Everyone makes mistakes. It's inevitable that we're going to make mistakes. But one of the most important things is to be able to recognize what mistakes we're making, figure out why we're making them, and if appropriate, move away from that pattern of mistake. So in today's episode, I'm going to be telling you seven mistakes that I see lots of PhD students and academics making that I want you to check that you're not making too. Some of them are relevant to everybody. Some of them are a little more focused on people who are balancing teaching and research and all of those things as well. They are all things I want you to check that you're not doing.
Hello and welcome to episode 29 of series 2 of the PhD Life Coach and we are going to be thinking about what mistakes you might be making. Now this isn't to pick you apart, this isn't to tell you you're doing all these things wrong. Things are hard in academia at the moment. It is a difficult environment and the last thing you need is someone like me telling you that you're also making a load of mistakes. I promise that is not my vibe here.
I'm not telling you you're making mistakes in order to make you feel bad. I'm trying to help you see some of the things that you might be doing and what you could do instead so that it all feels a bit easier. They're all things that I've done. They're all things I saw my colleagues doing as I came through my academic career, at every level, pretty much. And they are certainly things that I see my clients experiencing now. So, I've got seven, unless I make up more as I go along, which, you know, sometimes happens if you're a regular listener. So, let's get started.
The first mistake is one that I made for most of my career, which is trying to impress by doing it all. So sometimes we're so eager to demonstrate that we're good enough, so eager to demonstrate that we were a good appointment to our PhD or to our lectureship or whatever it is you're in at the moment, that we feel the need to do all the things, all the time, just to justify our existence. And sometimes we're justifying our existence to other people. Sometimes, actually, we're mostly justifying our existence to ourselves.
If I do all the things, I will believe that I'm a good enough academic. I will believe that I'm a good enough PhD student. And the problem is, and like I say, it took me a really long time to accept this myself, when we try to do all the things, we end up not doing any of them enormously well and putting ourselves under much more pressure than we ever actually need to.
Because the truth is, we don't need to do all the things all the time. Certainly not all the things all the time to the best of our ability. Now, those of you who are in academic jobs may feel like actually you are expected to do all the things all the time. That that is the impression that our institutions give us, you know. In the same newsletter or email or whatever you get around, they tell you about REF, they tell you about TEF. They tell you about the NSS. They tell you about all these things. If you're not in the UK, I'm aware that didn't make any sense For international listeners, uh, the REF and the TEF are ways that our research and our teaching are evaluated, respectively. NSS is our National Student Survey, which has given a lot of attention. You are told that you should be able to do all the things.
It's just not true. And there's two ways you know it's not true. The first way is you look around at your colleagues. No one is doing all the things. Everyone is either struggling and exhausted and trying to do all the things, but barely coping, or they're just deciding there's some things they just don't put much effort into.
We all know the people who've got huge grants, huge publication records, who don't worry about their student feedback and just crack on with their teaching roughly. We all know the people who never hand in their forms on time and all that kind of stuff. You know, there's lots of different ways that we're all letting different bits of it slide.
So, first reason, we know you can't do it all because no one actually is doing it all. The second way we know you don't have to do it all, is because people get jobs and get promoted all the time who don't do it all. There's no clearer message from universities than when they promote somebody who's got great grant income or got great publications, but don't do any of the other things that you don't have to do it all perfectly, that is the strongest message that I can give.
You know, they taught the talk, you have to do everything, but actually when it comes down to promotions and things like that, they don't usually actually walk that walk. They still promote people who only do some of the things. Now you might be sitting here thinking, well, yeah, but I like all the things. And that's how I've spent my career. I wanted to be what I called a balanced academic. I wanted to do all the things. But what we have to then accept is if we're going for that, and I think there's a lot of merit to that, we can't be as good as others as the solely research orientated professor, and as good as the National Teaching Fellow winning teacher, and as good as the incredible pastoral care, looks after all the student, knows everybody's name, person, and as good as the person that does outreach, and as good as the person that does all the admin and leadership and things.
If our choice is to be someone who does all the things, we just get to accept that we're not competing with the specialists. We're competing by being balanced and finding that version that makes us a really valuable academic by doing all of the things good enough.
