Links I refer to in this episode What to do if you want more reassurance How to manage your supervisor or boss How to have a great relationship with your supervisor What to do and think if you have a toxic relationship with your supervisor How to improve your writing Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast and this week we are doing client Q& As again. So you guys may have heard my episode a few weeks back where I answered three questions from listeners and I got some really good feedback on it. People seem to really like it and so I am going to do these regularly. So I have three questions today that have come from a kind of combination of existing people in my membership who've contacted me separately from the main coaching sessions and people who have been in my workshops who dropped questions in the chat that were maybe slightly outside of the kind of main topic of the workshop and so we didn't get to them in lots of detail, but that I said I would answer in my podcast. So all of them this week are anonymous for various reasons, which you'll see as we go through, but there's three quite different topics and I think all of them are going to be super relevant for you guys. So keep listening and let me know what you think. Question one today comes from a student who had recently handed in a major chunk of draft to her supervisor. So it'd been something she'd been building towards for quite a long time. She'd handed in and she asked me to speak about post deadline, post accomplishment lethargy. That she said, "I always feel like I lose my flow so badly after having been in a deep flow of draft writing. It's worse because, when I've been in flow, I've often thrown out my routines and structures and I don't know how to get back into it." And I thought this was just a fascinating one and one that people often don't talk about, right? Often we focus on how can I get the thing done and we don't spend quite as much time thinking about how do I kind of transition out of getting that thing done and into doing something else. Now, my first recommendation here is really often the first recommendation for pretty much anything you guys ever ask me or I ask myself, which is acceptance. This is really normal. It's really normal to have a little come down after any accomplishment, any period of long work. This is not a sign that anything's gone wrong and it isn't a sign that you are like not getting back into it, that you're being lazy or any of these things. Often it's completely understandable and it might even be beneficial. Where this sort of thing becomes a problem is when instead of accepting that this may well happen, we kind of should on ourselves. We tell ourselves that we should be able to continue working at this pace. We should be able to get straight on with the next thing because there's so many other things to do. We should be able to get back on top of routine tasks quickly because they've been mounting up while we've been working on this other thing. And none of those things are true. As usual, when we find ourselves kind of feeling guilty or feeling shame around not having done these things or not being able to do what we think we should do, we actually end up making it worse. We actually make it harder for us to transition. Because now we've got the kind of come down from having handed in the piece that physical tiredness, cognitive tiredness that comes from doing that. And we're adding on top of it a whole bunch of negative emotions. It's pretty unrealistic to expect ourselves to work really hard towards a deadline and then not have any period of transition before we start on something else. Now you might be thinking, okay, that's all very well, Vikki, but I have got a ton of other things to do. I can't just arse around for a week because I haven't, you know, because I've had to come down after handing that piece in. I've got stuff to do. But the joy is, firstly, when we do take away some of that guilt and shame, or try and like dial it down, try and dilute some of that, it actually usually lasts less time. Because it's usually the unpleasantness of feeling like we should be doing something and that we are not, that makes it last for as long as it does. Work becomes something to avoid because we feel guilty that ironically we haven't been working. Secondly, when we can accept that this happens, it becomes something we can plan for. Now, that might involve working fewer hours, it might involve accepting that we're going to work more slowly, or it could mean accepting that maybe we're just going to do some of the little fiddly bits rather than anything that takes really big cognitive effort. We can plan for the fact that this will probably happen, and therefore we're not sitting there telling ourselves that we should be getting straight on with the next thing. We can tell ourselves, I've planned this. I plan to have a gentle day today. A gentle two days, whatever you decide. That all becomes part of the plan. Now when we plan for it, we leave space. So we don't end up getting behind because we've kind of made unrealistic plans and then not stuck to them. We've literally planned to do nothing much in this space. But when we plan, we can also start thinking about a reintroduction strategy. So if we know that after a deadline, we find it difficult to get back into work, if we accept that and plan for it, We can also plan for when am I going to get back into work and how am I going to do that? So for example, are we going to have one day completely off where we allow ourselves to recover from what happened before and then the next day we're like back on it, normal schedule, normal intensity, pace of work. Or are we going to do something that's a little bit gradual? That, you know, we'll have one day completely off, we'll have one day where it's sort of lighter tasks, and then by the third day we'll be back to normal. What is going to be that transition? And when are you expecting yourself to get back on track, as it were. Because the difficult thing, if we don't plan and we just wait for when we kind of feel like it, feeling like it can take a while. Okay. Because feeling like it often comes either from active management of our thoughts or from starting doing the thing, even when we don't want to and kind of realizing that we can actually get on with it. So I would really encourage you to plan ahead for this. Decide what that kind of post accomplishment period looks like, for how long you want it to last, and what exactly you expect of yourself during that time. And if we can make it as achievable as possible, then, when the time comes for us to start working again, it's easier to tell ourselves, yeah, I've had my rest, I've had my come down period, I'm getting back on it now, I've had my great gentle break in, now we're working. And it's easier to then implement, rather than trying to implement when part of your brain is saying, oh, you really should be doing this, and the other part of your brain is going, but you really deserve a rest too. We can kind of bring that all into agreement, then it's much, much easier. The final thing I'd say, and this is stimulated by the last part of the comment that I got from this person, which is, when I'm in the flow, I've thrown off my routines and structures and getting back into them is hard. I would also encourage you, if you're listening and for everybody else, I would really encourage you to consider the extent to which you throw off your routines and structures. To some extent, it happens for all of us. If we've got a period of intense work, maybe we're not spending as much time on kind of self care or organizational tasks. I've had clients who often let some of the admin stuff slide when they're on a big mission to get stuff done. I would really encourage you, if you know that it's hard to get back into your routines after a period of hard work, I would really encourage you. consider how you can keep a version of your routines during that period of hard work. Now, I don't mean stick to everything as normal, because then it may well be hard to put in the additional work that's needed to complete the task, but spending a small amount of time each day, just firing off a few emails to stay on top of your inbox or putting aside just an hour or two a week to do some of the more mundane tasks that keep things ticking over. What we can do then is we can try and sort of minimize this transition, partly by planning the transition out, but also like, minimizing how different this period of lots of work was compared to the period afterwards. So it's kind of reducing that gradient of transition. So those are my tips. If you experience this kind of post accomplishment lethargy, there's some things I think you can think about. Let me know what you think. Have you ever experienced this? What makes it harder? Is there anything that's ever helped you transition that that I haven't mentioned? Let me know and I can talk about it in a future episode. Now, the second one comes from a regular member of mine, but I'm going to keep it anonymous because she's talking about supervisors here, and so I want to keep it all as confidential as possible. And she's asked, how can I improve communication between myself and supervisors? And in this particular case is one that we've coached on in my live membership sessions several times before. And it sort of falls into two issues. It falls into issues of supervisors not responding to emails. We're not responding to messages. This is a distance learning student. And there's also issues around Perceived, from her side at least, uh, big personality differences between her and the people that she's working with, with her supervisors, whereby she doesn't always feel she can bring her whole self to the meetings. So I'm going to try and address both of those. But I am also going to refer you all out to, I have, I think it's, Four, yeah, four episodes where I talk about supervisory relationships previously and you may well be able to draw out things from those that are useful as well. So there's one about where to, if you want, what to do if you want more reassurance, one about how to manage your supervisor, one about how to have a good relationship with your supervisor, and one about what to do if you've got a toxic supervisor. So I'll link to all of those in the show notes. I'm gonna do my best not to repeat stuff that's in those, um, but do have a look at those. 'cause they may well help too. But in terms of lack of replies to emails from supervisors, the first thing we have to is get super factual about what we're actually saying here. How often are you messaging? How often are they replying at all? How long on average is it taking to reply? The reason that's so important is that sometimes it feels like your supervisor, inverted commas, never replies, but actually when you look at the facts of it, they do reply to some things, but not to other things. Sometimes it's a couple of days, sometimes it's a little bit longer. You know, it's a bit mixed as to how in contact they are. And the reason that's important is there is a really big difference, in my view, between annoying and unacceptable. So supervisors and any academics that are listening will be right here with me on this, I am sure supervisors are pretty stressed. They're pretty busy. Pretty busy. Very busy. They've got a ton of stuff on, they're getting far too many emails, and sometimes it is easy to procrastinate replying to students. And ironically, just as with students, this is affected by their emotions too. If they're already feeling a bit guilty that they haven't replied to you, or they're feeling a bit frustrated about how many questions they're answering, or whatever it might be. If they're experiencing big emotions, they might procrastinate responding to students the same way that students procrastinate responding to them. That is not in any way to justify the unacceptable. But if what we're looking at is sometimes they reply, other times they're a bit slow, sometimes they forget, but usually when they reply, they're reasonably helpful, then we might want to categorize, and you get to decide where your boundaries are with this, but we might want to categorize that in the kind of annoying territory. And in the annoying territory, I would always take two approaches. My first approach would be in my own thought work, which is really trying hard not to spin this into a story that it isn't. So often students spin this into, my supervisor doesn't like me, my supervisor doesn't value me, they don't think I'm good enough, all of these things. And a sort of periodically unresponsive supervisor almost always doesn't mean that. It almost always means it's something about them rather than about you. Okay, so we can be really careful what stories we're telling ourselves about what this means. We can also be really careful what stories we tell ourselves about what this means about our prospects, because sometimes again we can spin these stories that and if they don't answer then I won't have time to do this and then if I don't have time to do that then I'll never finish. We can be really careful about that. We can get really specific about what exactly do we need and where can we get what we need, whether from the supervisor or from somebody else. The other part when we're in this kind of not ideal but annoying category, is working with the supervisor to see if there are ways that you can make this more straightforward. So sometimes people don't respond to emails when they perceive you're sending too many. So you can discuss with your supervisors, would it be more useful if I collated my questions into a single email rather than sending a message every time I think of something? Or would it be easier if when I ask you a question, I reattach a summary of the piece of work that I'm doing at the moment so you know exactly where I'm at? What would make it easier for your supervisors to respond to your emails more quickly? One for me is changing the subject line of the email. Often people just end up doing re, whatever the original email was, and I've got no idea what's coming up. So trying to make it so that your emails are super clear about whether it needs a response, super clear exactly what it is, making sure the supervisor's got all the information that they need to be able to respond and so on. So, spending some time figuring out either on your own or with your supervisor, whether there's anything you can do to make it easier for them to respond more quickly. Okay. So that's on the kind of not perfect annoying, but Okay. It is what it is, side of things. And that's gonna be useful skill learning, right? Because if you are gonna carry on academia or even go into other industries, you are gonna get people not replying to emails. It's just, it's a thing. So learning those skills can be really useful. However, there is then a side at which this strays into unacceptable. And it's always difficult for this specific student, and for anybody else listening, experiencing this, to decide where that boundary sits, as to when this moves from being annoying to unacceptable. For me, unacceptable is where it's happening almost all the time. Where it's happening and it's taking upwards of a week to respond to messages and where you don't get the answers in the end. So it's not just delayed, they're just not answering some of the things. For me, that's where it errs into unacceptable. But different people will have different perspectives on that and it will really differ. You know, I came up through a science program where we really had pretty close contact with our PhD students, well with my supervisors when I was a student, and then with my students when I was a supervisor. We have pretty close contact. In arts and humanities subjects where especially if you're a distance learner, things like that, then the regularity of contact may well be different. One way, if you're unsure, is at any of your schools or departments, there will be people who are responsible for postgraduate research. They'll all have different names depending on your university, where you are in the world. You can have conversations, not complaints, you can have conversations about what's happening at the moment and whether they would consider that to be acceptable. Okay, often what happens is people think I've got to tolerate this, tolerate it, tolerate it. And then they get really, really cross and go straight to sort of complaints and that sort of thing. I would really encourage you to have conversations with people who are outside of your supervisory relationship, who have direct experience of and direct responsibility for postgraduate studies, to say, this is kind of what's happening at the moment. What do I do? Is this normal? Should I just be managing this or should I be expecting more than this? If they think you should be expecting more than that, that is a really good opportunity for them to give you advice about what that might look like in your school. Sometimes it can look like them giving you advice about how to broach it with the supervisor. Sometimes it can be them broaching it with the supervisor. Because remember, what most students don't know is whether there's any history of this stuff with their supervisors. So sometimes you might go and talk to somebody about this and they'll be like, oh, that's really unlike him. Okay, that, yeah, I think there must be something going on there because that's very strange. Okay, let me have a quick chat, we'll see. Other times you might go and they'll be like, yeah, this is always an issue. These are the ways people have handled it in the past. Universities aren't always the best at dealing with long standing issues with supervisors, which I think is a problem in the sector generally. Um, so speaking to somebody else is the only way of knowing and really finding out what, what is going on here. They will then be able to advise you about ways of addressing it, whether you want to bring on other supervisors, whether this person can just be supported to respond more quickly, or to find ways that it's easier for you to communicate. So always use those structures. Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. Even more complex, to be honest. So this notion of not being able to show up as your true self in the supervisory relationship. And I actually think this is one that I would like to do a full episode on at some point, but I want to bring on somebody who's got specific expertise in this field. Because whilst this isn't the case specifically with the student who's written this particular inquiry, this often happens where people are being supervised by people who come from a different racial or cultural background from them. And particularly where the member of staff, the supervisor, comes from a racial or cultural background that is kind of in the mainstream, common within their organization. So, you know, in my situation, white British people supervising people who are from different racial and cultural backgrounds. And there's a whole thing around something called code switching, where people behave differently in order to fit in with what is perceived as being the social norms in their department. And it's one of those really complicated situations where, in many ways, it works, in inverted commas. There's a lot of evidence that people who code switch to fit in with the kind of the hierarchy are more likely to be successful, are more likely to be perceived as professional, to be given opportunities and so on. But at the same time, research shows that it comes at considerable personal cost, both in terms of their relationships with their own cultures and in terms of their relationships with themselves, physical or mental burnout and so on. And that side of it is something that I think I would like to discuss in more detail with somebody with specific expertise in that area and or who has direct lived experience of those sorts of things. So I think we'll go into that in more detail in a future episode. In this case, there is a nationality difference, but it's not a racial or cultural difference that we're talking about here. So when we're talking about personality differences, I think really we exist on a bit of a continuum here, where at one end, we can decide to show up as what we perceive as our authentic, typical, everything about ourselves, and they just have their response to that, and that's their problem. All the way through to we dramatically modify our personality and authentic self in order to fit in. I think the first thing to say is there's probably not a correct place to be. on this continuum. But I would encourage you, wherever you are on it, to make a decision for reasons that you like, and do your best to accept the consequences that come with that decision. Because there's consequences on both sides, and probably In the in between as well. So on the side of showing up as your true authentic self, which seems very different from the people you work with, the consequences there are that they are probably going to have an opinion about that. And we can make a lot of big drama about them having an opinion about that, whether it's them making snippy remarks or whether it's them not wanting to spend time with us. If we decide that that's how we want to show up, then we get to manage our thoughts about their responses. They're adults. They get to have whatever responses they have. We get to manage our responses to it so that we're not turning up as our true authentic selves and then beating ourselves up for saying the wrong thing or for them not liking us and all of those things. We have to own that decision and manage the thoughts and emotions that the consequences of that. Obviously, as usual, caveat, I'm not talking about them having unacceptable responses to us. I'm talking about them just perhaps not meeting us with the warmth and enthusiasm that we might like, for example. Okay, so we can accept consequences on that side. The other side, if we decide that we're not going to show up as our authentic selves, we are going to mimic however we think people should behave in this setting, or we think they want people to behave in this setting, the consequence of that is that we may feel that they don't really know us. We may feel that we're not bringing our true selves to work. And again, we get to manage our thoughts and emotions about that decision. Because I believe the worst thing you can do is be at one or other end of this continuum, but beating yourself up for the consequences of it, showing up as your true authentic self, then telling yourself that you shouldn't and that they should respond differently and that it should all be different to this, or turning up in the way that they expect you to turn up that's more compatible with them, and then beating yourself up about the fact that you're not being authentic at work. Whichever way you go, and there's not a right answer to this, trying to be compassionate to the fact we've had to make a decision here because it's not as straightforward as it could be, and that those decisions have consequences is really, really important. This is going to sound like maybe a cop out compromise, but I'm a big fan of trying to find an authentic middle ground. We all, no matter our personalities, no matter our cultural backgrounds, we all have a range of versions of us. People who have seen me in an escape room will have seen a version of me that I don't show everybody because I can sometimes be a little obnoxious. If I'm in a competitive environment with people that I love and that I know love me, I get very overexcited, slightly bossy. For slightly, read very, and just generally threw myself into it at a very high speed and volume, and it's a whole thing. However, there's also a version of me when I show up in a coaching session, for example, where I very much focus on listening, on understanding, on really trying to engage with and connect with the person I'm listening to, and both of those genuinely feel like authentic versions of me. Neither of those are play acting, and both of them are very different. In my day to day life, I'm probably somewhere in between with sort of fluctuations depending on what we're up to and who I'm talking to. But I want you to think about the range of versions of you that feel authentic. There will be a bunch of different versions and that gives you options as to how you show up in your supervisory relationship. I'd actually really discourage people from saying, I'm just going to do the minimum and that's it. Because I think often it then becomes a bit self perpetuating, they start to see you as distant as well. And I think sometimes in an attempt to protect ourselves, we make the situation a little bit worse. I would really ponder on what is an authentic version of you that comes out in some situations that you could use, in order to have a connection, maybe not the connection you envisaged, but to have a connection with these people that are very different from you. Again, though, if this reaches a stage where you cannot connect with your supervisory team, you feel you cannot be open or honest or authentic with them in any way, this again is an opportunity to talk to the people that oversee postgraduate research at your, your school, your university, wherever level um, to chat with them about whether this is something that could get resolved in more structural ways. So bringing other supervisors on, on board, for example. I hope that is useful. I think this is one of the really big issues in academia at the moment. And those of you who are at higher levels, those of you who are supervisors will recognize the supervisor side of it, but you may also recognize it between you as an academic and the senior academics that are ahead of you. And if anybody wants to come on and talk about the difficulties of code switching, and what we can do in those very challenging situations, then do get in touch. I would love to have a guest with expertise in this. My final question came up in a workshop. So I do workshops that are for my membership, but they're also open to universities to book as one off workshops. And this was somebody who'd come as a one off workshop, and I was asking about what's challenging at the moment in their lives and they said that they lack the knowledge to assess their own work and that meant that they were really struggling to know whether what they were writing is good enough. I just thought this was so important that I decided to like grab it out of the chat from the workshop and respond to it here. Because when we realize that we lack the knowledge to assess our own work, we often think that's a problem. That you should be able to assess your own work, and that if you can't assess your own work, then you can't do it. And when we think of that as a problem, it can be absolutely paralyzing. It's so hard to get on and do anything when you don't know whether it's good enough, and crucially, you believe you should know that it's good enough. My first response to this is, you don't. You don't have the knowledge to assess your own work. If you're a first year PhD student, second year PhD student, even more senior than that, or if you're a more senior academic doing grants and things like that for the first time, you probably don't have the knowledge to assess your own work accurately and thoughtfully. The only bit that's a problem here is you believing that that's a problem and believing that it's an irretrievable problem. At the moment, you have a pretty limited understanding of what people are looking for in this piece of work. That's why you're at the beginning of this academic journey. That's why you're working with people who know more than you do. Not being able to tell whether it's good enough or not, or handing it in thinking it was good and then getting a bunch of comments back telling you it's not as good as you thought it was, is exactly what should be happening. You're in this messy grey bit where you're becoming your next version. You're becoming an independent researcher if you're a PhD student, you're becoming a senior researcher if you're an academic, and you're meant to not know. And it's okay. It's nothing about you. Everybody has been in the position where they don't know whether what they're doing is good enough, and they've got insufficient skills to figure it out on their own. So what do we do? Well, first thing is that whole acceptance thing. This isn't a problem. This is exactly where you're meant to be. What you can do on top of that is start to think about, well, what do you understand? What do you know about how it should, inverted commas, be done? So that you can start from that understanding, so we know there's lots of nuance of how to make it a deep argument or how to be critical or whatever that we're finding really, really difficult, but there are elements that you do understand based on your previous education. Get really clear on what those things are and learn to check your work for the things that you do know need to be there. The second thing is being really systematic. Often what happens, when we're at the beginnings of learning how to write a paper, for example, we kind of expect our first drafts to sound a bit like an article, because we don't really understand how many iterations they go through. And so we actually end up spending less time iterating our work than people who are much, much more experienced, much more knowledgeable than us. We need to accept that this is going to go through