2.11 How to manage your emotions when everyone is stressed
27 November 2023
If you're listening to this in real time, it's the end of November 2023 and it's that time of year when it just feels like everybody around us is getting stressed. It's the run up to Christmas, we're finishing things off for the end of term, we're trying to achieve our final goals, we're trying to get ready for the holidays, we're thinking about what we want to achieve next year and everyone's kind of run out of energy. And to be honest, if you're listening to this at a different time, you may well be feeling like that anyway, because more and more the academic year feels like that all year round.
If you're trying really hard to kind of look after yourself and stay on top of your own stress levels, but you're finding yourself surrounded by other people who are stressed, other people who are complaining, then this is the perfect episode for you. We are going to be thinking about how can you manage your mind when those around you are losing theirs without needing to push them out of your lives, without needing to solve their problems, how can we study our own emotions and look after ourselves, no matter what is happening around us?
Hello and welcome to episode 11 of the PhD Life Coach and we're going to be thinking about how to manage your mind when everybody around you seems to be feeling stressed, too. Now this has come up partly because of some supervisor training that I've been doing. So, as you know, I run workshops for PhD students, but I have now also developed training for supervisors, which really thinks about us as humans in this supervisory relationship. I know from coaching PhD students that your supervisors have an enormous impact on your experience as PhD students, and I know from my coaching of academics that the quality of your relationships you have and your experience of supervision affects your experience of academia too.
It's a two sided thing. And so my supervisor training is really designed to help supervisors figure out what relationship they want with their PhD students and how to be more intentional about how they create that within the context that we're not superhuman supervisory machines and that we're all too busy, overworked, and feeling under pressure.
So it's a really cool course. Hit me up if you wanna know more about it. But the reason why I wanted to talk more about it today was because some of the tools that I introduced in that I think are really useful for lots of people, because what I see when I talk to students and when I talk to members of staff is that the people around us can have a really profound effect on our stress. I want you to imagine you go into the department, you bump into a colleague, whether it's a fellow PhD student, fellow academic, whatever stage you're at, you bump into them in the corridor, they tell you all about how they've got too much to do and they don't know how they're going to do it, and so you sort of listen to that and empathize and feel, yeah, it is like that, isn't it?
You get settled in your office or at your desk and somebody else comes over to moan about their supervisor. Or to complain about university administration not being effective or to complain that things should be doing differently and then you're just about to try and get going on what you intended to do and somebody else needs your help because no one else will help them and they've been abandoned and all of these things.
And suddenly we're in this position where we are surrounded by people that are having their own struggles and who sometimes remind us of our struggles. I certainly experienced those days where you go in and feel like, Okay, actually I'm going to get on it today. There's stuff I want to do, I'm feeling okay. And by the time you've talked to a few people in the corridor, You've lost the whole will to get on with anything because we allow their emotions to sort of infiltrate our emotions. When they're feeling like that, we change the way we think and the way we feel, and it can have really profound effects on our actions.
Now, you might have seen things on Instagram and other bits of the internet where they talk about you know, mood suckers and eliminate them from your life because you need to surround yourself with positive people. No. No, no, no, no. A. Not realistic. B. Not desirable. C. What about people who have mood disorders, mental health problems, etc, etc? Not useful! We're not shutting anybody out here. We don't need to shut anybody out here. Because shutting them out implies that we have no other way of coping or managing this. We can still have people around us who have whatever perspectives they have, and we can, with some skills, with some practice, with some support, be still responsible for our own emotions and behavior.
Now, if you find yourself thinking well, no, but people do upset me, people do frustrate me, they do affect my mood, then, that's okay, it's understandable, we're taught this stuff growing up. You know, how many times have you either said to a child or had said to you, oh don't say that, you'll hurt mummy's feelings? Okay, we get taught that we're responsible for other people's feelings and that they are responsible for our feelings.
Today, what I want to introduce you to is a notion called emotional adulthood, and how this can enable us to take control over some of these things. So this is something that I was taught as part of my training through the Life Coach School with Brooke Castillo. And she talks about this notion of emotional adulthood, which is taking responsibility for our own thoughts and feelings.
It's saying that whatever circumstance I'm in, so whatever the factual situation is, whatever people's behavior is, I am responsible for the thoughts that I choose to focus on and the feelings that I therefore experience. Okay, this is not saying... I always have to put a bunch of caveats up because people always have perspectives on this I can probably hear you say, yeah, but does that excuse bullying? What if people are behaving unacceptably? And of course, if somebody is bullying you, I wouldn't want the thoughts that you choose to be. That's okay, I can put up with it. You might prefer to choose thoughts like, This is unacceptable, and I'm going to do something about it, for example.
So, being responsible for your thoughts and feelings doesn't mean always thinking positive thoughts, and it doesn't mean only experiencing positive emotions. It means accepting that if you are feeling frustrated in the moment, it is because you are thinking, they shouldn't speak to me like that. Now, if you stand by that, you think they shouldn't speak to you like that, happy days, we get to be frustrated and we get to decide what we want to do from a place of frustration.
That's fine. But we also can recognize that there are a bunch of other thoughts we can choose to have about that situation. And the joy with emotional adulthood, if we can take responsibility for our own thoughts and feelings, is it means we don't have that situation where people can drag us down, people can ruin our moods, where people can upset our intentions. It also means we're not dependent on other people to make us feel happy. Or to make us feel secure, or make us feel confident. Because that's the flip side of this. If we are on one hand at the sort of whim of the people around us to determine our mood, because they affect our mood, we believe directly, then the opposite is also true, that we rely on those around us to make us feel better.
It's something I see in the supervisor student relationship a lot, that students want their supervisor to make them feel secure. They want them to make them feel confident. And one of the exercises we often do in coaching is to identify what you want to hear from your supervisor and figure out how you can tell that to yourself.
So often I'll have a client and they'll say, I just want my supervisor to tell me I'm doing a good job. And what we do instead, because we don't have control over the supervisor, we, you know, we can request more positive feedback, but we don't know what we're going to get. What we do instead is figure out how can I make sure I'm telling myself I'm doing a good job?
Cause usually when we need to hear it from somebody else is exactly when we're not saying it to ourselves. So emotional adulthood is taking responsibility for your own thoughts and feelings.
So, what does this have to do with being in an environment where everybody's feeling really stressed? It means that when somebody is telling you all about their stresses, you don't have to have the thought, yeah, they're right, things are rubbish, and get down about it. You don't have to have the thought, Oh, I need to help them. I need to make them feel better. You don't have to have the thought, Yeah, they're right. Everybody's completely out of order. This is terrible. ? You don't have to have any of those thoughts. You can think, Oh, they're having a really tough time right now, aren't they? That's a shame. Yeah, I feel bad for them. You can have a thought, That's a really interesting perspective. You can have a thought, yeah, those things are true, but I can still be okay.
There's a whole bunch of thoughts that you can have that don't translate to you immediately just sucking up the emotions of those around you. And it's not easy, okay? I'm not gonna lie, you're not gonna listen to this podcast and then just go away and it'll all be water off a duck's back, it doesn't bother you, yeah?
It's not that we don't empathize with the people around us. But there's a big difference between jumping in and joining in in their negative mood and empathizing and staying with them. So as coaches, we get taught how to hold space and how to, we call it, not get in the pool. So I will never jump in and be like, Oh my gosh, yes, it sounds like your supervisor's horrible. Oh, you definitely have too much to do. That's terrible. We'll never do that in a coaching session. That doesn't mean I don't empathize with you. That doesn't mean I don't say, Wow, okay, that sounds like a lot. Yeah, I can, I can see why you're feeling like this, if those are your thoughts. I can see that this supervisor's not behaving the way you wanted them to. That must be really hard for you to accept.
Okay, I can empathize. I can understand your emotions. I can understand your thoughts without jumping in and telling you that you're right. And sometimes we can channel that a little bit more in our... personal interactions at work.
I don't mean start coaching people. Never start coaching people without their consent. Don't just jump in but you can choose not to get in the pool with them. You can watch the thoughts they're having and think how interesting it is and to decide how you want to respond to those thoughts.
The other thing that people always say when we talk about emotional adulthood is that some elements of our emotional reaction to things are not within our control. And I agree, especially if we have mental health problems, there can be biological causes for the things that we're experiencing. Anybody who has menstrual cycles will have experienced the impact that hormonal changes can have on how we perceive things and people that have experienced trauma in their lives may also find themselves reacting in a more heightened way or in an inappropriate way because of those past experiences.
All of that is absolutely real, is absolutely true, but it doesn't negate the fact that we still get to choose what we think about that. So one of the things that I've noticed is when I'm being a bit hormonally irrational, what really helps in my thought processes is just acknowledging that that's the case. And not in a blaming myself way, but in a, yeah, things always feel a bit worse at this time of the month. That's okay. We don't have to turn this into, and I need to change my life and I need a new job and I need to change everything. We don't need to, because we know that at this time, everything feels like a really big deal. And that's okay. Because I can look after myself in that.
So I don't try and tell myself it's not a big deal, because, you know, arguing with a hormonal person, we've probably all tried it, not ideal. And especially when it's ourselves. Well, yeah, I don't have to convince myself it's not a big deal. I just have to remind myself that, yeah, it feels like a massive deal at the moment, and that's okay.
So by taking responsibility for our own thoughts and feelings, it slightly buffers us from all the people around us. And that might sound a little bit heartless, you might be thinking, but I don't want to be separate from these people, I want to help them, I want to improve that.
But I would argue that jumping in the pool with them and getting down too, getting stressed and overwhelmed too, doesn't help anyone. It doesn't make you feel better, it doesn't help them, and it creates an environment that becomes self fulfilling. Because if we all are just at the whim of each other, then I listen to you being overwhelmed and stressed and anxious, and then I talk to somebody else about how overwhelmed and stressed and anxious I am, and they talk to somebody else, and then it just spreads like wildfire through departments and we've all seen it happen.
So being responsible for your own emotions doesn't make you heartless and it doesn't make you unempathetic. In fact, it enables you not only to look after yourself, but also to make positive change in the environment you're in.
One of the other models that I talked about in my supervisor training actually comes from psychotherapy, but I'm not using it in a psychotherapy sense. And that is the Karpman Triangle. It's called the Drama Triangle. It was developed by somebody called Karpman. And it's a really useful model to help you understand human behavior.
So imagine a triangle, and in one corner it says victim, one corner it Karpman rescuer, and one corner it says persecutor. Victim, rescuer, persecutor. And what Karpman proposed is that when people are under pressure, when they're in difficult situations, they position themselves and other people in one of these places on the triangle. So maybe when we're feeling overwhelmed, we've got too much to do, we put ourselves in the position of victim. We say, this isn't fair, the sector's broken, everything's terrible, there's nothing I can do, I can't change anything, I can't improve anything, we're very much in this victim mode.
And, importantly, that's not saying that we're not affected by structural things. I very much believe that there are structural issues in academia at the moment. But when we take on the victim role, we abdicate all responsibility for any element of self regulation and just say it's entirely their fault. I can't do anything about it.
Okay, and we then position others as either the baddies, the persecutors, the ones that are causing this, university management, who are ruining everything, as often we talk about, or we position other people as the potential rescuer. They should help me. My supervisor should be making me feel better about this. My head of school should be fixing this for me. And the problem here is we're always looking outside of ourselves for solutions. So instead of the victim taking responsibility for their own emotions and their own thoughts, and how they therefore behave, they look for others to either save them, or others to blame so they can pass on responsibility for why they're in this situation and what they're going to do about it. That's because it's easier. It's much easier to blame somebody else and it's much easier to expect others to swoop in and rescue you.
The other real key feature of this triangle is its volatility. How quickly you can flip from one to the other. So I want you to imagine a situation between a supervisor and a student here. And the student has positioned themselves in victim. They think they're not getting enough supervision. And they're going into a meeting where they are hoping that their supervisor will help them with this. So they've positioned their supervisor in potential rescuer mode here. And they have the conversation, and the supervisor says words to the effect of, really, you should be able to manage this for yourself. It's not something that I have time to give you more support with, so you need to go back and try again.
What's going to happen if they stay in this drama triangle is that the student will likely quickly flip, so that the supervisor is now in villain. They're now in persecutor. Okay, they've gone from being a potential source of support to, to blame for my feelings. If you're not going to help me, then you're a baddie.
Okay, that flicks. And so then the student might be like, well, that's not good enough. You should be, you know, you're not doing your job properly. That's not fair. So they're then starting to blame the supervisor. Now put yourself in the position of the supervisor, who a second ago was a potential rescuer in the eyes of the student, now is a potential persecutor, in the eyes of the student, and that doesn't feel nice. None of us want to be a villain. None of us want to be the persecutor. So we now flick with, well, you never try hard enough. You haven't done enough work. The only reason I haven't done your comments is because you were late giving them to me in the first place. You need to show more independence. And now the supervisor has swung themselves round into being victim and is putting the student in persecutor mode.
Okay, we flick between them and those of you who are out there going, Oh, no, I'm nice. I'm nice to my students. I'm lovely. We don't have these problems. I want to ask, do you position yourself into the position of helper, position of rescuer? Because the other thing that happens is a student comes in saying, oh, I'm really struggling with this. I'm finding it difficult and the supervisor sweeps in. I can help with that. Let me do that bit for you. Let me make a plan for you. I'll give you the papers you need to read. I'll structure this out for you. I can monitor you more carefully.
And you put yourself in this rescuer mode. And what happens, it sounds really nice. It sounds like you're helping. You want to do what's best for them. But what it does is it reinforces to the victim that they can't sort these things for themselves. It reinforces to the student that they need the supervisor to rescue them. It reinforces to the supervisor that the student isn't capable, And maybe it stays like that for a while, while the supervisor is able to help. But then maybe the supervisor starts to resent it a bit. They start to think, oh, I've helped this person so much, and they're not grateful, and they're not making any progress, and then the supervisor flicks themselves into victim and positions the student as the persecutor. I've given you all this help and you're still not pulling your weight. I've done so much for you and you don't seem to care.
So when we position ourselves as rescuer, and we do that in a kind of contingent way, we expect a level of gratitude, we expect a level of personal change and development because we've helped them so much. When that doesn't happen, plot twist. It's probably not going to happen. Then suddenly we start feeling like the victim here, that the student's taking advantage of us, that we're doing too much for them. And the student is now in persecutor.
I would be amazed if any of you listening to this today, haven't found yourself in this triangle. It might not be with your students and supervisors. It might be with managers. It might be with your family. It might be in relationships. Okay. We see the same dynamics. People who've done this in more of a psychotherapy context, see this with our families of origin. See this in the families that we live in now, I'd be amazed. So don't worry if you found yourself in one of these positions, it just makes you a human being.
But when we start to notice it, we start to see the negative consequences of it, even the negative consequences of being the helper, being the rescuer. And by understanding it, we get to choose something different.
In the years following Karpman's description of this triangle, Choy described a triangle called the winner's triangle. I don't like that phrase, I'm just going to say. I don't think winners is a particularly helpful psychological construct, but I really like the triangle.
And what Choi proposed is that instead of taking on the role of victim, we want to take on a role of creator. And this is where we take responsibility for our own thoughts and feelings. So that idea of emotional adulthood. And where we are willing to be vulnerable because we are taking responsibility without blame. We're able to share the things that we're finding difficult because we're not beating ourselves up for them. And we're not expecting others to beat us up for them. We're not having to protect ourselves. We're taking responsibility while admitting that we're finding things hard. That's the kind of creator role so that's the alternative to victim.
They then proposed coach instead of rescuer. So here, whereas the rescuer swoops in to try and fix it for them, the coach helps the creator to be self empowered, helps them to come up with their own solutions, provides some structure and support and prompts and challenges to think how can they help themselves.
And then the final one is Challenger instead of Persecutor. Because sometimes things need to change. So none of this is about accepting whatever environment we're in. Maybe you're experiencing some bullying. Maybe your department is doing something inappropriately. Maybe there are things that you think should be done differently.
When we're in persecutor mode, we just moan about the baddies. We moan about university management not doing what they should be doing. We sort of fall victim to, it's unacceptable, it's not fair, all of those sorts of thoughts. In Challenger, we challenge constructively. We say, you're not responsible for my thoughts and feelings, but I am saying this is unacceptable. I am saying we should be doing this differently, and here's an option. Here's a way we could do it.
And similarly, it's not swooping in and fixing it, because sometimes that kind of challenger role, if we allow it to go to its extremes, it can put us in rescue mode. So one thing I see a lot is people who have very strong feelings about equality, diversity and inclusion, very important and very worthy feelings about those things, and they want to make things better in their environment. And they start out challenging and calling for it. And then when other people don't step up, they step into, I'm going to have to do it all, aren't I? I'm going to have to be the one that creates socials for all the different diverse groups. I'm going to be the one that has to set up new systems for these things.
And therefore they're putting themselves back into that original triangle. They're putting themselves back into rescuer mode because people didn't step up when they were in challenger mode. So we can flick between these two triangles. That's human. We're not going to beat ourselves up for that. But, trying to think intentionally about staying within the winner's triangle, the constructive triangle, whatever we want to call it.
Staying within creator, where we take responsibility for ourselves. We're vulnerable and open because we can be kind to ourselves. Coach, where we seek to self empower others and ourselves. And challenger, where we seek to give constructive feedback to make a difference in things that are important without just fixing it all ourselves and without just blaming other people.
So I want you to think, where have you got difficult conversations coming up? Do you need to talk to your supervisor about some work that you haven't finished yet? Are you a supervisor who needs to talk to a student about deadlines that are being missed? How can you think through those interactions in advance? And think, how can I not go in there as victim? How can I not go in there seeking rescuing? How can I not go in there treating them as the persecutor here? How can I put myself in a position where I'm moving between being a creator responsible for my own thoughts, a coach, and a challenger?
I would love to hear how you get on with trying that. I think it can really fundamentally change the way our relationships work.
One thing that came up when I was doing the supervisor training this week with it, we talked about these triangles in that. And a question that I got a few times was, what do you do if the other person stays in the original triangle?
So let's imagine you take on a more coaching role. Whichever way around. It doesn't have to be, you know, the student can coach the supervisor too. It doesn't have to be a hierarchical thing. You put yourself in the coaching role, and the other person stays firmly in victim mode. No I need you to solve this for me. And it is difficult. What I would really encourage is that you have to stand firm. You have to maybe help explain why you're doing it the way you're doing it. But what often happens is because it feels uncomfortable for you to be in coach mode while they're over here in victim mode, sometimes we feel that kind of pressure to go into rescuer mode because the victim will just feel so much better if we flop into rescue mode and just tell them what to do. In the short term, they feel so much better, but in the long term, we know it doesn't help. So we have to stand firm. So we have to coach ourselves. To remind ourselves that just because they are in victim mode, we don't have to rescue them.
They are responsible for their own thoughts and feelings. If they choose to stay in victim mode, that is entirely up to them. All we can do is create environments in which we're happy with our behavior. We're comfortable that we've stayed in coach mode and hope that in time we can help them to see how beneficial that is. So stand firm.
Now one of the things that's challenging about all this stuff, as always, is this all sounds very nice, Vikki, but how do I do it in the moment? And this is something I touched on briefly last week. If you haven't listened to last week's episode with Alex Connor, where we talked about ADHD, maybe because you don't have ADHD and you didn't think it was relevant. Listen to it anyway, I promise. There's stuff for everyone in there.
One of the things that he talked about is how somebody with ADHD is likely to never be able to thought plan their way out of some inappropriate reactions. So if you have ADHD, you have problems with emotional regulation, you are probably at some point going to snap defensively when somebody offers you criticism, for example. And yes, we can work on developing that, but it's probably going to happen. So if you're experiencing that and you're thinking, well, there's no way I can stop that happening and therefore, if it happens, then I failed at this emotional regulation. What I'd really encourage you to think is you now have a choice about how you respond to that. So in that primary moment, you responded defensively, let's say, you attacked back because you felt hurt, just like a dog who's in pain might snap at you.
That bit, we might not be able to coach away, might be able to work on it, might be able to help us to develop the skills to take a breath and calm that moment, but we may not be able to coach that away, whether you've got ADHD or not. What we can coach is how you react to that.
So if we put I responded defensively in the circumstance line, that's just a fact, let's say, then we choose what we think about that. And often what we think about that, if we're unregulated, is I'm a terrible person, they're going to hate me, they're not going to want to work with me anymore, and then that makes us feel overwhelmed, or upset, or angry, or frustrated, or embarrassed, and all of those things, and then we start behaving in weird ways after that.
So even if you have reacted in the moment, even if there in the meeting, you put yourself in victim mode or you put yourself in rescuer mode without meaning to, once that's happened, it becomes a circumstance and you get to choose how you respond to it. Now, imagine the difference. If you went into a meeting and you were feeling very victim y, you were feeling very, like, everything was everybody else's fault, and you went in and you had that conversation and things, and you weren't able to regulate yourself in the moment, and then after the meeting, you sort of realized what was happening and how you could have done it differently, then imagine the difference between thinking, oh no, I went in as a victim, they're going to think I'm useless, they're not going to want to work with me anymore, and thinking, ah, yeah. I could have handled that better, didn't I? Okay, it's understandable. I get it. I was under a lot of pressure, but that could have gone better.
Just think the different emotions there and the different actions there. Because if we make ourselves frustrated and we make ourselves embarrassed, we're probably going to hide from that person. We're probably going to avoid speaking about it. We might double down in our defensiveness, put them back in villain mode. Well, it was their fault. You know, I only reacted like that because they were horrible to me. Whereas if we can choose our thoughts about that uncontrolled reaction and go, yeah, that wasn't ideal. We can feel comfortable to go back and have a conversation and say, look, I'm sorry, that wasn't okay. Um, this is why, I have problems with emotional regulation or I got really wound up, but it wasn't okay. And I apologize for that. How can we move forwards? You can address it more readily.
The other way you can manage all of these things is by going back to this idea of boss mode that we often talk about in the podcast. So boss mode is where we sort of almost lift ourselves out of our student selves or our current academic selves and make ourselves one level more senior than we are at the moment. And in that mode, we get to think how we support this person.
So, if you have a potentially difficult meeting coming up, or a presentation coming up where you think you might get challenged, and you might feel like a victim, or you might struggle to regulate your emotions, you get to sort of look ahead and be like, Ooh, I've got that thing. I'm worried about that thing. I'm worried how I'm going to react then. You can put yourself into boss mode, take a nice notebook and a hot drink and go and think, how do I want to show up? How would I show up if I was in creator mode? Where I'm vulnerable, willing to share that I'm finding things difficult. So... If you're going in and you're asking for support, victim might be, I just don't know what to do. I haven't, you know, I need you to help me. I'm just not coping, victim mode. Or creator mode. We go in and say, okay, this thing is specifically what I'm finding difficult. I know, you know, I feel awkward about the fact I'm finding it difficult, but I, I am and I want to share that with you.
Um, this is the specific bit. This is how I've tried to help myself. This is, you know, how I'm taking responsibility for it, but I've really appreciate some thoughts and guidance about how I can take this forward. It's such a different conversation because you're thinking, okay, how would I show up if I was willing to show my vulnerabilities and I was taking responsibility for my behavior and for my progression.
Similarly, if there's something you've got to have a difficult conversation because you've got to tell somebody you're not happy with how things are, how different would it be if you were treating them as a persecutor? You're like, this is your fault. It shouldn't be like this. It's terrible. Versus going in there as a challenger saying, look, I understand why things are like this. I get where it comes from, but this is the impact that it has on me that I'm seeing, and these are the ways that I think it could be changed in the future. So you go in in that much more constructive way.
Similarly, if you know you're having a meeting with somebody who's going to want your help, and you think they might position themselves as victim, what are you going to do in order to stay in coach mode? Yeah, we don't have to be good at this in the moment. We don't have to be able to just switch it on like a tap and be the perfect human being all the time. We don't.
We get to look ahead and go, Oh yeah, that might be challenging. How could I show up? What could that look like? Yeah, even if it's just, I know we're all pressed for time, even if it's just in your head in that five minutes while you're walking to the meeting. Or in that five minutes while you're grabbing a drink before you turn your Zoom call on, even if it's just in that time, how do I want to show up?
What would that look like? How do I take responsibility for myself in this meeting? We get to just coach that so we can think it in advance by putting ourselves in boss mode, then in the meeting or in the interaction, whatever that interaction might be, we do our best, deep breaths, always help everything, taking that moment to pause before we react.
But if we don't, if maybe it doesn't go as we want, then like we were saying with the ADHD stuff, you can put yourself in boss mode afterwards and go, okay, that went like that. I get it. I have compassion for the fact it went like that, but what can I do now to reconcile it for myself, to reconcile it for other people? So by putting yourself in boss mode, it can just help you to set these intentions, which makes it so much easier to then do in the moment.
If you expect yourself to just be able to react like this intuitively in the moment, then you're setting yourself up to find it really, really challenging. Let's choose intentionally, practice behaving like this, and then evaluate it afterwards and try again.
It may be that what you want to prepare for is those more informal interactions. So if what you're finding is that when you go into the department, you're inundated with people telling you how terrible things are, and so you're finding yourself not going into the department, i. e. changing your circumstance, perhaps what you want to do instead is to put yourself in boss mode, and think, how am I going to regulate my own emotions when I go into the department and encounter people that are complaining to me? How am I going to retain thoughts that help me? How am I going to maintain emotions that I know will help me get things done? Whilst also giving time and space to my colleagues to have whatever emotional experience they're having. And you can plan that stuff in advance too.
And then finally, when we're in boss mode, we can also think about how we take responsibility for hearing the things we need to hear. Because like I said at the beginning, we often want to hear from our supervisor that we're good at things, that we've done enough, and so on. I want you to spend a little bit of time thinking, how can I make myself feel heard? How can I make myself feel more confident? How can I make myself feel valued? Because we are going to hear our own voice more than any other voice we ever hear in the whole world. And so we get to choose which thoughts we focus on more, so that if we want to feel more confident, we can think thoughts that make us feel more confident.
And if we want to feel more secure, we can think thoughts that make us feel more secure. And if we want to feel happy, we can think thoughts that make us feel more happy. It's not a panacea. It's not going to fix every mental health problem that anybody has, but these things can really help. We don't have to make the negative thoughts go away. They can be there and we can choose to give more space to the thoughts that help us feel the way we want to feel in a particular context.
Remember. The way we want to feel in a particular context might not always be positive. When we look around the world, as it is at the moment, there is a whole lot of things that I feel angry about. And I'm sure you do too. There's a whole lot of things I feel upset about. There's a whole lot of things I feel scared about, to be honest. And I don't choose to make that go away. I know what thoughts are causing those. I know that I have a lot of thoughts about how politicians should run this world, how our leaders should behave, what decisions should be being made, and those thoughts are what make me angry and frustrated and scared, and I choose not to change those, because I think at the moment it's perfectly appropriate to feel angry, frustrated, and scared. So this isn't toxic positivity. This isn't make yourself feel happy, chappy all the time. This is knowing that even in those situations, you have responsibility for those thoughts. They just might feel completely appropriate for you right now.
What I choose to do instead is to focus on thoughts where it might lead to more purposeful action, where it might lead me to do something that might make a difference, or where in the short term, they can co exist, where I can say, I am really angry and upset and scared about what is happening in the world, but right now my focus is this task. Right now, I'm going to believe that it's important for me to record a podcast and speak to the people who are looking forward to this, because in my own little way, I'm supporting people out there in the world.
I choose to focus on that. So I allow the negative thoughts to be in my head. I allow them to be there because I think they're appropriate. I don't want to challenge those thoughts. I think they're perfectly fair. But at the same time, I give more space to the, I can make a difference to PhD students and academics who are having a really tough time and who are doing really, really important work by getting some of my work done.
And you can choose to do that too. There may be some negative thoughts that you don't want to think. They feel disproportionate. If you're thinking that everything's terrible and there's no point even bothering with my work. You might not want to keep that thought, because that's the sort of thought that, it doesn't lead to anything good, it doesn't lead to you making it better for anybody else, and it doesn't lead to you getting your stuff done either.
So that sort of thought, you might want to pick apart, you might want to challenge it. In what ways isn't it true, what else do I believe? Should the world be different? Yes. Can I still do my job? Yes, absolutely. I really hope this has been useful. It is a challenging time for an awful lot of people at the moment. Let's take responsibility for our own thoughts and feelings and have a lot of compassion for ourselves that we are in really tough circumstances right now, and that's okay. We can still support ourselves. We can still be kind to ourselves. We can still tell ourselves the things we need to hear and support ourselves through whatever we need to do over the next few weeks.
Be kind to yourself. Doing all of this does take energy. You're not going to immediately find yourself able to regulate all of your emotions, and that's probably not even desirable. Be kind to yourself and reclaim some of this power over your own thoughts and emotions. Thank you so much. I hope you found this useful, and I will see you next week.