The other way we can manage it is if you want to be someone who does all the things is you can do all the things, just not all the time. So I think I've mentioned on the podcast before, one of the best bits of advice I ever heard was you can do all the things, just not in the same year. So you can decide this year is the one where I really double down on getting a grant. This year is the one where I really dig into getting my teaching sorted, because I've gone into new modules and I need to get that sorted, and that needs to be the priority.
And it doesn't mean everything else just stops, but it means that we have focused on one thing of the things as our main focus for that phase. And there'll be other stages of our career where the other things can come in.
If you're telling yourself you have to do all the things and you have to do all the things perfectly, you're creating a recipe for overwhelm, probably procrastination, possibly burnout, and just not really enjoying this career that we've created for ourselves. It's not true and you don't have to do it.
The second mistake that I see people making is believing that they're the only person that can do something right. And I always find this a really funny one because a lot of my clients tell me that they lack confidence. They tell me they're really unsure of themselves. They tell me that other people seem to be better at things than them.
But at the same time, when it comes to getting things done, often we think we're the only one we can rely on. My stepdaughter's currently just started university and she's having the joy of group work. I'm sure all of those of you who've been involved in supervising group work before will know the challenges that she is experiencing at the moment.
And often we think that we're the only one that will get the stuff done, we're the only one that will do it well enough, we're the only one that can fix that bit of kit, or the only one that will bother to do this. And again, that keeps us stuck in roles and tasks that aren't necessarily serving us anymore. Because what it means if we tell ourselves that we're the only one that can do this, or we're the only one that bothers to do it properly, then partly we build a sense of kind of resentment in ourselves that we're stuck doing this thing. And partly it makes it really hard to move on to other things.
I remember experiencing this quite early in my academic career. I was wellbeing tutor, and this was way before universities had the kind of the big wellbeing services that most universities have now. And it really was something that was dealt with by the academics. And I was a very diligent wellbeing tutor and I looked after my students really well. And I'm sure I helped a lot of people. But when it came time for me to take on a different role, I was really reluctant to let it go. I probably stayed in it two years longer than I should have done because I didn't believe that other people would do it to the level that I did it. And when I finally did move on to a new role, other people didn't do it the same way I did it.
Did they do it as well as me? Really depends on your definition of well. Because actually, whilst I was super helpful, I think I was also probably there too much for the students. I think I enabled some of their helplessness and I think I created a sort of impression of availability that probably wasn't exactly what they needed.
And then regardless almost of whether they did it as well as me, has this department gone on and thrived? Yeah, absolutely. Has there been a whole series of well being officers now? Yeah, absolutely. And is it all fine? Yeah. And if I had allowed myself to believe that either other people would do it, if not as well as me, then good enough, then I could have moved on to other things much more readily and with less regret than I did at the time.
So I want you to really ask yourself, are there things you're doing because you think no one else will do them as well as you and really question whether that's true or not, or whether it's time to move on.
The third one, and I see this at every stage of the academic career, from newbie PhD students to senior professors, is prioritizing tasks for other people. And again, this makes you sound like a really nice person, doesn't it? You know, everyone loves the person that puts other people's needs before them and is always there to help if you need them and things like that.
These things can make you sound like you're a really nice person. What I want to offer though, is that there's a bunch of people that need you to succeed in the things you're doing for yourself. Because when you're doing tasks for other people, you're not writing that big, exciting research grant that the world needs you to do.
And you're not designing that new, amazing module that your students don't even know they want to do yet, but they're going to love. You're not doing the things that get you the recognition, but that also move forward your discipline and your research and your scholarliness in meaningful ways.
Now, I think it's partly this notion that putting other people first makes you a really nice person that holds us in this mistake as well. Because I'm not saying be selfish, but what I'm saying is when we believe that in order to be a nice person, we have to put other people before ourselves, there's a lot of downsides.
We don't get to achieve the things that we want to achieve. We set up an environment in which in order to be considered nice, you have to do all the things, which I don't think is a helpful environment. You might be willing, on the surface, at least, to do all the things for other people.
But do you really want to tell the people that are five years behind you that this is what they need to do in order to succeed and in order to be liked? Probably not. It's probably not the sort of role model that you want to set. There were times towards the later part of my career where I started saying no to things, just to demonstrate to people more junior than me that you can say no and that that's okay.
