If you're a regular listener, you're going to have heard me talk about self coaching, about exploring the thoughts that we have and the impact that they have on our emotions and our actions and the things that we achieve.
It's something we've touched on in tons of different subjects, but I thought it would be really useful to have a single episode where I actually take you through the principles of self coaching, why we do it, how we do it, and how you can start incorporating it into your lives and the benefits that you might see when you do.
If this is your first episode, you've picked the perfect one to start. This is like the foundation course that underpins everything else we do. So listen to this one first and then go back and find the topics that resonate with you at the moment.
Hello and welcome to episode six of season two of the PhD Life Coach. A lot of people find coaching for the first time when they're experiencing some sort of big event in their life. For me, it was the pandemic. I had had quite a stressful few years running up until the pandemic at work, but everything else was largely okay.
Things were, their "normal for me" form of chaos, but generally ticking over okay. And I built my own coping strategies really for that stress, which mostly consisted of having lots of fun things to do. Lots of networks of friends, activities that I was involved with that took my mind off work and gave me that sense of community. However, at the time I was living on my own and not in a relationship and then the pandemic happened and all of a sudden, all of my coping strategies weren't there anymore.
I couldn't go paddle boarding. I couldn't go to my circus classes. I couldn't see my friends. I couldn't come home and visit family. And I think we sometimes forget how long it was until the government introduced bubbles. So for somebody living on my own, I went 13 weeks without touching another living soul.
I didn't have Marley at the time, no one else was in my house, we weren't allowed bubbles, and it was a whole thing. And at the same time, I was head of education for my department at the University of Birmingham, and it was my responsibility to oversee our transition from face to face, normal inverted commas, higher education teaching, through to a online version that we could run during this really uncertain period.
And that's across four different undergraduate programs, a foundation program, and all of our postgrad taught programs as well. It was quite a time and I rapidly realized that I was going to need more support than I was able to do for myself. That was where I found Kristen Carder's ADHD coaching program, Focused, which I hugely recommend for anybody who wants ADHD focused group coaching and it was there that I discovered self coaching.
This notion that we can use systematic tools and practices to support ourselves to do the things that we want to do. And this led to everything that's changed in my life, really. So I did this program. I moved on to a different coaching program when I thought I'd learned everything I could from that one. This was from the life coach school who actually developed the self coaching model in the format that I'm going to be teaching it.
From there, I certified as a coach. And it was after that, that I decided to actually leave academia and set up the business that I run today.
So self coaching for me has been enormously influential in terms of my own life and the way I manage myself, but also, ultimately in changing my career to doing what I'm doing today.
Similarly, a lot of my clients come to me and to self coaching when they reach a trigger point where they say, enough is enough, I need to do something about this. Either something specific has happened. They've taken a leave of absence and now they're coming back to study, or they've been told they're making insufficient progress. Or they simply look at their lives and say, I don't want it to be like this anymore. I loved doing my PhD. I loved my academic career. And I haven't felt like that for a long time. And I've suddenly realized that maybe it doesn't have to be like that.
And that is often when people start to engage either with actual coaching, where you work with somebody else like me, or with self coaching and self help materials so that you can try and change this stuff independently.
So what I'm going to be helping you with today is really understanding what we mean by self coaching, what it can be useful for, and importantly, how to do it, and how to get more support if you would like to.
Now I studied in the sport and exercise sciences department, I was surrounded by psychologists. And so this notion of self regulation, of being able to regulate your thoughts and emotions shouldn't really have been that new to me. And it wasn't. I certainly knew it was something that other people did.
There were tools that people were using with elite athletes, with vulnerable communities, that I always thought, well, yeah, that sounds brilliant. I can't do that. There's no gap for me between engaging my brain and opening my mouth. In fact, my mom would tell you often my mouth opens before I engage my brain.
Sometimes it reminds me a little bit of Marley. So Marley my Labrador is reactive. He's a poppet, but he's reactive to other dogs. And people always say, if you need to train him, you need to get him to a place where he can see another dog, but not react to it. And it's in that moment that you start to regulate his emotions.
