things out because I wasn't worried about doing my best. I was there to learn to do cool stuff. When we tell ourselves we have to do our best, we avoid things that make us feel like we're not at our best while doing them. We don't take risks about how to do something in case it turns out that that wasn't the best way to do it. Always wanting to do your best is an incredibly conservative way of expressing yourself. It sounds dead ambitious, right? It sounds like, oh, I'm doing my best. I'm so good. But it often keeps you within your comfort zone so that you can always be comfortable that you are doing your best. And I, ironically, that means often we are not stretching ourselves into things that we can't yet do, but that we can learn. The fourth one is even worse. The fourth one is that trying to do our best can send us into paralyzing perfectionism where we don't do anything at all. All of us have had that issue where we've got a paper to write or a presentation to give, and we simply can't start it because we're so convinced it has to be really good. I will feel better tomorrow. I'll start when I've done more reading. I'll start when I know exactly what I'm doing. I'll start when I'm clear on my story. Telling yourself you have to your best on everything can take you to a place where you literally can't even start at all. The fifth one is that weirdly, sometimes telling yourself to do your best can actually lead to mediocrity, because if you've got quite a fixed idea of what you are capable of and what your best looks like, then sometimes you won't push yourself past that because your goal is just to do your best and you think that this is your best. There are times when actually setting yourself a more specific goal. There's a bunch of research done about this in like factories and productivity and all that kind of jazz that if you give people a specific goal to aim for, they end up doing better than if you just tell them to do their best. So we kind of have different extremes here, right? That sometimes telling yourself to do your best, if you are a very perfectionist person, you're a very ambitious person, you have high expectations, can lead to burnout and paralyzing perfectionism. And other times telling yourself to do your best, if you're somebody that's doesn't necessarily think that you're brilliant at things, sometimes telling yourself to just do your best. Actually keeps you trapped at a level that you could exceed with a little bit of support and a more ambitious target. Number six is it's completely implausible to do your best all the time. Even top athletes. Think of the sports people that you admire the most. They are not at their best all the time. They train to peak at competitions. They do not expect to be running world record times or to be at the absolute top of their game all the time. They have off seasons. They have on seasons. Within their on seasons, there are some things they're doing to the best of their ability, and there are other things that they're not doing at all. It is completely implausible to expect yourself to be at your best all day, every day for your entire PhD and academic career. It's just not realistic. No one. Does it So you are holding yourself to something that is just completely unachievable. Even if you set yourself, this is gonna be the best year ever, which I also think it's slightly problematic if we don't define it better. But let's say you do best year ever, it still doesn't mean you have to be at your best every single day. Best is not meant to be a steady state. Best is meant to be something that happens intermittently when you need it. Quick interjection. If you are finding today's session useful, but you are driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me. After you've finished go's, my website, pH life coach.com, sign up for my newsletter. We all know that. We listen to podcasts and we think, oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter's designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions, and you'll get one action that you can take immediately to start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's faces on my one-to-one coaching or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. My seventh reason is maybe controversial, but I stand by it and I think you should too, which is that not all tasks deserve your best. Okay. If you are somebody who is like eager to please, always worried that you're not quite good enough, that people are gonna realize you don't deserve to be there and all that kind of jazz. You might be trying to do your best at every single task you have. You might be trying to do your best research and doing your best writing, and being the best teacher, and being the best administrator, and being the most helpful colleague and being all these other things. And probably in your private life, you're also trying to be the best partner and the best parent and the best friend and the fittest person and the whatever else, right? Some tasks do not require you to be at your best. It is gonna be great for your health if sometimes you exercise when you are not going to be at your best, but you have a little walk anyway. There are other things that simply don't deserve your best. There are no prizes for fixing the fonts in a form that somebody has sent you. They don't deserve your best. They deserve to be filled in and returned. One thing that my members keep asking me for merchandise, they want t-shirts, they want stickers, they want all sorts of things. And one thing that I think we should get on a t-shirt is fit for purpose. You do not have to do your best at everything. You just have to do it in a way that is fit for purpose. Your PhD needs to be fit for purpose. Its purpose is to get you through the Viva and get you a qualification. It needs to be fit for purpose. If you can do other things too, where you get some publications, happy days, but it needs to be fit for purpose. Completing some pointless form about some course you went on or whatever needs to be fit for purpose, needs to be completed, needs to be handed in. That's all. It doesn't need to be beautiful. Doesn't need to be extensive. Certainly doesn't need the formatting. Fixed needs to be fit for purpose. Need to give a presentation needs to be fit for purpose. Not all tasks deserve your best. Not all tasks need your best. We get to save our best for the stuff that really matters. The eighth one is similar to that, but not all elements of any task deserve your best. So let's take that presentation example. It needs to be fit for purpose. So you need to decide, why am I doing this presentation? What's the point of it? Remember, there's different points, right? Sometimes presentation might be about sharing preliminary data to get feedback from people. Sometimes a presentation might be about sharing your final results with end users who might use it. Sometimes the presentation might be to get a job, okay? You need different things depending on what the purpose is. It needs to be fit for purpose, and within that different elements of it need your best, more or less. So if you are sharing preliminary results in order to get initial feedback, does it need to be your best analysis ever? No. It needs to be sufficient analysis to enable people to comment on it. Does it need to be the most beautiful slides ever? No. In fact, it's probably better if it's not the most beautiful slides ever. 'cause that's not the purpose of what you're doing. You are pulling together something that you can clearly share data with others so that they can comment on it. It doesn't need color coding, it doesn't need Google images, it doesn't need animations. It needs to be fit for purpose. You know, we, going back to forms. If you've got like progress review forms to fill in or something, some elements of that deserve whatever best efforts might mean, but deserve effort, right? Actually sharing what you've been doing, making a good case for why you've made sufficient progress. Great. Let's put our efforts into that. Does it matter if this is the most elegant language ever? Does it matter if you repeat the same word three times in a paragraph? Does it matter if the bullet points are all the same? No. Those things don't matter. So even within tasks where the overall task matters, some of the details don't matter. They don't deserve your best. Number nine is we have to remember that some bests are mutually exclusive. Let's take the example if you're interdisciplinary . I was right at the intersection between psychology, neuroendocrinology, and immunology, right? And so I knew stuff across all of those disciplines. Was I giving my best to psychology the way if I was a psychologist, oh, was I giving my best to immunology the way if I was an immunologist? No, the things were mutually exclusive. There was only so much time I had, so much effort I had and expecting to be able to give my best to all of these elements was just not realistic. If you've got responsibilities at home, then some fixed definition of what doing your best as a researcher means may be in contradiction to what your best as being a parent is. Expecting yourself to do your best in all domains of your life, in all tasks within a domain is completely unrealistic because sometimes these things are in direct contradiction to each other. You can't do your best at being the most focused academic there ever is and be the most available academic there ever was. The 10th reason is it's not even necessary to do your best at every element of it. To have an academic career, to succeed in an academic career. I've never met anybody who can do their best in all elements of their career. And most of the time, and I've talked about this on the podcast before, most of the time, your seniors, the people that wanna promote you, the people that wanna support you, will be encouraging you to focus a little more. If you are someone who tries to do your best across the board and burns yourself out because of it, you'll almost always receive the advice to focus more, to accept which things you're doing less well so that you can excel in some of them. And I found that really hard. I really wanted to be a balanced academic, as I called it, and I think you can do that to some extent, but it doesn't look like doing your best at absolutely everything. So what does it look like? What does it look like to be somebody who wants to succeed, who wants to show up as a version of themselves that they like, but who accepts that maybe this narrative of do your best, do your best is not helpful. Well. The most important element for me is to define what we actually mean by doing our best? What are the constraints we've got around that at the moment, and how much is this particular task worth? If we can get super specific about what doing our best looks like, it's a lot easier goal to actually aim for and hit, and it's much easier to know afterwards that you actually did do what you had defined as your best. So one way that I like to think about this is doing my best is putting in the amount of effort that this task is worth within the constraints of my other priorities. Okay, I'm gonna say that again. It's putting in the amount of effort that I think this task is worth within the constraints of my other priorities. That is very different than expecting a hundred percent from yourself across the board. If I don't think the task's important, then the amount of effort I'm gonna put into it is gonna be less, and I'm not gonna tell myself that I didn't do my best because my best was the amount of effort that task is worth, and I gave it as much as it's worth. Within the constraints of other priorities, I will put in my best to my business, for example, but not at the expense of my sleep, not at the expense of time with my family, not at the expense of not exercising. So I get to decide and you get to decide what are the constraints and what's the amount of effort that this thing is worth. And interestingly, this can also really help you to progress tasks because actually if you are telling yourself I have to do my best, I have to do my best. It's really easy to procrastinate 'cause if you feel like you're not on perfect form right now and you are not gonna do your best, then it's easy to convince yourself that what you should do is come back later. Right? When I can do this at my best. 