version after version after version after version, and that is okay. We can be systematic in terms of only looking at one thing at a time. If you know roughly what structure it should be, then let's only check the structure. If you know roughly what should be in a paragraph, let's only check the paragraph structures. If you know roughly what an academic tone might sound like, only check that. Okay. We can do one thing at a time. Experts might be able, I mean, I still don't think it's a great idea, but experts might be able to edit for lots of things at a time. But if you're a relative beginner in this, you won't be able to and that's okay. We can do this systematically. We can work through it ourselves. The next thing is this is a great opportunity to try and get quick and dirty feedback. Now, some supervisors do not help here, and I apologize for any academics who are listening, but I stand by this, so I'm gonna say it. Supervisors who want polished drafts before they give any feedback, just stop. It's not helping you. It's not helping them. It's such a waste of everybody's time. What that doesn't mean is that you should be reading drafts. Like, every week, and you shouldn't be expecting your supervisors to be reading hundreds of drafts. But, what you can do, is ask your supervisor to give quick and dirty feedback to a short extract. Because the way we learn is by getting quick feedback, adjusting. Quick feedback, adjust, learn. Quick feedback, adjust, learn. We don't learn by huge protracted periods of time where we're stressing out about whether it's good enough or not. No one's giving us any feedback. And then at the end, well, we've polished everything, they've told us we focus on the wrong thing. That's not how we learn. So really encourage your supervisors, and if you're a supervisor, please do this with your students, really encourage your supervisors to allow you to send in 400 words and just ask them to only give you comments based on the academic style of the writing, for example, or ask them to be able to send them like a paragraph outline where you've got in this paragraph, I'm going to say this, this paragraph, that, da, da, da, where it's a line for each thing and ask them solely for feedback on the structure or solely for feedback on the argument that you're making. Try and use any opportunity to get quick and dirty feedback. Even if you've written more, one thing you can do is to learn to extrapolate from feedback. So if you've written four pages of a lit review, give one page to your supervisor, ask for feedback on it, then apply everything you've learned from that one page to the other three pages before you send that to your supervisor. So that way, if your supervisor in that first page has said, um, you know, too much passive voice here, um, try and go into more detail here or you've got repetition here. You can then go through the other three pages, looking for passive voice, looking for repetition, looking for where more depth is needed. It reduces supervisory workload because they're only reading one chunk of it instead of all of it. And it's giving you an opportunity to actually practice assessing the quality of your work, because that's what needs to happen here. Not having the knowledge to assess your own work, isn't a fixed state. It's just your current situation. And the way you learn, the way you get the knowledge and skills to assess your own work is by practicing doing it with prompts, with support. Another tip, and I'm going to confess to being a massive hypocrite here because it's not one I've ever done, but I still stand by the fact that it would be really useful and I kind of wish I did and had, is keep a journal. So when you're thinking about not really understanding what good quality looks like, try and write about what you think at the moment and what bits you don't quite understand or what you do understand and try and keep that up over time. When you get feedback from people, try and write in your journal about what did they change in your work? What is this telling you about what you should be aiming for in future pieces of work? Because I promise. I promise one day this will all feel second nature to you. You will understand what good feels like for your field, your discipline, and you won't remember that you didn't used to. And when you have your own students or when you're a senior academic supporting more junior academics, you won't understand what they're not seeing. You won't understand why they just can't see that this isn't in the right order or whatever. If you can keep a journal so you can see how your own understanding is changing over time, you'll get that sense of making progression and it will help you much more appreciate your understanding when you have it and you're taking it for granted. Because what's going to happen is you're going to start out at a place where you don't even really know what good looks like, and you don't have the knowledge and skills to assess your own work, but you're then going to move to a place that I've discussed in a previous, episode where I was interviewing Dr. Katie Peplin, who's a writing coach, where she talked about the taste gap. And this is an even more painful place, so if you're worried about not knowing how to assess your work at the moment, got a more painful place coming, I'm afraid, which is where you know it's rubbish, but you don't know how to fix it. Okay? This is where I'm at with the art things I do at the moment. So, I have a bit of an arty hobby, and I'm at the stage where I know it doesn't look as good as the stuff I look at on Instagram or whatever, but I equally don't know how to make it better. Now, Katie called that the taste gap. And that, again, is another developmental stage that feels very uncomfortable, because you know your writing's rubbish, but you don't know how to fix it. But, again, We work through that, we figure out what bits we do know, how we can change things, and in time you will get to a place where you know what good looks like and you know how to fix your writing so that it looks more like that writing that you want it to. Understanding this is a developmental process rather than as a sort of innate fixed failing in you can help take some of the sting out of that uncomfortableness and help you see how you can start taking steps towards being able to assess your own work. I really hope those three questions were useful. Please do keep them coming in. You can use the send Vikki a question button in the podcast or you can drop them as a question in my YouTube or reply to my email if you're on my newsletter. However you get me questions, ask me in a workshop, ask me in community coaching, whatever you like, but get me some questions and I will answer some more for you in the future. Let me know what you thought of today's episode. Thank you all for listening, and see you next week! Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked 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 thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

Links I refer to in this episode Why we all need to be more intentional and resourceful Why we all need to be more encouraging and accepting Why we all need to be more compassionate and curious How to be more strategic and ambitious Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. This is the final session of my how to be your own best boss kind of mini series that we've been doing here. Regular listeners will know that over the last couple of months, I've had episodes where we talk about all the different qualities that you need to be a good boss to yourself. So we thought about being Strategic and ambitious and curious and compassionate and all of those things. And today is the final two qualities. And there's a certain irony to this because the two that I have made you wait the longest for are patient and realistic, which are both, I think, really important qualities and today we'll think about why. Before we get into the details of it though, I want to remind you that these episodes are all part of my Be Your Own Best Boss online course that is available for any of you to purchase. And in this course, we really think about how you can be a better boss to yourself, how you can change the way you speak to yourself, how you can change the way that you organize yourself, that you manage your tasks, that you plan and strategize and review so that you keep all the things that you're already doing well and develop some better habits that will support you to succeed in the future. Now, most podcast listeners will know by now that I also put this on YouTube. Hi everyone on YouTube, if you're the ones watching this there. I'm going to highly recommend that everybody whips over to YouTube this week because I am going to quickly show you what the be your own best boss program looks like. So I'm doing the old share screen. Here we go. So in be your own best boss, you get the introduction to the course. You've get this first module. Like I say, this is about being the boss you need. It's got self assessments, figure out what are you doing at the moment that's working and what is holding you back. It's going to teach you all about the self coaching model, which I talk a lot about in these episodes, how you can use it to coach yourself to achieve your goals. It's going to think about why we need to be compassionate, how we can choose thoughts that are going to serve us and really focus on being the boss we need in our own lives. We go back to modules. Module two is much more organizational. So here it gets much more pragmatic. I'm giving you specific tools that you can use to organize your time and help you think through why tools that you've discovered in the past don't work just haven't stuck and why they haven't helped you. We think about your dream week. We've got sections in there about how you can start your week that in a way that will set you up for everything else you want to do. And it teaches you, in detail, my role based time management system. which many of you will have heard me talk about here on the podcast before, but this is where I give it to you step by step, including a document you can use, to manage all of your tasks if you want to use the role based time blocking system. Module three, which I'm clicking onto now on YouTube. You can see it's all about figuring out why you do and don't follow your plans. We think about the difference between boss you, who does the planning and the strategizing, and then about implementer you, who's the one that has to do the work. And we figure out, there's some diagnostic tools in here for you, to figure out, is the problem mostly with the boss version of you and how they're planning and strategizing and decision making, or is the issue more with the implementer version of you, not following those plans? Usually it's a bit of both, but what we do here is it's a whole array of different options. If the issues with the boss, there's a bunch of different tools you can use. If the issues with the implementer, there's a whole bunch of different tools. So here we're really getting into the kind of nitty gritty of making through, making sure that we follow through. through on the things that we want to do. Section four, start looking longer term. Here, we're thinking about how we plan our months and how we plan our quarters. Often outside of the kind of university requirements, whether that's your sort of progress reviews or whatever you call them, and your university at your stage of your career, outside of that, people often find it difficult to kind of plan and figure out what systems to use that will actually work. Often we end up just making a bunch of goals, not sticking to them, beating ourselves up next time and then doing it all over again. I'm going to teach you a really specific process in this module that you can use to plan and review your months that takes into account the fact that we're driven by our thoughts and feelings. So instead of just ignoring that, instead of focusing only on what actions we need to take, we're going to think about what thoughts and what feelings we need to have in order to take those actions, in order to achieve our results. And then there's also a whole quarterly planning process that takes you through that sort of slightly more macro version, okay, where we think about what do we want to actually exist at the end of the three months? What process things do we want to change at the end of the three months? And then finally, and this is brand new, there is then module five, which covers the stuff that we've done in these past podcast episodes, but in much more detail. So, thinking about the 10 qualities that you need in order to be an effective boss to yourself. So, it's taking you through, just as I do in these episodes, what we mean by those qualities, in what circumstances they're useful, what thoughts might help you feel useful feelings, what feelings you might want, what actions you might want to take, what results those will help you achieve. So make sure you check it out. It is the perfect sort of entry level version of the work that I do. If you've been wondering about the membership, things like that, this is a brilliant way to get some self guided stuff. If you think you haven't got time for the membership at the moment, you're not ready for a long term commitment, you can buy this as a one off. You will have it for as long as it exists. If I upgrade it, there'll be additional things added. You'll get all those as they go along. So you can go to my website thephdlifecoach. com and click on the bit about self guided programs and you'll find the Be Your Own Best Boss program. So that's where this all comes from. It's all part of that program which I think is like the foundations of how to be a successful PhD student and academic. By the way, if you've been wondering about the membership and think you might jump into the membership, you get that for free in the membership. If you're a bit on the fence and you're thinking, oh do I buy that or do I go into the membership, get this with the membership as well. Plus all my other self paced courses too. Anyway, that's enough about that. Let's get on to the last two qualities that I want to discuss. So, realistic. is quality number nine. And this sounds like a funny one because often, you know, I've talked to you about being more ambitious, about setting your sights high, believing you can achieve all the things you want to achieve. And I stand by that, absolutely. But we also need to be realistic too. People listening to this will laugh. This is one I've had to really, really develop and I still have to actively manage and actively kind of keep an eye on. This is probably the one I find hardest because there is a substantial chunk of my brain that believes that if I just get on with it, I should be able to do all the things. It's a kind of mix of delusion, arrogance, and ADHD. Who knows? But anyway, so I have actively channeled my realistic boss. And what we're really thinking about here is being realistic in terms of the scope of projects, for example. So if you're designing a research project, what will the scope of that be? What's in, what's out? And how can you make sure that you are realistic about that? We can be realistic about quality. of the work that we're producing. Sometimes, particularly quality of first drafts, right? A lot of my clients have unbelievably high expectations of how something should sound when it comes out of their head in ways that are completely unrealistic at any stage of an academic career, let alone towards the beginnings of it. So, realistic about the quality of the work that we produce. We need to be realistic about the amount of work we can do, particularly in relatively short periods of time. We tend to underestimate what we can achieve over long periods of time and overestimate what we can get done today. If any of you have ever had that thing where you've got like, I don't know, a weekend where you're gonna work or, for me, it was a train journey a couple of weeks ago. I was convinced I was going to sort my entire life out on that train. Uh, being realistic about what you can do in short periods of time. There's also being realistic about how much recognition and reward and praise and reassurance we can expect to get from other people. Often people think that if I was doing well, people would tell me that all the time. If I was doing well, I'd win awards. If I was doing well, I'd get recognized for my skills. And that's simply not true. Often there's a limited number of places where you can get recognition and reassurance. And often the people that divvy it out, your supervisors, your bosses, your heads of department, etc, are often just really busy and doing that's not necessarily the top of their priority. So we get to be realistic about those things too. We also have to be realistic about the scale of our impact. So often we go into academia because of the impact we want to have on the world, whether that's kind of intellectually or practically, theoretically, whatever it is. But then we realize that we're just a tiny cog in a big machine and sometimes it can be hard to see how this little bit of work that you're doing is going to lead to something meaningful in the future. There's that saying that originally comes from like social action. I think it was Margaret Mead saying that never underestimate the impact of committed people making small actions. It's the only thing that's ever changed the world. That's a horribly paraphrased version, but you know the one I mean. The same is true in academia. Committed people making a series of small academic realizations is also how the vast majority of huge leaps of understanding have ever happened. So being realistic that we're a small part doesn't have to take away from the ambition that we can also have for the change we want to be in the world. So what circumstances is it useful to be realistic? I think it's useful to be realistic when we're planning studies, when we're planning our schedules, when we're submitting stuff or entering stuff. So if we're submitting grants or papers or entering competitions, you can be realistic about your chances of winning while also being ambitious about how much you will get out of participating and attempting to win. Okay? So this is how I see realistic and ambitious living next to each other. Winning something, being awarded something, whether it's a grant or a paper acceptance, or whatever is out of your control, somebody else is making that decision. So we get to be realistic about how likely that is to happen. But the bit that's in our control is how much we get out of it. And we can be as ambitious as we want for how much we will learn through this process. The fourth circumstance I can think of at the moment where it's useful to be realistic, is when we're judging what we've done that day. One thing I've noticed in myself and in loads and loads of my membership clients, my one to one clients, is that they, no matter how much they've done in a day, they get to the end of the day and think, oh, I didn't get done everything I would have liked. Now, in reality, everything they would have liked was an unrealistic amount of stuff. Hopefully made a little bit better if they'd been realistic in the morning. But regardless, if at the end of the day, we're unrealistic about what it was reasonable to have done today, then we end up beating ourselves up and being really critical of ourselves, or we can, when we're thinking, ah, you should have done more. If we can be more realistic, kind of goes along with compassion, I guess, but be more realistic when we look back and review about what was it reasonable that I could have got done, then we can also recognize much more effectively what we have done. So those are the sorts of circumstances, the sort of situations in which I think it's useful to be realistic. The thoughts that I think help are things like, I can do what I can do. You know, it sounds very pragmatic. It's like, yeah, I'll do what I can do. I have this amount of time. I have that much stuff. I'll get done what I can get done. I like to remind myself that I'm part of the jigsaw. You know, I would love to help every PhD student, every academic in the world to enjoy their careers more and get the stuff done that they want to get done without sacrificing their health and well being. I'd love to help every single person. But I also know I'm only a small part of the jigsaw of people who are looking after PhD students and academics. And thank goodness, because realistically, I can't do it for absolutely everybody. So thank goodness I'm part of a jigsaw. So thoughts that help. I am part of a whole jigsaw of people that are trying to achieve this. And I value my bit of the jigsaw and I'm grateful for all the other pieces. An old favorite of mine that you will have heard me talk about before, but one step at a time. When you're being realistic about things, you can see that you don't have to and indeed can't do all the things at once, but actually you can see realistically I can do this element now. And I'll do that element next. Another thought I like, particularly in those situations where we're being realistic about whether we're going to get the job or the promotion or the award, is this is worth doing regardless. And that's a question I want you to ask yourself while we're being realistic, is Is doing this thing only useful if I win or get the promotion? Or actually, could it be useful? Can I realistically expect it to be useful to go through the process? And if you've gone through that decision making and you've decided, you know what, yeah, I am doing this, then you can remind yourself, this is worth doing regardless of the outcome. This final one is, It is a thought. It's also something that I saw somebody talk about on Instagram, actually, and I can't remember who, so I'm not going to be able to credit, all apologies to them. Cite your sources, people. But I really liked it, and so I wanted to share it with you guys, which is that your best is what you can do without sacrificing your health and well being within the time that you give the task. I'm going to say that again. Your best is what you can achieve in the time you give it without sacrificing your health and wellbeing. I would really encourage you all to sit on that thought and to really kind of ponder, because so often people beat themselves up. This isn't the best I could do. I could do this better if I have more time. Of course you could. But when we're being realistic, when we're being realistic bosses to ourselves, the version of best we're looking for is the best you can do in these conditions. And the best you can do in these conditions has boundaries around it. It has time boundaries around it. It has effort boundaries around it. And it absolutely should have boundaries around it in terms of, not eating into your health and well being, whether that's by stressing you out, by going into your relaxation time, your sleep time, whatever, your best is what you can do within the time you allocate the task without sacrificing your health and well being. And we've actually, here's a secret for you, I haven't told anybody. And I'm going to see if you can guess. In fact, you can message me on Instagram or through my website or whatever, my newsletter, if you can guess. I have got a author coming on to talk about their book. It's not a PhD book. It's a, like, out there in the big wide world for all sorts of people book that is about this very notion of how much health and well being you shouldn't sacrifice in order to achieve. See if you can identify what it might be. I'm really excited. I was reading it on a train and I just decided to message him and he said yes. So I'm really excited. That will be coming soon. See if you can work it out. Anyway, so we're thinking these thoughts. I can only do what I can do. This is one, my piece of the jigsaw and I'm grateful for the rest of the jigsaw. We can do this one step at a time. This is worth doing regardless of the outcome. And I know what my best actually is. And when we think those thoughts regularly, we're likely to experience feelings like patient, calm, and determined. And when we experience those, and maybe even some pride in what we've already achieved. We're much more likely to focus on what we can do instead of what we can't do. To make progress without getting distracted, to work on through, make realistic plans and to see that longer journey. And when we do those things, we get done what is worth doing. Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. I'm going to move rapidly on to "patient" because I feel like patient is very related to realistic. Because I think we can't be realistic if we're not being patient as well. Because part of what stops us being realistic is this kind of scurrying towards I must achieve things immediately. But for me, patient is about being willing to take time over something. Willing to do something for a long time that feels difficult or that maybe you're not good at at the moment you're doing it. Again, this is one I struggle with. I, um, I love a new hobby, as many of you will know. I also expect to be good at a hobby immediately. I'm not good at most of my hobbies, but I do struggle to remember that I have to go through a learning process just like everybody else and that's part of patience, is being patient with yourself that you're going to take time to learn things. So part of being patient is tolerating that discomfort, is believing that if you give it time, if you put in effort, that those skills will develop. It's seeing that longer picture that we talked about with realistic and it's appreciating where you're at because one of the best ways to be patient is to be enjoying whatever stage you're at at the moment rather than quite such a hurry to get over there. And I think it's useful to be patient when you've got long term goals, whether that's completing your PhD, completing a grant, whatever level we're talking about. It's useful when we're doing painstaking work. I remember my laboratory days where you'd be pipetting for hours and waiting for incubations and all that fun stuff. Or when I was trying to recruit human participants to take part in my studies and it felt like it would take forever to get as many as I needed, or when I was getting people to do questionnaires. All these things are long and painstaking. In fact, I'm not even going to talk about the cardiovascular analysis I used to do. That took hours. Clicking on the most old fashioned computer you've ever seen. Anyone who's doing their PhD now, who's 22, 23, whatever, you would be shocked if you saw the state of the tech that I was using to do this back in the day, being patient with that sort of painstaking work, repetitive work. And it's important to be patient when you see other people achieving things that you haven't achieved yet. Whether that's submission of articles, getting promoted, finishing their PhDs, any of those things. Often seeing other people ahead, in inverted commas, of us, can really test our patience because we're like, why aren't we there? But it's those moments where it's so important to be patient and to keep our eyes on our own journey. So what thoughts help me feel patient? I'm doing this for a reason, remembering why. This is worth the time, and something I think about, it's okay that this is taking me longer, because often I think we think it's a problem when something takes a long time, and when it's boring and laborious. But actually sometimes what can help us feel more patient is telling ourselves, you know what, this, this is how long it takes. And this is okay. It's okay that it takes this long. It's okay that other people have done stuff faster. But this is the pace I'm doing it and this is okay. And if we can think those, we're going to feel pretty similar to when we were talking about those realistic thoughts. We're going to feel patient and calm and determined and willing. Willing is one of my favorite emotions that you may have heard me say it before. Willing to do the boring thing, willing to wait for the payoff at the end. We're willing to do the boring cardiovascular analysis then we're so much more likely to take that laborious action. So we're more likely to keep doing the thing. We're more likely to make it worth the time we're putting into it. Cause often when we're impatient, we do it badly and then we have to come back to it, or we procrastinate it, in which case it takes even longer. in the long run. When we're thinking these patient thoughts, we're also less likely to criticize ourselves. Because when we're in a hurry, when we're impatient, we're often telling ourselves, you should be able to do this faster. It means something bad about you that you can't do this faster. Everyone else could do this quicker. This shouldn't be this difficult. It shouldn't take this long. When often the truth is it, it just does take this long. And that's okay. And therefore when we can remember that, we're much less likely to whip up stories about how it means that we're not good enough. So this is an action that we're less likely to take when we're patient. And just as with realistic, we're much more likely, if we take all those actions, we don't beat ourselves up, we make it worth the time, we get on and do it, we keep doing it regularly, we're much more likely to achieve our important goals. So that is a pretty whistle stop tour through why patient and realistic are such important qualities