You start giving him treats, encouraging him to be calm and all those things. My response is always, there is no moment. If he can see them, he will bark. Even if they're 200 meters away, if he can see them, he will bark. And it often felt a little way like that with my thoughts and emotions. So, my sort of go to emotions were overwhelm, definitely, and probably an unhealthy dose of frustration.
And I never really saw them coming, and I certainly didn't really believe that they were something that I could regulate in any particular meaningful way. In fact, the main thing that generally saved me from being in more of a pickle than I was, was my resolutely quite perky nature. So I would get overwhelmed. I would get frustrated, but like a beach ball, I would often pop back up to being relatively perky quite quickly.
So it felt like it was more luck than judgment really, that I wasn't struggling more than I was, but I would hear people talking about all this self regulation and basically just write it off as not something I could do. Nice for other people, not something I could do.
And that's where, when I got into coaching and got taught about the self coaching model, that it actually became much clearer because suddenly I could see the influence my thoughts were having on my emotions and I could see the way my emotions were leading to my actions.
And understanding both of those things helped me really understand myself at a much deeper level than I'd ever been able to before. I used to spend an awful lot of time in the action line, as we call it, and I'll explain what I mean by that as the show goes on. But I would spend a lot of time deciding what I needed to do differently in life.
I was the queen of new resolutions, of new habits, deciding everything is going to be different and then not living up to the plans because I hadn't really thought about what would I actually need to think and feel in order to actually do those actions. I just kind of came up with, well. I should exercise three times a week. I should plan my food. I should do this. I should do that. And starting to learn about the self coaching model, I had so many wow moments where I'd be like, Oh, that's why this hasn't worked.
That's why I do that. And it really helped me to see how all of these things interconnect. And that's why I want to share it with you today.
So, as I say, I was taught the self coaching model initially by Kristen Carder and then by the life coach school. I do adapt some bits of it and I know Kristen does too. There's a few absolutes that the Life Coach School say about this model that I don't subscribe to and I'll explain those to you as we go through, and I do recognize that versions of this have been developed by other people at lots of times over the past.
What the self coaching model suggests is that everything can be divided into five different things. They're circumstances. So these are the truthful facts of the situation, and they could be proven in a court of law. I am talking to Zoom right now to record this podcast.
That is a circumstance. Life Coach School claim that all circumstances are neutral until somebody thinks about them. I have some challenges around that in practicalities when we're actually talking about the very difficult circumstances that some of my clients find themselves in. And so I tend not to talk about them as neutral, but I do talk about them as factual, that everybody would agree I am talking to Zoom.
So these are the factual circumstances. Then we have underneath the circumstance line, we have the thoughts line. And this is the story that we tell in our head, the cognitive thoughts that we have about that circumstance. So if my circumstances, I'm talking on my podcast, my thought could be, this is going to be really useful for my clients.
And that is a thought that I have. So let's go with that one. So it's the story that I have about it. Now, if you were doing a podcast and it was something that you're not experienced in and perhaps you feel nervous talking to people, your thought might be, everyone's going to think this is rubbish, for example. That just shows how you can have the same circumstance of recording a podcast and have completely different reactions to it, completely different thoughts about it.
Okay, so facts in the circumstance line, thoughts, your story in the thoughts line. Underneath the thoughts line is the feelings line, and this is the emotion you experience in your body, and it is driven by the thoughts that you're having. Now, again, this is another point where I diverge from the original teaching of this model.
In the original teaching of this model, thoughts are the only source of your emotions, and if you can sort out your thoughts, it will sort out your feelings. I don't believe that. I know enough about psychophysiology to understand that sometimes some of our emotions are driven biologically, whether that's through biochemical mental health problems or whether it's through hormonal fluctuations and those sorts of things.