'cause it's really important I do my best. Whereas if you have defined doing my best at this project as I'm gonna do 10 hours work on this over the next two weeks, and it's gonna have to get done. That's how much time it's worth. That's how much time I'm willing to give it. Then suddenly that becomes much more focused and instead of, I just need to do my best on it, you need to figure out, no, what am I gonna spend these 10 hours doing? What is the best way to spend those 10 hours? How can I get it from here to there within those 10 hours? Not how long will it take, but how am I gonna progress it as far as I can within the time I'm willing to give it? Suddenly you approach it much differently. You don't need to be at your best now. You need to do the work that you said it needed in order to be done, that you said it deserved, that you said you were willing to give it, given your other priorities and constraints. And that, my friends, is how we do our best at life as a whole, rather than telling ourselves we have to be our best all the time. We give tasks the amount of effort that they're worth within the constraints that we have, so that overall things aggregate out as the best version of the life we can have within the constraints we have at the moment. We have done our best on average. We have done our best, given our circumstances, we have done our best within the context of what we are willing to give and what these tasks need and deserve. Lemme know what you think. What do you get caught up on when you tell yourself you've gotta do your best? Where does it maybe help you? Where does it not help you? Let me know what you think of today's episode. If you are not already on my newsletter, please do join. That's how you get to message me. Join the newsletter. You can reply to any of my messages, um, and tell me what you think. Tell me how you are gonna implement these ideas in your life. Thank you all for listening, and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics time.

< Struggling to figure out your career path after your PhD? In this episode, David Mendes—host of the Beyond the Thesis podcast—shares expert tips on using networking to map out your job market early. Learn how to have strategic career conversations, explore industry roles, and avoid last-minute decision panic. This conversation offers practical steps PhD students can take to better understand their options and plan with confidence. Links I refer to in this episode Beyond the Thesis with Papa PhD (David’s podcast) Connect with David on LinkedIn David’s Skool.com link Transcript Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast and I have a guest with me again this week. Vikki: I am really excited to welcome David Mendes, who is better known to many of you, probably as Papa PhD and the host of Beyond Your Thesis podcast. So welcome, David, it is so fun to have you here. David: Well, thanks for having me. It's really a pleasure to be talking with you today, across the pond. Vikki: Yes, yes, absolutely. Always having to get my brain around time zones, which is not my strength, but we figured it out. David: We figured it out. Vikki: So today we're gonna be thinking about how to make career decisions, and particularly thinking about how networking can be a really useful way to make decisions about what you wanna do, not just something to be done at the last minute, but before we get going about that, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit more about you, how you got into what you're doing and what else you do other than your podcast. David: Yeah. I've been doing Beyond The Thesis, which at the beginning was just called Papa PhD, started in 2019. Just before Covid. Just before the pandemic. So this project of sharing people's career journeys after the PhD came up nine years after my defense. David: I defended in 2010, I did a PhD in cell biology and what happened in 2010 was that I wasn't ready, I wasn't ready to, you know, project myself professionally into anything that wasn't being in the lab and continuing to do cell biology. I, I wasn't ready, I hadn't had any particular training on it. David: I didn't know people, let's say in industry or in any other domains that weren't academia. And, and so this means that, you know, for that six months to a year after defending, uh, I was, you know, floundering, I was trying to leverage my like personal and family network, which was actually how I got my first like contracts, just after my PhD and eventually trying to to understand where people in the institute that I was were going, that was not academia. And then reaching out to them and doing that kind of organic networking. But it was all done in a sense of urgency. I wouldn't say panic, but some people may panic because, you know, they might be like me far away from their family, even their continent of origin. David: And they found out or they understood that they don't want to stay in academia and to continue that path, but they need to keep paying the bills. And so it's legitimate to be kind of panicking in a certain way. In any case, I ended up finding my path into a domain, which is medical writing. So through finding out where people who were in my institute were going, I ended up being able to find my first position there. But, what happened in the years after between 2010 and 2019 was that, uh, I started getting invitations to career panels. And so the thing that started happening was all the obstacles and all the difficulties that I thought, you know, in my little personal bubble belonged to me and, and were my responsibility or my fault, I was seeing that each year I was going to these career panels and young graduate students who were almost finishing, were sharing the same feelings that I had had at the end of my PhD. And that was kind of an aha moment for me that, oh, this was not just me. It's, there's kind of this systemic phenomenon where people are getting to the end of their graduate studies journey and are feeling lost, they lose their footing and they start having this doubt of, did I do the right thing or was it a strategic error on my part and now I kind of made myself an overqualified and maladapted person in the job market. David: So jump to 2019. What happened that here was that for different reasons, I started on my own to have my own, like medical writing and medical translation clients. So that, plus the fact that I, and it's, it's these serendipities, you know, on Facebook there was this, uh, article saying why you should start your podcast in 2019. And I had some gear, and that kind of alignment of, I have some time, I have this sense of, of mission of wanting to reduce the number of young, brilliant people who feel bad about their choice maybe of, of following an academic path. I think it's, it's unfair that that's how they feel after all these years of dedication to this journey. I'd love to, to find a way to inspire them, to co comfort them in their choices and also to comfort them that there's cool stuff out there for them after their degree. That was just kind of the right alignment of planets to get me started and to think, oh, you know, I know like a handful of people who were in my institute when I was doing my PhD, and they're not in academia and they're having fun, being entrepreneurs, being science communicators, being in industry. And I'll reach out to them and see if they're interested in sharing their stories. And they were. David: And so that, that was how the whole concept of Papa PhD was born and then, well now we are almost reaching six years. Right. So it's, it's kind, there's a snowball effect. Of course. First I started with the people I knew and now I'm, you know, I'm interviewing people that are much farther away from kind of my close circle of people I know. Vikki: So why do you think people find it so hard to figure out where else they could go? David: Well, there's different aspects to it. One aspect is that the PhD is a very demanding endeavor that, the tendency is that it'll take most of your time, most of your bandwidth, you know, most of your brain for all those years. David: So if there isn't some, um, you know, either mandatory curriculum, let's say, that pushes you during your PhD journey to do some courses on networking or to have, uh, internships in government or in industry, well, the PhD will absorb all of your energy, all of your time. And you'll stay in this tunnel vision because naturally, you know, it's, it's, it's kind of an, an ecology thing, right? If, if there's no competition for that space in your brain and in your life, the PhD is gonna take all of that space. That's the first reason I'd say. Does that resonate with you? Vikki: Yeah, definitely. And I love that the visual of thinking of it as an ecology where things sort of expand to fill it, is such a good way of thinking about that. Vikki: I wonder whether there's also things about the sort of expectations and the kind of emotions around deciding that this route that lots of people who did, who started a PhD thought might be their route isn't now. I wonder if you could sort of speak to that a little. David: Yeah, so from all the people that I've interviewed, one of the main aspects that comes out is that it's only as you get into a PhD, into, you know, first year, second year, et cetera, and that you spend all those hours with your supervisor, that you actually see what being the head of a lab is. David: And often you come into the experience, you know, you, you are, you're brought into a PhD and what you bring with you is kind of this um, romanticized, let's say image of the scientist that is probably based on some fifties, sixties era or even seventies reality. But, but which today does not exist anymore, of you have, a scientific question you are really passionate about, you'll be given a space in university to kind of dig into that and bring young people with you to also dig into that. But then no one talks to you about all the admin, all the boards you need to be on, all the grant writing. And so all of that kind of is revealed to you once you're in it. David: And I think. I'd say the, the, that's a big chunk, maybe it's the largest proportion would be that. Vikki: Yeah, a hundred percent. And that's without, I mean, you've already alluded to this, in your own story, but that's even without the kind of geography impact, you know, people often don't realize quite what level of sort of geographical relocation is often, I mean, I'm speaking to someone who stayed at the same place, so I'm not one to speak on that. Vikki: But for lots of people at the moment, regular relocations are gonna be part of that journey and things. I think often it's that side as well that people don't even necessarily know is what's coming. David: That's it. The other aspect is the competition. I know that in life sciences where I was, you know, the competition for funds, for grants, et cetera, even like between labs, it's something you also don't know about. And not everyone appreciates living with that pressure. And a reality today, at best, one in five of the people in a PhD cohort will be able to get a tenure track position. So this means that the other four actually we're going to have to scramble to find other ways to stay adjacent or in academia. And I think that translates into pressure on the graduate students and they feel it during graduate school, but then, uh, even if they, they start on the first postdoc, second postdoc, there's people who end up realizing then after one, two postdocs that, okay, I've pushed this far and there's a wall that I can't break through, and then people need to reorient after. David: So, with such dedication and so much, you know, blood, sweat, and tears, trying their best to break through to that thing