Short one this week - I am using a current example from my own life to talk you through how to look after yourself when it all goes wrong. I talk through how I decided what work I am and am not going to do, and how I am looking after myself in the process. It’s short and the audio will be less crisp as I’m recording on my phone but I think it will be useful for many of you. Transcript Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. Um, I'm not gonna lie, I nearly didn't record this podcast. Um, a lot is happening over here and I am not gonna go into the details on the podcast. But suffice to say that life is complicated right now, if you're concerned. I am fine. I don't want you to be worried about me, but there is a lot of stuff going on that means that things are more difficult than I would like them to be. Um, and I need a podcast for this week, and so when, when I found out all the things that I've recently found out, I had to stop and think, right? What am I actually doing? What do I need to do? What can I do? Defer. What can I decide not to do? Essentially, how can I look after myself while I navigate all this other stuff? And for a moment I thought, right. I have a podcast episode that I've already recorded, intending to cover off the one of the Christmas period podcasts. And I thought, you know what? I can just move that forward and share that with them. Um, and so I was like, okay, we'll do that. That's fine. But then I thought actually for two reasons, I didn't wanna do that. Firstly, from my perspective, I don't want to disadvantage future me. Okay? I am super proud of the fact that I have already recorded one of the podcasts for the Christmas period, and I didn't want to then put myself back behind that if I. Used that one. Now. I was proud that I had the option, right? I was proud that I had something in the bank that I could use, but I didn't want to mess up my carefully lay plans to be ready for Christmas. I also thought that actually it might be useful for you guys. To hear a little bit about how I am navigating managing my workload while things are challenging. And actually that decision was reinforced when I sent a message to my membership, explaining to them how I was gonna handle it and what implications it might have for them. And I got a lovely email back from one of my members saying how much she values that I not only coach them, but I model. Like in my own life, how I navigate things. So I thought it was a really good opportunity. So this episode is about what to do when the bad stuff hits the metaphorical fan. Um, it's gonna be short. Um, you can already probably hear I'm recording on my phone because I'm away from my usual setup. There's not going to be a YouTube version of it. So this, and I'll explain in the podcast why all that is so. The first thing is pause and breathe. Okay. I am a few days into the situation unfolding, and I haven't made all these decisions immediately. Sometimes we think we have to like just. Immediately cancel everything or immediately decide that we're doing everything or whatever. I gave myself a little bit of time to pause and breathe. I decided that there definitely would need to be some adjustments, but that I could take a little bit of time to figure that out, and I would always want you guys to do that too. Just take a second to have a deep breath, a few deep breaths, and give yourself some time to think about it. Um, the second step always is to gather a small network of support. And I'm saying small because sometimes when difficult things are happening, some of you will want to retreat into your shell and not tell anybody at all. Others of you will feel a kind of urge to tell lots of people. Um. I was probably in the latter half where it was like, I kind of wanna talk about this stuff. Um, but actually sometimes having a large network of people just adds, you know, trying to help you can add to your cognitive load. So I basically told a few people what was happening, people that were able to help me either pragmatically or emotionally. And I haven't talked, I've got lots of very close friends that have no idea of anything happening. Um. But having a small network of support is easier to navigate and it means that the sort of, you get the things that you need. Um, one tip for when you're asking for support, partly, you know, we have to balance our own feelings of guilt and whatever that they're doing. This, I try to. Acknowledge that that's okay to feel like that, but it's also okay to ask them. Um, but one practical tip is, um, ask people to take the cognitive load, not just give them tasks. So as a really small example, I'm away from home at the moment, so, um, my dog is with my mom and my sister will be taking the dog to the field. Now I could be messaging her with details about what time 'cause he gets a secure field 'cause he's a naughty barky boy. Um. I could be messaging her with details about what time the field is and how to get in and what the code for the padlock is and when to pick him up and blah, blah, blah. I'm not, I've just told my sister to talk to my mom. They can sort it out between them. So do your best to ha wherever you can to hand over cognitive load as well as needing to sort of navigate the, like, give out the tasks yourself. Next step is cancel anything unnecessary. Now, thankfully this week I actually had a relatively light week. I do do workshops for other universities as one-offs. Um, and I didn't have any this week. I have a small number. I have my usual member member sessions, and I have a small number of one-to-one sessions, but I didn't have any other workshops. I don't know, I don't think I would've canceled them, but have a look through. I did have a few other bits and pieces that I was intending to do that I have let people know. That. Um, so to go immediately canceling anything that you can truly go, yeah, that's just not necessary this week. When you are considering the rest, when you're considering what you do wanna do and what you don't wanna do, really avoid all or nothing thinking. There can be a real tendency to either tell yourself, I've just got to keep going. There's too much to do. I can't, you know, I can't cancel anything or to tell yourself I absolutely can't do anything I need to just. Cancel everything now. Sometimes nothing might be the right answer. For some of you, depending on what's happening and everything, doing absolutely nothing might be the right answer for me this time. I don't think it is the right answer. I think I, I am perfectly capable of doing some things and in some ways it's quite nice to return into a little bit of normality for a period and do the things that I do normally and that I get, like I get nice feelings from doing and whatnot. Um, so for me, nothing was not the right answer. And remembering that it's not an all or nothing thing is super important because then you can kind of pick and choose in a intentional way what things you want to do. And for me that means balancing up two things. It means balancing up what is kind of most important, what will cause the most disruption if I don't do it, for example. Um, but it's also thinking then about what things do I have cognitive space for and what things do I. Get some benefit from doing. Okay. So at the moment I'm actually recording this, sat in a coworking session with my members. Um, and I, I love seeing my members. My members are great people. They always make me feel better. I love being with them. And so it's actually really nice to be, to be doing this. So thinking about what things actually give you those little bits of joy and what things you don't need to do. The other thing I would really encourage you is to think about your future self as well as your current self. So I gave you an example of that at the beginning of the podcast. Okay. So I, um, I could have just used a, um. A prerecorded podcast for today, but that would have penalized future me. 'cause I would've then need to think of something different to talk about for the Christmas podcast, for example, that I've had planned for a while. Um, and I decided not to, I decided to be kind to future me and do this now. Now, does that mean that I'm doing a slightly half-assed version of a podcast? Yeah, absolutely. There's no YouTube. The sound's not gonna be great. It's gonna be shorter than usual. Is it gonna be super useful for you? Yeah, I think it probably is to be fair. Um, and. So it, it, it does the job. And I think, to be honest, I think it does the job in a good way. And I'm really pleased that I'm not adding to my list of now having to think of more things for the holiday, for example. The other thing is once you've decided what things you are doing or what things you aren't doing, think about whether there's anything you can either reduce or preempt. So for me, I've sent a message to my members saying, look, at the moment I'm intending to go ahead with all of our sessions. I enjoy talking to them. It's about, it's a load I can manage. Um. But I have also given them a heads up that it's possible I may change my mind about that. It's possible I may need to cancel some sessions and I've given them some, um, practical information about what that will look like, that I'll essentially delete it from the calendar or I'll send them a message in Slack that I might not be able to access the membership site to send a, um, send a specific message. So by doing that, I sort of. Preempt the fact that something unexpected might happen, if you see what I mean. And it just means that I know that they're kind of aware and it means that, um, I will have less logistics to sort out if I do decide that something needs to change. And you can think about how that applies to you. For example, you know, maybe there are deadlines you still want to try and hit or something, but you can then, um. Make sure that you, you know, if you've told people that there might be a problem, then it's much easier to quickly send your supervisor a message saying, yeah, it turns out that was optimistic, not gonna hit it, or whatever, than it is to have to explain it all in that moment. Um. Final thing is just be really kind to yourself. Even this sort of planning, even trying to think through what you do and don't want to do can take a lot of cognitive load at a time when you don't have much to go around. So keep it really simple. And my final message is don't forget that you are a body. You are a human body, a human being body, as well as just a brain. Um. I just took a break in the, um, body double session to have a big stretch on the hotel room floor and I feel a lot better for it. We've been really mindful to make sure we are drinking water and trying to eat some food and all those sorts of things, so when it is all going down for you, don't forget those basics. Looking after your body, I am keeping it really simple this week. So that is your podcast. I suspect it will be something that is useful for some of you when, when these things happen. Um, thank you all for being there as usual, and I will see you next week.
< We’ve talked before about celebrating tiny wins, so now we’re talking about big wins. If you feel uncomfortable celebrating papers being accepted, finishing your PhD or getting a job, or any of the other big objective successes, then you’re not alone. In this episode we’ll talk about why this can feel so uncomfortable, how we can expand our definition of “celebration” and how we can ensure that we recognise and remember these important events. This is particularly relevant for you if that sounds much too embarrassing and social awkward to even consider! Links I refer to in this episode If you liked this episode, you should check out “ how to be kind to yourself ”. Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the PhD Life Coach Podcast, and this is really building on an episode I did a few weeks ago about celebrating tiny wins, and if you haven't listened to that one, don't worry. This one entirely stands alone, but this is sort of the other end of the scale, right? Because I think all of us can benefit from learning to celebrate our tiny wins a lot more. Those day-to-day things that we either take for granted or disregard as easy, where actually we have that opportunity to fill our lives with positive reinforcement and praise for doing the small things, but we then also have this question of what to do about the big things, what to do when we get a job, what to do when we get a paper accepted, when we get a promotion, whatever it might be. at the moment I'm doing a lot of work helping my members and other people who attend workshops that I run to identify their strengths. And one of the things that comes up over and [00:01:00] over is that people are really worried about being too big for their boots. They're really worried that people will see them as big-headed or arrogant and conceited. And so many of them find it really difficult to identify their strengths, and many of them find it really difficult to celebrate their big wins. They somehow feel that by celebrating their wins, that means they're diminishing other people or they're making other people feel uncomfortable or any of those things. And so this episode is really about how can we celebrate big wins in a way that doesn't feel like we are getting too arrogant and we're making other people uncomfortable, or how can we at least reframe that so that we're comfortable celebrating our big wins. So one of the things I always teach my members is that when we have little anxious thoughts, um, not big anxious problems, but like little anxious thoughts. It's useful to put 'em on the table in [00:02:00] front of us and ask us before we do anything else. Is there any truth here? Okay, so we're gonna do that with this one. Is it possible that you do sometimes get a bit too big for your boots, as it were, that you do sometimes behave in a way that is perceived by general people, not by just one person? By is perceived generally as a bit arrogant, a bit conceited. Is that true? Okay. Now I'm gonna put a rule on this. We don't count childhood. When we are kid, we're all idiots, right? When we are kids, we don't know. We almost all have probably been told at some point, oh no, don't say that. Or whatever. So this is', I don't want you traipsing up some memory from when you were 10 years old and going, oh, Mrs. Knight told me that I'd get too big for my boots. Screw Mrs. Knight. Mrs. Knight was my Class five teacher. Screw Mrs. Knight. She doesn't get to live in your brain anymore. You were a kid. You were finding out what was okay, what wasn't. So we're not gonna use those [00:03:00] memories. But if in your adult life you can genuinely think of times where people who care about you have had a quiet word and said, dude, maybe tone it down a little bit. You're kind of going on about yourself much more than you go on about other people , we're gonna touch on that very briefly at the start of this episode. And the reason I'm doing it very briefly is because I don't think that's most of you in my experience, the people who are perceived as too arrogant and conceited usually aren't the ones asking, how can I celebrate this without appearing too arrogant? They're not the ones asking it. And that means they're probably not the ones listening to this episode. The vast majority of you are probably worried about this in a kind of hypothetical. I don't want people to judge me way, but with no grounds for thinking that they actually do judge you in that direction. But let's touch on it. And when you're thinking about this, I want you to remember this is not just somebody who like feels bad 'cause they haven't succeeded this in the same way as [00:04:00] you have, or that you know, you've reminded them of something they haven't done in their life. The definition of arrogant is unpleasantly proud. With overconfident, with being conceited, there is an element of dismissing other people's wins as well. So this is not just about you celebrating yours to an excessive or unpleasant amount. It's also that you dismiss other people's achievements as well, if that still feels like you. I have a few small tips. The first one is don't generalize your wins too far. And this is true for all of us, right? Is that just because you've got one paper published, it doesn't mean you are the greatest thing ever. It doesn't mean that it's gonna be easy forever. It means we get to be proud of this one thing. So we get to make sure we are not generalizing too far. We need to make sure that we are feeling and expressing gratitude for the things and the people that helped us along the way. Usually when people are unpleasantly proud they're sort of taking all the credit without [00:05:00] recognizing how other people have contributed. We wanna make sure that we're all so celebrating other people's wins. And again, this is true for all of us, however loud we are about our own wins. We wanna be that loud about other people's wins as well. And finally, if this is something that you struggle with, I want you to take some tips from this episode where we think about quiet ways of celebrating, because sometimes if you are somebody who feels you have something to prove, you are somebody who has often been told that maybe your own self celebration is a little bit much. It can be useful to practice some quiet celebrations, not to manage other people's emotions, but to see what that feels like. So if you feel like you genuinely actually are in danger of being a bit arrogant and self-absorbed, then those are some tips for you, but we're gonna move on now 'cause I think for the vast majority of you, that's not the case. For the vast majority of you, this is something that you are worrying about that probably isn't based in much [00:06:00] other than either your own brain or like the occasional comment you've got from somebody who probably had other motives anyway. So the first thing that I would remind you, which is always, always true, is that other people are allowed to have thoughts and feelings about you. If you are behaving in a way that you think is appropriate, if you are celebrating in a way that you think is appropriate and that is in line with who you want to be and comes from your best self, other people are allowed to have opinions about that. That can be hard to stomach sometimes, but it's true. Everybody isn't. You are entitled to your opinions about people. You can think that people around you should behave differently than they do. It doesn't necessarily mean that we then have the right to make them change or anything like that. So we get to remember, yeah, there it is possible that by saying, I'm celebrating this, somebody will get upset about it. And that's their responsibility. Okay. [00:07:00] As long as we're comfortable that we've behaved in a way that's in line with our own personal, like code of ethics, our own personal ways of being, other people are allowed to have that, those emotions and the reason that has to be true is sometimes us just existing can have those impacts on each other. Okay? We all know, and I agree with the kind of the sensitivities around this, we all know, you know, companies who give you the option of opting out of Mother's Day celebrations, for example, if that's something that is really upsetting for you, for whatever reason. It doesn't mean that we can't celebrate our mothers. Those of you who have had children, there will be people who will be upset when they see other people having children, having families, because that's something they weren't able to do. For those of you celebrating professional success, there will be people that will find that upsetting because it will remind them of the things that they haven't done. We can be compassionate, we can be understanding, but it doesn't mean we have to not celebrate ourselves. [00:08:00] People are allowed to have emotions about whatever they have emotions about, and we don't have to micromanage ourselves in order to eliminate that entire possibility. Because apart from anything else, it's not possible. You just existing means that people will have opinions about it. If you never celebrate anything, people will have opinions about that too, right? There is no way of avoiding other people having emotions, so we get to check in and say, is this an okay way to behave as far as I'm concerned? And then we can just be compassionate to other people's responses to it. Now, why is it even important to celebrate? Well I think there's a bunch of reasons it's important to celebrate. We wanna make sure that we are getting a nice reward for the hard work that we put in. Now, I'm a big believer, this is why I talked about tiny wins first. I'm a big believer that we should focus on enjoying the process as well as [00:09:00] waiting for that end goal. But we can give ourselves a lot of positive reinforcement by then celebrating that end goal. What I see in academics and PhD students so much is the second that thing has been achieved, we somehow discount it in our heads and move on to the next thing that we haven't done. And what that does is it doesn't give us any positive reinforcement for having achieved the thing that we've achieved and if we don't get positive reinforcement, it's much, much harder to work towards these things in future. So we wanna be positively reinforcing the process on a day-to-day basis by celebrating our tiny wins, but then also celebrating the actual achievements so that we get that bigger scale positive reinforcement as well. The second reason I think it's important to celebrate is so that our wins are just as memorable as our losses. I want you to think about how much time you have spent, thinking about times where you failed or where you got embarrassed 'cause you did something wrong or you didn't live up to [00:10:00] your expectations or whatever it might be. I want you to think how much time you have spent ruminating on those experiences, I bet all of you can think back to times in your childhood and the ones that will be very vivid, that have popped into your head many, many times, are the ones where something really embarrassing happened. Where you were ashamed, where you were, you know, where people were judging you, where you were getting to hold off. Those things live rent free in our heads so often, and we reinforce them by rehearsing them over and over again. One of the things that celebrations can do is make the wins more memorable too. So that when we are feeling a bit nervous, we also have vivid memories of times that we've celebrated. Celebrations also give us the opportunity to learn from our experiences, and I'm gonna tell you more about that in a second when I give you some ideas about how we can celebrate. But when we just move on quickly past our [00:11:00] wins, without truly celebrating them, without truly analyzing them, we often miss the opportunity for a lot of learning and self-improvement as well. Finally, I don't want you to underestimate the extent to which you can serve as inspiration or example to others. So for everybody who sees your win and goes, oh no, I've never achieved anything like that. I, you know, I feel bad about myself now because they celebrated their win. There's somebody else going, oh is that possible? Is that possible for someone like me? And this is particularly, this is true for everyone, right? But it's particularly true if you come from demographics that are traditionally underrepresented in academia. Every time you see somebody who looks a bit like you or comes across a bit like you achieve something, you get to go, oh this is something that's an option for me. This is something that could happen. Somebody else who [00:12:00] looks a bit like me or sounds a bit like me or experiences a bit like me has done these things. Maybe I could do this too. Now I'm gonna give you an example there. And this is a combination of tiny wins and celebrating success. So when I was a academic, you have all these sort of admin, leadership service type jobs and one of the ones that I have for quite a long time was a sort of welfare tutor. Now, this was back in the day, right? This was way before the university had kind of minor counseling services, but beyond that, there really wasn't the focus on wellbeing that there is now. And so a lot of that really fell on academics. And I took my job as welfare tutor probably a bit too well, but anyway, that's a story for another day. And we're also personal tutors, so we have people who don't necessarily have problems, but they're allocated to us throughout their undergraduate degrees and we're like their first point of pastoral care. Anyway, so I was welfare tutor, I was personal tutor, and that meant I got thank you cards, right? And I loved my thank you cards because frankly, I am not organized enough to ever write. I write [00:13:00] thank you cards for my Christmas presents. Thanks, mom. I definitely do that. But beyond that. I rarely get round to it. So if anybody ever thinks to send me a thank you card, I absolutely love it. And they used to say really lovely things and so I used to stick them on my wall and I didn't stick them on my wall to show off. You know, some people may have thought that, that I was saying, oh look, students love me. I stuck them on my wall because when I was having bad days, I would notice them and I would remember why I do what I do. So it was very much positive reinforcement of tiny wins for me. I'm sure some people had opinions about it, but I knew that I benefited from it and I knew that some people probably had opinions about it, that I was trying to demonstrate how popular I was with the students. That's fine, they can have opinions. But the bit I had underestimated until somebody said it to me was the extent to which they also served as inspiration for my students. So I had a gorgeous personal tutee who I loved. She was a really, really lovely girl. And she didn't have many particular problems [00:14:00] as we went through and stuff, but she was good at turning up for her personal tutorials, which anyone who's personal tutor will know that's not necessarily expected. So I knew her reasonably well anyway, when she was ready to graduate. And it was her final post, final personal tutor meeting of her degree program. She came to see me and she'd got a card and that was really, really lovely and she said to me, I remember coming in here for my very first personal tutor meeting, and I looked at all those cards and the first thing I thought was that I'm gonna be well looked after, because if all these students are saying thank you, then I'm gonna be well looked after. And the second thing I thought was that I can't believe in three years time I am gonna be giving her a thank you card having done my degree, it feels like such a big thing. I can't believe I'm gonna get there. But seeing those cards reminded me that I will. And she said, and every time I come from my personal tutorials, I look at the cards and I think I'm going to give you a thank you card. When I finished my degree [00:15:00] and it became her, like it was her symbol that she was going to get there, and I had no idea. They had never been put up with that intention. But that little mini celebration of myself, that little mini, I'm proud of the impact I've had, that little mini, I want to remind myself of this, when things are tough was also unbeknownst to me acting as inspiration for somebody else. And anytime you celebrate anything, that is also true. So if I've sold you on, then it might feel a little bit uncomfortable, but there might be benefits from it. What are ways that we can celebrate without this sense that we are bragging about ourselves. So the first question I want to ask you is, what would be a really you way to celebrate? And you might be going, the you way to do it would be not celebrating, but if we look at you and the things that make you different, the things that make you interesting, the things that make you, you, what might be a really you way to celebrate. As an example, I was celebrating a good [00:16:00] launch last summer. I went for a flying trapeze lesson. I can't think of anything more me than going for a flying trapeze lesson. It's something that people go, what really? At your age about, it's something I'm not. I'm o, I mean, I say I'm okay at it. I'm okay at flying trapeze compared to the population. I am not okay at flying trapeze compared to flying trapeze people, but compared to most people, I've done it a few times. I can vaguely. Do it. Um, if people want me to, you have to have to reply to my emails and tell me you want this. If you want me to, I will post a video on Instagram at some point and you can see my best catches anyway. I booked that, that was a very me thing to do. That might, that is probably not a very you thing to do, although if it is, I recommend it. It's incredible. So what would be a very you way to celebrate? Are you a crafter? Could you make something to commemorate your success? Could you, you know. Do a little embroidery or make a piece of art or something like that. I [00:17:00] also did that. I don't even know where it is now actually, which is bad. I'm looking around my office madly. I made a piece of art to celebrate the people that entered my very first round of the quarterly membership, so I did that as a little mini celebration 'cause I love craft too. What could be things that just make you stay in that moment a little bit longer and commemorate it in some way so that you are sort of spending more time on it at the time, and so that it's something that you think about more regularly than you would if you haven't got something that exists like that. And the nice thing is it can be different every time. I tend to do something different every time, 'cause you know my brain. But you might find that you wanna be somebody who has a little tradition that maybe you do a little mini cross stitch every time you get a paper published or you add a crochet tile to, to a blanket every time you get a paper published or something, um, they might have to be quite big. 'cause otherwise that's gonna take a while to make a blanket unless you're a genius, but you get [00:18:00] my point, right? You can set up little traditions where you do something like that. I've seen people get their abstracts printed onto mugs and things like that so that they remember when they got their first paper published, for example. Could you start or continue some sort of collection? So if they're, you know, I don't know by yourself, a little Lego figure for every time you get a new paper or each time you get an achievement of some description. I keep my, I Haven hadn't even thought about this celebration, but it's totally true. I have a whole row of champagne bottles in my lounge. People always think I'm an absolute alcoholic, but they represent many different achievements generally in my life. So I've got one from when I got my undergrad degree. I've got one from when I got my PhD. I've got a couple from two different PhD students. So my first PhD student and then another PhD student bought me a bottle of champagne. So I'm gonna keep it. I've got it from when I got my professorship, that was a little tiny one 'cause it was during the pandemic and so I was on my own and one of my best friends came and put it on [00:19:00] my door step and then retreated an appropriate distance with a party popper. So that was a mini one. And so I always remember that that one's my professorial one 'cause I drank it on my own. Could you start little mini collections of something that you only get when you've got some sort of big achievement? And these don't have to be big, expensive things, right? In fact, often it being something little that kind of accumulates over time can be a really nice way of doing it. Essentially what we're trying to do is you celebrate as the verb that means to recognize and make special. It doesn't have to be shouting about it to other people. If you find the idea of telling other people really uncomfortable, then you know, I think we should probably coach on that. But we can start from these kind of quiet personal celebrations. The other thing is they can be a route to sharing, right? 'cause it's very different matter what you think. You're scrolling LinkedIn and you're saying, I'm happy to announce blah, I'm happy to announce blah, and you're going, yeah, whatever. [00:20:00] Anyway. Or then somebody posts, um, I dunno. Here is a cushion I made to celebrate getting promoted, whatever. It's such a different vibe, right? People are gonna engage with that in a Oh, it's beautiful. You are so clever. Oh, and by the way, congrats on that. It's gonna change the nature of the interaction. Others of you, you might be like, I'm not crafty. I don't make things. That's okay. Let's make it memorable in other ways. So maybe you love hiking. Okay. Maybe every time you get a big celebration in your life, paper, published, promotion, whatever, you hike a new hill. So some new summit that you haven't been up to before, maybe you take with you the paper. So you have a photo of yourself at the top of a hill with the paper pointing at it grinning like a maniac. So that you've got a memory and a photo where you are doing something very you to celebrate it. Maybe, you know, you're a canoeist, you go to a new river every time you get published or something. Anything that makes it memorable, [00:21:00] recognizable, where you are commemorating it in that way. Now, I also mentioned that the other really important reason to celebrate is so that we can properly learn from the experience, and this is not to take the joy out of it, right? I don't want you to be like, oh, this is a learning experience. But we dissect our fails. What should I have done beforehand to avoid this? What should I have done during it? How could I have been better? How can I be less crap next time? I want you to bring that level of forensic analysis, but I want you to bring it positively to your wins. This is something I do in the coaching sessions all the time, and I can see people get uncomfortable with it because it feels weird to talk about it, but I promise it is super, super rewarding and that is I want you, when you have had a paper published, when you have got promoted, anything like that, I want you to ask yourself, what strengths did I bring? Then enabled this to happen. If it helps you feel less uncomfortable, also [00:22:00] express gratitude for the support that you got. But I want at least as much time on what am I grateful that I did? What strengths did I bring to this? What difficulties did I overcome in order to achieve this? What can I take from this to move forward? Okay, and I want that. What can I take from this to move forward to be two different elements? Firstly, how can I replicate what I did? So where did I use my strengths? Where did I overcome difficulties in a way that I liked and in a way that feels sustainable so that I can replicate that? How can I basically reinforce that this is evidence that I know how to do this thing? The second bit that I want you to do though is I also want you to notice where you achieve this in ways that aren't how you want to achieve things in future, because some of us are still a little bit stuck in that I achieved it, but I beat myself up, I [00:23:00] worked hours that weren't sustainable, but I hated that were unhealthy, I thought in unhealthy ways, et cetera, et cetera. Right? So we also get to learn from, if I achieved it in ways that aren't how I want to achieve things in future, what can I learn from those lessons? Okay, but don't go straight to that. Strengths first. Okay. Strengths first. What you're proud of first. And I want you to talk to somebody else about it or write about it or speak into a voice note recorder about it. Anything that really kind of emphasizes that stuff so that it really reinforces it in your mind. You then, if you have got a kind of planning and review process, like the one that I teach in my membership I want you to insert this into there, okay? I want you to have some notes. These are strengths I used when I achieved my last thing, so these are things I want to do more often, and you can build that into your planning and review process. Finally, and I suspect most of you [00:24:00] are a long way from this, but finally I wanna reiterate the same advice I gave the people who were actually in danger of appearing a bit arrogant, which is we try not to associate our wins with our self-worth. So what I want you to be doing, I want you to be celebrating the wins for the fun of achieving those wins. For the fact it was a challenge and you met the challenge and you made it happen. What we don't want to do is take lessons of, this is evidence I fit in academia. This is evidence I deserve to be here. This is evidence that I am a worthy person, because the downside of that, if you use objective achievement as evidence that you are a worthy person. If you have. A period of time where you have fewer objective achievements, then you are gonna use that as evidence that you are not a worthy person, that you don't deserve to be in academia. You all deserve to be in academia. You are all capable of being in [00:25:00] academia. So we wanna separate those two things out so that we are super happy that this thing's happen. 'cause isn't that fun and exciting and it's out in the world and I'm doing my thing. Yay. And yeah, it showed some of the strengths that I have. But it's not the reason I deserve to be here, and it's not the reason I'm a worthwhile person. All those things, I have intrinsic worth. I don't need to achieve things in order to have intrinsic worth. And so I want you to make sure that when you are celebrating, we're staying in the, I'm celebrating this fun thing that I've put out there that I'm really proud of, not, oh, finally, I'm good enough. Finally, people might believe that I'm enough. Again, if that side is something that you really, really struggle with, then that is a little bit of evidence that maybe you need some coaching and you could consider looking at the membership in the future. My final tip, and this is true for everybody, the best way to feel comfortable about celebrating yourself is to celebrate everybody else at the same volume you celebrate yourself. If we all [00:26:00] celebrate each other's successes, if we all spend more time feeling proud of others, reminding them of their strengths, emphasizing, commemorating, making memorable their achievements, then partly it just makes it such a nicer place to be. And then it also makes it much easier to celebrate our own successes 'cause it all just feels like the same tone, right? We are people who celebrate, so celebrate each other's successes, celebrate your own successes, and let's make academia feel like a much more fun and pleasant place to be making these achievements and making our contributions to the world. I hope that's useful. Let me know what you think. If you have any questions or wanna let me know what you think, you can always reply to my newsletter, or if you're not signed up, you know how to do it. Go to my website, PhD life coach.com. You'll find a sign up for my community button right there on the front and I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you all so much for listening, and I will see you next week.