to generate in our own bosses to ourselves. As I said, some of these, when I look back over the 10 I've discussed with you guys, some of these I've always been pretty good at, strategic and ambitious, pretty good at those the whole way through my career. I've always been quite curious . Compassionate has taken a little bit of time, but I'm a lot, lot better at it. Realistic and patient, I'm still working on. Even in this business, I want every single one of you, I get like a thousand downloads a week at the moment, I want every single one of you to buy my Be Your Own Best Boss program because I know how much it will help you. And I'm a little bit impatient about making that happen. But I know that I am much more likely to keep supporting you guys and to keep producing more self paced courses for you and keep supporting all my members and everything else when I am realistic and patient for these things to come. You guys will find me at exactly the moment you need me. You will find this course at exactly the moment you need it. And I trust, and I keep reminding myself to trust, that you guys will make that decision when it's the right decision for you. But do have a look at it, because I think it would really help. And the little impatient part of my brain wants you to get that help. Let me know what you think of this whole series. Also let me know what you're struggling with at the moment. I've got some more client Q& A's coming up over the next couple of weeks, and I'm looking for either questions or just things you're finding difficult at the moment that maybe you don't know where to get support for. Let me know, either message me through Instagram or reply to my newsletter, which you can sign up for on my website as well. And I'll answer it in a future podcast episode and it'll be amazing. Anyway, all so much for listening. I hope you found that useful and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked 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 thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. This week's going to be a bit of a heavier episode than usual. This is something that has been on my mind for a little while now, based partly on what I see in my coaching sessions with my one to one clients, with my membership students, and partly obviously my own experience of the world. And that is there's a lot of crap happening at the moment. There's a lot of really, really difficult, heavy things happening in a lot of different areas of the world. Some of them natural disasters. Some of them, unfortunately, man made. Some of them at a huge scale, some of them at a more personal, just family level issues. There's a lot of stuff happening. And there's a lot of times where I see clients or even find myself thinking, how do you get on with your normal day to day when all this stuff is going on around you, and by around you, I mean, either directly in your environment or within your sort of social circles or your cultural circles or your geographical areas, or just simply your humanity, to be honest. How and if do you get on with the things that you thought you wanted to do when your mind and heart and soul and everything's taking on all this really heavy stuff? And I often put little caveats flippantly on my podcast, but this one, this is a big caveat. I'm not a therapist. I'm not an expert in any of this stuff. I'm not, you know, I try to be trauma informed, but I'm certainly not a trauma specialist. And if this is something that is. deeply affecting you at the moment, whether it's in your personal circumstances or the things that are happening more generally in the world, I'd encourage you to reach out to somebody with specific expertise in helping people to identify when that's becoming a problem and how to look after themselves. So the stuff I'm going to talk about today is coming from the place of somebody who's a concerned ex academic, who's a coach that can see how some of these things can impact on the things that we want to do and who knows that sometimes we have to change what we want to do. Um, but if you think you're in need of more specific support, I'd really, really urge you to, to reach out for that too. Okay. Nothing I say today is in any way intended to be a replacement for specific expertise. For those of you who might be thinking, you know what? I'm pretty good. separating myself from what's happening in the news, and like my day to day. I'm pretty good at getting on. I'd urge you still to listen for two reasons. One, because I think you never know when something is going to hit you directly and your, your family, your friends, the people you care about directly, where this stuff will suddenly become relevant to you. Obviously, not wishing it on anybody, but you just never know. These things in the words of Baz Luhrmann from the 90s, these things happen on a Tuesday afternoon when you least expect it. But also because even if you are currently able to detach yourself from those things quite well, there's people around you who aren't. I guarantee that. There are people around you who are being deeply affected by the things that are happening in the world. And who might not be saying so, and might not be openly talking about it, and you might think that they aren't. But I promise, there are some people around you who are struggling with the things I'm going to talk about today. And so, if you feel like you don't need to listen for yourself, I'd really encourage you to listen for the people around you. So that you can just keep a little eye out, so that you can hear the things that people are actually saying and so you've got some ideas of ways you could respond if it does come to your attention that people are struggling. And this is relevant as usual for students, for academics, for everybody at any level of the academic world. We're all human beings trying to navigate this and this is all, all the same stuff for all of us. The first thing I want to say is, it's okay. It's okay to find this difficult. It's okay to not find it easy to stay focused on things that you used to and maybe still do feel are important when there's so much other stuff happening in the world. It's okay that you're finding it difficult. And so if you're saying to yourself, I just need to concentrate, this is ridiculous, you know, these things aren't directly affecting me, I need to actually just get on with it. Let's give ourselves a little bit of compassion here. It is okay to find this difficult. The news is full of big, big stuff at the moment. It always is, but it feels more than usual, right? It feels more than it has. And it's okay that you have a whole bunch of emotions about that. You are not alone. Lots of people are struggling and it's okay. We don't have to not feel those emotions. We don't have to beat ourselves up for feeling those emotions. It's okay. You're a human being and this is tough stuff. Academic work takes cognitive effort, and it often takes a big chunk of emotional regulation, right? It takes managing the uncertainty and managing our insecurities and all of this stuff that we usually coach on week to week, right? When I'm coaching on how to get your writing done or whatever, we're regulating emotions we have about our writing. And if you are using all your regulation to cope with the other stuff that's happening, it's probably not a surprise that you feel like there's nothing left to regulate your academic work. There's nothing left to, you know, overcome the procrastination, to overcome the not wanting to get on with things the way perhaps you normally would. This is not a surprise. It's not your fault and it's not a sign there's anything wrong with you. The reason that's so important to understand, the reason why I'm really laboring this point, that this is okay, is that when we judge ourselves, we layer on a whole other layer of junk that we have to deal with, and we don't look for ways to support ourselves. We don't look for ways to make it a little bit easier if we're just telling ourselves we should be able to get on. Please hear me say, it's understandable if you're finding it hard. And there are things you can do to look after yourself. The first place we're going to start though, is whether you should be working at all. And this won't apply to all of you. It may not even apply to most of you, but for some of you, if this stuff is all feeling very close to home, or it is very close to home, I want you to consider whether you should be trying to work through this. Sometimes we don't even think about that as a possibility, right? We just, we're in it, this is what we're doing, it's just gotta happen now, we've gotta do it. But, if you are affected by the stuff happening around you or to you, to the extent that you cannot engage in your studies, and that it's not in your best interests to try and, force yourself to, try and encourage yourself to. If it feels like those things are not going to be good for your mental health and for your physical health, it is worth investigating how you can take a pause. Now, sometimes there's practical things around that, those of you on stipends or with other responsibility and things, I know it's not always quite that straightforward, but a pause can be a short pause, a pause can be a weekend, it can be a week, a pause can be a month, two months, a pause can be deciding that, you know what, this just isn't what you need to be pursuing right now. You need to be doing something different. All of those things are there and you get to pick. Now, hear me when I say it, I'm not saying don't continue with your PhD, there's no way you can do it, none of those things, in a minute I'm going to give you a bunch of ways you can support yourself so that you can continue. But I want you to make sure you have all options on the table, because sometimes we don't even look at some of the options, because we consider those to be failures or to be letting people down or to be just not an option at all. Everything's an option. And I want you to look at each of the options and really consider what feels truly best for you at the moment. Because sometimes our best interests are to disengage from a goal. To say, you know what? Not now. Maybe never. Who knows? But not now. This is just not good for me at the moment. And you might think often I have clients say things like, yeah, but if I, if I take a year off, then, you know, next year I'll just be beating myself up for that wasted time. Or if I don't finish my PhD, I'll always regret it. And I want to offer that those things are optional. You could not finish and you could decide never to beat yourself up about that. And to remind yourself every time you think of it, how you chose the right thing. How you chose the right thing for your mental health, for your family, for your community, for whatever reasons it is, that you love those reasons. That yeah, it was disappointing, and we can be disappointed, and that's okay. But, we love our reasons and we did it for our best interests. Because often it's the fear of those things that we'll say to ourselves in the future that stops us from making difficult decisions. The second part of this is really for people who have decided that, yeah, I'm finding things really tough at the moment. There's a lot going on, but I do want to keep going. I'm not going to make any changes to my registration. I'm not going to take a leave of absence. I'm not going to pause my registration, any of those things. I am going to keep going. But I want it to feel better than that. And in those situations, what we can do is we can think about how can I make it feel easier by changing some of the assumptions I make. The assumptions about how much I should be working, the assumptions about how high level I should be working, when I should be working, where I should be working, what support I should be getting. We have loads and loads of assumptions about how we have to do it and lots of them aren't necessarily true. I'd encourage you to think about which bits you're finding really difficult. Is it that you're finding it difficult to get going? Is it that you're finding it difficult to focus for long periods of time? Is it that you're finding it difficult to do the harder cognitive stuff? Is it that you're finding it difficult to be in social situations? Which bits are you finding difficult? And really think through how you can make those easier. Can you limit it down so that you're only really trying to do one thing at a time? So if, for example, at the moment you're trying to collect data for one study and write up another study, can you pause one or other of those so that you can really sort of slow down and immerse yourself into one element of your work for a while? So you're not taking a full pause of your PhD or your research or whatever, but you are reducing the things you're doing. Can you tell people that you're just not gonna do some of the additional things? We all know that there's kind of core stuff that we have to do, whether it's for academic jobs or whether it's for our PhDs, and then there's kind of the peripheral stuff that is either fun or impressive or will go towards our promotions or future jobs. Are there any of those things that you want to say? You know what? Not now, not at the moment. I don't need to. So there's that really kind of practical side of it. We can also really think about our expectations of ourselves and maybe our expectations are that we sit down and start working exactly when we said we would, and we work the exact time blocks or whatever that we said we would. Maybe we just need to loosen up on some of that. Maybe we need to just say, you know what, I will, I'll get three hours done. At some point today, it might not be exactly when I intended, but I will. And you know what? I'll be proud of that. And that will be sufficient. So it's changing some of our expectations. Some of the pressures that we put on ourselves unnecessarily by taking account of the fact that you're trying to do this in a really difficult environment at the moment. We can also think about the things we say to ourselves, because when we're finding things difficult, we can use that as a reason to criticize ourselves. We can tell ourselves that we shouldn't be finding it difficult. We should be able to manage this. Or we can use it as an opportunity to like engulf ourselves in all the self praise in the world. Everything we do, we're so proud of the bits that we've done. We're so proud of how we're getting on, even when it's only tiny things, reminding ourselves of all the things we've achieved in the past, of all the reasons that we want to do this, all the reasons why it's okay if we're struggling. We can really create a sort of psychological environment through how we talk to ourselves, where we feel loved and appreciated while we try and do this difficult stuff. And that doesn't come naturally to lots of people, but it is something that gets easier with practice, I promise. So even if you can just do it a little bit in amongst everything else, then that can be really helpful. Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. Other ways you can try and make these things easier is thinking about the scaffolding that you have around you, right? If you were learning to ride a bike or something and you didn't know how, you'd have stabilizers, you'd have somebody supporting the back, you'd do it in a safe area, all these things we put around ourselves to keep ourselves safe when we're learning a physical skill. In this situation where things feel kind of wobbly like that, I want you to ask yourself what scaffolding you can put around yourself to make it feel a little easier. Do you want to have a conversation with your supervisor or your boss about the fact that you're struggling at the moment and that just a little bit of understanding would really help you. Do you want to reach out for more structured support in terms of things like writing groups or organizing co working sessions with your friends? If maybe you're struggling to get going on your own, would having that sort of support network around you make it feel a little bit easier? Could you ask support from somebody in terms of really breaking down your tasks into very achievable things so that when you are trying to do work, you make it as easy as possible for you to do it? Could you use tools like the Pomodoro Technique where you work for a very short chunk of time and then have a break. Maybe you use Pomodoro anyway, but maybe you could shorten the amount of time you spend working and increase the amount of time that you spend resting. So that instead of expecting yourself to sit down and write for two hours, you expect yourself to write for 25 minutes and then to have a break. Are there certain environments that you find more conducive to focus? Do you want to work with your computer disconnected from the internet? So those of you who've listened to my episode about not reading while you're writing, one of the ways that you can kind of encourage yourself to do that is completely turn your Wi Fi off, turn your internet off, put your phone somewhere else, and then it's just you and your computer, or you even and a notebook if you want to go that far. Would detaching yourself so that when you have the urge to check the news or to look at social media or the other things that are going on, you're just that little bit further away. Would that help you to be able to put yourself in a little bubble for a minute in order to be able to do the things that you want to do? There's also a bigger motivational element here, and this one we have to be careful with, because I don't want you putting pressure on yourselves. But sometimes it is worth remembering why you wanted to do this PhD, why you wanted to do the research you're doing at the moment, to do the work you're doing. Often when there's other bad things happening, it's easy to feel like everything you're doing is pointless, especially if you're doing a PhD where it's not got sort of direct application, right? So some people's PhDs, it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, easy to see how that's useful. And other people are like, oh, I don't know. But there's a reason you chose it, there's a reason you thought it was valuable, there's a reason you thought it was interesting, there's a reason you cared about it. And we don't just have to accept that those reasons have gone away just because other things feel really important right now. You can choose to reinforce those reasons for yourself. You can choose to spend more time reminding yourself of that, giving yourself prompts, having notes, whatever it is that makes you think of the reasons that you decided to do it. So that when there's a whole load of stuff over here saying, Oh, I really, you know, I don't even know why I'm doing it. You can go, I do, I do know why I'm doing this. It's because of these things. And I can do a little bit of it now. We then get to think about how we look after ourselves around all of this. The first thing is keeping a little handle on what we're doing in our minds. Now, one of the very, very first self help books that I ever read when I was, I don't know, probably an undergraduate or early PhD, something like that, was Stephen Covey's Seven Habits. Absolutely classic. Bits of it I'm not so keen on, but lots of it that I love. And one of the things that he talks about is the difference between your circle of concern and your circle of influence. Now your circle of concern are the things that you worry about, the things that you think about, that you care about, that take up space in your mind. Your circle of influence are the things you can actually do and have an impact on and change. And when these circles are different sizes from each other, in both directions, which I'll talk about in a second, when these circles are a different size from each other, then we get problems. Now for a lot of you guys in the context that we're talking about here, your circle of concern will be much bigger than your circle of influence. You will be worried about the stuff happening in the world, the stuff happening to your families, that's way out of your control. And when we have a big circle of concern and a smaller circle of influence, we can feel very powerless. And when we feel very powerless, we often don't take the actions that are within our control. Often we fixate on scrolling through news articles, for example, and make it very difficult to do small things we could do. that might help. Now the flip side is bad too, right? It's probably less of the issues that we're seeing here, but if people have a very big circle of influence and a very small circle of concern- often we see this in big, powerful people who have a lot of impact on people's lives, but don't necessarily care- then that causes problems too. So what we're trying to do at all times is to try and keep our circle of concern as close to our circle of influence as possible. And that doesn't mean we can't care about things that are outside of our control, but it does mean we can think about what things within that are within our control. So, for example, if you are understandably concerned and upset and scared and angry about all the things happening in the Middle East, you're probably not in a position where you can do anything to change it. However, you might be in a position where you could offer comfort to somebody who is struggling in your own community. You might be in a position where you can write to somebody in power or whatever form of protest feels comfortable or appropriate for you. You might be in a position where you can amplify the voices of people who aren't being heard right now. These are things that whilst the sort of overarching issue is far, far, far outside all of our circles of influence, we have mini pockets. of influence within that. And if we can spend more time in those pockets of influence doing the things that we can do, and less time immersing ourselves sort of passively in the awfulness of things, in that circle of concern, It's much better for our own mental health and it benefits the world because we're then not just making ourselves feel terrible, we're actually doing the small actions that could make a difference in one or two people's lives. The next parts are looking after yourself in all of this is remembering that when a lot is going on, you need more care for yourself, not less. Often what happens when we're struggling for whatever reasons is that we eat worse. We stop exercising. We stop seeing our friends. We stop going out. We stop spending time in the fresh air. We sort of hunker down. And sometimes maybe that's what we need. If we're hunkering down in a kind of supportive and loving way. But often what we're doing is actually neglecting ourselves when we really need that extra support. So I want you to think about how can you make it easier to spend a little bit of time outside? How can you make it easier to go to sleep at night? How can you make it easier to eat food that nourishes you? Without starting some big regime. This isn't a health kick. That's not what we're going for. But food that makes you feel warm and cared for. Okay, how can you give yourself these things? How can you nurture yourself while you're struggling with all this stuff? I want you also to think about how you can give some of this stuff space because we don't cope with any of this by just squishing it down and telling ourselves we've got to go get on. If you've got these emotions inside yourself, it doesn't help to just say, Oh well, nothing I can do about it, let's crack on. Because these emotions are there and they're going to come back up one way or another. So giving yourself space where it's okay and safe to express your emotions. Finding people where you can express your emotions and it be okay is really important. Allowing yourself those moments where you can scream or cry or get angry and rant or breathe or give yourself a space where you can experience all of this. And you might think you don't have time, but the irony is if you give yourself that space, It gives you back time. If your mind and body is existing in a really tough time, let's look after that mind and let's look after that body. The other thing that giving yourself space to experience emotions does is it enables you to defer emotions sometimes too. So if we're constantly telling ourselves that we shouldn't be upset, we shouldn't be getting this wound up, then we're sort of permanently squashing it down and then it will just burst free at some point. Whereas if we can say, you know what, at the moment I'm in work mode for the next 40 minutes. I'm in work mode. I'm going to keep my brain in this room. If I feel it drifting off to think about other things, I'm going to gently, gently nudge it back to my work, but I've got two hours clear this afternoon where if I need to get upset, if I want to actually think about this and wallow in this and be there with it, that's okay. I've got space for that. Right now I'm doing this. I am going to spend time just, just being later. Knowing that you have put that time aside can really help most importantly with your own psychological health, but also with your ability to then focus in the moments that you want to. And then I have one final thing, especially for people who perhaps aren't experiencing this strongly themselves, but know that they have friends and colleagues who are. this is a tip that I got from a friend who suffered a personal loss. I'm not going to go into the details, but a very, very difficult personal loss. And her tip was, ask me how I am today. Don't ask me how I am because I don't even begin to know how to answer that question. But if you want to express caring and you want to like, see how I am, ask me how I am today, cause I can answer that. I can tell you if it's a good day or if it's a bad day. I can tell you a little bit about how I'm feeling today. Make it really specific. Don't expect somebody to be able to answer the, how are you question, because if it's too big, they will just lie to you and tell you they're fine. But if you ask them, how are you doing this morning? You might just get an answer where they're able to be authentic and you're able to provide the support that they need. I found that tip really, really useful and have used it with several people that I care about who are going through difficult things at the moment. I hope you find it useful too. I know this has been a kind of heavier episode than usual. I hope it has been of use to some of you. This is a little bit of me reaching into my circle of influence to say, what could I actually do in these situations that might be useful? Where do I have a skill set that might be helpful and making this is one of the things, one of the things that I decided that might be of use. And so I hope it has been for some of you. If anybody has specific things that you're struggling with, specific questions, please do let me know. You can either contact me on Instagram at the PhD life coach, or through my newsletter. You can then reply to that. You can sign up for that on my website. I'm still doing my client q and a podcast episodes. So if any of you have got comments or questions based on what I talk about today that you want me to go into in more detail or things you think I should have covered that I haven't, or anything where you think I was misguided in anything I said today, please let me know. Please let me know and then I will try and expand on and respond to those in a future episode. To finish on a lighter note, it's been my husband's birthday this week, so I'm recording this the week before it goes out, and it's been my husband's birthday, and he's a massive child about his birthday. He has just turned 46 years old. You'd think he'd just turned six years old. He was so excited. He was running around like a small child. He couldn't sleep the night before cause he was too excited. He told everybody about it because he likes attention on his birthday. And so he tells everybody about it. He was fit to bust with every single present that he opened. And so to finish, my question for you is, I want you to think about what things did you get super excited about when you were a little child? What games, what toys, what activities did you adore when you were 10? And how could you bring a little bit of that into your life now? Because I think sometimes we focus on relieving the negative and that is hugely important, but sometimes it's useful to try and inject a bit of silliness, of play, of fun as well. So I want you all to have a think about how you could inject a little bit of fun and play into your lives this week and just lighten it all a little bit. Thank you all so much for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked 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 thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. And this week we have another guest with us. I am super excited to introduce Rosa Smith, who is from The Brilliant Club, a really cool public engagement organization in the UK. And she is going to talk with us today about inspiring the next generation. And, you know, Just tiny little tasks like that. So, hi, Rosa. Rosa: Hi, thanks for having me. It's lovely to be here. Vikki: It is wonderful to have you here. Anyway, tell people a little bit about yourself and about the Brilliant Club. Rosa: So, I'm Rosa. I've worked at the Brilliant Club for seven years now, which I can't quite believe, and my background is in secondary school. So before