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"Accepting where you are is the first step to getting where you want"


The PhD Life Coach podcast

Whether you're a PhD student or an experienced academic, life in a university can be tough. If you're feeling overwhelmed, undervalued, or out of your depth, the PhD Life Coach can help. We talk about issues that affect all academics and how we can feel better now, without having to be perfect productivity machines. We usually do this career because we love it, so let's remember what that feels like!

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by Victoria Burns 25 Mar, 2024
One of the things that always amazes me is the similarities between the challenges that PhD students have and the challenges that people at every stage of academia, all the way up to a full professor, have. And never is that more true than in the challenge of comparing yourself to others. From all of my one to one coaching and group memberships, it's so apparent that at every stage of the academic tree, people are comparing themselves to those around them and doing it in ways that just doesn't help and where they end up feeling guilty, feeling frustrated, feeling hopeless. And it's just so sad that whether you're a first year PhD student looking at the rest of your cohort wondering if you're doing enough or whether you're some kick ass senior professor who's smashing their career, we're still looking across to other labs going, Oh, well, they, you know, they have still got more grant income than me. They still got more publications than me. It's so sad. And it doesn't have to be like that. So today we're going to be thinking about how to stop comparing yourself to others and what to do instead. Hello, and welcome to episode 28 of the PhD Life Coach. Do you find yourself comparing yourself to others, and somehow always coming up short? Always feeling like we're chasing down the next person who's doing the thing that we need to be doing, putting ourselves under pressure because of these comparisons. This originally came up because the PhD students in my membership program were experiencing this a lot. They were comparing themselves to their cohort. Some of them were writing up and feeling like the rest of their cohort had already left and making that mean something about them and their abilities. Others were closer to the beginning of their program and just feeling like other people were in the swing of it much more quickly than they were. And then I see later on when people are seeing how fast people get promoted or when they get their first big grant or when they start winning awards from their learned societies or whatever it is. At every stage we're sort of watching across to see what other people are doing and then using that comparison to mean something about us. And we dug into it in one of our coaching sessions. So we have these online group coaching sessions where we have discussions in the Zoom chat, first of all, and then we do coaching in front of each other. So people get to see each other being coached. And we realized that when I asked people what they compared, they also compared themselves on a bunch of different things. It wasn't just on the sort of usual academic metrics of publications and progress through your PhD. But they were also comparing themselves in terms of how much work other people did and how much energy other people put in. And the thing that was really cute, bless them, and I've seen this at every level, is that we compare ourselves in both ways. We worry if people are putting in more effort than us and we worry that they're working harder than us, but we also worry that there are people that never seem to work as hard as us but are still doing okay. So either way round, whether we work more or less hard, we can make it a problem. They also compared themselves in terms of how much experience they had, before and outside of their PhD. And in both directions too because I had PhD students who'd come straight in from their masters who felt that they were much less experienced than other people in their cohort and then I had people who were part time PhD students who had senior careers in other things who felt that yeah they had that experience but that wasn't the same as having recent academic experience and that actually these people that came straight from their masters were much more prepared for their PhDs. And again I see this with Full Academics as well. I see people who have come straight through, stayed in academia their whole lives, feel like they don't have the external experience that other people have, and then the people that do have external experience feeling like a bit of a fraud within academia because they feel their actual academic credentials aren't up to it. Either way round, somehow we still come out on the bottom every time. And then when you chuck in, all the quantitative things that we can measure in academia, whether that's grant income, or number of publications, or impact factor, or citation numbers, or awards from learned societies, or fellowships, or whatever it is, once we chuck in all that stuff. There's so many things that we can compare ourselves on, and none of it really helps. Even people that think that they really aspire to having a good work life balance can compare themselves to people who they think have a better work life balance than we do. So even when we're trying to actively not engage in some of this kind of one upmanship, we can sometimes feel that actually other people are better at the work life balance than us. Oh, so and so never works weekends, and I always have to catch up a bit on a Sunday night, even though I don't want to. And we start comparing ourselves on how well we're doing work life balance as well. So in today's episode we're going to think about why it's such a problem to compare yourself to others, and importantly, as usual, what you can do instead. Now, some of you might be thinking, I don't actually see this as a problem. By comparing myself to others, I give myself something to strive for. And, you know, many of my achievements have been attempting to beat my brother, or to beat my best friend, or whatever it might be. We hear sports people talking all the time about how their bitter rivalries drove them to better performances. So why is it even a problem? Well, I would argue that there's a bunch of reasons why it's a problem. Now, for most people, these sorts of rivalries only drive you to your best if you maintain a mindset where it is achievable to be as good as or better than these other people. So where you believe that they're really good, but you have capacity, i. e. it's a challenge rather than a threat, you have the resources to potentially be able to meet or exceed them then maybe you perceive it as a fun rivalry, maybe you perceive it as something that will drive you to achieve more. Unfortunately what happens for a lot of people is it doesn't feel achievable, they compare themselves to others in a way that either doesn't feel realistic or is not realistic for reasons we'll discuss in a minute and what happens then is usually something around guilt or frustration or even despair and despondency. We essentially give up or really struggle to keep going because when we look and compare ourselves to these other people and come up short, it doesn't feel plausible to meet them. And when something feels too difficult, it's really hard to then put in the hours and the effort to try and achieve the goal. Those of you who have listened to my previous podcast about procrastination will know that if we keep thinking thoughts that make us feel guilty or frustrated or despondent, we're likely to end up procrastinating or overworking one way or another, because we try and avoid these negative sensations. It can also be a poor motivational strategy because when we start doing things just in order to be better than somebody else, it shifts us away from a more intrinsic motivation where we're doing something because we enjoy it, because we value it, or because it's part of who we are. And more into a more extrinsic form of motivation where we're doing it in order to beat somebody else. i.e. Get some sort of external benefit that is separate from the benefit of the thing itself. Now I'm going to do an episode in the future, where we look at these different types of motivation and why it can be really important to understand them when we're thinking about motivating ourselves, but suffice to say here, when we're more intrinsically motivated, we're doing it because we value the thing itself, and because we enjoy it, and it's part of who we are. We're much more likely to be able to put in sustained effort, and to have good psychological health during that, than if we're doing something in order to beat somebody else, to get that reward of winning, or to avoid the punishment of losing, in inverted commas. So even if you feel like the rivalries are actually driving you to better performance, we need to look really carefully about whether that's actually helpful in the long run, or whether that is going to lead to situations where you lose your intrinsic motivation and have poorer psychological health because of it. The other thing that I think is different between rivalries that drive us on versus comparisons that hold us back is the extent to which they make us believe something about ourselves. What I see often in academia is people who find that the comparisons they're making just reinforce the stories that they tell about themselves. So if you believe that you're somebody who doesn't work enough, you will probably compare yourself to people who work more than you and end up sort of reinforcing that belief. If you believe you don't write quickly enough, you compare yourself to people who write quickly and publish a lot and make that mean something about your academic life. If you're doing this, don't worry. This is totally normal to do this. Our brains like to be right. And so if we're constantly telling ourselves that we're not good enough at something, we will look around us for evidence that that's true. And one place you can get evidence that that's true is by looking at people who are different to you and comparing yourself unfavorably to them. When we have brains that want to be right, unhelpful comparisons is one of the things that they will do. But it is also super problematic because if we reinforce the fact that we're not good enough at what we're doing or we reinforce the fact that we're not fast enough or that other people are doing better than us and we find evidence for those things being true, it's much harder for us to generate the sorts of emotions that are going to enable us to get on and do our work. We're going to find ourselves stuck much more in in that kind of hopeless, I can't quite get on with this, I'm overwhelmed mode rather than in the, okay, let's go. This is exciting. I'm capable of this, let's get this done, kind of mode that we know helps us achieve our goals and feels so much nicer. The other downside that my clients identified is that it can really waste energy. We put a lot of cognitive space in comparing ourselves to others, deciding whether it's true or not, what that means, spinning stories about how they're going to go much further than us or how it's not fair and they've had more advantages. We can use up a lot of cognitive space doing this. And as I talked about last week in my episode about how to manage your energy, cognitive energy is a really important resource for academics. It's something that we really need in order to be able to do the hard work. And if we find ourselves using up that cognitive space on spinning stories about why we're not good enough and why other people are doing better than us, it doesn't leave as much cognitive space for the other things that we need to do. Comparing ourselves to others also skews our decision making because if we're constantly telling ourselves that we should have more publications like she has and we should have more grants like she has and we should have a better work life balance like he does, then we start making decisions based on trying to be more like them, trying to achieve the things that they're achieving. Now that doesn't necessarily sound like a bad thing unless we're doing it from a frantic place and often we're doing it from a frantic place. So we take on that committee role because we should have more extracurricular activities and we volunteer to organize that conference because we should have more leadership things. And we then agree to do that extra publication because we need to have a longer publication list. And all of a sudden now we're over committed and overwhelmed and now instead of beating ourselves up, that we're not as good as other people, we're beating ourselves up because we can't stay on top of things the way everybody else does. And in reality, when we made those decisions, we were probably comparing ourselves to a bunch of different people. We were comparing ourselves to the one who's got lots of publications and the one who does lots of leadership and the one who does lots of other things. And somehow thinking that we should be better at all things than all of them. And making decisions. from that place is never going to go well. If we choose to do things simply to keep up with or beat other people, we don't then end up planning our lives around our values and our priorities and designing a life. that we actually like. So what can we do instead? Well, I'm going to argue that we can compare ourselves to people. I think in many cases, it can be really useful to compare ourselves to people. And at the end of this podcast, I'm going to tell you exactly how I want you to do that. But first I want to tell you why I think we're doing it badly at the moment. What is wrong with the way we're currently comparing ourselves to others and why it leads to all these problems. And then I will share with you what we should do instead. So the first reason is we do it inaccurately. We compare ourselves to what we know of other people. So we compare ourselves in terms of our grant income without knowing what support they've had in order to generate that grant income. We compare ourselves in terms of how many hours they're in the office or in the laboratory without knowing whether they're actually productive during that time, whether they work when they're at home. Or what it is, you know, sometimes you're like, Oh my God, they're always at work, but actually they're faffing about on Twitter or, you know, Oh my God, they get so much done and they're only in the office six hours a day, but actually they're working all weekend. We don't know the truth. Yet often we compare ourselves to these fictionalized versions of other people. One of the tips I often give clients is that you have to remember that you're comparing your insides with their outsides. You don't get to see the messy bits. You don't get to see the mistakes they've made, unless they're really public. You don't get to see all the things that they worry about, or the projects they didn't finish. You just get to see the announcement that so and so has got another grant and make it mean that you're not good enough. So we compare ourselves really inaccurately based on incomplete information. That's the first way that we get this wrong. The second way is that we compare ourselves selectively. We compare ourselves to one bit of that person. I wish I was as far through my data collection as that person without looking to see whether the other elements of their life, of their academic progress are actually something that we're jealous of at all. So I used to run the third year project module in my school. And one of the things that I always used to see was I had some students coming towards me going, Oh my God, my friends, they finished their data collection, and I haven't even started yet. And, and, you know, it's a nightmare. I don't know what to do. And then I would have the other students come to me saying, oh my God, my housemates finished their literature review already, and I haven't done any writing at all, because all I've been doing is data collecting, and I'm going to be so behind when it comes to the writing. And they were looking at each other. They were looking at each other selectively, and comparing themselves to the one bit that those other people were doing better than them at, and not looking at any of the other bits. Not looking at the ways that actually you're about the same as each other, or the ways that actually I'm a bit further ahead on this stuff than you are. The other way that we compare ourselves selectively is we don't take into account their whole situation. So often we compare ourselves to the grant income of one particular person, but that person is working in a highly fundable field, has a lot of senior mentorship, doesn't have a family, works really long hours, doesn't have other hobbies outside of work, all these other things. We don't take those into account because we're only comparing ourselves to their grant income. We compare ourselves selectively to the bits that we can see and the bits that reinforce our narratives about ourselves. So we compare ourselves. This person does that faster than me. This person does that better than me. Very rarely do we go actually, yeah, they do, but I don't like the rest of their life, or I don't like the rest of their choices, or actually this other part of academia I'm actually better at than them, I'm further along than them. We rarely do that bit, we just selectively compare ourselves to the bits that reinforce the negative sense that we have of ourselves. The third thing, we compare ourselves unproductively. And what I mean by unproductively is we compare ourselves about things that we can't change. So I see a lot, for example, people who have small children comparing themselves to people who don't and thinking how different things would be if they didn't have small children. That's what I would call an unproductive comparison, because it's not one that you can change your circumstance. You're comparing yourself to somebody who's in a fundamentally different position to you. I see it a lot with part time students comparing themselves to the progress made by full time students. It's not productive because unless you're going to change to being a full time student, it's not a fair comparison, and not one that you can actually learn from in any meaningful way. You know, it's a similar situation for people who have disabilities, who have physical or mental health problems. Comparing yourself to people who don't have the same challenges as you, it's a really unfair comparison and it's unproductive because you can't just decide, oh okay I won't have this anymore then. It's not how it works. Comparison is only productive if it leads to something that's useful and comparing yourself on something you can't change is never going to be useful. The fourth reason that we do comparisons in an unhelpful way is when we do it repeatedly without action. So we constantly feel like we're not as good as that other person, but we don't do anything about it. We constantly compare ourselves to somebody else who's, you know, just a bit further along than you, even though you started at the same time, whether that's your PhD or getting your senior lectureship or whatever it is. If we repeatedly compare ourselves to the same person without actually doing anything, again, we just reinforce our negative beliefs. We generate negative emotions and make it way harder to take the next steps. So what do we do instead? I promised I would give you an alternative here. What we do instead is that when we choose to compare ourselves, we compare ourselves compassionately and with intention. Now I have talked in the past about boss mode and student mode. And those of you who are signing up for my be your own best boss program will learn so much more about this. I'm super excited. Starts at the beginning of April. I've had my first few people register and it's going to be amazing. You will have heard me talk about being a boss to yourself where you're actually planning and being strategic and then being your student or worker self where you actually carry out those tasks and actually implement. My big rule for comparing yourself to others is you're only allowed to compare yourself to others when you're in boss mode, when you are thinking strategically, when you are thinking from a place of what do I actually want to do differently, or don't I? So when you're in boss mode, you can look at other people. Sometimes it is useful to compare your work patterns to others, to just reevaluate whether you're doing it the way you want to be doing it. You can compare your current publication record or current grant income record to other people, because that can be really useful information. But when we are being our best boss to ourselves, we do that compassionately. We don't do it to reinforce our negative beliefs of ourselves. We do it in a curious way. We do it in a way that goes, I wonder. We do it in a thorough way. So we don't only compare ourselves to the people that are doing. than us. We compare ourselves to a wide range of people so that we can really sort of muddle out where we sit in this pecking order. Are we about where we want to be? Are there ways that we could improve? We get to think about it intentionally. So we think, okay, they've got more publications than me. Why is that? Are they doing something that I'm not doing that I could and would like to choose to do? And if so, how can I figure that out and how can I start doing it? When we're in boss mode and particularly when we're in the kind of compassionate and curious boss mode that I'm going to be helping people generate in my new program, then we can really strategize based on some sensible and logical comparisons. What we don't want to be doing when we're in student mode, when we're in worker mode, where our job is to get on and implement the plan, we don't want our brain spinning with, I'm not good enough. She's better than me. He's got more than me. I'll never be able to, because it makes it enormously harder to get the work done, which is what we need to do in order to achieve our goals. And nothing intentional comes from spinning when you're in worker mode. When you've got things that you're meant to be doing and you're not doing them, if you're spending that time comparing yourself to it, it doesn't help you get the stuff done, and it doesn't help you make intentional change. So, next time you hear yourself comparing yourself to somebody, you don't have to tell yourself to shut up. You don't have to tell yourself that you're not allowed to do that anymore. Because there's a bit of your brain that's doing that just because it worries about you and it wants you to do as well as you can do within the situation that you're in. Okay, so we don't have to shut up that bit of brain. But we can say to that bit of brain, this isn't for now. Next time we're in boss mode, we can think about this properly. We can compare our publication record properly, decide exactly where we're at. Are there things we want to change? Are there things we love about where we are with our publication record? Are there people we are doing better at? Are there reasons we are where we are? And is there anything sensible and achievable that we can take from these comparisons? And we do that in boss mode. We then set those intentions and student mode or worker mode gets on and does those implementations. So you can compare yourself to other people, but let's do it in a way that is fair to you and in a way that enables you to use that information to get better at what you're doing and achieve your goals rather than in a way that just gives yourself another stick to beat yourself with. I really hope you found that useful. If you're listening to this in real time and you're a PhD student or a postdoc who wants to hear more about my Be Your Own Best Boss program, just find me on social media. I'm the PhD life coach and Dr Vikki Wright. You'll find me everywhere or get yourself on my mailing list. So go to my website, thephdlifecoach. com website, sign up for the email list. Contact me through that. Find out more details. I would love to have you in the program. It's three months. We've got workshops. We've got group coaching. There's an ebook. There's access to other workshops. All sorts of stuff. It's going to be a wonderful community. We're going to learn so much from each other, so do check that out. If you're a member of academic staff, remember I do one to one coaching, or tell your students about my program. I would love to support them too. Thank you all so much for listening and see you next week.
by Victoria Burns 18 Mar, 2024
In this episode, you get to hear a live coaching session with Laura! Laura is a part time PhD student who has tried every planning and task management tool possible! She shares that she finds it stressful to even think about planning and is worried about how to manage the last couple of years of her research. I coach her as I would in a private coaching session and we reach some great insights about how Laura is already planning way more than she gives herself credit for and how she can keep developing her skills. Perfect for anyone who has ever been self critical, worried about planning or fed up of never finding the perfect system! Vikki: Hello and welcome to episode 27 of the PhD Life Coach. And this is going to be another of my special episodes where I have somebody on to be coached. So today I have Laura with me who has volunteered to be coached around a challenge that she's experiencing at the moment. So hi, Laura, how are you doing? Laura: Hi, yeah, no, I'm really good. It's really exciting, uh, to be doing this today. Vikki: It's amazing to have you here. So tell everyone a little bit about who you are, where you're at in your PhD journey. Laura: So yeah, so I'm a part time PhD student, so I'm in my fourth year. So that's like year two in equivalent full time years. I am in information studies. So, researching kind of how people use and experience information and I'm looking at it in the context of running as a sport and in my day job, I work part time as a librarian at a university. Vikki: Amazing. So good. I have a lot of part time students that listen to the podcast and who are part of my membership program and do one on one coaching with me. And often they feel like they're experiencing very different challenges. And one of the things that I think is so useful is regardless of whether when people listening, whether you're part time or full time, I think the things that part time students learn how to do are obviously useful for other part time students, but can be really useful for full time students as well, because you've almost got a more extreme version of this really long, drawn out project, which feels like that as full time, so even more so as part time. So, tell me a little bit about what is feeling challenging at the moment. Laura: I think it's very much, you know, four years of doing it, and for me, that feeling very much kind of like we've kind of crossing over that halfway point now, and yeah, you know, maybe a little bit of pressure around how much there's going to be left to do, but it is also very much that maintaining that momentum and that energy, you know. I've been doing this since 2020, we're now 2024 and that seems to be kind of rapidly moving on, but I feel like I've still got a really long way left to go. Um, and how do I, how do I keep myself, I mean, I love my research. I love my topic and you know, sometimes I can't imagine not having this in my life, but at the same time, it's like gotta keep, gotta keep going. Vikki: Perfect. So tell me more about how you're experiencing the momentum at the moment. Is that, does it ebb and flow? Is it always low and you're having to kick yourself into it? Does it come in spurts? How do you experience it? Laura: I think, I, I mean, so I had a really difficult year last year. I broke my ankle partway through the year, which, as someone who's researching running, was, you know, an even more incredibly difficult setback. And I got COVID, I just felt like it was like a real struggle of a year to keep going. So I do kind of feel like I'm coming into this, this second half of this new academic year with a bit more of like a renewed, like, finding my energy again but it's very much trying to get into that rhythm of, you know, balancing going to work, doing the PhD, how everything kind of slots together. And I think that can be, that can be really difficult. And if, you know, I've come home after a, a really long week at work and it's like right time to sit down and try and get myself back into this headspace of doing my research. Vikki: So I think one of the things that's really interesting when we're thinking about Finding things sort of difficult, looking kind of over a long period of time, sort of, oh, I need to keep momentum going. We could either focus on how you can look at that sort of timescale, the kind of now till the end of your PhD timescale, and think about that in a slightly different way than you are at the moment. Because I think sometimes when we tell ourselves, Oh my God, I've got to keep momentum for all this time. That can be an exhausting thought in itself. So we could think about that side of things. Alternatively, what can be useful is to actually draw the focus a bit closer to where we are and sort of almost train, train ourselves the right word, not sure, but to kind of encourage ourselves to think about how we can maintain momentum over a week or a month as our key focus with the belief that as long as we keep doing that, the rest will come together. So which feels like it might be more useful avenue for you to explore, do you think? Laura: Hmm, yeah, because I, yeah, because I tend to, I say if I was to really reflect on my working kind of habits, I'm much a get a burst of like, so I'm so hyper focused on this and it's all I can think about it's all I'm going to do. And then I kind of feel a bit burnt out and I can't, I'm like, I'm going to have to like, lie down for a week and I've drained myself of all my energy. So I'd say I don't, in the short kind of term, I don't work in a very sustainable way. But thinking about the big goals to me is quite often quite overwhelming and stressful, so I do, I'm, I, I'm good at thinking, okay, what am I going to do this week? Vikki: Okay. Laura: But I don't necessarily, you know, I'm not always very good at thinking, or what, what, what might I be working on in six months time. And how do I get to that point? If, does that make sense? Vikki: Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. And again, I think it leaves us in a place where there's a couple of different things that we could think about. We could think about how you could look after yourself to work in a bit more of a sustainable way day to day, which might then help you feel like it's going to be easier to keep that going in the long term, or we could address the bit that feels a bit overwhelming and actually dive into how could you spend a small amount of time thinking about that longer term picture in a way that doesn't feel stressful and overwhelming or at least where we can handle and regulate that stress and overwhelm. Laura: Yeah. And that kind of, I suppose that kind of feels like a good thing to do because sometimes I wonder if the reason why I get into these, like, okay, right, all, all I'm going to do every night this week until like 11 o'clock at night is... all the words are going to pour out of me and I'm going to be so in the zone. And sometimes I think that comes from a place of, of panic. Like, oh, don't feel like I've made much progress for a while and now I'm going to go into like super, super panic writing mode and churn out a load of stuff. Vikki: But if you're not quite sure what direction you're going in and where you want to be at certain times, then that can be challenging, right? Because you're putting in all this effort, but you don't know whether it's going in the right direction at the pace you want it to be. Laura: Possibly, yes. But yeah, if, if someone said to me, right, sit down and, plan out what you want to be working on and when for the rest of 2024, I would probably like freeze up and go, Oh no, no, no, no, no. Vikki: Okay. Well that sounds, if you're willing, then that sounds, and I don't think we do a full year. If a full year feels like it would be a freeze, then one thing that can be really useful to do with that, and we'll think a bit more about why you feel like this, but one thing that can be really useful is to find a period of time that is beyond what you feel comfortable planning for easily, regularly, but is not as far as like completely panic inducing. And I think this is really useful for people because I think people often struggle to have these broader, perspectives. And often I find it's because people think that they need to know more detail than they actually do and so we avoid thinking about it at all. And so I think if we can go through some of that, then I think that will be really useful for people listening who are trying to do these sorts of longer term planning as well. So tell me what is it about planning ahead that feels stressful for looking further ahead than that? Laura: I think it's that indecisiveness and how do I, how do I know what I'm supposed to be doing in the future? Because I do, I even, you know, I just feel like sometimes I feel like I just about know what I'm doing now. So it is that, you know, the committing to the abstractness of and the potential. I don't. Yeah. It's I know some people seem to find it almost quite comforting to have things planned out, but I do not. And I think it probably must really frustrate my supervisors as well actually. And it's like, you know, what's Thinking about the bigger picture, um, and me being like, Oh, I'm, I'm not a planner. Vikki: Well, one thing I will reassure you and everybody with, and I do workshops on this is we are never responsible for other people's thoughts and feelings. So you show up how you want to show up and how you are with your supervisors. And then your supervisors are grownups who are allowed to have whatever thoughts and feelings they have. And everybody, in my experience, everybody stops acting quite so weird if we just accept that people will think and feel what they think and feel, and it's not our responsibility to micromanage it. Um, so, we'll leave your supervisor's frustrations over there. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, who knows. Your responsibility is for you to think about how you want to show up, okay? Laura: Exactly, exactly. Vikki: So, a question. Is it the idea of making a longer term plan? So that period of time where you're actually thinking about it and planning it that feels difficult, or is it the notion of having a longer term plan? So if your fairy godmother could come down and just say, here's your plan for the next six months. It's all stuff you really like and want to do. I'm magic. So I've taken into account absolutely everything you want, but it's realistic as well. Um, do you like the idea of having it or is there a challenge with that as well? Laura: Oh, what a, what a question. I think part of me does like the idea of, you know, the magic plan just appears for you. I think part of me would then be kind of like, but what if, what if it doesn't go to plan? Vikki: What would you like about it? So it's okay if you're having different sides of the coin, how you're feeling about it, and we'll explore both. But let's start with what would feel good about having a three month plan or a six month plan? Laura: The security of, like, here's a mapped out kind of direction that we can, we can kind of follow to help us feel less chaotic all the time. Vikki: Why do you think it would reduce the chaotic feeling? Laura: Because a lot less energy would like, and like mental energy would constantly be used. . Trying to work out, okay, where are we again? What are we doing right now? What, what should I be doing today? What's my priority today? I think I, I, you know, when you, especially when you're part time and you know, you've got one day a week that is your, your day to sit down. And, you know, you're not working, that's your PhD day and then you find yourself thinking, okay, well, what, what should I be doing today? You know, if I could be like, okay, it's, this is, this is the plan says we're doing this today. Let's just try and do this. Vikki: And how do you think that would affect your productivity and how you feel about your work? Laura: Again, it's, I suppose it's sometimes, you know, is there an element of needing that yeah that mental flexibility to be able to be like, sometimes I'm a bit like, well, what do I feel able to be doing right now? It's almost like needing like a little menu of these are the things that need to be done. Which one do I have the right brain space for right now? Cause of course you don't always, you know, you might be like, okay, I need to I should be writing, like, this findings chapter but actually, you know, there's stuff going on that means I, I don't feel I can get into it right now. It's, yeah, it's really, it's the, particularly kind of being in a, a bit of a writing. stage right now, although the way my, the way we've kind of structured my PhD is that I've done some data collection over the last year, I've spent the last few months doing analysis and writing it all up. And now I need to start moving back into another phase of data collection, which I think is not always how lots of not, not, it's not kind of the typical way you see PhD kind of timelines. Vikki: So you're sort of switching between some different things at the moment. Laura: Yeah, which was a deliberate strategy that we thought about that would be useful to help me with this issue of you know, the, I like novelty, I like to have fun new things to be thinking about. So that was a, a good strategy that me and my supervisors talked about. And I was like, actually, I think doing it like this would be much better for how my brain works than spending two years gathering a load of data and then having to sit down And all I've got left to do is write about it. Vikki: And that's something that's going to be different between different individuals, right? Because I coach people where their dream is just to have one thing that they can just immerse themselves in and do that. And the task switching between things, they find really difficult. Whereas other people, I'm a bit more like you, other people like to have a few different things. Um, what I want to notice though, is that you have said that you don't like and find it very difficult to plan for the future. But this bit of what project sits where and therefore what activities you're going, that sounds like you've been planning for the future. Laura: It's like, yeah, I've been planning for the future, but I've not been committed. Yeah, it's, I've not been, I suppose it's all. Yeah, it's. It's funny that isn't it actually, but yeah, the idea that do actually have actually been doing the planning. I just don't recognize it as planning, because it's maybe it's not what what I think other people think planning looks like. It's not in a Gantt chart. It's not in a big thing on the wall. It's not in like a anything it's just all in my head. Vikki: And this is so interesting. I want all of you listening to think about this in your own lives is often we have these pictures of ourselves, right? As to what person we are and what we do and what we don't do. You know, for a long time, I had a belief that I was someone who over committed and then didn't finish things. And that used to really hold me back because I really, really believed this and it almost made it true because when I believed I was somebody who overcommitted and then didn't finish things, I had, I, there was no real incentive to not overcommit because it's, oh, that's what I do. And it took quite a bit of coaching for me to be like, Yeah, I overcommit, and there's some things I don't finish, but there's a lot of things I've finished. There's a lot of things I have done successfully. And so this image of myself as being someone who didn't finish things was not only not helpful, it just wasn't true. And so I think recognizing that in some ways you are someone who plans for the future and who plans for the future with their own preferences in mind. So it's not that you've planned out a way of doing studies that's just the most efficient or whatever. You've planned out a broad structure, even if it's not written down in a Gantt chart or anything, but you've planned out a broad structure that takes into account what needs to be done and what might work for you. How does it help to think that you are already doing this a bit? Laura: It, it, that's such, yeah, to have that kind of reflected back to me as yeah, the, the idea that. You know, I'm not just aimlessly wandering through a PhD. I have really thought about, you know, made those decisions around when to do particular things, and where we are going to go with it next. I think part of my, part of my big like kind of block on this is often to do with the fact that I'm the type of person who will be like, Oh, a shiny new, like productivity tool. Oh, a new notebook, a new diary. I'm going to use this diary. This is going to be the system for me now. And I find it really hard to pick a system and stick to it because I kind of forget to use it. Laura: And so I've done all the different, you know, the, the websites with all the little to do doing done boards on the calendars, the spreadsheets, the bullet journals, I have literally tried every single system out there and I'll get all like super excited about it for like a week and I'll put all the stuff in it and I'll set it all up. And then I'll just completely forget to look at it. So I find planning stressful because I find it hard to. follow through with whatever, you know, with that system for planning things out. Vikki: If anyone's watching this on YouTube, so if you're on podcasts, just so you know, I post all of these on YouTube as well. Um, it's exactly the same. It's not like fancy YouTube videos, but if you prefer that format, you can just do it. Anybody watching on YouTube will see that I was grinning all the way through Laura's saying that then. And that was not because I was laughing at you, Laura. That was because I was empathizing with you so hard. In fact, I think my fourth ever podcast episode. It was called Why You Don't Need Another Planner. So if you haven't listened to that one yet, I would highly recommend you go back to that. Uh, exactly the same. And so many people experience this and we can think about why that really isn't a problem and it isn't, but we can also think about why we choose to do it. And we're going to go that way first. So why do you want to find the system that works? Laura: Because, well, so yeah, like, if, it's like, you know, I, you know, you can't, can't hold everything in your head when it comes to all the things that need to be done and when they need to be done by. I mean, I can try and hold them all in my head and, you know, you get told, don't you, like planning, having, you know, all the tasks mapped out and the deadlines and when you're going to do them by and keeping track of it all. But, you know, you get told that's a really important part of project management skills. And part of me still, um, maybe, yeah, that idea that surely there's gotta be, like, the perfect solution out there, I just haven't found it yet. Um, I know, I do know that that is probably not actually true. Vikki: Possibly not. How would you feel if you had the perfect system? What things would you say to yourself, and what emotions would you experience? Laura: You know, I just, I don't, I don't actually know the answer to that question. Like, because part of me does recognise that I don't, there isn't a perfect system out there for me, so I do find it quite hard to imagine. Vikki: But what thought and feeling are you chasing? Because when we're looking for a new solution for something, we're essentially chasing a thought and feeling combination. Laura: Reassurance that I'm doing it right. Vikki: If you had the perfect system, you'd tell yourself you're doing it right, and you'd feel reassured. Laura: Yeah, I'd be like, I feel so secure that, I'm, I'm doing everything I should be doing right now at the right time. That kind of relief that you're not going to drop any of all the things you're juggling. Vikki: I'm not going to drop any balls. And this is really interesting and it might sound to listeners like we've slightly gone off on a tangent away from planning. But one of the things that I've found with myself and with clients is that is that one of the biggest barriers to planning can be this belief that we won't follow through on our plan anyway and therefore it's a waste of time and it's a bit of a painful waste of time because we're going to beat ourselves up for not following through on our plan as well. So understanding this stuff is a really important step to feeling willing and able to plan so that that doesn't feel quite such a threatening thing to do. So I want you to notice that what you really want isn't the perfect notion template that's going to automate all your everything's or the perfect the perfect daily planner that's got gold edges. This is back from the days when I fell for all this stuff. I still do to some extent. You know, whether it's old school, whether it's the perfect technical solution, it's not the solution that we're looking for. It's that we want to feel secure and we want us to feel reassured and we want to believe that we're on top of things and we're doing the right things. But anyone who's familiar with the self coaching model that I teach knows that the system we're using is just a circumstance. Yeah, it's just a fact. I have a Notion template. I have an Excel file. I have a diary system. I have a bullet journal, whatever it is. And the rest of it comes from our thoughts. And so we don't actually need a new system in order to feel more reassured and more secure. We just need to change the things that we're saying to ourselves all the time. Because it's when we're telling ourselves, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't even, you know, I never plan ahead. I just wing it and work hard and burn out and all of these things. When we tell ourselves all of this stuff, that's what makes us feel insecure. That's what makes us feel like we're not in control of this last period of our PhD, is all these things we tell ourselves. Okay. So before we get into the practicalities of actually how we can plan, tell me things that you already believe about yourself that make you feel reassured or secure. So we're not going to, I'm the most organized person in the world, because that's, that's not helpful. Things you already believe that make you feel secure? Laura: Like, you know, I know that I'm good at getting things done when they need to get done. Vikki: Perfect. I'm good at getting things done when they need to get done. Perfect. What else? Laura: I think I actually quite, I enjoy the, the, the sense of achievement of finishing off a piece of work that, you know, has been hanging over me. And then, you know, all of, and you think, you think you're never going to get it done. But I really, you know, I, I enjoy that sense of like achievement and those little moments of, and I'm good at recording those little moments. Vikki: Okay. Amazing. Because lots of people aren't. So that's a real strength. Laura: I don't have to do lists, but I am good at two. I am good at things. I've done lists. I love that. Vikki: In fact, I have a whole episode about done lists as well. So if anybody's interested in that, it's called why you shouldn't have a to do list. Um, so yes, that can be enormously important because so many people rush from what I need to do next, but as soon as it's done, it's forgotten and they're on to the next thing. So that's a huge strength. So you're someone who gets stuff done and you're somebody who gives themselves credit and sort of recognizes those achievements of getting stuff done. Laura: Yeah, I like little milestones and I do, I, you know, I think I am good at recognizing the, you know, the fact that PhD, it's not all about the end result. It's about everything you do along the way. Vikki: So you're someone who has milestones? Laura: Yes, I suppose I am. I suppose I am. Vikki: You're starting to sound a lot like somebody who plans a little bit more than they give themselves credit for. Because you can't achieve a milestone if you haven't got a milestone. Laura: That's very true, isn't it? I'm a I'm a, I'm a planner that can't recognize the fact that they plan ahead. Vikki: Who at the moment doesn't believe that or doesn't spend time thinking those thoughts? It's not that you can't. At the moment, you don't spend time thinking about the times that you have planned. Laura: Um, and don't, I think, yeah, well, you know, those, if you, you know, to ask me What are you very good at believing about yourself that is a very negative, self limiting belief? It probably would be , you know, I'm terrible at planning. I'm disorganized, I'm chaotic. I, you know, and I probably do limit myself with, with that a lot 'cause I can't stick to a system. Vikki: I mean, I don't think the problem here is the, you can't stick to a system. I think the problem here is that you're telling yourself you should be able to stick to a system perfectly. Laura: Yeah. And I think. That, someone, I had that given to me as a piece of advice once from someone else, um, who was trying to give me some support with getting, you know, getting, getting into good like habits in the PhD, and their advice was, Just pick a system and stick to it, and all will be well. Vikki: Yeah, that's not what, that's not exactly what I'm saying. I, I sort of agree with that. Yeah. Rather than the kind of pursuit of the perfect system. I don't think there's actually anything wrong with switching systems. I mean, switching systems every couple of weeks and spending lots of time researching the perfect system and watching YouTube videos about how to do the perfect system and spending lots of money on planners you never use, yeah, that's probably not ideal. But switching up how you do it every now and again, not a problem, not a big deal. Laura: Or if you're like, if your system just kind of fizzles out, or morphs into something different, then maybe that's okay? Like, yeah, I think maybe I, you know, given myself a lot of, a lot of, of pressure to be like, be like the perfect, like, super organized phD student, because you kind of need to be super organized when you're working in such limited blocks of time. And yeah, that probably is a bit of a barrier to how I think about what planning is and whether I'm good at it and things like that. Vikki: Cause I think one of the biggest issues for want of a better word is the belief that if the planning system fizzles out, to use your phrase there, that the A, that that's a big problem and B, that that means you need a different system. I have stuck to, and I'm going to tell you in a minute what my definition of stuck to is, because it is definitely not the same as what most people's is at the moment. I have stuck to the same planning system now for probably 18 months, something like that, which for me is revolutionary. This is, you know, my previous best was about two weeks, genuinely two, three weeks. And the reason I've stuck to it this time, it's because I have completely changed my definition of what sticking to it means, okay? And when it fizzles out, I don't take that as a sign that this is the wrong system. I just notice that it's fizzled out and start doing it again. Laura: Yes, rather than thinking, oh, it fizzled out, therefore it can't have been working. Yes. I need to invent a whole brand new process for doing it. Vikki: Because when it fizzles out, the habit can be to make that mean something about the tool that you're using, i. e. that it's the wrong system, you haven't come up with the right way of doing it, or that it says something about you. That you can never stick to a system and that you are somehow flawed. Often, we make it mean both, which makes it a whole heap of fun. We have both the wrong system and the wrong brain and we're screwed and we'll never succeed. Laura: Yeah, that sounds so familiar. Like, it's me. I, um, I am not good enough to, you know, To do this planning, why, why am I not good enough to be a planner? And I think maybe one of the, I suppose one of the big fears might be that, you know, I'll get towards the real end of the PhD and find myself in a place where I'm thinking, Oh, if only you'd stuck to, if only you'd put more effort into following that Gantt chart, we might not be in a in a, in a mess right now. And of course, I don't know I'm going to be in a mess in like a year or so's time, but I have that fear that I might be, and it could be my fault for not planning well enough. Vikki: Do you know the best thing about that fear though? That fear is a fear of a thought that you might have in the future. You can decide that you're just not going to think that thought, or you're just not going to believe and give it lots of airtime. You can decide that no matter what happens between now and then, you're not going to spend lots of time telling yourself you should have done it differently, and you're going to choose instead to focus on things that are also true. That you've made progress that you've got through, you've got stuff done, et cetera, et cetera, you know, you've already said you're good at recognizing the things you've achieved. You can decide I'm just not going to, if my big fear is that I'm going to tell myself I should have sorted this out earlier, I could just not do that. And of course it will still come up. I'm not saying we can't just, that we can just delete these thoughts from our heads, but we can decide. One of the phrases I really like, that I use with myself a lot is the, We don't speak about ourselves like that. And I have to remind myself of that. I'm going to do a podcast episode. In fact, by the time this one comes out, it will have already come out. So check it out, guys. It's great. I haven't recorded it yet, but I'm sure it will be. About the things that I'm still doing wrong in inverted commas and how I've learned to be okay with it. And so I do still have these beating up thoughts that come up in my head. You should have done this. You should be further along. You should be more on top of this, dah, dah, dah. But I'm also increasingly better at reminding myself we don't, we don't talk to ourselves like that. We don't have to think those thoughts and if we can build that into a planning system where it doesn't matter if we stick to this plan perfectly or not. The point is that we make a plan from good intentions. We attempt to stick to the plan for good intentions. And when we notice it's not quite what we thought it was going to be, or we're not quite doing the things we thought we can be. We can either realign or compassionately nudge ourselves back, but that none of these things mean it was a big mistake or a waste of time or a huge failure. It just means we need to realign ourselves back to what we were talking about and what we were doing and that that's okay, because that readjustment is part of the planning process. Laura: Yeah. And kind of, you know, when you asked What are you good at? And again, I do think I am actually very good at responding to, to those difficult moments. Probably partly thanks to my kind of professional background and the amount of kind of reflective practice we do in teaching and in librarianship and things like that. I do feel I've got this really good skill of being a very reflective and reflexive practitioner, which I think of as a strength in other respects with the PhD, but perhaps I've never really thought about how it can be a strength when it comes to, when plans don't go to plan. Vikki: So tell me just briefly what you mean by reflective in this context. Laura: Um, so it's like, taking those moments to think, okay, what, what's been going on, what's happened, how did that make me feel, what could I do differently. So when we're teaching in my job, you know, if we've done a teaching session, it might not be a formal thing of, you know, sitting down and writing about it, but generally always taking those, you know, those moments to think, how did that go? What didn't work? What am I going to do differently next year when I teach this particular workshop or this particular class? Vikki: It's almost like you're planning. Laura: It's almost like you're planning, isn't it? Vikki: Yeah, I'm terrible at planning. I'm really good at reflective practice. I think about what I've been doing and I work out what I need to do next. But yeah, terrible at planning. Awful. Laura: Awful at planning, good at, good at thinking back on how things have gone. Vikki: Thinking about how it's gone and deciding what you're going to do differently next time is literally planning. So you are telling me at the moment that you have an overarching structure for your PhD where you know roughly when you'll be data collecting and what bits you'll be writing up during that and things. And you have well developed skills at being able to think about how things are going and decide how to do them differently next time. Laura: Yeah, yeah. I'm guessing my, uh, my actual problem is just, not, um, not being able to recognize a lot of this. Vikki: It's what happens is people think that someone who is good at planning makes a plan, does the plan, And then makes another plan. And that it's this very linear, I decide it all in advance, I just implement it exactly how I intended, and then I do it again. And people have this perspective, but that is not how planning goes for anybody. There are people who are much more highly structured. I get that. It used to, I was head of education in my old role, and so I'd oversee all the modules in my school. And it would baffle me sometimes where people were like, but I'm teaching this in six months, Vikki. I needed to know this two months ago, cause it's all planned out. I'm like, how is it all planned out eight months before you start? I don't understand. So some people are much more highly structured in how far ahead they do these things and stuff. But no one just plans it out, does it exactly as they say, and then goes on to the next one. It's an unrealistic level of perfection that we're asking of ourselves. When we can see that the process of planning helps us to make some decisions now rather than later. And then we get to kind of work through the plan and some bits of it we will do and other bits that we don't do, and then we can readjust. And if we see that readjustment as an intrinsic part of the planning process, then suddenly we haven't failed at our plan. We're just assessing where we are, we're retweaking and going again. And that doesn't mean, you know, I was the queen of remaking my revision timetables because I'd color coded them and then I hadn't stuck to it or whatever. It doesn't mean just cramming, cram more in. It, readjusting can be going. Oh, I'm planning too much, aren't I? I'm not actually putting a realistic amount of stuff in here. Um, I need to get rid of some of this or I need to postpone some of this or whatever it can be that. It can be noticing You know, you are constantly telling yourself. You need to start work at 7 30 a. m You never do so How about we just tell ourselves we're gonna start working at 8 and then we are sticking to what we wanted to do Let's not give ourselves sticks that we just never ever stick to So that readjustment is part of the planning process, whether that's a sort of three, six month planning process, or whether it's a what we do this week process, readjusting is part of it. Laura: Yeah, it really is, isn't it? That kind of, and yeah, I would say, you know, I'm, probably a good strength of mine, that reflection and on the flip side, not be afraid to deviate from what I thought I should be doing, because something is telling me that that's not the right thing to be doing right now. Vikki: You get to be reflective then and think about, do I like this thing that's telling me to deviate? Because sometimes our brains tell us to deviate because it feels hard, or, you know, we can't be bothered at the moment, or it sounds boring, or we don't think we're good enough, or those things. So sometimes we hear those gut feelings and we can listen and go, You know, I don't like those reasons for deviating from the plan. We need to just stick to the plan. Or we listen to them and go, they're actually telling us, you know what, you put too much in this section of time. Or, you know what, I'm not actually interested in that study we designed. I don't know how we ended up over there, but it's not what I want to be doing and so we readjust. And so, When we can take some of the emotion away where we're not telling ourselves that readjusting means that we're big failures and our plan was a failure and we're rubbish and our system's wrong. We just tell ourselves that, okay, that's interesting. I'm deviating from this a bit. I wonder why that is. Is this actually the wrong route? Have I set it up in a way that doesn't work for me? Or do I actually need to develop my, my sort of skills in doing the thing I intended to do a little bit more? And we can have a mixture of those things, yeah? We can, we can have a mixture of It's partly sometimes I just fap about on my phone when I should be starting work, and I just need to get on with it. But other times, if it's something that I'm constantly setting myself up for fail because I never do it, well, let's just I obviously don't want to right now, so let's just not plan it. Laura: You know, it's so interesting to hear somebody talk about Like planning as something that has that ongoing kind of reflection and questioning. What's going on here is, you know, rather than what you often hear when you go on course, you know, you get sent on all the courses, you know, project management courses and time management courses and it's all, you know, it is all very structured and if you do this, this, this and this, you'll get to the end. And I don't think, I, now when I think about it, I don't think I've heard as much kind of emphasis on That, you know, that importance of like reflection and thinking almost, you know, you know, on a regular basis, what's going on here? Does this, is this working? Do I need to change something? And I quite like thinking about planning from that perspective now. Vikki: Why does that feel better? Laura: Cause it, it kind of makes me think I can be in control of everything in a way that feels very comfortable and like natural to how I go, how my brain works and how I, how I approach things rather than planning being something that It's like something I've got to learn, like this brand new skill that I don't already have. Vikki: Yeah. I want to take you back. You said that if you had the right system, you would think, I'm doing it right. I'm doing what I should be doing. And I think what you just described, It's essentially you telling yourself that. that actually if I see planning more as a reflective process, more as something where I am going to wander off, but then I'll nudge myself back, or I'll choose a different way, or whatever it is, then I can be telling myself, I'm doing this right because I'm adjusting my plan. I'm sticking to the bits that I really want to and the bits that are really important. And I'm recognizing that some weeks are going to be different to others and some days are going to be different to others. But on the whole I'm, I'm doing this and, and that's so powerful because then if you want to be feeling secure and reassured, you can make yourself feel secure and reassured by knowing that you've got this iterative, messy sometimes, but ultimately kind of well intentioned system, where we, we figure it out. Laura: Yes. Yes. That's like, I do actually, just from having this, this conversation, I'm like, yeah, actually, like, maybe I do have a lot more control of this big unwieldy PhD thing than perhaps I give myself credit for sometimes. Vikki: You've done four years. You've done four years alongside another job and got yourself here as somebody who believed, you know, through all of that, believing that you couldn't do planning. But somehow getting here, so you were doing planning and you did all these things. And I just want you to think how much easier the rest of this could feel if you know that it's not reliant on you finding the perfect system and beating yourself into doing it perfectly. So I had a meeting yesterday with some people who were interested in doing my group program, which is called being your own best boss and we're going to cover loads of this stuff. And I was talking then about my experience with role based time blocking, which is one of the tools that I recommend. And I was explaining to them, you know, I stick to role based time blocking probably between 50 and 70 percent of what I intend each week, something like that. Um, you know, in better, in inverted commas, weeks, maybe a bit more than that, but there's always bits I shift and not for good reasons. There's always bits I shift because I've been procrastinating or bits because I'm tireder than I thought I would be, and I'm not managing it or whatever. But I've got enormously better at not beating myself up about that. And that makes it so much easier to then just tweak stuff. To then just go, Oh, look, today's felt a bit rubbish. And when I look at it, I didn't stick to any of the things that I put in it. Okay, well, what can I do in this next hour that'll make me feel like I've finished intentionally? And let's just have a look at tomorrow and see, am I being realistic or not? Because what I used to do, right, was just shove more in. It's like, well, I've been rubbish today, so tomorrow I need to do all of today's and all of tomorrow's, so let's just wedge it all in. Whereas now I'm so much better at being like, you know what, that's okay, you know, today went great. Things feel better when I do the things I intend, so let's just try that tomorrow. Let's see what barriers we can overcome. Do that tomorrow. And the response from the people in the group was like, Oh my God, you only stick to it 60 percent or whatever. I was like, yeah, but you teach this stuff. And I'm like, yeah, we know. And I teach it from that place of not doing it perfectly. And they were like, I think I could do this. I'm like, yeah, you definitely could. I think it makes so much difference to know that just because you're not doing it perfectly doesn't mean that it's not a good system. It's not that it's not a system you can make work and you're not someone who can keep this all on track. Laura: Yeah. And that's a really, really helpful, a really helpful reminder. Like, like you said. Before it's, you know, it's not necessarily the system doesn't work and you don't need to just completely get rid of that system just because you haven't been following it as you planned it out or as, as you said you were going to do, but kind of acknowledging that, you know, life gets in the way, you're not always going to remember or, you know, whatever happens. But the system can still be a useful system to come back to. So I think there's actually a system that I was kind of using and I haven't, I haven't opened the notebook for like a week, but I can kind of recognize that it does actually really work for me when I, when I need it to. Vikki: Absolutely. I want to pick up one thing you said. You said when life gets in the way and things, one thing that's really important with this is we're, we're super compassionate to the fact that things aren't going to go perfectly, but we also take responsibility for them. So life doesn't happen to you. You make decisions. Okay. So things happen and then you make the decision that I'm going to deal with that instead of the thing I intended. Okay? And that's not to, like, blame or anything like that, but the more we can recognize that even interruptions are decisions we make, because we decide whether we're going to engage with them or not. Even emergencies are, you know, there are people who would hear that a family member are in hospital and would continue working because that's the decision they make. Other people would go immediately, no questions asked. It's all just decisions we make. And so what we can then do is decide which of the decisions that we stand by, which of the decisions, actually, that was an interruption that was absolutely appropriate for me to drop what was on my plan and go do it. Actually, that was an interruption that just felt a lot easier to deal with than the thing I intended to do. So, yeah, next time I might need to think about that differently. So we just take that little bit of control, um, of it. The other thing I'd say, or two things, so one is I tend to have the same core system for deciding what I'm doing each quarter, what I'm doing each month, each week, and the same core system for how I manage what tasks I have, but I tweak Exactly how I'm doing it that week. And what I found enormously useful about that is I'm not reinventing. I'm not wasting time learning a whole brand new system. I'm not sort of having to move across all the tasks that I put in a Kanban board last week, but now we're going to be in an Excel file or whatever, um, but I do give myself little, Oh, Is it useful for me to put it on little post it notes? So I just have the one thing I'm doing now. This is what I'm experimenting with at the moment. Or would it be useful to take things that were in my electronic diary and put them into my bullet journal instead? Oh, do you know what I mean? These things. So I have these kinds of, I have cores and then I twiddle around the edges and that really helps because I'm not reinventing, I'm just slightly going, okay, would this help? I think this might help. This might make it feel easier. And that, that can be a really sort of positive thing, because I'm not wasting loads of time, but I am constantly just trying to iterate a little bit to make it feel nicer and easier to, to stick with. The final thing, as your like, reflective homework, is you've mentioned a couple of things where you have strengths in other areas of your life that you haven't really thought about. So the reflective practice is one example that you haven't really thought about applying to planning. I'd really encourage you to spend a little bit of time thinking about some of those other strengths. And this is true for all PhD students, but particularly for part time PhD students who've got this whole other bit of their life where often, you know, they're quite experienced, they're quite senior, and all of those things. Have a think about whether there's anything you do in your library life, in your teaching life, that you can take and apply over here. So have a ponder about what other skills you have in your librarian world that actually could be deployed over here really effectively. Laura: Yes, I like that. I like the sound of that. Some reflective, reflective homework. Vikki: Perfect. So what do you think you'll take from this session? Laura: I think the thing that's really kind of like light bulb moment almost is that idea of kind of planning is not necessarily like you say that fixed, like here's my plan and I'm going to do my very best to stick to it. And obviously, you know, whereas planning can be more of a, an iterative ongoing, like, you know, if you're always sitting down and thinking right, what do I want to achieve in this little block of time, that's still, that's still doing. Having the intention of planning something. I think if you use the word, kind of, the intention of it, I think that's something that's really important to actually recognise. You know, not just drifting through a PhD and just seeing what happens. There is a lot of intention there with what I want to achieve. I just haven't thought about it as, well actually this does make you somebody that is doing planning work and actually potentially being quite good at it. Vikki: Perfect. What a lovely thing to take. One thing I always encourage people after coaching sessions like this is definitely spend some time writing down some of the thoughts you've had during the session. Obviously you're going to get this recording of it too, so you'll be able to go back and listen to yourself anyway, but also have a think about what's one thing you could do today. that helps sort of move you forward from where you're at. Okay. So thinking of a sort of something that you can immediately act on, um, can be really useful too. I'm sure for lots of people listening, this will have been super useful. So thank you so much for coming on and being open and honest and willing to share all of these things. People really benefit from hearing other people getting coached. Everybody watching or listening, I want you to have a think, what are you going to take away from this? What are you going to do differently because of the stuff that we've talked about today? And if you're interested in being coached in the future on the podcast, do just drop me a message and let me know. I'm going to make this an ongoing series. So thank you everybody for listening and I will see you next week.
