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This is the first time I have ever had to put a spoiler warning on my podcast. I'm so excited. If you have an intention to watch series two of the UK Traitors and you haven't yet seen it, please go listen to a different podcast. There's 60 something of them out there. See what you can find that I published last year, that might be of use to you now and come back to this once you've watched. If you didn't watch and have no intention of watching, I'm not fully sure we can be friends, but we'll go with it. I trust you. That's fine, don't tune out. It's all good. You don't have to have watched The Traitors for this to be an immensely useful episode, but if, like me, you got a little bit obsessed with The Traitors, then you are going to love this episode Because we're going to be identifying eight things that all PhD students and academics can learn from The Traitors. This started out as five things you can learn. I got carried away. I might add more as we go through. Who knows? I'm a little overexcited.
Hello and welcome to episode 21 of the PhD life coach and we're talking about The Traitors. Oh my goodness, I can't remember the last time that I was as excited about a TV show as I was during The Traitors this year. Absolutely immense. And I think the thing that made me love it the most was also being on Twitter alongside it.
So I'd watch the episodes, I'd be seeing what other people were saying. Afterwards we'd be dissecting the cliffhanger, figuring out what we thought would happen next. And It was just truly amazing, and got a little bit obsessed, got lots of my friends into it as well, and now I figured out a way to weedle it into my work as well.
Because I thought, you know what? There's lessons in here. There's stuff we can learn from The Traitors, other than, it's amazing television. Now, those of you who know me well, will be very impressed to learn that I have resisted the temptation to buy a cloak.
I nearly bought a cloak for my YouTube. If you didn't know, I'm on YouTube as well, just a kind of recorded version of this podcast. But I hope you'll be impressed to know I restrained myself. I mean, I confess, I did spend about 10 minutes just now with a shawl over my head, seeing if there was a way to kind of recreate the Claudia vibe. But frankly, without the fringe, it wasn't a winning look and I decided against it. So look at me being mature. Very impressed with myself.
Anyway, if you haven't seen The Traitors, just to bring you up to speed, 22 people put in a Scottish castle with Claudia Winkleman, TV star extraordinaire. Three of them are made Traitors and the rest are Faithfuls and the faithful's job is to find the Traitors and banish them from the castle. Because if they get to the end of the series and there's any Traitors remaining in the castle, they will take all the prize money at the end of the game.
So Faithfuls are on the lookout for Traitors, Traitors are trying to go undetected and persuade people to banish Faithfuls instead. So they're all sussing each other out trying to figure out what's going on and everyone's trying to convince each other that they are a faithful and they deserve the prize pot.
I watched series one, loved it. Watched the US version, it's okay. Australian, pretty good. I haven't watched series two of those yet, but series two just went absolutely wild in the UK and I just found it, apart from just super exciting television, I found it such an interesting insight into human behaviour that I thought would be super relevant to all of us. And a cheap excuse to keep talking about it.
So, lesson one is, clever is not enough, you have to be persistent too. Those of you who watched it will know that Jazz was a bit of a legend for working out who were Traitors from about the third or fourth episode all the way through to the very final and everybody's been calling him Jazzatha Christie and things like this and marveling at his skills and he was really good. In a game where you're taking in so much information all the time, they're together all day every day, he seemed to have more insight into what was going on than pretty much anybody else. He was really good at the detecting part of being a faithful. However, the thing that he was much less good at was convincing other people of his thoughts.
Now, at first, you could argue that was a tactical thing. He was holding back so that he didn't sort of stick his neck out too much and get murdered by the Traitors for having too, too good ideas, essentially. And we know that happened. So at first, this was a good strategy.
But in the later stages of the game, and particularly once he got through to the final and end game, it became a real limitation. He would sort of vaguely raise his suspicions. Somebody would say that they didn't agree, and he would stop talking. He would kind of go, oh, okay. And we made excuses when he was biding his time at the beginning. He's just being tactical. But at the end, he just wouldn't or couldn't persuade other people of his amazing ideas, his amazing insight. And it really reminded me of people I've known in academia who have been super clever, got amazing ideas for new research, or different ways of teaching, or different ways of organizing the administrative side of academia.
And who struggled to put across those viewpoints, and so they weren't always listened to. Now, you may argue, quite rightly I think, that some of it is on the others to listen. So in the case of the Traitors, I thought it was ridiculous that Evie and Andrew and Molly didn't listen to Jazz more when he was expressing really legitimate concerns. They just immediately brushed him off. So it's definitely on the people around us to listen, but as with everything we talk about in coaching, we only have responsibility for our own behavior. And I think Jazz has to take responsibility for the fact that he didn't push his ideas forward in a convincing way and persistently enough to make change happen.