< THIS EPISODE CONTAINS MASSIVE SPOILERS!! Imposter syndrome is top of my mind at the moment because it’s the focus of my membership this quarter. I’m also utterly obsessed with The Traitors and have been loving the UK Celebrity Traitors which just finished. If you want to hear how the final five (and the winner in particular) made me reflect on imposter syndrome, and hear my tenuous links to an academic context, then check out this episode! If you haven’t seen it, and have no intention of watching it, no worries - you’ll still get some useful insight into overcoming imposter syndrome! Links I refer to in this episode If you liked this episode, you should check out “ eight things PhD students and academics can learn from The Traitors ”. I am apparently obsessed…. Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. I'm so excited because I'm gonna talk about my favorite topic, but I promise I'm going to try and make it relevant to PhD students in surviving academia and all that stuff. As usual, the topic, as some of you will know or suspect at least, is Celebrity Traitors. I am mildly obsessed by like social deduction, reality TV type game. So I'm not so into the sort of let's get married ones, although I have watched those too. Not mocking anyone who watches those, but my favorites are the ones where there's a game, there's a puzzle, there's deceit. They're having to kind of figure each other out. There's challenges and just lots and lots of shenanigans. To give you an example of quite how obsessed I am, when I knew Celebrity Traitors was coming out in October, and I was super excited about it, I rewatched [00:01:00] all series of the UK Traitors, all series of Australian Traitors, all series of New Zealand and i'm currently on season two of US Traitors and I'd like to emphasize rewatching now. Any of you're like, hang on Vikki. How do you have time to do that? Is 'cause I have them on while I'm doing other things. I'm a TV while cooking TV while cleaning my teeth sort of a girl. Anyway. So suffice to say I'm a little bit obsessed and we were all super excited about Celebrity Traitors here in the UK because whilst many of the people may not be globally famous, international students you may not know who they were, in the UK, this was quite the lineup. This was not yet average. I'm a celebrity, get me outta here, kind of are you really a celebrity kind of vibe. These were proper celebs and it was super, super exciting. It lived up to absolutely everything that I wanted it to be, and to be honest, all the way through, I was like, where's a little tenuous [00:02:00] connection to academia that I can use as an excuse to do another Traitors episode? Because if you haven't seen, oh, you did already do a Traitors episode, a year or two ago when it was series two on in the uk, the Harry and Paul series. Um, so if you haven't checked that out, make sure you check it out. I'll link it in the show notes for you. But I really wanted there to be some tenuous reason for me to talk about traitors on the show, and I had to wait all the way to the finale, not just the actual final, but the spinoff show, Uncloaked actual finale, where they had all the celebrities in a theater like celebrating their finale and blah, blah, blah, and talking about their experience. It took me all the way to there. Then I saw it, and then from there I was just super, super excited and that is what we're gonna talk about today. So first thing before we go any further, big warning, huge spoilers. Huge. So especially if you are not in the UK [00:03:00] and you are gonna watch the Traitors at some point when it comes out in your country or you are not up to date. Massive spoilers. I'm gonna talk about the winner. Um, so winner or winners, um, in case you haven't turned off yet. So if you do not want to know what happens in Celebrity Traitors, you have to save this episode for another day. Short version. Everyone feels like an imposter and it's not true. There you go. That's the short version. You can now leave without having any spoilers. My second request is at the end of this episode, I'm gonna talk about what I'm waiting for next, which is Irish Traitors, which is gonna come out in the UK any minute. We've been promised it in November. I'm super excited. If anyone spoils it for me, I will cry and I dunno what else, but you'll make me sad. So don't please do not spoil it. I'm aware that it has already been broadcast in Ireland. It is probably already been broadcast [00:04:00] in other places. I am super in love with the host, they're amazing, and I'm just really, really excited about it. So please don't, spoil it, please. Thank you. Appreciate it. Right. So what was the moment? The moment was when the winner, alan Carr was being interviewed have immediately after he left the castle, so this wasn't like live in the finale. He was being interviewed immediately after he'd left the castle as he had just won. Celebrity Traitors and Ed Gamble was asking him about his experience and whether he thought that he was gonna win, and he conceded that um, I love this so much, that apparently his agent had booked jobs for him during the second week of the filming because they'd all assumed that he would be knocked out by then. And so he was starting to hint at this sense that he hadn't expected to do well. You know, this sense that he wasn't gonna be good at it and things and my little brain was like, Ooh, [00:05:00] imposter syndrome. Um. But then it went further and he said, and I've got it. Actually, I recorded it into my voice recorder so I have a transcript. It's possible I have too much time on my hands. Go with it. It's all good. And he said when Stephen Fry talks, or David, now David is, David Olusoga, who's an academic, a celebrity academic who is on the show and got into the final five. He says, I go quiet. I'm not worthy. I'm not intelligent, but I've learned maybe sometimes you do need to question stand up for yourself. And Ed said, well I think you winning has absolutely proved that and Alan said "idiots can do well". Some of you'll know that I'm not considering, I am actively going to do merch that you guys are gonna be able to buy. Um, idiots can, well might be one of the greats. 'cause I feel like it kind. Sums up what we all need to hear sometimes. And when I heard this, my heart just went out [00:06:00] to him. So for context, those of you who are not based in the uk, I have no idea how globally famous Alan Carr is. Probably not at all 'cause I get the vibe he's very British, but he's. Like big, big, chat show, host, presenter, um, you know, he would be hosting like Saturday Night Live or something like that if he was in the US. He's hilarious. He is also one of the guest judges on RuPaul's Drag Race. He's had tons of different series of his own. He is a big name. This is not a sort of C list celebrity. And the fact that when he's then around other celebrities and particularly celebrities who are well known for being very intelligent, he is having this sense that he doesn't have anything to say. And if you've seen it, he actually like almost shrinks in on himself. He's like shoulders round and his head goes down. He almost like folds in like, I don't have anything to say when these intelligent people are there. And I just found it fascinating. This man's job is [00:07:00] talking to other people as well as being a comedian in his own right. And it just really struck me that if someone like Alan Carr can feel like that, then anyone can feel like that. It actually reminded me of another story, which is not quite imposter syndrome, but it made me laugh. And if there are any parents out there, I feel like you'll appreciate this. I saw Michelle Obama being interviewed about her daughters and the interviewer said something like, they must be so grateful to have all your wise advice and help. You know, that's such a privilege to have you as a parent. And she just started laughing and was like, are you kidding? She's like they think I'm an idiot. They don't listen to a word I say. I try and give them advice and they laugh. And then I say, people pay me millions of dollars for my advice. And they're like, yes, shut up, mom. And I'm just like, I'm done. This is great. If my stepchildren don't take me seriously, it's fine. Michelle Obama's kids don't take her [00:08:00] seriously either. Loved it. Anyway so it just really struck me that imposter syndrome can hit anybody at all. And from there I thought, you know what, Vik, you could probably stretch just that thought to a whole episode. But is there anything else in the Traitors that has something to say about imposter syndrome? And it made me reflect on the final five. So those of you familiar with Traitors, the people that get through to the final really are kind of treated as winners in their own right? Yeah. It's the next step to be the one who wins the money. But if you make it to the final five, then that means you've done. All the missions you've seen off like 15, 20 other people, you are to all extents and purposes a winner. And particularly in this celebrity version where, you know, they were doing it for the money was for charity, not for themselves. Then really what these people win is exposure. If they are in need of further exposure in their career and things like that. Making it to the Final Five really, really counts as winning in this context. [00:09:00] And I looked at the photos of the people who made it to the final five -more spoilers coming up- and it just struck me what a range of people it was. What different approaches they had taken to the game. How personalitily, is that a word? I don't think that's a word. How personalitily and demographically they were very different from each other. Yet somehow they had all succeeded in their own way and they all seem to adore each other. That's one of the things, if any of you don't watch The Traitors 'cause you don't like the nastiness watch this version, 'cause they're gorge. They all adore each other. It didn't make them bad at finding traitors. It had to be said, but they just all adore each other. So we had Alan Carr, the eventual winner who is giggling [00:10:00] and blushing. The dude couldn't even say, I am a faithful with a straight face without starting giggling yet somehow he still got away with it and won the entire competition. Okay. He is bumbling. He is hilarious. He is the exact opposite of cool, calm and collected, yet he was the one that carried out, well, two proper murders in plain sight, plus another one where they met on the chess board overnight. Obviously, as you do, and so managed to show that somebody who appears to be just a silly guy who's got no idea what's going on, actually was running the entire show under the surface. Then we had Cat, Cat Burns the singer, who was the other traitor, and I think Cat Burns was pretty famous around amongst young people, amongst the youth , but she's not a household name by any stretch until now. [00:11:00] She is now very much a household name, and Cat Burns is literally the opposite of in terms of demeanor of Alan Carr. She is calm, she is cool. She keeps her head. She can kind of fly under the radar a little bit, but people really like her so they don't criticize her for it. She talked quite a lot about being autistic and about feeling socially awkward and needing time to herself and not being sure whether she was gonna be able to play these sorts of social deduction games when she usually finds people exhausting. And she came all the way to the final and she did absolutely amazing. And in fact, pretty much everyone who came out beforehand had nothing but amazing things to say about how she was, the type of person she was and what an incredible job she was doing as a traitor. In fact, she was many people's pick for the [00:12:00] winner. Then we had David Olusoga, who is an academic. He's not, again, not super famous before this obviously a celebrity, but not super, super famous before this, he's got various TV shows where he talks about clever history related things, and he is. cool, calm and collected, but in a very different way from Cat. Cat is cool as well, right? She's a musician, she's young, she's fashionable, she's very, very on trend, um, in the sorts of way where she doesn't follow trends. She kind of sets trends. David is very intellectual, very deep thinking. He's quite quiet. He wasn't as insightful as he thought he was gonna be. I think it's fair to say, but he got this far, right, and he was one of those people who really took his time to think things through often. I think we think that cleverness is kind of a, quickness is the first one to understand something. He was much more of a, I need to [00:13:00] carefully ponder this kind of man, and he was amazing. He was probably I don't know my age, a little bit older, that kind of vibe. Lots of sort of slightly older people in this, which I think really, really added to the sense that this program was for absolutely everybody. So he took a very, very different route to the final. He'd been kind of accused a couple of times, but then managed to talk his way out of it. Again, not in a smarmy way, just in a kind of calm and considered way, presenting sort of feasible alternatives. He got a little bit of luck with the draw. That's a whole other story that we don't have time for, but it's good. So he, again, a third really different character. And then we meet Nick Mohamed, who I adore at a level that is probably slightly unhealthy. You may have seen him in Ted Lasso. You may have seen him on Task Master. He is glorious. I adore him. He is how somebody [00:14:00] manages to be like the sweetest politest way. The only way I can describe it is his mom must be so proud of him. In the very first thing before even the challenges started, they had to dig for a shield in their own grave, and he went and dug Celia's grave for her because, he didn't want her to have to do her own digging. So he looked for a shield for Celia before he'd even found his own shield. This is the type of man he is. He's then ludicrously talented. You know, he just, oh, I play the violin. Who knew? He's a comedian, he's a magician. He's in the magic circle. When it got to the puzzle bits, he was just like, just let me, and did all the puzzles and like two seconds flat and. At the same time, he's just gloriously sweet and kind and humble, and I adore him, but he's very different from all of the others. Super intelligent like the others, but just very sort of personable and [00:15:00] understated. All about the personal relationships. Really insightful. It still baffles me that he messed it up at the final stage. He got almost too clever at the final stage. But he has just secured himself as the nation's darling. I think it's fair to say. And then finally last but certainly not least, was Joe Marla, huge rugby player, he's got big beard, he's massive, he's got cauliflower ears. He's hilarious. He is the king of the kind of one-liner put down that he has just enough twinkle in his eye to get away with. And he played the game completely differently to any of them. He was, as you would probably expect, unbelievably competitive, unbelievably determined, really insightful, could totally spot not just what people were doing, but also what the people who made the program were likely to have chosen. So he came up with a whole big dog theory. And he really [00:16:00] went hard on several of the traitors, and in fact, he knew who the traitors were. He just got super unlucky at the end. But he was a very, very different person. And it was just looking at physically, they're very different people. Joe Marler is a man mountain, Nick Hamed is miniature . You see them together, they're a whole range of ethnicities. They range of genders, they range of sexualities, and you see them all together and you're like, there's no way. How can you have one competition that all five of these very different people essentially excel at and where they all love each other and where they've all got completely different strengths that they're bringing to it? And yet they all belong in something really important. And I think that's really important for us all to recognize 'cause I think sometimes we have this conception that there's a particular way you have to be to succeed in [00:17:00] academia and that there's a particular type of behavior, the particular personality style, a particular intellect style, a particular demographic, sometimes too, and. I think this just really personified in that setting something that I see in academia, which is that that is simply not true. There are things that are traditionally more rewarded. That is for sure, and I'm gonna talk about some unconscious bias stuff in a minute, because this imperfect in traitors or in academia. But there is a whole variety of ways to succeed. There is a whole variety of personalities right at the very top of academia. There is a whole variety of personalities and skills that are succeeding and doing really well in academia. Remembering that what we really need to be is the best version of ourselves and bring that to academia, I think can be a great way of reducing and in time overcoming, our imposter syndrome. I get to [00:18:00] be the very best version of myself and bring that to academia. Now even amongst those that didn't make it to the top, so let's count the final five as like the professoriate, right? That they made full professor, they got tenure. That's the equivalent. There was a whole load of other people that participated in the game, participated in my academia metaphor, who didn't make it to the top, but had incredibly successful games. I mean, no one is going to forget Charlotte Church on her knees, in her white dress digging the grave, trying to look for shield covering herself in mud. Plunging her head into the well to listen to the music. If anybody threw themselves into that game, it was Charlotte Church. Everyone will remember her for that. Everyone will love her for that. Even though she didn't go all the way to the final five, she had a hugely successful game. Celia Imrie, I [00:19:00] said to my sister, what would I do if I told you this before? I can't remember. Might, should have done anyway, going with it. I said to my sister, Celia Imrie got called a queen and an icon in traces, and I said, what do I need to do to be called a queen and an icon? And the Lindsay said, I think it's too late already, Vikki, which I was hurt by. But Celia Imrie is, she's got 30 years on me, I reckon in 30 years I can do something to be called a queen and an icon. Anyway, I digress. Celia Imrie, amazing actress, known for being like super posh, super amazing actress friends with all my Judy Dench and all that lot like literally girl dreams. Who knew she was hilarious? Who knew that she was going to absolutely carry it there. We had a castle full of comedians and Celia Imrie was the one that on multiple occasions made people laugh more than anything else. If you're not familiar with the fart incident, you need to check it out online 'cause I'm not even gonna describe it 'cause it's too [00:20:00] good. And you need to see the video version if you haven't already. Um. My favorite was her honesty and authenticity. When it came, they were doing quizzes about who was the most, you know, who's leader of the pack and all that stuff. And they said, who's the most two-faced? And this is the one no one wants to receive. And Celia just shoved her hand up and goes, oh, I think that's me. I tell people I like them all the time, and I don't really, just the best thing I've ever heard in my entire life. I love her. She didn't win. She should have win. She was robbed. Alan, I'm not forgiving you for that one. But she went in there with people thinking she was one thing, demonstrating that she was something else and massively, massively winning in a metaphorical sense, the game in the sense that the entire country adores her. And once this goes international, it has already, I'm sure to some extent. Everybody is going to completely adore her and just again, demonstrated a completely different way of [00:21:00] succeeding in this game. Now, was it perfect? I adore the traitors, but it has issues, issues that I believe are not specific to traitors, but that actually reflect the world that we live in, which is that there is a really, really troubling tendency across the entire traitors franchise for the people that are, eliminated initially to be disproportionately people of color, people who are not straight or not cisgender , people with disabilities. Essentially, people who are different in some way to others, and I don't actually believe that in the vast majority of cases that people are consciously saying, I am gonna eliminate the people who are different to me, or I don't want those people here. But what I think is happening, which happens in life as well, is this unconscious bias where if somebody is different to you, you give them less benefit of the [00:22:00] doubt than if they're more similar to you. And I think this is what happens a lot of the time in the traitors is that if somebody, so for example, we've had people who have later told us they have autism things being eliminated first. For example, when if at the beginning of the game you've got very little to go on. Somebody behaving in a way that seems a little odd to you, can be enough reason for them to go. Now in celebrity traitors this had another level to it. 'cause it had a level of celebrity hierarchy to it as well. 'cause I think it's fair to say that whilst it was a way better lineup than any of us anticipated, there was still a range and a range, not just in degrees of famousness but also in terms of who you were famous with. And I think it was apparent that the people who were either slightly less famous or who were more famous to younger people, so people who were famous through YouTube and things like [00:23:00] that went earlier than people that were kind of household multi-generational names. And I think that's mirrored in academia too. I think there is a tendency that if people conform to the what might be considered the sort of norm, I guess, or the historic norm , people who conform more closely to that or people who have hierarchy and prestige on their side are given the benefit of the doubt more, or it's assumed that they fit and therefore these other people who are a little bit different maybe don't fit so much. And I think unfortunately, the same sorts of biases are very much true in academia. This is not the episode for a whole, how to deal with that. Maybe that's an episode I'll do in future. It's something that I'm addressing in the membership at the moment. What to do if people treat you like you're an imposter. I will translate some of that into a future episode. Give you a little glimpse of the sorts of things we do inside the membership. But the [00:24:00] short version is that we don't beat ourselves up for experiencing it. Sometimes we can kind of gaslight ourselves that it's not real. Let's not beat ourselves up. That is evidence of intrinsic biases, unconscious biases in. Academia, there absolutely is. There's evidence of conscious bias in academia, so if you are experiencing it isn't just the figment of your imagination, however, what we do get to choose with support and love 'cause this is not straightforward. We get to choose how and if we internalize that, whether we make that mean that yes, we actually don't belong in academia and how we choose to respond, to what extent we choose to advocate, to what extent we choose to ignore. We get to make those decisions from a intentional place so that we show up as the best versions of ourselves as well. And importantly to recognize how we get support to do that. Because I do not believe that this is something that is for the people who are being discriminated against to solve on their own. These are structural [00:25:00] issues that we all should be trying to reduce. So. Celebrity Traitors is not perfect. Academia is not perfect, but both are settings where a whole variety of different types of people can and do succeed. This has given me the perfect excuse to whitter about Celebrity Traitors to you all. I did a workshop last week. We got talking about Celebrity Traitors in the break. 'Cause it was the day of the final that evening. So at that stage we didn't know who'd won. We talked for so long, I forgot to start the next session and we had to run over. Oops. Anyway. It was super exciting. I hope you enjoyed listening to me squealing. I hope most of it was audible. I'm told that sometimes I'm only audible to dogs when I get excited. I hope all you can hear everything that I wasn't squeaking too badly. I hope you're excited about watching Irish traitors if you are based here in the uk and it is coming out to you soon too. No spoilers. Anybody. Please don't make me [00:26:00] cry. If you have any questions about imposter syndrome, make sure you're on my newsletter. You can just reply to that, ask me questions, and I will answer them in future episodes. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week.
< This week I’m confessing my dirty secrets. Have a listen and compare your screen time to mine! I talk through why I’m unhappy with my current phone usage, why I’m not beating myself and what I’m doing instead. If you’ve ever felt like you can only change by “being more disciplined” or “criticising yourself into wanting it enough” then this is an important episode for you. I might not have a success to report back yet in terms of reducing my phone usage, but I’m feeling very proud of how I’m going about this challenge! Links I refer to in this episode If you liked this episode, you should check out “ how accepting where you are is the first step to getting where you want to be ”. Transcript [00:00:00] I hadn't decided that I was gonna talk about this, but I've decided I'm gonna, I feel like it's something that lots you gonna empathize with and I. I'm gonna tell you some secrets that I'm hoping my mother won't listen to and what I'm gonna do about it. So let's go. Welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast, and I am talking mobile phone usage. I'm recording this on the 3rd of November. It'll be coming to you in what, a week's time? Something like that. So it's a weird time for New Year's resolutions, right? But. I've just, I've reached a point where I have so many things that I want to do and where I really want something to change with my phone use, and I'm gonna share with you today [00:01:00] why that is. I'm gonna share numbers, which makes me want to cry, but I'm going to tell you anyway. I'm gonna share numbers. I'm gonna share my screen time numbers and all that sort of jazz. I'm gonna tell you why I think it's. A problem why I am bringing a lot of compassion to myself. So I'm gonna try and demonstrate how I'm practicing what I preach with all of this stuff. And I'm also gonna tell you what I am doing about it. And whilst I don't believe in sort of external accountability, I do hope that by sharing this with you and potentially updating you on my journey as I go through it, it might be interesting for all of us, so let's crack it out. Let's crack my gorgeous little phone here out which wastes far too much of my time and let's go to screen time. We are going to screen time, see all app. So we'll go week. Why not last week's average, I don't even [00:02:00] wanna say it out loud. Last week's daily average was six hours and 54 minutes. Before that it was 5 44, 6 11. So it's that kind of ballpark of which last week, apparently I spent 12 hours on Instagram. I'm just. Outraged. In fact, when you throw in Facebook as well, it becomes 15 and a half hours. I'm not gonna count WhatsApp, WhatsApp's talking to my friends. Talking to my friends is important. This makes me wanna vomit, genuinely makes me wanna vomit. I am somebody who feels like she has a hundred thousand things she wants to do. There's things I want to do for my business. There's things I want to do for my health. There's hobbies, there's interests, there's friends. And I don't tell myself I'm too busy as much as I used to, but I do tell myself I'm too busy [00:03:00] and I'm doing that, and I'm gonna bring a whole load of self-compassion 'cause I'm feeling the judgment in myself. Even as I talk to you about this today. I'm not unusual, right? I am pretty confident if you guys open up your screen time now, there'll be a whole bunch of you. There'll be a whole bunch of you, probably parents who are going, what, how on earth. And there'll be others of you going, mate, you should see mine. Okay? So I'm well aware there's a whole range of this. I'm also well aware that this isn't by chance, right? These things have been designed specifically to engage us, to draw us in, to keep our eyes on their information so that they get our information and so they can sell us stuff. So I am not holding this up as a me being weak or me being stupid or lazy or any of those things. I genuinely don't make it mean those things about myself. And I [00:04:00] have been quite careful in curating what I look at. So some of you, yeah, I'm sure you've all heard the phrase doom scrolling, and I'm sure a lot of you do engage in it. I do a little tiny bit. So I follow this. Have you seen the, there's, there's a brother and sister on Instagram who are very liberal and their parents are very right wing and they interview them essentially so I do scroll things like that sometimes. I'm not gonna give you links. You can find them if you are going to spend more time online. So I do doom scroll, things like that from time to time. I do look at the news from time to time, but it's mostly not that right. I've quite carefully curated, particularly my Instagram feed, so that it is essentially hobbies that I like and dogs, lots of dogs. The problem is that I'm spending far more hours looking at pictures of dogs than playing with my dog or looking at people doing circus tricks than [00:05:00] practicing my circus tricks or looking at people doing calisthenics than doing my calisthenics or looking at people doing art than doing my art, et cetera. Can you tell, I have a lot of hobbies. You hopefully know that about me already. And so whilst i'm not blaming myself and whilst I'm not kind of beating myself up in a sort of, you're so weak and stupid sort of a way, I do also wanna take control over this because this is not what I want my future self to be like. I wanna be able to do some fun stuff. You know, when I'm, if I'm laying on the sofa, showing my husband cute dog videos, I wanna do that. Sometimes It's cute. We laugh together, we enjoy it. It's fun. But if I'm designing my dream day, my dream day doesn't start with an hour scrolling, and my dream day isn't punctuated by scrolling all the way through the day, and it doesn't end with an hour scrolling. [00:06:00] So that's one big reason. This is not what I want my future to look like. Another reason is I've become increasingly aware of when I grab my phone and I grab my phone when I haven't made a decision about something else. So when it's not clear what else I want to be doing and I grab my phone when something gets difficult. So I do genuinely, you know, I'm being really open with you here, right? Because I think you guys value that. But I think it's useful to know that somebody who gives you lots of advice doesn't have it all figured out. I notice that if I'm saying, oh, should I do this or should I do that? Should I write it like this? Or write it like that? I grab my phone and the only explanation is I'm grabbing my phone to avoid the mild, and it's only mild discomfort [00:07:00] of not knowing what I'm gonna say or not having decided what I'm gonna say or not having decided how I'm gonna do something. And the other thing that scares me is how often I go on my phone to do one thing and then 15 minutes later, get back to what I was doing and realize I never did the thing I intended to do on my, you know, I'm going on my phone to check the weather for tomorrow or something, and I come back 15 minutes later and I've, you know, I've answered something on LinkedIn. I've liked somebody's, whatever, and I've, you know, just double checked my emails for no reason whatsoever. It is just so unintentional, and when I spend so much time talking to you guys about time blocking and being intentional, and I do that stuff right and I'm much, much better at time blocking than I used to be. But those interstitial spaces, those [00:08:00] gaps between the blocks and sometimes in the blocks, I'm not gonna lie, but mostly between those blocks are pretty full of phone time, and I think it becomes a crutch. I think it becomes something to look at, to avoid thinking about anything else. You know, I pull it out in queues. I pull out on the train. I pull out when I just finished driving before I go into the house. I'm told that might be an A DHD thing, right? That trouble with like transitioning from one area to another. And so again, I see that with kind of curiosity rather than judgment, but it does slightly freak me out how, if you ask me how many times I've picked up my phone in the last hour, I wouldn't be able to tell you. I have no idea. Half the time I don't even notice I've done it. I've [00:09:00] decided I want it to change, and I'm a big believer that one of the best ways to make things change is to make it easier for yourself. I used to think that the key was to be better. I just needed to be more disciplined next time. I just needed to be stronger next time. And in reality, I don't think that's true. In reality I think we need to make these things easier, especially when we're up against something that is technically designed to draw you in. And that is, you know, filled with a perfectly curated a load of stuff you're interested in. Of course, we need to make this easier and so I wanted to share with you what I'm gonna try and I'll give you an update and we will see how we go in the future. But the things I'm gonna try, I already got myself a little. I already got myself a Fitbit. Joby. Garmin, that's the word. Which means that if my phone isn't with me, then I [00:10:00] hear it go off 'cause it buzzes on my wrist. And that's helped a little bit, but my phone is still almost always with me. And so I decided that I needed to try something a bit more extreme than that. And I am trying, and I'm telling you right now, ain't doing a review 'cause it hasn't even arrived yet. But I will share, I'm trying one of these Brick joby, the little, little devices where you can tap it and it bricks your phone. You can decide which apps it blocks, and then in order to, um, un brick it, you have to tap it back on the thing. And for me, that is a, it's not a barrier, right? I could just walk back to the brick and unbrick it whenever I wanted. For me, it gives a definitive decision that I'm not using my phone for a period of time, and it is also forcing me to think, encouraging me to think, I should say, encouraging me to [00:11:00] think about when do I actually wanna check my phone because this is one thing in my life where I get a bit all or nothing, and I go, well, I, why would I want to spend any time scrolling? This is ridiculous. It would be stupid to block an hour of my day to scroll, Instagram. Why on earth would I do that? Completely separate from the fact that I usually do that before 7:00 AM. Um, so. What I'm hoping, and the way I'm planning to use it, is to make it so that I'm much more intentional about whether I'm intending to use my phone during that time period or not. I'm not gonna set any automated things. You can set it so it comes on at particular times a day and all that sort of stuff. I'm not going to do that at first. I'm gonna experiment with it a bit, but my intention at the moment is to use it to physically tap, I'm gonna allow WhatsApp still come through 'cause [00:12:00] connecting with my friends is very important to me. That's not the bit that I'm worried about. Spending too much time doing chattering on WhatsApp, that feels worth it to me. I'm gonna block the things that lead to unintentional scrolling. I'm gonna block Facebook. I'm gonna block Instagram. Thank goodness I never started TikTok. Thank goodness Elon ruined Twitter for me. That used to take hours of my life too. But that's gone. I am gonna block Rightmove as well. I'm not moving house guys. I moved house like three years ago. I have a very bad Rightmove habit of just looking at houses that I'm never gonna afford and I don't like covet them. I just make plans as to, oh, I'd put this in there and I'd put this in there and Oh, that wouldn't work 'cause I couldn't possibly not have two studies or whatever. So I'm gonna block Rightmove as well. And I'm gonna try and be really intentional and I'm gonna try and kind of experiment with it. 'cause I can already feel my brain overthinking of well, exactly when will you block it and what exactly when will you not and [00:13:00] dah, dah, dah. I'm gonna try and be experimental with it. And the other thing I'm gonna be really clear about, and this is the bit that I'm naturally very good at, is what do I want to do with that time? Because I think it's one thing to tell yourself to stop doing something, but you also have to decide what you are going to do with that time, and I am really excited to actually go a lot more analog. So often what I do is I'm looking on Instagram for inspiration to do some fun art or crafts or something. Well, I've got a ton of art books. I've got a brain, I've got a ton of art materials. I don't need a phone to do that. I watch people doing circus tutorials. Well, I've got a load of circus toys. I know some stuff. I've got some books. I've got friends who do this. I can. You know, I can figure out that stuff. Calisthenics, I don't need, I don't need some guy off the internet telling me how to do pushups. I have been physically active my entire life. I have a [00:14:00] PhD in sport and exercise sciences, which was, it wasn't specific to that. I used to teach anatomy for God's sake. I know how to do this stuff. I know how to broadly, not at specialist level, whatever. I know how to broadly structure exercise programs. I know what I need to be doing. I need to actually be doing it. I tag loads of healthy videos and then I spend so much time scrolling, I eat toast. It's craziness. I have a load of recipe books, I can use them, and so my goal is to swap my screen time for actually specifically using stuff I have already, and this is where, other than buying the Brick, it kind of fits into this sort of less spending thing as well, right? This kind of being more sustainable. So my intention with it is to use this as a way to be [00:15:00] more present, as a way to use the stuff I've got and to actually do the things rather than watch people do the things. The other reason, and this actually directly relates to you lot, and I'm not gonna tell you the details, but on Friday I decided that I wanted a strategy day. I wanted to really think about my business and what I was gonna do next and how I would serve you guys next and what that would look like and everything. And I decided that I needed to get away from it all. And one of the joys about being your own boss is that you can decide to do whatever you want. And so I booked myself into a very lovely spa for the day. And I took a notebook and a pen and I designed and then printed out some reflective questions. And so in this spa, they don't let you take care, or at least they discourage you strongly from taking your phone into the spa itself. So I locked my phone in the locker for the whole [00:16:00] day and I took my notebook and a pen, and I scribbled so many notes. I nearly finished my entire notebook, of ideas, of things that I think would help you guys. Things I want to do over the next year or two, ways I want to support the community, a whole load of freeways. That I want to support the community. I'm going to say. So many ideas about so many things, and because I have a coach too, I discuss them with my coach tonight and we've narrowed them down and I have a plan and you guys are gonna get to hear about them soon. But let's just say getting a little bit more analog and getting a little bit more connected and being more intentional and stuff like that might be coming your way in the PhD Life Coach world. So keep a little eye out. You'll hear more in the new year. But it just really reinforced to me that my brain's got some quite good stuff in it if I [00:17:00] stop spending hours watching a lady's shrimp mantis called Ludo, he's so cute. I'm gonna miss Ludo. I am gonna still have to check in on how Ludo's doing. But anyway. If I spent less time filling my eyeballs with things like that, or why apparently skinny jeans are now coming back in again, I'm too confused, looking at those things. If I spend less time doing those things, my brain actually comes up with a lot of good ideas and insight and clarity and energy. So yeah, this is my plan and I'm trying it now because as my coach always recommends Karin Nordin who I've recommended before, um, now is the perfect time to practice New Year's resolutions. So I haven't decided. I might have a screen time goal next year. I don't know. I haven't decided yet, but now I'm gonna practice and I'm gonna see what's useful and I'm gonna see, [00:18:00] okay, if I'm not gonna wake up and scroll for too long. What am I gonna do instead? What works well? Do I wanna get up and work? Do I wanna get up and exercise? Do I wanna get up and chill out? What do I wanna do? I'm not sure, but I'm gonna experiment and I'm gonna see what happens when I'm not just filling my brain with whatever the machine sends my way. Lemme know whether this resonated with you or not. I wasn't really intending to talk about it, like I say, but it was been top of my mind, and so I thought I would share it with you guys instead. If you have already been on this sort of journey, message me. I am often, I say, you know, I'm not looking for tips and whatever, but particularly if you've ever used Brick and you've got suggestions as to how to set it. The only sort of advice I'm not interested in is don't use Brick. It's a waste of money. Or don't do that. Do this instead. I've bought it now, I've bought it and I'm going to experiment with it. So I don't want to hear that [00:19:00] advice. But if any of you've got tips about setting it up, tips about how you've used it, other ways that you've reduced your phone use, uh, let me know because I intend to really give this a massive shot and keep you guys in the loop about what I've been spending my brain and energy and intention doing when I haven't been doing that. So let's see I hope as well as hearing a podcast about phone use, I hope you are also hearing the tone that I'm speaking not just to myself, but about this. I'm not trying to fix myself. I'm not criticizing myself for being where I'm at, and this is unusual, right? I used to, but I'm really not. I'm curious. About how I'm gonna do it, curious about how it's gonna work out. I'm feeling creative [00:20:00] about what I'm gonna try and what I'm gonna do instead. I'm feeling enthusiastic, and enthusiastic is a really big value for me. I'm feeling really enthusiastic about trying this, and I'm open to kind of collaboration and interest and all those sorts of things from other people too, so that I can explore options and I'm pretty confident that at some point I'm gonna, you know, scramble downstairs in the middle of the night 'cause I'm desperate for my fix and un brick my phone or whatever. I'm sure it'll go wrong at some point, but that's okay. I'm not gonna make that mean anything about myself either. And so hopefully hearing me work this through with you like this, as you can tell. I mean, this is even less scripted than usual. Um, hopefully hearing me work it through like this might help you think about how you could address some of the things you're trying to change in your lives. We don't have to be more disciplined. We don't have to criticize ourselves until we have to do it. [00:21:00] I just think, I think being kind to ourselves, thinking how we can make it easier and seeing what happens. Being optimistic about the possibilities is such a more fun way to do this. I'm gonna keep you posted. Let me know if you have been inspired or if you have any advice for me. Thank you all so much for listening, and I'll see you next week.
