Every single one of us will have written to a word count at some point in our academic careers. Often as undergraduates, the struggle is to write enough words to hit the word count, but as we get further through our academic careers, the challenge increasingly becomes to stay under the word count. So if you've ever struggled to shorten your work to meet the requirements of your submission to your degree program or to a journal, then this is the episode for you. Keep listening.
Hello and welcome to episode five of series two of the PhD life coach. your work might not feel like the sort of thing that I usually coach on. Usually we talk about mindset issues rather than the technical how to's of doing a PhD. The reason I'm talking about it though is because it's something that causes an enormous amount of stress amongst lots of the PhD students and academics that I work with, but also because...
I think it is a mindset issue. There are technicalities, there's ways of learning to write more concisely and to edit and shorten your own work. And there's a ton of books, there's a ton of websites, there's a ton of resources you can find to learn how to do that. Yet all these really clever people, you guys, still struggle to shorten your work.
And that's because I don't think it's as simple as just not knowing how to shorten it. So you have a whole series of limiting beliefs that make it really hard to even start doing it. So in this episode, what I'm going to do is try and identify some of the limiting beliefs that I see in my clients and help you figure out ways to shorten your work.
And because I know you all love a concrete tip, I am going to finish up with a few techniques that you can use once you've got over some of the beliefs that you might be held back by at the moment.
Now often, at this point in the podcast, I tell you about how this is something I'm also struggling with, that I'm still working on, you know, I'm right there in the trenches with you working on it. And for lots of the things we talk about, that's true. Shortening work? I love shortening work. Give me an essay, tell me to chop a thousand words out of it, and I will gladly do it. That is not an invitation, by the way. Please don't send me your work to shorten. It used to be one of my party tricks when I was working with undergraduate students and they'd tell me that there was no way they could shorten their assignment. And so I said, you know, you willing to bet? Let's put the first paragraph up on the screen and I'll go through it and show you how I would shorten it without losing any content. So this is not even taking out irrelevant content. This is shortening it without losing any of the message at all. And I would go, right, we could twist this around, turn that around, chop that out. So you've got repetition here. Do, do, do, do, do. And we'd always be able to chop a hundred words out of that first paragraph. And the students just used to stare at me like it was magic.
So today. I'm not coaching from the perspective of, I, you know, I'm struggling with this too. Let's learn together. I'm coaching this one from the perspective of, I am good at this. Let's go. You can be good at this too.
The reason I'm able to do it isn't because of some inbuilt ability that I have, it's because I have a bunch of beliefs that at the moment I suspect a lot of you don't have. So, let's identify what beliefs you do have at the moment. I'm going to tell you some that might work for you a little bit better and then we'll get on to the technicalities towards the end.
The first thought that I see lots of academics having is my work is complex, so it needs to be this long. This belief that if an idea is complex, it's going to take you lots of words to explain it, really holds us back from shortening it.
It makes it hard to even believe that it's worth trying to shorten it. In some ways, it makes us not want to shorten it because in shortening it, we're losing complexity or so we think. So why would we want to, we've worked so hard to have all this nuance and like detailed understanding of our subject.
If we we're gonna lose complexity and lose nuance by shortening it. We usually don't want to do that. And so this belief really holds us back. Even if it's true, and we'll come to that in a second, but even if it's true, spending time thinking that if I shorten this I will lose complexity and nuance is going to make it incredibly difficult to shorten it.
Yet, often, we still need to. When we're undergraduates, PhD students, we often don't have control over our word counts. And even as academics, when we're applying to journals, there are certain journals we usually want to publish in and they just have word limits. And the more that we are consciously trying to shorten our work to meet somebody else's target, while also telling ourselves that it's going to make our work worse, it just gets harder and harder.
Now, one of the things that I believe is that it doesn't take more words to explain more complex ideas. I believe that complex ideas can be explained in relatively efficient ways if you're really selective about which bits of it you need to explain, and if you are really efficient in the sentence structures you use to describe that complexity.
I remember all the way back to being a PhD student and my supervisor at the time always reminding me that the Watson and Crick paper where they describe the structure of DNA for the first time in Nature is a single side article. It is very short. And he always used to say, if they can explain that in one page of A4, you can explain this much shorter than you are at the moment.
And I know that if they were publishing that today, it wouldn't just be a one page paper. Partly it was just a product of its time. But you can extrapolate the point to something that's relevant to you. If you want to publish in that journal with that word count, everybody else who's published in that journal has managed to reduce their words to 5, 000 words or whatever it is. If they can, with their complex ideas, then there's no reason that you can't either. And the longer you keep believing that it will make your work worse to shorten it, the longer it's going to take to do this.
