21. Why I want to coach your supervisor (and your vice chancellor)
6 March 2023
In this episode, I consider the downside of always assuming that our seniors "have it together" (whatever level of academia you're at). Often we create a story where, if they haven't replied to our email or changed their mind about our study, it means that we're not important or our study is wrong. I'll be discussing why it's almost certainly not about you and what we should do differently as a sector.
Transcript
Hi everyone and welcome to episode 21 of the PhD Life Coach. Last couple of weeks we've been thinking about managing supervisory relationships, and I'm kind of building on that this week too. And so this week we are going to think about why I want to coach your boss and what that means for you.
We make tons of assumptions about people that are in senior positions to you. If you are a PhD student, I want you to think about your supervisors, senior collaborators maybe, or postgrad lead, any of those sorts of people that have kind of direct responsibility for you. And if you are an academic listening to this, I want you to think about people above you, whether that's your head of department, head of school, your research group lead if you're a postdoc, maybe all the way up to your vice chancellor, the people that are in charge of your entire institutions.
I just want you to take a second and reflect what thoughts do I have about those people. Now you might have positive thoughts, you might have negative thoughts, you might have a combination of the two. I think this is a particularly timely moment to think about this stuff as in the UK at least. There are a lot of strikes and disputes to do with pay and pensions and decisions that senior leaders make on behalf of other academics.
Emotions are running really high and understandably so. They're really complex issues and we all want what's best for the sector and we want to feel recognized and we want to have secure jobs and to not have to give up the rest of our lives is it sometimes feels to succeed and to do the work that we want to do.
And when we are in these kind of intense environments, it's really easy to look at the people above us and tell a whole bunch of stories about that. Because often we separate ourselves from the humanity of those people. And this isn't going to be a, please think of the vice chancellor's sort of a podcast. That's not what I mean at all. But some of the assumptions that we make are that they are operating from their best selves. That if they make decisions about workload, about pay, about all of these important things, that they are doing that with care and thought and attention and sufficient time to think things through and no emotions and absolutely logical, best selves.
And that's simply not the case. All senior leaders are also under pressure. They're also fatigued. They're also working too many long hours. Now, it may feel very different from somebody who is struggling to bring home enough money to be able to support their family or support themselves.
Absolutely take that, but often, but often we assume they have bad intention. We assume they're coming at this from their best selves and they think they've made all the right decisions, and we assume that. They are disregarding our views or don't care about our views, don't value us, don’t think about us at all.
And what I've found fascinating through my journey through academia - so as many of you'll know, I started as an undergrad, finished as a professor in the same university - is people think this about the people at every single level.
So when I was a PhD student and people had supervisors that weren't great, the PhD students assumed, we assumed that our supervisor was deprioritizing us, that they didn't care, that they thought we weren't important or whatever it is.
And then when we got to be supervisors, we realize that sometimes we don't reply to our PhD students because we've just lost track of our emails and there's 4,000 things to do, and we're teaching this week and we're marking this weekend, we're doing everything else.
And so we kind of cut ourselves some slack, but then we think that our program leads or our senior colleagues, that they've got it together. And so when they make decisions about where money goes in the lab, for example, that's because they don't value my research and they don't think I'm a good teacher and they don't think I'm ready for promotion and all of these things.
And then we become those roles and we're program leads and we are research leads and things like that. And we realize “Oh my goodness. I just made a decision about that budget. I've never been taught anything about budgets. I just made a decision about that budget based on the things I could think of at the time and with the amount of time I had to consult. But I don't know if it was the right thing to do or not. And now everyone's yelling at me. Um, I did my best, but maybe it wasn't. I don't know.”
We're thinking those things and we're like, “no, but there's more to this story. I didn't have enough time to consult. People above me were putting me under pressure. I had to just pick, and I can't fund everything. You know what? What do I do?”
But we think the people above us - the head of schools should have given me more time. The head of school should have given me a bigger budget, and then I wouldn't have to prioritize like this. And then we become head of school, thank goodness, never did that. But we become head of school, lots of friends who did,
We realized actually we still got people above us, putting us under pressure, putting us under time pressure, and forcing us to make decisions but weren't necessarily decisions that we either had time to fully think through or even fully endorse, but we had to take them in our name because that collective responsibility is part of leadership.
And where I saw this more than any other time was when I was doing leadership training through the university. So I did a whole variety of different levels of leadership training, and that brought me into contact with a whole load of academics at lots of different levels of seniority as I progressed through with them.