by Victoria Burns 11 Mar, 2024
How many times have you seen or been on a time management course? How many books and podcasts and blogs and social media posts have you seen about time management? I want you to compare that to how many times you've seen courses and support for energy management. So much less. It's so rare to see people discussing energy management compared to how often we see people talking about time management, and it just doesn't make sense because time passes. We can organize our tasks within time, but we can never manage time itself. It's the one commodity we have very little control over. But that's okay. Because actually time management is rarely the issue. Our issues are usually around energy management and focus management, yet there's much less support out there for this. So that's why I'm recording this podcast. Hello and welcome to episode 26 of season two of the PhD life coach. And today we are talking energy management. Now this is, it's another personal one for me, really. So I, as most of you know, have some sort of, I don't know what, but undiagnosed ADHD type tendencies. I don't struggle too much with energy. I do struggle with being able to direct my energy towards the things that I intend to do. So my amount of energy, I would say, is somewhere between normal and higher than normal. But my, uh, my ability to direct it into the, um, things that I've sort of intended to do, that I've planned to do, I find quite challenging. I also have a sister that I love very dearly who has had chronic fatigue for 30 years ish, give or take, and it fundamentally affects every aspect of her life. For her, it's much more about the amount of energy she has. Between the two of us, we have learned an awful lot about how to manage your energy. Now you may have other reasons why energy management is so important to you. If you are a parent with young children or you are menopausal, or you are a part-time PhD student who's doing a PhD in your evenings and weekends, or you are an incredibly busy academic with 4,000 things going on and you don't feel like you've got the energy to do any of them, whatever the reason. Maybe you're older, maybe you have other health conditions, maybe you have other disabilities that I haven't mentioned. There's lots of reasons that energy management is important to all of us. And even if you're somebody who considers yourself pretty healthy, able bodied, no particular reason why you might be struggling with your energy, you may still not be able to kind of, control your energy, use it as you want to, direct it in the areas that you want to spend it. And that is what today's session is all about. Thinking about what do we mean by energy, how can we manage our energy, and what things do we have to be careful of in the process. Now one of the things my sister and I talk about a lot is there's different types of energy, and these aren't like distinctly defined in the scientific literature or whatever, but there's the physical energy that it takes to do physical tasks. There's emotional energy. You know what it's like when you've just got home from a day at work where everybody's been annoying and you haven't been able to say anything about it and you've had to kind of regulate your emotions and not get frustrated with them and deal with this and you come home and you're just exhausted and you haven't got any left so your partner says one thing to you and you just snap at them. We know what it's like. That's emotional energy. There's cognitive energy. The energy it needs to sit down and read that article or write that report But where our brains are really thinking lots about something that's difficult, and we're having to stay focused and put our attention on it. That's cognitive energy. There's also social energy. We vary quite a bit in our introversion, extroversion, and whether we get energy or lose energy from being with other people. But our social energy is another area for us just to be aware of when we're planning all of these things. A big type of energy that I've noticed is kind of creative energy as well. Sometimes we've got the energy to do clearly defined tasks, but we haven't got the energy to come up with ideas and be sort of generative in that sense. I'd love to know, you can let me know on social media or via my website, if you can think of other types of energy that I haven't covered today. So why is it useful to understand the different types of energy? Well, for me it's because when we say we're tired, that can mean a whole variety of different things. That can be a deficit in all of these forms of energy where we're just knackered, or it could mean we're low in any one or more of these forms of energy. But if we know what type of tired we are, it can help us to plan much more effectively what we actually need to do now. So as an example, often after a day at work, I feel cognitively tired. I sometimes feel socially tired. Whilst I'm a pretty extroverted person and I do get energy from having all of my coaching sessions and training sessions that I run, at the end of the day, when I've had lots of sessions in a day, I can just be very tired, socially speaking, but I'm not physically tired. And sometimes I can be sat on the sofa being like, I'm so tired. And then my husband suggests we go for a walk and I'm like, I can't, I'm too tired. And then it's like, no, this makes you feel better. And actually when I get out and walk, I'm not physically tired at all. And the walk becomes rejuvenating for me because I wasn't short of physical energy. I had plenty of physical energy. I was just short on cognitive energy and social energy. So a nice quiet walk where I'm just chatting to my husband or if you're really low on social battery, perhaps where you're not chatting at all, can be exactly what you need. So by understanding these different forms of energy, it can really help us to make decisions. If we understand these different types of energy, what we also need to understand is which tasks use the different energies. So, the example I just gave you there was pretty obvious. Walking takes physical energy. And if you go with somebody else, it maybe uses a little bit of social energy too. But other things, it's not quite so straightforward, depending on how you find that task, it may take more or less of different types of energy. So as an example, writing, once I get going on writing, I don't find writing particularly cognitively challenging. And so I can usually write even when I'm feeling relatively cognitively tired. Reading, much less so, unless it's just reading for fun, but reading of academic articles and things where I'm really having to kind of dissect what they mean, I need more cognitive energy to be able to stay focused and to direct my focus onto that reading process. We get to divide the different tasks we have in our lives into different forms of energy. These ones take physical energy. These ones take emotional energy. These ones take cognitive, social, creative. And we can then use this more nuanced understanding to plan in advance. So when we put ourselves in boss mode, if you don't know what I mean by moss mode, make sure you check out my podcast from two weeks ago, where I talk about boss mode, how we can use our kind of higher brain to plan and strategize and make decisions so that then student us, worker us, can just implement on that. We can use this knowledge when we're planning to make sure that we plan a nice mixture of different types of tasks, that we're not expecting our brains to do lots and lots and lots of different cognitive things in a row, for example. But we can also use it when we're making more spontaneous decisions. When we're thinking, I'm too tired to do this, we think, am I too tired to do anything? Or am I too tired to do this specific thing? Is there something different that actually I would feel better if I did as well? So we can kind of use it either in the planning process or in that more spontaneous process. I use this information to design my day. So I know that tasks that I might struggle to focus on where I need high levels of cognitive energy, I need to do earlier on in the day. I know that I can always plot more social things into the afternoon when I'm typically tired because I have a pretty big social battery and generally get more energy. I'm like a little dynamo. I get more energy from interacting with others. And so for me, I would always try to put coaching, put workshops, put individual meetings into the afternoon because I very rarely run out of social battery in the afternoons. I then also know- and this can be a strength and a weakness. So keep an eye out for this one in yourself. I also know that my creative energy is often replenished kind of early evening. Early evening when I'm just wrapping up the day, I've been doing lots of things is often when I get a new and exciting idea and get a kind of another burst of energy. Now, if I can direct that appropriately, then that can be amazing because sometimes I can just get a big chunk of something that's creative and important and valuable done in that last hour where actually I haven't got the brain space to do anything that's more organized, for example. Where I have to be careful, and this is probably the ADHD stuff coming out, is that because I know my creative energy is often boosted at that time of day, I also have to make sure that I don't get caught up in deciding that I definitely have to finish this thing today and therefore end up doing far too much going on into the evening and turning it into some massive project. So I use my knowledge of the different types of energy that different tasks take and my kind of baseline levels of those different sorts of energy to choose what tasks I do at different times a day. Doesn't always work. As I discussed in last week's podcast, I'm not perfect in any of this, but these are the things that I try to potter through. These are the things that I try to be mindful of when I'm doing my role based time blocking and deciding which chunks of tasks I do at which times of day. I want you to think about how that works for you. What times of day are best for you to be doing your cognitive tasks? What times of day do you need to get physical activity done? If I've been sitting all day, then I still have physical energy left in the evenings. Other people, regardless of what you've been doing during the day, struggle to summon up physical energy in the evenings and so if you want to get exercise done, you want to have it earlier on in the day. So knowing your own baselines, knowing the types of tasks you need to do and what type of energies you need can really help you plan this stuff out. Now, as with everything, We're never going to be perfect, and this can be an iterative process. You, if this is the first time you've thought about this like this, just try and watch it over this week. Don't change anything at the moment, but just watch what type of energy different tasks seem to need from you. Watch when you have more energy, when you don't get more energy and kind of just get to know it. Maybe make some notes of the different times of day, the different types of tasks and how you're feeling and just sort of use it as an opportunity to get to know yourself. Often when we learn something new like this, we start thinking, oh, that's another complication that I don't have time to think about, but actually, we can just do it really gently and really gradually. For people listening, especially if you are an academic or a PhD student who has another job, you might be thinking, well, I don't get to control my energy. I don't get to control what tasks I do at which times of day. I have meetings at all times of day and that's not ideal for me, but it is what I'm given. I have certain hours that I have to work. I have to teach whenever they tell me to teach. I have no control over this. That's fine too, but it's still useful to know because you then get to decide what you put in amongst those things. So if you know that your schedule, which let's say you don't have control over, has scheduled cognitive tasks in a time where you know that that's not going to be your strength. You can think with what do I need to do with the rest of the day so that I'm as ready and prepared as I could be for that. What do I need to plan in after that? So for example, if you know that you find teaching cognitively and socially tiring, then, what are we going to put in the slot immediately after teaching so that you can replenish as best as possible? We don't have to tell ourselves, I need to be different because this is the timetable they gave me and I've just got to suck it up. We get to think within the context of the immovable circumstances that I do have, how do I want to manage the rest of my tasks? How do I want to manage how I look after myself? How do I want to manage what I say to myself during all this time? Because even if you can't control it, even if you're like, yeah, but Vik, I'm straight out of my teaching into a quality assurance meeting and there's nothing I can do about it. Okay. We can at least decide that we're not going to sit in the quality assurance meeting going, I can't believe I can't concentrate. Everybody else can concentrate. I'm so stupid. I can't even do this. We're not going to beat ourselves up about it. Okay. Yeah. This is probably going to be a bit of a struggle because I'm pretty tired from teaching and I'm tired in the same sort of way that this takes, but I'm going to have a glass of water. I'm going to take my time. I'm going to be kind to myself. I'm going to contribute where I can. And I'm going to accept that this isn't my peak hours to be doing this but I can get it done. Okay. So regardless, if you have control over it, you can use this information to shape your time. And if you don't, you can use this information to shape how you treat yourself within that predetermined structure. One theory that I want all of you to be aware of, some of you will be already I know, is called spoon theory. Now this was designed by and for the disabled community and it refers to the notion that energy can be represented by spoons and that we are given a certain number of spoons per day and that number of spoons varies enormously between people and I would argue between different types of energy. How many spoons you have for the different types of energy. And the idea is by conceptualizing it like that, we can make decisions about how we prioritize how we use those spoons. Now, if you are somebody who has a severely limited number of spoons, then you're a real Olympian in this process. You know exactly how many spoons you have, how many spoons, even minor tasks, like having a shower or getting dressed or those sorts of things, how many spoons they take. And you are really the masters. I see it with my sister. You are the masters of knowing, if I do this, then I can't do that. If I do that, then I'll need to do this. And really being very sophisticated with your spoon management. It's like, I truly believe if you want to learn to budget, you need to speak to people who don't have much money because people without much money are absolutely skilled as anything at working out exactly what's going where, exactly what sacrifices they need to make on this in order to make that happen and so on. Don't budget from a rich person. It's easy to budget when you're rich. And similarly, learning to budget energy from people with limited energy can be a really useful tool. So however many spoons you think you have, we can conceptualize it like this and use it to make more intentional decisions about how we spend those spoons. So what can we learn from spoon theory? Firstly is accepting that everybody has limits on their numbers of spoons. Now, for some of you that will be absolutely obvious based on your health status, your age, all the things I discussed earlier. You might be really, really aware of your limitations. For others, you may never have thought about it like that. If you're generally healthy, got a decent amount of energy, you may never have thought about it like that. And you may still be stuck in the trap that I used to be stuck in of, I should be able to do everything. I did not accept that I had a limited number of spoons. I thought that I should be able to have an active social life and lots of hobbies and lots of family time and lots of work in lots of different directions and do all the extracurricular things I thought I should be able to do at all. And because I had probably more energy than most people, I didn't like to accept that there was any limit on that. And it was only actually when I accepted that even though my limit is pretty big compared to lots of people, there is a limit. And therefore, even though I've got quite a lot to go around, I still need to decide how I'm going to use it and how I'm going to spend it. Another lesson from spoon theory is don't judge yourself by your best days. So, sometimes, regardless of your health status, we have a good day, where we get loads more done than we normally do, within whatever context that means for you. And it can be really easy to judge every other day against that standard. That if I could get that much done in that day, imagine what I could do if I did that every day. And then when we have a normal day where we get a normal amount of stuff done, where we use a normal amount of spoons, it feels somehow inadequate compared to that perfect day, that one day where it all worked. In fact, one of my favorite questions to ask clients who say that they don't feel like they've done enough is what would constitute enough? What is enough hours done in a day? What is enough tasks done in a day? How much work do you have to do to declare it enough? And in most cases, they have never thought about it. They've never considered what would be enough. It's just a vague sense that they would know when it was enough. And the problem is, when we've only got a vague sense of what's enough, we spend most of our time thinking that it wasn't enough. So remember, best days are exceptions. They are not days against which to judge ourselves. Another lesson is that you can borrow spoons from the future, but only if you pay them back quickly. So what I mean by that is you can use more spoons in a day than you strictly speaking have. You know, we've all done it where we stay up late finishing something off or going out and having a good time, whatever it is. And then the next day we have to rest much more than we did in order to repay those spoons. And every now and again, for most of us, we can do that. We have to balance up the consequences of doing that. How big a deal is it to have to rest the next day? How easily replenished are your spoons? For some of you, particularly if you have ongoing health issues, we'll find that it's not easy to replenish your spoons. And so borrowing from the future leads to the next day not being worth what you gained by borrowing it, i. e. the amount of rest needed to replenish the spoon, the amount of pain you experienced, whatever it may be, makes it not worth it. But even if you're healthy and you're borrowing from the future, you're overusing your energy, be really mindful of when you are repaying this. Because sometimes, especially healthy people who don't have issues with their energy levels generally, think they can continue to borrow from the future indefinitely. They can keep pushing themselves. They can keep using more spoons than they actually got, and it will be okay. I'll muddle through. I'm always all right, really. And that's the path to burning out. That's the path to overwork and then actually having physical difficulties that will make it much harder for you to replenish those spoons in the long run. So, think about the consequences for you as an individual in your particular circumstances from borrowing for the future. And if you think it's worth it, make sure that you are also strategizing as to when and how you're going to be replenishing those spoons before the debt gets too big. I also want you to remember that even when we do a task, we can choose how many spoons we're giving to it, and which spoons we're giving to it. So, I've talked before about the joy of doing some tasks badly, just because they're not that important. Filling in a form? Don't mess about with the fonts. Just get it filled in. Don't tidy anything up. Right, good enough, happy days, off it goes. You can choose how many spoons you spend on something. Another example of that, outside of the kind of mindless tasks that don't feel important, is how many spoons you are going to give to the emotional side of it. So sometimes when we're at work whether you're a PhD student or an academic, we can get really caught up in all the stories, right? There's so many stories about, oh, it's not fair because this is happening, and it's not fair because that's happening, and they should be doing this, and they're not doing that. And all of those thoughts take emotional energy. They take from that store of spoons that we have to give things that we care about. And it's not easy to detach yourself from that because we usually care about the things around us and we care about justice, whether that's on a tiny, small, local level of our department or more widely than that, but you get to choose how many spoons you spend thinking and talking to yourself about this stuff. It is perfectly acceptable to sit in a committee meeting and go, you know what? I don't have enough emotional spoons for this argument. I'm just going to keep my mouth shut and not get involved. You can do that. You can decide that this argument just is not worth the emotional spoons. You can decide that this decision is not worth the amount of cognitive spoons you're giving it. Sometimes we get really caught up on, you know, should the title of my article be this or this? I don't know. How many cognitive spoons are you willing to give it? Not many. It doesn't matter. Just pick one. It's all good. Okay. So if you're finding there are things that are particularly draining any one type of your energy, ask yourself, Not how many spoons does it take? Ask yourself, how many spoons am I willing to give this thing? Because you have more control over that than it might feel sometimes. Another lesson we can learn is around what we do when we're low on spoons. And I'm going to talk in a second about replenishing spoons because that's super important and I don't want anyone to think that any of this is about sort of driving through and doing more than you're capable of because it's really not. But when we've got a small number of spoons left, we often think what we need to do is small tasks. And then we end up doing the things that are often much less important. Just clearing these emails here and there, filing that, tidying this up. You know, the busy work that always feels achievable, often doing things for other people, because that feels achievable and it feels important because they're going to thank us for it, and so we think not many spoons left. I'll do the easy things. And that's fine. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that. But if you find yourself doing that habitually, and you're always or regularly a bit short of spoons, the problem is that you will never feel you've got enough spoons for the big tasks. Often, especially during term time, when, you know, academics, you're teaching and got student responsibilities as well as all your research work and so on, we feel like we haven't got any spoons at all that we can give to the big tasks, because we need lots of spoons for them. And so we give little bits of spoons to all of the small things. But what I want to encourage you to think about instead, is if you haven't got many spoons left, how can you take small chunks out of the big tasks, instead of filling yourself up with the small tasks? What do I mean by that? So often our big tasks are writing, designing a presentation, planning our thesis, those sorts of things, you know, big important things that actually our progression of our PhDs dependent on, our getting a secure jobs dependent on, going for promotions dependent on, all these big things that actually really need to happen for our careers and for our contribution to the world are often the ones we don't feel we have enough spoons for. If we can really break those down into much more manageable chunks than we usually do, then suddenly we're in a position where actually with our few spoons we've got left, we could choose to just chip a little bit away from that paper, instead of using those last spoons to fill in some bit of crappy paper at the universities told you to do. But this only works if we know what those chunks are, because we know when we're low on spoons, when we're low on energy, the thought of looking at a big task and going, oh, how can I break off a little bit of this that I can do while I'm struggling, It's not going to happen, is it? We're going to struggle with that. It's not going to be good. So one of the things you can do when you're in boss mode is figure out how to turn the big job that you want to do this week or this month into very tiny things so that it's always clear what the next step is, and you don't have to work out all the tiny things. You just have to work out the next two or three tiny things that need doing. Because then if you have only got a few spoons left, Let's eat something important. Let's eat something that we actually care about. Because it's amazing how, if you chip away at something, how fast progress you can really make. The final thing is, I want you to think about what replenishes your spoons. And I want you to think about this from two perspectives. One is the, what replenishes your spoons that will feel good and that we therefore want to do more. So for me, walks always replenish my spoons, uh, showers always replenish my spoons, playing with a dog, all those things. I've talked about that in a past episode, before, so figure out for you, what tasks replenish your spoons. They make you feel better and able to do the things that you want to do. I want you also though, to be careful of false replenishment. So, this may be mainly for the ADHD people out there, but I think some of the rest of you might struggle with it too. I get false replenishment from taking on new tasks. Because I'm a creative person, and I'm somebody who's very enthusiastic, and I have lots of ideas, and there's lots of things that I think should happen in the world, I get a lot of energy from discussing new ideas and agreeing to do new things and starting new stuff. I get very excited. And that's brilliant. It's good to know. But I have also learned over the last few years to be cautious of trying to get my energy from there, because that's the route to overcommitment. That's the route to overwhelm and that's the route to never feeling like I'm on top of anything at all. Because if every time I'm low on spoons, I make myself feel better by taking on more things, that's no not astainable strategy. And it's taken me 20 odd years to realize that, but we got there. So, you know, happy days. You can learn it now. Um, But think for you, what are activities that you think replenish you, but that don't? Another one for me is social media. When I've got no spoons to do anything useful, I'm I often go on social media and feel like I feel, I never feel better for going on social media. I like social media, it has its place, I still want it in my life, but too much time on social media feels like it's replenishing me, feels like it's a break, but actually I end up more drained than I started with. So think for you, what false replenishments do you have? For some people it's alcohol, for some people it's eating. So think about what things do you tell yourself replenish you but don't actually in reality replenish you and be really cautious of those things. So I want you to spend some time picking things, picking just one or two activities that do genuinely replenish you. You enjoy them while you're doing them. And you feel rejuvenated after you do them. Be really mindful of what those are and consider even planning them into your day in advance of everything else. One of the principles of role based time blocking is to put your replenishment activities in first. So we don't put meetings in first. We don't put tasks in first. We put the things that are needed to maintain your spoons, to maintain your energy, to maintain your quality of life frankly. We put those in first. So identify what they are. Make sure you're planning them first. I really hope this has been useful for you. I am very aware that I am using a theory that has been designed by and for people in the disabled community. Often what is designed by those who are most in need can also be used in a kind of universal design way for everybody else. There's an awful lot we can learn from and with people who are struggling with this the most. With that in mind, just as a little side note at the end. Be really mindful of the spoon levels of the people around you, and the fact that they might have different absolute numbers of spoons, and might be distributed differently amongst the different types of energy. So one thing my sister and I always have to deal with is that I get more energy from interacting and she uses up energy from interacting. And so we have to balance that between us. Cause I offer is like, Oh, if you need to get that done, we could do it together. It would help. And so she's like, no, that doesn't help. That makes it harder, that uses more energy than if I did it on my own. Whereas for me, the self regulation required to do something on my own is enormously higher than if I was doing it with somebody else. You know, I'm the kid that my mum used to get my friend around to sit on my bed while I tidied my bedroom because then I'd actually do it. Because I have so much less resistance to doing it when somebody else was in the room. So be mindful of your own spoons. how many you have, what type, and how you spend them, and where you can get more of them, and be mindful of the spoons of the people around you, and how they may well be different to yours. And with a little bit of consideration to ourselves, and to those that surround us, we can make much more intentional decisions about how we use our energy so that we can live the lives that we want to live. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week.
by Victoria Burns 04 Mar, 2024
 Do you ever listen to my podcasts and go, well, that sounds all very nice and I'm sure it works for you, but I don't think I could do that. I don't think that's possible for me. Have you tried every organization system out there and always fall off the wagon after a couple of weeks, tell yourself that this is the time it's going to be better and then it's not, and then beat yourself up for it? If that's you, this is going to be the perfect episode. I'm going to tell you about all the things that I still struggle with, even though I teach them to other people and how I got to be pretty much okay with that. Hello and welcome to episode 25 of season 2 of the PhD Life Coach and this is going to be a bit of a personal one. I have been talking with clients recently who've been sharing how they can sometimes feel really almost hopeless about the prospect of improving the things that they currently find difficult, so people who plan or struggle to stick to their plans and they're kind of burnt out of looking for new systems. They feel like they've tried every single option out there and they never stick to it. And they're beginning to believe that maybe there's someone who just can't do this. In fact, you're going to hear from one of these clients in a couple of weeks time, because I've got another coaching session coming up where I'm coaching her on the podcast so you can hear our whole session. So keep an eye out for that one in a couple of weeks. But she's not the only person. Other clients have also said that sometimes they get put off learning new systems because they just don't believe that it's going to work. They believe that it works for other people. They believe it could be useful. But they've tried so many things and failed so many times, they almost can't get their hopes up about it. And they almost don't want to put themselves through it because when it doesn't work out, when it just becomes another planner that sits on the shelf or another IT system that you're not using anymore, it just becomes another stick to beat ourselves with. And a lot of the clients that work with me regularly, really like hearing about the things that I've found difficult because they see me as somebody who, A, I'm a coach. I do all this stuff. I have all these ideas. I have all these techniques that people can use. But also I was a highly successful academic, you know, I won awards, I made full professor, I've got, I don't even know, 60 plus publications, you know, I did all of those things. And when I tell them the things that I find difficult and they're the same things that they find difficult, then it kind of just gives them a little reassurance that, oh, I don't need to be perfect. In fact, I had a hilarious conversation in one of my membership coaching. So as many of you will know, I have a membership program at the university of Birmingham where students have annual access to ongoing coaching. And one of the students said, you have to be organized to be a lecturer. It's just like. Mate, have you looked at your department? No offense, and I don't actually know specific people in her department, but any academics listening, you'll know what I'm talking about. Seriously, there is no way in this world that you have to be organized to be an academic, because if that's true, there's a whole bunch of academics that we could all list that really don't fall into that category. I was like Has your supervisor ever forgotten to give you feedback? Has your supervisor ever, like, failed to turn up for something? You're like, yeah. That's them not coping with their workload. That's them not being able to organize things. Now I'm not criticizing the supervisors. We all know that the vast majority of this comes from overwork and overwhelm and the unrealistic expectations that this sector has of us. But this notion that you have to be this perfect example of organized, absolutely on top of everything bliss in order to be successful in academia, it's just not true. There's so many examples of people that are a hot mess but doing okay anyway. Now, that's not necessarily how we want to live, and it's not necessarily fun to feel like a hot mess, and we certainly don't want to feel like we're constantly overwhelmed and burned out, but the solution to that is not having to be a perfect organized person. The solution to that is learning to be a pretty good version of yourself and okay with the things that you find difficult. The first thing that I struggle with is getting started. In the mornings, I consider myself a morning person. I'm pretty chatty. I'm pretty awake. My worst nightmare is to go and stay with friends and them not get out of bed and me be kind of like, come on, what are we doing? What's happening? I hate it, But getting up and actually starting doing the thing I'm intending to do, I find it really hard. I get super sucked into catching up with a TV show on my phone, or scrolling through social media, or any of these sorts of things. I Get caught up in something that feels easier than the next thing I'm doing and then all of a sudden it's an hour later than I said I was going to start and I haven't started yet. And I used to make this a massive problem. There were many days, tell me if you've experienced this before, there were many days where if I hadn't started work at the time I intended to and therefore I'd thrown my schedule off, I would essentially give up on the day, not in the sense that I would just do no work whatsoever, but I would be in my mind, well, today's rubbish, today's a write off, I haven't even stuck to it now. You know, if I haven't even stuck to the beginning part, there's no way I can do the rest of it. And so, you know, it's all rubbish, isn't it? And then I'd go through the day in that kind of mood, like defeated, like, and I'd do the bare minimum, I'd go to the meetings I was meant to go to, but I'd waste time in between. And what I realized with coaching was that the problem wasn't so much the getting started in the morning, the problem was how I was then spending the rest of the day. So I still struggle to get up in the morning. And I say struggle, struggle implies that I'm trying really hard. Part of what frustrates me is in that moment, I'm not struggling at all. I'm just watching my phone and having a cup of tea and thinking, Oh, I'll start later. And that does still frustrate me and I'm still trying out tactics to make it a little bit easier to move myself on. But what has made it enormously easier is that I'm much better now, but when I do get going Of going, right, what are we doing? Picking the thing, going, or following my plan, if I've made one, we'll talk about that in a second. But, not beating myself up about the fact that I didn't start when I intended to, but focusing much more on what I can do now. That's the bit that's improved. I'm now much better at getting going on the thing that I said I'd do now. And making sure that that bit happens. And making sure that I squeeze bits in as I go through. And telling myself I can implement the rest of my plan. And then if I do that, it will be a pretty good day and it really can often be a really good day. One slightly weird technique that I can't remember whether I've ever shared on the podcast before, so bear with me if I'm repeating myself. I used to be part of a coaching program called Focused with Kristen Carder. If you have ADHD, I highly recommend it. It's really good. And we have body doubles where we would dial into zoom calls and just tell each other what we're working on. And then kind of not monitor, but like, just feel like you were there with someone while you were working. It was a really good way to get things done. And these people were all over the world, right? Some of them, and a lot of them were in the US. And what that meant was that if I was logging on at like half nine, ten o'clock, beating myself up about the fact that it wasn't 8am when I expected or intended to get working, there would be people there who'd be up super early working at like 7am, 6am their time. So I went through this phase of just adopting their time zone. I'd be like, I'm in New York, it's 6am, I'm super organized, and I'd just do that. And there was something about it that just changed the vibes for me. So if you struggle to get going in the morning, first step is to make sure you're not allowing that to poison the rest of your day. We're not gonna ignore it. I know some of you are going, yeah, but I need to start going on time or I'll never get everything done. We're not going to ignore it. We are going to try and tweak it, but we're going to start from removing this kind of knock on impact of that. From there, we can get more experimental. I'm more kind of trying things out now. I'm not beating myself up. I'm not thinking my day is ruined if I haven't started on time. I'm just Going, Oh, I wonder what happens if I start with writing. I wonder what happens if I start with exercise. I wonder what happens if I start with a dog walk. Whatever it is, I try different approaches. I'm definitely getting up earlier. Definitely getting up earlier. I'm not, still not getting up exactly when I want to, when I tell myself I should, which is a whole other conversation, but it's better. And you know what? I'm okay with that. Better is good enough at the moment. So the second thing that I talk a lot about in coaching, in fact, I have a whole episode about is time blocking. I use an approach called role based time blocking, which you can hear, I've got a whole episode about it, but essentially the idea is that you don't have to plan exactly what tasks you're doing in every block, but you plan what hat you have on. So as a PhD student or academic, you might have a teaching hat. You might have a data analysis hat, a report writing hat , you might have a reading hat, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. You get the picture, you get your different roles. As a business owner, I have I have coach, I have course preparation, I have operations like the admin behind the scenes, I have marketing, those sorts of things. And with role based time blocking, you essentially block in what role you're going to take in each slot. And then from there, work out what tasks you want to do. So in that marketing role couple of hours, you're only going to do marketing tasks. In the operations one, you're going to do these. And it can, it's a simpler way of time blocking than putting specific tasks in. It's really good if you're not very good at judging how long a task will take because as long as you stay in role for that whole block, then you've achieved it as it were. And I find it super useful and I've been using it for maybe three, four years. And when I tell people that, they assume that I mean that I block out my whole week and then I do what's in my blocks and I'm like this perfect embodiment of role based time blocking. I, that, no, that, that is not what I mean by using it. By using it, I mean that most days, or most weeks, I plan most of my role based time blocking things. I could show you my diary. I could show you some weeks where, you know what? There's whole days that I haven't put anything in. I'm like, I have no idea what I did that day. I do. Cause I have some notes of what I do each day. But in terms of the diary, I haven't put any time blocks in at all. Cause I For whatever reason, decided I'm not to, and didn't do it, so just did some stuff. Other weeks, you can see every time block in there, and I may be stuck to 60 percent of them. Something like that. But the reason I still use it, and the reason I still consider it a hugely effective system, Is that when I do use it, my week goes better, my day goes better. And when I don't use it, I'm really pretty good at not beating myself up too much about that. And just going, Oh yeah, you didn't do that for the last couple of days, did you? Well, let's do that for the next couple of days. And just sort of start it back up again. And I find that even on the days that I plan it out and then have to move things, it still goes better than if I hadn't planned it out. Because it's easier to know what I should be doing. It's easier to know what tasks got bumped because of the emergency or whatever. So there's much greater awareness. There's much greater intentionality. And so far for me, as a way of organizing my time, it's the least worse option. You know, people talk about democracy as being the least bad system of government. It's a bit like that. You know, I'm not that great at organizing all my time and sticking to the things I intend to do. But this is the system that I stick to the most and where I get the most benefit from, even when it's implemented imperfectly. And it is always implemented imperfectly. I don't think I can think of a week that I have ever done every single block in my, that I intended to do. And I mean, that would be nice, wouldn't it? So it was like computer games. Can I achieve perfection one week? Maybe I set that self as a goal, one week this year, I'm going to have a week where I do my time blocks absolutely perfectly. But if I work better doing it imperfectly than I do, if I don't do it, happy days. I'm okay with that. So I want you to think about what systems for you, are you able to implement imperfectly that would still make things better than they are at the moment? Another example of that, my third thing I struggle with is task management. And that kind of relates, right? It's my list of things to do. I have a fancy little Excel spreadsheet that I really like this system. So I have columns where it's, when am I intending to do it, as in what week am I intending to do these things? What tasks are there? What role do they fall into? So what type of task are they and are there specific deadlines or whatever associated with it? And I add filters in the top. So one of the things that I'm able to do with it is filter anything that I do need to do, but not this week. So often we get in our heads like, oh, and I've got that conference, and I've got that paper, and then in two months I'm going to be doing this, and da da da, and it can really add to our cognitive load to have all those things in our heads, even though we're not meant to be working on them now, knowing that we are going to have to in the future really can make that feel very overwhelming. And so what I love about my system is that I can filter, on the columns and just have the things I'm intending to do this week. In fact, let me know. So you can either contact me on social media, on all the usual places. I'm at Dr. Vikki Burns on Twitter. I'm the PhD life coach on. Instagram, or you can email me via my website, the phdlifecoach. com. Let me know whether you would like that Excel file as a freebie. I can share that with you and show you how it works. So I really like the fact that I can filter and be, only show me things I need to do this week, only show me things that are in operations. I've got my operations time block. I'm going to do those tasks. It works really well. Sometimes, quite often, I end up with bits of paper like this all around as I've thought of something. And what I then do is at some point when I go, Oh my God, my desk's a mess. I start sticking them into there, get rid of the paper, bring myself back to that system. And. I would usually, in the past, call that a fail. Like right now, I'm looking at my desk, and I've got three post it notes here that I've got things on that I need to do. I've got another bigger post it note over there. And then I know in my notebook there's a bunch of tasks that I haven't put on my sheet. And normally I would call that a fail. I would decide that that means my system doesn't work. And I would then start looking for a Notion template or a Kanban board or whatever it is that would be the system that works, that I actually stick to. And I don't now. I take that as a sign that I just need to get back to my system. I just need to go, okay, we'll pop those things into the file and then we'll go from there. . Because this system has the features that I need. It has the ability to keep track of what I need to do. It works with role based time blocking and it has the ability to simplify. Cause if I see too many things at once, it's all going to go wrong. And so, from that perspective, this system works really well for me. What I still struggle with, what I'm still not very good at, is checking the damn system. Checking the list. So there are days when I'm here and I do two hours work and then I'm like, I haven't even looked at my to do list, I have no idea. And they were things I needed to do, because they were on post it notes, they were in my inbox, whatever it was. But sometimes I look at my to do list after a few hours and I'm like, Oh my God, there's so many things. And then I look at them, I go, hang on, I've done that one. I've done that one. I've done that one. And I just haven't ticked them off. And again, I used to beat myself up about that. I used to think that I had to be somebody who diligently checked their to do list at the beginning of the day and diligently checked things off as I did them and diligently reconciled it at the end of the day and added things in and wouldn't that be nice? And I am building towards that. I am slowly working at my systems as to how that will work better. And each week or each fortnight I experiment with a different way of helping myself with that. But without reinventing the whole system, without deciding that I need to translate everything into Todoist app or whatever, um, this is the system. This is just the system. And I'm going to keep nudging back to it. And that's okay. It doesn't have to be perfect. But the more often I think, Oh, I haven't looked at that. Oh, I haven't put these in it. Then the closer it is to up to date anyway. There's very few people. If you're listening to this and you are one of these people, then all credit to you. But there's very few people that manage this stuff absolutely perfectly. And we don't have to. It's okay. We can do it in our own little way. And then get back on track and then do those things, use it exactly as we intend for a while and then not, and then get back on track. And the key, the bit I'm working on with all of this is reducing the amount of time in which I realize that I'm not using my system because back in the day, before I discovered coaching, before I discovered any of this work, I would not notice for ages that I'm not using it. I wouldn't consciously note that I'm not using it. I'd kind of be aware, but I wouldn't stop and think about that. And then I would declare the system rubbish and me rubbish and reinvent. Whereas what I'm really working on now is maybe not taking a week to notice that I haven't checked my to do list recently and haven't updated it and I've been going off a piece of paper instead, but to take three days or to notice today or to notice this morning and that as soon as I notice I'm a little bit not using it to move back into it. It's a little bit like, so my stepdaughter is going to be learning to drive soon and her grandparents live on a farm. And so she's been, you know, even though she's not 17 yet she's been able to practice up and down the farm track a bit. And, you know, when you're learning to drive, you can overcorrect. She's actually pretty good at her steering, but you can often overcorrect a bit or not realize you're drifting. And as you become a better driver, you're much better at just noticing tiny shifts and correcting them. That's what I'm working towards. Just being able to spot a bit quicker that I'm not doing the system as I want to, and nudging myself back to it, but not beating myself up every time. Yeah, we've all been that learner driver where we're like, I can't believe I can't do this. This is so bad. It's like, no, it's okay. Of course you can't do it. We're just going to, as time goes, we're going to get better. That's the sort of vibe that I'm trying to bring to all of this. The fourth thing I struggle with is decision making. I still have a brain that wants to do everything. I have so many ideas. Honestly, if I could run a company where I'm doing all the things, I have so many ideas for you guys that would help PhD students, that would help postdocs, that would help senior professors, leaders. I want to work with professional services. I want things that you can buy online that are completely self paced. I want high end coaching where it's super bespoke. I just want to do it all. I want to help you guys so much, and I'm so excited. I want to be doing keynotes. I want to be writing books. I want to everything. And so I find it difficult to make decisions because I want to do all of it. And making a decision means telling myself I can't do everything. And I have a whole course on this. You can go back to my podcast about how to make decisions or my podcast about what to do if you have too much to do. If you want to know more about the workshops that I do for universities, then do get in touch. There's still some available to book, but for example, I'm running one for Birmingham on Monday. So the day this comes out on how to make decisions and prioritize and I still find this very difficult. The difference now is I understand why I find it difficult. I find it difficult because I'm enthusiastic about all of them. I find it difficult because part of me still believes, to some extent, that I should be able to do it all and that I would be happy if I could do it all. The difference now, after coaching, is that I know that bit's not true. I know that I shouldn't be able to do it all. I know that it's not realistic on any level to do all the things that I want to be doing right now. And I also know that I wouldn't be happy if I tried. I know that the attempt to do everything and feel happy because you get to do everything culminates in not enjoying doing any of it. It's a bit like trying to eat all of your favourite foods on the same plate. So you might love ice cream, and you might love sausages, and you might love candy floss, and you might love avocado, but if you had them all on a plate Not so hot. And I know that now. So I know that it's uncomfortable to make decisions, and I know why it's uncomfortable for me. And whilst that doesn't make it any easier, and I still avoid it, it means that I do understand better that it helps. And I do understand that what I need to do is pick things to meet my different needs. So there's about 47 hobbies that I would love to have. More than that. So many more than that. But what I'm working on at this year is sort of picking one for the month, and then embedding new things. So from a physical activity perspective, January was about walking more. And I did, I increased my steps per day by 2, 000 or so extra steps compared to the end of last year. And that was my big thing. I was trying to do some strength training, but I wasn't putting a big thing on adhering to that. And then I did okay in January. I didn't quite add as much as I wanted, but I did okay. And then in February, it's like, right, let's keep on the walk and keep trying to increase that a bit. But I want to be a little bit more focused on adding the strength training stuff. And again, It's not been perfect. I've just done my monthly review and it's not been perfect, but it's been a lot better on the strength training and the walking I've maintained is slightly better than January. And now March coming up, I want to add a racquetball session every week. We played a couple of times in February, but a bit more ad hoc. I want to add that in. And then my idea is to get back to silks in April. And so rather than, as I would have done in the past, going, I'm going to go to silks and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that, and I'm going to finish writing my novel, and I'm going to sew this, and I'm going to paint regularly, and I'm going to do this, da da da. My brain still wants that, but I'm getting much better at going, but not all of the time. So I find it hard. I still have to battle my inner instinct. I've still got a brain that is going, you should be painting more. You should be sewing more. You haven't even got your paddleboard out yet. What's happening? But those things can come later. I'm going to start introducing paddleboarding after silks is embedded, so that I can go out on my paddleboard more. And we'll just see, and if at some point it becomes too much, then I make a decision about which things I swap out. Maybe racquetball is a winter thing and paddleboarding is a summer thing, and we rotate them. So it's getting easier. It's hard, and I recognize I don't like doing it, but I'm getting better at making it less painful and doing it more often. And then the fifth thing, and this is the one that's hardest to admit, is the beating myself up. Because, you know, I do coaching from a compassionate point of view, where we're really accepting of ourselves, and where the first thing we need to do is remove or try and reduce at least this level of self blame and self criticism that so many of us have. And I sometimes feel a bit of a fraud when I know that I do still criticise myself. I share all this stuff with you guys and I share all this stuff with my clients and encourage them not to beat themselves up too much and to be more understanding and I still beat myself up quite regularly. And that might feel like I'm being hypocritical and it might feel like, you know, how can, how can I be helping you guys? I say this to myself sometimes. How can I be helping you guys not to beat yourself up so much when I still beat myself up? But the thing I've really realized from that is I do still beat myself up. But I don't mean it as much as I used to. So I have these little dips where I'm criticizing myself but they don't feel as bad. They don't feel as true. In that moment, they feel true enough that I'm thinking them. But I know I'm being a bit dramatic and I know I'm being a bit unfair to myself. And when I'm not in that little pit, I don't believe them at all. I, you know, I believe the good things about myself and that's a huge difference. I used to have a high baseline of beating myself up all the time with then some really quite low dips of criticizing myself even more. And now the dips aren't as low and they don't last as long and I don't take them so seriously. And I'm definitely getting a lot better at not beating myself up about beating myself up. Because then that adds a whole other layer, doesn't it? If we're criticizing ourselves for not being able to regulate our thoughts and emotions better, then we're adding more critique on top of the critique that's already there. And that bit I'm getting much better at. I'm getting much better at telling myself You beat yourself up because you care, you beat yourself up because you want to be doing all these things, but you know, it doesn't help. So we don't need to do that. And you know, it's not really true. And sort of like with the tools, I'm much better at regulating it back. Cause that's what it's all about, right? This is about regulation. If you think about tools as in like mechanical tools or whatever. Anything that regulates itself, a thermostat, it doesn't keep things at the exact same temperature all of the time. It doesn't do it perfectly. It notices when the temperature veers off and turns up the heating. Or it notices when the temperature goes the other way and turns off the heating. That's what I'm getting better at doing. I'm getting better at knowing when I veer away from things that work for me, and I'm getting better at making the adjustments to nudge myself back there, but I still find them hard. I still struggle. There's still days where I don't time block. I don't follow my time blocks. I don't get started when I intend to. I don't make decisions about what I'm doing. I criticize myself and I don't update my to do list. There's days like that, quite a lot of days like that, but you know what? It's okay. I'm still getting done so much of what I want to be getting done. I'm still helping so many of you. I'm still enjoying my life so much more and I'm quite enjoying the project of working on these things, because now that I see it as a little fun project of things that I can refine, rather than an inherently broken me that I need to fix, it becomes a little bit more of a like, Oh, I wonder if this helps. I wonder if that helps. And that's so much better. If this has resonated with you, I really want you to think about which podcasts have you avoided listening to because you think you would never implement it perfectly? Go and listen to them. Try it out. Try it imperfectly. If you think you need more support with this, check out my website for all the different services I have. If you're listening to this live, then it's kind of the beginning of March, something like that. I have a new program for PhD students and postdocs where it's three months support. You get a ton of workshops, you get online coaching, you get an ebook and it is all about this stuff, learning to speak to yourself better, learning to organize yourself better from a compassionate and understanding perspective. So if you're somebody who thinks you can't change these things, but that this episode has given you a little bit of hope that maybe it could be easier than it feels right now, just drop me a message. Say I might be interested. I'll send you a bunch of information. There is an outline on my website, but it's always nice just to be able to chat about it. If you are listening to this on the day it comes out, on Wednesday, I have a free workshop to help you review your February and plan your March. Again, message me for the details. I'll send you the zoom link completely free. There will be a little bit of information in it about my program, but don't worry. The majority of the session is going to be helping you develop this reviewing and planning habit, which is one thing that I've been doing since September, actually sticking to and finding enormously useful. So do try and come along if you hear this in time. I'm sure I'll run it again at some point soon if it's past that date, by the time you hear this. I hope today has been useful. It's been really interesting for me to reflect on these things too. So for listening to me chat and I will see you next week.