I joined the Brilliant Club, I was a secondary school English teacher and then a head of sixth form, uh, which led me to kind of being interested in, in access to university and I realized from that point, really how challenging it was for some young people to even get their foot in the door to get into university. Um, and that's one of the things that Brilliant Club tries to tackle. So my current role at the Brilliant Club is Tutor Engagement Director. All of our tutors are either current PGRs or people who've completed their PhD. So they're all researchers, and what they do is, is go into schools and share their research expertise with young people, which I'm sure we'll come on to later in the podcast. Um, but really my job at the moment is, is overseeing their professional development while they work with us. Making sure that we've got the right researchers in the right places to work with our schools and as a charity, and I think I alluded to this at the start, but our real mission is to support students from non selective state schools who haven't got the same advantages as other students to access university and to really thrive when they get there. Vikki: Amazing. Thank you. And for our international listeners, state schools are public schools in the U. S., I believe. So state schools are our non fee paying, sort of bog standard ordinary schools. Rosa: Yeah, non fee paying and non selective as well. So, you know, we're working with students who haven't had the advantages of being in a more selective school. Vikki: Amazing. And we were just talking before you came on, just to let people know a little bit about you as well, you have had a very productive weekend. Rosa: Yes. Well, I don't know if it's very productive actually, because it stopped me from doing any other productive things, but I've just a lot of running. So I did a half marathon yesterday, so I'm a little bit creaky today. Vikki: And how was it? Rosa: It went well. Yeah, it was good. It was dry, which was a benefit because it's been so wet here recently. I'm in Shropshire. So I did the Shrewsbury half marathon yesterday, and it was long, but fun. Quite good fun. It was a good atmosphere. Um, and I had lots of lovely supporters. Vikki: And have you done it? Have you done this before? Is this a one off? Is this? Rosa: I have done one half marathon before, but seven years ago. So it was, uh, yeah, quite, it felt like quite an achievement to finish it yesterday. Vikki: Absolutely. Absolutely. Cool. So, and thank you for telling us a bit about the Brilliant Club. It sounds like an amazing organization. One of the things I want to say just for everybody in, if you're in the UK, this will be super, super relevant to you because you could engage potentially with the Brilliant Club yourself. If you are international, we have tons and tons of international listeners. There is also going to be lots of stuff in here that you can use when you're thinking about engaging with young people, helping raise their aspirations, outside of the context of the Brilliant Club. So there are different, even your universities may have these sorts of schemes going on and stuff. So if you're not in the UK, don't worry, there is still a bunch in this episode for you. So let's start by, let's start by thinking about what the actual students do, right? So most of my listeners are PhD students. I have some academics as well, who I'm sure will be interested for their students. So what do the PhD students actually do in this scheme? Rosa: So our PhD students act as tutors, and they're trained by us to be tutors in school. And what that means is they are tutoring students in school about their specific research and their. area of academic expertise. So, in comparison to other programs, they're not going in and doing, say, for example, English or maths tuition. They're going in and teaching a program of study that they've designed based on their area of research expertise, and that could be absolutely anything. So, as you can imagine, we have wild and wonderful courses created by our tutors that are based on whatever is their specialism. So we might have something, for example, about the chemistry of baking that someone has created and they've linked their chemistry research to what students might be interested. We've got courses that are about literary history. We've got courses that are about AI. We've got courses that are about climate change. Absolutely anything that you're researching, we can support you to create a course for young people based on that. Um, so what the researchers are doing when they create that course is setting up a series of sessions that they go into school to deliver over the course of a school term. So they'll go into school once a week for, around seven, eight weeks, and they'll deliver their program and they'll support the students to work towards a final piece of writing at the end. Vikki: Amazing. And why do you find it so important for them to do their own research? I've seen schemes before where either it's like a one off research talk or where the PhD students go in and, as you say, act as tutors on more kind of curriculum stuff. Why did you choose, I mean, I love it, but why did you choose to get them to teach their, their actual research? Rosa: Yeah, it's a really good question, and I think the answer is twofold. For the young people in school, it's very much about getting them to expand their critical thinking skills. And to, to really apply those critical thinking skills to something brand new, so something that's completely outside of their normal curriculum, and that exposes them to the type of study you might do at university that is completely different to what you might do at school. So it's about exposing the students in school to new ideas, complex concepts that they might not have otherwise had access to, and really being inspired by the PhD researcher's passion for a particular subject. So I think that's the benefit for the young people and it, you know, it's supposed to really foster that love of learning and that curiosity. For the PhD researchers, we hear from a lot of researchers that they have got opportunities to teach, but very rarely have they got an opportunity to teach their own specialism. They might be teaching undergraduates, but convening on, on a course that's set up by somebody else. They might be doing other outreach, but it's curriculum focused, for example, or it's very much about information and guidance about university, but not sharing their research. So for our PhD tutors, it's the opportunity for them to take their research and write it into a course that's really unique and bespoke to them. Um, and they tell us that that's a really beneficial experience. It helps them to really condense what is the most important thing about my research, that if someone couldn't learn anything else, this is what I want them to learn and to really get that experience designing a program of study, or, you know, a scheme of work that they might not otherwise get the opportunity to do. Vikki: Remind me, I can't remember whether you said this, what age group are they going in to work with? Rosa: We actually work right from the top end of primary school to the top end of secondary school. So, the youngest students you work with might be 9 years old and be in year 5 or 6 in primary school, and the oldest students will be year 12, so the first year of their A level study. We do have pre designed courses for the very youngest pupils, so if you're working with students at the top end of primary or the bottom end of secondary school, we've got some off the shelf courses that our tutors can deliver, and for the older students, it'll be a self designed course by the tutor. Vikki: And what do you see the PhD students get out of doing this? Rosa: I think there are lots of things. I think, obviously the thing we talk about the most as a charity, externally really, is the impact that they will have on the young people, so that kind of opportunity to really change the lives of young people. And that might sound grand, but actually we've got lots of evidence that, I suppose both qualitatively and quantitatively, that this work that PhD tutors do really has a lasting impact on the outcomes of those young people. So they do better in their GCSEs if they've done the scholars program, even though it's not GCSE tuition. And we think that's because of those critical thinking skills and independent research skills they develop and that confidence they develop. And students are also more likely to apply to and progress to a more competitive university after they've done the scholars program. So a big one is that impact on those young people. And, you know, the young people say really wonderful things about how inspiring their tutors been and, you know, that they really set them on a path that they might not have otherwise been on. Um, but it's not just altruistic. We think there are lots of benefits for the researcher's professional development, really. So we see benefits in terms of their, I suppose professional skills. So things like resilience, you know, it's nothing like having to deliver your research to a group of 14 year olds to make you resilient, you know, lots of the sorts of questions they ask, the challenges they might come up with. The, the lack of understanding perhaps of one of your ideas and you having to think, Oh, how am I going to present this in a different way? How am I going to restructure next time so it goes better. So I think there's a lot of resilience built in, in working with young people. There's also that experience of a professional work setting and having to fit into a school timetable. So that sort of time management and organization skills that you'll have to bring with you really and you'll develop over the course of working with a school. Communication skills. It's another huge one. So again, communicating something that you've spent years probably thinking about, researching, you might know more than anyone else about this particular niche topic, but having to really go back to basics and think, how will I explain this and break it down for someone that hasn't got the base of knowledge that I've got and doesn't understand perhaps the particular terminology and doesn't have that, that academic background. So yeah, excellent communication skills. And I think not just breaking down your research, but also just dealing with a group of students in front of you in a classroom environment. Um, there's nothing like that to develop your communication skills as well. Um, so that is a huge one. We also teach quite a lot of specific pedagogical skills. So there's a chance to really hone those if you, you know, if you want to stay in academia, for example, or you already are post PhD and you're teaching at undergraduate level, for example, there's lots of transferable teaching skills and training that we offer that you can take to other, other teaching. Even if you're not going into teaching in the future, those teaching skills I think can be really helpful in other jobs. I think in most careers you probably have to do some training and some presentation to colleagues. So, the sort of skills to structure a session, to break down ideas, to communicate them clearly, to anticipate misconceptions and tackle them. So lots of transferable skills as well as those benefits socially. Vikki: And I think we can't even, I mean, you talk about those social, the sort of social benefits as being a kind of purely altruistic thing. But one of the things I see with my coaching clients a lot is they've sometimes forgotten the excitement of their research. It's so standard to them and they're so aware of the things that they don't know and they're not good at and all these people in the world that know more about it than them. As a PhD student, you can feel really like the kind of bottom of the tree and that this is the most mundane thing ever and you've just, you know, you can, you can get kind of bogged down in that, , having something that you were really excited about first and then you can get quite, I've seen lots of clients get quite, quite bogged down in the like, oh, it's just really long journey now. And I think seeing other people being interested and excited and even impressed with you and what you've done and that sort of thing, I think can really give a boost that then makes it easier on those long days where you're just trying to get your analysis done or just get your writing done or whatever. It can give you a real boost to know that actually, people think this is quite interesting. This is actually quite cool. You know, when you get out of the kind of get your head out the weeds a bit and share it with people out there in the community, it's actually, it's actually really interesting and I think that can really help people. Rosa: I think you're absolutely right. And I think a lot of our tutors tell us that, that it, I suppose it forces you to think about why do I think this is so important? And why was I passionate about it in the first place? Because you've got to communicate that to other people. So I think you're absolutely right. And also, You might be surprised at the sort of questions that young people ask in a classroom that make you think, Oh, I really hadn't ever thought about it like that. And that might sound a bit mad, you know, given that they're 14, 15, 16, and you've been studying this probably for years, or at least a version of it for years, but actually, I think young people can really, um, I suppose, distill what you want to say with your research and get you to think about it in different ways and lots of our researchers tell us that yeah, young people, I suppose, reinvigorate some of that passion for their research. Vikki: Amazing. Do you have any stories about, obviously anonymous, but stories about students that you've seen make big developments by being involved in the program? Rosa: In terms of, of the PhD researchers? Vikki: Yeah. In terms, no, in terms of the PhD students themselves. Rosa: Yeah. I mean we, we've definitely had researchers who've talked about, I suppose particularly if they, they're maybe coming into this in the first year of their research where they're still developing their, their thesis idea. Um, we definitely had researchers tell us that they've sort of shifted direction of their research and, you know, thought actually I had the kind of several routes this could go down, but I've really explored this one idea in my scholars program course, and that's made me kind of want to hone in on that area of research in particular. We've also definitely had researchers who working with us has really ignited a passion for teaching in them that they perhaps didn't think they had before and made that, kind of, I suppose, consolidated that as being their career choice, which is wonderful. So we have, you know, some people who worked with us as tutors and then, and then gone into careers in teaching, which is always lovely. Vikki: So I guess the flip side of that is, what do you see the PhD student finding most challenging when they're doing it? Rosa: Yeah, I think, great question and probably lots of things and slightly dependent on what your previous experience has been. I think lots of researchers find what I've just talked about as being a real benefit really challenging. So, actually, what do you choose? You know, you've only got, you know, We say sort of five sessions of content delivery on the scholars programme and then preparing for final assignment. So really, you've got five hours to teach something to a group of young people. So really distilling what you're going to teach in those sessions and what you want that final assignment to be. So how, how do you condense such complex ideas into something that's understandable for non experts? I think that's, that's a massive challenge for researchers. And, and linked to that, the sort of. the way you communicate with young people and getting that right, getting the pitch right, so that it is academically challenging, but it's not inaccessible. And I think that's a challenge for every teacher to an extent, but it's particularly difficult if you're bringing your research into a school setting. Another challenge, which I'm sure isn't unique to the Scholars Program or Brilliant Club, It's just the time management aspects of it and kind of fitting this sort of work alongside a really busy research schedule, often other commitments, you know, most people doing a PhD have got multiple other commitments as well. So fitting this in, in your schedule, I think those two things are probably the biggest challenges that our researchers face. Vikki: And there's such useful challenges to face that I'm sure they are difficult. They're the sorts of things, again, that my clients talk about it with other contexts, things they're involved with. But if you can develop the ability to condense down complex ideas to something achievable or something sort of understandable, it's such an important skill. Cause I see so many people who are trying to shorten work. It's one of the biggest things that people talk to me about in my membership sessions, you know, I need to shorten this piece of work and there's no way, there's no way I can take out any words. I need all of them. And it's like, well, how many words is in there? Like 7, 000 words. Like you definitely can. And that ability to go, you know what? Yeah. To talk about it in this much depth, maybe I need 7, 000 words. But actually, there's a 200 word version of this that tells you the key stuff. And there's a 1, 000 word version of this that tells you the key stuff and elaborates a little bit more. And then there's a 3, 000 word version that probably covers most of it, to be fair. And I think anything like this that helps students to develop that ability to see that whatever the topic and whatever the scale of the topic, you can kind of choose a level and choose a quantity and make it work. I just think sets them up for everything. Rosa: Yeah, absolutely. It's such good practice for condensing complex ideas in a work context or just sharing your research with maybe academics that are outside your specialism, for example. So yeah, definitely lots of transferable skills in doing that. And we don't just leave researchers to do that by themselves either. I think what they can learn from is the expertise of other tutors who've come before. You know, we've got lots of example courses where a tutor has done it really well. Yeah. We've also got a template, what we call what, what the tutors go in and deliver a course handbook and we've got a template for that. So in our training, we'll cover kind of how do you use an existing structure? How can you use these ideas of how to structure a lesson to break down your ideas? So our training will really help with that and in a, in a transferable way, I think. Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. Vikki: Fantastic. And that was what I was going to ask actually, is what support, and I guess this is a two part question because some people will have access to the Brilliant Club if they're in the UK, and for everybody else, what support do you provide these students, and what support should, if people are looking for this in other countries or in places where you guys don't work, what sort of support should they be looking for? Rosa: I think they should be looking for a structured program if they're going to go and deliver their own research in a context outside of an academic setting. So I think looking for things like logistical support from an organization, which we do provide. So support to make contact with a school, for example, support to schedule sessions, support to communicate appropriately with students and teachers. So, you know, What we do on the Brilliant Club is allocate, the school allocates, sorry, a lead teacher and we allocate a program officer and those two people will liaise and then bring the tutor in when it's appropriate to organise what times to go into school, for example, and all the logistics of a placement. So I'd be looking for some sort of structure so that you've got support. in your very busy schedule, and you've got support about how to do a program like that in a way that's really professional and go into school and meet the school's requirements. I'd also look for training, you know, both pedagogical training and some training about the sort of expectations of a particular context. So if you're going into school anywhere, you want to know what the expectations of schools are. We have lots of international tutors working with us if they're living in the UK, who might not have gone to school in the UK. So we do try and cover kind of expectations of UK schools and things. So yeah, I'd be looking for training. I'd be looking for logistical support. We also pay our tutors and pay travel expenses. So we pay for, preparation time for training and for delivery, and travel expenses. You know, it depends what sort of program you're doing and, and how much time you've got on your hands, I suppose. But you would at least want to find out what the remuneration is, and, you know, consider how you can make that work alongside your other commitments, but you know, it is a benefit of, of programs like this. I think if you, if you can be paid given, we know it's, you know, really challenging financial time for lots of people. Um, I'd also look to make sure that there's a really clear safeguarding policy that both protects you and young people. So we offer safeguarding training and we've got a really clear system. We've also got a very safe way to communicate with young people on a virtual learning environment so that it's moderated and protected. I think also you'd, you want to make sure that if you're working with a supervisor, if you're a current researcher, that you get their support as well and that they understand what you're about to do and how you plan to fit that around your research. Vikki: Yeah, I'm going to ask you about supervisors in a minute because that can always be a whole thing in my experience. But before you do, I just want to, I think the pay thing is so important. I mean, I am thoroughly in favor of PhD students volunteering and all that stuff. And there's a lot of good that can be done and can be got out of that. But I think properly recognizing what the PhD students are bringing, and the fact that you pay them for the preparation time as well as for the training, I think is huge, because so often you get a kind of like an okay hourly rate for the thing you're actually delivering, and you're like, okay, that's all right, but then by the time you've added up how much time you've actually spent getting ready for it, then suddenly is not looking like a good deal anymore. So I think that's hugely important, not least to make it accessible to more students. Cause one of the things I saw when I was an academic and now through, through my clients as well, is that so many PhD students are having to hold down other jobs just to be making enough money, particularly people that are self funding and all that sort of thing that you can kind of end up in a position where it's only a certain type of student that can afford to do these things. And I think the fact that you pay them so this can be a way that they bring in money that they can actually live on, whilst also getting all this training and support. I just think, I think it's brilliant. I think it's such a good model for how to do this. Rosa: Yeah. And it's really important to us that it's accessible for anyone doing a PhD. What we really want is role models going into school. So we want Our, our school students to see tutors that look like them or have come from similar areas to them and, you know, share some of their life experience and not in every case, you know, and there are benefits both ways. We, we want everyone to, to think about coming to work with us if they're doing their PhD, but we do want a really diverse range of tutors to go into our schools and we don't want. kind of finances to be a barrier to anyone. Vikki: Amazing. So let's talk supervisors. How do you hear, so I'm presuming you don't talk to the supervisors directly, but how do you hear through your PhD students about supervisor opinions on all this stuff? Rosa: So we don't work with supervisors directly, but we do often work with doctoral colleges or graduate schools who are very supportive of our work and generally very interested in seeing the sort of professional development outcomes for The researchers. So we do report back to universities on the sort of professional development of a group of researchers at their institution if they're a partner with us. So we tend to get support from them, but they tend to also ask us, like, what can we tell supervisors? How can we, how can we promote this to supervisors and get them on board? Um, So I think, you know, I think the age old concern of supervisors is that anything that isn't your core PhD research is going to be distracting. What I would really want them to understand is that actually it's, it's a benefit. Compared to a different part time job or even other outreach opportunities, doing something like the Scholar's Programme, where they're actually using their research and sharing it with the community, is helpful to the research itself. It helps to distill a researcher's thinking. It helps them to break down what's really important to them about their research. So we want them to understand that. And we also want them to see that, you know, we know that a really large percentage of PhD researchers do not go into academia and jobs are often quite hard to come by in academia, even if researchers want to do that. So equipping them with the skills to explore a broad range of careers when they finish their PhD is sort of everyone's responsibility who's involved with that researcher at their institution. So we want them to be on board with the professional skills that can be gained through working with us. And also, most supervisors, one would hope, are interested in diversifying the future pool of researchers that they work with, and we know that, you know, the PhD population is not as diverse as it perhaps could be, and we think that putting a broad range of role models into schools and allowing researchers to really inspire young people that doing a PhD is amazing and exciting and something they might want to do one day will really improve the diversity of the future pipeline into postgraduate study. So, you know, we'd hope that if supervisors saw it through that lens, they'd be more supportive. So we'd encourage our tutors to articulate that to their supervisors as much as they can. Vikki: Definitely. I've seen it from both sides, I think. I used to oversee the postgraduate training for one of the colleges at my university. And we'd really struggle with those supervisors that you talked about who are just like, no, you need head down in the lab, get the work done. Anything else is a distraction. So we definitely had to try and manage that side of things. But then we also had the other side, where you had the serial volunteers, where you had PhD students who were doing Brilliant Club, and they were doing three minute thesis, and they were a postgrad rep, and they were a ambassador on open days, and they were a this and a that, and they were teaching this module and that module, and it's like, when are you doing your PhD? I don't understand. So I think for me, I would probably with for the people listening, I would probably really encourage people to think about what are they actually doing at the moment? Where are they getting their money from? And what's their what's their focus of their PhD? And what are they doing kind of co curricular stuff, so stuff that's related to their PhD but not it directly. And to think about where are they full and where could they be doing more things, because I think something like this is an amazing way of gaining all this experience and all this money and all this influence and impact and all this stuff that we've talked about. But it may be that for some of our listeners, now is the perfect time to do it. Get in contact with Brilliant Club, go do it. And for other people, it may be a case of, you know what, this is not right for the phase of my PhD I'm in right now. Right now I'm on, you know, I'm on the writing home straight or I'm on just establishing this study or whatever it is. I have a past episode about working out what phase of your PhD you're in and how you can then use that to make decisions. So I think it's one of those things where it's really important to kind of look at everything you're doing and see where this fits. Does it fit now? Does it fit at some point in the future? And then make the kind of decisions from there. And I think if supervisors see students doing that, then I think they're also much more likely to be supportive because they can see how you're going. Okay, we're doing these things this semester or this year. And then we'll focus on those things more next year, for example. Rosa: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And that in itself is a really transferable skill, like being able to navigate that and think through what is the best time to get involved in this when I can really commit to it. to it properly and I'm not committing to too many things that, you know, we do see researchers struggle sometimes because they've over committed and they say, yeah, I can do four placements in a term and then it's too much. So yeah, we want