that in the end ends up being, you know, out of reach. David: And I think that if somehow, there was some, I'd like to say mandatory, but at, at least easily accessible career training during the journey starting in graduate school, then the day you need to pivot, you wouldn't need to feel that bad about it because somehow you say, okay, this didn't pan out, but hey, I have in my network, I know people in industry, I can easily negotiate myself my, my path, my journey towards something else. And, and I feel that a, a lot of people end up having these negative feelings towards academia, and feelings of regret towards the choices they've made on that side. And I think it's unfair. I think choosing to work towards augmenting the community's knowledge is something the society needs and it shouldn't be something that people feel regret about. David: That's my mission. It's to kind of normalize the fact that the post PhD journey is not a one track thing. And also to tell people that not following the historic canonical path is not failure. David: That's my main, like my main mission with Papa PhD and with beyond the thesis. Vikki: So, yeah, so, so true. And you mentioned that we're gonna touch on that network thing in a second, but the other thing I wanted to just add was when you were talking about people starting to regret their choices, starting to resent academia and stuff, it really struck me what a difficult mindset that is to then be looking for jobs as well. Vikki: 'cause you know, it feels rubbish to be questioning your choices and thinking, should I have done something different five years ago and to be getting angry at academia that things aren't the way they should be and that all feels unpleasant. David: Mm-hmm. Vikki: But I think there's a big element to which that also then makes it really hard to look for other options in a way that's exciting and inspired and all that stuff. Yeah. If you are starting from this, this place where you know you've made a mistake somehow, and that's where I think the stuff that you are doing is so, so, so important to help people to kind of almost put to one side that resentment and regret and be like, no, no. Act. There's, there's a ton out there. There's so many things. David: Yeah. Vikki: And when you're thinking like that, you're so much more likely to find them and engage with them. David: Yeah. Thank you and I totally agree. One third aspect that I'd want to add is and I kind of identify with this a little bit, is also so to, to do with why it's difficult at the end. I myself know that one of the reasons I decided to keep on going with my academic studies was, one, my curiosity about science, but also I, at different stages where, you know, oh, do I go to masters or do I go to the PhD or do I go get a job? David: I was seeing what people my age and, and, and my colleagues who were going straight to the job market was were doing and I didn't identify with that. And somehow, if that's one of the reasons or one of the motives that brought you to keep on studying was, I don't see myself, I don't, uh, identify myself with people doing this or that job going straight to industry, going straight to sales or whatever. David: I'm gonna keep studying and try to become an academic. The other difficulty is then once you see that actually being an academic is not what I thought, and now I actually need to look back at what I kind of rejected in a certain way at the beginning. And so that's also emotionally it's difficult because I have to actually go back on my word and actually look at these places in industry that I had rejected at a certain point. David: But you need to think that you're not gonna go into it with the same background. Now bring all those years of like deep thinking, uh, you know, of, of managing and, and taking this very long project to its conclusion, uh, of communicating science, of digesting science, of treating data. David: One of the messages that I wanna bring and, why it's important to talk with people out there that have journeys that are inspiring to you is because they can show you kind of the path of how now with this background that you have, you can go back into the space which you didn't identify too much with five years ago, but now there's another way you can bring value to that space. David: And that's the ray of hope is and the inspiration is, and that's what I try to bring with the, the, the beyond the thesis conversations. Vikki: Yeah. And we've mentioned networking a couple of times, and it's always a word that people kind of react to in various emotional ways. In fact, as you know, we've had Dr. Jen Polk before talking about networking. So in this context, what are you meaning by networking? David: What I want people to start considering is not putting on a suit and going to an event and sharing, you know, a contact card and saying, hi, I'm da da da, I'm looking for a job. That's not it. What I want to share is that because as scientists, as PhDs, we have this tendency of I'm gonna go it alone. I can do the research all on my own. I'm going to go through the data and find, you know, what is it I want to do. David: I want to posit that this is a natural but a wrong reflex to have. Because the jobs in the job market is a very complex thing and just by using your normal, you know, research and data crunching abilities and capabilities that you developed through all these years, you are going to be missing different things. David: And one of the things you're gonna be missing is, you know, does this job or does this employer that on paper is, you know, checking all the marks there. This makes sense, but does it really align with my values? Is it really somewhere where I will flourish? Is it somewhere where, where I'll have fulfillment and pleasure in what I do? David: And you can't get that just with the data that's out there. When you go into a networking event or into a networking interaction with someone in an informational interview, please don't go into it thinking, is this person going to get me a job? I want you to take it as an exploratory exercise, but also a social exercise. Of course, you know, you need to find people who are inspiring to you and who genuinely you're curious about their journey. And this conversation with this person will help you kind of, uh, imagine if you have, you know, a color by numbers map of the job market, that's all blank. David: This person's gonna help you put some color in different places and help you build an actual map of, oh, okay. So the culture in this domain is like this, I like it, or very important, I don't like it. And, and, 'cause these are two very important outcomes of networking in this context is understanding where I would love to work and why, or where I would hate to work and why. And sometimes you go in thinking, oh, this is, you know, perfect for me. And then you talk with someone who works at this or that company, or in this or that space, and you understand, huh, actually this wasn't what it looked like. David: And actually, now that I've had this conversation, I know that I don't need to put effort there because somehow it doesn't align. So it's more, it's really, you know, creating, yes, creating social capital, knowing people in the space. But it's really, it's very much a kind of a job market cartography exercise. David: It's because for all the solo research you do, nothing is gonna give you as much rich information about a, a position or about an employer than talking with someone who works or worked there because of how much in a 20 minute conversation can be exchanged between two people. David: Plus, if you really choose people who you admire for some reason or who intrigue you for some reason, you will also be creating relationships that you can then nurture forever and, and that eventually will be become part of your, what I call your village and who eventually will think of you if they see a job posting come by and say, oh, you know what, David actually could be a great person for this. I'll, I'll reach out to him. If you go to someone with that, I need a job from you, uh, uh, kind of feeling and, and tone. It feels transactional, it feels, you know, it doesn't align with the kind of concept that I'm trying to, to share. Vikki: Yes, absolutely. You made me think of a conversation I had over the weekend, which is a slightly flippant example of the importance of a village. But a very good friend of mine who did her PhD about the same time as mine, um, has a friend who also did a PhD and is now very high up in the world of sports drinks and that sort of thing. David: Okay. Vikki: And her son is a competitive, like under 18 international sports person here in the uk and was having an argument with his mom about whether he should be taking creatine and doing protein shakes and all of this stuff 'cause he was adamant, he definitely should be, he 60 and she was not convinced. So she's just like. I'll find out. And so she contacted her friend who's like super high up in R&D in this world was like, should it be taking it? No, I win this argument. Not until you're older. David: There you go. Vikki: So even just silly things like that, she's like, that's why you need to know people who do interesting things, 'cause sometimes it'll help you win an argument with your teenager. David: That's it. And, and yeah. No, I, it's a great example. Even when you are during graduate school, if you're able to, this means that by the time you get your degree, you have this kind of safety net of people who are in different spaces, who have different stories to share, who can be sounding boards for you, for your decisions. David: There's this concept of a board of directors, right? If you are able to build a board directors for yourself of people whom you don't expect anything of, in terms of like getting a job or anything, but with whom you've developed an interest for them, but there's a relationship that's been created that's authentic , that's non-transactional. It's, it's going to allow you in moments of difficulty, which of course there are, there are, 'cause by definition, PhD, there will be difficult difficulties there. You'll have other voices, you know, that. Accept your own in your head, which often is gonna be potentially negative. David: You'll be able to have some other people chiming in and, and kind of pushing you forward, but also helping you have a wider horizon of thinking, well, if this doesn't pan out, I know that there's other things that can, and when it gets panicky is when you really have that single objective and that starts getting difficult and then you think, oh my God, I'm failing. David: And that's what I don't want. I don't want people going through that after all that effort, after all that dedication. Vikki: Yeah. And a metaphor you used earlier just really opened something up for me that this idea of thinking of it as a map where you are trying to fill in information on different aspects of this kind of possible career map because people like me, you know, my background, none of my parents went to university. I say none. I have stepparents and things. None of my parents went to university. They're all sort of either go into a business and work your way up or start a business kind of people. And so I had that world and then I went to university and I found my academic world. Vikki: But it's only when I was thinking of it in terms of that map, like you were talking about, that I realized that in my career, you know, I made my understanding of what it was like to work in academia, super vivid. I was surrounded by people that were doing that. And I knew lots of people from my family who were doing like job, you know, and some quite good professional jobs and that don't get me wrong. David: Yeah. Vikki: But jobs and I can't, other than people I did my PhD with, I can't remember really knowing people who had a PhD. Weren't in academia. Mm-hmm. We have one neighbor who worked in academia and other than that, I can't think of anyone that was in that thing. And so just thinking about it now, I had huge