by Victoria Burns 26 Feb, 2024
 I used to think I was good at planning. I used to think that I could like structure out all the tasks that needed to be done and figure out exactly how it needed to happen. What I thought I was bad at was implementing that plan. I thought that I lacked the discipline and the hard work and the focus to actually do the things that I had planned. And for ages that was what I worked on for ages. I worked on trying to desperately stick to the plan that I had made, and then not doing it, beating myself up and trying really, really harder next week. And it took me a long time to realize that the problem wasn't my ability to implement a plan, or it wasn't only my ability to implement the plan. The problem was that I was making stupid plans. I was making plans that weren't clear, that were unrealistic, that didn't have a focus. Plans that if another boss had given them to me, I'd have been like, what's this? This is not helpful. Yet I was giving them to myself. Every single week. So we are gonna be thinking about how we can be a better boss for ourselves when we are in that planning phase, so that we set ourselves up for success each week. Hello and welcome to episode 24 of the PhD Life Coach. This week, we're talking boss mode. Now, just to get clear straight up, I do not mean boss mode in the "girl boss" sense. This is not about how to boss yourself into doing things. This is not some vague call to get out there and boss your life and blah blah. Instead, what I mean by boss mode is how we almost lift ourselves out of the day to day for a period of time, just a short chunk of time, in order to take an overview of the task, in order to make some decisions, and in order to plan what we need to do. Now, you might be thinking, Oh, I already do that. You know, I plot in some times to do things. I write a to do list. I do that already, Vikki. We're going to go so far beyond just making a list and planning in what time slots you're going to do things in, because there's so much more to it. Because we all know that we don't always do those things and just because we write it on our list doesn't mean it happens every time. And just because it's in our diary doesn't mean we adhere to it every time. So we're going to be thinking about how we can put ourselves in the sort of boss mode that makes it easier for us to implement during the week. You might also be thinking, hang on, I listened to your first episode, which was all called how to be your own best supervisor. And lots of you did. It's still my most listened to ever episode. If you haven't listened to it, I highly recommend you go back and listen. But in that episode, we really talked about what qualities we want ourselves as our own best supervisors to have. And this time, what we're really thinking about is the more pragmatic side of, okay, when I actually put myself in boss mode, what do I even mean by putting myself in boss mode? How do I do it? And how do I want to show up? So we're getting much more into the practicalities of it. The other thing that is exciting about this episode is that I am going to be announcing my new group program for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. So this is essentially for anyone working in academia who doesn't yet have a permanent post. So if you're in teaching fellowships, that's fine. Research fellowships. That's fine. Any stage of your PhD. You can be a PhD student that's come straight through from a master's. You can be a part time PhD student who's doing this in retirement. Everything in between. Doesn't matter if you are a PhD student or you're in a temporary academic job, then this is the program for you. So make sure you keep listening and I'm going to give you all the details towards the end. I am so excited. It's going to be so good. This episode is going to touch on some of the stuff that I will be teaching in that program. So have a listen, if you find this useful, there is going to be so much more in this group program. So this gives you a real taster of the sorts of things we'll be talking about. So, first, what do I mean by lifting ourselves into boss mode? What I mean is, a lot of us spend our lives in a single mode of just being us, and sometimes we're planning things and sometimes we're doing things, and often we switch between those, so we get partway through doing things and decide maybe we're doing the wrong thing. We should do something different, so we go over there and do something different. And other times we have decided things and then we don't follow them and we argue with ourselves about it. And often we don't have a particularly thought out way of managing any of this stuff, of managing the fact that we're intending to do things and doing something different. And one technique that I have found really useful in my own life, but I've also been teaching now for quite a long time with my clients, is this notion of separating out the boss version of you and the worker, student, researcher, teacher, whatever you want to call yourself, the doer version of you, the you that does the work. And when we can separate those things out a little bit, we can then start to think about how we want the relationship between those things to be. And we start thinking about how one can really help the other. Now, I've touched on this a little bit. Those of you who have already listened to my How to Manage Procrastination Part 2, that one, the second one, where I'm thinking about past, present and future self, I've touched on this a little bit there, but we're going to take it a few steps further in this episode. So if we can separate out the boss version of us from the worker version of us, then we can start thinking, okay, how can the boss version look after the version of us that needs to actually do the tasks and how can the version of us that actually has to do the tasks show up the way we want to for the boss version of us. By separating it out, it gets much easier to describe how we want to be, and it becomes much easier to separate the tasks of planning from doing and much easier to think about the best ways to structure our days and our lives. So when I'm talking about going into boss mode, I'm talking about pausing on the doing for a minute. So stopping answering emails, stopping trying to write, stop trying to do the jobs that need doing now and instead take a moment to look at this from one step removed. To look at this situation from the perspective of someone who is managing this situation instead of the perspective of someone who's actually doing it. Now, one way to kind of. build this in your head, one way to kind of make this clearer for yourself is to imagine how would I act if it wasn't me that had to do the tasks that are on my to do list, it was my research assistant. And in this case, I want your research assistant to be super able, really keen and enthusiastic, but has a limited amount of time and a limited amount of experience of doing these things. Okay. And so what we get to do in boss mode is we get to think about how am I going to plan out the time, tasks, and understanding of this research assistant in a way that makes it as easy for her as possible. As with real life relationships, there's two main ways that you can have meetings, in inverted commas, with your boss in this context. So, yourself as boss. The first is in a planned and structured way. So this is where you might put aside some time each week, where you go into boss mode to look at where you're at, look at what you've been doing, what's gone well, what you might change. What you're going to do in the future. And if you haven't listened to it yet, go back and listen to the episode where I speak to Marie, who talks about her meeting with herself on a Monday morning, because that'd give you a real structure for this. So there's that sort of planned meeting. It doesn't have to be on a Monday. It could be any time of day, any time of the week. But there's that sort of planned ahead meeting. I always have one with myself on the first of the month, where I look back at the last month and look forward to the next month, for example. It's planned, it's structured. You're sort of really taking an overview approach. And then the second type of meeting is an emergency impromptu meeting, where everything feels like it's going a bit wrong. We've all had those moments, right, where everything just feels like it's going wrong, and we go to our boss and we're like, I just need help getting out of this moment. And in that situation, we're going to handle it slightly differently. So in this podcast, I'm going to be thinking about planned meetings and about the impromptu meetings and how we can differentiate those and how we can use this sort of boss mode to keep ourselves on track and to make things feel a lot easier. Now in that planned meeting, we're going to be thinking about things like recognizing what we have done. So a good boss recognizes progress and allows an element of praise for the progress made so far, so that we're not constantly just looking at the next to do list. So we're actually taking a moment to go, you know what, January I actually got this done, I got that done, I know I didn't cross that off, but we did do these things. In that meeting, we're giving credit to ourselves. We're also being reflective. We're also thinking what didn't go so well and why didn't it go so well? How could I modify things in order to make this work better next month? And this is where we do it from that place of firm compassion. We've had that conversation before. Firm compassion, where we're not just going to indulge the worker version of us, we're not just going to say, Oh, probably don't do that, it's a bit too hard. But we are going to say, if this person is consistently finding it difficult to focus for three hour blocks, why do we keep planning three hour blocks? Or if this person is consistently telling us that there's too much on the to do list, why are we putting more things on the to do list? So we get to be reflective, and we get to actually listen. And I want to listen to those worries of worker us, the things that we're finding difficult, so that we can compassionately and not judgmentally and curiously start to investigate, are there ways I can make this easier for them? If we're struggling with getting on with writing because emergency tasks are landing on our desk, can we plan time to do emergency tasks. Even if we don't know what they are yet, because they're emergencies, if we have something unpredictable happen every week, can we plan in time to do those unpredictable things? Do we need to help our worker self to believe that it's okay for people to wait for things sometimes? So sometimes the problem isn't that we don't have time to do those things, it's that we're telling ourselves, I need to help immediately, or else they'll think I'm useless, they'll think I'm not listening, they'll think I'm bad at my job, whatever it is. And so in boss mode, when we're in this reflective portion, we might want to think about what thoughts we want to give the worker version of us. So, for example, we might decide that a focus thought for the week would be something like, there's no email that can't wait two hours, for example. When we're reflecting, we might notice things like the fact that we're struggling with motivation at the moment. We might notice that we're spending a lot of time thinking, I don't even know why I'm doing this anymore. And so when we're in boss mode, we can choose to actively put in time to help with that. Now, some of us can generate more motivation by simply reminding ourselves why we're doing it. So you might put in time in your diary to spend five or 10 minutes writing about why you wanted to do this PhD in the first place and why it's useful for you or why you're doing the research that you're doing. Alternatively, other people get more of that from talking to other people. So you might then plan in time to talk with somebody else about your PhD and generate your enthusiasm and motivation that way. We get to problem solve for the version of us that has to actually do the work to make it that bit easier for them. So in this reflective part, we're really listening to the challenges that we had last week, and then we're leading the way we're planning for how we can try and address those things in the upcoming week. In these planned meetings, we're also making decisions and that can sometimes be making the difficult decisions. So one of the things I used to do, and I think I've talked about this in past podcasts, but one of the things I used to do was realize I had too many things to do, but I didn't want to decide which things I was going to do and which things I wasn't going to do, because that felt really uncomfortable because a load of me still thought that I should be able to do it all if I was just organized enough. So I would then just decide I was doing it all, get on with it, and then not do it all, obviously, and just wait and see which things I didn't do. And it was a strategy that lasted a surprising amount of time, considering how ridiculous it sounds now. But when we're in boss mode, it's our specific job to make those difficult decisions. It's our specific job to contact the people we need to contact to tell them that certain things aren't going to happen this week. Okay, so in this zone when you're planning, part of your role in boss mode is to go, you know what, there's not time for all of this. It's not that Worker thinks there's not enough time and she's panicking, there just actually isn't. In which case, what are we doing about that? Which things am I putting to one side? Which things am I just saying no to? Which things am I going to spend a little bit of time on? In this planned boss mode sessions, we also get to ask ourselves the question, how can I make this easy for her? So if we know we've got a writing block coming up, how can I make it really easy by spelling out in advance what the five key points I need are? How can I make sure she's got the resources that she needs to do this piece of work? How can I preempt what questions she might have and make sure that I've asked those questions in advance so that I'll have the answers by the time I need to do this? So we get to think ahead and think what would be really, really useful for me this week. Another technique that I find really useful when I'm in boss mode is to actually write notes to myself. So we all write to do lists, many of us will time block in some version, but the notes that I write, and I encourage my clients to write, are more extensive than that. I'm actually writing in sentences. I'm not doing bullet points of what tasks need to be ticked off. I'm actually writing instructions to myself. And the joy of this is that I can be more clear, so it forces me to really what I mean, but it also means that I can explain why I want myself to do this. So I'm able to write out, I want you to start with replying to customer emails because those are the most important part of my business. And I want to respond to them as promptly as possible. If you've still got time left at the end of this session, then I'd like you to also go to the whatever else, emails and prioritize those. But if you don't get to them, they can wait till tomorrow. So I put actual instructions to myself and I try and preempt the arguments that my brain might have with myself. The reasons I might come up with as to why not to do the thing that you said, I try and preempt those things in the note. And so try and explain why we do particular things. I can make it really clear, which are the tasks that are the kind of must-dos today. So I follow, Amanda Goetz , I'm not sure how to pronounce her name. I'll tag her in the show notes. I follow her and she talks about her Two Do list, the two things that she needs to do in a day. In these notes to yourself, you can make really clear which things on your list are your Two Dos, the two things that you absolutely must do today, and which other things are things that will fit in if there's time. You can make that really clear by spelling it out. You can also use this as a moment to reassure yourself. So if you listen to last week's podcast, you'll hear about me talking about how to reassure yourself, and why we need to learn to reassure ourselves. You can do that in your notes. So in my, here's my little notebook if you're on YouTube, um In the bottom of yesterday's note to myself, when my boss was, my boss, me, was writing to myself, I wrote, this feels overwhelming, but we're going to do is a bit at a time and see how far we get. Okay, so I made a note to myself and I would see that again during the day and be like, it's okay, boss knew I was going to feel overwhelmed. But it's alright, because we're just going to do the next bit. So you can use it as an opportunity to really explain out what we're doing and why. It also forces you to reflect, though. Because, I don't know about you, but if I just jot stuff down on a list, it's like, oh, do this, do that, do that, do that, do that. I don't really think that much about how long all those things are going to take, whether that's realistic, how I might feel when I look at the list. I don't think about those things. I just jot it down in a list. And that means that the first time I really think about it is when I turn up to do the list. Whereas if you are encouraging yourself to actually write out instructions to yourself, you rapidly start to realize when you're being unrealistic. You're sort of writing all this stuff out and you're like, okay, yeah, this is way more than fits in a day. Or I've been writing for ages and I'm only halfway through the task, that maybe this is more complex than I thought. So forcing yourself to do it can actually make you re- reflect in that original boss mode meeting so that you actually write something that's more sensible anyway. It helps at both ends. It helps when you're writing it and it helps when you're reading it to keep you on track as to what you want to be doing. Another thing you can do in boss mode is make a priori decisions. So decisions ahead of time. And the reason that's so important is we all know that we can plan but we don't always follow the plan. Things come up and we have to make decisions on the fly about whether we're going to let those things interrupt what we're doing. Now, some things are obvious, you know, if somebody you love needs an ambulance, you are going to interrupt everything you do to get that ambulance. Other things, I've got a bit of a tummy ache, or I don't really feel like doing it today, or the window cleaner's here and I can't concentrate while he's scrubbing the windows. Not quite so clear cut, They could be good reasons to stop working, there could be not good reasons to stop working. One of the things that you can do in boss mode is make some little mini rules for yourself about whether you would change your plan in different circumstances. So you say to yourself, this is the plan. These are the things I want you to do. These are the rough blocks that I've got lined up. Listen to my episode on role based time blocking, if you want to know more about that. We plan that all out, but we can also say, but if reviewers comments come back before Wednesday, spend Thursday on those instead of what I've got planned on Thursday. Or, you write to yourself, I'm expecting reviewers comments back any day. Please stick to this plan regardless, because we've got a good couple of weeks to do those, and there'll be time next week to work on it. So you kind of get to pre empt one way or the other things that might happen and what you want to do in that situation. Another example of that is deciding what to do if you feel like your writing's just not flowing. Maybe you've blocked in time to do some writing and you never quite know when to persist versus when to kind of concede the point and decide, you know what, it's not happening today, I'm going to let it go. You can in boss mode decide in advance how that's going to go. So, for example, you could decide, I've made it as easy for you as possible, I've given you some bullet points, I've given you the references you need, this is the paragraph we're working on, so we've made it dead simple, and I need you, i. e. me, I need myself to try my best to get into writing mode and get some writing done for at least 40 minutes. Okay, we are going to push in, even if it's feeling difficult, we're going to try and get in the mode. We're going to remind ourselves we only have to write the next sentence. We're going to, you know, really break it down. And we're going to keep doing that for 40 minutes. If, after 40 minutes, it's still, 40 actual minutes by the way, not 40 minutes of sort of doing it, sort of going on Twitter, sort of talking to the dog, sort of staring out the window. 40 minutes of properly deciding that we are going to make this work. If after that, it's just really, really not working, then you can decide a priori, that's the point where, okay. I'm allowed to go back and edit my references, or I'm allowed to go back and do some other task that feels less taxing and possible, but still is writing related. Now, those numbers aren't there to, like, give you a rule. You might not want to try for 40 minutes. You might want to say, after 10 minutes, it's not flabbing, I'm going to stop. Or you might say, 40 minutes? I can force myself to keep going for two hours. I'll do two hours. Whatever you decide is up to you. But decide it in advance, because when you decide it in advance, you're not then reanalyzing all the way through. You're not kind of going, Oh, I could just stop and do something else. I wonder if I should, after five minutes, I could just do something else. I wonder if I should, you're not using that. You're saying, no, we agreed. I was going to try my best to do this 40 minutes. And if after that, I can't, then that's fine. I'll go and do something different. So you kind of pre make those decisions. So have a think about what decisions you want to pre make. The joy is, you can of course reassess these decisions next week. So when you're next in boss mode, you can say, Okay, we tried the 40 minute rule and actually, you know what, that worked pretty well. We're going to keep that. There were several times where I didn't think I was going to get into it, but I did. So we're going to keep that one. Or you might go, you know what, that 40 minutes was just painful. Not once did keeping going for that long make me actually get in the flow of writing. So you know what? 20 minutes is long enough. If I'm not into it by then, I'll do something different. You get to reassess, you get to make it again, but you get to do it when you're in boss mode, rather than second guessing it the whole time while you're in worker mode. So these are the sorts of things that you do in structured boss mode, the boss mode sessions where you plan it in advance, you're looking back, you're giving yourself reassurance and credit for what you have done, you're looking ahead, you're making realistic plans, taking the difficult decisions, explaining your reasoning and trying to make as many advanced decisions as you can to really set yourself up for the week. Now I keep referring to a week. You don't have to do this weekly, you could plan to do them twice a week, plan to do them every morning, last thing before you start the next day, whenever you do them. But these are the ones that you've sort of structured in, in advance. And those are the types of tasks I want you to do in those boss mode meetings. The other type of boss mode meeting though, is an impromptu boss meeting. And as I said, this is when you're just having a little bit of a breakdown and struggling and just like, I just need to lift myself out of this for a second. And the key rule with these meetings is that we're only trying to solve for this specific issue. Often we lift ourselves out and decide this is the moment to reevaluate our entire career. Nah, no. What we're doing now is we're lifting ourselves out and we're saying, right, I'm just going to stop even trying for a second. I'm going to take a breath. I'm going to put myself into boss mode. My boss is calm and compassionate and clear. And I'm reminding myself that I can be all of those things. And we are just going to have a quick chat about how I am right now. And this is where you might be deciding that, you know what, I thought I was doing that this afternoon, but I don't feel good, or some stuff's happened that's changed things, something's come in, something's got cancelled, whatever it might be. And you get to have just a quick check in with yourself to make a decision about what you're going to do. One big tip, slightly change environment for this. Even if it means just going standing on the other side of your desk. Okay, I'm not saying go off to another coffee shop or something like that. But, stand up, move from where you have just been sitting and stressing and things. Remind yourself what type of boss you want to be. And ask yourself questions about what do I need right now and I want you to ask them from that compassionate, firm place. So, you're slightly sceptical, but very kind. So you're sort of saying, okay, are we tired? Or does this just feel difficult right now? Those sorts of questions. Are we the sort of tired that's gonna feel better because we have a nap? Or are we the sort of tired that's gonna feel better because we have a walk? What do I really need right now? Check in with your basic needs, you know? When did you last drink water, for example? She says, with her diet coke can next to her. I need to remember to ask myself that question more often. Where did you last drink water? You can check in with those things. You can ask yourself, am I spiralling right now? Because often when we're in these sorts of moods, these distressed states, the problem isn't the specific problem, the problem is all the other things that we're telling ourselves. That because we're finding this paragraph hard, we're going to get further behind, we're never going to finish, we're never going to get a job. And so when you go into impromptu boss made, you get to ask yourself questions like that. What am I making this mean? It's okay. What's the actual problem at the moment? And what are you telling yourself is now going to happen? So we get to just separate those things out. And this isn't easy if we're in the midst of feeling, you know, upset and stressed and things like that. And it could be that as your impromptu boss, the first thing you decide is she is not in the mood for any sort of logical discussion here. What she really needs right now is just get outside, go for a walk, and calm down a bit. And so you do that bit. And then you have the rest of impromptu boss meeting when you get back to make decisions about what else you're going to do. You can do the thing that you need immediately there in the moment. What impromptu boss doesn't do is take that stress moment and decide to reorganize the whole week. They don't decide they're going to completely change the research project they're doing or whatever. They just figure out what do you need right now, that will actually make you feel better, not the things that just mask it, so we're not talking going off for chocolate or whatever. What would be actually helpful right now, as your boss, as the slightly more calm and sensible version of you, what would be most useful? And how can I help you implement that right now? So that is boss mode, both planned and impromptu. If you found that useful, and I'm sure all of us need more of this in our lives, and you want to learn more about the specific how, so if you've left this episode going, okay, that's interesting, but how do I do this? What if I don't follow through? What if I still find it difficult to judge what's realistic? If you're asking all these questions of yourself, then you are perfectly set up to come onto my group program. So as I said, it's for PhD students and people in non permanent academic roles, so postdocs, teaching fellows, anyone like that. It starts the first week in April. It is going to run three months and it's going to include some taught workshops that are bespoke and specific to your program. It's going to include weekly group coaching sessions where you get to see other people getting coached, get one to one coaching yourself. You're going to get my ebook on how to be your own best boss with tons of exercises in it and things like that. And there's going to be some secret bonuses too, which I will tell you about soon, but access to other workshops, access to private videos and all sorts of things. You get access all the way through directly to me, so I will be able to help you with your specific issues and you'll be able to be in contact with the rest of the group, the rest of the community, so that you can support each other too. It is cheaper than my one to one coaching. It is 300 pounds for three months. And that includes all the workshops, all the coaching, the book, the community, everything is substantially cheaper than one to one coaching. I know if you heard my podcast last week, you've heard a little bit about it, but that is some more detail for you. I'm going to teach you how to do quarterly and monthly reviews and planning. I'm going to take you through those, how to monitor your progress, how to implement boss mode in your life in much more detail. We're going to think about self management, emotional regulation. It's going to be amazing. I am so excited to the extent that I'm actually encouraging many of my one to one PhD clients to move across into that program. That's how good I think this program is going to be. If you want to know more about it, make sure you're on my mailing list. Go to www. thephdlifecoach. com, go to work with me, and then pick the sign up option for my free online community and you'll get all the emails about it. Alternatively, contact me through any of the different ways that you can contact me, vikki@wemburycoaching. com or you can find me on Twitter at Dr Vikki Burns or on Instagram at the PhD Life Coach. Wherever you can find me, just send me a message. If you book in, you'll be directly in contact with me. You can tell me what's challenging you at the moment, what sort of support you're looking for, and I will explain everything to you about how to get involved. If you're a supervisor or another member of staff, please make sure you share this with people that you think would benefit from it. I might do one like this for senior academics in the future, keep your eyes peeled. Make sure you tell lots of people about it. Send me a message, just call it, I might be interested and I will take it from there. We're starting first week in April, it's going to be incredible. Hope you found today useful. Let me know how you get on implementing boss mode for planning in your life. And I look forward to seeing you all next week.