< If you’re bored of reading people’s “I’m happy to announce…” posts on LinkedIn, where they only seem to celebrate big wins like “I got a new job” or “my paper’s published”, then this episode is for you. I’ll tell you why big wins aren’t as motivating as they could be, why we should look out for tiny wins, and why sometimes the sillier the win, the better! Join my tiny win revolution and share your silliest wins today! Post on LinkedIn or Instagram, tag me, and use the hashtag #tinywins, and I’ll pick my favourite post in November 2025 and give you a free 30 min coaching session! Links I refer to in this episode If you liked this episode, you should check out “ why we should be more proud of ourselves and how to do it ”. Transcript [00:00:00] Hi everyone, and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. Now where I am in South Cambridge here. Autumn has hit. It is gray. I'm looking outta my patio windows over there. It's drizzly, it's gray. The clocks have already changed and so it is dark really early, and frankly, it's all feeling a bit murky now. I'm not someone who gets massively affected by winter. I use it as an excuse to kind of cozy up and do more inside hobbies and things like that, but. It is tough to stay positive when it's a bit murky. Now, I know I've got listeners all over the world. Some of you might be struggling with other things. I have Australian clients who are moaning about the heat. That's legitimate too. All fair. But however you are feeling this November, I think we all need a little bit of a boost. A boost to kind of end this year strong so that we are not sort of just dripping into the end of the calendar year. And I [00:01:00] think that boost comes from celebrating wins. Now you might listen to that and say, I don't have any wins. There are no wins. Or you might listen to that and say you've been spending too much time on LinkedIn, where everyone is happy to announce whatever it is they're happy to announce. Okay? That's not what we're talking about today. We are not gonna be talking about celebrating wins, like finishing your PhD or getting a paper accepted or getting a job. These are all legitimate to celebrate, right? Let's do it. But that's not what we're talking about today. Today we are gonna be thinking about celebrating tiny wins, so tiny that they seem utterly inconsequential to anybody except you, but they feel like a win for you. And these are my favorite sorts of wins. So today we are gonna be thinking about why big wins aren't all there cracked up to be, why they're not sufficient to keep us motivated and engaged with our PhDs and even our lives, [00:02:00] frankly. And why celebrating Tiny Wins is a much. Much better idea. I'm also gonna finish 'cause I'm feeling generous. I'm gonna finish with a bit of a challenge for you. I'm gonna tell you what I am gonna be trying to do throughout November of 2025. If you're listening to this live, and if you want to join me, you can enter a prize draw where you can win a one-on-one 30 minute coaching session with me completely for free. So make sure you listen to the end so you find out how to enter. So, first of all, let's clear up what's wrong with celebrating big wins. And the first thing to say is. There's nothing wrong with celebrating big wins. If you have big things happen, I want you to celebrate them. In fact, in the membership, one of the things I do is really help people how to celebrate big wins. That sounds really silly, but often we just sort of go, yay, that's nice, and don't feel quite as excited as we thought we would, and we don't really know how to go about celebrating it. So that's something I teach separately. Maybe I'll do a podcast on that at some point. But the problem with big wins [00:03:00] is firstly, they only happen from time to time. Right? It's not like we're waking up every day going, Ooh, another papers accepted happy days. These things happen every few months at best, right? They can feel really few and far between and that means that they're not enough to kind of sustain us on a day-to-day basis. Another issue with only celebrating big wins is that the joy of celebrating a big win never lasts as long as we think it's going to. So often people tell me, oh, I'll feel more confident once I've got my first publication. I'll feel better once I've got a full draft of my thesis. I'll feel better once I've got my PhD. But what actually happens is once we have achieved that thing, that thing we've been striving for, for ages, that thing that we've been telling ourselves will make everything feel better. What actually happens is we generally take it for granted pretty quickly. We often [00:04:00] discount it in some way. Oh, I was lucky. Oh, not many other people applied. Oh, it's a lower rank journal. Oh, my supervisor helped me loads all that stuff. Right? We discount it because it's somehow not in line with our perception of ourselves. So sometimes it's actually more comfortable to discount it than it is to accept, actually, maybe I am capable of doing things . So we take it for granted. We often discount it, and because we are. Ambitious, interesting, curious people. We are usually pretty fixated on the next thing pretty quickly. In fact, there's a book, I'll link it in the show notes. There's a book called The Gap and the Gain, which I think I've talked about before, where it talks about how people are especially highly educated, highly intelligent people like you lot, tend to look at the gap between where they are now and where they want to be, much more often than the gain IE where they are now compared to where they used to be. And only [00:05:00] celebrating big wins is real reason for that. You'll find you're happy for a day or two, and then you are looking to the next thing. Another reason why only celebrating big wins is not great is because. A big win often doesn't actually generate any momentum. A big win often comes with a bit of a crash afterwards. So if it's getting a paper published or something like that, often you are submitting your thesis is a big one. Often you've had this really big push of effort to get it done. You get it done, and then whilst you're celebrating, there is also this sort of energy and motivation crash afterwards where it's actually hard to start the next thing. It is almost like, I love reading, right? And it's almost like when I read an amazing book, it always feels a bit at the end of like effort to start the next book. 'cause I loved that book and all I had to do was pick it up and just get straight back into it sort of thing. And starting, even just starting reading a new book feels like a bit of effort and I [00:06:00] often have a little bit of a lag after a good book, before I start the next one. Now, when it's stuff that you are actually creating, that's even more pronounced. And so these big wins are wonderful and we all want them, right? But they don't necessarily generate men momentum to do the next things. So I am a massive fan instead of tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny wins. And when I say tiny, I mean. Tiny, tiny, tiny. And in fact, when we do our quarterly review, so in the membership, we always do a planning session at the beginning of our three month period together and a review session at the end, one of the things that I encourage them to do is share the smallest wins they can think of. Things that feel unbelievably stupid, unbelievably tiny, and specific to you but somehow are really important to [00:07:00] you. An example that I always give when I'm getting people to do this is. Literally, every time I put my electric toothbrush on a charger, I'm like checking me out being a functioning adult. Look at that. Now, for those of you who just don't even think about putting an electric toothbrush on a charger, you just do it. You'll be like, uh, what? Why? Why would you celebrate that? I am somebody who has spent three, four months probably at times, brushing my teeth with a electric charger that is not charged. So it's essentially just a chunky manual toothbrush because every time I look at it, I go, oh, I should charge that. Clean my teeth, put it down, don't charge it. Now that hasn't happened since I've been married 'cause my husband's an absolute superstar and if he notices it needs charging, he does it. But I still, if I clean my teeth and then notice the little red light and I go, I'm going charge it, I put it on the [00:08:00] charger. Look at me. I dunno why I break into Geri Halliwell there. That's not a reference that will resonate with many of you. Anybody old enough to remember? Look at me by Geri Halliwell. It's a pop classic. Anyway. Focus in Vikki Toothbrushes. That wasn't the point. Tiny, tiny wins is the point. Yours could be anything. My husband loves Bin Day. This could make him sound very strange. I promise. He's adorable. He loves bin day. It's so he's, it's so satisfying. You just put the bin out and they take it away and you got an empty bin. It's so satisfying, and it sounds silly, but I bet the vast majority of you go, oh, gotta put the bin out. He goes, it's bin day. I'm gonna put the bin out and off he goes, right? These, celebrating these tiny wins, especially when they're really specific to you and the things that you find hard, they give you a boost way more than big wins. When we decide that we are gonna celebrate [00:09:00] tiny wins, what it does is it makes us look for those tiny wins. And I wanna be really clear, this is not gratitude. So when we're talking about wins, we are not thinking about the things that we're so lucky to have in our lives. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of evidence that that's really useful too. But I want this to be things you've done specifically. So not, I'm so grateful my partner did this is, I'm so lucky to have a warm house or whatever. No, nor that, sir. The stuff that you've actually. Done. And when we decide we're gonna celebrate those things, we start noticing the tiny things that we do for ourselves. We're slightly more likely to do some of those. I charge my toothbrush much more regularly now 'cause I know I'm gonna have a little celebration when I do it. We're much more likely to repeat them and it reinforces the sense that you are someone who does these things, that you are someone who has tiny wins. So you are much more likely to go into the next thing with that energy as well. I'm gonna give you some more [00:10:00] examples. So over here I've got my chat document from. So in the sessions that we run in the membership, everyone's in the chat, chattering with each other, sharing their ideas and thoughts. So we had things like, I replied to an email I was anxious about without overthinking it. Um. I asked people in my shared office to keep the chatter down a little bit, which I found really difficult. I'm proud, um, for following through. Um, somebody said I ordered a bunch of candles and stuff in advance the other day, said that I have birthday presents sorted for anyone whose birthday's coming up. Anybody who struggles like she and I do with remembering birthdays and so on. Genius. Love it. Somebody else found the changing rooms in their new place of work so that they could cycle to work. Um, somebody called five utility providers in one day 'cause they were trying to sort out house stuff, which I think is amazing. Somebody celebrated spending more time with their cats. Somebody celebrated actually spending the full two minutes cleaning their teeth rather than cutting it off early. Lots of things and some of these things you'll be like, [00:11:00] well, I always clean my teeth for two minutes. That's fine. That one's not for you, but for other people, that's huge. And the point is we celebrate the ones that are relevant to us. What I love when I do this with the members, is it also sort of normalizes finding small things hard because if we celebrate when we achieve small things, that kind of implicitly tells us that these aren't things that we should just be able to do as normal adults. It normalizes, the fact that actually some of these hard things are hard for people. Some of these tiny things are hard for people but they are worthy of our celebration, and we feel so much better when we do it. It also makes the people around you feel better because suddenly they can celebrate their tiny things. People always sort of pause a little bit when I ask for tiny celebrations, but then once some come up in the chat, people start noticing quite how tiny they are. For you, it might be things like taking a bag to [00:12:00] the charity shop that has been in the boot of your car for six months. That'd be, I think that's a medium sized win. That's not even a tiny win, but things like that, right? It can be. I opened the document that I'm meant to be writing, that I've been putting off opening for the last two weeks. I opened it and looked to what I needed to do. It can be as simple as that. So this can be life stuff, this can be PhD stuff, whatever it is. It doesn't matter. We are gonna be spending November and hopefully going forwards, celebrating our tiny, tiny wins. So my commitment to you, I have decided. So you may have noticed I don't do much on Instagram. I'm at the PhD life Coach, if you wanna follow me. I don't do loads. Um, I have a kind of fixed, um, like, what's it called, the posts. God, I sound like such a grownup. The posts the main really bit. I have like a fixed one of those, but I do use stories, right? So my commitment is that for the month of November, 2025, I am gonna try and post at least once a day, a [00:13:00] tiny win. I'm gonna say what the win is. I may say why it's important, who knows? And i'm gonna use the hashtag tiny PhD wins. I know hashtags is not really a thing now, but it makes it easy for me to find stuff. I'm also gonna post some posts on LinkedIn, sharing my tiny wins, asking for other people's tiny wins. If you wanna join me in this tiny win revolution and have the potential to win a one-to-one coaching session with me, what I want you to do is either follow me on LinkedIn, look out for those posts, and share your tiny wins when I post or share in your own Instagram stories or reels, tag me and use the hashtag tiny PhD wins. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pick my favorite tiny wins. Okay, so the way you are gonna stand out, is it by being something that is so tiny or just really cute that you've done it, or that really resonates with me because it's a tiny win that I would find [00:14:00] difficult too, or that is something that we wouldn't normally share, but that I can see is a big deal. Anything like that? I am gonna pick my favorite and my favorite will get a one-to-one coaching session at the beginning of December at a time that works for you. We'll do 30 minutes on whatever PhD type topic you want. I do have another sneaky reason for doing this, and I'm gonna be open about it and I'm gonna ask for your help. That is my podcast is pretty amazing. I think there is so much really, really good content on it. I keep hearing from you guys how useful you find the podcast, how much things have changed for you, how you know you're using it all already, da, da, da. I want it to get to more people. It's already getting to a lot of people. I'm somewhere in the 125,000 download area now. I love that. Which is amazing and super exciting. But there are a lot more PhD students in the world. There are a lot more [00:15:00] academics in the world and I would love for more of them to find and listen to and find my podcast useful. So I'm partly doing this 'cause I want us all to share oh, tiny wins. 'cause I think it'll be super fun. I'm also doing it because I want people to find my podcast. So anything you can do that also helps share your favorite episodes or anything like that, please, please do. Tell your universities about it. Tell them to link to it on their virtual learning environment or whatever it might be. Right? It's all, the podcast stuff is all free. It will always be free. So please do help me share that. But let's share these tiny wins. So make sure you're following me on Instagram at the PhD life coach, so that you will see my silly stories, and you can share yours. If you share them, I will repost them on my stories and everything. So let's have a tiny win revolution and start celebrating all the little things that actually make our days feel so much better and [00:16:00] get the stuff done that we want to do. Thank you all so much for listening, and I will see you next week.
< Sometimes it can feel like the only thing that matters is whether you are “on track” or not. We measure our self-worth in progress, we report to our supervisors about where we are against our plans, and the only answer we can think of to “how’s it going?” is “busy”. In this episode I talk about why you are so much more than a Gantt chart and how believing that can change the way we interact with our supervisors, our friends and families and, most importantly, how we treat ourselves. This is perfect for anyone who is fed up of feeling behind all the time. Links I refer to in this episode If you liked this episode, you should check out “ how to cope with annoying comments at Christmas ” (even if it’s not Christmas!) Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast and this week's topic, I'm gonna tell you the truth. I hadn't planned anything for this episode and I, I was kind of working towards my launch and I'd cunningly planned out which episodes I was gonna talk about when in the run up to the launch, which was last week, as you'll remember. And I then realized I hadn't planned today. I was in this quite unusual position. I'm getting quite better at kind of planning all these things ahead. I was in this unusual position of sitting there going, Hmm, I need to record a podcast. I wonder what to talk about and my brain throws out 47 million things as usual, and I start getting in my head a little bit about what would be most useful, what haven't I spoke about for a while, you know, what will be the thing that they really need that will really help them right now? And then I reminded myself of the most important thing in everything [00:01:00] I do, which is the students that I work with. And so I thought back to the coaching I'd done literally yesterday, so I had two different coaching sessions yesterday. I run them at different time zones, so they worked for people all around the world, had two coaching sessions, and I thought, what was particularly interesting. What was particularly universal? What got everybody going wild in the chat going, oh my goodness, this is me too. This is me too. And a couple of different things sprung to mind. And as I pondered those things, I realized that they were all part of the same problem. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is kind of true for almost everything that I coach on. And a little phrase sprung into my head, and that little [00:02:00] phrase became the name of this episode, which is that you are more than a Gantt chart. So in case you're not familiar, a Gantt charts are those graph things that kind of show where you'll be by when during this time block i'm gonna work on this stuff until October, and then in October till November I'll be doing this stuff and so on. And they're a crucial part of project planning, right? But people get really stressed out by them because they get really stressed out by how on earth am I meant to know how I'm gonna do things, in what order, and how fast and whatever. And then they get really stressed out by being behind. So I coached somebody who'd had a period of illness during the quarter and was beating herself up about being behind the curve as she put it. I coached somebody else who was, finding it really difficult. She was very much at the end of her PhD and people kept asking her how it was going and when she'd be finished, and she was finding those questions really hard to answer because she felt like she kept saying, oh, [00:03:00] next month. Next month. And they were like, hang on, you said that last time. And she was really judging herself about that. And then I looked at my podcast episodes, right? If you guys are familiar with the podcast, you'll know this. But for everybody else, I've got like a hundred and something. I don't even know how many 'cause I do them in seasons, but like 150 probably episodes at the moment. And in my little podcast host thingy, I can rank them by most popular. And the two most popular are two of the very, very early ones, which is kind of understandable. You know, gotta love a thorough PhD student. Going back to the beginning with the, I going to listen to them all attitude. So I kind of get that. But then after that, which are the most popular? How to plan your academic writing, how to read academic papers more quickly, how to get ahead when you are behind, how to make your week more effective. What to do if you feel stuck. They're all about progress. They're all about sticking to your plans and smashing through and making [00:04:00] progress. Now, I'm not gonna tell you not to listen to these episodes. They're really good episodes. Make yourself a little list, go listen. But today I want to talk about why I think it's so important to remember that you are so much more than a ganja, and I'm gonna have three sort of demonstrations of this. One about why it's important for your self-worth. One about why it's important for your interaction with your supervisors, and one about why it's important with your interactions with your friends and loved ones. Okay? So let's go. Why you are so much more than your Gantt chart. So let's think about the first one, how you think about yourself, not just in terms of kind of self-worth, but also in terms of imposter syndrome, which is what we're focusing on in the membership this quarter. And in terms of actually enjoying this PhD process that you're putting yourselves through, that you leapt on into enthusiastically. And [00:05:00] when we solely think of ourselves as somebody who is on track or not on track, somebody who is where they're meant to be in their Ganttt chart or not, where they're meant to be in their Ganttt chart. Or their Ganttt chart is in a drawer over there somewhere that they haven't looked at for four months because they know they're not on track, and therefore they don't even want to look at it anymore. If that's you, I get it. Okay. I used to do that too. In fact, I'll tell you, I'll tell you why I'm feeling particularly good about this at the moment, so I have a wonderful coach called Karen Nordin, who I've waxed lyrical about many, many times on the podcast. If you don't follow her already, you should. She is at Karen Nordin, N-O-R-D-I-N, on Instagram. She's a behavior change expert. She's got a PhD. She's brilliant. Love her, and, i'm in her change academy and one of the things that I set myself as a goal this year, which she set herself too, actually, is 3 million steps. And when that breaks down, [00:06:00] it breaks down to like 8,200 a day. Now do not come at me, right? I'm a sports scientist. I know better than anyone that arbitrary numbers, like 10,000 steps are made up by manufacturers of pedometers. Don't come at me, but I know that my walking has dropped off massively, had dropped off massively, certainly since the pandemic, and especially working from home. Right. I spent a lot of time, you guys will see me with this background. I spent a lot of time in this room and I wasn't aiming for any kind of particular arbitrary number, but I wanted to increase it. 3 million steps seemed nice. And then those of you have been around for a while. Well, no. I broke my ankle in June. I was pretty much on track. Not entirely. Certainly wasn't doing it perfectly every day, but I was pretty good. I was pretty much on track and then I broke my ankle and that sucked. And I could have said, I, oh, I'm gonna sack that off, 'cause you [00:07:00] know, I had a six weeks where I was barely walking. I'm gonna sack it off entirely. And I really spent some time, and this is where you can see that I've worked on myself through my own coaching and things, that is exactly what I would've done. I would've either forgotten this existed and not been tracking it at all, which was my usual thing. Or I would decide it was rubbish, decide I couldn't achieve it, and therefore not think about it because it made me feel bad about myself. And this time I thought, you know what? The version of me that I want to be is someone that when things go wrong, I kind of recalibrate, and crack back on. And I don't mean sort of forcing myself to do a hundred million steps in order to try and hit an arbitrary target that's got squished in the middle of the year, but there's no reason I shouldn't be building back up to and then trying to do at least the daily average that I'd been intending.[00:08:00] And so I've actually spent the last few months still tracking my steps, and I don't just mean looking at them in my app. I mean, I have a little Google Sheet with them all in where I can see how many I've done each month and that sort of thing. And actually reflecting on it and learning from it. I've continued doing that even though my June and July stats really annoy me. I am learning to tolerate that because it has meant that I am actually engaging in that walking behavior more than I thought. Now. I'm also diving in on weekends a little bit more, too extra steps and I'm, it's possible I'm gonna put it out there. It's possible I might even hit my 3 million, but that is not the point. The point is that I'm staying with it because I haven't made it mean something terrible about me. Now you might say, yeah, but you had a good reason. But I know lots of you guys had good reasons. The person I coached had a great reason why she was behind and she was still beating herself up for it. When we put our entire [00:09:00] self-worth on, whether we are on track or not, suddenly that's a very fragile place to be, 'cause there's a whole bunch of things that could take you off that track. I went back to, I want to be somebody who walks more than I am at the moment and walks more than I have been for the last few years. And so as I've been able to, I've gone back to that core reason for setting that goal. And this is what I want you to think about. I decided this didn't mean anything about whether I was an undisciplined person, whether I should have pushed myself, whether I should be making up for it now, I didn't mean mean any of that stuff. I just make it made it mean there was a period of time when I wasn't walking as much, but now I can walk more. So let's go. My self-worth as somebody who exercises, somebody who gets outside is unaffected by the fact that I had a blip where I broke my ankle. I want you to really ponder [00:10:00] how does getting behind or not reaching the goals on your Ganttt chart affect the way you think about yourself as an academic? Because if you are somebody who makes that mean that you are maybe not good enough to be here, or that your supervisor will probably be regretting appointing you or that other people are on track and therefore you are not as good as them. If that's you, I get it. I'm here with you. I understand. But I really, really want you to notice that. Notice that you are equating yourself, your self-worth, your ability to do things with some Ganttt chart you decided on. And you don't have to, your self-worth, your abilities are measured by so many other things than just whether you are on time or not. Another reason we know [00:11:00] that to be true. Here's a little bonus for you. Another reason we know that to be true is your Gantt chart, your plan. You might not have a full Gantt chart, but you take the metaphor. Your Ganttt chart was designed by a version of you that didn't know what was gonna happen and didn't know as much about your research as you do now. Often we design these things at the beginning of our PhDs or at the beginning of the academic year. I didn't know I was gonna break my ankle and that wasn't on the Bingo card for 2025. I actually, I actually have a 202 5 Bingo card. That's a story for another episode. I'm sticking to that too. Very exciting. It wasn't on, I didn't put brief ankle tick. When you designed your projects, you didn't know the things that were gonna come up in your personal lives. You didn't know that the piece of equipment in the lab was gonna break. You didn't know how difficult it was to recruit participants. You didn't know that the British Library search engine went down for however long it went down. You didn't know any of these things. You didn't know how long things [00:12:00] take. You put in there. Really have Oh, right. Introduction between middle of January and the beginning of February and went, oh, that's actually way harder than I thought. You are holding yourself against the standard that you set when you knew less. Now, does this mean we should have thrown out the window? No. Plans are meant to inspire action. That is what they're there for. They're there to help us prioritize. They're there to help us make decisions, to force us in some ways to make decisions. But they are also flawed because they are supposition. They are things that are gonna change as we learn more and we experience more. So pinning your self worth to something that was designed when you were less knowledgeable than you are now is simply not fair on you. Please, please don't do it. The second time that you are way more than a Gantt chart is when you're meeting with a supervisor. And I've been talking about this, so over the last quarter in the membership we've been talking about improving your relationship with [00:13:00] your academic supervisor among other things. And one of the things we've talked about is how to have more effective meetings with your supervisors. And one of the biggest problems I see when I talk to my clients is people who have regular meetings, that's great. Love a regular meeting, but who use those predominantly as progress updates. I've done this bit and next I'm going to do that bit, and the supervisor goes, well done. Or maybe you need to hurry up. Or any version in between that. If you are only using those meetings to tell them where you are up to and to then tell them like, commit to for accountability, what you are gonna do next. You are missing so many parts of that interaction. You are more than your Ganttt chart. So what I want you to be using those meetings for are three things. - Moving your actual project forward. -Learning, developing your own learning and understanding,[00:14:00] -and developing a collaborative relationship with your supervisor. Those are the three purposes of any communications, whether it's meetings, emails, whatever you need to move your project forward. You need to develop yourself as an academic, learn more, and you need to build a collaborative relationship with your supervisor. If you are solely updating them on what you have done, what you haven't done, and then making further commitments, you are barely doing any of those things. You are using them as a checkpoint and checkpoints are just not that helpful. So when you think I am more than a Gantt chart, I want you to think what conversation can I have with them that will actually move this project forward? What hurdles are in my way? What am I finding it difficult to make a decision about? What am I worried isn't clear at the moment? How do I get them to help with that? What do I not know how to do? Whether it's about evaluating your own work or actually conducting a particular technique. What do I need to learn in order to move my project forward? Or just in my kind of professional academic [00:15:00] journey? What do I need to learn? How can I get that? And how can I build a collaborative relationship with my supervisor? Now that doesn't mean being friends with your supervisor. Some of you will be, some of you won't be. That's not a prerequisite. But having a collaborative relationship is, and one of the examples of that is if you focus on what's interesting or curious or like unusual or hard to explain in your research, and you have a discussion about that stuff. That's where you are doing the real stuff. That's what your supervisor came into academia to talk about, right? No one became an academic because they love Ganttt charts. If you love Ganttt charts and that's all you wanna do, go be a project manager and you'll be amazing. Trust me, we need people who can run clinical trial unit and keep all this stuff on track. If that's your baby, perfect. There's a billion careers out there for you. But most people didn't come into academia because they love Gantt charts. So if in those meetings instead of saying, oh, I'm, [00:16:00] you know, I said, I'll have done the draft, but I haven't. And then everyone feeling a bit bad about it, if you come into the meeting going I know I said I was gonna have a draft, but I've come across this thing and I just dunno how to explain it. Like in the data, I can see this, this, or in the archive, I can see this, this, or I found these two different arguments and I just can't work out how they fit together because one's saying this and one's saying that, and you know, and then suddenly you are having an intellectual discussion. That's what we wanna be doing. That's what we wanna spend our meeting times, doing, not updating a project manager about why we are not where we said we'd be. Okay. So that's the second reason. We are more than a Ganttt up because it helps us to have more effective meetings and communications with our supervisors if we remember all the things we are on top of that. We're an academic conducting a piece of research. We're a learner, we're a human being. If we remember those things, meetings so much better. Then the third sort of [00:17:00] circumstance that I want you to remember, your more than a Gantt, chart, is when your friends and family ask you how it's going. Now, I have a whole episode on this, which has got a title that slightly puts people off. It's called How to Cope With Annoying Comments at Christmas. There's nothing specific about Christmas. I might change the title of it at some point but it is about why it's so triggering when somebody asks us, how's it going? When are you gonna finish? What are you gonna do after your PhD? In fact, I'm just gonna tell you a story. So in my membership, they people come on for one-to-one coaching, right? They appear next to each other, but then in the chat they're all like cheering each other on sharing their experiences. If you're not watching YouTube. I'm doing like typey typey hands at the moment next to my face. Dunno why. Anyway, go with it. Um and somebody said, you should produce cards, Vikki, that just say, do not ask how my PhD is going. Give me money or food. And I'm just like, you know what? I think I can make a fortune selling those. And then when somebody asks you just [00:18:00] hand over, gimme money or food. Anyway, I have advice beyond that, but. When somebody asks you how something's going, if you are thinking of yourself solely as a Ganttt chart, that your worth is only if you're up to date on your Ganttt chart, then suddenly it's like, oh no. They wanna know when I'm finished and I dunno when I'm gonna finish 'cause this has happened and I thought I'd be finished already and I'm not. And all this drama spins off. Right? But it doesn't have to because you are more than a Gantt chart. What that means is we can remember a, as human beings, we are allowed to not share our heartache with anyone we don't wanna share our heartache with, which is, this is Mama Vikki, giving you full permission to lie. Okay. If somebody says, how's your PhD going? Your PhD's going crappy and you can't be asked to get into it because you don't like this person, or because you can't be bothered to explain or in a public place and you don't wanna cry, you can just say, fine. You can say fine. Great. Thanks for asking. How are things with you? You do not owe everybody [00:19:00] your truth. I'm not saying hide it. I'm not saying lie about it like because it's something shameful. You don't owe everyone your truth. You can choose what you share with who. So first thing, if you can't be bothered, just lie about it. Second thing though, is to ask yourself, what is that person actually interested in beyond me and my Ganttt chart? Because if it's a fellow researcher, they're probably interested in your actual findings. They're probably not interested in the timelines. So they're prob when they're saying, how's it going? They don't wanna hear, oh, I've handed in my results section on time, but I'm a little behind on my discussion. They don't wanna hear that they wanna know what are you studying, what have you just found out? What's the new data showing? What have you just uncovered? What's the new thought that you are grappling with right now? They wanna know that stuff and if they're your friends and family, they might wanna know that stuff, depends on your friends and family, but they definitely wanna know, are you enjoying it? Are you enthused at the moment? What are you finding overwhelming? Which bits do you like? Which bits [00:20:00] don't you like? They wanna know that stuff. They're not there to check up your positioning on your Ganttt chart. They're asking how it's going. So you get to decide to recognize I'm a human being who is way more than a Ganttt chart, which bit of that is this person interested in? And you can share that bit with them. So those are my reasons, my three situations where I think it's super important for you to remember that you are so much more than a Gantt chart. I wanna finish by saying this is no shade to Gantt charts. I think it's actually really useful not just to decide when you are gonna have done things by, but the most important part of a Ganttt chart is to notice where you've got conflicts and where you're trying to do too many things in a single block of time. So I actually love a Gantt chart because I think deciding what things you are doing in a period of time and what things you are not doing during a period of [00:21:00] time is a really important part of prioritization. I know prioritization is something we'll struggle with. That's a topic for another day. But a Gantt chart helps you to think those things through. It helps you see where you've got three bars all happening in the same month, and assess whether that's plausible or not. So this is no shade to Ganttt charts. I love you Gantt charts. You're not perfect, but you can be very useful. But you are so much more. So when you're listening to this on a Monday morning, you're thinking, oh my goodness, I'm already behind. I want you, in fact, I might even, should I make a sticker? I think we need stickers. Let me know. Reply to, if you're on my newsletter, reply to the email that you'll get about this podcast and tell me that you wanna buy a sticker that says, I'm more than a Gantt chart. Um, we are gonna do it. Merch is definitely coming. I hope you find today useful. I hope it reminds you quite how much more you have to offer this academic life and how I want you to be focusing on all of those things, not just on the extent of your progress. Academia is not a productivity wheel, even [00:22:00] if it feels like that sometimes, even if the sector feels like that is the only thing it cares about. We are here to do important interesting research and to enjoy the process and to love working with other clever people who are interested in the same things. So let's focus on that stuff and let our Ganttt charts just sit over there as one of many tools we use to make that all happen. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week.