blank patches where it's like, this is stuff you do if you don't have a PhD. Vikki: Yeah. And this is the thing you do if you, when you do have a PhD. And I love this idea of just trying to sort of fill in some of those gaps because otherwise the vividness that you have around academia, because you are in it every day for either good or bad. I think this is brilliant for people who love academia and think they want to stay in academia. Vikki: I half wonder, had I, during my PhD in postdoc had more exposure to more of this, whether I would've been quite as convinced to stay in academia because whilst I thought it was an amazing idea, who knows what other amazing stuff I would've found. David: I find it super interesting that, that you say that, which is this also works for people who want to stay in academia. And that's something that, that I also try to drone on, which is, even if your current objective is to stay in academia, if you go to a conference and someone inspires you, even if they're not in your domain, take the opportunity to talk with them and ask them how are you able to, let's say, develop such an interdisciplinary career and how do you make this or that work at your university or in your institute? What, you know, what did mentors tell you that really helped you? And because there's no better approximation to your future, be it in 2, 3, 5 years than someone who's there now. So talk to these people. Vikki: Yeah, I love that one. The thing I used to be, obviously while I was an academic, I was a personal tutor and so we'd be talking to students about what are your career plan, you know, whether it was undergrad or PhD students. Vikki: And so often they'd still be like, yeah, yeah, I should talk to some people. Some people, once I figured out what I wanna do, I'll talk to some people. Um, I would constantly be like, how about we talk to some people to help you figure out what you wanna do? And that No, no, no. I just need to, I just need to decide. And once I've decided, I'll speak to people working in that industry. So how do you respond to, I just got increasingly exasperated with them, which didn't work. How do you respond to somebody who says, yeah, yeah, that's great. Once I've decided I want to be a medical writer, I'll talk to David. David: Mm-hmm. I totally can see how that was a very frequent, answer from people. First finding out this one thing that you wanna do is going to be a very difficult endeavor for different reasons. The first reason is you are here now at, let's say, year two of your PhD. And of course, in Europe, PhD is usually the last three years. And, but here in North America it could be four or five, six. So you can say that and then go home. And in, when you leave, you know, when you finish your PhD, the job market, the landscape will have changed a bunch. So if this is your mindset, you may be in, you know, in this like pedaling to find something that is unfindable because the terrain is changing. And you know, at the beginning of your PhD, let's say, being a data scientist is something that looks really great, but then five years later, it's not anymore. And so the, the, my answer to to this would be, you are not going to find this kind of eldorado. David: You're not, you're not going to find this just out of your effort right now. And the second thing is, in this search of yours where you think you're gonna find this one gold nugget, you're gonna often be digging, and then you'll find a bunch of coal, and then you'll find just a, you know, basalt. David: And so you can also lose a bunch of time not finding the right thing or finding, you know, things that are not a match for you. So the best, my best advice to you because, again, one-on-one communication with another human is a shortcut to getting much denser information and much, much more real information, is start talking today. And be curious. So don't, don't have this like one track mind of, I wanna find the thing sample. And this will give you two great sets of information. I have the bucket of likes and I have the bucket of dislikes. And this is great because eventually when then you need to really look for a position, you have this bucket of things that you can already put to the side and not spend any energy on. David: That would be my advice. I, and again, I, you know, when they're young like that and they have this way of thinking, maybe this wouldn't make them change their way of thinking. But I, I think that would be the way I would approach it Vikki: definitely. So. Let's get specific. People listening who are sort of thinking, either they're not sure they want an academic career, or they're not sure they'll be able to have an academic career 'cause of the competitiveness where would you suggest they start? How do they find these people? What do they ask them? David: Okay. First give them a sense that they're right, you know, and say, start where you think you want to go. So let's say that you're thinking, I don't know, in my domain it would be I want to be a medical science liaison. So what you need to do now is to go on LinkedIn, and that's the platform I'd say is the one to go. Even if you're an academic now, everyone's there now and everyone who's interested in, in actually discussing careers and even hiring, et cetera. David: But you go on LinkedIn, maybe go geographically around you. So there's filters you can use there. So find people in this geographical area who are medical science liaisons. If possible, they even are alumni from the place that you are, which gives you a kind of a bridge to say, Hey, I'm now studying the same program that you are. David: And I, I saw you're a medical science liaison. I've, it feels to me that it's something that I like to do in the future. Could we meet and talk for 20 minutes? And that's the first step and then, what I was saying is you're trying to build a map. David: So go in with questions, go in with questions that you've prepared, go in with curiosity, and then let the person tell their story based on the questions that, that you, that you prepared. They'll probably have questions for you, so be ready to, to answer that too. But then ask the type of questions that will allow you to have this kind of pinball effect, which is, so who inspired you when you were at the end of the career? David: Yeah. Who was a mentor? Have one or two questions that, and you can even ask who would you recommend I talk next? Because I really want to understand, what's in the cards for me in the future. So always try to make it organically a snowball effect that start small, but that then you can, there's always a follow up step for you. David: And this will do two things. It'll help you kind of grow this network, but also it can, it'll kind of put it on your agenda, what the next step is. Yeah because. Like we were saying, the PhD, the tendencies, it'll take all of your time, it'll take your whole agenda. So if there's no pressure there, like positive pressure to create space for something else, it won't be there. David: So come in genuinely curious about understanding, you know, why the person gravitated towards that position. If you've thought of your values, let's say you value hybrid work to ask questions about that, et cetera, and then let's it, the outcome could be, oh, this actually confirms what I thought about being a medical science liaison, or, okay, I had some wrong ideas about what it is. And actually, after talking with this person, which was gracious enough to spend this time with me, I now know that I don't need to put more energy on this and so now I need to turn my radar somewhere else and restart the exercise. Vikki: Yeah. And that, that is a win too, right? Like you said, that is a win too, that actually, you know, having an interview where you walk away going, oh no, no, no, no, no, no. Is a massive win. 'cause it stops you wasting time over there too, right? David: Precisely. Vikki: One of the things that struck me while you were talking was, it might be interesting to ask people, were there other careers that you considered before you ended up in this one? David: That would be a good question to Vikki: see if they've got ideas like that. Especially, you know, if it's something a little bit adjacent to what they're doing, because I think sometimes we have quite a limited, you know, we have those kids' books where it's like, what do you wanna be? I'm gonna be a teacher or a doctor or a football fireman, and those are our options kind of thing. Vikki: And I think sometimes we just don't even know what jobs are out there. And I wonder whether sometimes by going for one that we know exists and asking them what they discounted, you might actually find some things that you didn't even know were there. David: Totally true. And often, and again, I'm, and I'm thinking of like farmers and you know, companies that are related to what I did during my PhD. David: Often, uh, these people will have colleagues who are PhDs and even within their organization and who are doing different things, you know. Asking the person, oh, by the way, do you have colleagues who are also like PhDs and who are doing different things? Vikki: It's so interesting 'cause I think sort of getting to not only ask about the job itself, but asking about what they love and hate about it and what's important to them. So I come from a sports science background and all of our students, undergrad anyway, think they're gonna work in elite sport. Vikki: That's their kind of, that's their kind of goal. A PhD level, it's much less so. But some of them do go on into that environment. And I remember talking with some of them that had gone off to do that sort of thing, working with Olympic athletes and stuff. David: Okay. Vikki: And asking them about their priorities and how they enjoyed it and stuff. And just listening to it like. This is fascinating and I don't care. So it's like, for you, this is amazing. I will watch the sports, I will cheer you on. I will be ecstatic if this all is good for you. But the idea of going to work every day where my goal is to make sure we shave one second off their performance because, you know, silver is the first loser and all of that stuff, I just don't get it. Vikki: I I, it, it doesn't, it rocks their world. And they would talk about all this stuff, so passionately and I was just like, yeah, I dunno. I'd quite like silver. Silver was quite nice. That's good too. Yeah. I just wouldn't be that fussed. And so I think just getting that idea of what is it that you love about this job and then being able to be like, oh no, that's not important to me. Vikki: Because sometimes people are like, you know, oh, I really get to travel all the time. I'm only at home a week a month. It's incredible. I get to see all these different places. And then for other people it's like, no, that sounds great for you, not me, for you. Exactly. Um, I, yeah, I think that's so interesting. David: Definitely. Definitely. But, I think in this exercise of, of building, this village and having these conversations, what's important I think, is to understand that this diversity exists and that there's space for it, in the job market. Because one of the things that I remember I felt is this fear of, oh, oh, okay. Gosh, I had one chance and I, I kind of blew it in a certain way. And now that, you know, I, I have this fear that I am this weird shaped puzzle piece that's not gonna fit anywhere. But there's so much out there, uh, that, that, like you said, if you have this approach of the kids' books of you're a fireman, you're an astronaut. Mm-hmm. You're this or that. It's really not like that. But the only way to understand and to know that actually there's this place that maybe I'm not an exact fit, but I'm pretty good fit, is by talking with people and by understanding that often things that it feels like it's very square. David: And especially if you look at job postings, it looks like you need to be like this. Like, and then you talk with the hiring manager and actually they really want to know other things about you. And again, I don't