by Victoria Burns 19 Feb, 2024
 This is the first in a series of episodes where I share a real life coaching session! In this episode, I talk with Ruth, a PhD student, who worries that succeeding in academia relies on having connections, rather than the quality of your work. She agreed to be coached for the podcast and we discuss why this bothers her, how it affects her work, and reach some conclusions that will help her move forwards. When you're listening, make sure that you relate it to your own life and think about how you can apply her experience to your own concerns. The session is slightly edited for time but mostly runs like a full session, so it'll also give you an insight into what it's like to be coached and how insightful it can be to listen to other people getting coached. Hope you enjoy! Vikki: Welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. This is episode 23 of series two, and we have our first of my coaching episodes. So some of you who follow me on social media will have seen that I did a shout out for people who were willing to be coached right here on the podcast so that you can all hear somebody getting coached and learn from those experiences. Vikki: And Ruth is one of the lovely people who got in contact with me to agree to take part in this. So welcome Ruth. Ruth: Thank you very much. I'm very, very pleased to be here. Vikki: Thank you so much. So maybe introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about what's going on in your PhD life at the moment. Ruth: Okay, so, well, as you said, my name is Ruth. I'm a PhD student, in Spain, actually, and I'm doing a bit of research in a mixture of different social issues such as gender and translation, basically, related to literature, to fantasy literature and specifics. So I'm basically trying to track how different gender profiles present in fantasy literature and how that presents a challenge for the translation of the original materials in English into Spanish, because, you know, there's a bit of a trickery with the gender marking in both languages being different. Ruth: So that's what I'm basically working on at the moment. It's been, it's been a while. I entered the PhD during actually during the pandemic. So some people were baking. I decided this was the way to go for me. Um, yeah, pretty, pretty risky for me to go that way, but not, not regretting it yet. So that's good. Ruth: And I'm basically, I've done most of the, you know, previous work. And the readings and all the training you have to go to start researching professionally, so to speak, and I'm basically working on my thesis, just, you know, get everything on paper, all the work that I've been doing to try summarize everything into just one book. And that's what I'm at the moment. Ruth: At the moment, because I'm actually struggling with this myself, uh, is this notion that you, to be someone in academia and to, you know, be part of it and just feel part of it. Sometimes it feels like. The more you work on your own, unless you have someone backing you and backing your work, you just don't feel like you're not going anywhere unless you have the right connections, so to speak. So it's like this fake propaganda of meritocracy of like do everything and just be the best and just invest so much time. Ruth: And to my experience, I can work myself to the bone. But unless I know certain people that have the right place, or I'm, you know, touched by grace, and I am in the spot, in the perfect spot, at the perfect timing, it is very hard to navigate this kind of murky waters. Vikki: Amazing. So people listening, what I want you to be doing is thinking about how you feel about the stuff that Ruth said. You thinking these thoughts. Um, as we go through, this isn't reality TV. Vikki: As we go through, I want everyone listening to be thinking about how would I answer the questions that Vikki asks? Would I say the same things that Ruth? What is that opening up? So that's just for everybody listening to be sort of Yeah, that's your task. That's your task, exactly. Um, and that way, what happens is that instead of just listening to your experience, you get to kind of connect it with your own experience. And so hopefully everybody listening will get something out of this for themselves. Sure. You mentioned some examples. Can you give me an example of where you think people have to have a connection in order to succeed? Ruth: For example, I realized that if you want to publish, getting published is not easy, as per my experience, and I have been published before, I'm already a published author, but I was so lucky because I knew someone that needed a book chapter very quickly, someone dropped out last minute of a publication and they were in need of someone to just, you know, fill a space and I was around the same area of research, but, you know, if I would have been in that area of research, but I didn't know the person that was actually editing the book, I might not have got the spot because I, you know, I wasn't planning on publishing at that moment, I thought I wasn't ready. I actually got ready because someone came and said, Hey, I have a spot. Do you want to fill it? And that was such a great opportunity for me and I, everything came through, well, you know, publishing is, you know, always delayed and this re redoing and remarking and everything, but at the same time, I can recognize that I was offered a very, you know, scarce possibility because I was at the right moment I was available. Ruth: And I was known. If I wasn't known, maybe I wouldn't have never been offered that because. I might have, you know, some other people might have been researching on the same issue and they just didn't get that opportunity. Vikki: I'm going to ask you a question, which might sound a bit strange. Why is this a problem? Ruth: No, I don't think it is a problem per se. I mean. Or maybe, well, maybe it is for the people that didn't get that spot. Because I was in no rush to get published at that, at that moment. Like, um, it was kind of early, but convenient for me. But maybe someone was in the last year, and that was kind of the last moment they could get something out, approved on time to present their thesis. Ruth: And they didn't get that. So it was very lucky for me, but maybe someone else could have used a possibility to even like more eagerly because they had less time to do so. And they weren't so I recognize I was very lucky. But for example. I have the same flip side of the coin at the moment, a couple of months afterwards, a publication, well, I worked at a Congress and I presented a communication there and they contacted me afterwards to ask if I wanted to be included through that communication in another book. Ruth: I said, yes, I sent my elaborated materials and they said, sure, let's go with this. It's been over a year and I have known nothing else from them. I don't know anyone in that institution that I can contact straight away. And the people I've been emailing on and on for months have been ghosting me. So in that situation, if I was in a rush to get that, you know, book out, I'm not because I already have my, my hours completed in that regard, but if I was. Then I would be in such a difficult position because I don't know anyone that I can contact directly being like, could you give me a hand, help me out? Because I don't know their institution straight away. So Vikki: it's a really interesting comparison, those two situations, isn't it? Because in both of them, the bit that seems to be bothering you is almost a hypothetical situation. Ruth: I'm very good at hypotheticals, I have to admit. That's kind of my thing. Vikki: Because in that first one, if I hadn't known them It wouldn't have happened, and that's the bit that's worrying you. In this current one, if I was in a rush to get this published, this would be a perceived problem. I'm interested in this, why these hypotheticals feel like they bother you. Ruth: I believe that I've seen myself in situations where those things have materialized, where I needed someone to help me out with something, and because I didn't know anyone, I didn't get it like that's, that's been my experience so many times, and I am fully aware of how the world works to some other types of experiences. I know that fairness is not entirely part of the game sometimes, depending on the area that you're working in. And academia seems to be one of those places where it just, it's so tight, like it's such a tight knot, that it sometimes it feels like very, very hard to just find a way to get yourself into the, into, you know, the thing. Ruth: For me, being someone that tends to do things on their own, I even have trouble remembering that I have to contact my thesis director to ask for directions because I am so used to do things on my own that the notion of, you know, having to rely on someone else because it's how it works. It just feels contrary to the way I do, me doing things. Ruth: And, I don't know, it kind of presents a mental, I don't know, someone may relate to this. But when you're used to doing things on your own, the fact of needing people to validate your, um, capacity or your, I don't know, ability to deserve a spot. It's tricky. It's not only about your work being good, because your work you can, you can polish, you can work on, on how you write and take another course and, you know, perfect your grammar or read more, more papers on the same issue, you will get the style, you know, um, those things you can, you can improve, you can always improve. Ruth: But connections are something so liquid and so depending on your personality so many times that you either have a great drive and big charisma and, and you've had the, you know, the enough life experience to get you through those places because I don't know, you're 25, 26, just fresh out of a master's degree or something. You may not have any work experience outside of this because you didn't have the time. Um, And you have to put yourself out there and advocate for yourself and your work, and you may not even have the tools to do so, because you've never had to, and those things are always what seem a bit. you know, challenging mentally, at least for me. Ruth: And that's, I know it's just hypothetical because that's not even my case. I started working when I was 19, when I was already in uni. So I've been used to being exposed a lot to the real world, but even that I recognize it's not easy. Sorry. So. I'm rumbling, I know. I don't know if I'm making sense. Vikki: No, it's really interesting. It's really interesting seeing your sort of thought processes go through. I'm wondering, what do you, if anything, do you make it mean about you and your place in academia? Ruth: Uh, what exactly do you mean that? Vikki: So you, you have this, this belief that you have be very connected to succeed in academia and that the things, some things you have been connected and you've benefited from that and other things you haven't been connected and you've, um, you know, you've suffered because of that. We can think in a minute about whether those things, to what extent we believe those things are true and stuff. Vikki: Yeah. And those may be true or not. It's almost by the bye that whether they're true or not. What's interesting to explore is what we make that mean and what the consequences of thinking those thoughts are. Yeah. Almost regardless of whether it's true. Yeah, and so I'm interested when you are thinking you have to be connected to succeed in academia what does that mean for you in academia? Ruth: Well, it's a bit contradictory because I enjoy academia a lot and I've always enjoyed researching, even in my free time, which is spend time, you know, looking for, for things. And that's, that's why I've always enjoyed, being a translator because being a translator means facing a new topic pretty much every single day. Ruth: At the same time, uh, I feel like as much as I may enjoy this field, I don't entail a notion of me working in this my entire life. Not because I don't think I would enjoy it. But because I think it probably would be very challenging for me to earn a spot, unless my thesis goes very nicely. Vikki: I want to relate you back to this notion of having to be connected. Because you're partly saying, you know, maybe I would have a future if I write a really good thesis. Vikki: And that feels a bit different to what you're saying in terms of being connected. Ruth: It just, I don't know, I guess this is kind of where the insecurity comes in where you might think that even if you are the best. Unless you know someone that can get you places, um, it's hard for you to make it, as it is in pretty much, I would say, any other field. Ruth: Um, and I, I have a struggle with, you know, the notion of not earning my position. in a place by myself. So even if I, like, probably that's another thing, even if I would have the connection, I'm not sure how comfortable I would feel using it. Vikki: Which of those feels like the bigger barrier to you, so is it that you feel, you mentioned insecure, you feel insecure because these things feel out of your control. So there, there feels like almost a sort of a vulnerable side there. Of, I could work really, really hard and still not make it because I don't have control over these things. . But there also sounds like there's an element of I could probably make these connections, but I shouldn't have to. I disagree with this as a notion. Ruth: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Vikki: And I'm just wondering which of the... Ruth: it's a bit of both. It just feels like such a struggle that you need someone to recognize you. I think it's a bit excruciating for me because it feels so unfair and I have a difficult relationship with justice, I have to admit. Vikki: Yeah, and this is what's really interesting is there's this sort of double impact it's having here, where on one hand, you're telling yourself that you need this and that you may not be able to do that and that that means you could work really, really hard and still not succeed. So there's that quite vulnerable side, but then there's also this other side of, and I don't actually know that I want to get better at doing these things because part of me feels like I shouldn't have to, and that it's unfair that this is how it works, and those sorts of things. And I think it's really understandable that the two of those things co exist, but I want you to see how having those two things co exist makes it quite hard to know how to move forward for you. Ruth: Oh yeah, of course. Vikki: Because on one hand you're telling yourself that you can't succeed unless you do these things... Ruth: I go through the game, but I don't want to go through the game Vikki: and you don't want to go through the game. Ruth: And the worst thing is there's like a third element to that, which makes it even more mentally., ah, noisy., Which is, I'm very good at social, at socially, you know, developing connections. Vikki: I could be really good at this. Ruth: I could be at that 'cause I'm, I'm, I'm very extroverted. Um, I'm very chatty. I am quite easygoing with people that I don't know from like like, I, I, I'm the kind of people that makes friends in public transportation. Ruth: So I see that I can make those things and I, if I wanted to, I could kind of make my way into those social arenas that seem a bit challenging because I do believe I could. It's just that it doesn't feel. I don't know. Authentic for one, and honorable for two. Ruth: . Like, so, it's those things that I could, I just don't want to because I don't think it's fair. So that's, that's my mental struggle. Vikki: So there's obviously different sides to this. And people listening might not have this specific experience of having these conflicting thoughts about the need for connections and things. Vikki: But sometimes people have these conflicting thoughts about how hard you should work, for example. That, um, you know, I need to work harder than I am in order to succeed, but I'm not willing to work harder than I am, or I can't work harder than I can, depending on my circumstances or my health or whatever it is. Vikki: So for everyone listening, translate this. If you don't have the same thoughts and beliefs that Ruth has around connections, translate it out to something where you, on one hand, think that you have to do something to succeed, but on the other hand, feel like you're not willing or able to do that kind of conflict that you have. Ruth: Yeah, at the end of the day, it's a conflict of fairness in a way of like how you think things are and how you feel they should be to any extent. Vikki: Absolutely. So what we're going to think about before we even start thinking about what we're going to do or anything, what I want to ask first is what is the consequence for you of thinking these thoughts. Why is it even a problem that you're thinking these thoughts? Ruth: I think it gets you down because you're thinking, like, you have to, you know, making a thesis, like writing a thesis or working in any sort of PhD process, it's hard. It's hard work, you have to be mentally in the game, because it's so easy to get sidetracked to get distracted by life or anything else, and if on top of that, you have something, some voice in the back of your head saying, Yeah, but as hard as you were, you're not going to make it. Because they speak like that. That's always the voice. Always, like, you know, whispering evilly, um, even when it is, when it is our voice. So it's, it's very hard to, you know, get the strength to just sit on your desk and just work through all the materials you're just working with and, you know, the data and everything when you're thinking, what's the point? Vikki: Let's model it out. So I know that you've listened to a few of my podcasts which is brilliant. Um, have you listened to any of the ones about the self coaching model? Ruth: Oh, no, I think I skipped that. Vikki: Perfect. That's even better because I was going to put it in for the listeners anyway. So those of you who are watching this. Vikki: On YouTube, we'll see, I pulled up my whiteboard. If you're listening on podcast, don't worry. I'm going to talk you through it anyway, but you illustrated a beautiful self coaching model without even realizing it and what you were saying. That's why I want to pull it out so that we can then use it as a structure to move forward. Vikki: So the self coaching model suggests that there are circumstances, which are the factual truths of a situation. You are a PhD student. There we go. Yep. That is a factual truth. That's a fact. You could show me evidence that PhD student. It's a factual truth. Vikki: Um, then we have thoughts, which is the cognitive story that runs in our head. And tell me the thought, just so you have the Vikki: thought, um, you can work hard, um, but you have to have connections to succeed. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. But you need connections. Yeah. But you have to have connections. Vikki: Connections. Okay. And then the next part of the self coaching model is feelings. And the purpose of this model is for us to really straighten out what we're thinking, how it makes us feel, what actions we then take, and what the consequences of those are. And the main purpose is understanding. So we're not going to judge ourselves for these thoughts, we're not going to, like, criticise ourselves, but we're going to see where things come from and use it to help us understand ourselves a bit better. Vikki: All right. So when you think you can work hard But you have to have connections to succeed. What emotion do you feel? Ruth: Oh, you feel discouragement. Vikki: Discouragement. Amazing. Okay, so I'm going to put that on the feeling line here. Now, actions. When you're feeling discouraged, what actions do you take? So this is not to make the discourage I cheer myself up and get on. Vikki: I don't do that. When you're in the midst of discouragement, tell me what actions you take. Ruth: I, I try to, well, first of all I try to distract myself from it because Like, I, I can, at this point, um, I am very introspective and I know, cause I spend lots of hours with myself, so, I know we talk a lot. Um, so I, I recognize when I'm entering that kind of like pit, dark pit of this is not going anywhere. Ruth: So, I would play some music and I would go through something like, okay, let's sit and... Vikki: these are things that you're doing. I'm going to pause you, cause these are things that you're doing because you recognize the discouragement. Yeah, because I recognize, yeah. I want you to stay in discourage. So, one of the things you said, that when you're discouraged, you get introspective. Vikki: And you start spinning thoughts. What else do you do? Ruth: I tend to do things with my hands, like handcrafts, things like that, or that keep my, my, you know, my attention going somewhere that feels productive. Vikki: Okay. What else do you do when you're in the midst of discouragement? Not to make it feel better, but when you're like acting out discouragement. Ruth: Oh, clean. Clean. Vikki: Perfect. Ruth: I clean a lot. Yeah. Vikki: Really common. What are the things that you don't do that you could be doing or that you would prefer to be doing. Ruth: Um, I try to, that's one of those things that I try to correct myself to do, but it doesn't always work, which is work. Vikki: Okay, so when you're in the midst of this arrangement, you don't do some work. Ruth: Yeah, it's just do the kind of, it's very challenging for me to find, because I could sit on my laptop and just, you know, the distracting thoughts are so In and out that it's very hard for me to concentrate so I can try and you know, I'll do something that doesn't take too much out of me. Ruth: I'll just read one paper and it just takes forever. Vikki: So you do easier tasks. Do you, when you're feeling discouraged, do you make connections in your field? Ruth: Um. Well, it's a bit hard for me to, well, I, sometimes I try to just go online and look for someone new or just drop a comment, but like I try to, to, um, say sometimes you get like in a revenge mood of, yes, I'm going to make this happen. Ruth: So you just go for like the opposite action. Yeah. It's like entirely changing. So it's like, yeah. Vikki: And that's brilliant. And what you're really illustrating for everybody listening, what Ruth's really illustrating here is how we have multiple models running at any one. Oh, yeah. And that's what can be really complicated is one of the things that's really nice about using these models is it helps us straighten out. Vikki: So when you're kind of going, right, I'm going to find some people that's not coming from discouragement, that's coming from determination or something. Ruth: Yeah, for example, but yeah, discouragement to me, it's a bit more. You know, immobilizing. Yeah, it's very hard. So I tend to go for. Yeah. So what I normally go is for something practical that has a like a productivity thing, kind of, you know, clean. Ruth: So things that I can make in the moment, which, um. You know, um, effect I can see straight away, because it kind of gets me out of that discouragement. Vikki: It is something that we call buffering. Okay. So it is a, any task that prevents you or helps you not feel the emotion that you're not liking at the moment. Vikki: So if you don't like feeling discouraged, then we often, we clean. Uh, we scroll on social media, we eat, we watch Netflix. Everyone has their different things they go to for different people. Um, but it's usually something that takes your mind away from the thought feeling combo that you weren't enjoying. And it's rarely something that's actually productive. Some people spin into Tiny productive tasks, so they sort their references or something like that, but they avoid the big difficult things. So That sort of buffering procrastination when you're feeling a negative emotion is really, really normal. Ruth: Yeah. I think that comes with a PhD. Vikki: Yes, absolutely. And this is why we need to learn this stuff, because we can manage this very differently if we understand it. So I'm going to take you through the model, especially for people that are listening rather than watching, and then we'll think about the result line. Vikki: So in the circumstance, we've just got, you are a PhD student, um, and you're writing or something like that. Your thought is you can work hard, but you have to have connections. When you think that you feel discouraged, when you feel discouraged, you distract yourself, you get introspective, you might listen to music, like do handcrafts and things, you clean, you don't sit and work, you tend to do easier tasks and you don't go out and make connections. Vikki: Now, the result is always the outcome of our actions, but it usually also relates back to the thoughts we're having. Okay. And this is going to sound slightly brutal, but go with me because we're doing this in a non critical way. Vikki: All right. All right. The result I see is that you don't work hard in this mode when you're feeling discouraged. Vikki: Yeah. You don't work hard and you don't make connections. This thought that even if I work hard I won't succeed if I don't have connections. Ruth: And then I don't do either. Vikki: And an action set that makes it really hard to work hard, and makes it really hard to make connections to. Ruth: No, no, no, I completely agree. Vikki: Do you have your reflections on that? Ruth: Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with that. And that's why the more I realize these type of patterns, the more I try to, um, sometimes if I, if I'm In a mental space where I can actually stop this from like spinning too bad into procrastination. Um, I can at least force myself to sit down and just work something, even if it's just small, because it would make it progress. Ruth: And at the end of the day, I have done something if it's not, even if it's not, you know, I finished this chapter is I wrote another paragraph. So that's another paragraph out. Um, but of course. Life takes you places and sometimes it just, it's just really hard to get out of those, um, of those. Vikki: This is so good. So what you are doing, which is absolutely brilliant. You are using one technique that you can use here, which is called interrupting the model. And that is that you still think you can work hard, but you have to have connections. You still feel discouraged. But through sort of willpower and determination, you're kind of cutting off this connection with feeling discouraged and not working. Vikki: So you are getting yourself one way or another to still work even though you feel discouraged. And that is absolutely a tactic that you can take. And particularly if the thought feeling combination feels really fixed for you, and something that is very uppermost in your mind, then sometimes it can be the best tactic. Vikki: So one of the ones where I often recommend interrupting the model is where people think that something's going to be difficult or boring. Uh, if you can get yourself to a place where you're like, yeah, it's difficult. I'm still going to do it. Or yeah, it's boring. I'm still going to do it. Vikki: You can kind of interrupt the model and be like, yeah, I'm willing to do something that's boring. I can do something that's difficult. What I would say with this one is that sounds like something that you can battle through to some extent, but it doesn't sound like a fun way of getting your work done. Vikki: I'm gonna write my PhD while feeling discouraged. Ruth: I, I have to say that it's not something that I, I don't know if allow is the word, but it's not something I try to focus myself. Um on like that that discouragement it is there like that thought process that you that we walk through It is there and sometimes it comes up as in well, this may happen and you may face this though I try to Kind of be like, okay Now the task is finishing this chapter and we're going to finish this chapter and if it goes right It will go great. Ruth: And if it doesn't, you know have the impact that you wanted to um Well, tough luck. What can you do? So, your work's still the same, it's just getting it out. So, I try to Vikki: And what you're doing here is you're illustrating a different technique. So this is great, you're working your way through these different techniques. And another technique is recognizing that just because I think this thought, and I do actually believe it's true, I don't have to spend lots of time thinking it because when we see a model like this, we can recognize that spending lots of time thinking, I can work really hard, but you have to have connections to succeed doesn't lead anywhere good. Ruth: No, no, it doesn't, it doesn't get you anywhere. Vikki: So you are, what you're doing there is you're sort of trying to squash that thought away. Yeah. And that recognises really well that thinking it isn't helping you. Yeah. But again, squashing it away is quite difficult because thoughts you squash away tend to pop back up again. Ruth: Yeah. It is. So, I try to, like, Yeah. Yeah. You know, work through it and just, you know, every time that I get that notion, it's frustration and it's, it's angers. Cause you know, that's what battles with a discouragement is the anger that sometimes you're going to feel that you may feel that, and, and it's going to feel unfair and you, you may not be able to do anything about it, um, in this situation, once you face it, but at the same time, What for once you're not facing the situation yet, so it may not happen. I mean, yeah, it might be true, maybe not. Is it what, is it working? Is it getting me anywhere? Vikki: So this is brilliant. You're sort of finding all these different strategies that... Ruth: I trick myself into it. Vikki: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what, what works, what I think works with these things is to try and find strategies that actually feel okay when you do them too. So there were two things that came out while you were talking that I was thinking. Vikki: One is whether there are alternative thoughts. That you might want to choose instead. So sometimes, especially when we feel like there's a thought that is really true, but we recognize it doesn't help us to think it lots, it can be useful to pick another thought that we also think is true, by the way. Vikki: Okay. So we're not going to pick. It's a meritocracy, and as long as I work hard, I'll be fine. We're not going to pick that, because you don't believe that. Ruth: Because you don't believe it, so yeah. Vikki: So we're never going to pick a, I can do anything I want. You know, I'm not in the manifesting world we're going to pick a thought, that you believe is true. Vikki: Okay, but I did want to flag one thing before we do that, which I think is interesting, which is, why do you think, at the moment, when you're trying to write your thesis, Why do you think your brain is offering you these thoughts? Ruth: Um, the negative ones, you mean? Oh, because I'm at the final stage. Ruth: Because I'm at the final stage and I see the end date approaching. . So, getting out in the real world and being, you know, a doctor. If you want, it's getting more real Vikki: what is your brain protecting you from? Vikki: Because I don't, ,by the way, just to put out there, I'm not a big fan of this notion of self sabotage and things like that. I think most of the time, the thoughts we have, our brain is on some level trying to protect us. Ruth: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I, I think, I think it's scary because it's the end of, uh. of a part of your life, like that you more or less have a notion of how it works, even as, um, you know, confusing as a PhD is, it is a PhD and once it finishes something new starts and new means you have to be a student again of whatever, you know. Ruth: Not a real student, I think, literally, but you have to learn how to make your way in the world from a different part of it, which is being a doctor and just, you know, trying to find a work related to that and all those things. And, of course, it is a bit, it's a bit daunting. It's, it's new. It's challenging. Ruth: And it is a bit, sometimes I feel like my brain is like, well, we can take our time. We don't need to rush through things. And I say this because, um, when I started doing the PhD and I kind of pitched, I kind of pitched an idea for the research and I didn't actually go through them. Natural progress of like, you finish a master's degree and then you get contacted by someone doing research and they try to interest you in that and then you join a group. No, I finished a master's degree. I had nothing to do with what I was doing in the PhD and I got an idea for research and I contacted a doctor that was teaching in my university and I was like, Hey, I have this idea. Would you like to tutor me in this in this thesis? Ruth: Because I think I'm going to write this and I would really like for you to be on board with this because I really like how you do things. And I think we have this topic in common. Vikki: I'm going to interrupt. Sorry. Just as an interesting notice, you created a connection in order to allow yourself to do your PhD. Ruth: Yeah, I actually, well, I not been not really created, but kind of rescued because they were a teacher of mine from my university years, but that was like 15 years before prior to that, because I'm, I'm 35 years old, so I, I went back to, yeah, I, I looked them up. Ruth: I was, I, I really liked the way they worked when I was a student and, and I thought, you know, they're doing this field, which is very related to the one that I want to do. And I know that we have a great connection as human beings because we worked before and it was very you know, peaceful and it was nice. Ruth: So I contacted them and they were like, super easily on board. Yeah, I kind of, now that you mention that, yeah, it makes me, Vikki: it makes me think that this notion that this is something that's going to be really hard for you and that's not fair. Ruth: That's why I mentioned that I don't think I find it challenging because I am very upfront with people and I don't, I don't mind going like after someone in a way because I want to work with you and it's exciting for me. I just don't like the notion of it may be a requisite because it feels like using people, um, even if you're using each other, you know . Vikki: Are you using your supervisor? Ruth: I don't think so. I think we're kind of working together. That's how I like to see it. Um, but I, I don't know, I have this battle with the concept of people using people, um, that I struggle a lot with, especially in today's world because I don't like it. Vikki: , let's go back. So we, so there's a possibility that, um, Your brain is trying to protect you from the uncertainty and the fear and things that, you know, the dauntingness, I think your words were, of, um, what's to come. Vikki: Afterwards, yeah. I wonder whether it's also protecting you a little bit from what you need to do at the moment. Ruth: Maybe, um, in the sense that I don't want to do it, do you think, or Vikki: just in the sense. It feels a little bit to me, and a lot of our brains do this, it feels a little bit to me like it's a lot easier to spend time worrying about whether if I don't have connections I'll ever manage to succeed than it is to sit down and do the difficult work of writing your thesis. Ruth: It could be. It could easily be because, um, well, it is, it is funny because it is easier in a way and it's so painful in the other hand. Vikki: Oh, absolutely. I'm not saying it's a great strategy on our brains part, but I think sometimes when we're getting ourselves sort of worked up about something that isn't actually a problem right now. Vikki: It can sometimes be a distraction from the fact that if we're not spending time worrying about that, we've actually got to sit down and write this thesis. And that's It's quite, you know, it's challenging and it takes cognitive effort and all of these things. And sometimes, um, our brains allow themselves to spiral on other stuff. Ruth: Yeah, could be, could easily be. I mean, that's the, actually, it kind of pops very at random. You know, someone in a casual conversation mentioned something and you're like, here it comes again. Ruth: Um, so as much as I can, um, at a conscious level, at least, because that's the thing, the unconscious, uh, I try very, very actively to take myself away from spaces that can be, that can lead me to those thoughts. But sometimes it happens. So I'm not entirely sure. Vikki: It will be interesting to notice. I want you to just keep an eye. So it sounds like it gets triggered sometimes in specific circumstances, where somebody talks about, um, Either having an opportunity or not having an opportunity and things like that. I want you to spend a little bit of time noticing when else it pops up. Okay. Because I will take a pretty strong stab that it will come up when you're finding something difficult. Ruth: Oh, I could look that up, definitely. I could look that up. Vikki: It just feels, it's something I've seen with clients in the past, and I don't want to put thoughts in the back, so that's why I want you to observe it over the next week or two. Um, one of the things I've seen with clients in the past is that, and I see it in myself, I get to a bit of writing where I'm like, I don't know what to write now. Vikki: And that's when it comes light. And then it comes with thought. Oh, there's just no point even doing this. No one's ever going to read it or whatever. Those thoughts come in and then it's like, oh, I don't need to do the hard thing because Yeah, because it's not going to get me anywhere anyway. It's not going to get me anywhere anyway and it's almost to remove you from that difficulty. Ruth: Yeah. Okay, yeah, I'll definitely keep an eye on that because I'm not entirely sure if that may be the case. It can very easily be the case because, you know, hard work is, is sometimes it's just your brain just escaping, looking for a way to escape the hard work. And now all that's left is the hard work. Vikki: So I actually want you to think about in advance now. Vikki: Yeah. is what thought could be a go to thought for you, that you already believe, like I mentioned, that when you find that this pops up, how do you respond to yourself? So I'm a big fan of having little dialogues with ourselves and trying to nurture a very kind of calm and fair sort of response voice. So we don't say, shut up saying that, it doesn't help us anyway, go away. Vikki: We don't say that to ourselves. But when we, if we know that our brain has a tendency to offer up thoughts that don't always help us, it can be really useful. So I do it with like exercise. So thought will come up. I don't feel like going to the gym or whatever. And my response is always, I try and do anyway, is That's okay. You don't need to feel like it, but we're going. Yeah. And that's like not very parental force . Don't be so lazy. You know? Get out. Yeah. No, no, no. Yeah. It's like, that's okay. You don't need to feel like it. But we are going, and I've kind of preloaded that thought. Does it work perfectly every time? Do I do everything myself? Vikki: No, obviously, no, it won't. It won't work every single time. But yeah, it really helps to have. something that you're sort of like, if I think this, then I'll think that. So what might be a thought for you that feels true, that would help you to feel an emotion that might help you to actually do the work and get on and do the things you want to achieve? Ruth: I think that in my case, um, because sometimes I would get into a very deep, dark, that noisy voice being like, You don't have to, um, you don't do this because it's not going to get you anywhere and you're not going to finish and it sounds very high pitched and very, very annoying. Um, and then I try, then there's another voice that starts quietly, but then it takes over, which is like, well, you've done it in the past. Ruth: You've made the connection, you talk to people, you made it happen. It may happen again. Vikki: And how has that worked for you. Is that a message that has helped you? Is it a message you want to tweak? Ruth: Um, I think that using my own past as a proof that if I have done it in the past, I can make it again. It kind of makes me believe it because I am the protagonist. It's not, I'm using, you know, someone's experience of, you know, look at that person very far away in the past that managed to do that very amazing thing. It takes so much willpower to believe something that's conflicting with what you're seeing straight away. But to use some example from your past, and if you did it in the past, you can do it again. So I think that using my own experience as a way to boost my, my mood, it kind of works for me. Vikki: Perfect. I love that. I'm gonna add in a contradict. How though, do you then reconcile that thought with the bits of your brain that believes you shouldn't have to it? Ruth: Oh, they're always arguing with each other. . Vikki: Yeah. That's why I, we need a thought I think that addresses both bits, because I think this is part of the challenge, and this happens so often, is that your go to thought to make the, you're not going to succeed if you don't have connections, bit of your brain feel better, then pisses off the bit of your brain that thinks you shouldn't have to, this is an unfair way, unfair system, this You know, uni shouldn't work like this. Vikki: So I wonder what thought there could be that placates both parts of this. Ruth: But um, the thing is, where I go, well, you've done it in the past. I kind of address both in the, well, not entirely both, but in a sense that, well, you, you have succeeded in the past without connections, so you may not need them. And you have made connections in the past and not out of ill motives. You've made it because you wanted to or because they just grew naturally, so don't, you know, try to not to fall on the, on the past, on the pattern of me making connections means I'm trying to use someone. Sometimes you make connections because you like them or because it worked for both of you. Ruth: And, and it was just, you know, very collaborative, um, two people in the same field working Ruth: So sometimes I try to not be so cynical about those things by, by telling myself, you have connections, you've made connections in the past, you're not, you know a mean person to, to have connections or to look for connections. Ruth: Sometimes you just really want to share your experience with work because it, it kind of gets a load out of your head. Like the same thing we're doing here, just discussing this, it's just very helpful to, you know, get it out um, and to share it with some other people that can have the same experience as you and be like, yeah, that happens to me too. Ruth: So, so it's kind of a way of saying. And you've done this in the past, you didn't do it for the wrong reasons. So you don't have to do it for the wrong reasons in the future. Yeah. And that may be enough. So just, you know, try not to go ahead. Vikki: I love that. And the sentence that sort of popped into my head while you were describing all that was something around, I can succeed by making ethical connections. Ruth: Yeah, I do have, and I've always had a pretty strong set of morals to that regard. So, that's something that's pretty important for me to feel that I'm working ethically to the best extent of, you know, my living. So, um, that's, that's great. Vikki: You're capable of doing that. Ruth: And I think I am. Yeah. Vikki: I, I am capable of making connections ethically. In line with my moral beliefs. . That will enable me to succeed. Ruth: Because that's probably where I would draw the line for myself. If my success means I have to be unethical about my methods, then I'm not going to be successful. Yeah. That's That's where I draw the line for myself. It may work for someone else or at a certain point, but that's my moral compass and I follow it. And I've been following it for some time. So sometimes it's even when I get in the very dark mental space of, you know, unique connections and see how these people made it work. Some part of myself would be like, yeah, but you would have never done that because it's not in your nature. So why are you even arguing with yourself? Vikki: I love that. Those thoughts are already there. So if we can just get to a stage where those are just a little bit more accessible. So towards the beginning of starting to think, I need connections to succeed. Vikki: You can think, okay, but I know how to make connections. And I know how to make connections that are in line with my moral beliefs. Yeah. That's okay. And in future, I can use my connections for good. That's the other thing. People often, when they're worrying about networking and they're worrying about making connections and whether it's ethical or whether it's smarmy or whatever, forget that , even as a senior PhD student, we're in a position to make connections that help other people, that do it because it's helpful to other people. Um, and so I'm just wondering whether if you can have that thought, you know, sometimes some clients put them on post it notes and things like that. Ruth: I think, I think, yeah, I'm all around my office. Yeah, I do it a lot because sometimes, um, just seeing in front of my face, it's like, oh yeah, right. Ruth: You're right. Um, And I know I posted that for myself. So it's like, yeah, okay, just, you know, keep that in mind. Um, and I actually, this thought process walked through with you at the moment. I didn't realize that that was the issue for me. Um, so at some level I knew, because, you know, I, um, I discuss morals a lot because I like philosophical talk a lot. Ruth: So that comes up in very, very social situations very often. Um, But I realized that probably that's my issue with the whole thing. It's the feeling unethical about things. Vikki: And you know how to do it without that. And you know where your boundaries are and you accept that if I need to do this, then I won't succeed in that way, but I'll succeed in this way because I know how to make ethical connections. Ruth: Yeah. Yep. That's it. Problem solved. Vikki: I would add to that for everybody. So anybody who's ever spent time with. like a child or something that we can give them logical responses, but they do also want to feel listened to. So the, the final thing that I would add is have a thought like that that's kind of your go to pre planned. If I hear myself saying these things, I will remember that, but then ask yourself. Are you struggling with something right now? Because if we think there's a possibility that these things come up at a time when you're worrying about the future, or at a time when you're needing to do something difficult in your thesis. Ruth: Yeah, you're a bit anxious about it. Vikki: And these actions, then we can reassure that symptom. We can say, no, no, it's okay. We've thought about this. We can make that, that's all that's that's okay, that's fine. But what's, what's, what's wrong with you? What's actually wrong, hun? And then you can be like, you know what? Vikki: I'm just getting freaked out about what happens after my PhD. Or you know what? I'm finding this bit of writing really tough. Be like, okay, let's, let's think about that. And then let's go for that. How can I support you in that? Because this is a distraction. Because we have dealt with that. We know how to do that. What's really the problem here? Ruth: I like that. I like that a lot. Vikki: Okay. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Ruth. I really appreciate you coming on. I hope that was useful. Perfect. So everybody listening, I hope that was useful for you too. I think lots of people struggle with notions of networking and whether they're good at it and whether it's ethical and those sorts of things. Vikki: So I think in that situation, this will have been super relevant. But as I say, also translate it out to anything else that's your kind of go to worry. Look, you can go back, listen to this again and watch the YouTube and kind of go through that process. if you want to hear more about the self catering model, I do have a full podcast explaining how to do that for maybe a month or so ago, so go back like four or five Vikki: episodes which will take, help you to take yourself through the stuff that I've done with Ruth. We use it as a structure in coaching when I'm actually coaching somebody else, but it's designed to be able to use it yourself. So when you feel yourself getting in a bit of a knot and you don't have access, coaching, then you have that opportunity too. So thank you so much, Ruth, for coming on. Ruth: Thank you. Vikki: And thank you everyone for listening.