< In this episode, I talk with Gabriela, a student in my PhD Life Coach membership. She is taking a few weeks off to get married and is struggling with getting distracted, worried that she’ll feel guilty while she’s away, and that she’ll dread coming back. Listen as we work through ways to address these challenges. Whether you are taking a big break like Gabriela, or you struggle to switch off even for the weekend, this episode will help you! You can also hear more about what it’s like being a student in my membership. Links I refer to in this episode If you like listening to coaching episodes, you might like this conversation with final year student Swagata , about overcoming overwhelm and overwork in the last few months of her PhD. Transcript Vikki: [00:00:00] I'm just jumping on here quickly to give you an update before this episode even starts. So today I am talking with Gabriela, who is a student in the PhD life coach membership at the moment, and she has a lot on her mind at the moment. You are gonna hear all about it in this episode, but I also wanted to give you a sneaky preview before we start the whole story. So Gabriela was preparing for some time away from her PhD for reasons that you'll hear about, and the day before she left, she put a message into the Slack channel. So we have a Slack channel for all members. She put a message into the Slack channel was saying, "hi all. This is just a quick message to let you know that I've officially sent the most upToDate draft to my supervisor today, and while it might not be as completed as I'd hoped for, I am incredibly proud that I've been able to send it on time and without compromising my non-negotiables. I'm ever so grateful to Vikki and my coworking lot. Whether you came once or you are a regular, these sessions are one of the best part of my resubmission period, and that is something I would never have thought of saying six months ago. I will miss you guys and [00:01:00] see you all in six weeks." So if you wanna know where she's off to and what challenges she was overcoming in order to get there, you've gotta listen to this episode and if at the end of this episode you're like, oh my goodness, I need some of this help too, then you are in luck. If you are listening live, the PhD Life Coach membership is open for new clients this week, so this is going out on the 20th of October, 2025, and that's a Monday. You can join between now and Friday. So if you wanna be part of that community, if you wanna be getting this sort of support so that you can achieve your goals the same way Gabriela has then go to the PhD life coach.com, click on the membership and you can sign up straight away. If you are listening to this at some other time, don't worry. We open once a quarter. You are always welcome in, so go and check it and I'll hopefully see you in the membership soon. Hope you enjoy today's episode. Gabriela is amazing. You will love her. Vikki: Hi everyone, and welcome to their PhD Life Coach podcast and we have another coaching episode this week. Now many of you will [00:02:00] know that I often ask for volunteers to come on the podcast to be coached about something that is useful and relevant for them at the moment, but they might also be relevant for my listeners. And often I give that opportunity to people who I don't work with in any other context. But today is a special, special occasion because today I am chatting with Gabriela, who is one of my PhD life coach membership students. So, hi Gabriela. Welcome. Gabriela: Vikki, thanks so much for having me. Vikki: No problem. It is a pleasure. Those of you who don't know, my PhD life Coach membership is a quarterly membership program where students get access to a ton of coaching resources, online resources, communities and coworking opportunities as well. And Gabriela is in for her second quarter now. So we have worked together for, what's that, four, four and a bit months, something like that and so I know her background quite well, but what we're [00:03:00] gonna do today is you'll give everyone a little bit of context just a brief story of where you are at at the moment and what you want some coaching on today. And then we'll go at this as though it was a one-to-one coaching session like we do in our group sessions. Except you get a bit longer because we're on the podcast. Okay? Gabriela: Awesome. Vikki: So tell people a little bit about where you are at at the moment. Gabriela: Right. So I had the dreaded sentence by every PhD student. I had my Viva last November and my PhD was deemed passable, so my Viva was accepted and I passed my Viva. However, I got resubmission and in my institution, resubmission means that you have to take a year long basically for your corrections, and they are more than major corrections, which means that I have to go back to labs, reanalyze my data, entirely rewrite my literature review, and I [00:04:00] have to resubmit it. It's basically like I'll be submitting first time, but this time I'm not allowed to have any other outcome, but minor corrections, PhD, and fail or fail. Gabriela: So this was absolutely not on the cards. I have done my. PhD since 2021. So I'm at on my like five years. It's a very long time. I had two months of a bit of a break to decide what I wanted to do, and at the end of that break I joined a membership. And one of the first things we talked about with Vikki was to make a decision. So I've made a decision that for some unknown reason, I'm going to go for it for another year. And so here I am however life keeps going, and I didn't want to stop plans, which I have already put in motion. It happens that I'm getting married, during the time we're recording, this is going to be less than three weeks. And [00:05:00] today I was hoping that we could talk about how to engage with these big life events, which are so important to us, and in my case, leads to a whole other, opportunities within my family life. And yet do it while we're in the PhD system and we are during our program, especially when we have this feeling of like lack of closure before we move on with our life. So I was hoping that at this stage I'm going to be done and dusted. My PhD is going to be submitted or at least resubmit it. But I just, life happens this way and I am still here. I have some stuff done. I've got deadline before my break for the marriage. I've got some deadlines I have to hit. But then I'm basically off for month and a half. And what I worry about is that while I'm going to be during my honeymoon, I'm going to basically like [00:06:00] thinking about it, and I'm not gonna be able to immerse myself completely knowing that when I come back, I have to drop into this mayhem I left behind. Vikki: Yeah. Perfect. Thank you. And I think. For people listening, you may not be in the exact same situation. You may still be pre Viva. You may not have something like a wedding and a big honeymoon and things happening, but I think so often people have this sort of parallel things happening in their personal lives, and particularly this idea of wanting to take time away without it getting spoiled by thoughts of the PhD, without it being super stressful before you go and afterwards I think is really, really relevant to, to lots of people. So yes, excited to chat this through with you today. Vikki: Before we do though, just because when you say time of recording, this is three weeks before your wedding, which is very, very exciting and the membership are looking forward to getting photos. Vikki: You will be [00:07:00] our second wedding actually. But this is also actually gonna come out just before the membership opens up again to other people. So you talked about making a decision and things like that. I thought it would be useful, just give a little bit of background as to why you decided to join the membership. What was it that sort of, you hoped you would get? Gabriela: So this is very out of character for me because I am very much so just get on with it. I'm going to deal with it on my own terms, um, and kind of don't bother other people. Just move on with your life but I was thinking to myself this way, I've done it my way and it didn't work my way. Gabriela: And the supervision and support I got from my institution was lacking for multitudes of reason, I decided not to blame anyone. I just wanted to find another way of doing things. And I've been actually directed [00:08:00] to an achievement coach in my institution first, and we started working together and I was like, do you know what? Gabriela: This is really good, but I'm kind of still feeling lonely within my cohort who moved on or they don't experience the same struggles, or they are in a completely different journey. So for example, they're being wildly published or they've got a massive grant or whatever. And I needed someone to maybe validate my feelings a little bit, maybe to find like this camaraderieship. Gabriela: So my institution was, uh, running this monthly updates on Vikki's like free workshops she was doing and still doing, and I was like, do you know what? I've seen her before on one of the conferences. I think that she was actually straight to the point and not really like, fluffy about some stuff and like, just believe in yourself. It's all gonna [00:09:00] be good. So I was like, she seems like she seems like the right person to do it. And I gave it a shot and I submitted like a little form if I can join the wait listers. I've done another meeting with Vikki and I was like, after those two meetings, I really felt like something progressed within me, even not with with my PhD within me. Gabriela: I kind of found myself again and kind of be like, oh, okay, so it's okay that I feel this way. It's been such, I know it's like incredible, right? It's okay to feel the emotions you're feeling, but I just think that the way you said it to me for the first time, it's like, it's okay. I just felt at home and I decided to, to, to progress with it and I found my community and, um, you mentioned coworking sessions. Gabriela: They're the ones which are like the community spirit is really there. You're not alone. You can, you can say, oh, the software really doesn't work, or my Word document is just keeps [00:10:00] closing on me and I'm losing stuff and, and you know, we cry and laugh and meme together. Vikki: And just to really clarify for everybody and just to give you the credit that you deserve, the co-working sessions, there's only two official co-working sessions per month that I run. The rest are all entirely led by my members, of which Gabriela is one of my super, like, super organized, super doing loads of them person. So they are community led and I actually really like that because it means that they are that bit more informal space. They are a bit more, you guys set them up when you need them, when you want them, use them however, and I know different people do different length work blocks and all of that, and so you get to kind of really, really adapt them. Vikki: The reason I wanted to touch on that is partly 'cause I think it's useful for listeners to hear from somebody who's made a decision that they might be trying to make at the moment. But I think also this notion that you have chosen really, really [00:11:00] intentionally that "No, no, I do want to do this". 'cause when we met, you were in a bit of a, I want to do it, but I don't want to do it and so I should do it, but I'm not really doing it. Vikki: And you were in that kind of slightly annoying, I think you were annoyed by it in Betweeny place where Gabriela: a hundred percent Vikki: it's like, Ugh, I've gotta do this thing, but I'm not doing the thing. And this is just feels very stuck. Tell me a little bit about the progress that you've made since then, because I think understanding how you have already changed so much will really help you to then believe that we can change this next bit. Gabriela: Um, so the first thing I've done, I kind of divided my. Months, according to quarters, um, when I've joined you, you, you do this quarter kind of setup and it really [00:12:00] works for me, uh, first because I'm, I'm a person who likes planning. I'm a person who loves to have agenda, all of this detailed stuff. Gabriela: And I felt like if I'm going to have these smaller goals I'm trying to achieve throughout the next year , it's going to feel a little bit more achievable. So that was my first. That was my first, like big progress I've made because before then I was just looking at this clump of stuff I have to make with no particular direction and no particular plan. Gabriela: So that was the first, Vikki: and, and you didn't wanna open your laptop, right? I don't wanna call you out. I remember our very, you were like, I did not open my laptop. Gabriela: Yeah. 150%. I was there. I looked at it like I had to change my setup because I physically couldn't bring myself to sit in a place I received the news that I am not deemed submittable or whatever. Gabriela: So I changed my setup and I [00:13:00] was not opening my laptop. So that is a good, the good thing to to, to mention, I just started to follow the plan. It's, it's not, it's not been super smooth by the way. Like, I, I wanted to submit basically like two chapters a quarter to say like, yeah, kind of two chapters a quarter or at least a draft of each chapter, um, uh, each quarter. Gabriela: So. It's not been exactly this way. But I've came back to dreaded labs, which was a huge mental block, uh, I experienced, uh, which we also coached on with Vikki on one of the group coaching. I came back, I asked for help. I continuously update my supervisor about my progress, which was not the case in my previous submission. Even if it's a small email to say I'm still working on my data analysis, you're going to have something by the end of next week. I'm still doing this every single Friday. So she's got kind of clear progress [00:14:00] report. I rewrote my literature review. It's patchy and I still have to add stuff, but I received feedback from my supervisor in the beginning of August, and she's pretty happy with how the things are going. Gabriela: It's more streamlined, which was one of the biggest confusion during my viva. It was actually what my PhD's about, because I had to combine three failed experiments and three failed routes into one big PhD and now I just focused on the one which is the closest to, to being a good project. So that has been done. I submitted recently my methods and yay, it's patchy again. And I was dreading it. And I also asked Vikki for a bit of an advice. I, I, I've done it. I just sent it. We'll see what they're going to say. So yeah, and I drafted my results and I drafted my discussion, but this is something which I'm going to have to really, really work on, on the other side of honeymoon and, [00:15:00] and my marriage break. Vikki: Perfect. And I know that feels like that's not central to the stuff you asked a coach on today. Mm-hmm. But one of the things that academics, PhD students, everybody, at every level has a habit of doing is taking for granted the bits you have done and immediately looking to the next bits. And what that does is it gives us this perpetual sense of not getting anywhere where in reality, and as you say, we've talked about this in group coaching before and I know the community's super proud of you too. You've made an enormous progress both in terms of the amount of work you've done and in terms of the difference in how you're showing up to do it. Gabriela: Thank you. Vikki: In this four months. Gabriela: Yeah. Vikki: And taking a minute just to go, I've come a really long way is actually a really lovely way to then look forward. [00:16:00] Yeah, because we get to say, okay, if I go back to past Gabriela who was considering whether to join the membership or not and told her where I am now, I think she'd be super, super proud. Gabriela: I think that I wasn't even imagining it if I have to be absolutely honest. I, I've, you know, I've done some like soul searching on the beginning of this year where I want to really achieve and where I want to be, and it's, yeah, I, I have to be honest with you, in, in the beginning of my, of the year, I was just hoping to not approach it from the PhD level I was thinking of approach it from an MFI level and submit, um, anything by July to have it over with. But once I started working within like membership and I started working with my new supervisor, I've seen that [00:17:00] maybe it's still worth to, to put forward the PhD and just see what they say basically. Vikki: Perfect. So tell me a bit more about what you are worrying about. You've got this three weeks, then you've got just over a month, isn't it? And then you're back. Yeah. So tell me more about your concerns. Gabriela: I think it's comes from two places. One concern is that I'm not going to be fully present, fully immersed in this one, once in a lifetime event. It's just not fair towards me and it's not fair towards my family. It's not to, you know, then my husband is not going to be fair towards him. And then the second, like streamline of worry is that I have so much to do when I have to come back, you know? I'm gonna come back and I'm not expecting from myself to like immediately jump into it and just produce, produce, produce, which means that I'm going to have a little bit of downtime, which means that I'm going to have to readjust my schedule again and kind of get back into the swing of things [00:18:00] and then I basically have like, I dunno, let's say four weeks I have to complete. So I'm trying to be conscious of the future Gabriela, and I'm trying to be conscious of the Gabriela who's going to enjoy her marriage and her and her honeymoon, and I'm trying to make the both of them happy with what I'm doing right now, but what it does to me currently is kind of just this overwhelm that I'm not doing enough and that I'm not focusing enough, and that maybe my work is not up the up to standard, which I was holding myself to. That's, that's basically where I'm, where I'm at right now. Um, and I'm trying to remind myself that I can only do what I can within the time I have. Like, it just become like my mantra, basically. But it is this, it, this is this s nagging feeling, which I can't switch off. So that's, that's kind of part of my problem. Vikki: Perfect. And like I said, I think this is really, really sort of adaptable to lots of different [00:19:00] situations that listeners will be in. So we've got these kind of three time periods, haven't we? We've got now to the wedding. We've got the wedding and honeymoon chunk and then we've got this period of time afterwards and you sort of slightly divided that. And I think it's actually quite sensible into a bit of a kind of gear back up as it were. Vikki: If people are watching on YouTube, I'm making like ramping up things with my hands. I'm aware that doesn't work on podcast. So you, you may well have it, you're not gonna come back. Land your airplane, wake up the next day and then go, right, seven hours work, let's go, kind of thing. So we're gonna have a little bit of a ramp up period, but essentially we've got these three blocks of time. And I love this notion. I love that you are using this notion of thinking about what does the Gabriela who's on her wedding and honeymoon need, and what does the Gabriela, when you come back need? The one I think you're neglecting a little bit at the moment is, what does Gabriela right now need? Okay, so let's have a little bit of a [00:20:00] think about for these three weeks. What do you need from yourself, from other people? Gabriela: From myself, I need to keep showing up, but while I am actually physically present for my work blocks, I need to be able to focus on the work rather than daydream or go into my little tangents about like, I don't know, research some stuff for the wedding and, and all of this. Gabriela: Yeah, all of this around because I have actually blocked some time in between my working blocks to finalize plans, and I have a week before the wedding to like completely immerse myself in this, like I'm getting married feeling. I need to be able to, rather than putting another, I don't know, another day of work on myself, I need to really make these hours, which I'm putting [00:21:00] currently work for me and what I need from others. And I'm definitely happy with what my supervisor is providing me with right now. And I've got additional support through university and through the community. . I just would like people to keep showing up for the coworking sessions. So I've got, so I've got someone physically with me going through it. Um, so yeah, I think, I think that's, that's mainly what I would say I, I need. Vikki: Okay. Cool. So this notion of being there and being focused while you're working, tell me a bit more. What are you expecting that to look like? Gabriela: More being in the actual PhD mode and less being, I'm gonna call it scatterbrain, but [00:22:00] it's maybe unkind words to use to my towards myself. I just feel like I have never experienced fully immersive like focus flow right now. Mm-hmm. It's like there's always this sparks which are coming off this focus flow and I am immediately drawn to them because they are more attractive and they're something I'm, I'm authentically and purely excited about. Vikki: Yeah. Gabriela: While the work I'm putting in my PhD requires from me to hype myself up. Yeah, it's just the focus. I can be incredibly focused on stuff towards, you know, the, the Happy Life event, but when it comes to PhD, I feel like it's kind of draining my energy more. Um, so I would, I would love to be able to submit next Friday this really nice chunk of literature review, which is not perfect, not edited, not grammar, spell [00:23:00] checks, nothing. Just content. It exists. That's what I want. Okay. It exists. Vikki: Cool. So I'm gonna take you in for a little bit more detail. So you want to turn up, I've got a 90 minute coworking session where I'm gonna work on my thesis. You wanna get straight in? You wanna work for 90 minutes and use all that time? Gabriela: Yes. Yeah. Vikki: What if that's not gonna happen? Gabriela: When it's not going to happen, then I'm sitting a little bit longer in front of my computer and hoping that, maybe if I run out of things to look at or run out of physical energy to focus on more than one thing, I will just be able to focus on this, on this one thing, which is my literature review and open, open mind. Vikki: But what if you don't need to? [00:24:00] Take it, take me through. So you're, you're working, you, you're like, right. This is a section of my lit review i've got to write, we are writing, I'm doing the keyboard fingers for people who can't see me. I'm writing away, I think, "Ooh, ribbons on the chairs. That would be nice. What color ribbons might I have on my chairs?" Vikki: And you shoot over here and you get onto Google and you start looking at different color ribbons. Okay. Gabriela: That's pretty much it. Vikki: Yeah. Okay. So what do you then do? How long does it take you to realize that you are doing something that's not what you were intending? Gabriela: Pretty much immediately. Vikki: Um, okay, so you notice. It is not that 15 minutes later you're suddenly like, oh my goodness, I'm looking at wedding things. What am I doing? It's pretty much immediately, Gabriela: it's pretty much immediately. Vikki: Okay, now that's good. Okay. Because often people don't necessarily even notice what they're doing and the [00:25:00] fact that you are already using time blocking helps with that because you know that this is a time period that you've put aside for writing and you are recognizing very quickly that you are not writing. Might not sound like a big thing, but that is actually a big thing. So you've noticed. What's happening in your head while you are looking at these ribbons over here? Vikki: It's basically like Gabriela: this little, this little finger, which is like, you should really not be doing this. You know that you're going to have time to do it. I don't know, like on Saturday or on Sunday, and right now it's the time you've got yourself into position. And mental space to actually be doing this. And because I work around my fiance, that means that I have got no one else in the house to care for, or, I dunno not, I'm not being distracted [00:26:00] basically by anything else but my brain. So I feel this, all of this comes into my head when I'm looking at these ribbons. Vikki: Yeah. Perfect. So you will know. But just for the listeners, we talk a lot in the membership about having the boss version of us who decides what's happening and who makes these decisions. And then the implementer version of us who has to actually do it. So boss you is kind of planning out when they should be working and things and then implementor you is going, Ooh, ribbons. And then it sounds as though boss Gabriela wanders past and goes, hang on a minute, dude. That's not what I put on your schedule. What is implementor you saying in response? How are you kind of justifying that you're carrying on doing it? Gabriela: Okay, so my go-to about the wedding stuff is, this is going to be once in my lifetime. This is like one thing I give myself to being [00:27:00] unreasonably attached to these ribbons. You know, um, because they matter. Yeah. And I know this is so silly, and I probably won't remember the ribbons on the actual day, but at the moment that feels like this is something much more important for my future than, doing my work. Vikki: Perfect. If that's true, why are we not time blocking ribbons or whatever? Gabriela: We are time blocking ribbons. It's just, it's just, when I'm doing my PhD, I always have this feeling that I should be able to do stuff which I want for the wedding. I know this is, you call it a toddler, right? It's kind of like that. Vikki: In a loving and compassionate way. Gabriela: Yeah, but it's true, right? Because it's unreasonable. I'm an adult woman. I shouldn't be like, I just want a candy, so I'm going to eat it before dinner. Like [00:28:00] it's, Vikki: I mean, you're a human being, so we all do that, right? Yeah. Gabriela: Yeah. Vikki: Let's not, I mean, you know, we're teasing you about being a toddler or whatever, but we all do this, okay? There's nothing, we do not need to sit in judgment. Especially when you've got something as huge and exciting as a wedding coming up, right, it is completely understandable that you are very distracted by it. Now, people often ask me. If you don't wanna be like super strict and awful to yourself and be like, no, no, no you must work and you don't wanna be all indulgent and just say, oh, well, doesn't matter. We'll just do the ribbon instead. What's the place in between that? And the place in between that is not shaming yourself for being distracted. The place in between that is reminding yourself what you decided. Okay. It's completely understandable, especially [00:29:00] when you know, you've got cognitively difficult work to do on your PhD. There's a whole bunch of, and I know you've worked on it lots already, so it's a bit better than it was, but there's a whole bunch of negative emotions around the PhD and stuff, and the sense that you shouldn't be having to think about it at the moment, it's not at all surprising that given a choice between sitting in that or sitting in ribbons, that it's much more tempting to be over there. We don't have to beat you up for that. Gabriela: Yeah. Vikki: Okay. What I want you to do, and actually I'm gonna suggest that you look at this on a week by week basis between now and the wedding, is I want the bit of your brain that thinks you need to finish off PhD stuff to get in the same room as the bit of your brain that thinks you should be able to focus entirely on your wedding and look at ribbons whenever you want, and I want you to help them come to a [00:30:00] decision. Because once we've come to a decision about what is genuinely reasonable when I'm being level-headed and compassionate. Compassionate to the me that wants to be excited about my wedding, compassionate to the me that wants to get my PhD to a place so that it's, you know, so it's easier for me when I get back. It's compassionate to all those versions of you. Because you could do either way, you could just say, oh, I'm not doing anything more on my PhD. I'm in full wedding mode for the next three weeks, or you could decide, weddings organized. I'm not gonna faff with anything else, I'm just gonna completely focus on work or any version in between. Gabriela: Yeah. Vikki: What I want you to get to is a place where you've agreed that with yourself. So that then if you are in a PhD block and your brain is going, oh, but I should be able to look at ribbons. You get to go. "Yeah, you can. Between [00:31:00] three and six tonight, I've scheduled you three hours of ribbon time. We agreed. This is PhD time. Come back." Gabriela: I, I see where you're getting at. I think, I think I do remind myself about it, but I think I'm a little bit worn down by how long I've been at it. That's, I think is like something which makes me very moody. Yeah. If I, for, for the lack of better word, it's a moody. Yeah. Yeah. So. I, I worry a lot about the ability to handle myself because I have thoughts that like, oh, when wedding's out of the way and honeymoon's out of the way, and I'm like, super chill about it because I'm, I'm, you know, I'm in this still honeymoon zone and everything's fine. Gabriela: I'm totally going to go back and smash it in the six weeks. [00:32:00] But then I also know that reality of it might look a little bit different. And I'm trying to prepare myself. I don't know if it's a good thing, but I'm trying to prepare myself for, a bit of a, you know, like as you said, downtime. A bit of a disappointing, no, not as much as I wanted to do during day days. Gabriela: Um, and I think what I'm thinking about is this decision making alarm is like. Yeah, it's like even, even even stronger, even harder. Um, and I'm making decision and I'm tired, you know? So that's kind of the circle of Yeah. Circle of weariness I'm at, at currently. Vikki: Yeah. And that's really understandable, right? It's been a really long. You know, it is like getting to the end of a marathon and then being told you've gotta go back again. It's like you, you've got got yourself to the viva and now this is all additional time. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: So it's [00:33:00] understandable, but I think that consideration needs to be in the planning room as well. Gabriela: Yeah. Vikki: So it's like I'm tired of regulating myself at the moment. Yeah. I've got this exciting thing and I'm tired of having to do that too. So then we also start to think, okay. What is actually reasonable to ask of myself at the moment. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: Yeah. How can I make it easier that I don't have to regulate myself quite as much? Gabriela: Yeah. I think you've done, yeah, I think you've hit the nail in the head in here. This regulation is what's exhausting me. That's absolutely it. It's like I'm, I'm parenting myself too much. Vikki: And that's, it is tiring. We need to keep doing it, but we need to be reasonable in what we're asking. Gabriela: Yeah. Vikki: And some of that is gonna be reasonable in terms of how many hours you ask yourself to work for. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: But some of it is also being reasonable [00:34:00] in terms of what level of focus you're expecting. Because I actually think if you could get to a stage where you do some work. And you do go over here and look at some ribbons, and then you notice you're looking at ribbons and you go kind of, okay, no ribbons. We're going back over here. It's all right. We'll do that later. But the fact that you got distracted and you spent 10 minutes looking at ribbons doesn't have to be a big deal. So I'm distracted at the moment, my wedding's coming up and I'm tired of tired regulating myself. Of course, I'm gonna wander off, but that's okay because I can bring myself back too without it adding extra hours. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: This is something that you mentioned before we came on to record, this idea that if you haven't focused enough in one time block, then adding more and more time on the end. And the problem is that means implementor you doesn't believe boss you anymore. 'cause boss you says you need to spend three hours working in your PhD this morning, but actually implementing you turns [00:35:00] it into five hours because you haven't met your required amount of actually being focused or whatever. Gabriela: Yeah. But then I don't believe my implementer me either because they don't do the work within the time allocated to them. It's like a self defeating kind of exchange notoriously between the implementer and the boss. Vikki: Um, so yeah, so, so one of the things I suggest with time blocking is even if you realize I intended to do 90 minutes on my PhD and I've done 15 minutes on my PhD, I recommend you go on to the next time block anyway. If you were then scheduled a break, go take your break. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Vikki: If you were then scheduled time to do wedding organization, go do it. Because if we have this perpetually moving schedule. Where actually if I didn't do [00:36:00] my 90 minutes well enough, then I won't take my break. Then I won't have the time doing my wedding stuff. Then I won't have this other things that I've organized. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: Then it doesn't reinforce the need to do the things when you're intended to do them, because you give yourself the option to do them later. And it means that you almost don't believe that you'll have time to think about the wedding later 'cause often you kind of take that away from yourself if you haven't been good enough. Gabriela: Yeah, I, I think it's, it perpetuates as well in like someone asking me like, oh, you know, how is your day going? And I'm immediately going it like. Oh yeah, it's fine. I'm technically here. I'm technically in front of my computer and technically working on my PhD, but I'm not really doing anything PhD related. And I think even like saying it out loud to someone or like writing it to someone, it also feels, I don't know, like it just [00:37:00] makes it too real. And then I feel like, okay, I really have to put like rubber to the road right now. I have to write it down. But as you said, it's kind of eating away from the time I blocked for something else. And it's just, yeah. Vikki: So I would just, if you set yourself 90 minutes to do your PhD, you are trying to do as much work as you can in that 90 minutes. And if 50 minutes of it was spent getting distracted, okay, but the time block still stops at the end of 90 minutes and you do what you were planning then. Gabriela: Okay. Vikki: Yeah, because it then it does reinforce the kind of, I've actually only got this bit of time. I used to have this conversation a lot with academics who used to work late and work on weekends and things like that too. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: There's nothing that will make you less efficient than knowing you'll make up the time later. Gabriela: Yeah. I, I get, I get what you're saying last, last week, I've. [00:38:00] Kind of bumbled about for most of my week. And then on Friday I had this big block scheduled and then a little bit of like a tiny block on the end of the day, which I usually don't do because I'm kind of a work life balance mastering trying to, at least. Gabriela: So, but I had some Friday evening by myself and I was like, okay, let's do it. And I produced a lot during that time because I felt I had this mindset of like, I didn't work as much as I should or would normally, so I'm going to do it right now. And there was nothing else I would be doing. I just wanna do this. Gabriela: So I get what you're saying with the, the motivation of making up the time, which I already bumbled about. Vikki: I think it's different to say, you know, I'm actually, I'm gonna slot in an extra couple of hours on Friday. Because you know what? There were some bits that I missed and I can smash out a few bits [00:39:00] there. I think that's fine. I think it's the, i'll let this session run a bit longer because I didn't focus as much as I wanted to. You know, I said I was gonna go for a walk, but I didn't really do anything, so I'm not gonna go for a walk. It's that kind of thing I want you to avoid because actually that structure, that sense of I've only got this period of time to do it, is part of what gets us going on the things. Gabriela: It's almost like punishing yourself comes more naturally than rewarding yourself. So you just go into this, um, this self-fulfilling prophecy of, oh, I didn't do it, so I'm gonna do it. So I'm, yeah. Vikki: And it just means you don't trust any of your time blocks anymore. 