Now, this, as those of you who know me will know, that isn't something that I have struggled with in the past. I'm pretty good, some would say too good, at pushing my ideas forward. What I have struggled with in the past is being persistent when people couldn't see that what I was suggesting was a really sensible thing to do and in certainly in the earlier parts of my career and sort of mid career I would get really frustrated that like two years after I'd suggested something a few times people would do the thing and act like it was some amazing new idea.
It's like, dudes, I said this two years ago! But I hadn't been persistent, and I hadn't been patient with the fact that sometimes you have to say the same things multiple times for people to actually understand where you're coming from or why what you're saying is important.
Now, this isn't being Maddie. Those of you who watched it last season will know that Maddie was just noisy and banged on about it over and over and over again. Sometimes she was right, sometimes she was wrong, but she wouldn't let it go. I'm not suggesting that we channel our inner Maddies. I was probably a bit too Maddie at points in my academic career.
But I think there's a happy medium. I think if we have Maddie at one end who bangs on about her ideas over and over and doesn't seem to care that no one's listening - love her, you know, all due respect Maddie, but same and then Jazz at the other end, who had great ideas, but wouldn't try and convince people in any meaningful way, I think there's a place in between, where we can bide our time, like Jazz did, but know that sometimes people are going to disagree with our ideas initially, but when they've had more time to think about them, or where you've presented more evidence, they might come on board. Sometimes people just aren't quite ready to hear it yet, but if we can keep going, if we can listen a bit longer, look for other opportunities where they might be coming around.
As an example, when Jazz heard Andrew talking about Harry, Jazz should have used that as his opportunity to be like, Right, Andrew gets it. Andrew knows. I can really, really be persistent now. I can really push. So I want you to think about ideas that you've been trying to bring up, whether it's research ideas to your supervisor, whether it's ways to change things at the university to your head of school, for example, and think, are there ways that I could be a little more persistent, a little more persuasive so that I could bring more people on board?
Jazz didn't win the prize because he wasn't able to bring the right people around at the right time. And he left himself in a position where he needed to persuade somebody that he was never gonna persuade. If he'd moved a little faster and a little more assertively, he may have been able to work with Evie or with Andrew to get Harry out and we can learn from that.
Lesson two is that there are lots of different ways to play this game. So in the Traitors, obviously there's the Traitors and the Faithfuls who play the game very differently. They've got different tasks that they need to do. But even within those, but even within those, there's a huge range of different approaches.
They're the people that go straight in, I'm going to be myself no matter what and see what happens. There's others that try and play a kind of long, slow game. There's people that were desperate to be Traitors. We saw Paul describe himself as cruel at the beginning when Claudia asked him to describe himself just to make sure that he was made a Traitor. All the way through to we heard in one of the Uncloaked episodes that Diane had got into absolute fits of giggles at the idea that she could ever be a Traitor, and Claudia decided not to make her a Traitor on account of the fact she didn't think she'd ever keep a straight face. So, there's different roles we can take, different people go into it in different ways, and there's a huge number of different ways to succeed.
We know Harry succeeded in the sense that he won the money, but was it worth the emotional toll of letting Molly down like that? Maybe. It was a game, but it was a different way to play. Molly got all the way through to the final without having basically done a great deal, I would say, other than just be lovely, so no one was worried about her and no one suspected her. That's a highly successful game. She had a huge amount of airtime. She was able to participate in every game that was going. She got a helicopter and everything at the end, and even if she didn't win the prize money, that's a hugely successful participation in a TV show like this. Diane goes out in the middle in absolutely iconic style, and is pretty much the toast of every town in the UK. There are lots of different ways of being a great player.
The same is true in academia. We kind of get sold this one path where you've just got to get lots of grants and lots of publications and, you know, progress up a research route and be the research superstar that's running huge labs or huge research projects and so on.
When in reality, there's a bunch of different routes to professor at most universities and there's a bunch of different ways to have a successful career. How are we defining success? Are we defining success as, you know, Prof before 40 and making tons of money? Or are we defining success as making a meaningful contribution to the lives of your students and your research contributions?
There's a whole bunch of different ways. And one of the biggest problems is that we often look at other people's way of succeeding and think that that's the only way to do it. And if we're not cut out in our minds to do it like that, then we can't succeed in academia. I want you to think about all the different ways that you can succeed in academia. You can pick a way of playing that plays to your strengths. You can pick a way of playing that you enjoy and that feels sustainable for the whole of your career.