I started leaving at a sensible time to demonstrate to people that you can and should leave at a sensible time as a senior academic because otherwise we inadvertently tell people that this is what you have to do to be considered nice and to be considered a good academic.
The other reason I think it's a mistake to always put other people's tasks before yours is I don't think it is just about being nice. And this is gonna sound harsh. I am now calling out all you people pleasers out there. It's not just about being nice. This is partly that you've been taught, you've been brought up that this is how you get people to like you and value you. But it's also because doing things for other people is way easier.
I don't want to be harsh, but it's true. And it might not always feel like that, but when you do something for other people, they usually give you pretty clear instructions. There's usually a firm timeline on it, and there's usually a good chunk of praise and thanks at the end of it. And whether that praise and thanks comes from them, which it often will, or comes from yourself because you tell yourself you're a good person for having done this for them. Sometimes we're doing these things for other people because it's easier, because it's clearer, because it's time pressured, and because we'll get gratitude at the end of it. Not because we're just nice.
These things are avoidance. Doing tasks for other people is a form of procrastination, if we're not doing it intentionally. Now, hear me, please, hear me when I say, I am not saying you shouldn't do things for other people. I want you to be amazing mentors. I want you to support your peers. I want you to be the ones that are collegiate and out there taking one for the team. A hundred percent, but not at your own expense. And not in some sort of misguided attempt to make people like you, and certainly not in some misguided attempt to avoid doing work that feels more difficult, less clear, or where there's less sort of certain gratitude at the end of it. Sometimes we need to put our things first in order to demonstrate that we can, and in order to stop avoiding the things that feel hard.
The fourth mistake I see people making, and again, I made this a lot, is not believing yourself when you say you have too much to do. Now I have a whole workshop on this, but when we tell ourselves we have too much to do, that isn't inherently a problem. Having too much to do is not a problem. Having too much to do is only a problem when we also tell ourselves that we have to do it and that we can't possibly do it. It's that cognitive dissonance where we hold two different thoughts that are contradictory but we believe them both. There is too much. We have to do it. Those two things cannot be true.
If you haven't listened to my episode, I have a whole episode on what to do when you've got too much to do. But here the mistake is not believing yourself that you do have too much to do. Sometimes we tell ourselves there's too much, but actually if we stop pressuring ourselves, we stopped like being a wuss about it, we can actually just get on and get it done and it's okay.
Most of the time, for most of you, particularly anyone listening who's in sort of mid to senior academic positions, or junior academics, you all have too much to do. It's just the world we live in. You have too much to do. Don't mess up by not believing that you have too much to do.
Because once we believe there's too much to do, we can start making decisions about which things we're not going to do. Or make decisions about which things we're going to do quickly and roughly and it's good enough. And which things we're going to give people warning that we're not going to do them till next year.
I have a bunch of papers that I never wrote up. Collected the data in various different formats and I've never written them up as academic papers and I won't now. I am considering writing some of them up as more like little blog post type situations, so who knows, they may see the light of day, but I accepted there was too much to do. There was too much data, there was too many options, and I couldn't do them all. And I tell you what, it felt enormously better to just decide I wasn't going to, than it was to keep telling myself that there was too much but that I had to do it all, and then inevitably not doing it.
Because there's no way to do it all if there genuinely is too much. So listen to yourself. Believe there's too much. Believe non judgmentally. Believe non dramatically. And just ask yourself, Okay, if there's too much, then what am I going to do? Because you're clever people. And we can come up with a plan.
Mistake five really relates to that one. And that is believing that things have a fixed level of quality and a fixed scope. So one of the problems with telling ourselves that we have too much to do is that we think our only two options is do the thing or don't do the thing. Those are not our options.
There are so many things we can do to a standard that is good enough, but not as good as our best, in order to have it done, but to have time to do the other things that matter too. Examples, beautiful PowerPoint slides. We can do just as good a presentation with very basic PowerPoint slides as we can with beautiful PowerPoint slides. We can fill in a module review form carefully, thoughtfully, and in lots of detail, or we can bung in some comments and it's good enough.