think there's a better way than talking with someone who has been there or who's there now, and that can really kind of, um, recalibrate your expectation of what the experience is. Vikki: And in terms of when to do this. Mm-hmm. It sounds like you are talking about pretty much throughout your PhD experience. David: I ideally, yeah. And you may, you may even, you know, be better placed to actually, you know, tell me about your experience. But I feel that first year students are very much in this, uh, how do you say? David: I just have like puppy love, uh, coming as an expression, but you know, in this beginning of a relationship, you know, like wide-eyed, oh, I just got into my program. I'm a PhD student now. So I think it's probably very challenging or more challenging to expect that first year students are going to, uh, to be putting some time looking at more than their academic, this thing that they just got onto and then you can, you can weigh in on that given that your experience, experience with students. But I think, you know, once that kind of honeymoon phase of I got into my PhD program and you announce it on your socials. I'd say at six months, uh, if you can start seeing, okay, where do graduates of my program. Where are they located now on the job market? David: And maybe you are really focused on academia and you can do that and see where are they in academia and start talking with them. I think that's important, but I think it's also as important to see, and those who are not in academia, where are they, what are they doing? And to do it just out of, yes, curiosity, but also it's kind of as an a kind of self preservation instinct of, I'm now in this honeymoon period, but someone's telling me that in three years you're gonna be ejected out of this reality, and you have this degree and then you're gonna have to figure things out. David: So yeah, I'm in the middle of my first year or beginning of my second year. Part of what I'm doing now is preparing myself to be, to be a professional. So I want to be ready for any outcome. So I'm going to kind of create this cushion of knowledge, but also ideally this network of people. And I'll start and, say, let's say once a month, I try to reach out to someone. Vikki: Yeah. David: That just, that already would be a great thing. Vikki: Yeah, definitely. And I, I, I definitely take your point that like people are not necessarily thinking about afterwards early on. And for me, I think what then becomes important is to think of the other benefits of why you're doing this too. Yeah. Because these sorts of reach outs are amazing for working out what you might do afterwards, but they could have other benefits too. Vikki: I've seen people who have had chance conversations with people in different industries who've found parallels between their research and something they hadn't even imagined before, things like that. Mm-hmm. Well, they've just met really interesting people and I think if we can also maybe take almost a little bit of the seriousness out of it that this is an amazing way to set yourself up for your career, but it's actually a real privilege just to have some interesting, you know, it's a cheap excuse to talk to some cool people, right? So, one things I love about having a podcast is I get to contact random people like you who are really impressive and interesting and be like, oh, can we talk? We'll record it. People will listen. Um, so I think there is an element to which it, it could be seen just as a, let's just talk to people, you know, tell them what you do, find out more about what they do. Be super interesting even if you never do anything in that direction. David: That's totally true. And actually, I'm, I'm remembering one of the episodes now, I'm, I'm not remembering the name, but I was talking with someone who, who went for their PhD in England and the person would ha would go have lunch with the philosophy people and then, and, and this is you staying in the academic thing, in the academic bubble. David: But it really, it even, and I don't remember the exact example, but I remember the, them telling me, actually there were projects that were born out of that because I was having lunch with a philosopher and I was discussing my physics thing and, and then there was some kind of bridges between the two and there was a project born out of that. David: So just even widening a little bit of who you are interacting with day to day at university can already bring some, like cross pollination and, and widen the, the view of what you do. So for sure, Vikki: definitely. Well, thank you so much. It is been amazing talking with you. I'm sure lots of my listeners are already familiar with your podcast, but for anybody who isn't, tell them where they can find you and how they can find out more about what you do. David: Sure. So the podcast is Beyond the Thesis with Papa PhD. You can find it on all podcasting platforms, there's a French version too. You can find me and reach out on LinkedIn. David Mendes, you should find me. The other way to, to talk to me directly is to go to, the community I've just created on this platform called School where I have some like zoom coffee time, like weekly, coffee time sessions there. So it's SKOO l.com/papa PhD. And, uh, i, it's a place where I try to have like direct, one-on-one or group, but, but direct contact with the community. there's also Papa PhD on YouTube if you, if you like to see the video versions. Vikki: Perfect. David: Thank you, Vikki. It's been a pleasure talking with you and I think it goes to show how just the power of conversation, you know, in our lives. David: And I think it's another moment for me just to help people out there who may be introverts like I am. Of course, now I've been doing this podcast for a while, and my introversion, I was able to kind of build some muscle around it. But, you know, of course conserve your energies if you're an introvert, but do consider the power of having conversations with new people. It's huge. It can really help you a lot and especially it can help you break some like cycles of negativity or some cycles of negative self-talk that, that you might be in because it'll bring in someone else's view into the conversation. So yeah, if that's the only thing that you take from today that, you know, having, having more conversations with new people, I'll be happy for that outcome. Vikki: I'm sure everyone will take lots. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for listening and see you next week.

< We don’t usually think of a PhD as a decision making process but it really is. We decide what research we do, how we do it, how we report it, and we make hundreds of decisions a day about what order we will do work in, what opportunities we will take up and refuse, and who we should ask for support. In this episode, I share the problems that happen we only vaguely, half-heartedly make decisions – and as usual, let you know what we need to do instead. Transcript Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast, and today I'm gonna talk about a problem you might not even know you have. You might think that you are good at making decisions. Others of you will think you are bad at making decisions, but only when it comes to like the big important things. I'm here to tell you that making half-assed decisions, like kind of, oh, I sort of wanna do this, I think type decisions is holding you back in so many areas of your life. I'm gonna share with you why that is and what we get to do about it and why everything's gonna be so much easier when you do this. Now if you're listening to this live, so this is coming out on the 28th of April, 2025. If you're listening to this live, then I have another reason why making full decisions that you believe in and that you stand by is gonna be really important, and that is because the PhD Life Coach membership is open for new members between the 28th of April and the 2nd of May i E. It's open now. And in this episode I'm gonna talk about why I want you to make a full and proper decision that you are either in or you are not. And I'll explain why as we go through. So first of all, I'm gonna tell you a story to illustrate what I'm saying here. As I record this, it's been the Easter holidays in a runup to a launch for me, and that meant that I had to make some decisions in advance about when I was working and when I wasn't. Now those of you who follow me on Instagram will have seen, I did a reel about this, but essentially one of the things that I really encourage people to do is to make definite, intentional decisions about when they're gonna work and when they're not gonna work. A halfassed decision in this context would be, I'll do some work over the weekend if I feel like it, or I might need to work this weekend, we'll see how it goes, and those sorts of statements might sound really kind of responsive and compassionate and flexible and fluid and all these attractive things, right? But in reality, we know that what most of us will do is we'll say that to ourselves. We'll spend the weekend going, oh, I should work, but I can't really be bothered. Maybe I'll, maybe I'll do it tomorrow. I'll just do this now. And then we end up not enjoying the time we got off and not doing the bits of work that we intend. And so what I really encourage people to do is make an intentional decision. That's an actual decision, not a kind of vague halfassed decision about "do I actually need and or want, want to work this weekend?" And if so, specifically on what? Specifically, what do I want to work on? Specifically why? Specifically when? And plan that out, and what happened? I did that, right, in advance of the holidays. I knew I had my stepdaughter here. I knew there was gonna be this temptation to decide not to work after all. And then I would feel afterwards. I'd feel annoyed with myself, or I know there'd be a temptation to kind of work more than I intended, and then I'd regret not spending more time with my family. So I made an intentional decision about what I was gonna do, and I did it and it was amazing. I had a gorgeous weekend. I did the things I needed to do. I had tons of fun. It was lovely. Now, this isn't all a, aren't I amazing? You should be like me thing, because I had exactly the same situation with something else over Easter. And I only realized when I was planning this podcast that I did not make intentional decisions. I made half-assed decisions, and that was around Easter eggs and chocolate and all of that good stuff that comes along with Easter celebrations. And I realized that I had made a halfass decision. My husband and I are both on a mission to not be more middle aged than we need to be and to have bodies that are functioning well as we're getting older and all of that stuff. And so we've been trying to be mindful of what we're eating, right? And so we'd made a sort of vague, I am gonna say vague decision that we were gonna try and plan our meals more, we were gonna try and snack less, that was fine. But what we didn't do was make a definitive decision about what that meant over Easter. And so when there's then a half-assed decision, a decision that's like, oh, we should probably eat a bit more healthily. That's a half-assed decision. We then argued with it over Easter. We decided, oh, but it's Easter. We can have this. Oh, but my stepdaughter's with us, we can have it after all. Oh, we're out for the day and we haven't planned anything, so let's get a hot dog. We argued with that decision because it was a halfassed decision. It was a sort of decision. It was a maybe decision. And it meant that we finished the Easter weekend going, Hmm. It was a lovely weekend, but we didn't actually need to eat all the things that we ate in order to make it a lovely weekend. It was a lovely weekend anyway, and so we're kind of frustrated that we didn't stick to what we said, but this is one of those occasions where I'm not blaming implementer me. This was not that I had a definitive decision and I chose to go against it. I left myself with a floppy decision. This was a