I also am informed enough about traumatic backgrounds and things like that to understand that sometimes our emotions precede cognitive thought. They happen faster than cognitive thought. And so I don't fully subscribe to the idea that feelings come solely from our thoughts. However, our feelings can be exacerbated, can be created more by our thoughts, and actually that is one part that we have control over. A lot of the other stuff is much harder, some of it maybe able to be dealt with through counseling and other techniques, but the way we think about things and the feelings that we generate through those conscious thoughts is something that we can explore and really look at the impact of.
So we've got circumstances, the facts of the situation. We've got thoughts, the cognitive story we tell in our head. And then we've got feelings, which is the emotion we experience. And in the model, we try and represent our feelings with a single word emotion. So if I'm thinking "my listeners are going to find this really useful", my feeling might be purposeful, or it might even be excited.
You know, I'm excited that you guys are going to listen to this. Somebody else who's telling themselves that everyone's going to hate it might feel shame, for example. They might feel dread at the idea of doing it. The emotion relates back to that thought.
After feelings comes actions. And this was something that I'd really not thought about very much before. And I think a lot of people who work in the kind of more cognitive end of the world, like academia, often don't. And that is, that our feelings drive our actions.
Any actions we take are driven by some sort of emotion that we're experiencing. Again, I do believe that some people do things entirely by habit. As an ADHDer, that feels like absolute magic. I have to put thought and feelings into every single action that I take, but I know that for a lot of people, you just, you can tick through routines, but the majority of the time, the actions that we're taking are driven by feelings, and sometimes those feelings might be motivated, they might be purposeful, things like that, but sometimes they're driven by emotions like sadness might lead to us avoiding other people, worry might lead to us procrastinating or going over things in our heads, shame might involve us avoiding any situation where somebody would find out about this, for example, so our actions are driven by the feelings that we're experiencing, which in turn are driven by the thoughts that we're having. And then the final line of this five line model, Circumstances, Thoughts, Feelings, Actions, is Results.
And that is our outcomes, what we achieve. And by achieve I mean that in the broadest possible sense. So that could be achievements in the sense of publishing a paper. It could be achievements in the sense of, the washing gets done , clean laundry is the result. So those results come from the actions that we take.
Now what I want you to notice in that model, we've sort of talked about how thoughts create feelings, how feelings create actions, how actions create results. The one we didn't say is that circumstances create thoughts, because that's the one where it's not true. Our circumstances do not create the thoughts we have about them.
Different people would have different thoughts in response to the same circumstances. And with training and support, we can learn to choose which thoughts we spend more time thinking about in different circumstances. Now, again, a point where I diverge. I think that circumstances can make it more or less difficult to think particular thoughts.
So, if you are on holiday on a tropical island, it is much easier to be thinking the thought, I'm having such a lovely time, than if you're in the midst of a highly stressful, highly busy job. So there are circumstances that make it much more likely that if left to their own devices, spontaneous thoughts will pop up.
So I don't believe these things are completely disconnected. However, they are not directly causal. Because you're in this circumstance, it doesn't mean you have to think that thought. Maybe it's more likely that you will, but it isn't inevitable. And we have so much control over which ones we choose to focus on.
What I'm going to do in the rest of this episode is share with you how you can go about understanding that a little bit more and how you can go about using this to help you understand your mind better. Because that's what this is all about. It isn't about just feeling good all the time. The purpose of self coaching is not to feel positive all the time.
There are many circumstances in which we don't want to feel positive. We look at the world as it is today, and we may not want to feel positive about that. We may want to feel angry about that, because angry leads to actions where we actually change things.
What we might not want to feel is defeated. for example. Because when we feel defeated, we don't take action. So this isn't about generating solely positive emotions. This is about understanding where the emotions and actions that you're having at the moment come from, what power you have over that, and in time, starting to think about how do I want to be in these circumstances, how do I want to think? How do I want to feel? What do I want to do? And what outcomes do I want to create?
So before I show you exactly how to make one, what are the key things that a self coaching model can help with? For me, it's separating circumstances from thoughts. Often people think that it is the fact that their article has been rejected that's made them feel sad.