We can send a first draft for our collaborators to look at that is beautiful and nuanced and sophisticatedly written and impressively referenced and all of these things. Or we can send them some notes in an outline to check that we're on the right page. There is a whole variety of scope and there is a whole variety of quality that we can perform all of these tasks to. One of the most common things that PhD students experience is the fact that their thesis never quite ends up being what they thought it was going to be at the beginning because at the beginning their scope was far too broad.,, They had far too high expectations of how much they were going to get done. And one of the things that that PhD students need to do is to sort of align their scope, quality, and time to do it, in order to enable themselves to fulfill the requirements of a thesis. When we tell ourselves that there is a fixed quality, that it is either acceptable or it is not, and there is a fixed scope that is decided and therefore set in stone, then the only thing that we have any control over is time, so the only things we can do is work more hours or allow it to carry on longer. Those things are not true. You can change the scope. You can change the quality. You can decide which things deserve the best of you and which things just need to be done.
The sixth mistake that I see people making is making time for the wrong sort of work chatter. So we all want a vibrant academic community. We want somewhere where we feel excited to go to work and share the things we're doing. We have people that we can bounce ideas around with, where we can share our successes and lament our failures and get stuck into whatever disciplinary challenge it is that you're trying to answer at the moment.
We all want that community. Most of us also tell ourselves that it doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't exist the way it used to, and that we don't have time for it anyway. The problem is that academic communities only exist if we participate in them. And if we tell ourselves they don't exist, then we won't participate in them and they won't exist.
During the pandemic, I did not make enough time for that sort of bridge building, collaborative, positive discssions. And I thought that that was the right thing because I thought that I needed to focus on all the things I needed to sort out to keep our programs running during that difficult time. In reality, and I think I've mentioned this on past podcasts, in reality, what I did was make it very difficult to implement change because I didn't sort of have my finger on the pulse as to what was happening and what people were thinking. And I wasn't getting for myself that like nice sense of being part of a community that actually makes it easier to get work done. It was not true that I didn't have time to have those conversations. I just believed it was true. And so I didn't make them, when in reality I think they would have helped a lot if I had made time for them.
On the flip side, what I do see people making time for is moaning about how terrible things are. You know, we don't, we say we haven't got time to have a conversation with somebody about our new research findings and what they might mean, but we do have time to spend 20 minutes in the corridor talking about how useless the latest university announcement is, why it shouldn't be like this, why we've got too much to do, why it's all crap, and why higher education is falling apart.
And don't get me wrong, we all need to vent sometimes, I get it, but I want you to notice what this does to your emotions. Listening to all of this, participating in this sometimes, I want you to notice what it does to your emotions. Because there is a very big difference between venting in a way that helps you feel better once you've done it, and venting in a way that just feeds the beast, where the more you moan, the more you listen to everybody else moan, the worse it feels.
This is not to say that there isn't a lot to moan about. I get it. I'm not sad that I'm no longer working in academia. There's a whole bunch of challenges that you guys are still managing. I get it. Just have a ponder on what types of talking about it make you feel better, make you feel like it was cathartic and got it out of your system, and which make you feel like the will to live is crawling out the door. Because you don't have to be involved in those conversations. Sometimes we feel like we do. You can just remove yourself. You can just say, oh well, I need to get on now. I do that now. If I found myself being like, oh, everything's rubbish, I just remove myself. And you don't have to tell people why, you can just remove yourself. Now, in time, as we learn to regulate our own emotions more, we may be able to listen to other people expressing their dissatisfaction with things without that having to impact our mood. But that does take a bit of emotional regulation skills. It takes some effort and energy and if you haven't got that right now, that's okay. You can remove yourself from the conversations.
But remember, swap it for something else. Swap it for a different conversation. Swap it for a conversation where you tell somebody that you want to hear about what they're writing about now. Swap it for a conversation where you talk about something that you value that they did or ask their advice on something so that you can have a proper conversation. This isn't about entirely withdrawing, this is not making the mistake of allowing your only interactions being people being very negative about the current situation.
And then finally, the biggest mistake I see people make, and I help academics with this, particularly academics, in some of my one to one coaching, is not having a narrative of their own against which to prioritize. Now what do I mean by that? If you are clear on who you are, who you want to be in your working life, and where you want to get to, so this doesn't have to be some grand ambitious plan, but just what type of academic you want to be and what's important to you.
If you have a really clear narrative of that, it's enormously easier to choose what to prioritize. It's much easier to decide, I'm going to say yes to this but no to that. I've got enough of these things, so I'm going to do some of those things instead. It becomes a lot easier because you've got something to sense check it against.