'cause you don't walk in your walk blocks and you don't chill out in your chill out blocks and you don't, you know, you don't do wedding planning in your wedding blocks. Gabriela: Yeah. So. Do you think that's going to be the thing? Which is going to help me to feel a little bit more immersed in the happy event. Vikki: So this is, so we've really focused so [00:40:00] far on this period, running up into to it. I have one last comment about that and then we'll think about while you're Gabriela: okay. Of course. Vikki: The other thing on this bit, running up to it is I want you to be a little bit more decisive. So what I mean by that is if you are genuinely saying, I had time blocked 90 minutes to do my PhD, but I don't feel like doing my PhD, it's the right decision not to do my PhD, and it's the right decision to look at ribbons, as my little analogy for all things wedding. Vikki: I want you to write that down. Turn off coworking. Go and look a ribbon somewhere else because this half-assed, I'm sort of meant to be working, but I'm not really working, but I'm feeling guilty about the fact I'm not working 'cause I should be working. It's just the worst of all worlds. [00:41:00] I would rather you just left. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: You just said, you know what guys? Brain's not in it, not doing the PhD. I'm gonna go and look at ribbons. Love you all. That's easy. Okay. And go sit on sofa and do it. Okay. Yeah, because at least that way you'll feel like you've had your wedding planning pleasure properly. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Vikki: I'm sitting on the sofa, I've got a hot drink, I've got my laptop. I'm looking at whatever I wanna look at. Yeah. Is when we end up in this neither or space that it's just really unsatisfying. Gabriela: Yeah. 'cause Yeah, of course. 'cause you're not really focused on either of them, so your brain doesn't even register that you're doing it a hundred percent. Vikki: And that doesn't feel like I deserve a wonderful wedding experience. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: That feels like, oh, I'm so useless. I'm still looking at ribbons when I'm meant to be writing. Gabriela: Yeah.[00:42:00] Vikki: I suspect that when push comes to shove, if you say, I need to make an intentional decision about this, I suspect that nine times outta 10 you'll decide to continue with your PhD. Gabriela: Yeah. It's, it's probably a Right. Vikki: Making that conscious decision Gabriela: mm-hmm. Vikki: Is important. Gabriela: It's probably correct assessment because even the physical action of picking myself up and going back downstairs and sitting on the sofa and stuff like that is already, you know, I'm already here so I might as well like do the PhD. So I get what you mean. Vikki: So we've really focused so far on that period running up to the wedding, and it might feel like we've not thought about the others, but actually the exact same principles apply. We get to choose really intentionally what is the kind of, I was gonna say, right, right [00:43:00] is never the right word. 'Cause that implies there's only one version. We get to choose really intentionally what we want that time to look like, okay? Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: And then from there, what we get to do is decide when other thoughts come up. How am I gonna manage that? So I assume that you have a, you have decided that you're not gonna do any PhD work while you're away. Gabriela: That's correct. Vikki: Is that fair? Gabriela: That's, that's correct. Vikki: So, okay, perfect. So what are the worries that you think will come up while you're away if you don't have the fear? Oh, I will find myself starting to do some work. What are you actually worried will happen? Gabriela: I worry about the mindset itself being like, oh, this is awesome. I'm really enjoying it, and I totally deserve it. However, there is this massive chunk of work I could have been doing during that time. Okay. That's what I worry about. Vikki: Okay, perfect. So what we get to do, this is why it's so important to focus on this first [00:44:00] bit. 'Cause the more you can look back on this period, as you know what I did the best I could, the easier everything else is. Even if this doesn't go perfectly, we can still do it, but it's easier if we've done this bit is in that period, you are, I'm gonna tell you now, sorry to be disappointing. You will have those thoughts while you're away. A hundred percent. Yeah. You will have your brain back here thinking about this Gabriela, and what she should have done, and you'll have your brain in the future about what it's gonna be like when you're back. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: Okay. The fact that your brain goes there isn't a problem. What we get to choose is what you say to yourself, how you respond when your brain goes, oh, I should have set myself up better. I've got so much to do when I get back. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: What sorts of things do you think you could say to yourself in that situation? Gabriela: Mm. I think one of the things which I would [00:45:00] try to convince myself of is that I've done things in a short period of time. So even if I think that the work I have waiting for me. Is a a, a big chunk of work, I can still manage to finish it on time. Vikki: Mm-hmm. Gabriela: Um, another thing is that once I come back, I'm going to have more feedback from my supervisor because she's, kindly agree that she's gonna work on my literature review while I'm away so I can have the kind of appropriate direction when I come back. Gabriela: So I'm not going to start from scratch. I'm going to have a nice layout of where I'm going with it. And that I've done the bit I said to myself that I will, because I believe strongly that I'm going to submit that literature review next Friday. So I've done it. Gabriela: And [00:46:00] maybe it's not been as completed as I hoped to be, or maybe I was thinking that I can do even more, but I didn't compromise on stuff, which I really didn't want to compromise on, which is spending time with my family, spending time with fiance, exercising, eating properly, et cetera. Yeah, so I think that's Vikki: perfect. So really reminding ourselves of the things we have done, of the things we're capable of doing, of the support that we've got, is all really, really important part of reminding yourself that this will be okay. I'm gonna offer you a more flippant one that I think is also useful, okay. Which is reminding yourself, this is not my business right now. Vikki: Okay, so what I want is I want you to start by reassuring yourself with exactly the things, you know. I did what I could do beforehand. I trust myself to be able to [00:47:00] handle what's there when I get back, I'm gonna have support, I'm gonna come back to the community. I'm gonna have, you know, all my different bits of support. Vikki: I, I've done hard things before. I want you to reassure yourself with that first. But if your brain is then going, yeah, but you could have done more. But it's still a lot left, which it probably will, right? 'cause we have a tendency to do that. I want you then to switch to maybe, not my business right now. Gabriela: Okay. That's gonna be a hard one. Vikki: Yeah, yeah, I know. But it's a really useful one to practice because the thing with, like logic and reasoning is you can argue with it. Okay. You can say, you know when you offer, yes, but you did everything you could. Yeah, but you didn't do that bit, did you? You know, you can have that little argument with yourself about whether you did enough before you left. You can have that argument with yourself if you allow yourself to about whether you are capable of it when it comes back, and we don't know because, you know, you haven't done it yet. It's still [00:48:00] uncertain. But if we can get to, no idea not my business. My business is to have a wonderful honeymoon. Vikki: Yeah and reminds it's okay that you're stressed about it. Of course you are something, it's gonna happen. But that's future Gabriela's challenge. I trust future Gabriela. She's gonna be great. Now we don't wanna like pressure future Gabriela now by being like, she'll be able to do everything. Let's just dump it all back. We wanna make it as while you are still in the bit where you can influence it. Gabriela: Yeah. Yeah. Vikki: We want you to support her as much as you can. Right. We want you now to be like, how can I make this and clear and straightforward for her to come back to as possible. And we'll talk in the membership about how you can set yourself like a little plan for when you get back so that you're not coming back to a, Ooh, where do I start? So that you kind of send yourself a note in the future, as it were to come back to, we'll go through that in one of the sessions. But when you are on holiday, you can't do anything [00:49:00] about what you did in the past. Gabriela: Yes. Vikki: Yeah. And you've decided you are not gonna do anything to help yourself in the future other than get resting and having a great time. But as in, you're not going to do any of that work. Gabriela: Mm-hmm. Vikki: So it's literally not your responsibility. Gabriela: That's going to be a challenging one, but, um, yeah, I can, I can definitely argue with myself. My then husband might be like, what did I marry into? But Vikki: not my responsibility. Not my responsibility. What am I doing? I'm doing this. My time blocking today says snorkeling, hiking, and then relaxing with my husband. Gabriela: Yes. Yes. That's, that's it. That's, that's exactly it. Isn't it crazy that we're always like, I think PhD is like this one thing which always makes you attached to it so incredibly much. It's not like you're leaving [00:50:00] the office and like, okay guys, see you in two weeks. It's like, it's always with you. It's always. You're always working in the background. Vikki: Yeah, but this is whereby being more intentional. We can actually wrap it up. We can, I want you to go away feeling like may, you know, maybe even you, you write a note to yourself and you seal it in an envelope and you put a bow around it. Vikki: It's like wrapped up, literally wrapped up on my desk for when I get back, and it's gonna have a motivational message in it to tell you that you believe you can do it. It's gonna have some clear instructions at first steps, some expectations, da, da, da. So that you're coming back to something. Yeah. Then you can say, I, I planned for this. Vikki: This is how I've designed my entire year. This is why I invested in the membership. This is what I decided to do, is so that I can have this time. And if it pops up, it doesn't have to be a big drama. Oh no, I'm ruining my my honeymoon by thinking about my PhD. You don't, there's not ruining it, [00:51:00] doesn't matter, but you can just remind yourself, no, no, it's not my business. My business right now is do I want this drink or that drink this food or that food? Gabriela: Okay. That sounds really reasonable when you say it. I might, uh, yeah, I might, I might say it to myself a few times with your voice before. I'm gonna translate this to my voice. Vikki: Well, you can have this on podcast. You can listen to the whole thing. Gabriela: Yay. Vikki: And it will come out probably just about right. I think. Gabriela: Oh, that's amazing. Vikki: Anyway, great. So much. Thank you so much for coming on Gabriela. I really hope that was useful. I think it's something that challenges a lot of people, so, um, I think it's really useful for other people. So thank you for being so open. Gabriela: It's always useful, Vicky, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna lie to you. It's always useful. Vikki: Good. Thank you so much and thank you everyone for listening, and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and [00:52:00] your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.
< When you buy something like a car or a piece of technology, you get a manual - it explains what you need to do routinely to keep the product running well and helps you troubleshoot common issues. Today we consider what would go in YOUR instruction manual - what does it take to keep you as a human being running smoothly during your academic experience and how should we deal with common challenges that come up. I help you identify what should go into your “manual” and how this can help us thrive in our studies and careers. Links I refer to in this episode If you found this episode useful, you might like this episode on what to do if you’re behaving like a toddler ! Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. Now I have a confession to make if you've read the title of this episode. I have a complicated relationship with instruction manuals. You see, half the time, especially if I'm left to my own devices, is like instruction manuals don't exist, right? I'm going to get that bit of kit, whatever it is. We just got a new air fryer 'cause we somehow broke the other one. I'm gonna plug it in. I'm gonna press some buttons. I'm gonna assume that I'm clever enough to figure this stuff out in my little non imposter syndrome anyway, and I'm gonna make it up as I go along and that means there's gonna be a whole load of buttons that I'm never going to use. Hello? Washing machine setting 10. Only one I ever use. That's fine. All good. That's half the time. The other half the time, and this is where somebody else is involved. So my husband has similar opinions about instruction manuals. Just they don't exist, just crack on. However, when he says that, I suddenly [00:01:00] become the instruction Manual dictator. No, no. We have to read the quick start guide, darling. We have to do this properly. I dunno what it is about somebody else behaving the exact same way that I behave, that makes me suddenly want to be little miss organised knickers. But it does. So I have a complicated relationship with instruction manuals. However, when it comes to looking after ourselves and trying to figure out how we are doing this whole life thing. I actually think they're a really, really useful analogy. So today I am gonna be telling you why you need your own instruction manual and like broadly what I think should be in it. If you want more help building one, this is something that we are gonna be doing in quarter four of the PhD Life Coach membership, which if you're listening to this, live opens for new members next week. So check it out if you want more support on this. I also have to [00:02:00] confess that, when I'm recording this, it is the morning after I just watched the first episode of Celebrity Traitors uk. And for those of you who've been around here for a while, you all know I am a big big fan of the traitors. I have been rewatching lots of series in preparation to get myself in the mood ready for celebrity traitors. It has got an amazing cast, so I'm a little bit over excited this morning, so I don't think we're actually gonna refer to the traitors in it at any stage, but I just wanted to warn you that I'm feeling kind of upbeat. It may get mentioned in future episodes. If you haven't seen it, I did do an episode a while ago where it's nine things or 10 things or however many things you could learn from the traitors. So if you're a fan too, make sure you check that out and make sure you're following me on Instagram 'cause I will be wittering pointlessly about traitors in a way that does not relate in any way to PhDs, but will be fun and distracting. So make sure you're following me there if you're not ready. [00:03:00] So right. Focus instruction manuals. That is what we're doing today. Instruction manuals. Why do I think you need an instruction manual? Well, I think we often live our lives the same way that I approach machinery left of my own devices, which is we just kind of start using it. Okay? We're born into these bodies. We grow up, we, you know, we're socialized, we're trained with all those things, and we just sort of go with it, and we don't necessarily often really stop and think what works really well for us, what doesn't? People who listen to podcasts like this and people who engage in memberships like mine and things like that, we often get a little bit more reflective, right? We start thinking, oh, it helps when I do this. It's not so useful when I do that. We sometimes come up with lots of shoulds about what we should be doing, but we don't often take a minute to just stop and kind of condense that into something that is actually useful, right? Because we've all [00:04:00] had these instruction manuals where they're like massive. They've got 47 different languages, which is wonderful, inclusive. Love that, but huge, huge documents, loads and loads of detail loads and loads of stuff that you don't need. We just don't need them, right? What we need is something that actually helps us get started, helps us figure out what we need to do to it regularly and helps us if something goes wrong. Those, to me, are the main things, right? Oh, and where to get further support. So let's say four things. How to get started, how it kind of, how we should help it run day to day troubleshooting and where to get further support. And I actually think those are the four things that we need in instruction manual for ourselves. How to get started of a day or when you start your new project or whatever. What I need to run effectively week to week. You know, 'cause we've all got, are you one of those people I'm gonna. Are you one of these people who's like, never taken the fluff out of your tumble dryer, [00:05:00] or I shouldn't tell you, but a certain, a certain sister of mine never realized you had to empty your hoover. I dunno where she thought it was going. I hope she doesn't listen to this. Led to quite a messy mess in the end. So, lesson learned, you need to empty a Hoover. We need to know those things about ourselves. What do we need for our own basic maintenance? And then troubleshooting can be super useful. 'cause if something goes wrong, it doesn't have to be a massive disaster. As long as we know, do I need to turn it off, turn it back on again. Do I need to change something? Are there one or two things I could check to see what's going on? If we know what to do to troubleshoot in these situations, then it doesn't have to be a massive drama, we just follow those steps, and if we know where to go for further support, not only is that useful if we need it, but it's also just kind of reassuring to know it's there, right? That if all else fails, we've got something to fall back on. So what I wanna do in today's episode is think through what each of those [00:06:00] sections might look like for a human being, a researcher, someone like us, if we were to write an instruction manual for ourself, now who is this manual for? Before we get into the details, I want us to really consider who this manual is for , because you might be thinking, Ooh, I can give this to my supervisor. I can give this to my partner, I can give this to my friend, or whatever, and I'm gonna say maybe, maybe. Okay. We don't know necessarily how they'll respond to that. Some of you might know that they'd love it. There are specific circumstances, which I'll tell you about in a second, where I really think we should be sharing these things , but the main person that this instruction manual is for is you. If one person needs to know how to operate this human being, that is you, it's you, that sort of self understanding, that kind of clarity of thought will really help you navigate all the things that are happening in your life at the moment. So this, this manual is primarily for you.[00:07:00] The one time that I would highly recommend sharing it. Is if you are in a position where sometimes you can't advocate for yourself effectively. So if you have, um, let me think. If you have seizures, if you have periods of mania or depressive episodes, things like that. Firstly, you must be getting medical support for this. Do not take anything I say as alternatives for that. But if you ever, you are in a position where you have things where you're like, you know what, there are times when I can't implement this for myself. Then it's useful for the people around you to have these things. If you are in that sort of situation, I want you to go back and check out an episode I did called How to Look After Yourself When conducting emotionally distressing work. I had Dr. Tina Skinner and Dr. Sarah Warbiss on to talk about this. They're experts in the area, and one of the things they talked about was psychological safety plans. So this is for people who either have psychological conditions or it does translate to physical conditions. [00:08:00] Or who are doing work that is very distressing and having a plan in place as to how to look after yourself is really, really useful. This idea of an instruction manual for yourself is sort of an extension of that, where it's not just if you are in something that is sort of an objectively, always emotionally distressing situation. It's accepting that life generally can be challenging and distressing sometimes, and it's taking it further so that it's not just about psychological safety, it's about thriving and enjoying your life too. The other thing I wanna say before we get into the details is I don't want you to take this too, too seriously. I want you to put fun stuff in this as well. So yes, we can think about what to do if you are feeling stressed. So troubleshooting when you're overwhelmed, for example. And we can think in terms of sensible things. We can think in terms of kind things, but let's also think in terms of fun stuff, right? Let's also think about silly [00:09:00] things that help you. So for me if feeling overwhelmed to the point that you can't work, stick her in front of an episode of the traitors. She will definitely feel better if you just stick her in front. That is essentially my, you know, restart the computer button. Put me in front of an episode of Traitors. I will come back with opinions about how they should change the rules, what they should have done instead of what they actually did do. Lots of very smug interpretations that absolutely ignore the fact that I would be terrible in the castle in real life. As a viewer, I'm amazing, so keep it lighthearted. So let's think through what these sections could be. And for me, the first one is that quick start that I mentioned because often when I talk to my clients and my members, one of the biggest things that people struggle with is getting started on something. Whether that is getting started in the morning or whether it's getting started on a new project or getting started on [00:10:00] anything. You know, going to a new art class. I just started a new art class. Did I tell you I like hobbies? So think getting started on anything new can be challenging for a lot of people. And so one of the things that's useful is thinking through what helps you to get started. If you wanna take this human being from not doing the project, to doing the project, what do you specifically need? What is effective for you? So as an example, I would have in there something like the purpose and likely efficacy needs to be clear. So I am very bad as my parents and former employers would tell you at doing something just because I've been told to. Just because of how it's how we do it. It's what needs doing. Yeah. I'm not so good at that. I need to understand why I'm doing it and why it's useful. Others of you, the quick start guide [00:11:00] might be really clear, step-by-step instructions. For example, I need that too. If, especially if there's a lot of steps in something, I need to know where to start. I don't need necessarily lots of detail, but I do need to know where to start. I need, I'm ashamed to say the old diet cake is a very good way to kickstart me. So thinking through, what things do you need to get started? You can think about your physical environment. I don't need a tidy house to get started, which is good. 'Cause otherwise I would rarely get started. I do need a somewhat clear desk. If my desk is chaos, then I really struggle. If in doubt, gimme a piece of paper and a pen rather than a computer. Happy days. Let's stick that in as a quick start guide if you just want to get going on a project. Encourage me to write about it, encourage me to talk about it. So those might be things that would go into my quick start guide. I want [00:12:00] you to think about what would go in yours. Now, I do have a cautionary tale for you. Those of you who spend too much time on self-help Instagram, and if you're here I suspect you might. If you spend too much time on self-help Instagram, what you might be telling yourself is my Quick Start guide is I need to get up at 5:00 AM and do three morning pages before meditating for five minutes, drinking my lemon infused water, walking for 10,000 steps, and doing my stretches and strength-based workout before the day starts today. If you are already doing all these things, happy days, I suspect you don't need my help. I love you. I'm glad you're here, but. For most of you, you don't need any of that stuff. You need one or two bits of it, maybe, possibly, perhaps sometimes, but that kind of notion of a perfect start is holding you back from starting. So emphasis on the quick bit of quick start. What do you need? Another example for me? Quick [00:13:00] start. You want me to get going? Stick me in a shower. Okay. If I get up and get in a shower. Get actually proper up rather than deciding that I can work in whatever I've just thrown on without showering, you are gonna get much better outta me. Okay? So I want you to think about those things. The kind of bare minimum, this is what would lead to a day or a project starting reasonably well. That's our quick start guide. Then second section is general maintenance. What do you need on a daily, weekly, monthly, annual basis to stay functioning broadly? This is not, again, this is not about, if you're on a big fitness improvement or a big self-improvement of whatever, you know, this is not where you're gonna put, I'm trying to read however many books a year or whatever this is what do you need basic maintenance. Okay, so here you might reiterate stuff [00:14:00] about, you know, how often you need showers, things like that. What sort of food keeps you broadly functioning, what sort of social things. Now, for some of you, that will be not too much. Some of you, the maintenance will be no more than one social night a week. Others, it'll be the other way round. Make sure you spend at least two nights a week doing something fun with friends. I'm at that end of things, right? I start to get miserable if I'm not doing things that are hobbies or social. So I need to make sure that even when I'm busy, that stuff gets prioritized in. What else helps? For me, daily knowing what my tasks for that day are, and preferably having that set at least the day before helps massively. A to-do list that actually has everything on it. [00:15:00] Now if you want more information about my to-do list system, I have a whole podcast episode about how to use role-based task management, and that's still the system that I'm using miraculously three years later. I haven't changed it for some new version, which I always used to do. Knowing that all the things I need to do in my business are in the same place, and, uh, kind of categorized and stuff helps me function on a day to day, week to week, month to month basis. I know that when I get overwhelmed, there's a tendency not to put everything in there just to think, oh, I just need to get on with things, and that's when it all goes a little bit wrong. So, in my manual, I would have stuff about my tasks needing to be in there. Part of your regular care also includes things like sleep. So on a regular basis, by roughly when should we be putting this human being to bed? I stayed up late last night to watch Celebrity Traitors 'cause I'd been at my art class and so I couldn't watch it live and I had to watch it before I got back in case I saw spoilers online. Did I mention that I love [00:16:00] the traitors? Uh, so I stayed up later. Last night. I wasn't in bed till like 11, which for me quite late. I am a, tuck me up by nine 30, lights out by 10 kind of a girl. I am also a girl that sometimes feels like she wants to go to bed at eight when she's exhausted. And part of my regular care instruction manual is do not let her go to sleep before nine. 'cause if she falls asleep at half past eight, she'll wake back up at half past 11 and be fairly confused and unable to get back to sleep. So think through what else would be in your kind of regular care stuff. Personalize this. I cannot emphasize enough. Personalize this. If yours says, eat enough protein, get eight hours of sleep a night and walk 10,000 steps and do three sessions a week of strength training. These are all very worthy things and great. Brilliant. Let's try and do those. I am actually trying to do most of these things, but I want you to really personalize this to you. Is it really eight hours? Does it matter whether it's late [00:17:00] or early, or what? When do you need to be in bed? When do you need to get up? How do we look after this amazing machine that is you? Section three is troubleshooting. Okay? And troubleshooting is where we get to identify stuff that's likely to come up. Common things that affect you as an individual. And again, these need to be really specific to you. And I want you to think either about a challenging situation that often comes up. So for me, let's say feeling overwhelmed. Okay? Feeling overwhelmed or having too many tasks, and I'm saying too many tasks in like inverted commas, because how it needs too many, who knows? But if it feels to me like it's too many, that's a common challenge that I need a response to. The second thing you can have in your troubleshooting guide is warning signs. Okay? Warning signs for me [00:18:00] starts canceling social things. If I start going, I just haven't got the head space to see my friends, we have a problem. That is a bad sign, that needs some support, that needs some help. Second one for me, if I start eating toast for multiple meals, we also need to intervene. That never goes good places. Okay? So if I'm deciding, you know, what, toasts good enough for lunch, toast, good enough for dinner, and I'm doing this in any sort of sustained way, then that, I'm gonna put that as a warning sign in my troubleshooting guide. Okay? So first job is we get to identify and let's not overwhelm ourselves. Come out with 5, 6, 7 things that commonly happen to you, okay? And then we start asking ourselves in a loving, supporting, compassionate, curious way. And if you dunno how to do that, you need to join my membership. 'cause this is what we're gonna be working on. What do we do in those [00:19:00] situations? Because for most of us, our solution to those things is I just need to get on with it. I just need to plan an evening out even though I don't need to, I just need to cook a decent meal. Whatever it is, I don't want it to start with the word, just because the fact you're finding this challenging means that there isn't a, just do this solution. 'cause just implies it's easy and we ain't gonna do that to you. You are finding this hard right now. However, what we're gonna do is try and make it feel as easy as possible by having something that's supportive but also helpful. Okay, let's take an example. When I am overwhelmed and I think I've got too many things to do, I need to remind myself that it's okay. I need to remind myself that I've felt like I've had too many things for a long time. I need to remind myself that I am capable of getting stuff done quite quickly when I pick [00:20:00] and I need to pick one thing that I can crack through and get on with. Because there's nothing my brain likes more than some evidence and actually, and some momentum. Once I get some momentum going on a task, I actually smash through things reasonably quickly. My problem is that freeze thing of where you look at all of them. So I need reassurance. I need kindness. Reassurance is that it's okay that you're stressed. Reassurance is not i'm sure you'll get it all done. That. You are liable to get snapped at if you tell me, "I'm sure you are doing it. Oh, you always do." Shut up. Not helping. That's not what I mean by reassurance. Reassurance is, it's okay. You've got a lot of things. No wonder you feel overwhelmed. That's the reassurance. Yeah. But you are capable of doing lots of things. What's the one thing you're gonna do right now? Let's do that. That would be my little thing there. The toast thing is one regular care. Have things that are easy to grab when you are feeling like you can't be bothered to make a meal properly that are [00:21:00] not just toast. So that would be in my regular care section. In my troubleshooting section, it's essentially, I'm gonna say this in a loving, respectful way to myself. Don't believe me when I tell you that I, I just really need toast right now. It's not true. It's not coming from the best part of me. It's coming from the carb craving can't be bothered to think part of me. Two solutions. One, somebody else cook something for me. Two, pick something that's slightly better than toast. I have a tendency to be perfectionist. I suspect many of you guys do too. I have a tendency to believe that if I'm not going to be just eating toast, I should be having a perfectly balanced Buddha bowl with a combination of proteins, carbohydrates, healthy fats, little snacky, crispy things on top of it, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I have made it a lot easier to make those. I'll talk about that another time. But best [00:22:00] case if I'm tempted to have toast for dinner. Well, let's have fish, fingers, waffles, and peas. Okay. Actually, not that bad. Yes, it's oven food. Yes. It's probably got all the preservatives in it but it is better than toast and butter. Okay. It's got some protein in it. It's got some vegetables in it. It's vaguely got some fiber in it. Let's go. So thinking through for each of your troubleshooting things, what would be a kind and compassionate response? What would you want to do in that situation? And then the final section, just a quick one, is further support, which is reminding you who have you got in your life and what are they useful for? Because different people are good at different things, right? My husband. I choose, well, my husband's amazing. He can help me with absolutely everything. Other people, I have some friends that are really good at picking me up when I'm down because they'll make me laugh. They'll take me somewhere ridiculous, they'll distract me. It's amazing. Other friends are really good at helping me prioritize in my business if I'm trying to make a decision or whatever. I've got [00:23:00] people that I can go to and talk that through with. I have people who will listen if I just really need to talk something through without getting offered solutions and things like that. And I can kind of, I'm not gonna name them now, but I can kind of picture in my head who these different people are. And so noting down who are the key people, who are the kind of support system here that if you are struggling, these are the people you can go to and what they're useful for. So that's what I mean by an instruction manual is a guide to running you. We have to build it with compassion. This is not about making a perfect version of you that will always function beautifully. This is about creating routines and kind of emergency protocols to implement that will make this feel much easier. As I say, make sure you don't limit it just to dealing with challenges. I want part of your self-care in there to be around how you make your life feel positive. What do you need in your life in order to thrive? Not just [00:24:00] cope with the things that feel difficult, what's stuff makes life feel really fun? We need all that stuff in there too, so that we can support ourselves to build the best phD academic life we possibly can. If you want some support with that and you're listening to this live, make sure you go to the PhD life coach.com. Click on the membership. You'll find all the details. We are open for new members between the 20th, which is the Monday and the 21st, second, third, fourth, fifth. Is that right? 20th, first, second, third, fourth, Friday, whatever date the Friday is, we're open till the Friday. You can join in that time. It is three monthly membership. You'll be in until the end of January. We are gonna be talking imposter syndrome, and we are gonna be talking identifying your strengths, figuring out how to look after yourself. We are gonna create our own instruction manuals with support so that you do it in a compassionate, non-judgmental, fun, and thriving kind of a way. Come join us again and have a little look. If you get on the wait list ahead of time, you will have access to some discounts [00:25:00] and to some other little freebies as well. So jump on the wait list. Hope to see lots of you there. Thank you all for listening, and I'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.
