Merry Christmas! Now, I'm recording this on like the 12th of December, my study is chaos, there are boxes everywhere, I've got half open packages, wrapping that needs doing over there, But I've decided I'm getting ahead of myself and I'm recording my Christmas episode. So this is coming out on actual Christmas day because that is a Monday.
So if you're listening to this on Christmas day, Merry Christmas to you. If you're listening to it in the follow up too, I hope you have had a wonderful festive season, whatever you celebrate. And today you lot seem to love my little listicles of different things you can learn. So today we've got seven things that you can learn from Santa Claus himself.
Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach. This is episode 15 of season 2 and it's Christmas Day. Now some of you are thinking, why are you releasing an episode on Christmas Day? Firstly, because it's a Monday. And I set myself the challenge that I was going to release an episode every single Monday, apart from during a break in the summer. And partly because not everyone celebrates Christmas. Some of you might be working today. Some of you might be just not particularly enjoying where you're at and want some of your usual routines. So we're here if you want it on Christmas day. And if not, you might be listening to this on Boxing Day or in that weird period of time between then and New Year when no one knows what day of the week it is.
Whenever it is, I hope you find it useful because we are thinking about Santa. Santa completes the biggest project of the year every single year, delivering all those presents all around the world, and I think we can learn a lot from how he does it. This is slightly tongue in cheek, but I still think there's some important lessons in here.
The first lesson we're going to learn is from Santa's naughty and nice list. Now, let's think about the logistics of how this works. Everybody's told Santa has a naughty and nice list, but one of the really important bits is that he starts with a presumption of nice. Everyone is on Santa's nice list unless they do something naughty.
And I just think that can be a brilliant model to follow. Often we sort of go with this idea that, you know, someone has to prove themselves to be trustworthy. I have to, you know, wait and see whether they're useful or not. If we can start from a place where everyone in your working environment has the potential to be on your nice list, has the potential to be useful, has the potential to contribute something interesting, something valuable to your research, or to your wider academic life, then we just start from a much more open and interested place.
We're much more likely to recognize the opportunities, to recognize the value that we can get or create with these other people if we start from the presumption that they're on our nice list, that they're there to help us. So that when they make a critical comment, we don't jump to, Oh my goodness, they're saying that because they think I'm stupid or because they're a horrible person.
We go, Oh, that's interesting. I wonder if there's anything in that. I wonder if that's something I need to look at in my research. I wonder if there's a way I can take that into account or whatever. We look at it as though it's coming with the best of intentions. It's coming from somebody who's on our nice list.
It just changes so much of the ways that we interact. It's the same as if we're giving critiques to things. Sometimes when you're critiquing other people's work, whether you're doing reviews or just reading a peer's thesis, you can sometimes read it and be a bit like, Oh my God, how did you not do this? This is so scruffy. Did you not put any effort in? But if we can start from a presumption that they're on the nice list and we're on the nice list, we can think, They probably did their best here, and there's reasons that it's not clear. I wonder what those reasons are. I wonder whether they don't fully understand this, or I wonder whether they think that this order makes sense, but I can just explain to them why it's not quite right. When we start with a presumption of niceness, it changes all of our interactions.
Now, I'm not saying there shouldn't be a naughty list. Santa has a naughty list. If it's good enough for Santa, it's good enough for us. And now he has his whole team of elves on the shelf reporting back. That's a whole thing, huh? I don't have small children in the house. Happy days. No one reports back on me.
But you can have a naughty list. You can have people that you don't feel comfortable interacting with for a bunch of reasons. There is nothing wrong with having boundaries around who you work with. One of the reasons that some of my collaborations worked as well as they did were because I forged them on the basis of people that I liked.
Yes, they were strong scientists. Yes, we have things in common in terms of our research interests. But my best collaborations came out of friendships. They came out of people that I just wanted to spend more time working with and so we design projects to make that happen.
Case in point, Professor Jenn Cumming. If you haven't listened to her episode from last year where she helped me do a strength based review of the year. Make sure you do. You can follow it through and answer the questions yourself so that you can review this year. It's a really fun activity to either end 2023 or to start 2024. Jenn and I had some research in common, sort of, but not loads, But we really liked each other, and we really enjoyed working together, and just as importantly, we brought complementary skills, both personality wise and academically speaking, which meant that we were a really good research partnership, a really good collaboration.
So have your naughty and nice list. Collaborate with people that you like. Have people that you have boundaries. That's absolutely fine. I don't work with these people because I don't like the way they work, or I don't like the way I tend to behave when I'm with them.So there is nothing wrong with having your boundaries, but let's start from a presumption that everybody is on the nice list and everybody has something to contribute.