It's the same as, you know, I've never been somebody who's particularly into like fashion and style and things like that. And so I often found it hard to decide what clothes to buy because I didn't have a clear sense of like what my style is. I've worked on it. I've tried, but other people have a very clear sense of what their style is.
So they'll be like, no, I don't go in that shop, that shop. I go in this shop and this shop. I wear these sorts of things and those sorts of things. And boom, it's easy, much easier. I did the same thing with my garden is I chose what colour flowers I wanted to have. And I just don't buy plants that aren't those colors because otherwise it was just massively overwhelming to choose.
And It's the same here. If you have a clear narrative for your career, you can then make so much easier decisions about which things to care most about, which things to put most time into, which things to postpone and which things just to not do. If you have no idea what your narrative is at the moment, and particularly if you are in an academic job at the moment, so not PhD students, but people who are actually working in universities at the moment, then keep an eye out for my one to one coaching.
So I'm usually on a wait list at the moment, but you can let me know what your situation is and where you're at and I can let you know how long it would be until I'm likely to have a space available. Because this is one of my favorite things to do. Help academics to figure out what their story is and how they can then use that to make decisions. If you're not ready to commit to coaching at the moment, but you think you'd like some more support on this, I do have three episodes of the podcast where I talk about how to figure out what your story is, why that's so important and how you can use it to move forward. So do make sure you check those out.
So those are my seven mistakes. How many do you think you're making? I've definitely made all of them through my career. So trying to impress people by doing it all. Believing that you're the only one that can do certain things right, and so getting stuck doing those things. Prioritizing tasks for other people instead of prioritizing things that will help you move meaningful things forward. Not believing yourself when you think and know you have too much to do, and so trying to do it rather than actually accepting it and coming up with a plan. Believing that things have a fixed quality and a fixed scope, so that all you can do is put more time in or take longer over it. Only making time for chatter that brings you down rather than consciously putting in time for chatter that goes back to the things that you really love about academia and that you find nourishing and fulfilling. And finally, not having a narrative to check your prioritization against.
If you are making any of those mistakes, and many of you will be making all of them, don't worry. It's okay. The vast majority of academics are making almost all of these. But I want you to pick one. I want you to pick one to have a little ponder on and to think, what would I need to believe in order to change the extent to which I'm making this mistake. So we're not going to stop entirely, but what would you need to believe in order to do something a little bit different?
As usual, I will be sending some more details in my newsletter about these podcasts, so do make sure that you are signed up for that. Every week you get a little summary, you get some reflective questions and an activity to try. So if you're not on that, make sure you get to my website, the phdlifecoach. com and you can sign up for the newsletter there.
If you're listening to this in real time on Easter Monday, and you're a PhD student or postdoc, you still have like 48 hours to get on my be your own best boss program. So check it out on my website. You will learn how to have positive self talk, how to organize yourself and plan your time, prioritize in ways that feel good and make you the boss that you need in your life. It's going to be amazing. At time of recording, I've got 10 people signed up already. I'm super excited. I would love a few more.
So let me know if you want to hear more about it. If now is not the right time, make sure you're on the newsletter and you'll be the first to hear about. opportunities in the future too. The other thing that I wanted to do a shout out about is I do workshops for universities, and I'm doing a special end of year, like special discount bonus thing. Now it might not feel like the end of year at the end of March, but we've got one term left. I do these workshops April through July. And so I'm offering a really discounted rate for access to all of them. So there are 11 workshops left, if you're listening to this in real time, and I'm offering that package for 1, 500. This is incredibly cheaper than it is buying them one at a time.
If you are an academic, please speak to your universities. There's usually a budget somewhere sitting around that needs to be spent before the end of the financial year. So I am here to help you with that. If you're a student, please send information on to your graduate schools requesting this stuff. You can find information about it on my website and on Twitter. So fish those out, send them to university, and hopefully you can get access to these workshops too.
It is a whole variety of topics, how to write when you're struggling to write, how to overcome imposter syndrome, what to do when you have too much to do, what to do if you're feeling behind, how to make decisions and prioritize.
And then in time, how to get ready for the summer. It's an amazing series of workshops. Make sure you're in. Let me know if you need more information. And I hope to see you all at those soon. Thank you so much for listening and see you next week.