that too. You know, we want you to do it at a time that's right for you. It's also worth saying that it's never too late. You know, we've got people working with us who completed their PhD many years ago and have either been working in academia or not, you know, and want to come back to their research and use it for something later down the line. So we'll work with you at any stage post PhD too. Um, so it doesn't have to be immediate. Vikki: I love that. I think it's always useful to remember as well that the supervisors aren't perfect at this stuff either. I coach all the way through to full professor and the tendency to overcommit or the tendency to put your head in your sand and say I can't possibly do anything else except this. If you don't get the sort of skills you're talking about or the sort of support that I provide, some supervisors never, never develop past that. So sometimes the, the lack of understanding from supervisors is from their own tendencies and their own kind of challenges in balancing all the things that academia asks of them. So yeah, I think these are making these decisions and figuring out how to balance things and how much you can do, I think is a huge part of all of this. Just to finish off, what would you say to anybody who was considering getting involved in something like the Brilliant Club? Rosa: Obviously the first thing is what you've just touched on. You know, really think about what commitments have you got? What time have you got? How are you gonna fit this in really to everything else that you're doing. But I would urge you to go for it at a time when you feel it's right. I think there's so many benefits to how the way you think about your research, but also to your future career. Working on something like the Brilliant Club or another outreach program, you know, if you're outside the uk. It's such a brilliant thing to put on your CV and to talk about in interviews. You can talk about the way you've navigated it alongside your research, the way you've built communication skills, the way you've navigated a really different professional setting than that of a university. Um, so my advice would be do your research. Find a program that looks and feels right for you. Have a good look at the Brilliant Club website. And if that doesn't feel right, there'll be outreach opportunities at your own institution, you know, that you can find out about. Um, so have a look what's available. And just really think through before you apply. What skills have you already got? How can you articulate your communication skills, your passion for your research, and really why you care about the mission of that organization? What we're looking for in applicants is that they're passionate about their research and that they have great communication skills, because everything else, we can work on in training and communication skills are also something we expect you to develop over you over the course of your work with us, but we just want someone who can talk confidently and excitedly really about their research. Vikki: Amazing. And I remember you said, so mentioning the website, we're going to link to various different links to do with the brilliant club in the show notes. So for any of you listening, who desperately trying to grab pens or whatever, that will all be at phclifecoach. com in the podcast section but I remember like when we talked previously, that there were certain bits of the country that you were really keen to try and find more people. I know you want people all over, but do you want to give a shout out to areas that you're specifically interested in finding people or particularly interested to get more people to? Rosa: So as I say, you can apply from absolutely anywhere. We're particularly looking for researchers at the moment in Essex and sort of Southend, Thurrock area. We have lots of interested schools there and you know, if you're a researcher that either lives in Essex or can get to Essex easily from London, that would be amazing. Similarly Hertfordshire. and also kind of Bexley, Bromley, that, that kind of top area of Kent. So obviously some London tutors are easily able to get out to those places, but often our schools are somewhere, you know, as you know, schools are not always in the most obvious next to a train station place. So if you live in, in any of those areas, thinking about the South. Then we're also very keen for more tutors in Coventry, Rugby, Stoke sort of area. So if you're there, then, then we'd love to see an application from you and then finally Bournemouth, we're keen for some more tutors there because we've got some new schools interested in Bournemouth, that we've not worked with before. Vikki: Amazing. And that list is obviously as of, like, the end of September 2024. So if you're listening at another time, because my podcast episodes stay up for do check the Brilliant Club website. I'm sure there'll be information there about what specifically places you're looking for, but it's good to know which areas you, you particularly need people at the moment. And before we finish up, Rosa, one of the things that my clients and my listeners are always thinking about is the different careers that they can have after, doing a PhD. As you mentioned, lots of people won't go into academia and I think you've shown brilliantly how all this sort of work can set people up to do that. But maybe you could tell us a little bit about what it's like working for the Brilliant Club and what type of opportunities there are there. Rosa: Yeah, I'd love to. So obviously my background is not in PhD research. I was a teacher, but I've got lots of colleagues who have come to work for the Brilliant Club post PhD. Several of them were tutors with us, a couple of people have done internships with us and then become a member of staff, which is also worth checking out. If you're a funded PhD through a doctoral training partnership, lots of those, as I'm sure you know, will fund a placement, and we offer a limited number of placements if you've already got funding. So do get in touch with us if you're interested in that and that applies to you. The sort of careers that are available somewhere like the Brilliant Club are really varied. So there are jobs in any organization, in any charity that are HR focused, finance focused, those sorts of things. Our staff who've done research often go into our research and impact team, for example, so we've got a team who really are solely focused on evaluating the impact of our programs and other educational interventions. So, Evaluation is really important to us, and making sure we're measuring impact is really important to us. So we've got quite a good track record of doing that, and now we do that for some other organisations too. So we're looking for people who are experts in analysing data, are experts in presenting data in accessible ways, I'm really thinking through, a small scale research project essentially. So those sorts of jobs are really appropriate for someone who's done a PhD. But also often people who've completed their PhD want to do something that is supporting other researchers. So the person in my team, Katrina, who is our head of tutor engagement on our tutor engagement team. She is really interested in making sure that all of our PhD researchers are getting the best professional development, the best support, and, and she really advocates for her community really of researchers. So she's gone more into a support role, but I think she would say that having done her PhD has been really beneficial in thinking about what sort of support our tutors need. Vikki: This is why I always try to remember to ask this question of people who come on the podcast because I think so often people only see the route into a traditional academic role or kind of leaving it all behind and going off into some corporation somewhere. I had a guest on a while back, Holly Prescott, who talked about academic adjacent careers. So check out that episode, everyone, if you're interested in this stuff, and I think these are such interesting examples of academic adjacent careers where you're still working with research, you're still working with people from universities, but in a different context and with a different aim. And yeah, I think it's just really useful for people to know these sorts of things exist. Rosa: Yeah, definitely. Do check out our website and have a look for vacancies, because things do come up and we're always interested to hear from people who've finished their research. Vikki: Well, thank you so much for coming in, Rosa. I hope that you have inspired lots of the listeners either to engage themselves or if they're academics to encourage their PhD students to engage. If people want to find out more, where should they be looking? Rosa: So first and foremost, look on the Brilliant Club website. There's a whole area there about being a tutor. There is a little video, there's some FAQs, there's lots of information. You can also sign up on our website for an information event where you can find out more and come along to a live session. We are on LinkedIn and X and Instagram, so do check us out on any of those platforms. If you've got specific questions, you can also email apply at thebrilliantclub. org to find out more. We'd love to engage with you and if you've got any questions, do just reach out. Vikki: Amazing. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you for such a useful episode. And thank you everyone for listening. I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked 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 thephdlifecoach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

Links I refer to in this episode How to write the thing when you’re struggling to write the thing How to improve your writing with Dr Katy Peplin How to plan your academic writing with Dr Jo VanEvery How to work with the version of you that shows up Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. This is a super exciting week because it is my first client Q& A session. I should have some new theme for that. Anyway, we're not going to have a new theme for that. Stay focused, Vikki. Here we go. People can send me questions. You can send me questions and I will answer them on the podcast. Now I launched this last week and I already have three questions to answer so we are going to go right ahead and answer these questions and they are all clustered around a topic which is even better and it's a topic that comes up so much with my clients and members which is how do I get it done when I don't really feel like getting it done. So we are going to go through three specific questions that listeners submitted to me which are all about getting it done when the motivation is low. If you have questions you want me to answer, I'm going to give you all the details at the end of how you can go about doing that. But essentially get them submitted. I will answer them on a podcast for you soon. So the first question, question one comes from Gill, who is a PhD student in Canada. She is a part time distance learning PhD student. So shout out to all our part timers and our distance learners. And she asks, I struggle most with writing when there is too big a gap between where I am, sitting with my notes, and where I need to be, writing sentences. What do I do? Now, I absolutely love this question, because I think it already shows quite a lot of insight and understanding. Often when people come to me, they say, I'm just struggling to write. I just intend to write, and then I can't write. And if that's where you're at, there's a bunch of episodes on the podcast already about how to write when you're struggling to write, which is one of my early podcasts, and then a couple of episodes, three episodes. Three different episodes with guests, with JoVan Every, with Alison Miller, and with Katie Peplin, all about, writing and getting going on writing. And I'll link those in the show notes for you. However, this is more specific. What I love about it is Gill is showing real insight into the problem here. She says she struggles most when there's too big a gap between where she is and where she needs to be. If you can get specific the way Gill is getting specific with her challenges here, you are already five steps along the way to solving this, even without me helping along the way. So she's showing real insight. She also went on to say, and this is where she's already starting to be curious. She's already starting to figure out approaches for herself. So she says, what I'm slowly learning is that there are several iterations of working my notes to get them from high level sorting by theme down to I want this paragraph to argue point A backed up with evidence points B, C, and D. And essentially here, Gill is answering her own question, which is amazing, which is that often, if we can notice what the real problem is, ie that there's a really big gap between sitting with your notes and having coherent sentences, then we can already start to speculate about what the solution might be and what's happening here is Gill is already recognizing that she needs to see that there are several steps. Often we think that if we've got our notes here, we should be able to write paragraphs there. And we get really frustrated when that's not possible and when we struggle with that. We make it mean something about us, rather than making it mean something about our technique. And the technique that we're missing here is this understanding that there's several iterations in between those two points. However, Gill is still talking about struggling with this, so she's gone a really long way to identifying the problem, but let's think about some additional suggestions. So the first thing is, if we're trying to identify these interim goals, we need to be really clear on what they are. So often you hear people say, just write something bad first. And the difficulty is, partly, we're all kind of high achieving people, we don't really like writing things that are purposefully bad. But also, what does that even mean? And how do you then turn something that's bad into something that's good? I think it works better, instead of thinking about it as a bad first draft, try to describe what it really is. So, for example, if you're starting from your notes, you might want to next go to having the one bullet point that sums up what that paragraph needs to say, the one point you want to make. Now, lots of you will say, yeah, but I don't know, I've got all these notes and I don't know what point I want to make. Perfect. We've now identified a new problem. So what we now need to do is figure out what point we want to make. And so what we can then do is set ourselves a different interim goal. So a next step for you might be to write down what you are thinking. So this isn't even a draft to be a bad draft. This is a draft to get it out of your head. This is a draft where we're just saying, I kind of want to say this, but then I don't really think that makes sense. So maybe I should say this instead, but then I don't know whether that links back to blah de blah. So you're literally doing sort of stream of consciousness of your thoughts about these notes. Because if we can get it out of our head and onto a piece of paper, it then is so much easier to do this next iteration, which is to start to pick that apart and kind of go, Oh, well, could be a key point, I suppose. And that could be, and maybe my next step would then be to decide which of those points I want to make, for example. But by really turning it into very tangible steps that aren't just, write the next sentence, write the next sentence, but instead identifying actually different steps that will move you from having your notes to having sentences. You may have seen on my Instagram, if you're not following me, by the way, make sure you are. I have more people on my newsletter than I do on my Instagram, which is a bit strange. So make sure you're following me at the PhD Life Coach. I'm going to be posting much more regularly for reasons I'll tell you about at the end. Anyway, I said on my Instagram recently, a little quote that I came up with when I was coaching some people in my membership last week, which was, if you're struggling to see the light at the end of the tunnel, shorten the tunnel. If you're struggling to think, right, I'm only going to celebrate when this paper's finished, for example, and that feels like a really, really long way away, we need to shorten that tunnel, give ourselves much smaller tasks to do and then celebrate the light on those tunnels. So in this case for Gill, when she's starting with sitting from her notes, that first light, that first short tunnel might be to get from sitting with my notes to writing two pages of whatever comes out of my head, including what I don't know, so that I've got something to work with. And then we celebrate, we enjoy that. And then when we're ready to enter another tunnel, another task, we look at that and pull out, what are three points that I could make, for example. Okay, so we're sort of creating something where it feels like you're going through distinct steps. And many of these steps are just for you. These are not for anybody else to ever read. These are to get your head straight. Now, one of the reasons that so many of you will find this challenging is because people very rarely talk about these steps. And the reason I think for that is partly people who are highly skilled don't understand exactly what they've done to get to be highly skilled. They kind of take it for granted. So have you ever been like taught to drive or anything by somebody who's really good at it? So my stepdaughters, one's just learned, one's about to learn. And my husband grew up on a farm. He's been driving tractors since he was nine. He knows exactly how to reverse a vehicle, reverse a vehicle with a trailer, all sorts of things like that. But he can't explain it to someone who doesn't know. Cause he's just like, well, you just back it up over there. Yeah. into the space. And he can't give step by step notes. And you will find that your supervisors are very similar. They often won't be able to describe the steps they go through in order to write a paper. In fact, especially if they often write on the same topics, they may not even go through all these steps because they can go from vague ideas in their head to a plan, to a draft. They don't need all those steps in between. And then the people that are taking all these steps, the people that are doing postdocs, the people that are at the beginnings of their academic career, or people who are more senior but have always found their writing more stressful, they don't really have the platform to talk about how they do this. And often they do it in a way that's driven by panic and self hatred anyway. They haven't necessarily discovered sort of a fun, iterative process that you can go from notes to an okay draft. So that's why if you're finding this hard, don't worry. No one really teaches this stuff, or very few people teach this stuff. Very few people know it themselves, and even fewer are telling you about it. So don't make it mean anything that you don't know this. The final thing to say is to keep an eye on some of those thoughts. So often when we're describing this stuff, we're talking about things we have problems. We, like Gill, we talk about it as being a struggle. I struggle with writing when there's a big gap. Well, of course you do. That's not a struggle. That's just the process. This is the route that people take to getting writing done, and the fact that you're wrestling with it means you are engaging in an academic pursuit. The fact that you're thinking, oh, shall I say it like this or shall I say it like that? means you're doing the thing. This is not a sign you're doing it wrong. This is the sign that you are an academic. So don't problematize the fact that it takes you a bunch of drafts to write something that sounds half decent. That is literally how it's done. So, for all the rest of you, copy Gill, get really specific about which bit you're struggling with, And then, as I've demonstrated hopefully today, it's quite straightforward to identify steps that you can take to close that gap between where you feel like it's all difficult to actually doing the thing. Let me know whether that resonated with you. So when you send me questions, let me know how you feel about that one as well, how that could get you writing something you're finding difficult at the moment. Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. Now my second question came in the same message from Gill. And this is, my other sticking point is when I feel that the task in front of me will somehow judge work I've already done. And she said yes, I know how that sounds. Don't worry Gill, I totally totally empathise. So today I'm feeling resistance about reviewing my chapter structure because I'm afraid I'll discover I need to rewrite pages of it. Again, so, so common. I'm sure lots of you listening will resonate with that. Especially at the beginnings of our academic career, we really attach our work to ourselves and to our worth. And therefore, if the task we need to do is to pick holes in something that we kind of self identify with, that we think is part of us, that's not a fun job to do. You know, anything where you're critiquing your own performance, isn't fun, if you make that mean lots of negative things about you. So, if by looking at a piece of work that you've done in the past and you're trying to pull it apart to improve it, the narrative that's going on in your head is, Oh God, you should have done this before. Oh God, this is rubbish. I can't believe you rate this so badly. We're going to have to do so much work now. This is terrible. Then of course it's going to feel awful. But I want you to imagine an expert. I want you to imagine somebody who's a high performance in something you care about, so like an athlete or a musician or something, and they're watching their race or they're listening to their performance and they're almost gleefully looking out for things that they're doing wrong because they know if they can identify things they're doing wrong, they can make it better and making it better is what they want to do. I want you to imagine those people in whatever context works for you. That's the vibe we want to bring to analyzing our work. Not looking for mistakes in a kind of, I don't want to find any, because that means I've got to do some work. And that means I've been rubbish and I've wasted time and da da da. But I want to find things I can improve here because I'm going for peak performance. I want this to be as good and as clear and as articulate as I can make it. And it's fun to look for places that I can shave off a bit here and add a bit of nuance there. So that's the first thing is really thinking about how we can change the way we're thinking about this as a task. The second thing kind of takes that on a deeper step. Why is it a problem if you find things wrong with it. And this will differ for different ones of you. Sometimes it's because it feels like a lot of effort. That if I identify that it needs restructuring, it feels like I'm going to have to do a whole load more work and that feels like a lot of effort. Other times it's because we allowed ourselves to believe it was done and now it's going to be a bit disappointing if it's not. Or we're worried that however much we pick it apart, it's never going to be good enough. I want you to identify, really specifically for you, why it's a problem that you might find something wrong with it. And this will differ a bit for all of you. And then what we do is instead of avoiding looking for those faults, instead of avoiding finding the problems, we look after ourselves through that problem. So if you know that it feels like a lot of effort, that's why it's a problem because it feels like so much work to do and that's a lot of time and effort, then you reassure yourself on that stuff. You reassure yourself that we don't have to do it all today, that we're going to support ourselves to get it done, that it could be fun to do a bit more. I remember I took part in a, like, I won a mentor award thingy for fiction writing, last, two years ago, and, um, maybe even three, three years ago. Three years ago. Blimey, time's running past. Anyway, and part of my sort of process through that, reviewing the novel that I'd written, made me realize... I may have told this story before... but made me realize that I needed to write it in first person instead of third person, which meant completely rewriting the whole thing. And I had a feeling that it sounds as though you guys have sometimes, where it's like, Oh, man, that's a whole lot of work. But I also knew it was the right thing. And so instead of avoiding it, what I did was I looked after myself while I did that. It made it easy for me to make the changes I needed to. I made it fun. I reminded myself how much better I was making it. And I actually plowed through it pretty quickly. So if you're feeling that judgment, totally, totally get it. Think about why it's a problem and think about how you can support yourself through that. What do you need to say to yourself so that it doesn't feel quite so bad to need to rewrite the things you've done? Finally, just as an aside, let's just start from the place that you're going to have to rewrite this more times than you think. Because part of the problem here is when we kind of set ourselves up our expectations that a first draft, once we've done a first draft, all we'll have to do is tweak it and it'll be fine. Let's just not start from that place. Let's just start from the place that I'm going to rewrite this ten times and that's fine. Because actually, if we just get on with that, like I did with my novel, if we just get on with that, you can actually get it done way faster than if we're procrastinating even looking because we're scared of what we'll find. Let's just look. Get on with it. Look after ourselves as we go. Let me know what you think about that question, whether that's brought up other questions for you. And then the third question came through on my podcast. So you may have noticed in your podcast app, I'm going to find it on my phone so that I can show people who are on YouTube. Cause if you don't know, these podcasts come out on YouTube as well. Anyway, if you go, wherever you get your podcasts. So here, I'm just showing you, um, on the screen, it says PhD Life Coach, it's got last week's episode up, and then it says, send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show. And if you click on that, then it takes you through to a form that you can fill in and it sends me questions. Now, the only downside, and I have to apologize to the person who sent this, if you don't put your name in it, I don't get any contact details. So this is an anonymous PhD student who the app tells me is based in the UK, but beyond that, I don't know who you are. So, apologies for not being able to shout you out by name. In future people, if you want to get shouted out by name, you want to know it was you, then please do leave your name in the message as well. Anyway, this person has said, I keep saying that I'll do the work when I feel motivated, so I keep trying to find ways to motivate myself. So, could you answer something like, how to get stuff done when you feel unmotivated? Now, this is a huge one, this one I actually have an episode planned for in 6 8 weeks, something like that um, but I'm going to give you some quick tips now. And the first one might sound counterintuitive. The first one is, why are you expecting Did you guys hear Marley shake then? That noise was my Labrador shaking because it is nearly an hour till tea time and therefore he's clearly starving to death. He'll be fine. Chill your beans. So, the first step might sound counterintuitive and that is asking yourself why you expect to feel motivated. Now, I remember talking about this recently, and I can't remember whether it was on a podcast, whether it was in a membership call, so do apologize if I'm repeating myself, but I think it's useful for everybody to remember this, is that motivation doesn't have to be feeling super excited and like really wanting to do it. Often, I think people expect to wait until they feel motivated because on the times that they have done that, everything's felt so much easier. But I promise what feels enormously easier is to learn to do things when you don't feel motivated. Even just remembering that you don't need to feel motivated in order to do the thing can help in and of itself. Because when your brain says, I don't want to, you can go, okay, that's alright, I know you don't want to. That's alright, we haven't got to argue with that. We are going to do it. You don't need to want to. Okay, so even just remembering that there is no need to feel motivated can really help with getting on with stuff. Another little trick, like mental trick that I use when I need to do something that I don't feel like doing is I remind myself what the genuine alternatives are here, because often the only two alternatives we give ourselves are I do this thing, which I don't want to do, or I don't do this thing that I don't want to do and I do something else instead. That's more fun. I eat, I scroll on social media. I go talk to my friends, whatever it is. Okay, so we let ourselves be in this world where those are the two options. Do the thing I don't want to do, or don't do the thing and do something