Lesson two, look after your reindeer. They are all part of the team. Santa gets all the glory, but he couldn't do this without his reindeers. He couldn't do this without the people that pull his sleigh. We all have people that pull our sleighs. We all have people who make the work that we do possible. It may be your supervisors, your collaborators, your managers.
It will almost certainly be administrators, technicians, people around the university who support you and help you to achieve the things you achieve. We have our teams at home, we have our friends, our family, our partners if you have them. Sometimes it feels like we are single handedly carrying this enormous sack of research, like Santa, all on his own.
But we all have a team of reindeer, even if you don't see them regularly. Make sure they feel appreciated and make sure you remember they exist. You don't have to do this all on your own. If you don't feel like you have many reindeer at the moment, like you feel like you're doing this on your own, try and find them.I promise they're there. I promise there are people that are cheering you on and who are trying to help pull you through this. Find them and look after them.
Lesson three, it's fun to track progress. So my step mom is a little bit obsessed with Flight Tracker for reasons that none of us quite understand. She's under a flight path in her house and she likes to know which plane's gone over and at Christmas, you can track Santa. So all the way through the time zones, you can check where he is delivering presents and he appears on Flight Tracker with all the others.
There's various different places you can find this, but you can see where he's going and she and the grandchildren get really excited spotting where he's going and how he's getting closer and closer to us here in the UK. And just seeing something getting closer can really, really build excitement, build momentum, and make you feel like you're getting somewhere.
I have a whole episode on why you should get rid of your to do list and have a done list instead. So if you haven't listened to that already, then do check that out. I've mentioned already the episode about the strengths based review of the year. Make sure you are tracking your progress.
Make sure you can see how far you have come. Santa is going a long way in a night, and you are going a long way in a year. But when we see it happen, sort of day by day, it feels really slow. You see the days where you don't move forward and you see the things that you intended to do this year that you didn't do.
And it can make us feel like we've made no progress. But if you can track the things that you have done, even at a really rough level, I'm not very good at actually sort of doing the consistent little habit trackers and all that sort of stuff. But I do know roughly what I've got done each month. When you look back through that, it really helps you to have thoughts like, ah, I'm actually getting somewhere, I know more than I did, I'm further along than I was, I'm making progress here. And those thoughts can really lead to feelings like, purposefulness and motivation that make it so much easier to do other things. Track your progress the way my step mom tracks Santa.
Lesson four, wrap as you go along. Like I said at the beginning, I'm currently in a big pile of wrapping paper, empty boxes, parcels that are ready to go. And it's the 12th of December. I'm starting wrapping. I'm doing a bit as I go along, because when you do it all at once in a massive thing, it's a bit of a nightmare. It's so much less intimidating to just wrap a couple of presents. You also have less worries about them getting found then. Because if they find them and they're wrapped, it doesn't give as much away.
Now, I know there's a whole bunch of you going, Yeah, but then I have to get the wrapping stuff out and it'll just be much easier if one day I can just blitz it, get it all done when I'm really in the mood and I can get everything out and just do it in one go.And I see the same pattern with writing. People say, Oh, I'll get writing done when I've got a clear day and I can really get into it and get loads done at once. The problem is fully clear days very rarely come along, and when they do, you suddenly feel all this pressure to, like, do everything and get it done, and you beat yourself up if you don't get as much done in that day as you intended to. And I'm sure in the run up to Christmas, many of you listening to this were like, Oh, I'll get them all done in one go, I'll get them all done in one go, and then you don't have time to do it, and then suddenly it's Christmas Eve and you're doing it in the middle of the night. Ready for Santa to deliver, in case anybody literally is listening. But when we tell ourselves, I'll just do it all in one go, it'll be easiest, it's really hard to keep that progress going that we mentioned, keep that momentum going. So wrapping your presents as you go along really takes the edge off it.
Doing your writing as you go along, doing your references as you go along, stops you having that huge pile of it to deal with at the end. And if you're still saying, yeah, but it just feels like a lot of hassle to do it like that, ask yourself, how can I make it easy? So with your wrapping, how can you have one thing of wrapping paper, one sellotape, one scissors that live somewhere that you can get to them easily, so that when you buy a present, you quickly wrap it and it's done.
In your academic life, how can you have it so that the document that you are writing at the moment, when you open it, it's absolutely clear what the next thing you need to write is. Because yesterday's you wrote a couple of little bullet points for today's you, so that when you start, it's dead easy and you know exactly where to go.
So if it feels like a big thing to start where you're going, oh, I don't want to. Think about how can I make it as easy as possible for me just to jump into and to do a bite sized chunk.
The other thing I think of when I think of wrapping up as you go along is something that I have always struggled with and this is properly finishing things off when they're done. So often we will do a presentation and then that's it over. We will run a workshop. That's it over. On to the next thing. And we don't have time to stop and think.