strategic problem. This was a boss me problem. I did not make a definitive decision about what my eating plans were over Easter. Now, how does this translate into PhDs? You may think you don't have that many decisions to make, but you have a gazillion decisions to make. You have to decide what to read, what studies you're gonna do, exactly how you're gonna do them, what methods you're gonna use, how you're gonna analyze them. Whether this data point is an outlier or not an outlier, whether you are gonna write it like this or write that, work on this first or work on that first. Say yes to your supervisor. Say no to your supervisor. Billions of decisions. And lots of them you are probably making in a kind of half-ass way. Oh, on Tuesday I'm gonna try and work on my writing. Half-ass decision. On Thursday, I'll do some reading and see where I get to halfassed decision. Okay? What we need to do is we need to be much more definitive about our decision making. If you decide that Tuesday morning you are working for two hours, I want you to make that a definitive decision because when we make it a definitive decision, it does two things. One, it makes it way harder to argue with. Now, some of you will be thinking, I still argue with it. That's okay. We'll talk about that in a second, but when it's a definitive, I am absolutely doing this in that slot. When it's a definitive decision, it's harder to argue with. Secondly, when we make a definitive decision and we're actually definitely gonna do this thing, then we spend a little bit of time thinking, okay, what does that look like? So if we're like, I am definitely gonna do some writing in that time slot, then we might spend some time hopefully thinking, right, exactly what am I writing? How can I make that easier for myself? How can I make sure I've got my supervisor's comments by them? How can I make sure I've got the resources I need by them? How can I make sure I've got a bullet pointed list of what I need to cover? If it's a definitive decision, that's definitely gonna happen, we're way more likely to set ourselves up for success with it. You know, relating it back to the eating thing, if I'd made a definitive decision that I was going to continue in my quest to eat like somebody who's going to age well, I may have made decisions to take a healthier snack into town with me so that I didn't end up buying a hot dog or to make more mindful decisions about what's snacks I bought into the house, for example. You support yourself when you know it's something you're definitely going to do, that you've made a definite decision about. You support yourself. The other thing that you do when you make a definitive decision, or I'm gonna encourage you to do if you don't do already, is you then have your back about it. Now, if you haven't listened to my episode about how to make effective decisions, I think it's called How to Make Decisions that You Love, that's what it's called. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, I want to go and check it out. But a key component of that decision making is that once you've made the decision, you make it a decision you love. So instead of being like, oh, I wish I was reading today, instead of writing, you say, I am so glad that I'm getting this writing done. In fact, I had a gorgeous message from one of my members who's actually leaving the membership this quarter for the best possible reason. She's leaving because she has pretty much finished her thesis. She's really confident with getting ready for the Viva, and she knows she can do her changes, so she's leaving for like the best reasons ever. One of the things she said, she sent me a lovely email to thank me for my support, and one of the things that she said in that email was that she really spends a lot of time reminding herself how glad she is. She's getting this written. She made a decision. There was a point at which she wasn't sure that she was gonna finish. She made a decision she was going to, and one of the things we talked about was having your back in that decision. If you decide you're going to do it, we reinforce that that was the right decision all the time. so that we don't spend time going, oh, I did decide this, but I wish maybe that, no, I made this decision and it was the best decision. It was made for good reasons, and this is why we're doing it. Now, this also fits into when you are reading and writing. So often my clients say to me, I don't know how to structure this. I don't know what I need to be reading. And they frame it as a don't know question, as a lack of knowledge question when in reality, most of the time it's a lack of decision making. It's not that you don't know how to structure it, it's that you haven't decided how to structure it. And if you can figure out that this is a decision, that you get to pick how you structure it, then suddenly you can support yourself to do that. It's like, okay, I need to make a definitive decision about how to structure this, and how would I do that? Well, I might look at the different options I've got. I might experiment with the different options. I might compare them. I might choose what my priorities are for this piece of work. See how that informs the decision that I make. Okay. When we frame it as a decision, we then think about what that process needs to be in order to make that decision. And remember, with all decisions, there's a time limit on it too. So you might decide, I'm gonna decide on the structure of this chapter from now until the point I send it to my supervisor for feedback. If after that, they give me different feedback, or if after that I decide that I think it could be structured another way. Great, no problem. But I'm gonna do my best to make this work between now and then so we can time limit these things as well. That way when you are writing, you are not kind of going, oh, I sort of thought I'd structure it this way, but now I'm not sure it works. So I might change it around and do it that way. And then wonder why you get to the end of the week and you haven't got anything done. By being more definitive in our decision making processes and in then making the decision, it enables us to take action so much easier. Otherwise you become like, have you seen those Instagram videos where they put the dog in the middle and then the dad runs one way and the mom runs the other way and then the dog, it is like to see who the dog prefers. Right? But often the dog just sits in the middle going. And doesn't go anywhere at all. That's what we do when we don't make decisions. We're sitting in the middle going, oh, maybe that way, maybe that way. I dunno. And we don't move. Whereas when we make a decision, we can run in one direction and then if that gives us our best possibility of actually making a choice and actually getting somewhere. Now, how does this all relate to the membership? You might think that I'm gonna use this time to tell you all the reasons why you should join the membership. And to be fair, there are many, many reasons that you should join the membership and I want you all to go to my website, PhD life coach.com, and click on the membership, have a look at what we offer. I'm not here to tell you that you should join. I'm here to tell you that you should make a decision, a definitive decision for the next quarter, because that's how long it is until you can get in again. I want you to either definitively decide that you are joining the membership, in which case, go do it now. Like as you hear this, we're only open till Friday. I don't want you to miss it. Jump straight in and join. Or I want you to definitively decide that you are not joining this quarter and that you are gonna make that work. So not just definitively deciding that you're not, definitively deciding that you are gonna not join, and you're gonna have a really good quarter where you support yourself without the support of the PhD Life Coach membership. Okay, what this means is it makes it much less likely that you'll kind of dither, not make a decision, and then next week be like, oh, I kind of wish I had, that would've been really good, dah, dah. We don't want that. Equally, I don't want you to kind of join, but kind of be like, but I don't really have time and it probably won't work, and da da, and then not come to anything. I wonder why it didn't have any effect. Okay? I want you to decide, and if you decide, I want you to make the most of it, that doesn't mean come to everything. You don't have to come to everything to make the most of it. You need to come to key things at moments you need it and get the support that you need to make a difference. I want you to decide that doing this is gonna be the best decision ever. And if you decide not to, I want you to decide that that was the best decision ever. I'm so glad I chose not to do the membership this quarter. I'm so glad I decided to figure this stuff out myself. Make it the right decision. I. I think that's the harder decision, right? I think it's harder to figure this stuff out on your own, but make it the right decision. I've had to make this decision recently, so until now I did my original post-training, all that stuff, and obviously I've got tons of experience in academia, but I'd never had any business coaching at all. And it wasn't something that I felt like I needed, but more recently, as the membership's growing, my business is growing, I thought that actually it would be really useful. And if I was gonna do it, it was this one coach. She just got me. I follow everything she does on social media. She's brilliant, love her, and she offers quite an expensive business coaching mastermind thing, uh, like I can't even tell you how many times more expensive than the membership, like super expensive and. I really thought it could be useful, but I was also really like, oh my God, that's so much money. And what if I don't make most of it, and what if I don't earn that money back and dah, dah, dah? And so I had a little thing and then I thought, you know what? Listen to yourself, Vikki. Do the things that you tell your clients to do. Let's make a definitive decision. And so I looked at it and I thought about what would be my reasons for joining? And I thought about what would be my reasons to not join? And I thought about which decision would I prefer to regret, which I think is a lovely question to always ask yourself. And I asked myself, if I went all in on my decision, what would that look like? And I thought, you know what? If I go all in and I buy into this mastermind and I go all in on it, and I decide to make it the best decision ever, this could absolutely transform my business. This could change my experience of running this business. It could expand the membership, help me reach more PhD students. It could be absolutely amazing. And I decided, you know what? I would prefer to go all in, try and make this the best experience ever. And if it doesn't end up exactly what I thought it would be, I am willing to regret spending the money and putting that in because I don't think it'll happen. And I'd rather regret doing something than regret not doing something. And so I decided to jump in and not gonna lie so far been amazing, loving it. I want you to have a think, what decisions do you need to make at the moment, especially tiny decisions about how you're gonna frame an argument, what you are gonna do today, how you're gonna analyze your data, all of those things, and think how much different would it be if I made a definitive decision for a explicit period of time and went all in on that decision. Trust me, avoiding half assed decisions, making definitive decisions is the way to make spectacular progress, move you forward faster, get you more information, and from there if you need to pivot, then you pivot. But you pivot with loads more information, loads more progress, loads more experience. It's all about making definitive decisions. I really hope you found this useful. If you haven't checked out the membership already, make sure you go to my website and have a look. It is gonna be focusing on procrastination and focus, getting stuff done, prioritization, task management, all that good stuff that all of us need, it's gonna be super exciting. It runs three months. Make sure you check it out. Make a decision that you love. Thank you everyone for listening, and I see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics time.