When you have quite a fixed belief like that, one way that you can work on it, rather than just swapping it for a different belief that you don't necessarily think is true, one way to work on it is to get curious about it. Because this idea that it needs to be as long as it is, In order to keep the complexity, is quite an all or nothing perspective.
It's quite, there is a fixed amount of complexity that I need to have in this paper. This is how many words it takes to convey. And if I shorten it, then I won't be able to convey the complexity. Instead, if we look at it with curiosity and say, I wonder how much of this complexity I could retain if I work to shorten this paper then suddenly it becomes a little puzzle. Ooh, I can keep that idea and actually just say it a bit more efficiently. Actually, that bit doesn't sort of, that bit's not crucial anyway. I can shorten that. It becomes a bit more of a game where you're trying to retain as much of the nuanced story as you can while just seeing whether it's possible.
So you don't have to believe that your paper will be better if it's shorter. I think it will be. Almost always, papers would be better if they were shorter. But you don't have to believe that. You don't have to ever believe that. But if you can just wonder. I wonder if it's possible to shorten this bit. I wonder if it's possible to say this a different way.
Then we sort of awaken our more open brain, our more creative brain, and start to explore ways that we make it possible. Because as I've said in previous episodes, our brain likes nothing more than being right. So if you believe there is no way you can shorten this without reducing the complexity, there won't be, because your brain will try to prove you right.
It will stop looking for solutions, because it thinks you're right, that there's no way you can do this. Open up the, I wonder if it's possible, just explore a bit, just play with it. As a technique, just play with it and see whether you can shorten it. I bet you can.
Another thought that I believe is connected to that is this is how academics write in my discipline. I have a running joke with one of my very best friends and colleagues from my old department who comes from a psychology background. I trained through sport and exercise sciences. And we always laugh about how much more long winded psychology papers are than sports science papers.
A lot of sports science journals and at the biological end of things, your word count is going to be 3, 000 words in a lot of papers. And some of that... It's quantitative. I accept all those of you who do qualitative research. Sometimes you do need longer to write about it because you've got crates and all that jazz. I understand.
But even in simple quantitative papers, the difference between a psychology article and a sports science article is hilarious. In length, and we used to laugh about this a lot and whilst understanding disciplinary differences is really important, they can become limiting as well when you allow yourself to believe that psychology papers are always long, or whatever discipline you work in where you believe that they are always long and they always have to be long.
You really limit your ability to look and see if you can do it another way, because you could write a paper that's the same length as other papers in your discipline, but actually contains even more complexity. Don't allow the disciplinary norms to become an excuse for sloppy, long-winded writing.
We can instead believe that it's possible for anyone of any discipline to write in a way that's more concise. We can believe that our discipline would benefit from more concise writing, and when we're on the reading end of it, suddenly we believe that's true so much more. So don't allow your disciplinary beliefs to get in the way here.
We talked a little bit about beliefs about the end product that hold you up. That it needs to be longer in order to be appropriate for your discipline, in order to be sufficiently complex. There's also beliefs about the process that hold you back. And one belief that I see a lot is that if you cut out words, that was time wasted. That if you end up not using a chunk that you wrote, then you wasted your time writing it in the first place. And again, this can really hold us back, because then every time you delete a bit, you're like mourning the loss of those words, mourning the time that it spent you to write them. Whereas when I delete words, It's a little win.
It's like, oh, I can take that bit out. Oh, there's another bit I can take out too. Cool.
Two things I do to address that. One's a belief, one's a technique. The belief, I believe that the best way to write is to write too much and then pull it down to what you need. And the analogy I always used to give my students is making a good pasta sauce. So if any of you can make a good pasta sauce from scratch, you'll know you start out, you do your onions and your flavors and all that stuff. You put your tomatoes in, whatever you're using, and you always end up making too much.
It's the same as with soup or any of these kind of liquidy meals. You make a volume that is more than you need, and then you slowly simmer it over time because then the water evaporates out, and you're left with all the really good juicy flavours. It tastes so much better if you take the time to simmer off all the water that doesn't taste of anything, and just end up with a much more concentrated soup. If you just made the amount of sauce you needed and ate that, It just wouldn't be so flavourful, it would be a lot more watery.