Wrapping things up as you go along also covers, after that presentation, just stopping for a minute to make a few notes about how you might do it differently next time. What you need to change. Maybe even making those changes in the slides while it's fresh in your mind. It's after you've run a workshop, making a handout so that it can actually be useful there in the future for other people who are going to do this workshop.
It's tying off those loose ends. It's making sure if you run a conference that you do send out the feedback forms and you analyze them and you actually do something with it. It's doing that last 5 percent so that a job is actually finished and it's yielded as many benefits as it can.
It's something I'm still working on. It's something that some people are much better at than other people. I am very much the sort of person that's going along quite fast and when it's done it's out the way and I'm on to the next thing without really thinking about wrapping it up. But if we can do it, as we go along, finishing up things that we've done, not only does it mean we yield the full benefits of that thing, which is super important, but it's also so much easier to just tidy off the to do list and mark it as completely complete.
Otherwise, we have so many tasks that are like 98% Percent finished other than that last little bit that just then clutter up our to do list, clutter up our brains and make it feel like we've got a thousand things to do when in reality, the issue is that we just haven't quite finished the things that we've done. Wrap them up as we go along. Let's keep those to do lists clear, keep us moving forwards.
Lesson number five! Santa recognizes that different times of the year are for different things. At the moment, Santa is super exhausted, because he's just whizzed all the way around the world to deliver all his presents, and he's now back off to the North Pole, or wherever you believe he lives, to chill out.
He's not going to do a lot over the next month. He's going to eat all those mince pies we left out for him. He's going to relax with Mother Claus, chill his beans, sit in a hot tub overlooking the snow, and reflecting on a job well done.
Then he might start thinking about how he gets ready for next year. Maybe we're looking back and reviewing how well these deliveries went. Is there anything he can do to make it more efficient? He can start working out who's on his new naughty list, who's on his new nice list, planning who's going to get what. He does different things at different times of year. I know these lessons are getting super tenuous, but go with it, okay? There's some really good stuff in here, in amongst the cheese.
In academia, it's really important to recognize that there is a cycle to the year and that you don't have to do all the things all the time. When you're in the midst of your heaviest teaching terms, you don't have to be beating yourself up because you're not writing tons of papers. It's useful to think about how you can wrap as you go along and keep some little bits moving, but it doesn't have to be at the same proportions as at other times of the year.
There'll be other times of year where there's just a little bit more space. I'm aware there's often not that much space, but there'll be just a little bit more space to be thinking about some of those longer term projects, thinking about grants, thinking about promotion applications, those sorts of things.
For PhD students, your PhD will be in phases. There'll be times when you're just desperate to get going on data collection, but you haven't, you haven't finalized your design yet, or you haven't got your ethics approval, or you haven't got your assay working or whatever it might be, and you're in the midst of that, we have to recognize the phases that we're in and focus on the things that are appropriate for that phase rather than beating ourselves up. Santa does not sit there in June beating himself up about the fact that he is not yet delivering presents. He is in the midst of logistics planning or whatever Santa does in June. And he knows that the busy bit where he's delivering it all will come in due course. When he's in the midst of the delivery bit, maybe occasionally he wishes that he was just chilling out somewhere.
But he knows that this is his really busy period and that it will calm down again afterwards. Try to stay in the phase you're in and focus on the things that need doing in that phase rather than wishing you were somewhere else beating yourself up because you're not doing all the other things as well.
Now some of you, especially the academics who listen to this, might be saying, that's all very well, Vikki, but marking eats into my Christmas now, exam prep eats into my Easter, my summer used to be for research, but now there's annual reviews and module planning and all these other things that squish up the holidays.
I get it. I've been there. I recognize that the phasing of the years isn't as pronounced as it perhaps once was. That is a fact. Those of you familiar with the self coaching model that I used, that I would describe as a circumstance. That the universities have spread out the academic load so that it stretches into holidays more than they used to.
However, what I also see is lots of people making that worse, making it mean that they never have time to themselves, that they can never have a break, because there's always something to do. And what I would really encourage is for you to consider, how can you phase your year and your thoughts within the context that you're in.
Yes, there are tasks the university requires us to do at all different times of the year. And maybe we resent that, I get it. But we get to control the pressure we put on ourselves. We get to control the stories we tell ourselves about what we should be doing at the moment. Maybe we can slightly modify our expectations.
So we don't necessarily maybe get that six week period in the summer where we can exclusively do research anymore. But maybe in the summer it becomes 50 percent research instead of 10 percent research. Okay. And instead of resenting the fact that it's not 100 percent research, we enjoy and make the most out of the 50 percent that we do have.