< If you start your weeks strong but usually end disappointed, then this episode is for you! I’m going to be sharing how everything improved for me when I separated “boss me” from “implementer me” and used that idea to understand why I felt so frustrated at the end of the week. I’ll identify the most common issues so you can see which resonate most with you and give you some specific ideas to try out this week! Links I refer to in this episode Sign up for the webinar on 23rd April 2025 here Transcript Hello welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. I've got a question for you. How do you usually feel on Friday afternoons or whatever day of the week you typically stop work? I spent years and years, not gonna lie, probably 20 years finishing the week, mostly feeling somewhere between exhausted and disappointed. That I'd somehow been running around all week doing loads of things, yet not finishing any of the things or many of the things, certainly not all of the things that I intended to do, and not really able to see why. Because at the start of the week, it had been a cunning plan. It had definitely been a cunning plan, and then somehow by the end of the week, it hadn't happened. And ugh, I used to be baffled, frustrated, disappointed. I used to just walk away. It would be Friday afternoon, Friday evening, and it'd be like, you know what? Laptop shut. Didn't shut down any files. Didn't close down. My emails didn't turn off my computer. What's that shut my laptop leave? Because I was just cross and annoyed. This makes it sound like I hated my academic career. I had a lovely time, but that Friday afternoon feeling of, ah, I've done it again. I've still not done all these things, was just, it was a thing. Okay. And I also have to emphasize, and I've told those of you who listened before, I've heard this before and stuff I have to emphasize, I was doing well through all of this. I finished my PhD really quickly. I got an academic job quickly. I was succeeding in all possible metrics. I was succeeding, yet I still finished weeks like that. And people used to say to me, you know, oh, you just need to plan what you're gonna do, tick off what you've done, and then review your week on a Friday. And I'd be like, oh, shut up. Leave me alone. That sounds terrible or completely unfeasible, if not terrible. And now I find myself in this place where I'm telling you all that we need to make realistic plans, follow through on them, and then review our weeks. Except I am gonna do it from a perspective of someone who knows that it's not that simple. From the perspective of someone who gets it. So what we're gonna talk about today is a way of thinking about this that I have touched on in the podcast before, but we're gonna go into it at a level of detail that we haven't done before. And in fact, I'm giving you a sneaky preview into some of the materials that are in my Be Your Own Best Boss program, which as you might remember, is free to all of my members. So the two things I want to introduce you to or remind you of are these notions of boss you and implementer you. Boss you is the version of you who makes decisions, who plans, who prioritizes, who makes sure you've got the resources and the support that you need. And then implementer you is the version of you that actually does what they're told. Which has never been my strong point in life, people will agree. They're the version of you that has to actually do the work. And most people don't divide it out like that. So most people kind of try and plan a bit and then they do some stuff and then they decide they don't like it doing it like that. So they decide to do it a different way. And it kind of switch backwards and forwards between, am I doing it, am I deciding? I don't know. Am I changing my mind? Should I do that? Maybe I won't. And flick backwards and forwards between Boss You and Implementer You. And that's how you end up having weeks where you kind of decide sort of at the beginning of the week what you think you wanna get done, and then some stuff happens during the week where you change plans and do something different and decide you don't feel like it, decide that was a terrible idea, and then you end up somewhere completely different. What also happens when we don't understand these two distinct roles is it makes it really hard to figure out what's going wrong. So when students come into my membership and I'm talking with them about what they're finding challenging at the moment, often they don't know why they're not achieving their goals or why they're achieving their goals, but they still feel rubbish and behind and overwhelmed. They don't know how to figure out even what the problem is, and that makes getting support really hard. Right? Do you need to go to a time management course or do you need to go to an imposter syndrome course, or do you need to go to counseling, right? You don't know. All you know is this isn't working for you right now. And so one of the things we do in the membership is try to really pin down exactly what's going on. And the first step is understanding these two different roles. Now, when I first started figuring this out for myself, I suddenly realized that my follow through, my implementer, she wasn't brilliant. She definitely procrastinated, but when she got going on something, she was pretty good and she got it done and she mostly hit deadlines, certainly for important things, not for administration quite so much, but for proper things. Absolutely hit deadlines and. I realized that I was actually being quite unfair to implementer me, ending my weeks, telling myself I was useless, telling myself I hadn't done enough, when actually I've been working damn hard all week and I was being quite unfair to implementer. Now I ain't saying that was perfect and we'll talk about the ways the implementer can go wrong in a minute, but what I wasn't doing was really scrutinizing boss me. Because my problem was that boss me was so enthusiastic and so ambitious and so over committed. And so determined she absolutely could do everything. Not because people told her she should, because most people told her she was trying to do too much. Not because of people pleasing or anything like that, but just because I find the world a very interesting and exciting place and I want to do all of it. And for many years I was fully convinced that I could, and that the main way to make that work was just to commit to it and figure it out. And then I was wondering why my weeks were finishing in chaos and not having achieved everything. I used to start planning, like I used to try and do time blocking and stuff, and I'd start planning when I was gonna do things, and then I'd realized some things didn't seem to fit and at that point I did not question, how many things I was trying to fit in. I instead decided time blocking, was stupid, stopped doing it, dove in, got some stuff done, and ended the week disappointed. You might not be quite as extreme as that. Others of you will be nodding along and going, oh my God, she's inside my head. Okay, whichever. When we can see the difference between boss who chooses what's the biggest priority at the moment, who chooses and identifies what phase of your PhD or your research career you are in at the moment and and makes decisions accordingly. And then the implementer, you who actually does the tasks. When we understand that, then we can better understand ourselves. I want you to imagine. It's the end of the week and you are doing your Friday review. Now, if you don't do a Friday review, don't worry. I'm still getting in the habit. I'm still making it work, but if you're listening to this live, so if you are listening to this on either the 21st or the 22nd of April, 2025, you can come to my free webinar where we are gonna be designing personalized weekly review sessions exactly for you. Not complicated stupid ones that productivity gurus tell you you have to do that take you longer than the rest of your work. Quick, straightforward ones that actually help. So if that's you, make sure that you check out my website and sign up for that. You'll be able to find the links in the transcript here if you can't find 'em anywhere else. But imagine you are in a weekly review, even if you don't do one. Let's imagine you do and you ask yourself. How has boss you got on this week? Not just how have you gone, how has boss you got on? How has the prioritization gone? How has the planning gone? Did you design a week that actually ended up feeling good? If you did time blocking or any sort of organizational structures, did you plan something that either did or should have felt good. Did you plan about the right amount of work? Did you plan way too much? Did you scatter yourself around? Did you forget key commitments? Did you not allow for things going a bit wrong as they inevitably will in a week? Have a think about how you would review past you. Think about last week. How would you review the boss you last week? Now I want you to spend some time reviewing implementer you. This was the version of you that was meant to follow the plan and do the work. Did you do the things you said you were gonna do at the specific times? Did you follow through on tasks even if you didn't particularly feel like them? How would you review that side of you? And remember, as with any sort of performance review with a boss or something like that, we wanna remember to compliment ourselves too. So I want you to remember to think what did boss you do well? What did implementer you do well? As well as what they could have done better? Now these two things obviously interact with each other, okay? These are not two separate things. Just as you and your supervisor interact and make each other's lives harder or easier, boss you and implementer you interact as well. So I want you now to imagine you put boss you and implementer you in a room. And I want you to make sure they have a loving, compassionate, and supportive sort of a relationship. They're gonna be good to each other, but they are gonna be honest and pragmatic. What would boss you say to implement to, you would boss, you say, you know what, dude, I'm so sorry I set you up for a fail there 'cause that was, that was just a shit show of a to-do list. Or would they say, mate. I planned a pretty good week for you. Manageable amount of stuff and you didn't do it and that's kind of frustrating. And vice versa, what would implement to you say to boss you would, they say, what are you doing? You, you gave me some instructions, like write something and I don't even know where to start. I dunno what I'm meant to be writing. I dunno what stage it's meant to be at, what quality it's meant to be. Or are they gonna say, you know what, thank you. Because when I sat down to do my analysis on Friday, I knew exactly what I needed to do. 