The same is true with writing. If you've got to write 3, 000 words, and you write 3, 000 words, it's probably going to be watery and not so flavourful. If you write 4, 500 words, and then cut out the 1, 500 words that actually aren't adding to the flavour and are just making it watery, then you end up with a really juicy and flavourful article. Losing words is part of the process, it is not time wasted.
Another underpinning belief that helps you to believe that, sort of reinforces that belief, is believing that writing is thinking. So for all of you who think that writing is a way of taking your thinking and putting it on the page for somebody else to look at, please, please, please reconsider.
Writing itself is a process of thinking. It's not just about communicating it to somebody else. First job is communicating it to yourself, and the first time you ever communicate it to yourself, it's gonna be messy. Bits aren't gonna make sense. It's gonna come out in the wrong order. That's okay. That's why we're writing it down, because it's really hard to get that clarity in your head and when you expect to get clarity in your head, and then you start writing and it comes out well, that's when we procrastinate starting writing, when we beat ourselves up because our writing isn't good enough, and where we then think, but this should be, this is the right length now, this should be what I'm able to submit.
If you can really try to internalize the belief that writing, is thinking, then suddenly that time isn't wasted. The time spent writing the kind of fluffy, long winded version is just one step of the thinking and writing process. And taking it back out again is another part of that process. Suddenly becomes so much less painful.
One little technique I would encourage if you're not fully convinced, but you want to try it, is I always have a second document called stuff I've chopped out. So I rarely delete things. I do if it's just little wordings, but mostly I have a separate document.
And if there's a paragraph I don't think I need, I chop it and pop it in there. And it's so much less painful than deleting it because I can tell my little worried brain that it's okay. If you decide you need it later, it's there. I have hardly ever gone back to that folder, but I do it for everything I write. I move it over there.
It's the same thing if you're involved in writing fiction. It's the same thing, you might write whole scenes that you never end up using in your final novel, but they help you get to know the characters more.
Another thing that's a process thing is that I don't have time to do this. And that might be true this time. It might be true that you haven't allowed time in your writing process for this chopping element of it, for this editing element. And there's two things we can do about that. So usually we start beating ourselves up, or we start saying, I simply can't do this because I don't have the time. Anytime you find yourself saying you don't have time to do something, the best thing to do is see what do I have time to do?
So maybe you don't have time this time to do a full edit to get yourself down. And maybe therefore you don't want to write too far past the word limit because you've only left yourself a little bit of time for editing. But say you have 20 minutes. How much could you chop in 20 minutes if you went about it in an open minded and systematic way?
I bet you could chop more than you think. Often when we tell ourselves we don't have time, what happens is we don't use the time we have available. We sort of write it off. I haven't got time to do it all, so I'll do nothing. It's true with a lot of different behaviours.
Any of you ever look to your kitchen and gone, Oh my God, it's a tip in here. I don't have time to clean it. I'll leave it compared to, Oh my God, it's a tip in here. I'm going to take three minutes just to get that stuff out of the sink. So at least the sink is empty and often that's all it takes three minutes for it just to look that little bit better.
And the same is true with writing. Few minutes, you can chop some bits out here and there, suddenly it's feeling a lot more streamlined. So don't underestimate the time you do have available to do this.
The long term plan here though, is to always plan to have time to chop it. And this goes back to accepting that that's part of the process. If you accept that a heavy chop is part of writing, then you structure that into your plan. So you have a full draft a week before the deadline, whatever it might be. You just accept that's part of what you need to do.
Some of you might've noticed if you're on my YouTube channel, cause these podcasts go out on YouTube as well, but I've cut my hair.
I didn't tell myself that, Oh my goodness. I'd grow my hair down to here. It's going to be wasted growth. If I chop it off, I know, well at least I like to think it looks better like this. It certainly looks healthier when I chop those broken ends off. I allow time every however long it is to go and chop my hair off because I know it will be in better shape if I make time for that to happen.
Same's true with your writing. Plan time to edit your writing to chop off those split ends and those broken bits so that you can have a shorter and in better condition piece of writing. And if you usually listen to this on the podcast and you want to see my hair, come over to the YouTube channel. We put all of these episodes up there every week.
There's some shorts up there too. There are also some interactive videos that can really help you start your day or get you moving when you're feeling a little bit stuck. So come over, subscribe, check those out, and make sure you leave some comments on the videos as well.
Another process thing that people believe is that it's going to be boring to shorten it. I've done the fun bit. I've done the getting my ideas down. The editing is just boring and tedious. And again, it doesn't have to be. You are the person that is having the thoughts that are making it boring. There is nothing boring about editing, per se. It's the thoughts that you have, that this is pointless, that this is going to be painful, that this, you know, I shouldn't have to do this, etc, etc. It's all those thoughts that make it feel boring.