It is not that specific circumstance that has made you feel sad, it's the thoughts that you're having about that circumstance. So, somebody might think, oh thank goodness I got rejected from them because I'd rather publish somewhere else and they'd feel happy receiving that rejection letter. Somebody else might think, oh well I always thought they'd say no and feel calm about receiving that rejection letter. Others might think, this means I'll never publish ever again, and they'll feel devastated about it. It is not the circumstance directly that creates the emotion that we feel, it's the thought that we filter it through that creates that emotion. So that's the first thing.
And what's empowering about that is that we have some control over our thoughts. It's not always easy. We have a lot of habitual thoughts, but we do have some power over that. Whereas when we think our emotions are caused solely by our circumstances, that makes us really helpless. There's nothing we can do about that.
Unless we're in a position where we can really change our circumstances, suddenly there's not a lot we can do about the fact that we're feeling terrible and not doing the things we want to do. If we can see that the thoughts we're having are optional, then so much more can change even when we're not in a position to change our circumstances.
The second thing is the model helps us separate our thoughts from our feelings. Now, often as academics, we can get really caught up in our heads. We can really get stuck in our thoughts and our thoughts as truth and not be able to separate them from emotions. So as an example, when I work with clients, I often find that if I say, what emotion are you experiencing right now?
They'll say, I feel like no one likes me or I feel like I'll never finish this PhD. And I have to remind them that that's a thought, that's not an emotion. And we have to get back to what's the actual emotion you're feeling. And it's really common to find that quite hard to identify. One thing that can help, and I'll link it in the show notes, is looking at an emotion wheel.
This is like a big circle, which has got lots of different types of emotions, there's like the big segments, and then narrows down to more specific emotions within those. And sometimes looking at that can really help you identify more specifically the emotion you're experiencing. And that's important because if we can't identify the emotion we're experiencing, it's really hard to understand what's going on in our body and what we actually need. Are we feeling shame or are we feeling sad? If we can pick that apart, we may be able to manage ourselves differently in order to move on.
Another thing self coaching model teaches us is how important feelings are for actions. How many times have you said to yourself, I just need to get on and write this. I just need to practice my presentation. And. We don't think about what are the emotions that are making it difficult.
When we know that we're feeling embarrassed, then no wonder it's hard to get on and practice our presentation. If we're feeling worried, no wonder it's difficult to write your article. If we can understand how our feelings drive our actions, then we're in a much better place to change our actions from a place of real understanding.
And then finally, as I've said, the self coaching model helps us see where we have power. It helps us see how we are not solely the victim of our circumstances, and that there are things that we can do to make things feel a lot less painful. Now, for some people, that may include changing your circumstance.
It may be that withdrawing from your program or changing your job is the right thing to do. But what the self coaching model helps us figure out is how can we do that from a place of empowerment and from positive emotions, not just to make ourselves feel better. Because the worry always is that if we change our circumstances in order to make ourselves feel better, then we get to the new circumstance and we still feel the same way, we don't know what to do anymore.
It's that whole thing of everywhere I go, there I am. We can change our circumstances, but the self coaching model helps us figure out how to change our circumstances in a way that's just fun and interesting and an exciting adventure rather than a last ditch attempt to stop us feeling sad.
So how can you actually do this? One of the things I would suggest is trying this when you're not in the midst of a big emotion. So not trying it when you're feeling hugely overwhelmed or hugely worried or any of those things. But when you're feeling like you're not quite right, when you're sort of not getting on with the things you want to be getting on with, feeling a bit meh, you're not quite sure why, that's a great time to try this out.
And what you start with is a thought download. Basically, all this involves, I'd encourage you to always do it on paper, grab paper and a pen, and you write for about five minutes about what is happening at the moment. What's happening in your life, in your mind, in your body, what you're doing and all of these things.
So you really dump it all out on a piece of paper. And that's because when things are in our heads, they get really tangled up and they're really hard to see in any sort of objective way. When I start a coaching session, I often start with a verbal thought download. I ask them, tell me what's going on at the moment and they tell me and I'm then sort of looking at those thoughts and helping them tease them apart.