So these were my peers at any one time and whenever I talked to them, they were genuinely all wonderful people. You know, you think that you're going to reach a stage where you meet the knobhead leaders, and I actually didn't. Very rarely! The vast majority of the time, these people had reached the next stadia leadership believing that they could do better than the last people because they had everyone's best interest at heart and they were going to work hard and consult and make sure everyone knew what was going on and they're going to make a difference.
And then they got there and realized that they are the same old human beings that they were 10 years ago and that actually there's so much to do and so much time that you don't get to bring your best self to every level. And at every level I saw people, and I felt myself being someone who wanted some grace from the people behind me.
I wanted people who I was giving these decisions too, to understand that, you know, I was doing my best here within the constraints, but the people above me I still thought should be doing their jobs better than they were. And then you get there and you're like, yeah, it's not that easy, is it? And the reason this is so important is because we forget that at every stage of seniority, we are there with the same human brain.
We're there with our thoughts, which are complicated and messy. We're there with our emotions, which sometimes help and sometimes don't. We have the time pressure. We have all of those things running through our heads and we have to learn that lesson “Wherever you go, there you are” and at every level we're still human beings, and I think we expect ourselves to be different that when we're in those leadership positions or people that reach those leadership positions should be more on top of it by then. They should have more clarity of thought.
They should have the time and space to consult. When we get there, we will.
It’s similar with my clients. I coach across all levels of seniority. So from PhD students through to full professors. And at every level, I have people who worry about their confidence.
I have people who worry, they're going to get found out, that they're not sure they're doing the right thing and, and it just makes me realize that you can get whatever badges you want. You can get promoted to any level. You can get awards and grants and papers and citations and all these metrics that we think will make us feel better when we get them and you don't necessarily feel better.
There is a very good chance that the people who are directly senior to you worry about their performance as much as you do. There is a very good chance that the people who are senior to you feel just as overwhelmed and incapable as you do sometimes.
There is a very good chance they procrastinate. There's a very good chance they regret snapping at you last week, but they only did it because they were exhausted, and their child's sick, and they haven't written a paper that they were meant to have written and they have no idea when they're going to do it. So they snapped at you and again this isn't making excuses.
This isn't saying that any of these things are okay, but it's saying that everybody at every level of academia needs coaching and needs to understand how their thoughts and feelings influence their actions.
Now, some of you'll say that when you become senior at university, you have access to coaching, and that is true to an extent. So many senior leaders will have access to some coaching, and sometimes that can be really useful. In my experience there are many wonderful coaches working at universities, but often the style of coaching is focused on what am I going to do next? what are the pros, cons? Why would I do this? Why would I do that? Okay, let's go. We'll do this. And then accountability coaching from there.
And what I experienced much less of was coaching that really focused on the thoughts you are having and the emotions you're experiencing and what impact that has on your behaviours. And that's where I love the training that I've been through with the Life Coach School, where we really treat ourselves as rounded human beings whose thoughts and emotions dictate the actions that we take.
So I want to coach your bosses, your supervisors, your heads of school, your vice chancellors. Because I know that when they're having thoughts like “there's too much to do, there's not enough funding for this. I don't know what I'm doing. I've never done a budget before. Everyone's going to hate me when I introduce this, but I think I've got to.”
When they're having those thoughts, they are feeling emotions like overwhelm and guilt and shame and hurriedness and hopelessness and all sorts of emotions that do not lead to them taking actions that are coming from their best selves.
And the problem with other people's actions is they create our circumstances. They become the things that happen to us. Now with coaching, with support, with mind management, we can choose what we think about those environments. We can choose what we think about other people's behaviour, and therefore how we feel. It's not that their behaviours inherently dictate our responses. We get to pick, but we all know it's a lot easier to pick nice thoughts and to pick positive thoughts, if you are in an environment that feels like you are being supported and understood.
And so when we are surrounded by people that are taking actions from shame and guilt and hurriedness and hopelessness, we've got a whole lot more mind management to happen because they're taking all these actions that are not necessarily helpful.
When we come at a challenging situation, feeling overwhelmed, stress upset, tired, then we tend to make decisions to try and make those things go away. Now, sometimes that can be really fast decisions, so if it feels really uncomfortable to stay with a difficult decision, then sometimes we just make a snap decision and make it go away, and a snap decision isn't necessarily always the right decision.
We sometimes make decisions for the wrong reasons. We tell ourselves we have to only focus on the facts and we have to take emotions out of it. That's some people's coping strategy, but that doesn't take into account the fact that you are managing human beings who have thoughts and emotions, whether you like it or not.
Other people try and guess and pre-empt what other people's thoughts and emotions are and try and do things to fit in with that and to try and make them feel good when actually we can't make other people feel good. Only their thoughts can make them feel good, and we don't have responsibility for everybody else's thoughts and feelings.