I set myself a challenge, and I'll give you a specific example of that towards the end, but I set myself a challenge when I'm editing, so that I can see the progress I'm making towards a goal.
How can you make it feel more light hearted, more engaging, like a fun thing to do. Alternatively, if that belief that it's boring feels really entrenched, one line that I find really useful and I know my clients use a lot is, I'm willing to do boring things. Because sometimes, you know, academia can't be fun and games all the time. We can make it a lot more fun than it feels at the moment.
But sometimes we have to accept there are some bits of it that are just boring. And often what makes those boring bits painful is all the thought processes that tell us it shouldn't be boring. So in this case, so those of you who are familiar with the self coaching model, where we have circumstances, the true facts of the situation, the thoughts, the story we have about it, the feelings, our emotions, actions, which are the things we do, and then the results, which are the outcomes of those actions.
Often we think of boring as being a feeling, something that happens because of our thoughts, and that influences our actions. One thing you can choose to do though, is to put, it is boring, in the circumstance line. Let's accept that's a fact. I mean, I don't accept it. I think there's things you can do to change that.
But let's say in this case, you firmly believe, you are absolutely adamant this is boring. Well, let's stop fighting that and just put it in the circumstance line. You can now choose what you think about the fact that this is boring. Because if you think it's boring, and therefore I don't want to have to do it, I shouldn't have to do it, I'll do it later, and all of those thoughts, you're gonna feel unmotivated, you're gonna feel distracted, and all these other things.
Whereas if you can think, this thing's boring. But it's a core part of the process, so I'm going to crack on. I'm able to do boring things. I'm willing to tolerate being bored for a period of time in order for this to be done. Then suddenly, your feelings are purposeful. Your feelings are willing.
Things like that. And you're much more likely to get on with it. Because I tell you now, you might think editing is boring, but the one thing that is more boring than editing... It's spending all your time beating yourself up about the fact that you aren't hitting word counts and that you can't publish your work.
That's much more boring, I promise you now. So we get to decide what we think about the fact that a task's boring and choose how we're going to do it instead.
The final thought that I think holds everybody back that struggles with this is a belief about yourself. So we've had beliefs about the writing and the discipline itself. We've had beliefs about the process of editing. I think there's also a belief about ourselves that make this difference, which is I'm not good at being concise. I'm not good at editing my work.
And we can sometimes really have these fixed perspectives on ourselves, that there's something that we are not good at, as though it's something that, you know, I burst out of my mother's womb able to edit work. It's not true. Any of you who've listened to these podcasts know that I am not the most naturally concise person in the world.
I can talk around the houses to get to my point. I have learned to edit it, because I know that in written work at least, a focused and concise argument is much more effective. I have learnt this through experience, I have learnt this through conscious effort, through being shown specific techniques. This is not something that I am specifically good at.
And if you can believe about yourself that you have the potential to get better at editing, suddenly you're in a mindset where this is something you could learn. And so you start to look into ways that you could do it more effectively.
So really question whether you have a fixed mindset on this, whether you just believe you're not good at it, and look for little openings that you think where you could convince yourself that maybe this is something you could learn.
And I'd always recommend starting with something that you used to believe about yourself, but that you no longer believe. Because we all have things where we overcome our beliefs about ourselves. We used to believe that we weren't somebody who could get into graduate school and you all got into graduate school.
So think of something where you have shown in the past that it's possible to believe you're not good at it and then to get better at it anyway, and use that as evidence that maybe you could get better at editing too.
If you're sitting there thinking there's nothing, there's just nothing at all that I've ever believed about myself and changed, I'm not sure I believe you, but okay, let's go with it. In that case, believe whether editing could be one thing where you could start to challenge your fixed belief about yourself. Maybe this could be the one thing where you could make a little bit of progress. This is the thing that in a year's time you're going to use as an example of your ability to grow and develop and to get better at something that you used to think was a fixed attribute.
Okay, to finish off, I want to give you some really practical tips, things that I have found useful over the years. And most of these I have found searching on the internet, been recommended them by. Friends, friends who've read books and then told me what's in those books and all of those. So many apologies for any of these that I've like stolen that should be attributed to anybody.
I don't know any of the references behind any of these, but they're really useful techniques. So have a start with these and then think about what ones might work for you.