fun instead. And in that case, with those two choices, obviously, we're going to pick don't do it. Unless you're one of these very disciplined people, in which case you're probably not listening to this podcast. We allow ourselves to believe that those are the two options, when in fact that's not true. Our two options are do the thing we don't want to do, or sit here having a massive negotiation with ourselves about whether we're going to do it now, or later, and why we don't really want to do it now, but we probably should do it now, and have a massive old blimmin debate about it with ourselves. That's an option. Or we have the option, which is that we decide not to do it now, but we still need to do it later. And that option often comes with a whole bunch of self recrimination. Now, obviously, we can manage our own minds. We've been learning about this stuff for a long time now. And so there could be an option over here, which is, I decide to do it later, I'm completely fine with that decision, and when it comes to doing it, I then do it. We quite like that option too, if you can pull that option off. But what we want to do is be at one extreme or the other. We either want to be, we do it now, even though we don't want to do it, or we don't do it now, we don't beat ourselves up about it, we decide when we are going to do it, and when that time comes, we get on and bloody do it. Okay. Except most of us don't go for either of those. We go for the bit in between where we negotiate with ourselves. We argue with ourselves. We don't do the thing we don't want to do, but equally we don't do the thing we do want to do because we kind of half arsely sit around our desk as though that counts. Or, we decide we're not doing it, but we beat ourselves up about the fact we're not doing it, we dread the day we have to do it, and we turn it into this bigger deal, so that when we are meant to be doing it next time, it's even harder to motivate ourselves to do it now, because not only is it a task we don't want to do, it's now got a whole bunch of shame and guilt thrown in for shits and giggles. Excuse my language, feeling feisty today. We'll go with it, this is an adult podcast. Okay. That's the bit we want to avoid. And so sometimes when I'm thinking, I really don't want to do this thing, I remind myself that I don't want to have not done this thing either. I really don't want to do this thing, but I don't want to have not done it either. I don't want the consequences. I don't want the stupid arguments in my head. I don't want the need to coach myself through the fact that I didn't do what I said I was going to do. You know what? It's less painful just to do the thing and I'm going to do the thing. When we remember that self negotiation is the most painful part of this process, it is often easier to just do the thing. My final tip is remember there is a difference between the energy it takes to do a task and the energy it takes to start doing a task. Often what we're lacking is initiation energy. Actually, once we start doing something, it often gets quite a lot easier. That's something else I want you to remember and I want you to remind yourself of. It's the initiation energy that's painful most of the time, that bit of energy that requires you to start writing, to think about what you're going to do and so on. But once you get going, it's usually easier. If you can remember that, it's a lot easier to then get started because you're reminding yourself it's actually only a short burst of willpower that's needed here. Only a short burst of kind of self talk and geeing yourself up to do it. Because once you get going, it's almost always easier to do it. Okay. Remind yourself it's only initiation energy. In the longer term, we can think about ways to build your motivation, ways to make tasks more intrinsically motivating. And as I say, I am going to cover that stuff, but I want you to start, whoever sent this to me specifically, at the moment, I want you to start Forget trying to make yourself motivated. Try to work on doing things when you're not motivated. All the rest can come later. I really hope that you guys found that useful. I loved answering these questions, so please do send more. You can do it if you're on my newsletter. You can send them in, just by replying to the email and I will always give priority to my newsletter crew so make sure you're signed up for that, but also if you're just a podcast listener, that's cool. I get it. You've got to get to know me first. Make sure you press the send Vikki a question button. Let me know your question. Let me know your name, maybe where you are in the world. What stage of your PhD you're at. That would be amazing. And I will answer all your questions in the future too. Anyway, let me know how you get on with getting things done when you don't really feel like it. Thank you all for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked 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 thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

Links I refer to in this episode Why we all need to be more intentional and resourceful Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast and today we are back to our be your own best boss little series. So those of you who listen regularly will know that over the last couple of months I've been doing episodes where I think about what qualities we need in order to be better bosses for ourselves. This is all based on the notion that how we speak to ourselves and how we treat ourselves is really important, not just for what we get done, but also how we experience doing our PhDs and working in academia, and often we're not doing this well, right, often we're being judgmental bosses, we're being confusing bosses, we're being one minute very kind of indulgent bosses and the next minute very disciplinarian. And it doesn't have to be like that. We can learn, it is a skill and a practice to develop the ability to lead ourselves in a way that's more effective and that feels better. Now I have a whole online course about this to be your own best boss course which will take you through the whole process of identifying what sort of boss you're being to yourself at the moment, and then developing the habits that you want in terms of self talk, planning, organization, reviewing, and generally achieving success. Now I identified 10 qualities that I think all good bosses should have, whether it's your actual boss, or in this case, the boss you're being to yourself. And I've been talking about those in these series of episodes. So you may have heard me talk already about being more compassionate and more curious. There's another episode about being more encouraging and accepting. And then a third about being more intentional and resourceful. If you haven't listened to those yet, don't worry, you don't have to listen to them all in order, but I would recommend that you go back and find them. I'll link to them in the show notes on my website phdlifecoach. com. Today, we're going to be thinking about two that I think link together really well, and that is being more strategic and being more ambitious. And if you hear those and go, Oh, no, that's not me. That's not my vibe at all. Please stay with me. Trust me. I am going to define strategic ambitious in ways that I think will feel good to all of you. And I hope by the end of this episode, you'll not only see why I think this is important, but also understand how you can implement this in your own life. I'm going to follow the same structure as before, where I talk about what I mean by strategic and ambitious, what circumstances I think it's useful to have these qualities, what thoughts you need to have in order to be strategic and ambitious, what feelings those thoughts will generate, what actions they'll allow you to take, and what results they'll allow you to achieve. And the reason I use that structure for those of you who aren't familiar is that's the self coaching model. This notion that our thoughts create our feelings, our feelings create our actions, and our actions create our results. If you want to hear more about that, again, I will link to an episode where I talk you through how you can use that model to coach yourself and help yourself achieve any goals that you want to achieve. But I structure these episodes around that, so that we've got a really concrete plan about how we can implement this stuff into our lives. So let's start by thinking about being more strategic. Now, one of the things we all know about academia is there's just too many things to do. There are so many options. You could do this study or that study. You could go to this conference or that conference. You could volunteer for this, volunteer for that. So many things. And often, it feels as though you have to do all of those things in order to succeed. And we all know that what happens when you try and do all of them is that we end up exhausting ourselves and not doing any of the things as well as we could do. Now, in the last one of these, I talked about being intentional, and that was about choosing our behaviours as well. But the difference with being strategic is we're choosing our behaviours not just on the basis of what feels good and what aligns with what we want, but we're also choosing our goals and behaviours in terms of what aligns with the organisation or powers or people that can influence our careers. So for example, when you're strategic, you're choosing which activities you take partly on the basis of which ones you want to do, but also on the basis of which ones are likely to be recognized by your examiners, which ones are likely to be recognized by reviewers, by promotions panels. It's understanding that whether you're a PhD student, academic, or a senior professor, you are part of an institution, of a discipline, of a sector that has particular priorities. And when we can understand those priorities, we can choose which things to spend more time on. Sometimes being strategic can sound a little bit self serving. It can sound a little bit like we're sucking up. We'll do whatever the big man wants us to do. And it doesn't have to be like that. It can be like that. Some people do that form of strategy. I like to think of it as a Venn diagram where you've got a circle of all the things that you care about and that you want to spend time doing, and you have a circle of all the things that the organization wants you to do, whether that's for your qualification or for your job, and what we're interested in is finding the places that overlap, finding the places where the things that feel good and important to you overlap with what feels good and important to your organization so that we can strategically put our efforts in those places most so that not only do we enjoy what we're doing, we value what we're doing, but that we get the recognition that we deserve. Does it mean that you can't do some of the things that are just for you? Things that you think are important, but your organization, your supervisor, whoever it is, doesn't seem to value. No, of course not. You can do whatever you want, but choose it mindfully. Choose it knowing that you're doing those things because you think they're morally important or you think they're important to your discipline and you recognize that they're not things that shift the needle in terms of your actual career progression. That's fine. You get to pick that. We're people. We are not just career building machines. You get to do whatever you want here, but do it knowingly. Don't sit over there doing all the things for all people and then wondering why you don't get any recognition for it. So if you can be a more strategic boss for yourself or develop your understanding of strategy, then we start to recognize and understand some of the complicated structures there are in academia and then decide how and when our goals align with those and what we need to therefore do in order to achieve our professional goals. So, in what situations, what circumstances is it useful to be more strategic? Well, I'm thinking about things like if you're asked to take on a new role, whether you're asked to be a postgrad rep, or whether you're asked to be a head of department, or whatever it might be. That sort of thing, where you're choosing whether or not to take on a role. I think it's important to be strategic when you're choosing which goals you're going to focus on. We get to be strategic when we're going to new events. Now again, this doesn't mean going and being that networking weirdo that only wants to talk to important people, not everybody else. But being strategic when you're choosing how many of the sessions you go to, which sessions you go to, whether there are specific people that you want to try and speak to for specific reasons, we can be strategic around all of that. And if you want more help with networking, again, I'll link in the, in the show notes, but I did a really good interview with Dr. Jen Polk about networking. So do check that one out. The fourth circumstances I came up with is when you're invited to get involved in a project. Whatever level of academia you're in, you might get asked to collaborate on something, to contribute towards something, and you get to decide. Often we don't see it as a decision, right? It's just like, oh my god, thank you so much for asking me. But if people invite you to do those things, it is a decision, and you can be strategic when you decide whether you're going to do them or not. It's those sorts of circumstances. That's not an exclusive list, but it's that kind of thing. And what thoughts would I try and generate if I was trying to be a strategic boss to myself? It's things like, I can decide where and if this fits with my other commitments. So it's that acknowledgement that there's choices to be made here and you get to choose. It's reassuring yourself. Things like, I don't have to do it all. I need to choose what things I do do, but I don't have to do it all. It's thoughts like, at the moment, I'm focusing on X, so that other thing can wait. And again, I feel like I'm sending you off to loads of other episodes here, but I think there's so much good stuff on here for you. I also had an episode about thinking of your career in phases and this can really help with this idea that I'm focusing on this thing now and I'm doing that thing later. That's a thing for after my PhD. That's a thing for after the teaching term's done or whatever. The final thought that I think is really useful is accepting that sometimes we need other people to help us navigate this stuff. So it's thinking things like there are people that will help me understand what I need to do and how to take these next steps. Universities can feel like really complex, weird, arcane places, and understanding that there will be people, they may not be the people you're directly around day to day, but there will be people who can help you navigate that, is part of being a strategic boss. You don't have to know this all yourself. You just have to know that these things exist and that there are people who can help you figure this out. Now, if you think thoughts like that regularly, I think you'd end up feeling emotions like calm and committed and focused, and maybe even relieved because you're not chasing your tail. You can choose what you're doing. And if you're feeling all those emotions, I think you take actions like reaching out for advice, getting clearer on your goals so you can check you're aligning with them, getting clearer on the goals of your organization or your degree so that you can choose how much you align with them, saying no to things that don't align with your priorities or that don't serve your current goals. And doing some things well, instead of trying to cram everything in. And I think the results of those actions would be things like a streamlined work plan, a calmer work life, clearer progress towards goals that you actually know why you're pursuing them and getting advice that will actually help you implement all of this. So I want you to think, to what extent do you think you're a strategic boss already? Is this stuff that kind of comes naturally to you or it seems a bit of a mystery? If it seems like a bit of a mystery, don't worry. That's really common. Especially if you have any demographic characteristics that means that higher education doesn't reflect you as much as it could. It's not unusual to feel like you don't know any of this stuff. That doesn't stop you being strategic. I want you to identify ways that you're already being quite strategic. I know you all will be to some extent. And to think about things that you could do that would make it a little bit easier to be a little bit more strategic in future. Now, the second part of this is going to be thinking about being more ambitious. And again, this is another word that people can make sound quite negative sometimes. I remember once I got criticized for being ambitious. I was talking to somebody quite senior about some ideas that I had and there were quite a lot of things that I was keen to do, and he was like, You're quite ambitious, aren't you? And I was like, I don't know how to reply to that, because, I mean, kinda. But also, you make it sound like that's a bad thing, and I don't quite understand why. It was almost a, you don't have to worry about all of that, dear, sort of vibe. And it was definitely not how it was intended. The person who said it was very, very well intentioned. But it was still this slight negative, and I think particular sectors of society, women, people of colour, will experience being called ambitious differently than other people. Now, again, in this, I'm not talking about being ambitious in any negative sense. I'm not talking about being ambitious in the sense of squashing other people to get to the top or any of those things. I'm talking about being keen to achieve the things that you want to achieve. To reach your definition of success. That you are someone who strives towards things that are important. And importantly, somebody who's willing to face proximal challenges. So stuff that's happening now. So feeling uncomfortable, working hard, feeling embarrassed, potentially all of these things, you're willing to risk those proximal challenges in order to achieve your broader goals. Those broader ambitious, that's what being ambitious means in this context. Circumstances where I think it would be good to be ambitious are when you're trying to decide whether to do something that feels difficult. Often we allow the fact that it feels difficult to say, well, maybe I shouldn't, maybe I'm not quite ready yet, maybe later. When actually if we can be ambitious and we can be like, you know what, I'm willing to do something that's difficult in order to achieve these important goals, then that's us being ambitious. I want you to be more ambitious when you're worrying about whether you're good enough to do something or not. We so often compare our insides with everybody else's outsides and we say, surely there's somebody better for this role. Why? Why not you? In fact, that's a great thought to have. Why not me? Why shouldn't I do this role? I want you to be ambitious when you're thinking about middle to long term goals. Often we're over ambitious when it comes to what we can get done in the next hour or the next day, but we're really unambitious in terms of what we can get done in the next three months or the next year. Be ambitious when you're setting your goals, you're setting the things that you think you can contribute to the world, when you're deciding on your definition of success. There's uncomfortableness in any goal. If we pick silly little goals, there'll be uncomfortableness around, Oh, maybe it's not good enough. Maybe I, you know, maybe I didn't try hard enough. Maybe I should have done more. There's uncomfortableness in going for ambitious goals. So if there's uncomfortableness either way, why not be ambitious? Why not set our sights high and try and make that happen? Now, there's a whole bunch of thoughts that you can have if you're being a more ambitious boss to yourself. And this is things like, I've done difficult things before. So this is about reminding ourselves of our capabilities. I have the capacity to learn to be good at this. We don't have to already think we can do it. So often people won't take on a role because they're not sure if they can do it. And I'm like, dude, if you can already do the whole role, don't take on the role. How boring. Do a role for the next three years that you're already sure you can do? Dull. Take on a role that you think you can learn to be good at by about the middle of your term. So at the beginning, you'll be a bit like, this is hard. In the middle, you'll be like, you know what? I think I can do this. And by the end of the three years, you'll be like, yeah, I'm kind of done with this now. This is, this is straightforward for me now. That's perfect. So I have the capacity to learn to be good at this. Remind yourself that you're willing to be uncomfortable. So that you can achieve your goal and remind yourself there's going to be uncomfortableness regardless of what you decide. So you may as well choose the ambitious goal. Reassure yourself, you have something important to offer. I saw a lovely interview with Kamala Harris, where she was talking to a young girl about public speaking. And she was saying, you might be scared. You might be nervous when you're public speaking, but the audience needs to hear your ideas. So we have to be willing to be uncomfortable, willing to have that period of time where we're doing something that makes us nervous so that people can receive our ideas. And I just loved that as an approach to nerves. It's not that you have to not be nervous and it's not that you have to make all of that go away. We have to be willing to experience it so that people can get the benefit of the things that we have to say. We have to remind ourselves that this thing, this thing that feels difficult, is the next step, is the next step to achieving the goals, the things that are important to us. And we have to remind ourselves that it is safe for us to put ourselves forward for it. And we can know it's safe by pledging that we will look after ourselves, that if we go for these ambitious goals and then we fail, we don't reach them in entirety, we will be kind to ourselves. We won't beat ourselves up for having attempted it in the first place. We won't tell ourselves we were stupid for even considering having gone for it. We'll be kind to ourselves, whether we succeed or whether we fail or anything in between, because that's what makes it safe to have ambitious goals, knowing that you will be okay, whatever happens. And the final thing is to have that glimmer of what could be. It's that whole cheesy, you know, the little motivational things you get on Instagram that are like, um, you know, yes, what if you fall? But what if you fly? I want you to keep the thought this could be amazing. Imagine, imagine if this all goes well, imagine if we achieve this goal, how amazing that could be. And if we think thoughts like this, we might at minimum feel resolved. If we're thinking thoughts like I'm willing to do the difficult things, then we might feel resolved. And we might feel willing to do the stuff. But we might even get glimmers of excitement and hope and optimism and meaning by trying to achieve ambitious goals that actually we've selected intentionally, we've aligned strategically and now we're supporting ourselves to achieve. That might feel amazing, mightn't it, don't you think? Now, if you're feeling excited, hopeful, willing, resolved, you might put yourself forward for a challenging role or opportunity that you'd perhaps been a bit worried about. You might make a suggestion for how things could be improved, step up to be the one that makes things better. You might start planning out a route that even if that goal feels like a really long way away over there, you might start planning a route to getting to it. And you might start visualizing what it would be like to actually be someone who can achieve those goals. And I want you to notice the two different types of results that are out here. One is achieving the goals. That is one amazing result. That you go off and do those things that you dreamed of. But the other result, and this result is even more important than the other result, is that you have become somebody who can do difficult things. By being ambitious and then putting in the work to try and achieve that goal, you become somebody who can do difficult things. Who can take steps towards an ambitious goal. And the one I love about that result more than anything is that it doesn't matter if you achieve your goal or not. If you set an ambitious goal, you work hard towards that ambitious goal, you coach yourself through that process, then regardless of whether you get to the actual specific ambitious goal or not, in the end, you have become someone who is willing to be uncomfortable, who is willing to do difficult things, who is willing and able to learn, who can take themselves through these things of believing that it's possible, even when it doesn't feel like it is, and who can get really close to achieving their goals. Becoming that person sets you up to do everything in the future. I want you to think about yourself at the moment. How ambitious are you at the moment? What ways are you already ambitious and what tiny ways could you be a little bit more ambitious? Is there an ambition? Is there a goal that you've been worrying about or avoiding or thinking, there's no way I could do that? How could you make it a little bit easier to believe that it might be possible and to start supporting yourself? I really hope you found today useful, been thinking about being more strategic and more ambitious. Do go back, check out the three others where we were thinking about those other six qualities. We've got two more coming in a few weeks time. If you want any more support with this, I have my Be Your Own Best Boss online course where I take you through all of it. But if you're someone who's like, yeah, I could buy the course Vic, but I probably won't finish it, then maybe you do better in a community setting, in which case check out my membership program, because not only do they get all the coaching and the support, they also get access to all the online courses, so you would get Be Your Own Best Boss for free as part of that membership. You can find out all about it in the phdlifecoach. com. You can contact me through the website if you have any questions, you can find me on Twitter at Dr Vikki Burns, on Instagram at The PhD Life Coach. And if you already get my newsletter, you can always reply to that with any questions. If you're interested in the membership, I can set you up with a free seminar so you could come and see it in action. So let me know if you want to try that. I hope today has been useful and I've got your brain buzzing about what goals you could achieve this year. Thank you all for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked 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 thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