You don't have to go in there being the pantomime baddie like Paul. As an example, Wilf, from the first series. I'm not going to give first series spoilers in case you're going to go back and watch it. But those of you who've seen it will know that his game didn't go exactly as he thought it would. But I've heard him talk on a podcast about how he's glad that it worked out like that.
He's glad that he had the experience that he had, and he's got a lot more out of it afterwards than he thinks he would have been had it turned out the way he'd originally intended. You can play this game however you want to play this game.
Lesson three, and it kind of connects to that, is that whatever you do, people will criticize you for it. We saw Sonia getting banished because she was a big personality who was influencing the room and all of that. And then we saw Meg fall under loads of suspicion because she was really quiet and not saying anything.
We had people who were banished for not speaking up enough at the round table, and people who were banished for speaking up too much and getting people's backs up. Whatever you do in the Traitors and in academia, people will tell you that you could be doing it a bit differently than you are.
I remember getting criticized for being too ambitious, that I wanted to progress too quickly and that I needed to kind of slow down and take my time and not get people's backs up and things. Other people were really impressed with the trajectory that I took and the things that I took on. And I'm really glad I did the things I did because I had some wonderful experiences.
Whatever tactic you take, someone will tell you, you should have pushed yourself forward, but not like that. You should have been quieter, but not like that. You get to pick. In my opinion, the best way to play the academic game is to turn up in a way that you can be proud of.
Where when you stop and think about what sort of academic do I want to be? What is my purpose for doing this? Why am I here? What do I want to achieve? How do I want to show up? Are you doing those things? Are you showing up the way you want to show up? If not, that's okay. And that's things we can work on. You can listen to other episodes of the podcast, there's other support if you're not showing up the way you want to right now. But when you're making decisions about how you need to be in order to succeed in academia, there's no right answer. You get to choose to play a game that you're proud of.
Lesson four, be trusting, but not too trusting. So this is in honor of the lovely Molly, who, by the way, if they don't make her a Blue Peter presenter, I'm starting a riot because I think she would be. An amazing Blue Peter presenter. Did you see her scrambling up over those rocks in the final episode? Amazing. She'd be so good. But we all saw her let her loyalties and her friendship get in the way of that final decision. Does she stand by it? It's hard to tell from her interviews whether she regrets it or not. But I think it's an important lesson that erring on the side of trusting people can help you go a really long way in both the Traitors and in academia. Working with people you like is a really important part of academia. And so building those relationships so that people want you to be involved with things is really important.
You know, it's one of the overlooked things about Molly. She got to the final because people liked having her there. And the same is true in research. People recruit people because they like having them there, they enjoy working with them, they carry on collaborative partnerships. I've carried on collaborative partnerships and even started collaborative partnerships with people where our research didn't necessarily gel in an obvious way from the outside, but we loved working together and so we made it work and it actually ended up being amazing. But it wasn't the obvious like tactical choice. We did it because we liked each other. And you go a really long way like that.
The downside, as we saw with Molly, is sometimes you can be too trusting. You can assume that everyone has your best interests at heart. An example I see here a lot when I coach PhD students is supervisors who encourage you to stay on and do more research in their labs. Particularly in the science and engineering end of things, often I see the most able PhD students recruited into postdoc positions within the same lab. And the supervisors really selling this as an amazing opportunity for the student. And sometimes it is. I mean, I'm talking here as somebody who stayed her whole career in the same department, and I don't regret it.
For me, it actually was an amazing experience, because the postdoc that I was recruited to had a ton of freedom about what I got to do. And so, whilst I stayed on, I changed what I was doing a lot, and I took real ownership of it.
One thing I see, though, is that sometimes supervisors encourage people to stay on in their lab because it's better for the supervisor. They know they've got a safe pair of hands, they know that person can run the next project really well, they know how the kit works, they haven't got to train somebody, and sometimes the students are too trusting that their supervisor has their best interests at heart.
It's unusual for a supervisor to be actively wanting to screw over a student, but we have to remember that supervisors have got their priorities too. They've got their own stresses, their own progressions that they need to make, so sometimes it can just be worthwhile just to step back and be like, okay, is this entirely for me? Or is this a bit about them, too?
And this happens at every level. You know, your head of school trying to persuade you to take on a new administrative role, because it's going to be great for your career, great for your next promotion prospect. Is it? Is it actually? Or do they just need somebody to do that admin role?
Again, not suggesting they're being Machiavellian, not suggesting there's anything dark. But sometimes we can be a bit too trusting and go, Oh, okay, if you say that's good for my career, I should do it without questioning, Why is it that they're asking me that? Is it because it's best for me? Or is there an element of it that's best for you too?