The first one is making a reverse plan. I love this, I used to make all of my students do this. So once you've written a first draft of something, what you do is you put that to one side where you can see it, and then you get a piece of paper or another document, and you look, paragraph one, what's the point of paragraph one?
You write down what that is. Paragraph two, what's the point of paragraph two? You write down what that is. And you go all the way through, so that you reverse engineer your draft, back into a plan. So many of you will have written a paragraph plan out before you wrote your first draft so that you kind of roughly know what's in what section.
This is the reverse of that. You take it back to that. There are many benefits to doing this. The first is, ask yourself, was that difficult? Because if a paragraph that you read you find hard to sum up in a single sentence of what the point of that paragraph is, then it's probably a bit of a waffly paragraph. Have you got two ideas in there? Is there no idea in there? Is it not clear what the point is? So even the process of doing this, if you find it difficult, tells you something about your writing.
The second benefit is you've now got a really streamlined version of your old article. And so now it's much easier to see, hang on, I talk about that stuff in this paragraph, but I also talk about it in this paragraph down here.
I don't need both of those paragraphs. Can they be merged? How can I manage that? So you can check for repetition and repetition is a brilliant thing to identify because that way you can shorten your work without losing any content at all. You might be thinking, there's no repetition in my article.
There always is. Always, always, always. I could go through published articles and show you where the repetition is. So always look and use this sort of technique to look for places where you've repeated your point, and not in a good reinforcing way, just in a, I didn't check enough and I repeated it way. And look at those places as to where you can shorten.
Often repetition happens when you haven't talked about things in the right order. So you kind of have to remind people of things in order to get back into it. And that's another benefit of this is you can see what order you've taken people through this piece of writing and you can decide actually. If I did this in this order, then I could explain it just once because we would cover all the bits in one time.
So you get to reorder your work doing this as well. So really useful technique. This can also help if you then take that plan. This feels long winded, but go with me. If you take that plan and write it again, so get rid of your first draft, take your plan and rewrite it, often you will find that the second time you rewrite it from your brain, not looking at that one, in a more concise way, because you won't remember every detail.
You won't remember the exact way you said it last time. Even doing that just for a paragraph is a really good exercise for those of you who have the limiting belief that there's no other way to write this.
I guarantee if you put it to one side, you sit in a room with an empty notebook and you try to rewrite that paragraph, you will write it in a different way. Often when we're staring at our own work, literally no other way to do this. But if you try and do it from memory, you can't remember that way. So you do it a different way and it can really open up, actually, there's a few different ways that I could write this, and some of them are shorter and clearer than others. So that can be a little game to play with yourself.
The second technique that you can use uses a model of the structure of an article that I often used to teach when I was in academia, which is that most articles are shaped like an hourglass, so they're kind of wide at the beginning. So you're talking about the broad context of your work and they sort of come in and get more narrow, like the top part of an hourglass, as you get down to the end of your introduction, which typically will end with a, therefore the present study did blah, blah, blah, blah. Then you have a narrow bit, which is where you're talking specifically about what you did and what you found. So your methods and results. And then the discussion usually gradually opens you back out again.
So the first paragraph of your discussion is usually the current study found, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you slowly contextualize it back into the literature and the meaning of this for the world and all those things. I accept there'll be interdisciplinary differences in this. It's not quite the same if you're writing a literature review or any of those things.
But if you're writing an empirical study, often it will be that hourglass shape. Now, what's that got to do with shortening anything? A place to always look for shortening is the very top and the very bottom. Often, we have waffle at the beginning that contextualizes something way more than it needs to be.
So in my old field in the sports sciences, the classic example of this was a whole paragraph explaining why lack of physical activity was bad for health. Whole paragraph, like the first seven lines, always redoing that. And it's like, you are writing for the Journal of Sports Sciences, anybody reading this knows.
Have that as a sentence at the beginning and then rapidly get into what is specific about your piece of work. Which specific bit of that are you getting into? So shorten that wide bit of the hourglass. That is a great place to look where you can be more efficient.
Similarly, towards the bottom of your conclusion. Don't just chop off your conclusion. But often that sort of last or last two paragraphs get a bit waffly again. How can you make those bits more specific? Because those are the bits that are more distal from what you did. How can you shorten those elements to make those more concise so that the words that you use, are much more specifically focused on the stuff you did, you found, and how it relates to the literature.
One technique that I was introduced to is the challenge that in any article, remove one paragraph from the article, on the basis that it's irrelevant. In each paragraph, remove one sentence, and in each sentence, remove one word.