by Victoria Burns 12 Feb, 2024
 Wouldn't it be nice if sometimes someone just told us that we were doing a good job, that we were enough, that we were doing things well enough and that they were proud of us. And yet so often, that doesn't necessarily happen in academia. Lots of us feel that our supervisors could give us more reassurance, our collaborators or heads of school could give us more reassurance, and it's really hard to keep pushing yourself to work as hard as we all do, when we feel like we're not getting the praise and reassurance from other people that we think would really help. In today's episode, we're going to be thinking about what you can do about that. And, clue, it's not all about asking other people for reassurance. Hello and welcome to episode 22 of the PhD Life Coach, where we're thinking about what you can do if you don't get enough reassurance. This is something that comes up a lot with my clients at pretty much every stage of the academic journey. That they just wish somebody would let them know whether they're doing things right or not. Whether they're doing enough. Whether they're performing at the level that they're expected to be. And this is really understandable, right? Academia is a really kind of intangible place. It's really hard to judge whether we're doing as much work as other people, whether we're the standard we should be, whether we're focusing on the right things. And often the kind of goal setting and review processes are pretty fluffy. You know, most universities will have like monthly reviews or something for PhD students. They'll have maybe annual performance reviews for academics, but they're few and far between, and often they can be a bit of a paper pushing tick box exercise if they're not done well. Maybe one day I'll do an episode on how to make the most out of those review processes. But for the moment It's enough to say that structurally there aren't many opportunities to get reassurance and praise from others. And sometimes even when we have success, we get publications, we pass parts of our PhD, you know, we pass our progress panels or whatever it might be. We still aren't sure whether we passed really easily, were we like flying colours, top of the class, or were we just good enough, scraped through. It can be really hard to figure out. And that means that we can end up feeling really quite uncertain about our abilities, about our standing, how we're doing, whether we should be pushing harder, whether we can sort of take our foot off the gas a little bit. And it also means if we're really sort of desperate for this reassurance, we can start turning up a bit needy. And this is something I see a lot. You guys might have seen it in personal relationships as well. When you're feeling sort of a bit insecure, maybe in the early stages of dating. So when I was still single and I was sort of on dating apps and things like that, if there was somebody that I quite liked and I wasn't sure what they were thinking about me, I'd be sort of pushing to get little bits of reassurance, right? And we know in that context, that's not hot. That's not attractive to be sort of going, do you like me? How much do you like me? Do you like me enough? Um, and unfortunately, the same is true in academia. If we're saying to our supervisors all the time, or to our Heads of School, am I doing enough? Am I doing the right things? Then sometimes we end up showing up as somebody who doesn't trust their own judgment, showing up as somebody who kind of is putting other people under pressure to reassure us and make us feel a particular way. It also means that we sometimes start doing tasks in order to get reassurance. So one of the things I see a lot with my clients is they find it easier to prioritize tasks that are for somebody else than tasks that are for themselves. So if somebody has set you a deadline to get a draft done, you're much more likely to hit that deadline than if you've set yourself a deadline to get a draft done. You're much more likely to prioritize getting your marking done for some other module organizer than you are for planning ahead for your own module, for example. When we're in need of reassurance for others, we prioritize tasks where we're more likely to get that praise and reassurance. And in doing so, we then end up neglecting things that are actually really important for us and our careers. Things that are real priorities for us. So, in this episode, I'm going to give you some really practical tips about what you can do if you find that you are feeling in need of some more reassurance and even finding yourself seeking out reassurance from others. First thing is, we're just not going to judge ourselves. It's totally understandable. As I say, it's a complex world, we don't know necessarily whether we're doing it well, and it's nice to be praised by others. So, let's not beat ourselves up, let's go at this compassionately, this is something that we want to address and we want to learn some skills around. But there's nothing wrong with us for the fact that we quite like getting praise and reassurance, okay? There's nothing wrong with you. But let's figure out some alternative ways of doing it. The first one is to notice reassurance you're already getting. I remember getting, and I can't remember whether I've ever talked about this on the podcast before, but I remember getting my first ever module reviews back when I'd done some teaching for my old supervisor, and 95 percent of the comments were really good, you know, she's enthusiastic, she was clear, she was this, that, the other, and then a few were she went a bit too fast. One told me I was sarcastic. outrageous. Now I'm like, yeah, but at the time I was outraged. Um, and what we often do is we disregard the good ones and we focus in on the things that reinforce the things that we're worried about. And partly that's a problem because it means we're focusing on something that actually reinforces our worst fears. But it also means we're missing an opportunity to get reassurance. There's a known phenomenon that's part of the imposter syndrome, and I talk about it in the course I do on how to overcome imposter syndrome. It's available for universities. And that is that when we receive praise or reassurance, if we're somebody who kind of doubts ourselves and feels like a bit of an imposter sometimes, we disregard that praise and feedback, either on the grounds that I only did well because I was lucky, or on the grounds that I only did well because I worked really, really, really, really, really hard and so it doesn't really count, because I exhausted myself trying to do it. Sometimes we disregard it on account of the fact, yeah, it looked alright on the surface, but they didn't know how chaotic it was behind the scenes. They didn't know how late I was up. They don't know how there was a couple of bits that I just winged, or whatever. And so we sort of, instead of taking this reassurance, this reassurance that we really want. Instead of taking this reassurance, we disregard it. We say that, oh no, not that sort of reassurance. That doesn't count. That's not really evidence that I'm doing well enough. That's not really evidence that I'm good enough. They're only saying it to be nice. They're only saying it because I was lucky this time. So the first real lesson here is to notice reassurance you're already getting. Some people only give reassurance in a very kind of throwaway remark. Ah, you did well this week. And then carry on. Grab it. Grab it and remember that. I used to keep, and I recommend all of you do if you don't already, I used to keep a folder of nice things people say. That was what it was called. Nice things people say. And if anybody ever sent me an email thanking me for anything, I popped it in the nice things people say file. And it's a really nice place to look. I also used to keep all my thank you cards from students. Loved having those. So keep anything you get, and then when you're feeling like you never get enough reassurance. You can revisit these things. So you notice the stuff you get, you keep the stuff you get, and you can revisit the stuff you get. Because I guarantee all of you are getting a lot more praise and reassurance than you are giving yourselves credit for at the moment. The second thing you can do is seek specific reassurance. And I want you to really notice that word, specific. When we say things like Am I doing well enough? Am I about up to speed? Am I where I should be? Really generic reassurance. Then it can be a little bit annoying to be on the receiving end of that because you feel like you're just like, yes, yes, you're fine, you're fine, stop worrying. You feel like you're having to manage that person's emotions, to manage your emotions. But also it's hard to, I mean, that's a big question. Am I good enough? Good enough for what? So if you want reassurance, one thing you can do is get really specific about exactly what do you want reassurance about? What is it that you're worried about? Is it that you're not far enough through the research that you're doing at the moment? Is it that you're all good enough at writing, whatever good enough means? Get really specific and ask for advice about that thing. That way you're much more likely to get focused advice. You're much more likely to get something that's actually specific and useful. And if people tell you that actually there are some things that you do need to develop, you get much more specific advice because, you know, if you say to somebody, am I doing well enough? If they say yes, That's really easy to disregard, because it's like, oh, well, they don't know. But if they say no, what does that even mean? What are you going to do with that? So if you're going to seek praise and reassurance, get really, really specific about what you're asking for feedback on. You can also look for evidence as reassurance. Sometimes we only count praise and reassurance if it's in the form of somebody saying, You're doing really well, Vikki. I'm proud of you. You're doing really well. When in reality, a bunch of people don't say those things. But if they keep coming back to you to ask you to do something, then that's praise in itself, that means they trust you to do that job. If they give you relatively minor edits, or thorough edits, but no sort of really big structural changes, the absence of heavy critique is reassurance in itself. This was something I really had to work on as a supervisor, because my tendency, if I was giving feedback to a student, I'm going through a manuscript, and I'm trying to do it in a hurry, as always, because we've all got too much to do. My tendency would be to focus in on the bits they had to change. And I got feedback from students that sometimes it was really good to know what they'd done well, partly from a getting a reassurance point of view, and partly from the point of view of actually learning why it was done well. And so I had to really train myself to comment on paragraphs that I thought were fine and explain why I thought they were fine, as well as comment on paragraphs that I thought needed to change. So is that something that I learned as a supervisor? Maybe your supervisor doesn't do that. Maybe your collaborators don't do that. But one of the things that I asked my students to do in parallel is, if you give me a manuscript and I've got a couple of paragraphs that I haven't put comments on, that means I think they're good. Yeah, give me the benefit of the doubt here. I'm going to try and put more positive feedback in your work, because you said you'd like that and I can see why that would help. But if I haven't, and there's no comments in that section, let's take that as praise. Okay, so look for evidence of reassurance, evidence that someone thinks you're doing a good job that goes beyond them just saying, yeah, I think you're doing a good job. I would also really recommend joining a community of some sort. So all of you who are in departments have colleagues around you, whether you're a PhD student or an academic. But there'll often be other communities that you can join. Groups at the university, writing groups, at the University of Birmingham we have my PhD Life Coach membership, that's definitely created a community amongst the PhD students. By having a community where you can kind of cheerlead each other, it can be another source of reassurance and praise. So with my students in the membership, it's wonderful. We had one of our sessions yesterday. They're all in Zoom webinar and getting in the chat and they're telling us about papers they've had published and things and they're all cheering for each other and looking up each other's papers and they're talking about it on social media. They're sharing in each other's celebrations and they're sharing in each other's successes. So look in your university for opportunities for those sorts of communities. You can build them yourself. These can be just small friendship groups or they can be organized structures. So academics will have access to training programs where you can meet people, um, offered to the things like action learning sets and stuff like that, where you can have people that you meet with regularly, and you actually can give praise and reassurance and champion each other. Look out for all of those opportunities. For PhD students and postdocs, if you're listening to this in real time, it's the beginning of February. I am very excited to announce that at the start of April, I am going to have a group coaching program available for PhD students and postdocs to sign up as individuals. So as you may know, I have the membership, which is at one university at the moment. It's open to other universities. I am in some discussions at the minute, but that relies on institutions investing and all of those things, which, as we know, can take time and persuasion on my part. And if you're an individual student, you might think I don't have access to that. Now, all of you have access to my free monthly coaching which will be on the 14th of February if you're listening to this live. So next Wednesday make sure that you are signed up for my email list if you want to make sure you get the details of that. But all of you, if you are either a PhD student or a postdoc, will have the option to sign up for my new group coaching program on how to be your own best boss. It's going to be three months. You're going to get workshops. You're going to get coaching sessions. You're going to get my ebook on how to be your own best boss. It's going to be amazing and it's going to be an incredible community. You are going to get to know each other. You're going to champion each other. You're going to meet people that you can work with outside of this on zoom, where you can provide support and reassurance and praise for each other. If you want to make sure you get all the information about it, it's literally, it's not even open to purchase yet, it is just at the being launched stage right now, then make sure that you are on my email mailing list. So go to www. thephdlifecoach. com, click on work with me and you'll find my mailing list there, make sure that you are signed up there and you'll get all the information. If you are listening to this a bit later, it's going to start on the 3rd of April. So you've got till the 3rd of April to sign up. So get in touch if you want more details. It's going to be amazing. Even if you don't go into a program like that, though, there's other places that you can get free community. Make sure you're doing that. Make sure you're celebrating your friends. Making sure you're sharing with them the things you're doing. So you can get that reassurance and praise from your peers. Now, if you're an academic You might be saying, oh, but what about us? Like I say, there are places at your university you can find these things. You can build collaborative groups where you can do this for yourselves. But if you think I should run a group program for academics, let me know. Drop me an email. It's sort of tootling along in the back of my mind. I'm being careful not to do too many things at once, which is always my tendency. But it is tootling along in the back of my mind. A group program for people who are more senior than a postdoc, who are at any stage of their academic career. Possibly over the summer, possibly a have the best summer ever kind of vibe. So that we rest when we want to rest, we write when we want to write, we get stuff done and actually enjoy it. Let me know whether you feel like that would be useful. I feel like it might be. Anyway, I'm getting distracted from reassurance and praise, but I hope that was a useful sneaky insight for you all. So how else can you get more reassurance and praise? My next tip is probably the most important of all of them, which is I want you to ask yourself, when did you last give yourself reassurance and praise? I hear so many clients say, I just need them to tell me I'm doing a good job, and I always ask, When was the last time you told you, you were doing a good job? What proportion of the time do you tell yourself you're doing a good job, versus what proportion of the time do you spend telling yourself you should be doing more? That you're not enough? That this isn't good enough? If we're wanting more reassurance and praise from others, we could almost always be giving more reassurance and praise to ourselves. Now, some of you will say, as clients have said to me in the past, Yeah, but I don't know if I'm doing enough. I don't know if it's good enough. So I don't trust my judgment. And the way I always answer that is You're trusting your judgment that it's not enough at the moment. You're believing yourself when you tell yourself you're not good enough. And you're believing yourself when you're telling yourself you're not working hard enough. Or that you're working as hard as you possibly can be and it's still not enough. You're believing all of those things. Why do we trust our judgment on what we're bad at, and not trust our judgment on what we're doing well at? We need to start saying things to ourselves that we do believe. Oh, you worked hard today, Vic. Good work. Things like that. Not, you're the best writer ever. We don't need to say that to ourselves. We need to acknowledge when we've tried hard. We need to acknowledge when something's successful. We need to acknowledge that there are things that we're doing well. The more we can try and get in the habit of reassuring ourselves, and at least reducing the amount that we're actively rubbishing ourselves, the less we find we need reassurance from other people. Because usually, when moaning we're not hearing it from others, it's because we need to hear it from ourselves. It's not just that it's the easiest thing to change, because we've got control over our own behaviour much more than anybody else's. It's not just a pragmatic thing. We need to hear it from ourselves. We need to tell ourselves that we're enough and that we're doing enough and that we're doing a good job within the constraints that we have. I used to have a little cartoon in the pandemic, which was just this little guy with a little sign. It's like a little cartoony man with a little sign, that said, Under the circumstances, you're doing rather well. And I thought, you know what? That basically sums it up. Under the circumstances, whether it's the pandemic or just the general higher education sector, you're doing rather well. And I think we can all tell ourselves that a little bit more often. My next tip is we delve a little deeper and we ask ourselves, why do I need this reassurance? How do I anticipate feeling if somebody told me I was doing a good job? And why do I feel Like, I need to, and why do I think I need to feel that way? Because sometimes what we're looking for is for somebody to take away discomfort. At the moment, we're feeling like something's difficult, we're feeling uncertain, and we feel like somebody else's praise will take away some of that uncertainty, or it'll make it feel a little easier, give us a little bit more confidence that we're able to do it. But if we can get to the bottom of why you feel like you need that, we can address that need directly. So instead of thinking, I need praise because I need to feel more confident about my abilities, we can think, how can I feel more confident about my abilities? So we don't work on getting the praise, we work on building our confidence in the things that we're trying to do if we want praise because we feel disconnected and isolated and lonely and all of these things. Then we go, Oh, I want reassurance just so that I feel connected to somebody else. Well, I could work on just feeling connected to somebody else, and there's a lot better ways to build relationships and to build connectedness than asking for praise. Is it because I want acknowledgement? Is it that I'm working really hard and I want someone to recognize that, because even that, we don't necessarily have to ask for praise. Then we can make sure that, okay, I need to make clear to somebody how many hours I'm working, what I'm getting done, so that they acknowledge it. So they can actually see how much I'm doing. We can address these needs more directly if we understand where these more superficial needs are coming from. And then my final tip, is sometimes we look for praise and reassurance because we don't like feeling uncertain. We don't like not knowing if we're good enough, not knowing if we can finish on time, not knowing if we can get everything done before the end of term, whatever your goals are. It's really hard to not know. It can feel really uncomfortable to not know. And so we seek reassurance and praise from others to reduce that discomfort. The final tip is knowing that we can choose to get a bit better at managing that uncertainty. So instead of having to make the uncertainty go away with reassurance, Being okay with not knowing whether I can finish this whole thing or not. Being able to direct our attention to, I don't know if I can finish this whole thing by September, but I do know that I can do this bit today and being able to direct our focus to that. Being able to remind ourselves it's okay to be uncertain. To go back to my dating analogies, it's okay at the beginning of a relationship to not be sure where it's going. It's okay to have those levels of uncertainty, and if anything, I would say it's healthy to have those levels of uncertainty. At the beginning of a relationship, It's not your job to know whether it's a forever relationship or not. That comes later. In the same way, it's not your job right now to know whether you can do your entire PhD in this amount of time. Your job right now is to know whether you can do this task now. More we can direct the focus to that and kind of get used to the fact that there's nothing inherently unsafe about being uncertain. That we can direct ourselves to the things where we do feel more certain and we can allow ourselves to feel uncertain about the other stuff, then suddenly we're in much less need of reassurance, because we don't need these negative emotions to go away, these uncomfortable emotions to go away, because we trust we can look after ourselves while we feel uncertain. We trust that we trust that whatever happens we'll figure it out. My final one is you can borrow a bit of reassurance from me. I am confident that anybody who spends their spare time listening to podcasts called the PhD Life Coach is doing all right. You're putting the time in. You're thinking about your practice. You're trying to do the best you can. You're actively learning how to regulate your thoughts and emotions so that you can be successful and still look after your mental health. If you're choosing to listen to this sort of thing, take the reassurance from me as a starting point that I think you're doing just fine. Thank you so much for listening, everyone. Make sure you sign up for my mailing list to hear more about my group programs and I will see you next week.