Whilst there are structural things that make this harder, our thoughts telling ourselves that other people should be different, we should be different, and this shouldn't be like this, just make it so much harder. We can pre decide what phase of the year we're in and how we want to divide up our time within that and then enact that plan without telling ourselves that we should be doing other things as well.
Lesson six is that you can adapt your story to suit you. Now, Santas all around the world have slightly different versions of how they get in the house and when they leave their presents and where he lives during the year. I think in the Netherlands, my friend told me this, in the Netherlands, he comes up by boat from Spain.
Do I have any Dutch listeners? Is that true? I find that very strange. In my head, he lives at the North Pole in a unspecified country, the North Pole, but there's different versions of this story all around the world. And even within cultures, there are different family versions of how Santa gets in.
Those of you who don't have a chimney I'm sure we'll have had discussions with your kids about what your version of how Santa gets into your house is. I remember a boyfriend I had at university when he and his brother were little. they were terrified of the idea of Santa coming in their house.
So to this day, I believe, Santa leaves their presents in the front porch because the little boys didn't like him coming into the lounge. So we can adapt our stories to suit ourselves, even when it's a massive tradition like Santa. And the same is true of your academic story. You get to tell your academic story. You get to decide what's meaningful for you. You don't have to follow the perfect linear path of a research-focused career that we get kind of sold as the only version of academia. You don't have to follow that. There's a whole variety of ways to succeed in and out of academia. PhD students, a bunch of you will stay in academia, but a huge number of you won't.
There's a whole different version of your story out there that is just as valuable, just as important, just as meaningful. Just as valued as any other. Within academia, you can have a story that is a teaching focused story or a research story or a combination of those. You can be an applied practitioner. You can be qualitative. You can be quantitative. You can tell your story the way you want to tell your story.
If you want to think more about this, that I have a few episodes that will be relevant. I did an interview with Kirsty Sedgman earlier this year on her book On Being Unreasonable, really recommend the book, really recommend that episode.
She talks about different routes to success within academia and how sometimes maybe we need to be a little more unreasonable. And there's also a series of episodes from earlier on in this year where I talk about how to tell your academic story. Because not only is it important for us to tell our academic story to ourselves so that we value what we're doing, being able to tell your story in a coherent way is a really good route to getting new jobs, getting promotions, and generally being recognized for what you do.
So if you're not clear on what your story is or you feel like you do a little bit of everything and you're not quite clear what you are or where you want to progress, then those episodes are really, really useful for you. I do also have a promotions package where I do six sessions over 12 weeks and I help you work out what your academic story is building towards a promotion application or a job application or something like that. I have a waitlist at the moment, but if you're interested in that, get in contact with me through my website, or any of my social medias, and I can add you to the waitlist. I'm hoping to get new clients in, in kind of mid to late January, something like that, there should be some spaces. So get on that waiting list. If that is of use to you. You can tell your story, however you want to tell it.
And lesson seven, Santa knows that everything is more special when you believe. We've all seen little children who see Santa for the first time, or they come down and see the presents under the tree and their little faces light up, and it's all so magical and wonderful.
Everything is better when you believe. We are living in a time where academia is under huge pressure, whether you're a PhD student, academic, it can all feel a bit rubbish. And, I don't want to tell you that you have to see the positives in it all the time because there is a whole bunch of things that are really, really challenging at the moment.
That's not you not being strong enough. That's not you not being resilient enough. It's, it's tough out there and that's okay. But Everything is better when we can believe that what we're doing is important. That the small interactions we have make a difference. That the research we do is interesting and valuable. That the teaching we do makes a difference.
So, find the bits that you believe. I'm not asking you to believe things you don't believe. Find the bits that you do believe and make sure you spend as much time thinking those as thinking the thoughts about the things that feel a bit rubbish.When we nurture that magic, we nurture that belief, and we start to spend more time on those bits that we believe, that make it all feel special and important and meaningful, everything becomes so much easier.
I really hope you enjoyed today. We have gone through some tenuous links to Santa. But I think there's some useful stuff to remember in there.
Have your naughty and nice list, but start from the assumption of nice.
Look after your reindeer. You're not doing this alone.
Track your progress the way we track Santa on Flight Tracker.
Wrap as you go along. Tie things off.
Remember that different times of year are for different things and that's okay. We don't have to be 100 percent everything all of the time.
Remember that you can adapt the story to make it yours, you don't have to have the same academic story as everybody else.
And finally, it's all so much more magical when you believe. So find the bits that you believe in and make sure you think them often.
Thank you so much for listening. I hope you are having a wonderful Christmas period. My next episode comes out on the 1st and don't worry, I'm recording that one in advance as well, because I'm resting over the holiday period, as I hope you guys are too. Enjoy the rest of 2023 and I will see you in the new year.