'cause you gave me all the right stuff and that made everything way easier. What are they gonna say to each other? Now. Because implementer us and boss us interact so much, you are almost certainly gonna have room for improvement on both sides. And that's the joy of a longer term membership, right? Is that we have time to work on all this stuff. Minimum membership is three months. People join for at least a quarter, and they love to say in longer than that if they can and that enables us to look at both. But as a podcast listener, as somebody who wants a quick win right now, what one of the best things you can do is decide, which is a bigger issue for you. And you need to be really honest here, because I was absolutely convinced it was my implementation that was the problem when it really wasn't. It was boss me. So if you are bit of a perfectionist, uh, bit of a people pleaser, bit of a high achiever, all those things that many PhD students are. I want you to seriously consider the possibility that it's boss you that needs a little bit more support. If it is what I do in the Be Your Own Best Boss program, which all the members get, is I go through a whole series of different sort of lessons that Boss you can learn that will help them to be a more effective boss to you. I'm just gonna share one or two with you guys today. I. One is a notion of targets or averages and understanding the difference between targets and averages. I want you to imagine that you are intending to work for day, I'm gonna say of proper actual work, okay, insert whatever number works for you, but let's say six of actual focused work, and that's your target and you want to average six hours a day. I want you to notice that if that is both your daily target and your desired average, then you only need a little bit to go wrong and you're not gonna meet your weekly goal. So if you aim to do six hours work a day, and your goal is at the end of the week that you will have done five days of six hours work, then as soon as you have a day that stuff happens, your computer crashes and you have to get it sorted out, or you're not feeling great or whatever it is, then you're not meeting your weekly goal. We have to have a difference between our daily target and the average* we're aiming for the week so that it allows for those sorts of things to happen. So if you wanna average six hours a day, you need to be aiming to work seven. Let's say you can insert your own numbers. Again, I'm not here to dictate hours for you, but let's say you aim to have seven per day on the understanding that probably at some point this week that's gonna go a bit wrong and you can still hit your target of 30 hours accrued this week. Now the joy of course, is if you do seven on Monday and you do seven on Tuesday and things are looking good, you might be able to end up giving yourself Friday off 'cause you've already hit your 30 hours. Who knows? But if you keep that as the same thing that your daily target and your desired average, or exactly the same number, you'll never, very rarely at least hit your goals. Or I mean, you'll end up in the worst situation, which is where you only did four on one day 'cause something happened on five another day because you didn't feel that great and dah, dah, dah, and suddenly it's Friday and you need to do 16 hours in order to be on target. And that's just no fun and not a great idea for anybody. So. If you are a good boss, separate out what are daily targets, what are averages you're aiming for to give yourself a good chance of being able to hit your goals. If your goals require 100% compliance, they're stupid goals. And I say that with so much love and respect because I still have to fight myself back from making these goals for myself. I'm right here in the trenches with you. You have to allow space for things not to be perfect for you, not to be perfect, and still to hit your overarching goals for the week. That leads to my second tip for bosses, which is we also need to decide how we manage slippages. What I mean by a slippage is where a task's taking longer than you anticipated or you're not kind of up to the number of hours you said you'd work or the work count you said you'd do, or however you are operationalizing it. We have to decide what do we do? Does that mean we work harder tomorrow? Does that mean we change the plan? Does that mean we add more hours? We need strategies and we need to pre decide them so that when we're in that moment, we don't act like really indulgent to ourselves or super critical either. Now, in the be your own best boss course. I have like eight tips for this, right? But one that I think is really useful is instead of asking yourself, do I have time to get x done now that my schedule slipped is to ask yourself how well can I get X done in the time I have available? And I think I've used this analogy before, but I want you to imagine that like someone whose opinion you care about is coming to your house and you've got 10 minutes to clear it up. You are gonna get it clear enough, right? You're gonna get the junk out the way. You're gonna wipe down the side. You're gonna just make it look vaguely habitable rather than like delaying them coming for hours so you can do a proper spring clean or just deciding that. You can't be bothered and it's fine. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a big believer in just letting people in your house wherever stay is in, but you get my analogy right? And the same is true with work. If you realize that things on Monday and Tuesday have taken longer than you anticipated they would, you get to decide that for the rest of the week, you are gonna see how far you can get the piece of work. In the time you have available, rather than saying, I'm gonna give it loads more time, or I'm gonna sack it off 'cause I can't reach it this week. The other thing boss can do to really help with that is give implementers some guidance about what that looks like. So if you are making a presentation, what that means is I want you to get the titles and the text on the slides. I do not want you to put any pictures in. I do not want you to change the color scheme. This can be black and white if it has to be, but we are getting the content in there, for example. Okay, so boss, you can manage slippages by not only giving some kind of constrained instructions, but also giving some indication about how to go about doing that. So that's a couple of tips. If you think it's boss, you, that's the problem. Now, some of the things we are gonna work on in the membership are really delving into that in more detail because. None of you are stupid. If you are planning too much into your weeks, you are trying to do too much. There's a reason for that, right? And some of that reason might be in your personal beliefs, in your backgrounds. It might be in the environment that you are in. It might be the way you are thinking about stuff. And if we can better understand it. Like for me, it really was this kind of ridiculous sense of enthusiasm and, uh, that I should be able to do all this stuff 'cause I work fast. I should be able to do everything. That really helped me because it made me realize that, you know what, I'm doing all this because I think I want to, but I don't want this life. I don't want it to feel like this. So I then had to decide what I wanted more. Did I want to try to do everything? Or did I want a life that felt a bit better than that and that was what I chose in the end. For others of you, the reason you're saying yes to everything, the reason you're taking on too much is because you're worried about what your supervisor's gonna say or whatever. If we can get to the depths of why you are doing this, as we do with my clients, then you are much better placed to pick strategies that will work for you. Now, you might be going, Boss Me makes great plans. Boss, me, specific, realistic. I just don't then do it when I want to. The first thing I'd say, in keeping with my general beliefs about the workplace too, is are you sure? Are you sure it's not Boss You's fault? Because sometimes implementer you is rebelling against a plan. Implementer you is saying, I'm not even sure I want to do this. This is only on my list. 'cause someone said I had to, or they're saying, I don't think I know how to do this and you haven't told me that bit. Or they're saying. I am tired and you haven't left me any breaks, so if you think it's implementer you go back to the beginning and double check it's not boss you, but if it really, really, really is implementer you, I have a tip for that too. Now this is gonna be the entire huge focus of quarter two of the PhD Life Coach membership, which runs from May. So people can join at the end of April. It runs May, June, and July. We are gonna be focusing on procrastination and focus and distractions and how we can actually do the things we intend to do. So if you struggle with implementer you, then the membership is exactly where you need to be. I'm gonna give you one that you can start using now though. This is the notion of intrinsic proximal rewards. I can't remember if I've spoken about this on the podcast again, lemme know if I have, but it doesn't hurt to hear it again. What this means is thinking very carefully about how you motivate yourself to do a particular task. Often what we do is we motivate ourselves either by thinking about getting it over with, and so we are really framing it as an in inherently negative task that we're doing, or we motivate ourselves by what we're gonna get once we've got it done, how proud we'll be when it's finished, what reward we're gonna give ourselves when it's over. And what those things do is they shift our motivation to either avoiding the task as much as possible or to sort of more extrinsic forms of reward. So stuff that's not inherent to the task itself, but that you'll give yourself when it's done. What I want us to do instead is think of much more intrinsic motivation. So the reasons why this task is important to us, the reasons that we could actually enjoy doing elements of this task. Now, not everything's gonna be fun and interesting, but often the things we're avoiding are literally the things we signed up to do in our PhDs, right? The reading and the writing and the analysis. These are the things we allegedly liked, which is why we decided to do a PhD except we've turned them into these big emotional volcanoes. If we can remind ourselves that this is an opportunity to spend time doing this thing, I like, we can really try and remind ourselves and heighten that sense of intrinsic motivation associated with the task. The proximal bit though is about making it something that happens pretty quickly. So this is not about how good it will feel when it's done. How glad you'll be to have your PhD in the future, any of that stuff, that's all far too distal to be motivating. The proximal stuff is the why it's good here and now. Why if I do this for an hour, I'm gonna feel good during that hour and at the end of the hour. Okay, so if you are struggling with implementation, focus on intrinsic proximal rewards. Why am I doing this? Why do I care about it? What do I actually enjoy about doing this task? And really focus in on experiencing those positive things. We can generate motivation there in the moment, even if it isn't coming to us in a flood of natural motivation. Now if you are thinking, okay, this stuff sounds good, but I have got so much to learn, perfect. I've got you. We're gonna carry on covering this stuff in the podcast, but if you want the more in-depth personalized, actually speaking to somebody about the things that are specific to you stuff you need the membership. Jump on my website. Click on the membership. There'll be a button. If you're listening to this live ish, it starts next week. The cart opens on the 28th of April. If you get in at the beginning, you get access to some stuff that people getting in at the end don't get, so keep an eye out for that. Jump in if you are listening to this randomly in like September, 2026. There's still a wait list open for the next quarter coming up, so sign up anyway this membership isn't going anywhere. So separate boss you, separate implementer you, review them separately so that you can really understand what you're doing well and what you're doing, not so well in the two different roles. And that is where we plan from. That is where you have the absolute capacity to make things feel a whole lot easier than they do right now. If you're listening live, make sure you signed up for the weekly review webinar. Even if you can't come live, you will get all the handouts and everything afterwards. It's gonna be super, super useful. We're gonna make sure that we really understand how our weeks have gone, what we have achieved, and what we wanna do differently next week. Make sure you're signed up. Thank you all for listening, and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics time.