by Victoria Burns 05 Feb, 2024
 video1901085470 This is the first time I have ever had to put a spoiler warning on my podcast. I'm so excited. If you have an intention to watch series two of the UK Traitors and you haven't yet seen it, please go listen to a different podcast. There's 60 something of them out there. See what you can find that I published last year, that might be of use to you now and come back to this once you've watched. If you didn't watch and have no intention of watching, I'm not fully sure we can be friends, but we'll go with it. I trust you. That's fine, don't tune out. It's all good. You don't have to have watched The Traitors for this to be an immensely useful episode, but if, like me, you got a little bit obsessed with The Traitors, then you are going to love this episode Because we're going to be identifying eight things that all PhD students and academics can learn from The Traitors. This started out as five things you can learn. I got carried away. I might add more as we go through. Who knows? I'm a little overexcited. Hello and welcome to episode 21 of the PhD life coach and we're talking about The Traitors. Oh my goodness, I can't remember the last time that I was as excited about a TV show as I was during The Traitors this year. Absolutely immense. And I think the thing that made me love it the most was also being on Twitter alongside it. So I'd watch the episodes, I'd be seeing what other people were saying. Afterwards we'd be dissecting the cliffhanger, figuring out what we thought would happen next. And It was just truly amazing, and got a little bit obsessed, got lots of my friends into it as well, and now I figured out a way to weedle it into my work as well. Because I thought, you know what? There's lessons in here. There's stuff we can learn from The Traitors, other than, it's amazing television. Now, those of you who know me well, will be very impressed to learn that I have resisted the temptation to buy a cloak. I nearly bought a cloak for my YouTube. If you didn't know, I'm on YouTube as well, just a kind of recorded version of this podcast. But I hope you'll be impressed to know I restrained myself. I mean, I confess, I did spend about 10 minutes just now with a shawl over my head, seeing if there was a way to kind of recreate the Claudia vibe. But frankly, without the fringe, it wasn't a winning look and I decided against it. So look at me being mature. Very impressed with myself. Anyway, if you haven't seen The Traitors, just to bring you up to speed, 22 people put in a Scottish castle with Claudia Winkleman, TV star extraordinaire. Three of them are made Traitors and the rest are Faithfuls and the faithful's job is to find the Traitors and banish them from the castle. Because if they get to the end of the series and there's any Traitors remaining in the castle, they will take all the prize money at the end of the game. So Faithfuls are on the lookout for Traitors, Traitors are trying to go undetected and persuade people to banish Faithfuls instead. So they're all sussing each other out trying to figure out what's going on and everyone's trying to convince each other that they are a faithful and they deserve the prize pot. I watched series one, loved it. Watched the US version, it's okay. Australian, pretty good. I haven't watched series two of those yet, but series two just went absolutely wild in the UK and I just found it, apart from just super exciting television, I found it such an interesting insight into human behaviour that I thought would be super relevant to all of us. And a cheap excuse to keep talking about it. So, lesson one is, clever is not enough, you have to be persistent too. Those of you who watched it will know that Jazz was a bit of a legend for working out who were Traitors from about the third or fourth episode all the way through to the very final and everybody's been calling him Jazzatha Christie and things like this and marveling at his skills and he was really good. In a game where you're taking in so much information all the time, they're together all day every day, he seemed to have more insight into what was going on than pretty much anybody else. He was really good at the detecting part of being a faithful. However, the thing that he was much less good at was convincing other people of his thoughts. Now, at first, you could argue that was a tactical thing. He was holding back so that he didn't sort of stick his neck out too much and get murdered by the Traitors for having too, too good ideas, essentially. And we know that happened. So at first, this was a good strategy. But in the later stages of the game, and particularly once he got through to the final and end game, it became a real limitation. He would sort of vaguely raise his suspicions. Somebody would say that they didn't agree, and he would stop talking. He would kind of go, oh, okay. And we made excuses when he was biding his time at the beginning. He's just being tactical. But at the end, he just wouldn't or couldn't persuade other people of his amazing ideas, his amazing insight. And it really reminded me of people I've known in academia who have been super clever, got amazing ideas for new research, or different ways of teaching, or different ways of organizing the administrative side of academia. And who struggled to put across those viewpoints, and so they weren't always listened to. Now, you may argue, quite rightly I think, that some of it is on the others to listen. So in the case of the Traitors, I thought it was ridiculous that Evie and Andrew and Molly didn't listen to Jazz more when he was expressing really legitimate concerns. They just immediately brushed him off. So it's definitely on the people around us to listen, but as with everything we talk about in coaching, we only have responsibility for our own behavior. And I think Jazz has to take responsibility for the fact that he didn't push his ideas forward in a convincing way and persistently enough to make change happen. Now, this, as those of you who know me will know, that isn't something that I have struggled with in the past. I'm pretty good, some would say too good, at pushing my ideas forward. What I have struggled with in the past is being persistent when people couldn't see that what I was suggesting was a really sensible thing to do and in certainly in the earlier parts of my career and sort of mid career I would get really frustrated that like two years after I'd suggested something a few times people would do the thing and act like it was some amazing new idea. It's like, dudes, I said this two years ago! But I hadn't been persistent, and I hadn't been patient with the fact that sometimes you have to say the same things multiple times for people to actually understand where you're coming from or why what you're saying is important. Now, this isn't being Maddie. Those of you who watched it last season will know that Maddie was just noisy and banged on about it over and over and over again. Sometimes she was right, sometimes she was wrong, but she wouldn't let it go. I'm not suggesting that we channel our inner Maddies. I was probably a bit too Maddie at points in my academic career. But I think there's a happy medium. I think if we have Maddie at one end who bangs on about her ideas over and over and doesn't seem to care that no one's listening - love her, you know, all due respect Maddie, but same and then Jazz at the other end, who had great ideas, but wouldn't try and convince people in any meaningful way, I think there's a place in between, where we can bide our time, like Jazz did, but know that sometimes people are going to disagree with our ideas initially, but when they've had more time to think about them, or where you've presented more evidence, they might come on board. Sometimes people just aren't quite ready to hear it yet, but if we can keep going, if we can listen a bit longer, look for other opportunities where they might be coming around. As an example, when Jazz heard Andrew talking about Harry, Jazz should have used that as his opportunity to be like, Right, Andrew gets it. Andrew knows. I can really, really be persistent now. I can really push. So I want you to think about ideas that you've been trying to bring up, whether it's research ideas to your supervisor, whether it's ways to change things at the university to your head of school, for example, and think, are there ways that I could be a little more persistent, a little more persuasive so that I could bring more people on board? Jazz didn't win the prize because he wasn't able to bring the right people around at the right time. And he left himself in a position where he needed to persuade somebody that he was never gonna persuade. If he'd moved a little faster and a little more assertively, he may have been able to work with Evie or with Andrew to get Harry out and we can learn from that. Lesson two is that there are lots of different ways to play this game. So in the Traitors, obviously there's the Traitors and the Faithfuls who play the game very differently. They've got different tasks that they need to do. But even within those, but even within those, there's a huge range of different approaches. They're the people that go straight in, I'm going to be myself no matter what and see what happens. There's others that try and play a kind of long, slow game. There's people that were desperate to be Traitors. We saw Paul describe himself as cruel at the beginning when Claudia asked him to describe himself just to make sure that he was made a Traitor. All the way through to we heard in one of the Uncloaked episodes that Diane had got into absolute fits of giggles at the idea that she could ever be a Traitor, and Claudia decided not to make her a Traitor on account of the fact she didn't think she'd ever keep a straight face. So, there's different roles we can take, different people go into it in different ways, and there's a huge number of different ways to succeed. We know Harry succeeded in the sense that he won the money, but was it worth the emotional toll of letting Molly down like that? Maybe. It was a game, but it was a different way to play. Molly got all the way through to the final without having basically done a great deal, I would say, other than just be lovely, so no one was worried about her and no one suspected her. That's a highly successful game. She had a huge amount of airtime. She was able to participate in every game that was going. She got a helicopter and everything at the end, and even if she didn't win the prize money, that's a hugely successful participation in a TV show like this. Diane goes out in the middle in absolutely iconic style, and is pretty much the toast of every town in the UK. There are lots of different ways of being a great player. The same is true in academia. We kind of get sold this one path where you've just got to get lots of grants and lots of publications and, you know, progress up a research route and be the research superstar that's running huge labs or huge research projects and so on. When in reality, there's a bunch of different routes to professor at most universities and there's a bunch of different ways to have a successful career. How are we defining success? Are we defining success as, you know, Prof before 40 and making tons of money? Or are we defining success as making a meaningful contribution to the lives of your students and your research contributions? There's a whole bunch of different ways. And one of the biggest problems is that we often look at other people's way of succeeding and think that that's the only way to do it. And if we're not cut out in our minds to do it like that, then we can't succeed in academia. I want you to think about all the different ways that you can succeed in academia. You can pick a way of playing that plays to your strengths. You can pick a way of playing that you enjoy and that feels sustainable for the whole of your career. You don't have to go in there being the pantomime baddie like Paul. As an example, Wilf, from the first series. I'm not going to give first series spoilers in case you're going to go back and watch it. But those of you who've seen it will know that his game didn't go exactly as he thought it would. But I've heard him talk on a podcast about how he's glad that it worked out like that. He's glad that he had the experience that he had, and he's got a lot more out of it afterwards than he thinks he would have been had it turned out the way he'd originally intended. You can play this game however you want to play this game. Lesson three, and it kind of connects to that, is that whatever you do, people will criticize you for it. We saw Sonia getting banished because she was a big personality who was influencing the room and all of that. And then we saw Meg fall under loads of suspicion because she was really quiet and not saying anything. We had people who were banished for not speaking up enough at the round table, and people who were banished for speaking up too much and getting people's backs up. Whatever you do in the Traitors and in academia, people will tell you that you could be doing it a bit differently than you are. I remember getting criticized for being too ambitious, that I wanted to progress too quickly and that I needed to kind of slow down and take my time and not get people's backs up and things. Other people were really impressed with the trajectory that I took and the things that I took on. And I'm really glad I did the things I did because I had some wonderful experiences. Whatever tactic you take, someone will tell you, you should have pushed yourself forward, but not like that. You should have been quieter, but not like that. You get to pick. In my opinion, the best way to play the academic game is to turn up in a way that you can be proud of. Where when you stop and think about what sort of academic do I want to be? What is my purpose for doing this? Why am I here? What do I want to achieve? How do I want to show up? Are you doing those things? Are you showing up the way you want to show up? If not, that's okay. And that's things we can work on. You can listen to other episodes of the podcast, there's other support if you're not showing up the way you want to right now. But when you're making decisions about how you need to be in order to succeed in academia, there's no right answer. You get to choose to play a game that you're proud of. Lesson four, be trusting, but not too trusting. So this is in honor of the lovely Molly, who, by the way, if they don't make her a Blue Peter presenter, I'm starting a riot because I think she would be. An amazing Blue Peter presenter. Did you see her scrambling up over those rocks in the final episode? Amazing. She'd be so good. But we all saw her let her loyalties and her friendship get in the way of that final decision. Does she stand by it? It's hard to tell from her interviews whether she regrets it or not. But I think it's an important lesson that erring on the side of trusting people can help you go a really long way in both the Traitors and in academia. Working with people you like is a really important part of academia. And so building those relationships so that people want you to be involved with things is really important. You know, it's one of the overlooked things about Molly. She got to the final because people liked having her there. And the same is true in research. People recruit people because they like having them there, they enjoy working with them, they carry on collaborative partnerships. I've carried on collaborative partnerships and even started collaborative partnerships with people where our research didn't necessarily gel in an obvious way from the outside, but we loved working together and so we made it work and it actually ended up being amazing. But it wasn't the obvious like tactical choice. We did it because we liked each other. And you go a really long way like that. The downside, as we saw with Molly, is sometimes you can be too trusting. You can assume that everyone has your best interests at heart. An example I see here a lot when I coach PhD students is supervisors who encourage you to stay on and do more research in their labs. Particularly in the science and engineering end of things, often I see the most able PhD students recruited into postdoc positions within the same lab. And the supervisors really selling this as an amazing opportunity for the student. And sometimes it is. I mean, I'm talking here as somebody who stayed her whole career in the same department, and I don't regret it. For me, it actually was an amazing experience, because the postdoc that I was recruited to had a ton of freedom about what I got to do. And so, whilst I stayed on, I changed what I was doing a lot, and I took real ownership of it. One thing I see, though, is that sometimes supervisors encourage people to stay on in their lab because it's better for the supervisor. They know they've got a safe pair of hands, they know that person can run the next project really well, they know how the kit works, they haven't got to train somebody, and sometimes the students are too trusting that their supervisor has their best interests at heart. It's unusual for a supervisor to be actively wanting to screw over a student, but we have to remember that supervisors have got their priorities too. They've got their own stresses, their own progressions that they need to make, so sometimes it can just be worthwhile just to step back and be like, okay, is this entirely for me? Or is this a bit about them, too? And this happens at every level. You know, your head of school trying to persuade you to take on a new administrative role, because it's going to be great for your career, great for your next promotion prospect. Is it? Is it actually? Or do they just need somebody to do that admin role? Again, not suggesting they're being Machiavellian, not suggesting there's anything dark. But sometimes we can be a bit too trusting and go, Oh, okay, if you say that's good for my career, I should do it without questioning, Why is it that they're asking me that? Is it because it's best for me? Or is there an element of it that's best for you too? Now, if there's an element that's best for the head of school or the supervisor as well, that's fine, that's not necessarily a problem, but let's make decisions knowing that. Let's make decisions going, there's reasons this is good for me, and reasons it's not, and there's reasons it's good for you too, and reasons it's not. And let's then make a decision from there. So be trusting, but not too trusting. Make sure you've got all the information that you can and that you're weighing it up in a kind of slightly sceptical, measured sort of way when making decisions. Lesson five, pull together on tasks. So, You will have seen in the show, in between all the murders and the round tables and the banishments and everything, they have big tasks that they have to go and do. They're collecting barrels that are worth certain amounts of money, or rowing across lakes and putting shapes together, or whatever it might be, and all the Faithfuls and Traitors are united in trying to do these tasks. And one of the things that struck me was how many of them say what a relief it is to be doing the tasks, because they almost relax from the kind of playing of the game and they all pull together to achieve a common goal. I've seen this in departments where, you know, back in the day where departments used to get inspected, everyone would sort of pull together to be ready for the inspections. I've seen it happen. We used to have like a poster day thing for our third year undergraduates when they finished their final year projects and everyone pulled together to make it work and even though there were different members of staff who had different opinions of each other and things, everyone kind of pulled together to make this amazing day for the students and staff. So, where you can see tasks, where you can pull together and just enjoy creating something, enjoy achieving a goal, really try to do that. Academia can be a competitive place and that can get really tiring if we're always focused on right what's on my to do list, what do I need to do next, how can I get ahead, how can I be ready for a job interview. Sometimes doing some of the extra things that are kind of fun, where you're pulling together with people that you otherwise wouldn't work with, or maybe are even in competition with, can just create a much nicer environment. All of these things are so much easier with friends and you'll also find that people just give themselves a little bit more grace if you know each other as well. So where if you don't know people in your department and you get a bit of a grumpy email from somebody, you might be a bit like, Oh my God, they hate me or ooooh they're a terrible person or whatever it is. If you know that person and you've been doing some activities with them and things, you'll be like, Oh, she sounds a bit grumpy today. What's going on? You know, just be curious about it because you've got other things to compare it to. So make sure that you're getting involved. You're getting to know other people so that we all just take some of that pressure off, give each other a little bit more grace and enjoy this amazing academic setting that we can be in. Sort of leading on from that is lesson six, which is enjoy the random friendships. So, series one, one of my absolute highlights was the friendship between Amos and Andrea. Again, go back, watch it, really hard to describe, but these are not people that you would expect to be besties in real life. They're like 30 years apart, he's a doctor, she's an older retiree, and they just loved each other, they just hung out, they played badminton in the gardens, and were just super protective of each other and really enjoyed each other's company. And I think those random friendships, you only really get either in taking part in something a bit unusual like The Traitors, or in kind of workplace settings, because in most hobby based things, you're with people that are similar to you. I mean, it was one of the things I used to love about circus when I used to do circus stuff. I met all sorts of different people that were nothing like me and came from all sorts of different places and backgrounds and experiences and ages and things. And I love the random group of friends that I have from circus. But often, you know, you go to a tennis club, it's a lot of people like you, go to a running club, it's a lot of people like you. And work is one of the places where there'll be people of lots of different ages and seniorities who have this one shared interest of the academic subject, but who in many other ways could be really different from each other. And I think allowing yourself space to enjoy those friendships, to get to know other academics who are very different from you and just enjoy the fact that you would have never met this person if you hadn't shared this one academic interest. In fact, I recently went back to my old university to talk about our membership program, and I took the opportunity to kind of wander around the department and have some chats with people, and I realized it was one of the things that I most missed about work was the kind of random conversations with people that I wasn't good enough friends with that I would stay in touch with, but who I really liked and I enjoyed talking to. And I really had a lovely time doing those natters. And one of the things, when I was saying to somebody how much I enjoyed it, One of the things she said was, yeah, but it's the first thing to go when we're busy, isn't it? And I thought that was a really insightful comment, because I don't think I'd really thought about that when I was still working at the university, that actually, as you get more stressed, you have fewer and fewer of those sort of incidental conversations. You work from home in order to get stuff done. You close your office door so that you're not disturbed and you can get things done. And these are all the things that productivity dudes tell us that we should be doing in order to get more done with our time. But I think we should reflect that sometimes that means we're cutting out some of the things that make this fun and enjoyable. So I think we can learn from the Traitors to make space for some of those random friendships, those unusual conversations, and to enjoy them. Lesson seven comes from the gorgeous Claudia Winkleman, who I love with an unhealthy amount of love. Bless her. She's amazing. And that is to take it seriously, but not too seriously. Where I think she pitches it absolutely perfectly is she gets utterly involved. So she's screaming in the tasks for them to hurry up, giving them time updates and things like that. She's proper gutted when some of them go home. You can see her in the background on the round table, kind of cringing and kind of going ahhhhh. Anyway, she gets really, really into it. She takes it seriously. She's not one of these slightly too cool for school presenters who sits back and judges everybody. She is right there in the castle with all of them. And that's what makes it such a joy to watch. On the flip side though, she does keep just a tiny bit of taking the piss out of it as well. So those of you who've watched it in as much detail as me will remember that her teasing Harry and Andrew for only recruiting men to being Traitors, talking about how it's like the olden days. She's just teasy enough that she's not taking it so seriously it's silly. She'll tease a little bit. There was the odd occasion in the round table where I'm pretty confident she was giggling. So she just teeters that line between taking it very seriously so we can see how much she loves it and not getting like angry and carried away, seeing the fun in it as well. And I think that is a real lesson for academia. We need to take this seriously. We are doing important work. Our research is meaningful. Our teaching is meaningful. But we don't have to take it quite so seriously. We can make space for some laughs. We can make space to enjoy the things we did wrong and laugh about them. To have those moments of levity. So make sure you're taking it seriously, but not too serious. And then my final lesson, lesson eight, is for everybody who, like me, was on Twitter going, Oh my God, I would have noticed this. I can't believe they haven't picked another Traitor. I can't believe they can't see that Harry's a Traitor. The lesson here is that it's way harder than it looks. We get this beautiful curated version of the Traitors where the producers hint, they show us all the right conversations so that we can pull this story together and kind of know what's going on. And in that situation, it's really pretty easy to see, oh yeah, if I was in there, I'd have known this, that and the other. Except, no you wouldn't. You'd have had about a billion conversations because you'd have been in there for hours and hours and hours. And actually, it's really hard to pick out anything meaningful when you're having quite so much going on. How does this translate to academia? For me, it's because when we look at other people, we're always seeing their curated version. We're seeing the TV produced version of their lives. We're seeing the bit they choose to make public. So we get to see the successes. We get to see the maybe carefully curated failures that actually show how clever they are or whatever it might be. We don't see the messy insides. We don't see how much they beat themselves up. We don't see where they have regrets or where they've still got hopes that they haven't achieved. We see other people's curated versions and we compare it to our messy version. And because we think our version is messy, we think we're not as good as them. It's not that, it's just like the people in the Traitors. They have access to all the conversations that go on in that castle. And you have access to all the thoughts that go on in your brain. It also means if when we're looking at somebody else's curated version, we think that we know what they should be doing, because sometimes we do that right too. We look at people like, oh, well, he doesn't pull his weight or whatever. We don't know what's going on in his castle. We think we can see this really clear story about what he's doing, what he should be doing and so on. We don't know what's going on in the castle. There could be all sorts of things. So the flip side of not judging ourselves too much, because our castle feels messier than theirs, is that also not thinking that we don't necessarily know what's best for them either. Because we don't have access to all those thoughts that are inside their heads either, all the stuff that's going on in their past and their lives that's affecting their academics that they're not presenting as part of their curated story. So having some respect, whether we're talking about the people who are in the Traitors, or people in our careers, that everybody had their reasons for doing things, and nothing is quite as straightforward as it looks from the outside. So! Those are my eight lessons. Clever on its own isn't enough. You need to be persistent as well. There are lots of different ways of being a great player. People will criticize things you do no matter how you behave. So you get to pick a gameplay that you can feel proud about yourself. Be trusting, but not too trusting. Pull together on tasks, because everything is better with other people around. Enjoy the random friendships that you can make through academia. Take it seriously, but not too seriously. And remember, everybody has a messy internal world. Don't compare yourself too harshly with other people's curated version. And don't assume you know what they should be doing when you don't have access to their whole messy story. I hope you enjoyed this. I loved it as a cheap excuse to keep talking about the Traitors. If you haven't watched it, why not? Go and watch it. I hope that this has convinced you that you should. If you have watched it, apparently Australia one's out on iPlayer now, and US is coming soon, so that is going to keep me occupied for the next couple of months, and I'm going to try not to binge them too badly. Thank you so much for listening, and see you next week.
by Victoria Burns 29 Jan, 2024
 How to be a better writer is one of the most common questions asked by PhD students and academics of all levels. While there are tons of useful "how to write" books on the market it can be difficult to translate this learning into actually improving your own writing. In this episode, I talk with writing coach Dr Katy Peplin about ways that you can support yourself to get better at writing and look after yourself at the same time! Hope you enjoy - there's some great advice! Here are some links if you want to hear more from Katy: Free: Template Webinar Work more intentionally toolkit Paid: Community Your Guide to Running a Writing Group Self-paced workshops Vikki: Hello and welcome to episode 20 of series two of the PhD life coach. And I have another guest with me today. I am super excited to introduce Katy Peplin, who is an expert in all things writing when it comes to PhDs and academia. And that is what we're going to be talking about today. Welcome Katy. Katy: Hi, I'm So excited to be here. Vikki: We are super glad to have you here. So, tell people a little bit about who you are and what you do. Katy: Yeah, sure. My name is Katie Peplin and I am the founder of ThrivePhD. So I work with grad students all around the world in all sorts of disciplines. Basically, to help them be humans and scholars at the same time, because I find that academia kind of forces you to choose one or the other. And many of us, have trouble, myself included, balancing both. Katy: So, I have all kinds of things that I do that support people, but, I really especially like working with people who are finding grad school really hard and would like for it to be easier. Vikki: Perfect. As I said, we're going to be thinking mainly about writing today. I know you support people doing a whole variety of things, but I always think it's useful to know what the people that are trying to help us struggle with themselves. Vikki: So my last couple of episodes has been about procrastination and that's something that I have worked on my whole life and I'm still thinking about. So, what do you find hard about writing? Katy: Well, the short answer is all of it. I am not a natural writer. I have always been more of a verbal person, and so there's something that kind of short circuits in my brain where, like, I feel like I have a fully formed idea or paper up here in my brain, and then I'm just really bored with the process of getting it out. Katy: And then when it doesn't come out perfectly, that's really frustrating to me. And then when I have to redo things or revise things, that can be really frustrating for me. So it's definitely not something that I've come to naturally. I specifically really struggle with, like, coherence, there's a lot of things that in my brain make total sense, and then when they're on the paper make less sense, because I don't ever fully, none of us ever really fully download everything that we mean into a sentence. Katy: And so I, um, I struggle a lot with that translation between what can feel really finished in my head and what other people can understand. Vikki: Yeah. For sure. And I hear that from clients so much. I'm more of a struggle to get on with it girl. Hence the procrastination comment before. Once I get going, it tends to be too long, but I'm reasonably okay at editing. But I hear from my clients a lot, just this, this notion that it sounds okay in my head and then just doesn't make sense. It's just not clear when it's on the page and really struggling to know how to pick that apart. Are there other things that you see with your clients? Things that they particularly struggle with? Katy: Well, I think that a lot of people just struggle with the idea that if writing doesn't feel easy, it's probably not good writing, if that makes sense. So I have a lot of people who come to me and they're like, man, I really struggle with like getting myself. It feels like I'm wrestling with alligators or sort of whatever their metaphor is. Katy: And in their head, I sort of realized that because it doesn't feel easy because it doesn't feel like something that they're good at, there's this automatic assumption that it's not good or that it won't ever be good. And so I see a lot of people kind of short circuit themselves at various parts of the process because it doesn't feel like it's working. And so that must mean that it's not. And often it's not working, but that doesn't mean that it won't ever work. Vikki: Yeah, I think we have this picture. People seem to think that a published paper came out that way. That like, if you're a top professor, you just pull up your keyboard and type introduction and off you go and it comes out looking something like that. And I'm sure there must be a few people that it goes a little bit like that, I guess, if they've been writing about the same thing for 30 years. But for the vast majority of people, it never ever looks like that, yet somehow that seems to be the standard that we compare ourselves to. That if it's anything other than coming out of my head completely articulate, then I'm obviously not good at this. Katy: Yes, and I remember, like, asking some of my professors, because I was a first generation grad student, I didn't have any access to the process, I didn't know what it looked like, and so I remember asking, like, okay, when you sit down to write Professor X, like, what does it look like? Katy: And nine times out of 10, they couldn't tell me. So they didn't have an articulate process themselves. But then when I realized that everything that I was comparing myself to was published and in order to get published, it went through multiple rounds of revisions, usually professional editors, usually a couple of different types of professional editors, sometimes writing groups, sometimes workshops, sometimes. Katy: Things that were supported over years, research, sabbaticals, all kinds of support, teaching load reductions. And here I was trying to write something of that same caliber by myself in my office, never having done it before while working and teaching and being very busy and also trying to like keep my body and brain alive. Katy: It wasn't, it wasn't a fair comparison and I didn't know that. And so I just thought there was something wrong with me. Vikki: Yeah, and expecting all that stuff in your first draft too. Katy: Yeah, yeah. Vikki: That this should be just how it comes out. Yeah, for sure. And I think it's really insightful that you asked that question even. The fact that you knew that you didn't know that, if you see what I mean. Because I think often, I was the same, first generation PhD student. And I think often we don't even know that people might have a process for doing these things that we don't have. Vikki: I remember when I was still teaching, I would spend quite a bit of time showing my PhD students and my undergraduates, all the file names that I had that kind of sat behind a published paper. So I'd show the, with the dates going through and the increasingly haphazard filenames that they have. I was preached to not to do what I did. But the increasingly haphazard names were until you've got one that's called final, final, submitted, final. And then you start getting all the revisions as well. Vikki: And I think just seeing that really helped. Now, today, we were thinking about not really so much how to get on with writing. If people are listening and are struggling with getting on with writing, I would send you back to one of my really early episodes, episode four, where I talk about how to write when you're struggling to write. Vikki: And that's really about some of these thoughts that we have that we're not good at it, that it should be easier than this, and how we can overcome those thoughts and get on with it. But today I know you've got some really useful tips about how people can actually improve their writing and get better at it. Katy: Yeah, because I think that for me I thought that there was this huge gap. Like, I am not a naturally athletic person. And so, like, I remember being in gym classes and realizing that, like, I was never going to be able to just, like, wake up one day and run a mile, like some people would. And that if I was going to have to do it, I would need to build up to it. Katy: And there were specific kinds of skills that, if I did them frequently, would help improve it. And when I had this sort of lightbulb moment, which I'm sure came from my therapist, that like writing is a skill, and it was also something that I could improve through conscious effort, it was really exciting to me. Katy: Not because I was excited to like do a bunch of drills and like learn how to write better, but because it was something that I could control. It was something that like I could consciously and intentionally do, rather than just brute forcing my way and like hoping that if I just wrote for 20 years, I would get better. Katy: Because like, you will, if you write for 20 years, every single day, you'll probably improve a little bit. But there are also things that you can choose to do that will help you build those skills faster and more intentionally too. Vikki: I love that because so often when I'm coaching people, I'm trying to get them to recognize it's a skill and to see that thoughts like, I'm not good at this. I'll never be as good as them and things like that really hold them back. But even if you believe you can get better, it's not necessarily easy to figure out how. Yeah. So if people listening, I'm sure they will be, so people listening to this podcast are everyone from new PhD students all the way through to full professors. And I know from my coaching that people struggle at every level with, with writing. Vikki: Where's one place that they could start? Katy: My favorite place, and the one that I think is really accessible to people, is to think about reading as cross training for your writing. So, so many of us scholars feel like, understandably so, we're buried under mountains of reading. We can't possibly keep up with it. Katy: And so it seems a little bit counterintuitive that I'm like, read more. But a lot of the reading that I see my clients doing and I even have done myself or it's very targeted. I call it like search and rescue reading where I'm like, okay, I need to go in and I need to understand this concept or I need to make sure that these citations are in order. Katy: I need to check out that methodology. I'm very rarely reading to understand how this works as a written text. And I'm a humanities person, so it makes sense that I come at that a little bit more, um, naturally than maybe some other people do, because it's part of my training, but when I started to think about paying attention to how other writers wrote, It really, really helped me. Katy: And so, like, concretely speaking, that means that when I write, I often have a separate color of highlighter where I'm like, good sentence, or I really like the way that this introduction is structured, or I really enjoyed the way that they incorporated these quotes. I basically just make like little love letters. And for me, I store them in Zotero. They're tagged in my thing with like good introduction or loved that conclusion or sort of whatever the nomenclature that makes sense to you is. But then I started to build a library of different kinds of introductions. For example, this person had an anecdote, this person started with the stakes, this person did this. Katy: And the more that I could kind of think about how they were working. The more I could realize that I probably have seven different choices for my introduction and why don't I try one instead of just like opening up a blank document, like you said, and typing introduction and hoping that the perfect one will come to me. Katy: So really thinking about my reading as yes, it's important for content reasons. And yes, it's important for me disciplinarily, but it's also really good for me as a writer to see other people write, and in that way, I gave myself a lot of permission in the later stages of my PhD to read for fun, and to read journalism, and to read nonfiction books, and to read fiction books, and to read YA books, and all sorts of different things, because it helped me, it helped me build a vocabulary to describe my writing, to describe other people's writing that I wasn't going to get just sort of like stumbling around in the dark. Vikki: Yeah, for sure. One of the things we talk a lot about is reading with a purpose. So you talk about search and rescue. I actually see that as a technique that a lot of students also need to learn. So I still have students who believe that if you're looking for information, you start at the beginning and read till the end and can't understand how they're ever going to get through their pile of reading because it takes them three hours to read a paper. Vikki: So that search and rescue that you're talking about, super useful if your purpose for reading that article is to check what methods they use or to get a quick summary of their findings or whatever it might be. But I love this idea of reading with the purpose of figuring out why that article works. And I think it's a particularly useful reminder for all our scientists. Vikki: Um, I was a sport and exercise scientist, so we were pretty interdisciplinary, but I was kind of at the psychology immunology end of things. So at the borders of sciences and social sciences. And that close reading wasn't such a thing. That kind of analyzing how they made their argument wasn't something that really got emphasized. Vikki: And I think the idea of reading an article so that you can figure out how did they link their paragraphs together? How did they finish their introduction? Where did they go next? Is. Something that's really useful. Is there anything that people should be careful of doing that, or any tips to make it more effective? Katy: Um, I have a whole webinar that I'm happy to put, yeah, that's like free, um, that people can play with. It's about sort of like building templates, and I think that it's especially useful for people who write in fields where there are pretty rigid structures that you're expected to write in. That there's an introduction, there's a method section sort of. Katy: On and on and on. And so I often think about it, and I do not in any way mean this in a derogatory sense. Many writing styles have a formula, or there's a variation of three or four different formulas. And the more that you can kind of figure out and then do it, then it's a lot easier to say, okay, in this person's introduction, they have one paragraph that introduces the stakes. Katy: They have one paragraph that talks about their experimental design, and they have one paragraph that talk, sort of previews the findings, and I'm just making that up. But then you can say, okay, for me to write my introduction, they wrote about whales, and I'll be writing about macrophages. But who cares? Katy: Because I just need one paragraph that introduces the stakes, one paragraph that, you know, talks about my experimental design, and one that previews my findings. And that makes it so that you have actual tasks to complete and actual things you can check off of a list. And that's not to say that you won't then need to revise or change it or your advisor might want something different, but you've started somewhere instead of trying to invent the idea of introducing a paper every single time from scratch by yourself. Vikki: Yeah, definitely. And I think you talking about the different subjects there raised something else for me that I think actually it's really useful to be reading something that's sort of within your field, generally, so you understand it and the structures are likely to be similar. But that's actually a different area than you're writing, because I know even if you go to an article thinking I'm reading this in order to learn, if you're writing about macrophages and they're writing about macrophages, it's really hard to a not be intimidated that they're doing it better than you. Vikki: But B, think, okay, I need to do it like them, but not so like them that I'm plagiarizing and all of those things. So, I love the idea of finding an article from somewhere sort of tangentially related to what you do, where you know the styles are going to be similar, but where it's completely different content. Katy: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that is one of the big fears and I know that plagiarism is a big problem and in no universe am I saying that people should go out and plagiarize. I think that many of us were taught that independent work has to come directly from sort of like on