< Today I’m answering listener questions in the same way that I answer questions for students in my memberships. People have submitted questions about all aspects of PhD Life and I’ve selected 7 to talk about today - for each question, I help you unpick what is really the problem, what is making it feel difficult and try to give some tangible ways forward. In the membership I do this all the time and post the answers into our private podcast. Listening to other people’s questions being answered helps you apply the learning to your own life so have a listen and see which of these resonate for you! Links I refer to in this episode If you found this episode useful, you might like this client Q&A episode , where I discuss getting stuff done when you don’t really feel like it. Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast and I promised you in a previous episode or previous email, can't remember which one or the other that I would answer some listener questions in an upcoming episode. Now, I try and do this from time to time. Anyway, 'cause I like to try and make sure that I'm really addressing the real life challenges that you guys have. But I also wanted to give you a little insight into what it's like being in the PhD life Coach membership program. This last quarter that has run, what would it be, August, September, October, I introduced a private podcast for members and what that means is they can go into our Slack channel. So we have a Slack channel where we can all talk to each other, share our wins, share our problems, all that sort of stuff. They can go into the Slack channel, go to the questions for Vikki channel and just drop in questions, and what I then do is I record them a little informal podcast, a little voice note that I then post into the private podcast .I post it anonymously with just what the question [00:01:00] was, and so everyone then gets to hear it so the members get. A pretty quick response to their questions, but other people can also learn from those experiences. And this is brilliant for people who either have something pressing or who for some reason can't make some of the live sessions right. That's one of the most common questions I get. What time zone are the sessions? When are they, what happens if I can't come live? Well, we try and have them at a nice range. I have one early in the morning, one sort of middle of the day and end of the day, so that it's sort of. Works for lots of different time zones and different commitments, but this is one of the things you can do if you can't make one of those live sessions this week, is you can submit a question and then you'll get a response from me in a few days or so. And so I thought I'd show you exactly what that's like. What that means is I haven't actually planned this. 'cause these voice notes are pretty impromptu. I read the question and I give people immediate thoughts. Now, quickly, this isn't necessarily advice. Occasionally it is if you ask [00:02:00] me, you know, good note taking or something like that. I'm probably gonna give you some ideas. Yeah. I'm not a pure coach who only ever says, but what do you think? Um, I will give you some advice, right? I have too many opinions and too much experience not to do that. But I'm also not gonna tell you what to do if you say, should I work on this or that? Should I apply for this job or stick to applying for grants or whatever. I ain't gonna tell you what to do. I don't know you, but what I am gonna do is raise some questions and thoughts for you to ponder on that will help you come to your own decisions. So we're basically gonna do that live on the podcast. I've got seven questions that you wonderful people have submitted to me. These are all non-members, just listeners and they've submitted them. I'm pulling up the questions in front of me now so I can see them. I'm gonna tell you what they said and give you a quick. Voice note podcast-esque response to each of them. So I want you to think which of these questions apply to me? And even if they immediately don't seem to 'cause their [00:03:00] circumstance feels quite different to yours, I want you to think what you can take from this. 'cause this is one of the joy of hearing other people getting coached, whether it's asynchronously like this or whether it's live in a coaching session, is you can so often see yourself in at least some of the questions and apply what they're learning to your life too. So let's go. Question one is I'm working on my literature search after much procrastination, I've planned what to do, how to approach it. I still don't feel like I know where to start. I have my topic categories, which I'll use to search, but I get overwhelmed by diving in. Which podcast episode do you recommend to help? They say, I checked the archive using controlled F and didn't see anything about literature reviews, but I could have missed something. So first of all, if you guys only listen to the podcast and you're not on my newsletter yet, you'll not know about the archive. Make sure you sign up to my newsletter. Go to the PhD life page.com, and click on the button that's right on the front there. And I have a. Searchable Google Drive, that [00:04:00] will usually help you find the answers to your problems. Now, the problem here was that this listener search for lit review instead of searching for overwhelm or procrastination. I tend not to have episodes that are, this is how to do something. Occasionally I do. I've got stuff about, you know, shortening your work and writing better notes and things like that. But usually it's more about the stuff that's actually making it difficult. So let's have a think about how we can help this person. Now, the first thing I noticed is you're saying that like, I've planned what to do, but I don't know where to start. And the problem with the, I don't knows, my members will know this 'cause we talk about this quite a lot. When you tell yourself you don't know, you take away all your creative problem solving and it sort of implies there's a right answer. There is a place you should start, and if only you could figure out what that was, everything would be easy. And that's simply just not true. Right? When it comes to writing a lit review or something like that, there's a bunch of [00:05:00] places. If you ask different academics for advice, there's a bunch of different places you could start. There's no, I don't know where to start. There's just I haven't decided where to start. So what I want you to think about is from a kind of curious and creative point of view, where could you start? What options are there? Why might you choose to start here or there? And then from there, it sounds really basic, but you then get to pick and start and not tell yourself that there was a place that you could have started that would've been better, or that would've, you know, been less painful or whatever. Just start and see how it goes and we figure it out from there. 'cause the fact is, what you are trying to do here is avoid the emotions that come up when it feels difficult and you're uncertain and you're confused. And so what we do is we procrastinate because we think once, I'm not uncertain, once I'm not confused, it won't [00:06:00] feel so bad. But those things don't just miraculously go away. So what we get to do instead is we're like, okay, I'm a bit uncertain. I'm a bit confused. That's all right. I can make a bit of a decision about where to start and I can tolerate those emotions. I can make sure that I'm not making them mean that I'm stupid or that I shouldn't be doing this or whatever. I'm just a bit uncertain right now, and that's okay. Academics should spend their lives in a place of uncertainty, right? Say, okay, I'm gonna be a bit uncertain. But I'm gonna see what happens if I do a little bit of this and see what happens if I do a little bit of that. And you'll find that by doing that, you start to unpick your own uncertainty. You start to say, okay, well I could do some of this and that will move that part on, and I could do some of that. And as long as we're super kind to ourselves about the fact that it feels kind of difficult at the moment, and that's okay, you'll start making progress way faster. I hope that helps. Question two, let's go. [00:07:00] I attended your motivational webinar. That was a cracker. That was, that was a little while ago. That was in July. And I have a question regarding my personal experience. I find science interesting, but I struggle with lab work and find it very stressful. I'm struggling with motivation and I find myself subconsciously avoiding the lab where I can. I have lots of autonomy, but little support and low perceived competence. Uh, now you, if you don't know what I mean by those things, that's 'cause you didn't come to that webinar. I will do it again at some point. I am sure. But essentially they're saying that they don't have many people to help them, and they're not really convinced that they know what they're doing and that they've got the skills that they need and that can really affect our motivation. I want to be competent in the lab so that I can materialize my theory and improve my relationship. I'm now wondering whether it's a personal incompatibility and not necessarily an easy change. And the question went on a little bit longer than that, that about their supervisory support and so on. And it says, do you have any tips about how I can improve my capacity, my competence, or my ability to handle this situation sustainably? [00:08:00] Okay. I thought this notion of a personal incompatibility was really, really interesting. So I think I'm interpreting what you mean there as being that you think you are sort of not cut out for lab work, that it may not be what you want to be doing. And that's not surprising. If you are in a situation where you don't feel like you're very good at it, you don't feel like you've got lots of support and you've got lots of choice, so you feel sort of a bit fragile, really, it's not surprising that you feel like you are incompatible with it, that it's not for you. What we wanna try and get to though is this actually a sort of internal gut feeling that, you know what, this is not what you wanna spend your time getting better at, or is this something where actually once you feel more competent at it, you will enjoy it and feel motivated to be there? You know, I started out in a not very lab [00:09:00] end. I was more sort of questionnaire based early on in my PhD and as I progressed in my academic career, I did more and more lab stuff and I felt a bit, not so much the low support, I had a lot of support around me, but the not necessarily being confident and feeling competent in the lab, I had that quite a bit. And one of the things I did was I decided in the short term, is this something I want to learn to do? . I'm not making big decisions about whether this is my life forever, but in the short term, is this something I want to learn how to do? And I decided, yes, it was. It would enable me to answer some questions and then once I'd decided that I decided that learning how to do this will enable me to answer these questions that I'm interested in, I then really quite consciously decided not to think about whether this was for me or not, whether I was somebody who was good at lab work, whether I was somebody who always wanted to do lab work. It wasn't relevant. What was relevant was that I wanted to learn to do these specific [00:10:00] things in order to answer these specific questions. And the reason that's important is when we're second guessing all the time, that every time something goes wrong we're saying to ourselves, oh, it's probably 'cause I'm not really cut out for lab work. And then we start, oh, should I even be doing this? These huge spiraling thoughts. That's exhausting and it doesn't help us build our motivation. This is all, if you guys heard me talk about decisions before then you'll have heard me touch on this, if not as a podcast episode about how to make decisions you love. But essentially I recommend and not only to decide for reasons you love, but for decide how long you are deciding. So in this case, I would decide, do I want to learn how to do these tools in order to do this stuff in my PhD? And if so, we then get to really focus in on how can I support myself? How can I gather in the support I need in order to learn these skills given whatever my natural inclinations towards this is. Then over time, once you've done that bit, you get to decide, do you want to do your next [00:11:00] study in the laboratory or something slightly different. Do you want to continue this after your PhD? I did eventually decide that lab work is not my baby. It does not play to my strengths. I'm super glad that I learned the things I learned and it meant I was better able to understand other people's science. And I have a sort of broad sense that if I needed to learn how to do a assay in a lab, that I absolutely could do it and I could do it to high quality, but that kind of careful, repetitive. Introverted often in terms of not being super interactive. Really focusing on the details and double checking and all that stuff. Just not playing to my strengths. Okay. Perfectly capable of doing it. Doesn't use the bits of me that I love the most. It was part of my reason eventually to, um, leave research. I, I moved into a teaching focused career with, before I left academia entirely. It was part of my reasoning for leaving research was that, that [00:12:00] stuff just didn't use my strengths to the extent that I wanted, and it always felt slightly like I was forcing it. Okay, so I want you to decide is it what you want to do for the next six months? If it's not, this is a great time to have a conversation with your supervisor about are there alternative ways of doing this, different focuses that you could have in your PhD or thesis, or even whether you want to be doing your PhD at all, maybe a different PhD or some other option is a better fit. But if you then decide, actually no, this is it. This is what I wanna do. Even if it's not my bag, even if it's not what I'm naturally good at, then we start thinking, what can we wrap around ourselves to make that feel as good as possible? So we stop telling ourselves, I don't know how to do this. And we start telling ourselves things like, I'm figuring out how to do this. I hope that one helps. Are you guys resonating? Remember that one? I'm talking specifically about laboratories and new arts and humanities People might be going, oh no, not really. Me. That can translate out. That can translate out [00:13:00] into, you know, whether you enjoy archival work, whether you enjoy field work, if you're a social scientist, for example. So you can translate that out into different settings. Next one. Here we go. Every four to six weeks I seem to crash. Not in a dramatic burnout way, but in a slow, heavy fog that settles in. What's strange is I'm not overworking. I spend work less than six hours a day strictly on campus, and I don't take work home or touch it on weekends. Did I mention that I like my project? I'm also in a very supportive lab and have a strong network. If anything goes wrong, I have people to turn to, but when the crash hits, I can't do anything. I struggle to lift a pen, eat or do basic tasks. Most of all, I lose all motivation to engage with my research. Best case, it lasts a week worse, it stretches into two months. For a long time, I thought it was a motivation issue, but after attending your motivation coaching a couple of months ago, I began doubting whether it was something else just to be on the safe side, I checked with my doctor and they said, I'm as healthy as I should be. So my question is, what do you do? When everything, everything around you is supportive, but your internal systems still shut down. [00:14:00] Is there a way I can reduce its impact on my PhD in research? So first thing I say, I wanna tweak that last question. It is not just how can I reduce its impact on my PhD research, it's how can I reduce my its impact on my life? 'Cause you are far more than your PhD research. Second thing I'd say, I'm super glad you went to your doctor, but I would also say that doctors are not necessarily always good at discovering underlying things that are more complex than the basic stuff. So I wouldn't necessarily assume that just because doctor says you're fine, that you're definitely, definitely fine. The reason I say that is because we can't mindset our way out of health issues if they're health related issues. Obviously I can't tell you whether it's health related issue or not, but I don't want you to just completely wipe that out of your head. One thing that flagged for me was the fact that you said every four to six weeks from your name, I'm gonna assume you're a woman. I hope that's [00:15:00] okay. I want you to consider whether there's anything menstrual cycle related to that, because it's that kind of length that sounds about plausible and not necessarily it coinciding with your menstrual period, but potentially with ovulation or anything similar. Apologies if I'm making any assumptions about your biology or stage of life or whatever. But the four to six weeks really stuck out to me. The reason that's important is because there's a difference between something being wrong and something being kind of not optimal, if you see what I mean. When something's wrong, we might want to look at ways that we can fix it if possible, when something's just not optimal, we might wanna like think of ways that we can support ourselves through these things. So I want you to notice, start doing some observations. Are there any patterns as to when this happens? Could it be cycle related? Is it related [00:16:00] to the weather, for example, is it related to particular events that if there's a particular type of event, and one way you can do that is a little bit of tracking . It sounds as though you are quite good at some routines in terms of how many times you work a week out, how much time you work a week, uh, where you work, and those sorts of things. So I'm hoping that tracking might be something that. You think you could do? Just very simple. There's a ton of apps for them and things like that, but equally, a piece of paper where you just jot down a few words about how you were feeling that day and what sorts of things happened might help you just collect a little bit of data to better understand when this happens. The other thing I want you to notice in that kind of tracking is are there places where you could have seen it coming? Because sometimes what we do when we don't pay much attention or when we think we have to soldier on, we breeze past warning signals and kind of keep going until [00:17:00] we're actually forced to stop. So maybe there are some warning signals that would help you feel this coming and allow you to plan for it. So that's the first thing. Some tracking so that we, you know, it is bring your best researcher plans to this so that we better understand exactly what's going on. The second thing is I want you to think about how you can be kind but not indulgent to yourself during that time. So I want you to really think, in that period where it's coming up and or during that time when you actually crash, what actually helps you. Because sometimes what we think helps, or what we kind of having the drive to do at the time isn't necessarily what helps. So, as an example, if in the evening or weekend. I am feeling kind of tired and lethargic. My drive is to scroll. It's to sit on the sofa, [00:18:00] scroll Instagram. And if I need physical rest, then that's not a bad she okay? It keeps me entertained while I am physically resting my body. So if I am physically tired, happy days, let's do that. But usually if I'm tired in the evening or weekend, it is not 'cause I'm physically tired. It is usually because I'm cognitively tired from the work I've been doing, or maybe I'm socially tired because I've been spending lots of time people, I don't get socially tired easily. I'm someone who gets energy from other people usually. But there are times when it's like, okay, that was a load of people today and I need to just not talk. There are different reasons you are tired and getting really aware of what actually helps during that time can really help. So, what activities help? What food helps? What thoughts help, what social support, help, and just getting much more intentional around that so [00:19:00] that we are not thinking about it in terms of, oh no, I'm crashing. Why is this happening? I'm not doing any work, dah, dah, dah. We are thinking about it in terms of, okay, I'm feeling like this. I've got these symptoms. Here are things that help me in that situation. I want you then to think during that period of time, what is good for you in terms of your work. And this is a really tricky one, and I'm gonna be really nuanced in my answer. Because if people are in full burnout and you say it's not burnout, but sometimes when we're in burnout, we don't think it's burnout. Sometimes doing absolutely no work for quite prolonged periods of time is the best way to recover from these sorts of things. Other times though, what we do is we need a bit of time off. We need a bit of time with [00:20:00] either a lighter load or no load, but then actually it then becomes quite hard to get started back up again. So I want you to think, not during this, but you know, you talk about struggle to lift a pen, eat or do basic tasks. We don't wanna be even thinking about working during that time. If you can't lift a pen, eat or do basic tasks, we are in no position to be thinking about working. But if that then spirals into a period where maybe you could work, but you're telling yourself it's too late, you've wasted all this time, you really don't want to dah, dah, dah. I want you to start thinking about what are small things that you could do in a way that feels good, that might give you a gentle route back in, because it sounds as though you do come back, you know, this is a cyclical thing where you feel bad and then you come back after a period of time. And what we wanna think is what is that sort of ramp back into your working again? As the [00:21:00] fog clears, what is your little gentle route back in? And the clue is that it should be gentle, it should progress, and we shouldn't be telling ourselves that we should be doing it faster. I hope that all helps. With the tracking it might help you better understand some of the underlying causes, in which case come back and we can discuss again. That one hopefully is helpful for people who have got any chronic health conditions, anything like that, or whose personal circumstances are cyclical or who struggle with menstrual cycle issues like I mentioned. Question four. How do you manage two supervisors who are quite different? IE they have quite different disciplines and therefore different ideas about project directions in terms of what to prioritize and what will or won't work? Really good question. So the focus in this quarter in my membership has been networking and academic relationships. So managing your supervisor's been a big one. And we just had a webinar about how to manage when you are very different from your supervisor. [00:22:00] But we also translated that out, thinking about what happens if they're very different. The first thing I would ask you to reflect on is why is it a problem that they're different? What issues are you experiencing because of your perceptions of them being different? Now, sometimes it can be disciplinary differences, sometimes it can be personality differences, approach differences, and all of those things. But why is it causing you a problem? Usually it's something around because person A says do this, and person B says, do that. You don't know what to do that you want to please everybody. You feel like everybody's advice should be followed and therefore you don't know which to do. Interesting. This is a really good example of how some of my podcasts are relevant to more than one type of thing. I have a podcast episode called How to Deal with Contradictory Feedback, and whilst [00:23:00] that sounds like a different topic, it's very, very similar to this. The key here is remembering any advice that your PhD supervisors or anybody else gives you is information. That's all it is. Advice is not direction. Advice is information. And particularly if you've got two different supervisors who are telling you to do different things, you can't do both of them. It would not make sense to do both of them, usually, right? They're saying, do this, not that. And they're saying, do that, not this. Now that's actually a brilliant position to be in 'cause whilst it's annoying and confusing at first, it means that you get to decide. Now that's true when you have just one supervisor, but with just one supervisor, it's harder to believe that you get to just pick and that it's your decision. 'Cause you're like, but I'm surely I should do what they say. But if you've got contradictory ones, of course you've gotta pick. So then we get to think, well, why does that feel hard? Well, it's [00:24:00] usually because we're telling ourselves that we don't know. We're telling ourselves that there's a right answer, that if we pick the wrong one, it'll be massively problematic. And also something about not wanting to offend and upset the people who gave us other advice. So those are the problems. The problems are not that you are getting contradictory advice. The problem and your supervisors different from each other. The problems are that you're telling yourself you don't know. You are telling yourself that it's a problem that you don't know and that if you get it wrong, it will be massive. And you're telling yourself that people will be upset if you pick the other thing. Okay? What we get to do is deal with those thoughts instead. We get to remind ourselves that there are many ways to do this thesis that end up in a successful PhD many, many ways. All of you have got infinite roots to a successful PhD. You get to pick one of them, but it doesn't mean that the others wouldn't have worked. It doesn't mean there is this one magic golden thread that takes you to a PhD. There's a whole [00:25:00] variety of different ways. We haven't gotta pick the right one. We've gotta pick one that we can defend and justify and hopefully enjoy doing. The other thing, and I spend my life telling my members this, your supervisor's emotions are theirs to manage, you have to behave in a way that you think is reasonable and ethical and all of those things, okay? I am not saying just go be a dick. That's not what I'm saying at all. But if one of them is gonna be disappointed 'cause you didn't pick theirs, well that's okay. They're adults. They're allowed to be disappointed. They can be disappointed. They can manage that themselves. We get to make sure that we explain why we've picked what we've picked. We thank them for their contribution. We consider whether there are ways that we can incorporate some elements if, if only if it improves our thesis. Not just to placate them, but are their ways. And as long as we've done all of those things, they then get to disagree or be disappointed [00:26:00] or whatever. 'cause the fact that you know, you're in a no-win situation, if they're telling you two different things. We're gonna disappoint somebody. And if we try and wedge it all in, what we're probably gonna do is disappoint ourselves ultimately. So remembering any advice is information. You get to decide. There's no right answer. Behave like what you consider to be a reasonable human being. And my fifth one, if it's ever really, really tricky, I highly recommend getting them in the same room. I used to have two supervisors as well. They got on with each other very well. They probably agreed 70, 80% of the time, but when they didn't agree, they really, really didn't agree and sometimes I would be spending myself literally going up and down the corridor talking to one of them. Well, what about this? Oh no, no, don't do that. Do this. Go down the corridor to the other one. No, that's stupid. Don't do that. Do this, da da. And I would be like, right, come with me. We need to be in a room and actually having the conversation as a three. So one of the things we learning coach training is about normalized by naming, [00:27:00] by actually pointing out something that's happening. And so a useful conversation can be get them in the room and say. I want us to discuss this. 'cause at the moment you are saying that we should do X and you are saying that we should do Y, and I think it's clear that I can't do both X and Y. So I'd like to discuss as a group collaboratively the possibilities that we have got available to us. Mostly X, little bit of Y, mostly Y, little bit of X or Y, Zed, something completely different. I want us to discuss them together and actually come to a conclusion and sometimes involving them in that discussion can help as well. Okay, hope that helps. Question five. I am so scared of starting to write my discussion chapter. I put it off by doing something else. I wrote an article which has no relation to my research to avoid the guilty feeling of not beginning to write the chapter. I'm too scared because this is the most challenging part of my thesis. My supervisor too stated that this is the key part to your thesis. I'm so scared I can't do it. Well, help me sort [00:28:00] this out. My supervisor also said I have to finish the full draft by Christmas, which makes me so scared. I need to write the discussion chapter and revise part of my findings chapter. This is such a good example of why procrastination is emotion avoidance. You are feeling scared because of the things you're telling yourself about this chapter and the things that people are saying to you. I'll take that. Okay? And we are therefore avoiding those feelings of scared. And in the short term, that's very adaptive, right? We get to feel less scared 'cause we are doing something else. The problem is, in the long run we are gonna get to that scared place at some point. And what usually happens, I said this, I said this at a training session yesterday, so I did one of my rare live sessions yesterday and everyone was nodding a lot. Is that what usually happens is that we are avoiding the feeling of scared right up until the point that the feeling of [00:29:00] pressure of an impending deadline feels worse than the scared about doing it. And then we flick over and start doing it. So that's why we often actually do get this stuff done in the end is because yes, we're avoiding the feeling of scared, but actually that becomes the lesser of two evils once the pressure of the deadline gets up. The trouble is that gets it done, but it doesn't feel very nice, right? So we want to think of a different way of doing it. What we get to do is we get to think about what thoughts are making you feel scared. So, um, what thoughts that you are having. 'Cause it's not having to write it. That's just a circumstance I will be writing my discussion chapter doesn't necessarily have to make you scared. It sounds from what you've said, that you are scared because it's the hardest part that you might not be able to do it. I'm scared I cannot do it. Well. Okay, so is those thoughts that are generating the feeling of scared and it's that scaredness that you're trying to avoid and that's making [00:30:00] you procrastinate. So we get to take two approaches. How can we make it feel less scary? How can we tolerate the scariness? So first of all, how can we make it feel less scary? Well, we can start checking whether these thoughts we're telling ourselves are even true. And I'm gonna start by asking you a funny question, which is, are you actually right gonna write this, this discussion? Are you actually going to? Because if you are, and I suspect you'll be saying yes, I I will. I know I will. Then we know we are going to do the scary thing eventually. And at this point I will refer back to last week's podcast where I was talking about writing the scary email 'cause it's a very similar thing. If you know you are going to write this, you know you are going to do the scary thing at some point, then we start looking at it not as something to be avoided, but something that we can make feel better and actually get on and do. Yeah. So are you gonna write it? [00:31:00] I'm gonna assume you're saying yes right now. So how can we make it feel less scary? I'm scared. I cannot do it. Well. Well, you probably can't do it. Well straight out the bag, but that's not a problem. You don't need to, we don't need to write a good discussion in the first version of it. If you're saying, I'm not sure I can get it good. I would really encourage you to defer that thought. So what we usually do is we try and reassure that thought. We try and say, oh, no, no. Of course you are capable, but your brain is still going. Yeah, but what if I'm not? I like to use, it's not my business. It's not my business to know whether I can get this to a good standard or not. It's not my business to know whether this will be good enough or not. My job at the moment is to move towards that and get it as good as I can get it. Is it good enough? Who knows? That's for my [00:32:00] supervisors, that's my examiners to decide, not for me to second guess. So instead of telling ourselves that we're scared we can't do it, and we should know that we can do it in order to do it, we can go, okay, I don't know if I can do it. What would be the first steps? Let's do those bits and see how we go. Okay? Don't need to know that you can do it. Just need to do the next bit. We can stop telling ourselves that we are worse than other people. That everyone finds. It's easy. Everyone says this is the scary bit. That's okay. We do the scary bit. Everyone who's ever written a thesis thought their discussion was the scary bit. Somehow they wrote a discussion. Somehow they got a thesis. So we get to say it's okay. I know this feels scary. But we are not gonna make up a load of drama to make it sound more scary. It's okay that it's scary, but we're not gonna feed that. And we're gonna ask ourselves, what if I was gonna do it, what would be the next bit? What would be the next few steps towards that? And we try and [00:33:00] keep our brain in that room. So what would be the first steps to roughly working out how to write your discussion chapter. If you were giving an instruction to an assistant or you're giving instruction to chat GPT to write your discussion, what would be the first step? Do not ask chat GPT to do it, but think through what would be the prompt that you would write if you were gonna do that? What would be the first steps? And then we get to say, my only job is to do those steps. Because you'll never write a discussion. You will make an approximate plan. You will review your plan, modify your plan. You will identify a few more papers that you need to read and slot in. You will draft the first paragraph. You will draft the second P, no right point. Do you write the discussion? It's just a series of small other tasks. Okay? Do you get to pick one? Say, okay, can I do that bit? I can do that [00:34:00] bit. Right. Next one. Can I do that bit? Yeah. I can figure that bit out. You can do this. It's normal to feel scared. It doesn't have to be a reason to avoid it. Question six. I know you are a PhD life coach, but I thought this might fit well as a PhD is not a separate individual than their life as a person. So I believe, um, life coaching as a whole would also help. First thing before I go into actually the question, that's literally why I call everything the PhD life coach, and it's not the PhD. Life coach. It's the PhD life coach. I coach on PhD life and in my membership we talk about stuff outside of PhD as much as anything else. So this, I do not separate. This is not about getting your thesis done and nothing else. You are not your PhD. You are a human being who is going through the PhD experience at the moment, and we want that whole life and experience to feel great. So this person says, sometimes I can question [00:35:00] prioritization at all levels, not just PhD tasks or work tasks, like spending time with loved ones, especially elderly family members, and how important that is given that time passes so quickly. And I don't want to reach a time where I feel sorry for not spending much time with them, but then I have to work and earn money and also develop my career and advance my PhD, let alone my personal needs and my leisure. I feel exhausted and sometimes depleted in cognitive, emotional, and physical energy. Sometimes I feel like I need a hundred hour day rather than a 24 hour one. It might look silly, but really am I asking for tips and tricks? How to prioritize all aspects of life based on what? Do you have any life management tips, not just time management? Most importantly, is there a system or scale that you recommend to rate important things in life at an individual level sort of scoring? Actually, we are gonna be doing something about this in the new quarter of the PhD life coach. It's funny that you ask. There are things called wheels of life that you can use to kind of think about your current satisfaction levels with different areas of your life, and I have some [00:36:00] tweaks on that, that I will take the membership through to think about not just how important they are, but also how much effort you're currently putting in, how much effort you want to be putting in, and how you can divide that when you've got limited effort to go around. Okay? So that's