This can create quite a fun little, Oh, how can I do this in this paragraph? Which sentence could I lose? Okay, in this sentence, which word could I lose? It kind of gamifies it a little bit, and is almost always possible in my experience. It sounds like it's quite a lot, but often when you do that reverse planning exercise that I mentioned, you find a whole paragraph that you don't need, because actually you've got two paragraphs that just broadly build on the same thing, and actually by making them more concise it can become a single paragraph.
That is often very doable. There's often repetitious sentences or ways that you could structure it, that would cut out a whole sentence and most sentences can have a word taken out of them, so that can be a really fun challenge to set yourself as you are going through your work. There's also about a million resources online.
So if you Google how to shorten your work and suddenly see this as, Oh, I wonder what techniques there are out there rather than, Oh, this is boring. I don't want to, then people have given really specific lists of check for all the times you say that, and can you remove them check for the times you say this, they give you specific inefficient forms of sentences that lots of people use that you can check your work for. So then it becomes this kind of little searching game. Oh, do I do that? Oh God, yes, I do. I do that here, here and here. Okay. We can take those out. And each time you go through it, you're checking for something specific and slightly different and then over time you end up chopping out quite a lot of words. So take a little minute to just Google some of those. And just believe that it's possible they might help you. That some of them might help you. That you might discover a way that you write that actually you could routinely tweak to make your work more concise.
One little warning there, though. Be cautious that you don't go so far with it that you make it hard to read. Sometimes, instead of really querying whether a concept is necessary, whether an explanation is necessary, people just shorten their sentences so much that they feel a bit note form.
Try not to do that. Be cautious that you're not just snipping words out, you're actually checking the readability of the work. And on a related point, be cautious of using abbreviations as a way of shortening your work. Now, there's a lot of abbreviations that are well established in a field. So in my field, if you say SBP or whatever, people know you're talking about blood pressure, it's fine. It's intuitive. Yes, you have to define it at the beginning, but anybody reading it doesn't have to translate it back into the words in order for your work to make sense.
They just know what that means on the whole. If you start inventing abbreviations for things that you just say too many times, then you're putting the cognitive load onto your reader and they will stop reading. So just be really cautious. Use the abbreviations that are well established in your field. Avoid inventing new ones just to make your work appear more concise at first.
My final tip is to practice. It sounds really obvious, but grab a published paper and work out how you could write it shorter. Actually retype some of the paragraphs and write them shorter. I guarantee you can. Most academics are not particularly skilled at editing their work.
The thing with practicing on somebody else's is there's so much less emotion involved. We're not connecting to this. We're not sort of remembering how much work we put into writing this and then feeling sad about the fact we're deleting it. It's someone else's work. We can easily chop it. And if you realize that you can chop published work, then you're never going to fall for the, Oh, well, I have to have this many words. No, you don't. Literally, I can see it right there. I can even make that shorter. So practice on other people's, take out some of that emotion, build the skills and then start to practice on your own work too.
I am practicing what I preach as well with this one. So, as I mentioned, when I do podcasts, I do this off the cuff just from some notes because I like it to feel conversational and relaxed and all those things. I don't know about you, but I hate podcasts where somebody is clearly reading out. Just, I can't listen to it drives me mad.
But I'm also aware that that means my transcripts are actually quite long winded. If you want my transcripts, they're on my website, www.thephdlifecoach. Com, you can check them out there, but they are very much, pretty much verbatim transcripts. A piece of work that I'm doing at the moment is to shorten those transcripts into snappy, short chapters that might form something that might be of interest to you guys in the future.
So, if you want to make sure that you're going to be one of the first people to find out about that, make sure you're on my mailing list. So, if you go to my website, www.thephdlifecoach. com, click on the Work With Me section, you'll see a link to join my free online community.
From there, you'll get emails from me from time to time, not super regularly, but with tips and suggestions, insider information, things that are coming along soon. And you also get access to my once a month free online group coaching. So I have people dial in from all over the world for this. It runs on a Wednesday about once a month.
You get all the details on the mailing list and I do one to one coaching in front of everybody else. So you can come along, see other people getting coached, get coached yourself. Last time I had people from the U S. from India, from korea, from the UK. It was amazing. I think somebody from Australia came to one of them stayed up super late.
So make sure you're on your mailing list, if you are either interested in the free group coaching, or if you're interested to find out what I'm going to be doing with my shortened little articles based on the podcast. Thank you so much for listening and have a wonderful week.