high, through our brains, into our keyboards, and we can't look at anything else, and we can't reference anything else, and we can't take a look at how other things work, and I often think about it in terms of, like, recipes, like, if you and I both make chocolate cakes off of the same recipes, but we're in different countries, we use different measurements, our stoves are different, our access to ingredients are different, as long as we document those differences, we'll never create the same cake. Katy: We're going to have two completely different cakes. And so I think that many students stop themselves from this kind of close analysis of other people's works because they're so worried about doing their own independent work that They don't use the kind of free help that's available to them, which is the shoulders of the giants that you can stand on if you'd like. Vikki: Definitely. It's like I shared with a client just recently these, you can get these documents of sentence starters. Yeah. Where, completely content free, but they sort of say, you know, if you're trying to disagree with an article, you could start with a sentence, a couple of words like this. If you're trying to add extra evidence, you could start like this. Vikki: And honestly, she was like, this is, this has changed everything. And sometimes even just those small things and you can pick them. You can, if you Google sentence starters, you'll find about a thousand people listening, but, but you can do that for yourself within articles too, can't you? Sort of. Well, how did they introduce the fact that they're now moving to something that contradicts what they just said? Vikki: How did they show that this was now the final paragraph of the introduction? And what did they say? Absolutely. Those things, I think, can really help. And then you're stripping out content, so it's never going to be plagiarism. No. Because you're stripping out the actual science and just using almost the connecting words. Katy: Yeah. And I think that so, academic writing in itself is so structured, you know what I mean, compared to like fiction or creative non fiction or some of the other genres, that there aren't that many different moves you can make. There are only so many ways to introduce a paper. There are only so many ways to say that you disagree with this author or disagree with that author. Katy: And the nice thing about using some support for the structure and the argument is that it helps get you to really see the difference between, this is the structure that I'm using to communicate my argument, this is what's important to me, that I disagree with that author, or that I agree with this author, or that our methods are completely different, but our results are the same, or whatever. Katy: That's your intervention. That's your scholarly contribution. It's not reinventing the form of the introduction for everybody who's going to come after you. Vikki: Perfect. So. Definitely more reading, targeted reading, and picking out how they did what they did. What else can people do? Katy: I'm also an evangelist, practically, for writing groups. Um, I was saved. I, I thanked my writing group in my dissertation acknowledgements. I regularly thank them. We're all good friends today. But I came from a department where my advisors and my faculty members wanted to see polished drafts. which is a completely reasonable boundary for busy faculty to have, which is like, come to me when this is ready and I'll give you the final levels of polish and we'll talk about, you know, kind of the fine grained things. Katy: But if that's the only structure that you have, and the only available Feedback. For some people, it can be, and I'm not exaggerating, years between when I set out to write a chapter and when it was ready for my advisor to finish. And I felt like I was alone in foggy woods and had no idea and that I couldn't ask for any help until it was this, like, mysterious final polished draft. Katy: And so I joined a writing group, and the people in my writing group had nothing to do with me disciplinarily. They weren't in my department. Um, they were in completely radically different fields. We all worked on massively different objects. But the magic of that writing group was that it gave me a structure for the in between. Katy: So we would all check in on Wednesdays and we would talk about our progress. It gave me deadlines where I was like, okay, I need to have something to share by Wednesday. So, um, , we're gonna have a latte and buckle down and get something to share by Wednesday. And I know that these people aren't, you know, they won't ever need to decide on my funding packages or get me a job. Katy: I can send them something that I'm not. proud of yet, and we can work on it. But the, the magic was they, because they didn't share the same disciplinary language as I did, they needed me to explain things to them that made me a better writer. So when I would send work to people in my department or people in my field, we all had a common language, and so we skipped over a lot of things. Katy: I didn't need to explain that theory. I didn't need to explain what I meant by this. And sometimes that's appropriate. You're giving a 10 minute conference paper. Nobody needs you to back all the way up and explain, you know, this fundamental idea. But as a writer, especially for me, because I tended to jump to the very highest levels, And people would have trouble following me. Katy: It was so useful to have friendly faces who could ask me very gently and constructively, what do you mean by this? Like, I was with you until here, and then I completely lost it. And because they were smart and reasonable people, I knew that they were getting lost. Because I wasn't being clear and it felt like it wasn't a punishment. Katy: It was just a chance to explain. And so we would record those meetings. I would get the transcripts later. I would spell it out. But having that structure in between was a complete game changer. Because before that, I was really just writing and trying to figure it out all by myself. And that wasn't efficient. Katy: It wasn't effective. It was isolating and it really created a breeding ground for me to be like, I am terrible at writing and I will never get any better because the, the goal that I was aiming for was so far away and there was no support in the meantime. Vikki: So in a second, I'm going to tell you why I disagree that that's an entirely appropriate way of supervising. Cause I don't think it is. But I love this writing group thing. So. Let's get a bit more specific about it. So how did you, how did you even find them and what was the structure? How did you make them? Katy: So this one was through my university. One of the life hacks for any PhD student is that you probably have some office on your campus that emails you regularly. Katy: Um, because I work with graduate student support that I know that they have a family. thousand different names in a thousand different places. But I know that my emails came out on Friday afternoons when my brain was checked out already. And I would go through that email and I would be like, that sounds good. That sounds good. That sounds good. And I got a lot of support and help for free from my university, not through my advisors, not through my department, but through like the graduate school. And so, in one of those emails, they said, you know, we're recruiting for interdisciplinary writing groups, they're free to join, we'll match you with people that have similar schedules, go for it. Katy: And so, we didn't know each other, we were all sort of randomly put in this group together, and then it was up to us to decide on the structure. So, we. Agreed on a meeting time and a meeting place and sort of how we would handle it. There were other groups that had much more rigorous schedules than we did. Katy: And they were like, we want everybody to have 5 new pages every week. And my group was a lot more like you sign up for a week. You send something between 5 and 10 pages. You tell people what you're most interested in. And actually, there's so many different ways to write a writing group and like to run it that I've seen them be really, really successful and look wildly different from each other. Katy: But I do have like a resource called like how to run a writing group where it says like, okay, here are some activities that you can try or here are different formats that you can try. But I think the idea that almost all of those groups boil down to that you have a shared agreement about what people are going to do in the writing group, and you have a shared understanding of what kind of feedback people are and aren't looking for. Katy: So I was not needing any of my people who study ancient Judaic texts, which I do not study. I was writing about cats on the internet. I don't need them to help me with like this scholar. said something that would be really useful here. I needed them to help me with like, okay, you made a really big jump from this idea to this idea. Katy: Explain to me how you got there. And another person in the group had, um, English was not their first language, and so they really wanted help with, you know, sentence structure, and does this make sense, and are these the right words, kind of thing. Um, so each member could have a little bit of a different aim for what they were using, but because we had an agreement to be really clear about it, nobody felt like they were wasting their time, um, giving grammar advice to someone who didn't need it, or, you know, vice versa. Vikki: Perfect. And you've mentioned a couple of resources. I'll get you at the end of this to tell everyone where they can find you and all of this stuff. And I'll link to it all in the show notes. So if you're listening, you will be able to track down all this stuff because there's, Katy has a ton even beyond what she's mentioned already. Vikki: Um, So one of the things I think that's useful with that as well is to remember what you get out of reading other people's as well. And I guess it goes back to your point about, um, reading and learning through reading too, that in these writing groups, it's a little bit like with, I do group coaching, as you know, watching somebody else getting coached, you can learn just as much about yourself as you can getting coached yourself. And I guess you see the same in writing groups. Katy: Absolutely. And I think that there's a real pressure as scholars to be as effective and efficient as possible, you know, um, every minute needs to be moving your own projects forward. And so I know a lot of people who are drawn to improving their writing skills, whether that's spending a little bit more time reading or joining a writing group or any of those kind of things. Katy: And they're like, that sounds great. And I would love to, but I do not have time. I'm so busy with everything else. And I think that a lot of - when I think of the the faculty members who I know who are producing at that very highest level that you look at their CV and you're like, how are you getting all of this done? How are you moving things so move so quickly through the pipeline? 8 times out of 10 they are working with a group of colleagues, or co authors, or writing groups, or people that know them forever, and they have built structures of community around their writing. Whether that's an editor that they used for 20 years that always goes back and forth with them, or a co writing team, there's a thousand different things, but Almost always it's effective and efficient, not just for your writing, but for everybody else's in the group to see other versions of it, to talk through ideas, to practice these skills, to get better. Katy: There's no substitute for it. And just because it's not directly moving 45 minutes, the indirect benefits are so huge. From your mental health, from your building connections in the field. My writing group, we have nothing in common, and one group member helped another one get a job at a university later, because they could vouch for them. Katy: And that was a relationship that we wouldn't have ever fostered without this writing group. So I think that it's sometimes okay to take a little bit of time and quote unquote step back. Share, read other people's things, um, build some of those extra skills, even if it's not, full steam ahead on your work for those 45 minutes. Vikki: Yeah, because that focus can feel like such a good thing, right? You know, who's ever going to argue with, oh, I just need to get my head down and get my thesis written. You know, it sounds like such a worthy thought, doesn't it? Yeah. Often it's, it's really preventing you from developing in these, these sorts of ways. So I think that's, that's great advice. Vikki: Before we go on to what other things you'd recommend, I want to back up my point about supervision. And the reason I don't think that's helpful, and I say this from a place of love. So, okay, if academics are listening, and I know they do, I've been you. I was a full professor at the university and I've had that super busyness and that idea that I don't have time to trawl through really rough drafts. Vikki: But my problem with it is, is it reduces feedback down to a single function of ensuring your argument is clearly argued and your spelling, punctuation and grammar are correct. And I think that's fundamentally misinformed. So in the same way that when you read a paper you can read it for a whole bunch of different things, I believe you can read a draft for a whole bunch of different things. Vikki: And for me, what I always used to try and do with my students and what I now encourage the people I work with to do, Is to be really clear why you want them to read it. So as a supervisor, you get a really rough draft from a student. It's really easy to be like, Oh God, do they think this is good? And then really stress out that they think this is good and how much development you're now going to have to do with this student. Vikki: If they think this is a decent piece of work and this is going to get me, take me hours to put line by line comments and blah, blah, blah. Whereas if students and supervisors can just have a conversation about it. Often, all the student wants to know is, am I making roughly the argument that you thought I was going to make? Vikki: Have I missed anything obvious? And then the supervisor doesn't need to read it for line by line edits. They need to have a quick scan through it and say, yes, but have you read the work of so and so? Why are you saying this bit and not convinced of that? Make the case clearer or remove sort of thing and to give that really broad brush sort of feedback so, you know, that they're sort of along the right line. So, what anyone listening who's in this situation, whichever side of it you're at. I'd just really encourage you to look at it at all stages, but to look at it at an appropriate level of detail and ask for it to be looked at at an appropriate level of detail, and to use your supervisor for what they're most useful for, which is, is this conceptually strong? Do I cover the bits of the existing literature? Is there anything I've missed So supervisors, if you're only asking for polished drafts, pull your fingers out. Talk to your students properly. Katy: Yes. And I, I probably am too gentle. There's different sort of protocols with it, but I always stress when I'm working with faculty in that position, it saves you time to intervene earlier in the draft. And so I know that, like, as a student, I would sometimes go six, seven, eight months, maybe, without a supervisor checking in on the idea. And there was nothing more demoralizing as a student than spending eight months on a draft even with all of the extra work that I was doing to check for comprehension and have people in my department read it and sort of move it, and then have my supervisor be like, this is great, except for I disagree with the main concept or this wasn't what I was expecting or you wrote 20 more pages than I thought you would or this isn't what a chapter looks like at all. Katy: And the number of times that I was sent back to, if not literally the beginning, very, very, very close to it. totally increased my time to a degree. It totally challenged the relationship that I had with my supervisor. Like, it definitely shaped my own beliefs about the efficacy of my writing. And if somebody had just said, hey, I would love to look at your outline and we'll just make sure, oh, wow, this outline is 17 pages long. Katy: This is too much content for one chapter. Break it up. That would have saved everyone involved sometimes literally years of work. So, um, it's more effective for everyone to intervene earlier, but even if you're in a situation where your supervisor is, for whatever reason, not open to that, there's usually other places you can go. Vikki: Definitely, definitely. One of the things I really like about this coaching is that I really sit on both sides of it, you know, being a PhD student, I've supervised PhD students, and I work with both sides of it now. And I can't imagine anything more terrifying than not knowing what my student is doing for six or eight months, that they could be completely off on a tangent. Vikki: And I just think it puts an enormous pressure on that next piece of work that the students always got to be really good, really, really, really good before it goes in and that puts pressure, but then it also the longer you take over it, we often tell ourselves the better it needs to be. So yeah, totally agree. Have that conversation, if you possibly can. So, are there other techniques, approaches, ideas that people can use to improve? Katy: The other idea that I would love to share with people, because when I heard it in a podcast being discussed probably years ago, I think I broke down in the car and was crying as I was driving home because it was so useful for me, was this concept of the taste gap. Katy: So this is an idea that I think I heard about it from Ira Glass, who's a podcast producer and interviewer. And he was talking about how frustrating it is for people who are artists or writers or anybody who's in a sort of skilled trade to be working on something and know without a doubt that there's a gap between what you like and admire and want to be in the field and what you're producing right now. Katy: Because I think that so much advice and like mindset work, which is all really valuable in its own right, can kind of sugarcoat the idea that like, if you just keep going, it'll get better. But to have somebody just flat out say, you are not making work at the quality that you want to be making work at, and that gap feels awful. Katy: He calls it the taste gap between, like, what you're making and what you want to make. He says that gap feels awful, and the only way to get through that gap is to keep making things, and to get feedback, and to solicit, and to run it through multiple items. He said there's no other shortcut for it. He says you could read every draft, you know, of every book that's ever been written about how to write more effectively. You can try every skill, drill, you can hire every editor. There's no shortcut for it, really, other than trying and not being where you want it to be and trying again. And when I heard that, it released something in me, because I was in this battle between, like, My therapist was saying, who cares if it's crap, just write it down. It's probably better than you think it is. And in a lot of times it was. I'm my own worst critic. Many of us are. But it also was really radically freeing to have somebody be like, yes, it absolutely is not at the same level as this book that you're reading or as the scholar who's been working for 40 years. Katy: And It's not expected of you to be writing a field changing text every time you sit down, but let that gap motivate you as much as it demoralizes you. And for me, that was so helpful just to have somebody acknowledge that and then be like, okay, and this is your way through it, you just got to keep going. Vikki: Yeah, definitely. Cause I think people don't expect that uncomfortable, you know, so, you know, they expect it to be a bit difficult, they expect it to be a bit confusing, but that idea that you do know what you want to write or how you want it to be, but you just can't get it like that. You remind, when you were talking, you reminded me of a conversation I had when I was at school with this boy who was in my class who was really good at art and I was sat next to him in art class and we were drawing like fruit or something. Vikki: And he was just like, I don't understand why you drew the apple that shape. You can see that it's not that shape, can't you? I'm like, yes, but I can't draw it the right shape. And he's like, but you look at it and then you draw it the shape you see. And I'm like, yes, I'm trying. And I just, and he, he was just so good at this and he did it so many hours, he just could not understand how I didn't, and I think often supervisors are a bit like that, you know, the ones that have been writing for years and are really experienced, but I don't understand why you would write it in that order, because, you know, it doesn't make sense. And so I think they sometimes struggle to know how to support students who are in this uncomfortable gap. Vikki: But on the other hand, I was so frustrated because I could obviously see, Stuart, thank you, that it didn't look like that apple, I knew that. But staying with it and keeping drawing it over and over again when I kept telling myself how rubbish I was, it's really uncomfortable, and I think that's often why people end up giving up things like art and music and sport, because doing something you're bad at over and over again is really hard. And I think that telling yourself that, you know what, it's going to be uncomfortable, but that's okay. Is, is huge. Katy: Yeah, it, it really kind of goes back to what I was saying in the beginning that so many of us feel that if we feel bad at it, or if we have like objective evidence that we're not where we want it to be, that we'll never get any better. Katy: And so I have clients and everybody responds to that feeling a little bit differently. And some people will like work to the point of burnout in order to just keep going. And some people will avoid it. And there's all sorts of behaviors in between, but all a lot of it boils down to it is uncomfortable to work very hard at something that is difficult. It's hard. And no matter how many times you do it, no matter how much support you have, writing is hard. And you might have forgotten that because you're in a place where everybody just treats it like this is commonplace. We all need to do it. There's no sense it is still wildly challenging to create new knowledge and then put it down in a written form so that other people can access it the way that it's in your brain. Like there's no other. It is a wildly challenging task. And just because it's uncomfortable doesn't mean that it's not worth doing or that you're not worth investing in it or that you can't get better at it. That discomfort does not automatically mean that the idea is bad. Vikki: The other thing that struck me as you were saying that is I think the discomfort also shows that there's understanding coming too. Because I was thinking about the people I know who don't write, who aren't in academia, who, this just wouldn't be a thing. Vikki: And they would read one of my first drafts of an academic article, and then they'd read a real academic article, and I don't think they'd see a massive difference. So a non expert eye, none of it makes that much sense, it all sounds complicated, and they wouldn't necessarily see the difference. And I wonder if a thought that might help a little bit is that if you can see the difference between published academic writing and what you are currently producing, that is an understanding in itself. Vikki: That is you understanding what good writing looks like. And I think on top of that, if you can get to a stage where you can pick apart which published academic writing you like better and understand why, because I know at the beginning everybody thinks if I don't understand it it's because I'm stupid rather than because it isn't very well written. Vikki: I think if you can start to actually see that this is clear academic writing and mine isn't there, then that's the beginnings of getting there, isn't it? Katy: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm thinking about how my husband and I, he's a musician and I like music and we go to all sorts of things and our favorite of the, the performances that we go to often are the dance performances because neither one of us are a dancer. Katy: We don't know enough to pick it apart. You know what I mean? We don't notice the mistakes. We don't see them. We just go for the pure pleasure of watching bodies in motion. And that doesn't mean we don't have opinions and we don't talk about things and say, I preferred this company to that company, or I really liked this, or I really liked that. Katy: But there's something so wildly freeing about watching other experts really excel in a field that you don't have any skills in. And I think that it's really easy to be a dancer and be like. I messed up this thing. I messed up that other thing. And to realize that those mistakes that feel life altering on the stage are probably only noticeable to a very small section of people. They feel noticeable to you because you're so focused on not doing them. Katy: And sometimes it's nice to be able to remember that, like, this is an incredibly difficult thing. And like you said, to the majority of the population, that difference between this paper and that paper, that gap that feels so huge to you, is probably not as visible to other people. Vikki: I just think, yeah, that's fantastic advice for anybody listening. So thank you so much for coming today, Katy. If people want to hear more from you, and I'm sure they will, you've sort of teased people with a few of these webinars that are available. Where can they find out more from you? Katy: Yeah, the best place to connect with me is the website, social media platforms come and go, and so like the website is the one that I control, so it's thrive- phd. com, and there is a place to sign up for my newsletter, it goes out every Thursday, and it always has the most up to date news about what I'm working on, and what things are available. I really put an emphasis on free resources and low cost things, so, I would be honored if anybody checked me out. But thank you so much for having me. This was, the, the light I needed in a gray winter day. Vikki: Yes, it is very cold where we're recording this. I highly recommend all of you get onto Katy's newsletter. I enrolled and read it every week. There's tons of stuff. And I think of all the people who work in this world, Katy is one of the people that has the most free and accessible resources. So definitely get in there. And if you're in a position to do so, look at her paid stuff as well. Thank you all so much for listening. I hope this has been really useful. It's been useful for me and has inspired me to get on with some of my writing jobs too. So I will see you all next week.
by Victoria Burns 22 Jan, 2024
 Procrastination is one of the biggest issues that my PhD student and academic clients talk about. And so it probably shouldn't have been a surprise that when I came to do an episode about how to manage your procrastination, it didn't all fit. I recorded it. I didn't even notice that I'd been talking for over an hour and when I came to process it, I thought, you know what, this is two episodes. So I split it into two episodes. Last week I talked about the NICE model that I've come up with to help you in the moment stop procrastination. So you're noticing, investigating, choosing and embracing. If you haven't listened to that episode already, go back, check it out. Today is the second half of that episode and here we're really going to be thinking about how we can set ourselves up to avoid procrastination a little bit more in the future. These two parts were, as I say, recorded as a single episode, so we are gonna dive straight in. I hope you enjoy. I run a lot of workshops on a lot of different topics. I have lots of individual clients at the moment, and this is something that's coming up with lots of different people. And on my dog walks and all of that, I've been reflecting a lot on the nature of procrastination. And one of the things that's really struck me is procrastination is a breakdown in the relationship between the current us here, today, current me, past me, who set the plan, and future me, who wants me to have done the plan. Now, you may not have thought about yourself in that kind of way before, in this sort of past, current, and future you. But it can be a really useful headspace to get yourself into. Because often we think about ourselves as just being, we're, we're just us, aren't we? And we're going through life and we're making plans and we're doing some of them and not doing other ones and achieving some things and not achieving other things. Whereas actually, if you could separate it out a little bit, and almost have a separate past me, is one person. Current me is one person and future me is somebody else. Then what we can do is we can start thinking about the relationship that we have with those versions of ourselves. Now, just to really emphasize, when I'm talking about separating these things out, I'm not imagining, I sometimes fall into the gap of like, future me is going to be amazing. You know, next year's Vikki's going to do so much stuff. No, past me is very, very similar to me, especially near past, you know, just in the last few days. And future me is going to be pretty similar to me too. Now, hopefully we might modify a few things here and there, but future me is going to be pretty similar too. But thinking of it as a relationship, that I have a relationship with past me, and I have a relationship with future me, can help us create environments where procrastination is less likely. And that's because I want you to think, if we think about these as a series of relationships at the moment, I want you to think what procrastination does to that relationship. Let's think about it when we're planning what tasks we're going to do, because people often forget this bit. They think about procrastination as being implementing in the moment, but actually one of the things I realized is one of the reasons I never implemented my to do list the way I intended is because I made stupid to do lists. For years and years and years and years and years, I made to do lists that I knew even at the time there was no way I could do. Completely unrealistic, completely unachievable, made them anyway. Fit of optimism, fit of denial, and then beat myself up because I couldn't do them. And for years I thought that I was somebody who couldn't deliver, who didn't do the things she intended, and I blamed myself for that. And it took me ages to realize that it wasn't a problem of implementation. It was a problem of stupid planning, which is still me. It was still, um, something that I was doing that I could change. So I still took responsibility for it, but it meant I'd been looking in the wrong place all this time. I'd been working, trying to work out how could I make myself do all this stuff that I had planned rather than going, let's plan more sensibly. So let's start with the planning you. So at the point you're, current you is planning, and when we're planning, we've got kind of near future, so the me I'm going to be tomorrow, this week, and future future me, okay, far future. And so when we're planning, we need to think, am I coming up with something that is clear, that is realistic, that they are able to do, i. e. near future, and we need to think, am I planning something that is going to get me where. far future me wants to be. So there's the me in the next few days that's going to have to actually do these things, and there's the me at the end of the year that wants these things to have been done. And often when we're in that planning mode, we're not really thinking straight about near future me. Sometimes, I don't know about you, but suddenly we think near future me, tomorrow's me, is going to be an absolute genius. She's going to be able to smash through all of this. She's going to be so much more motivated. She's going to get so much done. We come up with unrealistic things. Or in the moment, current me doesn't want to have to choose between things. That was always my problem. I'd look at my to do list or my ideas of the things I could do, and I didn't want to pick because I liked them all. And so I sort of just scheduled them all in, in an over optimistic way, and let it be future me's problem. But I didn't really think about it like that. I was like, well, we'll make it work. But if we can think about these relationships, then when we're planning, we can think, okay. What is realistic? How can I make it clear for them? How can I make it understandable and achievable? And this goes back, again, if you haven't listened to the How To Be Your own best Supervisor podcast, go back, listen to that. It's really important. This, this planning mode is almost when you're in boss mode and you're planning for the future you that has to do the work. So we're thinking Is it achievable? Can I do it? And we're thinking, is it going to get me where I want to be? Now, a little bit of time's gone past. We're in the implementation phase now. So we're in the phase where we actually have to do the things on our to do list. Now we're thinking about past me, who set this for me, and we're thinking about future me, who wants this to be done. And of course, we're thinking about ourselves. And what's happening when we're procrastinating? This is the zone where we procrastinate in this implementation phase. We're saying to ourselves, I don't want to though. I don't want to because when I do it, I'm going to feel uncomfortable, I'm going to feel bored, I'm going to feel guilt, whatever it is. So I don't want to. And often we start to justify it by saying, well, past me, when I planned this, I didn't know that I was going to be poorly, I didn't know that I was going to be on my period, I didn't know that this thing's going to happen, whatever it is. Or, oh yeah, I was a bit unrealistic when I planned this, so yeah, I'm just going to readjust. We sort of discount the wisdom of past us and use that as a reason that we're not going to do the thing. We're not honouring what past us had planned and intended. Sometimes, as I say, that's because past us planned something stupid, unrealistic, bless their little heart. Other times, it's because it just feels a bit uncomfortable now and we're using that as an excuse not to have to do it. And we're also often not thinking about the future us. Other than, again, having this really optimistic thing that future us is going to be loads better. Okay? So we're thinking, oh, silly past us. They thought that I'd be able to do this, but actually there's just not really time, so I'm not going to. And I can do it tomorrow. Future me's got it. Okay, so we're being dismissive of past us and we're being over optimistic about future us. And the irony is that when we shift and we are now future us and we're trying to implement now, we're probably going to do the same thing. We're going to go, oh, past us was super over optimistic because she was, by the way, but I'll try again tomorrow because I'll be better tomorrow. And so it just keeps shifting down the line. Instead, what we want in this moment, when we're in the implementation phase, is we want to be able to say, I trust past us. They had a plan. They had a plan where they tried to be clear, where they tried to be fair, and they tried to be realistic. I am going to do my best to implement it. Because the irony is, if somebody else had asked you to do this, you would probably do it. That's the relationship that we want to build with past us and future us is that we are as accountable to past us and future us as we are to other people. All of my clients and me say, I will always do something if my boss asks me to do it. I'm never going to say to my boss, Oh yeah, I just didn't. You know, I find that really hard to do. Obviously sometimes it happens, but rarely do we do that. When somebody else is waiting for it, I need to get this done or they're going to think badly of me. We're really happy. We're perfectly fine. Apparently, for future us to think badly of us, to past us to think badly of us. I want us to build accountability to past us and future us as the most important accountabilities in our lives. Because then we get to go, Okay, past us. This is what we decided. I'm not sure I'm convinced, because I don't know that we have time. But I'm going to do everything I can do to prove you right. I'm going to try and get as much done as possible. So when you hear the thought, I don't have time for this, we can say, I know, but this is the time that past us gave us for it, so let's see how much we can get done. I don't know that I can write all this in this. No, but I can use every bit of this hour. Because that was what past us decided. So we get to honor past us and do our best to implement what they planned. And the more past us took future us, I mean now, into account, the easier it is to say, you know what? I trust her. She made okay decisions based on the information she had at that stage. She made okay decisions and I am going to do my best to honor them. Now. We can then build that knowledge into future planning if we realise, ah, past us is still giving us too many tasks, really. We can build that into our next planning session. Okay, I remember I often give myself too much to do, so let's think about that and plan more realistically. But in this moment, we're not just going to write her off as an idiot, we're going to do our best to do the things that she said we could do. The other thing we're going to do in this implementation phase is be kind to future us. Once again, most of you would go out of your way to help a friend. You would put yourself out there to do something if it would help them out and make their lives easier. We need that relationship with future us. You know what? I'm going to do this now so that tomorrow's me doesn't have to. She is going to be so grateful to me that I've done this and she doesn't have to. She's gonna be so proud when she opens up this document and sees that I've written another couple of paragraphs. That's wicked. I'm gonna do this, but so that she doesn't have to. I'm gonna do this because I know that she is still very similar to me and it's not gonna be any easier for her than it is gonna be for me. So we're gonna go with it now. Okay, so that's the implementation phase. And then the final one is the review phase. And often we don't have a formal review phase, but we do think in our minds, I should have done that already and I didn't. We start looking back to past us. And what we commonly do at the moment is we judge past... so now we're in that phase where the current us has Is now looking back at what we have or haven't done and we can look back and go, we can judge far past us that made the plan and be like, well, she made a stupid plan anyway, we can look at the near past us. So the one yesterday who didn't do it and go, Oh, you should have done it. You're so lazy. You procrastinated again. We can be judgy. Or, much more helpfully, we can be compassionate and curious and be like, Ah, that's interesting. We came up with a plan. You didn't implement the plan. I wonder why that is. What was it that made it difficult to implement? What thoughts didn't we overcome? What circumstances made it feel more difficult than it was? Okay, and we get to review with that sort of compassion. Because we know that when we don't build that compassion in at this stage, and we start blaming past us, we should have done this before, all we're doing is inducing feelings of shame and guilt in ourselves, which make it much harder to get on and do tasks anyway. So the more we can be like, okay, that's interesting, she didn't do it as implemented. It is what it is, so we can get curious, or we can just accept, it's what it is, I am where I am, what's next? And then the cycle continues. We now get to plan, we get to implement, we get to review. And at every stage, we think about building this relationship, honouring this relationship between past us and future us. If that feels really difficult, really alien to you what I would really suggest is that you just keep it on the kind of really small timescale. So anytime any task feels overwhelming, shrink it down until it feels like something you can manage. So in this case, I want you to think about yesterday's you as past you, today's you as current you, and tomorrow's you as future you. What did yesterday's you think that you should do today? I want you to do your best to honour what yesterday's you thought you should do in the interest of building that relationship. Past you needs to trust that you will do the things you say you'll do and current you needs to trust that past you had a decent plan. So let's try and honour that. Let's also, in this moment, think about future you. How can we be kind to them? What will they be grateful is done because we did it today. When we're planning, how can we plan something that is as easy and straightforward and helpful and positive for future you to do as possible? How can we, when we're reviewing, how can we look back and be as kind and mindful and compassionate and curious as we can be about our past self. So we slowly build these relationships over time. And these are exercises that I'll introduce to you in later podcasts. Over time, you can build a stronger relationship with the future you, who's maybe a year down the line, five years down the line, so that you can kind of use her as inspiration, maybe even as a source of information and a source of ideas, but at the moment, let's just stay with yesterday's, today's and tomorrow's and we build a relationship where we trust that we are going to do what yesterday's us wanted us to do and we are going to plan so that tomorrow's us has a really nice day where they do the things that they want to do. Because Thing I find fascinating when we think about this as relationships, relationships with our past self, relationships with our future self, is how completely illogical it is. And this is not to beat up on anyone because we all do it, but I want you to notice how illogical it is. We think that past us was wrong for putting these things on our to do list. We shouldn't be doing these things today that past us said we should. So there's something wrong about past us. But I'm also going to beat myself up about the fact that I'm not doing it. We don't just go, Oh, okay. Yeah. Yesterday's me thought I should do that today, but actually I don't think I should. So I'm not going to and leave it there. We simultaneously say, Oh, I shouldn't be on the list. I should never have said I'll do it today. And guilt ourselves about the fact that we should be doing what past us said. So we've got this really weird relationship with past us. And then similarly, future us, we have this situation where we're telling ourselves that they're way more capable than us because, Oh, I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it tomorrow. It'll be easy tomorrow, da da da. They're way more capable, but equally we're not willing to do anything for them. We're not willing to say, you know what, I'll take that for the team. I'll get that done today so that you don't have to tomorrow. So we kind of really respect them as amazing, but not enough to actually make their lives a bit easier. And then current us, when we think about our relationship with our current selves, so often we're telling ourselves there's no way I can do this today. I don't feel up to it. I'm too tired. There's not enough time today. I'm, you know, poor little me. I'm all incapable. But we're also prioritizing us and our comfort over all the other versions of ourselves. So we're telling ourselves that today's us is a bit useless because we're not doing the thing we should be doing. But also, the most important thing I can do is make today's me comfortable. You know, I cannot force poor little today's me to do these things that I intended. So it's a very strange combination. And one of the good things about it is when you notice what a strange combination it is, something almost automatically shifts. So when you realize that you are thinking things that are just contradictory to each other, it's called cognitive dissonance, where we believe different things, but where actually you put them on the table together and they don't make sense as a whole, that feels really uncomfortable. That's naturally uncomfortable when you realize that. And while that's uncomfortable, that's also a good thing because it makes us go, All these thoughts I thought were true, literally can't all be true, because it's contradictory. And that's when our brain starts to figure it out, and our brain starts to go Oh, okay. Past us was doing their best. Current us is capable of doing this stuff. And it might be a bit uncomfortable, but I'm willing to do that so that future us doesn't have to do it. And suddenly it all gets a little bit clearer. It doesn't happen overnight. Don't worry, you're not going to listen to this and just go away and be like, Oh, don't procrastinate anymore. But I want you to keep this stuff in your mind when you notice, when you go through that NICE model. I want you to notice what you're thinking about past you, what you're thinking about current you, and what you're thinking about future you. And use that awareness when you're planning, when you're implementing, and when you're reviewing. Let me know what you think. I'd love to hear where is your procrastination breaking down? Which bit, is past you unrealistic? Is current you refusing to follow what past you did? Is future you sort of held up as this like icon who will do absolutely everything? Which bit of this breaks down for you and which bits do you want to strengthen in the future? Let me know. Let me know on social media, join my community. If there are other topics you want podcasts, I have a million ideas always, but if there are specific topics that you want, let me know. One of my community has requested one on peer pressure and that thing where you look around and think, Oh my goodness, everybody at my level is further ahead. So that is going to be coming up. I'm going to do that. Thank you for that suggestion. If you have other suggestions, get in contact. Let me know. I love doing these more responsive episodes. So thank you all for listening and I will see you next week.
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