Well, how you do it for yourself is to put them on paper and then tease them out from there. It's really important to keep writing for the full five minutes as well though, because sometimes the most insight comes when you think you've run out of things to say and you carry on exploring it a little bit further.
If you have time for nothing else, even just doing a thought download can help you feel like your brain's a little lighter, it's a little out there. In fact, there is some evidence in the literature that this kind of expressive writing can help you feel better in and of itself. However, the next step that you take in self coaching is you start to go through what you've written and do some specific steps. Now, when you become experienced at this, you're essentially, you build a self coaching model based out of your thought download, but I'm going to take you through some steps that you can start out with when you're doing this for the first few times.
The first one is we're going to try and separate circumstances from thoughts. So you look through what you wrote and say, what's the actual factual truth here? My supervisor sent me comments. The comments said X. And X has to be a direct quote of what they said. Okay? We separate out those bits that are actually factually true. I can go look, here's the email where my supervisor sent me comments.
Here's the comments that they made. That's the circumstances. Now we get to look and think, what thoughts are you having about this? The thoughts are, I must be terrible at writing. My supervisor thinks I'm an idiot. I'll never get this finished now. There's no point even trying. All of those sorts of things. Notice all of those thoughts.
And when we're doing this, I want you to notice from a point of compassion. I want you to notice, not with judgement, not with why on earth are you thinking that, but just, oh look, they sent me comments and I'm thinking these thoughts. You can even say to yourself, I get it. I understand why you're having those thoughts.
But they are thoughts. They're just thoughts. And we can see those thoughts without making them our truth.
Now you can start going through and just look to see what emotions you can see mentioned in your thought dialogue. Do you talk about any at all or do you just stay very much in your head? Start picking out the things that you're talking about happening in your body. Are you worried? Are you scared? Are you angry? Are you frustrated? Are you overwhelmed? Look for those sorts of words. So we're just getting a picture of what's going on here.
And once you've picked out those things, we can start to construct a model. And when we're constructing a model, we put those factual circumstances on the C line. So we write a C, we say, got comments from my supervisor. They said X, and then we write T for thoughts, and next to that we write one thought that feels like the most powerful thought at the moment. One that stood out to you as, oh goodness, yes, I'm really thinking that. And you write that down. Now a thought, we don't want it to be a question, we want it to be an actual thought.
So often people will say to me, my thought is, am I good enough? If that's the sort of thought you're seeing, I want you to write, I might not be good enough. Because really, that's the worry here.
The worry isn't, am I good enough? The worry is that part of your brain worries that you're not. So, the circumstance is you received comments from your supervisor, the thought is, I might not be good enough, for example. And now I want you to drop into your body, write an F underneath the T, and you say, right, when I think the thought, I might not be good enough, how do I feel?
And maybe you feel disappointed, for example, we write that on the feeling line. Again, there's no right answers here. You get to pick and you can look at your emotion wheel to pick one here, but you get to pick. And so we've got three lines of our model, got comments from supervisor. I think I might not be good enough, feeling, disappointment.
And then we get to ask ourselves, what actions do I take when I'm disappointed? Now, what's really important here is that , you're not going to put actions you take to make the disappointment go away. It's actions you take when you're in the midst of disappointment. So, remind yourself of all the things that you've done wrong in the past, might be one action you take when you're feeling disappointed. Avoiding work might be an action. Watching Netflix, eating chocolate, these kind of avoidant activities. Scrolling Instagram is one that I go to with a lot of these negative emotions. And in the action line, you can write down as many things as you want.
You can write down things that you do do. You can write down things that happen in your head. So you ruminate on it, you go over and over it in your brain, for example and you can also write down things you don't do. So for example, when I'm disappointed, I don't get purposefully on with my work, for example.
Okay, so you can chuck as much as you want in that action line. And then what I want you to do is think about your result line. So we look at the actions. If I keep taking these actions, what is the outcome going to be? What is the result going to be? And one way that often helps is in self coaching models, we often notice that result is related to the thought.