something we are gonna go into. I won't have capacity to talk about that now. So I would really encourage you, if this is something you struggle with, I'd really encourage you to be in the membership next quarter, and we'll do that in more detail. Short answer is I really like the idea of dialing things up and down. So deciding which bits of your life are in maintenance mode, you know, doesn't mean they're perfect, but they're fine at the moment, and improving them is not a priority and which things are dialed up at the moment. And what we then get to do is decide what that looks like. What does maintenance mode look like? So as an example, if you've got somebody elderly in your life who is not [00:37:00] imminently sick, is not imminently a sort of big, big priority to be spending lots and lots of time with, but you want to maintain a relationship, you want to feel like you're there for them. What is that minimum level of engagement? What does that maintenance look like? How often do you want to visit them? How often do you want to call them? What do you want? Importantly, what do you want that time to be spent doing? Because sometimes it's not about more and more time, it's about more presence and intention when you're actually with them. So what would maintenance level look like, and you can do that for different aspects of your life. What is maintenance level for your personal needs? What is maintenance level for leisure? Enough that these things don't deteriorate. Your health stays about where it is now. Your relationships with people stay about where they are now. Your PhD progresses at about the state. It's progressing at the moment. What does maintenance look like? [00:38:00] And then we get to identify which one or two areas of our life are we kind of turning it up at the moment ? Because we can't turn all, we can't be trying to progress all areas of our life at a time. It's just not possible. So which parts of our life are we trying to dial up at the moment? Where are we trying to put in a bit more? And what does that look like? What does a bit more look like? Now, you might be telling yourself everything needs to improve. I'm not even maintaining in any area of your life. And it can really feel like that. And that's an exhausting feeling. And when that usually happens is because you're comparing yourself to somebody who is doing that thing with a lot fewer other things. Okay? We all have a tendency to compare ourselves to parents who are parenting full time and to compare ourselves to people who are working full time and compare our leisure to people who have lots of leisure time and compare our beauty to people who are beauty influencers or whatever, right? We compare ourselves to people who are putting lots and lots of effort [00:39:00] into that one thing. So if you're telling yourself that it needs to be everything, that's where part of the problem is coming from. We could tell ourselves that we should be doing all the things, and the problem is we actually end up doing worse in all the things because when we're with people, we're thinking we should be working. And when we're working, we're telling ourselves we should be with other people. So what we get to do is we get to decide, okay, given that I'm a human being with 24 hours, not a hundred hours, and that I need to be sleeping for eight of those and that I have these other basic needs that need to be happening, how do I actually want to distribute my time? And then given the amount of time, what do you want to spend that time doing? What would be, if you have one hour a week to give elderly relatives, what do you want that one hour to be doing? What's a good use of that one hour? If you have 15 hours a week to give your PhD, what do you want those 15 hours to look like? What would be [00:40:00] useful use of that time? And that way we get to be intentional so that instead of during that time telling ourselves we should be doing something else, we tell ourselves, this is part of my phD time. This is part of my leisure time. This is part of my personal needs time, whatever, and this is the most important thing I can be doing. It is normal to feel dragged in lots of different directions, but we don't have to perpetuate that. We don't have to tell ourselves it's true. I hope that helps. Like I say, we are gonna be working work-life balance, feeling like an imposter and trying to figure out what actually works for us is gonna be a real focus next quarter. And then question seven, so this person talking about, they needed to make a plan. They've made a plan, and they're struggling to follow their plans, so they say, I am trying to read a hundred pages a day and write coherent essays for my comps exams as practice. I'm struggling with all the words and ideas to write these essays. I've considered doing audio into Google Docs. I'm trying to recall what I'm reading, so I would have it accessible when I take the exam in November. I'm trying to get it all done. [00:41:00] Now in a previous answer, this person's contacted me a couple of times. In a previous email you mentioned that you are aiming to read a hundred pages a day. You actually end up reading 20 pages a day and still feeling overwhelmed. And so how do you stick to your plan? Well, one of the things I encourage, so, my members have access to be your own best boss, which is a sort of online self-paced course. And one of the elements of that is, getting your boss self, the boss who makes the plans, and your implementer self, the person who actually does the work to have a conversation with each other. And so if you are in a position where boss you is saying you should be reading a hundred pages a day and writing coherent essays and implementer you is saying, I can't. I'm struggling to do this. I don't get through that much, and they don't feel coherent, then we need to have a little sit down and decide is the problem happening with the boss and the plans that are being set, or is the problem happening that we are not implementing in a way that's reasonable? And often it's a bit of both, right? But [00:42:00] usually we blame the implementer. I just need to be more disciplined. I just need to work harder. I just need to get on with it. But sometimes we're asking ourselves unrealistic things, and I said at the beginning, I wasn't gonna give advice, but I'm gonna give a little bit of advice. Okay. I wanna know what you mean by read. And I want you to think about how long you are giving yourself for each of these a hundred pages. Because if your definition of read is, read all the words, digest all the words, and fully understand each page, I think a hundred pages of a day of what I assume is academic text is a lot. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you it's too much, you know, what you're capable of. Um, but I think that's a lot. Now, could I read a hundred pages a day? 100%. I could read a hundred pages a day as long as I decided that I'm skimming them for key information, that I know what that key information is, that I'm choosing to ignore elements that are not relevant to what I'm doing [00:43:00] right now. And you put your own numbers in, right? You could be like, oh, I usually do that. That's fine. This question's not for you, if that's fine. Okay. I'd then think about what you are meaning by writing coherent essays. Because again, if you are trying to prep for exams and usually, so this is somebody, I believe you're in the us certainly in the UK and many other places, we don't have these sorts of exams. So this is not something that I've helped PhD students prep for, but I did used to work a lot with undergraduates who had to write essays in exams as well. The other thing is, do you need to write them in order to practice them or do you need to plan out what it would look like and what the key points would be? Often it's much more useful to if the question was this, here are the five key things that I would need to get in here. Here are the eight pieces of evidence that I would use. This is the conclusion that I would take is often much better to practice generating that bit than actually writing the [00:44:00] whole thing. Because you know, students would always tell me, I get marked down 'cause my essays don't sound academic enough. Almost always, that wasn't why they were marked down. Almost always they were marked down because the key arguments were not clearly presented. And that's not the same thing as not writing academically that means that it wasn't clear what you were saying. So if you can get much clearer on, in this type of essay, I'm gonna say these things in this sort of essay, I'm gonna say those things that works much better for an exam and can be much faster to produce. I am also a really big fan of what I call blank page revision, which is where you don't start with all your notes. You don't start with all your reading. You just take an exam question and say, okay, if I was gonna write this, you know, I would have an hour to write it. I'm gonna give myself 10 minutes to plan it. What would that look like? What would my plan be that I would do at the beginning of it? And [00:45:00] then once you've done that, then you use your reading to go back and go, okay, that was what I planned, but if I had access to my texts, how would I improve it? And so now, instead of reading in a kind of, I'm just reading linearly, beginning to end kind of way. We are looking to go, oh, that argument would've been better if I'd mentioned this. Oh, actually I missed one of the elements out. We should put that in. Oh, actually, I don't think that section's relevant. I'll cross that out. And so then we're sort of going, okay, how can I make this better now that I have access to my notes? That can be a really, really useful way of doing it. Those of you who aren't doing comps aren't preparing for those sorts of exams. The key thing here is if you are routinely planning to do one thing and you are routinely not doing it, we need a sit down conversation with ourselves about is it unrealistic plans or is it that we are not implementing in a way that's reasonable, reasonable, not optimal, not perfect. We don't expect perfection of ourselves, and therefore do we need to be working on [00:46:00] boss self to make clearer plans, more guided plans, more reasonable plans, or do we need to work on implementer self to work in a way that is more efficient or more effective or more focused or whatever? We need to sit those down. The answer is very rarely I just need to get on with it. 'cause we tell ourselves that all the time and it doesn't work. So that is my seven questions. That is an example. I don't usually, so in the membership, I record them out as little individual. So they're usually like five to eight minutes for each question, and they go in as a separate little question into the private podcast. So you can log out, oh, that's a question that I have, and click on it and hear my answer to it, as well as getting them for yourself if you're the one who submits. The question, but there's seven examples of the sorts of voice notes that I do in the membership all the time. If you wanna find out more about the membership, please just go to my website, phd life coach.com. Click on the membership. You'll find all the information there. If you join the wait list, [00:47:00] there are some special bonuses that only people on the wait list will get. I'll tell you more about them soon. We open on the 20th of October. If you're listening to this live, that's two weeks time. We are open Monday through Friday, so we are taking new members between the 20th of October and the 24th of October. If you don't come in now, we don't open again till the end of January. So you come in now for that winter period. So for the, November, December, January. Period. And if you don't come now, you'll have to wait till then. So if you want support through this winter period, if you wanna make sure that you get a restful and intentional winter holiday, you wanna make sure that you start next year strong. You need to be thinking about the PhD Life Coach membership. New Year's resolutions do not start in January. They start right now so that we make sure that we take this year in exactly the directions we want it to go. Hope to see lots of you there. You can sign up for the wait list [00:48:00] now. Let me know if you have any questions, and thanks for listening. I'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.
< Today I’m sharing a real life coaching experience we had in the membership this week. One of the members came to an online coaching session because she had a “scary” email to send and she realised she’d been procrastinating for what felt to her like ages. You have likely experienced this too! The trouble is, when it feels scary, we often end up overthinking it, making it more complicated than it needs to be, and/or putting off actually sending the email for a long time. In this episode, I take you through the process I took my member through to go from “I’m too scared” to “let’s get this done”. Links I refer to in this episode If you found this episode useful, you might like this client Q&A episode , where I discuss post-deadline slumps, uncommunicate supervisors, and judging your own work. Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. Now, this is not the episode that I'd planned to record for today, but I had such a good coaching session yesterday on a topic that just super resonated with everybody in the room that I decided to turn it into an episode and give you guys a sneaky peek inside what happens within the membership. So in the PhD Life Coach membership, I have students that have joined the membership to get the support they need so that they can enjoy their PhDs and get. The stuff done, you know, achieve the goals that they want to achieve. And we have these online group coaching calls. So you dial into a webinar, you can't see yourself, you can only see my big face. And then if you've got particular challenges, you can either ask them in the chat or more often and you raise your little zoom hand and come on. And so you appear next to me as if by magic. And we have what feels like a one-to-one coaching conversation while everybody else gets to see sort of your [00:01:00] thoughts coming out and the realizations that we have. Okay. And it's a wonderful learning experience because you get that one-to-one support, but also watching other people getting coached makes you realize that other people worry about the stuff that you worry about too. And it helps you see all the different options that are available. Anyway, I'm sharing this one with permission, but anonymously. So one of my regulars, she's been in for two quarters now, so she's been with me about five months at this stage came because she'd been putting off writing an email to her supervisor. She's at the tail end of her PhD. She's feeling like she's not quite as far ahead as she would like to be, and she hasn't been in that much contact with her supervisors for the last couple of months and feels like she really needs to update them. So that's sort of where we were at. And she came on and she was telling me that she was very scared about sending this email, that she'd been procrastinating it for [00:02:00] ages. She'd sort of written it and rewritten it. She'd avoided it, she'd ruminated on it. She'd done all the stuff that is so normal when we've got something that we kind of think we have to do, but that we're also really scared of actually doing. And as soon as she said this, everybody in the chat, 'cause the people watching are able to drop in the chat, right? Everyone in the chat was like, oh my God, this was me last Friday. Oh my goodness, this happens to me all the time too. And so people were really, really empathizing with it. And I also got quite a bit of grief and I got my chat over here 'cause I record the chat. I got quite a bit of people laughing with me, because I used some fun and analogies to make my point as we were going through the coaching. So some of you'll know I'm a big fan of using analogies to kind of understand complex ideas and particularly analogies that relate to things that are either [00:03:00] relevant to me and my life or relevant to the clients that I'm working with. And one of my other regulars commented in the chat, I live for Vikki's Circus analogies, so I thought why not? If this was such a common topic, it was something that everyone was really resonating with, that really helped the client. And where people seem to enjoy the randomness of the analogies, why not also share it on a podcast? So that is what we're gonna think about today. We've all had it right where we need to send an email to somebody and for whatever reason it feels scary. Maybe we're applying for a job, maybe we're asking somebody if they'll have a mentoring conversation and we're not sure what they'll say, or we are telling our supervisor, we're not gonna hit a deadline, we're asking for an extension, we're asking for feedback. All these things can feel quite scary, and that act of kind of pressing send on an email can feel like a massive deal.. Everybody's had that feeling, right? [00:04:00] So you know, you're tight in your chest, you feel a bit sick in your tummy, your brain's spinning with all the possible consequences of what you're about to do. It can feel terrifying. And when it feels terrifying, it's no wonder that we don't just crack on and get it sent. And that was where this student was at. Because she's been in my membership for a little while. She kind of knew that a bunch of this was about stories that she was telling herself that weren't necessarily true, and that definitely weren't helpful, but she couldn't quite get herself outta that herself. Now, the first thing I always remind my clients is. That's completely normal, right? This is why people need coaching. This is, I have a coach. This is why people need these sorts of things, because even if you've learned the stuff, even if you've actually got quite a lot of insight into your own behaviors and things, you get better at dealing with it yourself. But when it's something super challenging, you can't necessarily just do it on your own. And that's the gorgeous thing about these sessions is you, [00:05:00] they run three times a week so you can just drop in whenever you've got something that you need to talk through and get that sort of immediate support and cheering up. So she stuck a little zoom hand up. She'd actually given me a little note in advance that she had something that was quite urgent that she wanted to, and I always try and prioritize people that do that. So she'd drop me a little note and say, she was my first person that I promoted on. And as soon as she came on, I could see how tense she was and how upset she was about this. She knew that she wanted to get it sent, but she was really struggling to do it. And so I took her through a process. That I'm gonna take you through today, and it's based on doing bungee jumping. It's based on bungee jumping, skydiving, any of these sorts of things. And so the first question I asked was, are you actually going to send this [00:06:00] email? Sounds like a really weird question to ask. She was wanting to update her supervisors and she thought she had to send an email, and I wasn't saying don't send an email, but I was just checking in. Do you actually have to contact them? You could not contact them. You could talk to them in person. You could contact them in some other way. Right. Do you actually need to email them? And she had a little think about it and said, yep, I do. I do want to contact them and I do want to do it by email. The reason I asked that based on my skydiving and bungee jumping endeavors is I remember being on an airplane in New Zealand, which is where I did my skydive, and I did one of those ones where you've got a dude strapped your back. Right. I'm not brave enough to do the actual technical stuff myself, [00:07:00] and we're on the way up. We're in the back of this funny little airplane that had no seats or anything. We were just sat on the floor and I had a little cry because I was really scared and he was a lovely, lovely fella. And he said to me, look, I'm not gonna jump until you give me the okay. Because the thing with partner skydiving. Once the door opens, he's sat on the side of the plane, you are hanging off him. So the choice is his when you go. And he said to me, don't worry, I will never jump without your consent. If at any stage you don't want to do this, all you need to do is tell me, we'll just land the plane again. It's not a big deal. People have done it before. And through my tears, I said to him, if that was on the cards. I wouldn't be crying, I would just be deciding I wasn't gonna do it. The reason I'm crying is because I know I am gonna do this, and that's kind of [00:08:00] terrifying. And so that's what I wanted to check in with this client is are you actually gonna do this? 'cause if you are not, or if you are not sure, we need to have a different conversation about how you are gonna decide rather than focus solely on how do we get it done? Because sometimes this fear and dread and everything is you or your body saying, I don't actually wanna do this. And if any of you are sitting there thinking, I would never have got in the plane, or I have got on a plane and gone up and come back down again on a skydive and not done it, fair play to you for making a brave decision to decide to come back down is a super brave decision, to decide you don't want to do it, super brave decision. But it's a separate decision. So first we check, is this just my gut and intuition telling me I don't actually want to do this. In this case though, it wasn't that she did want to send this email. She did think it was necessary. She was just very scared. Next, I asked her why does it [00:09:00] feel so scary? What is it that's making this scary? And this is not to kind of decide if it's legitimate scariness or not. You're allowed to decide what's scary and what's not. We all have different conceptions of that, right? Some of you might think I'm an absolute fool for the things I've jumped off in my life, but you could not pay me. Well, you probably could now, to be fair, I have very little shame these days, but when I was like 25, you could not pay me enough to make me sing in front of people. Like literally could not pay me enough money to make me sing in front of people. I'm a terrible singer. If I was a good singer, I would be dangerous. You just never get me off stage. But I'm a terrible singer. I'm mortified, embarrassed at how bad or I used to be, at least at how bad a singer I am, and it would be terrifying. You'd never get me to do it. So no, like judgment or shame here, but we get to ask ourselves, why is it so scary? Because sometimes things are scary because there are consequences, [00:10:00] potential consequences that are feasible and potentially scary feeling. And sometimes it's scary 'cause we're telling ourselves a load of junk that's not true. Okay? And we do that stuff 'cause of culture and whatever, right? Habit, upbringing, blah, blah, blah. But we can decide whether the reasons it's scar are actually kind of legitimate to us. And so for her, I think the scariness was stuff around, you know, feeling like not scared necessarily, but sad that the relationship's not better with her supervisor. Scared about what feedback the supervisor's gonna say, whether she's gonna give her loads of changes and things like that. There was certainly some fear or worry about disappointing her supervisor or frustrating her supervisor. And I'm pretty confident all of you're sitting there going, yep. Yeah. Yeah, I've been there. So a lot of it was around the sort of fear of what might happen, fear of what they might think, and fear of what that might mean for the [00:11:00] future. So we get to go. Are there any bits of that? Any bits of these stories I'm telling myself that make me feel scared that I am able to refute or minimize or put down or whatever. Again, not to like de-legitimize your scaredness, but to take the edge off some of the bits that are unnecessary perhaps. And the one I always point out to my clients, is the ones about micromanaging your supervisor's emotions. This does not mean you shouldn't considerate, this does not mean you shouldn't be polite, act in a reasonable way and all those things, but your supervisor's emotions are your supervisor's responsibility. Your supervisor is allowed to be disappointed if they think thoughts that make them disappointed. They're allowed to be disappointed. They're allowed to be frustrated. Should we try and disappoint 'em on purpose, frustrate 'em on purpose? No, obviously not, but we have no actual control over their emotional responses. They might have absolutely [00:12:00] unrealistic expectations of you, and that's why they feel disappointed. They might have very low expectations of you, and that's why they feel really disappointed. There's loads of reasons, they're responsible for them. We get to decide how we act and we get to decide what's we believe is reasonable and in line with our own personal, ethical code and all that good stuff. Right? They are responsible for their emotions. The reason that's important is partly it can take the edge off some of their scariness. If they have, if they're disappointed, they're disappointed. If they're frustrated, they're frustrated, they can manage those emotions. I don't have to like put that on me. The other reason that's so important to remember is because worrying about disappointing someone, worrying about frustrating someone is the first route to making you behave like a right weirdo. Okay? It makes you massively apologetic. Or it makes you avoid talking to them entirely, right? Because you don't wanna disappoint them, so let's not tell them anything. So it might feel like a kind thing to worry about their emotions, but actually when [00:13:00] we worry about their emotions and take them on as our own responsibility, crucially, then we start behaving weird and that don't help anybody. So we dealt with a little bit of that stuff. We kind of felt like, yes, she was a bit trying to micromanage some of her supervisor's emotions, but that there was some other stuff that was actual consequences to her. She was a bit scared about what her supervisor would say, and she was a bit scared about the implications for whether that meant she could hit her deadline, what quality of work she could produce and things. So we got really clear on what specifically she was scared of. And the gorgeous thing there was, she started to notice more specifically that the scaredness was all stuff that was being made worse by waiting. That actually it was things, am I gonna have enough time to make the changes? What if I can't make the deadline? Now? All of these things are actually avoiding that sensation of scaredness was making it more scary. Now, it was [00:14:00] just interesting for her just to kind of notice, so we've asked ourselves, am I actually gonna do this thing? We've asked ourself why we're scared, are there any of these I can put aside? So as an example, right? Go back to the bungee jumps or whatever. Why am I scared? I'm scared 'cause I'm jumping off of fricking bridge with a thing tied around my ankles. Of course I'm scared. It's inherently scary. It's scary 'cause I'm up high. It's scary because evolutionarily we're not really designed to be falling like that and just enjoying it. I'm scared because I'm worried it might go wrong. I'm scared about, you know, potential consequences. Is it gonna hurt? Am I gonna enjoy it? Am I gonna be sick? All of these sorts of things. Yeah. So why am I scared? And then you get to ask yourself, okay, which ones of these do I actually legitimately believe it. So, well, people do these things all the time. Obviously there's some risk associated with it, but there's risk associated with everything. So, you know what, I'm not gonna tell myself the, I might die story because I [00:15:00] probably won't. The. I'm scared because I'm jumping off something and that's an inherently scary thing to do. I'm gonna take that, that's fine. I'm not gonna be able to mindset myself out of that, but I can stop telling myself that the equipment might all fail and I'll die 'cause that's just not helpful if I'm gonna do it anyway. So we are clear on those things. Then what we do is we do our best to make it safe to do the thing while scared. So a really useful mantra to keep in your head is, I'm capable of doing things while I'm scared. This is a good one for any of you who are scared of doing presentations or any of those sorts of things, right? I'm capable of doing things while scared. We get to think about how can we make this safe. Now, in the case of bungee or skydive, that's quite obvious, right? I did things like, I checked in with the guy who was strapping me up to say, you know, , am I ready? Are you comfortable? I'm ready? Is I looked down, but I've got any expertise, right? But like, it seems like it's fixed. [00:16:00] I've watched him do it up, all that stuff? So you check anything physically safe. Obviously that's not quite the same when you are talking about e sending an email. But how do we make it safe? We make it safe by not telling ourselves stories about how terrible it's gonna be if it goes wrong. We make it safe by saying to ourself, it's okay if you can't see me. If you are watching me on video, you can, on YouTube, you can see me. But on podcast, I've like put my hands on my chest, right just below my neck. And that always just feels like quite a calming place to put your hands. And you just say. It is okay that I'm scared. I don't have to not be scared, but I'm gonna be kind. This is where the self-talk comes in, right? Part of being safe is deciding what you are gonna say to yourself. So I'm not gonna tell myself that it's all gonna be awful. I'm not gonna tell myself that she thinks I'm an idiot. I'm gonna tell myself that I need support with this next step, and that's what I'm asking for. These are my reasons for [00:17:00] messaging and it's perfectly reasonable for me to send this message. It's perfectly understandable for me to ask for this help or to tell them this. It's okay to be scared, but I can do this anyway. And that can help you feel kind of psychologically safe as well. We are not trying to make the emotions go away often. We think I will send it once. I'm not scared anymore. I don't know when that not scared anymore comes. Usually what actually happens is we end up sending it, not when we are not scared anymore, but when the deadline gets so close that we panic overcomes that fear. Yeah. When the panic is higher, then the fear of sending the email, then we send it. But that's a horrible way to live your life. Many of us did it or are doing it for a long time, but it's not fun. So we get to say, I don't have to stop being scared. I just have to make it safe to be scared. Sometimes it can be, especially if it's an important email, don't do this other thing. Getting somebody else to check it through, making sure [00:18:00] they think it's clear and reasonable, all of those sorts of things. Another way you can make it safe is by just double checking that you've made it really clear and easy for the person that's reading the email. So you're not over justifying. It's one of the things we do when we're scared. One of the things we do when we're worried about other people's emotions is, you know, we're asking for an extension or whatever. I used to have this as a, oh my goodness. I used to have this as a academic so much that people would ask for an extension. And they'd give me pages and pages and pages of why their life was so terrible. Why? It was like I felt for these kids, right? I felt for, these were my undergrads. I felt for them so much, but it was so unnecessary. They needed to give me a quick thing as to that there was a legitimate reason for this, and beyond that, that was all they needed to do. There was no need for that massive story. So checking you're not over justifying, checking that you're making it very explicit what you need from the person that you're asking and making it real easy for them. So we're [00:19:00] talking reattaching the thing you want them to read or having, my two key questions are X and Y, making it super, super easy. That's another way to make it feel as safe as possible, that you are sending something that is as likely as possible to get the responses that we need. And then after we've checked we wanna do it, checked why it feels scary, made it safe, decided how we're looking after ourselves, we get it done. So this was advice I actually had to call on last weekend, so it's a long time since my bungee jumping days, right? But when I did my, I did my bungee in Australia, and when I was there I was so scared. I was so, so scared. And I saw somebody else go up before me. It wasn't anyone I knew, but I saw her go up and she stood on that platform for gotta be 20 minutes. [00:20:00] She just would get herself all ready to go and then be like, no, no, I can't. And come back again. And then she'd get herself ready to go and then she'd went, no, no, I can't. And I remember, and we are talking over 20 years ago, and I can just so vividly remember watching this and just seeing how much harder she was making it for herself. And I mean that with all the love and whatever in the world, right? I am not judge. I have no idea who she is. I'm not judging her in any way. It is terrifying when you have that physical freeze response. It's awful. But it was so much worse 'cause of the time she was taking. And so I decided then and there with scary things. If you're gonna do 'em, you've gotta decide you're doing them. Make sure you're safe, say nice things to yourself and just do it. So when I went up for my bungee. I literally [00:21:00] went up the queue and I decided in the queue I wasn't gonna look down. 'cause you're going up this tower, right? Total to toddle up the steps. And I'm like, I'm not gonna look down. I'm just gonna look at the horizon. I'm gonna admire the beautiful countryside and I'm just gonna look at the horizon. And I went, got to the top and the guy said, you're next. And I said, thank very much. Excellent. He said, you're okay? And I said, yes. He said, you're not looking down. I said, no, I'm not going to either. He said, okay, that's fine. And he did my ankles and I said, are they all safe? Yes. Are you happy? Yes. Everything checked. Am I ready to go? Yes. He said, stand there. He said, yes. He said, I'm gonna say with 3, 2, 1, bungee, you go on Bungee. And I said, okay, fine. He said, 3, 2, 1, bungee. And I jumped and I actually ended up loving it to be fair. I'll tell you a funny story about that in a second. But I actually ended up loving it and I decided I wanted to do it again. And so when I went back up again, he said to me, and I so remember this, he said to me, no one does that. No one doesn't look down, puts it around their ankles and jumps. And I was like, but it meant I was scared for about 14 seconds where she was scared for 20 [00:22:00] minutes. It's like, if I'm gonna do it, I might as well do it. And he was like, I think you're right. But most people don't do it. So I decided that time I was gonna do the same again, but go off backwards. High recommendation for you. Don't bungee backwards. Don't, just don't. I have a beautiful photo of me swan diving gracefully, backwards, which I'm very proud of. But other than that, it makes you boing around in a horrific way. So after the first one I was like, oh, bungee's not that bad. And then after the second one I was like, okay, bungee is awful. And I never do, so, never go backwards. Anyway, I digress. The point is, if you are definitely gonna do it. Don't take too long over it. I passed this on, I was at a holiday park last weekend with some friends and their kids, and the kid, and I did one of these drops, right where you go up a tower and you jump onto one of those big, like, I don't wanna say air bed, do not picture a domestic air bed. I mean like a stunt person type air bed. And he was [00:23:00] scared. Gave him exactly the same advice, little time as possible, and we go. So that's my final tip for you with your, these emails. Once you've decided, make it safe by making it as clear, as informative, as straight to the point. Short. If possible, people who know me well will laugh, but that's something I've learned over my career. Keep it short, um, and get it sent. We get it done. I hope you found that useful. I know my client found it super useful and so did everybody in the room. They could all apply it, even if you haven't got a scary email to send, which most of us do at some point, but even if you haven't, you can apply it to most other things that are quite scary, particularly where they're self-paced like that, right? It's a bit different if you've got a booked presentation or whatever, but if it's something where it's like, I can get this done sooner. Let's decide we're doing it, make it safe and get it done. I really hope you found that useful. I'm actually off to teach another workshop now. So, if you wanna find out more about the membership, it we open quite soon. Actually, we [00:24:00] open in about three weeks time. So make sure you go to my website, the PhD life coach.com, click on the membership and find out all the details. Get on my newsletter and you'll be the first to hear. When we're open and all the different things that we're gonna be doing next quarter. So make sure you sign up. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.