Now, if there's an element that's best for the head of school or the supervisor as well, that's fine, that's not necessarily a problem, but let's make decisions knowing that. Let's make decisions going, there's reasons this is good for me, and reasons it's not, and there's reasons it's good for you too, and reasons it's not.
And let's then make a decision from there. So be trusting, but not too trusting. Make sure you've got all the information that you can and that you're weighing it up in a kind of slightly sceptical, measured sort of way when making decisions.
Lesson five, pull together on tasks. So, You will have seen in the show, in between all the murders and the round tables and the banishments and everything, they have big tasks that they have to go and do. They're collecting barrels that are worth certain amounts of money, or rowing across lakes and putting shapes together, or whatever it might be, and all the Faithfuls and Traitors are united in trying to do these tasks. And one of the things that struck me was how many of them say what a relief it is to be doing the tasks, because they almost relax from the kind of playing of the game and they all pull together to achieve a common goal.
I've seen this in departments where, you know, back in the day where departments used to get inspected, everyone would sort of pull together to be ready for the inspections. I've seen it happen. We used to have like a poster day thing for our third year undergraduates when they finished their final year projects and everyone pulled together to make it work and even though there were different members of staff who had different opinions of each other and things, everyone kind of pulled together to make this amazing day for the students and staff.
So, where you can see tasks, where you can pull together and just enjoy creating something, enjoy achieving a goal, really try to do that. Academia can be a competitive place and that can get really tiring if we're always focused on right what's on my to do list, what do I need to do next, how can I get ahead, how can I be ready for a job interview. Sometimes doing some of the extra things that are kind of fun, where you're pulling together with people that you otherwise wouldn't work with, or maybe are even in competition with, can just create a much nicer environment.
All of these things are so much easier with friends and you'll also find that people just give themselves a little bit more grace if you know each other as well. So where if you don't know people in your department and you get a bit of a grumpy email from somebody, you might be a bit like, Oh my God, they hate me or ooooh they're a terrible person or whatever it is.
If you know that person and you've been doing some activities with them and things, you'll be like, Oh, she sounds a bit grumpy today. What's going on? You know, just be curious about it because you've got other things to compare it to.
So make sure that you're getting involved. You're getting to know other people so that we all just take some of that pressure off, give each other a little bit more grace and enjoy this amazing academic setting that we can be in.
Sort of leading on from that is lesson six, which is enjoy the random friendships. So, series one, one of my absolute highlights was the friendship between Amos and Andrea. Again, go back, watch it, really hard to describe, but these are not people that you would expect to be besties in real life. They're like 30 years apart, he's a doctor, she's an older retiree, and they just loved each other, they just hung out, they played badminton in the gardens, and were just super protective of each other and really enjoyed each other's company.
And I think those random friendships, you only really get either in taking part in something a bit unusual like The Traitors, or in kind of workplace settings, because in most hobby based things, you're with people that are similar to you. I mean, it was one of the things I used to love about circus when I used to do circus stuff. I met all sorts of different people that were nothing like me and came from all sorts of different places and backgrounds and experiences and ages and things. And I love the random group of friends that I have from circus.
But often, you know, you go to a tennis club, it's a lot of people like you, go to a running club, it's a lot of people like you. And work is one of the places where there'll be people of lots of different ages and seniorities who have this one shared interest of the academic subject, but who in many other ways could be really different from each other. And I think allowing yourself space to enjoy those friendships, to get to know other academics who are very different from you and just enjoy the fact that you would have never met this person if you hadn't shared this one academic interest.
In fact, I recently went back to my old university to talk about our membership program, and I took the opportunity to kind of wander around the department and have some chats with people, and I realized it was one of the things that I most missed about work was the kind of random conversations with people that I wasn't good enough friends with that I would stay in touch with, but who I really liked and I enjoyed talking to.
And I really had a lovely time doing those natters. And one of the things, when I was saying to somebody how much I enjoyed it, One of the things she said was, yeah, but it's the first thing to go when we're busy, isn't it? And I thought that was a really insightful comment, because I don't think I'd really thought about that when I was still working at the university, that actually, as you get more stressed, you have fewer and fewer of those sort of incidental conversations.
You work from home in order to get stuff done. You close your office door so that you're not disturbed and you can get things done. And these are all the things that productivity dudes tell us that we should be doing in order to get more done with our time. But I think we should reflect that sometimes that means we're cutting out some of the things that make this fun and enjoyable. So I think we can learn from the Traitors to make space for some of those random friendships, those unusual conversations, and to enjoy them.