So in the thought, in this case, it was, I might not be good enough. My view is if we feel disappointed and we take lots of avoidant action because we feel disappointed, our result might be we don't support ourselves to be good at doing our PhD. Okay. Finding a result can be tricky. So don't worry if an obvious result doesn't jump out to you, especially an obvious result that doesn't connect back up to the thought.
It can take some skill and experience to learn how to do that. But that's okay because you're still getting as far as understanding what you're thinking, what you're feeling, and therefore what you're doing. Now the immediate thing here is people go, okay, how do I change my thought? If I can see my thought is causing these feelings and these feelings are making me do things that aren't helpful, how do I change my thought?
We're not going there yet. Don't focus on changing your thought immediately. We start from compassion. It's totally understandable that this is a habitual thought. You've probably thought this for a long time. You've probably had other people tell you it's true. You probably see this in the circumstances around you.
So we start by not judging our thoughts. It's okay that you're thinking these things. I guarantee whatever you've written in that model, I have probably coached people on in the past. It's okay. There's nothing wrong with you. But we also get to reflect that you are choosing that thought. Subconsciously or consciously, you're choosing that thought and we don't have to. So what we get to do now is we get to slowly tease it apart. We get to think, is there any way this isn't true? Is there any evidence that maybe I could be good enough. In what ways might I be good enough? What do we actually mean by good enough here? Is it good enough to finish my PhD or good enough to do this thing I'm doing right now?
So we sort of really gently pick holes in it. Because often the first thoughts that jump into our mind are like big dramatic thoughts and often when we then look into them, we're like, well, you know, I did do my masters and I did finish that and I have thought this way before and then been good enough and my supervisor did pick me and we start to pick these little thoughts apart and notice ways they're not quite true.
Okay, we're not looking to disprove it completely. This is a thought you've held for a long time, probably. It feels really true to you, but we can pick little holes in it. The other thing we can do is not ask ourselves to believe I am good enough, because that can feel a really long way from where we are now.
But what we can do instead is to ask ourselves, is there anything else that I already believe? For example, in this situation, I already believe that other people get negative comments on their manuscripts. I do believe that. I believe that's true. I believe that some people have published an article after getting negative comments on their manuscript.
I believe that my supervisor was probably trying to help. I do. Okay. I might also believe that this is all a sign that I'm not good enough, but I do believe those other things too. And that's the wonderful thing with the human brain is we can believe a whole bunch of things at once, which often contradict each other.
And yeah, in time, maybe we want to try and resolve some of those contradictions. But in the short term, why don't we just spend time thinking one thought we already believe, instead of a different thought we already believe? Because if we're thinking other people get negative comments and still get published, then our feeling might be hope.
For example, and when we feel hopeful, we might start going through the comments and seeing which ones we can change. We might start reading ways to deal with the problem that's been identified in the paper. We might start taking actions that help us to move towards a finished article. So we're never trying to think of some hippy dippy, positive thinking, everything's perfect manifestation thought.
We're just picking a different thought that you already think is true.
We're not getting rid of the other one, we're just spending more time on this one that leads to emotions that help us to do the things we want to do.
You might want to write down these other thoughts that you think are true and spend time on why you think they're true, why there's evidence that you think they're true, so that you can sort of build the strength of them. This sort of self coaching isn't something you do once and everything's okay.
It's something that becomes a practice. I'm someone who does it intermittently. I do it when I feel I need it and when it's useful. Other people build it into a routine that they actually do regularly in their lives. The key thing though, is try it once. Have a go, see what you find. Let me know how you get on.
You can message me through my website. You can contact me on Twitter or Instagram. I'm at the PhD life coach. You can find me there. And if you want more support on this, sign up for my free online group coaching. I have a free online community where you get emails from time to time, and you get access to a monthly free group coaching session.
It's available to everybody all over the world. You can watch other people getting coached. You can be coached yourself and I can support you through developing some of your own self coaching models so you can really enhance your own practice so that you have a tool that you can use to support yourself whenever you need it. Thank you so much 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.