Links I refer to in this episode How to use the Do Know Don't Know List How to break your work down into chunks How to use Role Based Time Blocking I've noticed a lie that a lot of my clients are telling themselves. And it might sound a little bit harsh to accuse my clients of lying. I don't mean they're actively misleading me, but I do think they're misleading themselves. And maybe you guys are misleading yourselves too. The lie I hear is that I can't get into my work unless I've got a big chunk of time. It's the clients who are convinced that if they only have an hour, it's barely worth starting because they need to get into it and flow doesn't come unless they've got all day. It's usually the same clients who are struggling to find those big chunks of time because other things come up or get in the way. And the irony is that I also hear from lots of clients that when those big chunks of time finally come up and you're like, yes, I can actually get some stuff done. I'm going to get in the flow. Today is the day. That somehow those hours disappear and we don't do all the things that we said we would be able to do in those big chunks of time. And the reason I call it a lie is because even in those big chunks of time you're doing the work one block at a time. It might feel easier sometimes if you can hit that kind of magical flow where things come easily but an eight hour day is still a series of one hours. And what that means is there's nothing except your thoughts preventing you from using these smaller blocks of time. Now. This episode is not about chunking your work. That episode already exists. Go back and check it out. I'll link it in the show notes for you, but instead it's about getting started. The reason I told you about this lie to start with is because this is one of the reasons why people struggle to get started. They struggle to get started because they're telling themselves that it isn't long enough, that there isn't a big enough chunk of time for them to do anything meaningful. It's just a really good example of how our thoughts sometimes prevent us getting started on the tasks that we want to do. So in today's episode, we're going to think about some other thoughts that get in the way of starting, and I'm going to give you three specific tools that you can use to get started. I'll also refer you back to some other podcast episodes that are going to help as well. There's tons of support for you here. Hello and welcome to episode three of the third series of the PhD Life Coach, and we are talking about getting started on a task. As I said, first we're going to identify some thoughts that make it more difficult to get started, and one of them is that I don't have enough time to do anything meaningful. If we believe that, we make it true. We start slowly and indecisively. We warm up on things that maybe don't really need doing. And suddenly it's an hour and we haven't even got into it. And now we need to be somewhere else and we've wasted our time. We make it true by believing that it can't be useful. I was recently chatting with one of the clients in my membership about this and she really believed that she needed time to gradually warm herself up into working and that that meant these shorter bursts of time just weren't enough for her. And I can't remember how we... I love an analogy. I mentioned last week that I'm really creative. I love an analogy. And it made me think of tennis lessons. I want you to imagine that you went down to tennis lessons at your local sports centre and you turned up for the lesson. And the person said, Yeah, the thing is, we need to do backhand and forehand and serve, and we need to do ground shots, and we need to do volleys, and we need to do placement, and we need to do footwork. So I don't think it's worth us having this lesson. Um, come back when you've got a full day. How, how would you react to that? I think if you were anything like me, you'd be like, well, we could do a bit of it, perhaps. You know, and it's not that they're lying, you know, to play tennis, you do have to work on all of those shots, but do we need to work on them all in this hour? Does that mean it's not worth working on any of them in order to have a tennis lesson? No. Obviously not. We would pick one bit and we would do that bit and we would come back next week and do some more and we wouldn't wait until we could play eight hours of tennis in one day. When we think of it like that, suddenly it becomes obvious, well of course I could just do a bit of it. We could get a bit better at one part of it, but somehow when we're thinking about our thesis, it doesn't feel like that. Now, the client that I was talking to, we were also talking about the need to warm up, that sometimes she likes to do some emails, do some reading, kind of get herself in the mode for writing, and that often by the time she's done that, suddenly the time she'd allocated to writing had gone away. And again, we went back to that tennis lesson and I thought, well, okay, what if you turned up to this lesson this time? They don't send you away. They're like, okay, you're here for an hour, but they tell you about the importance of warmup and they get you a bit warmer. And then we start doing something easy. We start doing a little gentle rally or something like that across the net. And And you just kept doing that until the end of the lesson. And you were like, well, hang on, what happened to the tennis? I came because I wanted to do some drills, I wanted to play some games. And they said, yeah, yeah, but we had to warm up. And you said, well, yeah, I know, but I came for an hour's session and we haven't done any of the things that we said we'd come for. And they said, yeah, yeah, but we have to warm up. You know, takes us a while to get into it. And again, I don't think you would be paying for that tennis lesson. I don't think you would be returning to that coach. Because we might say, well, yeah, okay, maybe I need a warm up, but maybe I need 10 minutes and then we get going anyway. Is it the most perfect warm up ever? No, but we could warm up by playing tennis. How about that? How about we do just enough warm up that we don't injure ourselves, we kind of get vaguely in the mode, and then we hone the rest of our warm up, do the rest of it while we're actually playing tennis, i. e. the thing that we came to do. And again, the same is true in writing or in any of your kind of harder academic pursuits. Sure, if you want to start by doing 10 minutes of reading, 10 minutes of editing, okay. But why are we allowing that to turn into 50 minutes? Because that's when warm up becomes procrastination. That's when we're not getting into it, we're avoiding it. And one of the things I suggest, if you're someone who feels like you need to break into it gently and you sometimes get sucked into, okay, I'll just answer a few emails to get in a work mode, and then suddenly it's two hours later. If that's you, it's okay. That's understandable. But I also have a suggestion for you, and it builds on that tennis analogy. I'm an ex sport scientist, and one of the things that we know is that the way you need to warm up for a sport is with movements that are relevant for that sport. You wouldn't warm up in the same way for a gymnastics meet as you would to play football, for example. That very first bit of just getting your heart rate up may be, but beyond that you want to be mirroring movements that you're likely to be making in that sport. But we do them more gently, we do them more slowly, and we do them so that they're not at the extremes of your range of motion. You can do the same when you warm up for writing. Instead of warming up for writing by doing some other academic task, like answering emails or reading papers, warm up for writing by writing slowly, gently, and within the realms of what you know. i. e. not at the extremes of your range of movement, your range of knowledge. So instead of distracting yourself by doing something that maybe gets your brain going, but doesn't actually get you into this task, Write a gentle paragraph on something you do already know about, without worrying too much about whether it's good or not, this is a warm up after all. Just write a quick paragraph about the topic that you're about to write on. Give like a little rough introduction to what you're about to say. Warm up by doing the thing you came here to do. Warm up by playing tennis, by writing, rather than disappearing off over there and doing something that feels a lot more manageable but doesn't move you towards your goals. Other lies we tell ourselves are that we don't know where to start. Now, I've mentioned this in previous podcasts, but I'm going to reiterate now because I think it's really important. I want you to always be clear between the difference between don't know, i. e. lacking information, and don't know, i. e. haven't decided. And where you're starting on the piece of work that you're doing is almost always a haven't decided issue, not an actual I'm missing information issue. And that's because it doesn't really matter where you start, you just need to start somewhere. And that means you just get to pick. So again, if you're struggling to start and you're telling yourself you don't know where to start, Remind yourself that this is a decision to make, not something that you don't know. And again, I was talking to a different client in my membership about this as well, this idea of making decisions. And her decision was around where she was going to go to work, whether she was going to work at home or work at the library. And she often procrastinated making the decision, wasted time, and then kind of didn't really do either. And one of the things that I reminded her is not deciding is a decision. So if you've got a piece of writing to do and you haven't decided yet where to start and you allow that to mean that you don't start yet, you do something else instead, that means you are deciding not to start. It's not that you haven't made a decision. You had a choice. You could start with this, or start with that, or start with this other thing, or you could not start. And at the moment, you're just not starting. That is a decision. Same as for this client. If you don't decide that you're working here, or you're working there, then you're deciding that you're not working. And that's not, again, not to beat up on you. I'm never trying to beat up on you. But I want us to take responsibility for lack of decision making being a decision in itself. Another thing we tell ourselves that doesn't help is that I'm not ready to start yet. I don't know enough to start yet. Again, all lies. I want you to listen to my episode about the Do Know, Don't Know list as a tool that will help you with this if you're feeling like you don't know enough. That will help you get really specific about what you do know and that you don't know. And I just want you to be mindful of the fact that usually when we're telling ourselves we don't know enough to do it yet, it just means we're a little bit scared and we just need to be a bit more supportive to ourselves, not that we're not ready to start. There's probably a whole load of other thoughts. Tell me, let me know. You can either respond, if you get my email newsletter, you can respond by email or if you just listen to my podcast, if you go to the place where you get your podcast, you'll see a send Vikki questions button. Let me know -what other things do you find stop you from getting started on your work? Because what I want to spend the rest of our time on is thinking about what can you actually do aside from coaching yourself on those thoughts, which is a really important element of this, what tangible steps can you take in order to get started on a piece of work that you want to do? My first tip is to separate finishing what you're currently doing with starting on the task. Now, let me tell you what I mean by that. Often what I'll find is it's the morning, I'm having my breakfast, I'm scrolling on my phone, and what I need to do is I need to start work. And I usually know what my task is, because I've usually set that out in advance with my role based time blocking system. Check that out in another episode as well. Um, But I can hear in my brain, as I'm scrolling on my phone, I can hear in my brain, right, you really should be going and doing X now. You know, this is the time you've blocked for that. I can hear myself almost persuading to do it, but I'm still scrolling. And I'm still scrolling. And one of the things that I have found most useful is remembering that we've actually got two different activities here. First activity is stop scrolling. Second activity is start the next thing. This is true whether you're watching TV, whether you're talking to friends, whatever you're doing that you don't want to be doing anymore and you want to be starting work, experiment with stopping that first thing. We don't need to think about starting work yet. We just need to think about stopping scrolling. We need to put our phone down. We need to turn the TV off. We need to stop playing the computer game. Because it's very easy to stay in that kind of parallel world where we're doing the thing and thinking about the work. And that's the worst world because that means we're not doing the work and we're not really enjoying the thing we're in. But if you can separate it out, suddenly it's like, I don't need to think about work. I just need to put my phone down. I can do it. I can put my phone down. Right. Phone down. Let's go. Then suddenly you haven't got all that stuff going into your eyes, whether it's computer games or TV or scrolling, whatever it is. You haven't got all that stimulation coming in. And then it's easier to sit quietly and be like, okay, right. What work is it that we're doing? And again, our task is not start work. Our task is open document. Identify next step, for example. And suddenly when we break it down like that, actually it's much easier to get started. Because we're not thinking about everything at once. You can use this tool. I procrastinate going to bed. I think I've talked about this before. I procrastinate going to bed because I think of it in a whole series of tasks. If you can break it down, put feet on the floor, walk upstairs. Clean teeth, wash face. Then suddenly, actually, if you're only thinking about the next one, it becomes much more manageable. This will be, some of you will be looking at me going, well, surely you just go to bed. Um, any of you , neuro divergent will recognize this. Uh, some of the others of you may as well, but the more you can break it down, the more you can identify stopping one task as one decision, starting the next task as another decision, the easier it is to get started on the next thing. The second tool I want to use, and this is a little mantra that we talk about a lot in my membership, is stay in the room. One of the reasons that starting a task feels complicated, Is because in our brains, we've connected it to 47 other things. I need to do this thing. And then you see that. And then I need to do that. And then I need to send it to my supervisor. And then my supervisor will give me comments. My collaborator will give me comments and I need to respond to those. And then you send them up. But I've also got that other thing and I'm teaching next week. So I need to do that too. And suddenly it's like, well, I can't start on anything because there's 400 things in my brain. We also sometimes spiral into, but if it's not good enough, then they're going to think this. And if, you know, if I can't respond to their comments, then they're definitely going to think I'm an idiot. Maybe I won't even be able to get onto the next thing after all. And we connect it to a load of things about our abilities, our future and so on is the, what we're making it mean. When I can see clients doing this, I can see them taking the one task we want to start and connecting it to all the other tasks and all the things about themselves. I often say, stay in the room with me, just stay here, stay in the room with me. And that's our little shorthand. Let's just stay on this one thing. We need to start this task. That needs to be the one thing. We don't need to think about all those other things. We don't need to think about what's going to happen if your supervisor doesn't like it. We don't need to think what happens if this grant is rejected. We need to stay in the room and focus on this one thing. This is an amazing strategy. If you hear other people spiralling, you can use it. You can use it on yourself. Just stay in the room. Take a breath. Stay here in the room with me. What do we need to do to start this? I find it super calming. I know my clients do too. It enables you to feel the emotions associated with this specific thing that you're trying to do without having to kind of connect it and fix absolutely everything else. We stay here, we start this one task, one thing at a time. My third one's a semi silly one, but I like it and I think it really, really helps. And that is, I think it's useful to have a theme song. You know how in like boxing or wrestling or whatever, I used to watch WWF. Did you guys used to watch that when I was like 16, 17 or whatever in, what would that have been, nineties. And it was Brett the Hitman Hart and Triple H and all that crowd. Please let me know, comment or something. Let me know whether this is just me being ridiculous. Anyway. WWF. They all had their theme music, right? When they came out, they had their theme music. And it like, got them in the mood and they came out all like, feisty. You know what I mean. They came out ready to fight. And I think we can do this. I think we can identify songs, and it can be your very, very personal choice. I am going to share mine with you in a second. It can be your very, very personal choice, but identifying a song which is, uh, right. Let's go. Fight time. We're doing this piece of work. Music. And for me, I think I've mentioned the, the, the playlist before. I'm not sure I've told you the specific song. So, for me, it comes from the Selling Sunset playlist. It's drivel. I'm aware. Very excited. I think there's a new season out on Netflix. Gonna be checking it out soon. They're all like, Power ladies strutting around in their heels and things. Those of you who know me realize that I am very much a trainers and leggings sort of a girl. So it is not my vibe on any level, but there's something about the music that makes me like, yeah, I can do this. And there is one particular song. And for those of you on, YouTube, you will see me in just a second, share it with you on the screen. It's called Strut by Dita I'm now holding my phone out. Apologies for the terrible audio quality. Okay. And it keeps going like that. And so this is me getting ready to start working. I'm getting ready. I've got my document open. Now we start writing. Okay, so it has like a minutes build up into it and now we're going. Now if any of you are going i can't write with music on nor can i but this gets me going and then what happens is i'm typing, that starts to annoy me and i turn it off and i carry on typing okay so this is not me suggesting that you should write with lyricked music on But, choose your song. Choose a song that kind of gets you in a like, yeah let's go, I can do this sort of a mood. Preferably one that builds to like a little bit of a crescendo like that one did, so you know your moment where you start. And let me know what it is. I have a secret goal that I'd love to make a Spotify playlist with all of your songs on. So, if you think of songs, let me know. Either Instagram, PhDLifeCoach, uh, Twitter, DrVikkiBurns. Or, you can send it, where it says ask Vikki a question in the podcast thing, you can send me your song there too. Or reply to my newsletter, because hopefully you are all, all on my newsletter, because every week you will get summaries of these podcasts and loads of other good stuff that you'll have heard about. Let me know, what song gets you ready to get your writing done? Seems like a small thing, but it can super help you go from, uh, I should start, to yes. Let's start. I really hope that's useful. I really hope YouTube's not going to tell me off for having illegal music. So if that bit didn't work, then, ah, sorry. It's called Strut by Dita. Find it on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Check it out. Laugh at my taste in music. It is all good. I really hope that's useful. Have a think. What are you getting started on today? Which of these techniques are you going to use so that you can move even in maybe a small chunk of time that you have available today? Thank you all so much for listening and I will see you next week.

I am just back from walking the dog. I am windswept. It is definitely autumn here in the UK. And that means it's the start of a new academic year. Last week I talked about all the ways that I can support you this academic year. So check that out if you haven't listened to it already. But now I want you to think about how you can support yourself this year. We are going to be thinking about how we can start this new year in the way we want to go on. And we're not going to talk about goals or target setting. Often we start new years thinking about all the things we're definitely going to achieve this time. But instead today I want us to think about some more positive and empowering ways to start a new year. These are based on a workshop that I did last week for my membership students, so the clients that either are at the University of Birmingham or who have signed up as individuals to my membership program, they get access to two workshops a month. And the last one was about how to start as you mean to go on. There was a ton of stuff that we covered in that workshop, but there were some bits that people found really useful that I wanna share with you guys today. Hello and welcome to episode two of season three of the PhD Life Coach, and we are gonna be thinking about positive ways to get this year started. The first thing I want you to think about as we start this new year is how can you harness your strengths this year? So often, and I definitely did this in the past, we spend more time thinking about how can we fix all the things we're doing wrong? How can we get up a little bit earlier, work a little bit harder, be more focused, be more disciplined, do things better than we're doing them at the moment. And very rarely do we stop and think, what am I actually really good at? What comes quite naturally to me? What have I been developing strengths in over time? And how can I use that stuff more? If anything, before I started learning all this coaching stuff and kind of really embedding it in my life, if anything, I was running away from my strengths. Some of my strengths, things like being enthusiastic, connecting with people and stuff, I thought of, in some ways, as being weaknesses that actually they took away from my focus because I was so enthusiastic about stuff, I tended to take on too much, over commit, then maybe not deliver on everything, or at very least exhaust myself trying. And so these things that were strengths, not only was I not really recognizing them as strengths, particularly, sometimes I was thinking of them as weaknesses that needed to be mitigated for. Other times I just didn't even recognize them as strengths. I'm quite creative. I'm quite good at writing in a way that's easy to understand and engaging that sort of stuff. And again, that stuff I didn't even recognize as a strength because I just couldn't see why other people couldn't do that. It felt so easy for me that it that I didn't particularly recognize it as something that I was good at. I want you to have a think about what strengths you have. Things that could help you in your PhD or academic journey that you're not currently using or not currently spending much time thinking about. Now don't worry if this feels a little bit uncomfortable. We're kind of taught not to talk about our strengths. You know, no one wants to be the kind of boasting, big headed person who goes around telling everyone how great they are. But that doesn't mean we can't recognize our strengths. Some of you might even feel like you don't really have any strengths. One of my clients said in the workshop that the problem is, especially when you're doing your PhD or you're working in academia, is the things that you used to think of as strengths, being clever, learning things quickly, everyone around you has them, so they don't really feel like strengths anymore. So if that's you, if you're thinking, you know what, I don't even know what my strengths are anymore, let's just spend a few moments thinking about that. What strengths did you used to think you had? What strengths would your friends and family say you have? Really try and dig into it and identify some things, either that you feel like you're getting lots better at, or that you've always felt that you're quite good at, or you've always found quite easy. Now, even if you do nothing else at all, recognizing these strengths is super useful. Because one of the things we know is that what we pay attention to is what we notice. So if you pay attention to your strengths, you remember you've got them, you remind yourself of them, you're much more likely to notice the times when you use it. Whereas when we're constantly trying to fix our faults, we notice the times that we do things wrong. So even if you don't actively try and use your strengths more, just by thinking about what they are, you're more likely to notice them and more likely to recognize the ways in which you're performing well. But we can go further than that. We can start thinking about how can these make us more effective in our lives at the moment. And effective you can interpret in any way you want. It could be effective in terms of getting more stuff done, being more focused, having a work life balance you enjoy, pursuing work that feels meaningful, however you define effective is completely up to you. But how does your strength and how could your strengths help you to do that? So for example, for me, I know natural enthusiasm is one of my real strengths. It comes across when I'm teaching, comes across when I'm coaching, and it keeps me motivated to do lots of different things. Now I've mentioned it can be a weakness if I let it go kind of unbridled and I just get distracted by lots of things. But when focused, what it can do is it can really remind me why what I'm doing is important and really encourage me to take my ideas through to fruitition. I was so enthusiastic about getting this membership site up and running for all of my members and all my potential new members like you guys, and for getting my online self paced courses all up and online, and my enthusiasm for that really drove me through what was a very busy time getting all the content ready for that. It could have felt like quite a trudge. It was a huge amount of work, but because I was enthusiastic about the topic, I was enthusiastic about how useful it was going to be. I was excited about the idea of you guys using it, then actually it's been really fun. Now I did have support for it and I'm going to talk about that in a future episode. I had somebody helping me with the technical side of pulling it all together. But from my side, I was providing all of the content, the shape of it, the structure, the exercises, everything. And harnessing my enthusiasm has really made this feel like a really positive experience and has got it done in a timeline that I, for a while, didn't think was possible. Another strength I try to bring is that I'm creative. I'm quite good at coming up with either analogies or new models that help people understand concepts. And again, I've tried to use that in the materials that I've been designing for you guys, so that the things I talk about are. are memorable, there's a structure for them so you can actually use them, and people seem to really resonate with that. So I've tried to bring my enthusiasm and my creativity to this work that I'm doing at the moment. Think ahead to your term. What are you doing between now and December? What are the kind of tasks that are on the agenda? And how could your strengths help you to achieve those? I would love to know what strengths you've got. So if you want to share them with me, you can find me on Instagram or Twitter. I'm the PhD Life Coach on Instagram and Dr. Vikki Burns on Twitter. Find me there. Tell me what your strengths are. We are such a hugely talented community and it's amazing to know what strengths we're bringing to the world. The second empowering suggestion I want to make for this year is that we spend some time predicting the future. Now, I went through a whole crystal ball exercise in my workshop. If you're interested to know more about that, it will be available as a self paced course in the next month or two, depending on how my enthusiasm drives me through. We shall see. Um, so it should be available soon, but essentially this is about looking ahead and thinking about what's likely to happen and what we want to happen. And I took my students through a process to identify all of those things so that we can then strategize to maximize the things that we want to happen and to mitigate for or prevent the that we don't want to happen. And we do it with good, like, self insight. Now, what do I mean by that? I mean, you are probably going to be very similar this academic year than you have been in other academic years. And I hope that doesn't feel like bad news. I used to start every academic year, and every calendar year, and some terms, and some Mondays, telling myself that I was going to be different. This time, I was going to be new organized Vikki. I was going to do things on time, in a slower methodical way. I was going to carefully work my way through things. Yeah, that never really happened. There were things where I improved in those directions, but that never happened because I was trying to be someone that I wasn't. When in reality, if we can look nonjudgmentally at what we're likely to do this term, and then from there, decide what we wanna do about that. So I know I'm likely to be enthusiastic, I'm likely to be creative. I'm probably likely to have too many ideas, more ideas than I can implement. I'm probably likely to get behind on some of my routine admin tasks because I do that, you know, it happens. I'm likely to procrastinate a bit. I'm likely to get some work done in a big burst of excitement and creativity. And when I can look at it like that, without judgement, just as a, you know what, I know me. I've lived in this body and brain for a really long time now, and I'm pretty good at knowing how I'm likely to show up. Then we can plan for that version of us. Not changing ourselves into somebody completely different. The world doesn't need you to do that. The world needs you to show up as the best version of you. So then I can start thinking, okay, how can I support myself to use my strengths? Like we just talked about, but also how can I support myself so that the other ways I'm likely to show up, I'm likely to procrastinate. I'm likely to overcommit. I'm likely to get behind on admin tasks, how I can mitigate for those things. I mentioned that I got some support pulling together the membership site. Part of that was me mitigating for those things. It's much harder to procrastinate when you've got somebody who's expecting content from you. It's much easier not to get behind on admin tasks, if you've got somebody doing some of those basic admin tasks for you. So that was me mitigating, for some of the things that I knew I was likely to show up as. And that wasn't straightforward for me. I had to pay for that. And I had to manage my mind about the fact that there was part of my brain that was going, we could