Lesson seven comes from the gorgeous Claudia Winkleman, who I love with an unhealthy amount of love. Bless her. She's amazing. And that is to take it seriously, but not too seriously. Where I think she pitches it absolutely perfectly is she gets utterly involved. So she's screaming in the tasks for them to hurry up, giving them time updates and things like that.
She's proper gutted when some of them go home. You can see her in the background on the round table, kind of cringing and kind of going ahhhhh. Anyway, she gets really, really into it. She takes it seriously. She's not one of these slightly too cool for school presenters who sits back and judges everybody. She is right there in the castle with all of them. And that's what makes it such a joy to watch.
On the flip side though, she does keep just a tiny bit of taking the piss out of it as well. So those of you who've watched it in as much detail as me will remember that her teasing Harry and Andrew for only recruiting men to being Traitors, talking about how it's like the olden days.
She's just teasy enough that she's not taking it so seriously it's silly. She'll tease a little bit. There was the odd occasion in the round table where I'm pretty confident she was giggling. So she just teeters that line between taking it very seriously so we can see how much she loves it and not getting like angry and carried away, seeing the fun in it as well. And I think that is a real lesson for academia.
We need to take this seriously. We are doing important work. Our research is meaningful. Our teaching is meaningful. But we don't have to take it quite so seriously. We can make space for some laughs. We can make space to enjoy the things we did wrong and laugh about them. To have those moments of levity. So make sure you're taking it seriously, but not too serious.
And then my final lesson, lesson eight, is for everybody who, like me, was on Twitter going, Oh my God, I would have noticed this. I can't believe they haven't picked another Traitor. I can't believe they can't see that Harry's a Traitor. The lesson here is that it's way harder than it looks. We get this beautiful curated version of the Traitors where the producers hint, they show us all the right conversations so that we can pull this story together and kind of know what's going on.
And in that situation, it's really pretty easy to see, oh yeah, if I was in there, I'd have known this, that and the other. Except, no you wouldn't. You'd have had about a billion conversations because you'd have been in there for hours and hours and hours. And actually, it's really hard to pick out anything meaningful when you're having quite so much going on.
How does this translate to academia? For me, it's because when we look at other people, we're always seeing their curated version. We're seeing the TV produced version of their lives. We're seeing the bit they choose to make public. So we get to see the successes. We get to see the maybe carefully curated failures that actually show how clever they are or whatever it might be.
We don't see the messy insides. We don't see how much they beat themselves up. We don't see where they have regrets or where they've still got hopes that they haven't achieved. We see other people's curated versions and we compare it to our messy version. And because we think our version is messy, we think we're not as good as them. It's not that, it's just like the people in the Traitors. They have access to all the conversations that go on in that castle. And you have access to all the thoughts that go on in your brain.
It also means if when we're looking at somebody else's curated version, we think that we know what they should be doing, because sometimes we do that right too. We look at people like, oh, well, he doesn't pull his weight or whatever. We don't know what's going on in his castle. We think we can see this really clear story about what he's doing, what he should be doing and so on.
We don't know what's going on in the castle. There could be all sorts of things. So the flip side of not judging ourselves too much, because our castle feels messier than theirs, is that also not thinking that we don't necessarily know what's best for them either. Because we don't have access to all those thoughts that are inside their heads either, all the stuff that's going on in their past and their lives that's affecting their academics that they're not presenting as part of their curated story.
So having some respect, whether we're talking about the people who are in the Traitors, or people in our careers, that everybody had their reasons for doing things, and nothing is quite as straightforward as it looks from the outside.
So! Those are my eight lessons.
- Clever on its own isn't enough. You need to be persistent as well.
- There are lots of different ways of being a great player.
- People will criticize things you do no matter how you behave. So you get to pick a gameplay that you can feel proud about yourself.
- Be trusting, but not too trusting.
- Pull together on tasks, because everything is better with other people around.
- Enjoy the random friendships that you can make through academia.
- Take it seriously, but not too seriously.
- And remember, everybody has a messy internal world. Don't compare yourself too harshly with other people's curated version. And don't assume you know what they should be doing when you don't have access to their whole messy story.
I hope you enjoyed this. I loved it as a cheap excuse to keep talking about the Traitors. If you haven't watched it, why not? Go and watch it. I hope that this has convinced you that you should.
If you have watched it, apparently Australia one's out on iPlayer now, and US is coming soon, so that is going to keep me occupied for the next couple of months, and I'm going to try not to binge them too badly.
Thank you so much for listening, and see you next week.