And if you've been in a leadership position, you know, if you try and make decisions so that you are popular with everybody, that's going to cause its own problems too. So these leaders with their human brains are not making their best decisions.
Another thing that people do in this situation is they generalize from their own experience. So when you don't have time to fully think everything through, you assume that people have a similar experience to you. Some of you may have experienced this where you've gone to somebody senior for advice or for mentorship, and they've said, “what you need to do is this, this, and this”, and you're like, “oh, hang on, that doesn't feel right to me. That doesn't feel like something that's possible at the moment.”
We see it a lot in academia at the moment where senior colleagues will say to PhD students, “oh, as long as you've got maybe one publication, when you go for a job, you'll get a permanent job on that. That's fine.” Not looking at the fact that they got their permanent jobs 30 years ago, and right now the people who are applying for permanent jobs have far more qualifications than that person did when they were applying for these junior roles.
So not taking the time to think about how things have changed, not taking the time to think how somebody's route might be different. So I spent the last seven-ish years of my academic career as a teaching focus member of staff with emphasis on teaching leadership. And I had many people saying to me, “what you need to do, you need to get head down. You need to produce research papers.” And I'm like, “no, but that's not the career trajectory I'm on. That's not what I want to do.”
But they couldn't generalize beyond their own experience because generalizing your own experience is the easiest thing to do. And they were busy and they had like 10 minutes to give me advice, and they were thinking of 14 different things. And so the first thing that jumps into their head is, “oh, I did it like this. It worked. Yeah. Kind of do it like that. That sounds good.”
And then we're like, “oh my God, they don't understand. Or maybe I'm wrong,” but actually they just didn't have that much time to think about what they were saying to you.
I think we also underestimate how fragile people in leadership can feel sometimes. One of the weird things with academia is most admin roles, you kind of promote through your peers to get into them, and suddenly you are head of school and you’re line manager for a whole bunch of people that last week, you were peers.
Two years ago, you were all at the same level. 10 years ago you were students together, whatever it might be, and suddenly now you're in this leadership position and you can't talk to them about it anymore.
That's a weird feeling. That's a fragile feeling. Leadership is challenging, and when we can't bring our best selves to that, we don't make the best decisions and we change other people's circumstances. We change other people's experiences.
And it cascades down. I want you to think about the last time you were tired and hopeless and overwhelmed and all of these things, and I want you to think of people that are junior to you. Whatever stage you're at in your academic career, there are people who are junior to you if you are a final year PhD student, you have people that are further down the PhD ladder than you, so the newbie first years perhaps. If you're a newbie first year, there are master students working in your department, there are undergraduate students. You might have children, you might have other people who are in your life who you have some sort of influence over.
When you were tired, when you were overwhelmed, did you snap at them? Did you turn up as your best self and like carefully talk through the different options of what they might do? Or did you just tell them what to do? And then regret afterwards that you sounded so grumpy. I bet you did, because it cascades down.
When we have people above us who are feeling all of these emotions taking actions they don't necessarily believe in themselves, and then we experience those actions, we then, if we don't learn how to manage our minds, we then have thoughts like, “oh, well they don't care about me. Maybe I'm not good enough to be here. Maybe this is just a toxic environment”. We get grumpy, we get upset, we get overwhelmed, and then we take actions that create somebody else's circumstance.
Sometimes in departments it goes around in circles. I'm sure there's a whole bunch of you who've walked into a room with colleagues not feeling too bad, and then this colleague moans about that and that colleague ignores you, and that colleague gets stroppy about something else, and you leave there going, “oh my God.” And then you are in a bad mood, so next time you walk into a room, you create that environment for somebody else.
And sometimes one or two people will step out of that and they'll get coaching and they'll learn to manage their minds and to explore their thoughts and the influences of those thoughts and learn how to choose different thoughts.
And that's what I help people with, and I help people at the very bottom of this pyramid a lot of the time, the grad students who are on the receiving end of lots of this. And we can make amazing progress to help grad students, help PhD students to interpret things a little bit differently and to look after themselves and look after their minds while they're managing this.
But I want to coach the people above you too, because it'll help them, it'll help their interpretations of the people above them, but it'll help the PhD students too. When we start to coach at every level, that's when we can start to change entire environments because it shouldn't be your responsibility to survive and be resilient in a toxic environment.
It should be the university's responsibility and everybody in it’s responsibility to target every single bit of it. So that your senior leaders are getting the support that they need so that they can make decisions from their best selves so they can show up the way they intended to, not the way that they ended up showing up just because they're tired and stressed and overwhelmed.