just do this. We don't have to spend that money. We were perfectly capable. If we just put our mind to it, we could do this ourselves. And the reason I dissuaded that part of my brain was because I knew that with all my good intentions and all my enthusiasm, technically I could do all those things, but I would probably be battling some of these ways that I was likely to show up. I know for a lot of you, delegation is often not an option. There's not somebody that you can just pay to do things for you. So instead we get to think about other ways that you can mitigate ways that you're likely to show up. So for me, I'm likely to get behind on admin tasks. And one of the things I do to support that is I try and make it as simple as possible to do the admin tasks I need to do. So where I have a clear system. So when I take on new clients, I have an invoicing system, for example, although that's going to go in my new fancy membership site soon. But at the moment I have an old fashioned invoicing system. Because it's very clear, because it's very step by step, I don't actually, I'm perfectly on top of all that. I haven't set up my expenses system anywhere near as well, and I'm not so on top of that. So one of the things I know I need to do this year is set up my expenses system so that it's much easier for me, someone who doesn't particularly like having, is good at it when I do it, but doesn't particularly like it and puts it off and finds it boring and things, I need to make it easier for myself to do those things. Okay, so how can you think about the way that you're likely to show up this year, and think about how you can maximize the ways you're likely to show up that you want, and mitigate for ways that you're likely to show up that you don't want. The final thing I wanted to talk about today is modifying your environment. Now usually those of you who have been with me for a while will know that I often coach around the self coaching model. And one of the key tenets of the self coaching model is that our circumstances are separate from our thoughts. And that it's our thoughts that create our feelings, not our circumstances. So it's not the fact or truth of what's going on around us that influences our emotions, it's the thoughts we have interpreting those circumstances. That might suggest that I don't think modifying your environment can change the way you feel. And in many ways, I don't think it does. I see a lot of PhD students, academics, and I do it myself even now, but certainly in the past a lot, trying to get a sense of feeling calm and in control by tidying their office or coming up with a new filing system or a new task management system. And I know as a coach that the sense of calm or being in control doesn't come from a new tool, it doesn't come from a tidy office, it comes from the thoughts that you're having. However, as a human, I also know that sometimes it's a lot easier to have helpful thoughts if your circumstance, if your environment is conducive to it. So whilst I definitely don't suggest that you spend the start of this year starting completely new reference manager systems and learning, you know, new note taking systems and all of these things I do want you to think, are there simple and quick ways that you could change your environment that would make it easier for you to behave the way you want to behave? Whether it's having a nice thing of water so that you drink more fluid so it's right there and you can get it. I now have to remember to fill it. Those of you watching on YouTube will see, I just flashed my nice, beautiful blue decantery thing at you. That was part of my mission to drink more water. I'm actually not very good at filling it up, so I need to work on that, how I can modify my environment to make that more easy. But how could you change your environment to make it easier? Is there a way to make it easier to find the documents that you need to write, to always know where you're going to start writing? I'm a big fan of the thing where you write at the end of your piece of writing exactly what you need to write next, so that when you come to it, you know exactly what you're doing. What could you change in the place that you work to make it feel more comfortable? Do you get cold and go off because you're cold? Do you need to keep a blanket in there? Do you need to have better lighting so that you don't get a headache? Do you need to arrange to meet with friends so that you get work done, sort of in some company? What can you modify about your environment that will make it easier for you to use your strengths and harder for you to sort of succumb to the things that you find more challenging. I want you to notice my phrasing there. We're not trying to fix anything. We're not trying to stop ourselves doing anything. We're trying to make it easier for us to engage in the behaviours that we want to engage in, and less easy for us to engage in the behaviours that we don't want to engage in. Another example, on days that I want to walk on my treadmill more while I'm working, I work with my shoes on. Because if I've got my shoes on, it's a lot easier for me just to pick up my laptop, go over to my walking pad, and walk while I'm working, than if I have to go off and remember where I left my trainers and come back and then get on. It's a small thing, but it's an environmental modification that makes it a little bit easier to engage in that behavior that I want to. For some of you it might be choosing to work away from home, choosing to work in the library, choosing to work in a coffee shop, or it's about finding a place that's actually a dedicated little work spot for you at home, even if that's only a small zone in the corner of another room. What would make it easier for this year to feel like a good academic year? So we've thought about harnessing your strengths, we've talked about predicting the future and looking for ways to maximise or mitigate the things that we think we're likely to do this year. And finally think about ways that you can modify your environment to make it easier to support yourself, to engage in all these behaviors. This is all about being a good boss to yourself. You're thinking forward, you're thinking, how can I make it possible for the version of me that needs to do this work and the wants to have the life they want to have? How can I make it easier for them to do it? How can I make it feel more fun? How can I make it feel less effort and more engaging? We're planning strategically to make this all feel easier. Now, this episode is going out on the 16th of September, 2024. So if you are listening live, you still just, and I say , , have time to get into my membership before our quarterly planning session, which is on Thursday this week, Thursday the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, Thursday, the 19th of September. So if you join in the next three days, you will be in in time for our two hour workshop on quarterly planning, which is all about deciding what we specifically want out of this quarter. So we'll do a little bit of this, how to make it easier for ourselves, but it's really going to be about decision making and prioritizing around what do we want to exist in three months time that doesn't exist at the moment, and what are going to be the steps to get there. Importantly, we're not just going to set goals. We're going to think about what do we need to think and what do we need to feel in order to take the actions that we need to take to achieve those goals. And it's that holistic approach that is what is going to make this session different from any planning session that you've been to before. So if you want in on that, or if you're already a member, amazing make sure you're there. If you want in on that go to my website phdlifecoach. com Click on the membership at the top and join. As long as you are in by Wednesday you will get access to that on Thursday. There'll be an online self paced version for members only, if you can't make that session. Not going to sell that as a separate product, but it will be available there in the membership. And we're going to do it every quarter. So we're going to do it now planning for the next quarter. And then in three months time, we will do it again, looking back at the last quarter and forward to the next quarter. So if you need that sort of structural support from a live community, then do check out the membership. I really hope you found today useful. Let me know if you have any questions. I'm hoping to do episodes in the future where I respond to listeners questions and things like that. So you can either email back to me from the newsletter, or if you go to your podcast provider, there's a send Vikki a question button. Just click on that. Send me some questions. Let me know what you'd like me to speak about in the future. Hope you all have a lovely week. Thank you all for listening and see you next time. Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked 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 thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

I'm going to guess how I think you're feeling right now. I'm recording this at the beginning of September in 2024. And that means in the Northern Hemisphere, at least, it's back to school time. And when you work in a university or study in a university, even though it's not quite the same as the school year, we still have that sense of starting a new academic year, getting back into something after the summer break. I've always found that time to be a bit of a contradiction. On one hand, there's this sense of new beginnings, new starts, new possibilities that this year things will be a little bit more organised, so you'll stay more focused, you'll get stuff done, this belief that maybe things could get a little bit better, that we could be a little bit better. On the other hand, I often spent this time beating myself up about not having got as much done over the summer as I'd intended to and feeling a bit stressed out about what was coming, especially those of you who are teaching, but even if you're doing your PhD, that sort of thing of, right, I'm into another year now, I'm a second year now, I'm a third year now, I'm all but dissertation now, whatever stage you're at, there's often that sense that you're going into a new phase, and that can be both exciting and a bit scary. So how I decided to start this season of the podcast is to let you know all the ways I can help you. If you're worried that you procrastinate too much, or you're overwhelmed, or you don't feel like you're good enough, or you feel like you really need to pick it up this year, or something has to be different this year, or that everybody else is finding it easier than you, any of those things, I'm here for you. I've got a whole bunch of free stuff. So don't turn off. If you don't want to spend any money on this, I have got, let me look at my list. I have got five different ways, five, five different ways I can help you for free. And then I'm also going to tell you about a couple of opportunities, new opportunities, which I'm super excited about for us to work together a little more closely. I want you to finish this episode feeling like you're not on your own, feeling like there's somebody who gets it and can help you with this. And with an idea of which one might be a good fit for you. So let's start with the free stuff. And to be honest, if after that, if you want to turn off at the end of the free stuff, that's up to you. I think it's worth waiting, but the other things I've got some low cost options too, but. If you want to stop after the free stuff, totally get it. Never going to sell to you without your consent. So let's begin with the free stuff. The first is this podcast. Hopefully many of you are returning people who were here for season one, season two. If you weren't, you're so welcome. So glad you found me for the beginning of season three. Make sure you check back through. All the things that I've covered before, one of the things I will put in the newsletter. So there's a newsletter that I'll tell you about in a second that goes out on a Monday. One of the things I'll put in the newsletter is my little handout, which helps you work out where to start with the podcast. So if you're brand new and you're a bit like, Oh my goodness, there's 80 something episodes, where do I start? I have a handout for that, so you can have a little look. I suggest some episodes and tell you why I suggest those. If not, just dig in, scroll, see what you can find. There's an absolute wealth of advice, motivation, there's example coaching sessions where I'm coaching real people on the podcast. You can hear them talk about their challenges and think about how it can affect you. I've got interviews with amazing people who help you be a more effective writer or how to network or how to review and plan your year. All sorts of amazing guests, amazing episodes. Dig back in, see what you can find. So much goodness there. There's also, the second thing is the newsletter. As I mentioned, I send a newsletter every week. It's not just me wittering on and it's certainly not me just selling stuff to you. What I do is I give you a summary of this week's podcast and I do that for a reason. Often we listen to podcasts and then we don't enact anything in them. We sort of go, Oh, that's pretty clever, and then don't do anything with it. And I don't want that to be you. If you hear me say something that you're like, Oh, that could be useful. I want you to use that. I want you to try it out. I want you to tell me how it went. Tell me what worked for you and what didn't work for you. So in the newsletter, you get three kind of take home messages from the podcast. You get two reflective exercises and one action that you can take right now to make everything feel a little bit better, whether you're a PhD student or a senior professor, it all applies for you. I also, in that newsletter, let you know about the other free stuff that you have access to. I'll remind you of other ways that you can work with me. But the main thing is that summary of the podcast to really help you embed all of that. The third thing you can get for free is online group coaching for free once a month. And this is all in the newsletter. So if you want that, you need to be on the newsletter. You need to go to phdlifecoach. com and the very first big orange button that you see will show it will say, sign up for the newsletter and get access to free online monthly group coaching. You dial in, it's a webinar, you can only see my face, you're just lurking in the background, and people take in turns to get coached. You stick your little Zoom hand on, one of you will get promoted, you'll appear next to me as if by magic, and we'll have a conversation about something that's causing you problems at the moment. You'll get the benefit of some one to one coaching completely free from me and everybody else will get to see you being coached. Now we don't watch it like Netflix. We watch it with the intention of learning from it, from ourselves, because seeing somebody else have a challenge that feels a bit like one of our challenges is an amazing way to not feel alone and to come up with ideas that you want to try out in your own life. So make sure you come along. The timings change. They're all in the newsletter. You'll find all the dates so you can put them in your diary. I release the zoom details just before the session and we'll see you there completely free. And just to reassure you, it's not a sales pitch. I mention the ways we could work together in other ways, but you ain't gotta listen to like 10 minutes of coaching and 50 minutes of me telling you why you should give me money, that's not what it's there for. This is my contribution to the world for anybody who is never going to pay me for anything. It's also a wonderful opportunity for any of you who are considering paying me, but want to kind of check it all out a little bit first. So either way, come along, get your free coaching every month. The fourth thing, I have a new thing on my podcast where my podcast provider has this like, ask me questions option. So if you check the place that you got this podcast, you have a look, whether you're on Spotify or Apple or wherever, have a little check in the blurb, there should be a button that says something about ask questions. If you ask questions on there, I will answer them on a future podcast. It's something I haven't done in seasons one and two. It's something I want to start now because there's this new facility on the podcast. And you'll ask questions, I'll answer them. So you'll get bespoke advice on the podcast to answer your questions. You'll be able to hear from other people's as well. So press that button. No one's doing it at the moment. It's been there for a while. So if you do it, you will probably get your question answered. You can tell me when you ask whether you want me to say your name or anything like that. So you're welcome to do it as a named person. You're also welcome to do it anonymously. If you don't say, I'll assume you want to be anonymous. So drop in your questions, anything you're struggling with, anything you think I haven't answered in the podcast, or at least you haven't found it, just ask a question and I will answer it for you. The fifth way I can help you for free is kind of an extreme version of that, which is, I mentioned that I sometimes coach on the podcast for a podcast episode. So these were real students who wanted support, and they got a free coaching session in exchange for me being able to use it in my podcast. So if you think that that's something you'd be willing to do, that in exchange for getting that help about your specific problem, you'd be okay with me sharing that on the podcast, just let me know. I want to line up a bunch of people for this year. I'm looking to do at least six or seven of these over the next year. I want every level of academia. So brand new PhD students through to senior, senior professors, everything in between. Just let me know if you fancy it and let me know what's challenging for you at the moment and we will try to make it work. So that's five different ways that I can help you completely for free to get over all the things that feel difficult at the moment. Let's get this PhD, let's get academia feeling a little bit easier without beating ourselves up, in ways that feel sustainable and fun so that we can get stuff done. Now, my next way I can help you is sort of free, especially if you're a student or a member of staff, which is that universities can pay me to put workshops on. So I have a whole series of PhD workshops on things like how to be your own best supervisor, how to write when you're struggling to write, how to start as you mean to go on, what to do if you feel behind, uh, how to overcome imposter syndrome. I'm trying to think of them all. There's so many. What to do if you've got too much to do. That's a classic. Everyone loves that one. There's a whole series of them, and your university can book them. If you think your university should book them, send them my website, phdlifecoach. com, tell them how amazing the podcast is, tell them how much you think it would be an amazing thing for your university to offer, and tell them to get in contact with me. Often universities like student led stuff, and members of staff, often you have access to people who make these decisions. So between you, I reckon we can make this happen at a load of universities. And the good thing with that is it means I get paid by the university and you get it completely for free. So it is a win win situation. They're two hours, they're online and they're good. They're really good. Get some really great feedback on them. So check that out. Make sure you encourage your universities to sign up. I also run workshops for staff. So if you're an academic member of staff and you're feeling like, hang on, I need that stuff too. Any of them can be converted to staff courses. For example, I have a specific staff version of how to write when you're struggling to write, and particularly how to write when you're too busy to write that I ran for a couple of universities last year was super well received. Really, really good. And I also have a couple of courses about supervision. So I have a shorter course about how to have difficult conversations as a supervisor and I have a more extensive, how to be an effective supervisor course as well. So if those sound interesting, nudge your university, get them in touch. I can share with them all of the details. Now for the last few minutes of the podcast, I want to tell you about the two paid ways that you can work with me at the moment. So if you're convinced, you'll definitely never give me any money or certainly not at the moment, you can stop listening now. It's been lovely having you here. And I really, really hope that you engage with all the free stuff. I don't mind. So I love the fact that I can support people all over the world who will never ever pay me. However, if you think that maybe you'd like a little bit more hands on support and a little bit more in detailed stuff, and if you feel like something needs to change, that it can't really carry on the way it's been. And that actually putting a little bit of money into it might just help you get where you need to be, then listen up, I've got two options for you. The first is my lower cost, more self paced option. I have an online course called how to be your own best boss. And this is based on a three month program that I ran earlier in the year with a cohort of students, but now you can do it on your own. If you're in the wrong time zones to work with me, or maybe you work full time and you can only do things in evenings or weekends, and you want a bit of flexibility of doing it yourself, then this is a perfect option for you. It's got about 60 lessons, so we go through, in fact, Those of you who are on YouTube, I'm going to show you. So I'm just going to share my screen here for a second. If you're listening on the podcast, check out YouTube because it's got all the details here. So you can see my website. This is where you sign up for my newsletter. If you go to self paced courses right here, it's going to take you through to this. And you'll see there's two here at the moment, be your own best boss and too much to do, too little time. That is coming soon. Keep an eye out. I'll shout out for that, but be your own best boss here. I will take you through. It's not just about time management. It's not just around bossing yourself to achieve everything. It takes you through exactly what you need from yourself as a boss. How you can organize your time. How you can talk to yourself. How you can manage your tasks. But all in a way that takes into account all the stress and thoughts and feelings that we have about this stuff that are why these techniques have never worked in the past. We have reflective activities. It's all designed by me. So not only am I a coach, I was a senior professor in the UK, before I did this, I've supervised PhD students to completion. I've supported even more. I know what stuff helps. And this is not just for PhD students, whatever level you're at, you will get what you need out of this course. So we have, module one is how to be the boss you need. This is really about how we talk to ourselves. If you're super critical, self judging, then that one is going to be amazing for you. Module two is a bit more pragmatic. It's thinking about how you organize your time and your projects, but all the time thinking about how can we do that from compassion and curiosity, not just by learning a fancy new tool. Module three is for those of you who don't follow your plans. Okay. So if you think, yeah, I plan all that stuff, that sounds great, Vikki. I just don't do what I plan. And then I beat myself up for it, module three is the one we pinpoint here why are you not following your plans? And we have strategies to help you figure out in a bespoke way, how you can do what you intended, make plans that you can follow and then follow them effectively to the best of your abilities. Not perfectly, never perfectly, but to the best of your reasonable abilities and be satisfied with that. Module 4 is my planning and review process so we go through how you can review your months and plan the next one and how you can review your quarters and plan the next one. Okay, so we've got 4 big modules and there is a fifth module coming soon, and anyone who buys it now will get that one for free when it comes out. But at the moment, four big modules, about 60 lessons in all of it, and it's amazing. It's £47, it's a one off payment, and it's going to be really good for anybody who loves self paced stuff, likes being able to take themselves through it, like in their own time, who wants specific techniques, who wants reflective activities, and wants everything to feel a bit better than it does at the moment. Now, some of you might be thinking, that be your own best boss program sounds amazing, but I keep buying things and then not doing them. So I'm really worried that I'll buy it and then I won't work my way through it. First thing, it's designed to be done in chunks. It's got tons of interaction in it, tons of activities to do. So you should hopefully feel more engaged and able to drop in and out of it as much as you can anyway. But, if you're somebody who responds better to having times in your diary where you're actually doing things, people to speak to, community to go through things with, and actual live interaction, then my membership is the best option for you. I'm going to share my screen again for people who are on YouTube, there it is. Look, doing your PhD can feel so much better than this. That's like a little strap line on the video. The membership is a monthly membership where you get access to online group coaching sessions. If you're watching, there's my big face talking about how amazing it is. You get access to online group coaching, where you'll see people getting coached, like the free monthly one, but twice a week. You'll get access to workshops, those ones that I offer for universities. I do for you all the way through the membership. So you get all of those live throughout the year. We do two a month, they're two hours online, and you get self paced versions of them as well. You also get access to that whole, be your own best boss program too. So if you're thinking that sounded really good, but maybe a bit more support would be great, then you get it for free as part of this program. We also have a Slack community. So you will meet with the other people who are in the membership already. You'll be able to set up co working sessions with them. You'll be able to exchange ideas, support each other, share your wins, commiserate on the things that go wrong, and generally feel a little bit less alone than you are right now. If you're interested in that, again, go to myphdlifecoach. com website. You'll be able to click on the membership, find out all about it. I'm really up front with prices. Some people on these things just don't tell you the price until you dig around. I don't want to do that. The membership costs £97 per month if you pay it on a rolling basis. If you can pay up front for six months, then it is £475. That's in pounds. If you're from the US, £97 is about $130, something like that. £475 is about $630, that sort of ballpark. But I want you to think how much support this is. And I want you to think about the difference it could make to how long your PhD takes. It only needs to cut a month or two off the time it takes you to do your PhD for it to start paying for itself already. Sneaky one, too. If you've ever worked with me before, so you did my Be Your Own Best Boss program, or you've paid for one to one coaching in the past, get in contact. I have a sneaky alumni rate for the membership just for you guys. So get in contact if that's of interest to you. So there are a ton of ways you can work with me for free, for smaller amounts of money, for bigger amounts of money. The one way you currently, only some of you could work for me with me is on one to one coaching. So at the moment I am not taking any new PhD clients. I have a pretty full set of clients at the moment you. And I'm encouraging all new PhD people who are interested in getting my support to come into the membership. I truly believe it's the best way for you guys to work with me. You will get all the support you need through that membership program. If you're an academic member of staff, get in contact. I do have a short waiting list, but I would hope to have availability for academic staff in kind of late October, something like that. I'm so excited to be starting a new season. I've got so many amazing topics coming up. Thank you for indulging me telling you about all my services for an episode. I truly do it from the point of view, I want you to know that the support you need is out there at whatever level you need it to be. I am planning and recording a ton of new podcasts for you. We are going to run throughout this academic year. If you've got ideas for topics, if I haven't done them before, if you think there's things I could go into in more detail, let me know. I'm always open to new suggestions, people I should interview, or if you want to come on and be coached yourself. It is amazing to be back. I'm super excited about this year. I hope you are too. I am here for you however you are feeling. Thank you for listening and I will see you next week.