So why have I done a podcast on this? Well, several reasons. First one is that I think you should tell your supervisors and your heads of school and your vice chancellors all about this podcast and you should suggest they listen to this one, and I would love to help as many of them as I can.
I also made it though because having some insight into the humanity of your leaders can really help you with the thoughts that you choose to have about the situation. And this is not to excuse bad behaviour. I've touched on that in my last two episodes where we talked about managing, um, improving supervisory relationships, managing toxic supervisory relationships. This is not about saying it's okay to behave badly.
This is about accepting that the stories that we tell ourselves, that they intended this and this means something about us and it means something about them may not, often won't be, the full story. Having a little understanding of that can just take some of the heat out of what you are thinking about it.
That's not to say you shouldn't disagree. That's not to say you shouldn't campaign against things. That's not to say you shouldn't strike, all of these things. You can absolutely believe that they have made the wrong decision and in many cases they probably have. But you can simultaneously believe that they made the wrong decision because they're a human being who was in particular circumstances, who thought certain thoughts, had emotions, and took actions that were probably not their optimal actions.
They're probably not the best thing that they could have done. You can believe it was misguided. You can believe that it should be changed, without believing that they were inherently evil and intentional in those actions.
And in doing so, we can try and figure out how we make this entire environment a little bit less angry and a little bit less stressful, and a little bit less overwhelmed.
We can also be a little bit less self-righteous about it. I spent a lot of time, as some people listening to this may remember, as a junior member of staff talking about how I would do it when I was in charge, saying, “you know, oh, we'll do this. There'll be so much better. We'll make sure everybody feels included. We'll do this, we'll do that.”
Did I? To some extent, in some of the things I did. Did I all the time? No, absolutely not, because I was not my best self all the time. There were times when I was thinking thoughts that did not help, that led to me to make decisions that were not the best decisions and that other people didn't like.
I didn't always show up as my best self, despite all the optimism of mid-twenties Vikki, who thought that if only she was in charge the world be a better place.
We're all human beings. We all deserve a bit more compassion. Let's criticize the decisions that are made, but have understanding for where they might have come from, and let's try and ensure that as many people as possible have access to high quality coaching.
So that we can make our little corner of the world a little bit more compassionate, a little bit more curious, and a whole lot less overwhelming. I'm really interested to hear what people make of this episode, so make sure you're following me on Twitter @drvikkiburns. Let me know your thoughts and have a wonderful week.
A critical inner voice is one of the most common and difficult experience as a PhD student or academic. In this episode, you get to hear me coaching TWO of my current students in the PhD Life Coach membership, who are both part time PhD students while holding down demanding careers in our National Health Service. It runs like one of our group coaching sessions, where they each get coached AND hear each other get coached on self-talk, prioritisation, and compassion. If you have a critical inner voice, or if you’ve ever wondered about the benefits of group coaching, then you’re in the right place! If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on How Winnie the Pooh can help you manage your mind . Transcript Vikki: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast, and this week's episode is actually something that we've never done before. Those of you who've been listening for a while will know that occasionally I have either listeners or members come on to have one-to-one coaching with me on a variety of different topics. Vikki: But this week I've actually got two of my current PhD life coach members on the episode to both be coached today. And the reason we thought this would be a really fun thing for you to all listen to is because as you'll hear in a second, both Kate and Janice have a sort of similar situation. At the moment, they're both part-time students with full-time jobs which I know will resonate with lots of you, but we thought it also reflected a bit more what we actually do in the PhD life Coach membership. Vikki: We have online group coaching where you get to hear other people getting coached in a webinar format as well as getting coached yourself. So how today is gonna go is that I am gonna coach [00:01:00] Kate and I'll get 'em to introduce themselves in a sec. I'm gonna coach Kate while Janice listens, and then Janice will come back on and we'll have a bit of a chat about what she took from listening to the coaching. Vikki: And then Janice will come on for coaching while Kate listens. And then Kate will pop back to talk about what she took from Janice being coached. You guys get to listen to all of it, so you get to hear two different people getting coached on this. Even if you're not a part-time student with a full-time job, there will be lots about time management and prioritization and self-care and all that good stuff that we all need to think about. Vikki: And you'll be able to see how beneficial it can be to hear other people getting coached and apply it to your own life. So thank you both so much for agreeing to come on. I'm super excited to have you here. Let's go ahead and do some intros. So Kate, do you wanna tell us a bit about who you are and what you're researching? Kate: Hi. So my name's Kate. I work in the NHS as a nurse and I am working, managing, working clinically and doing a [00:02:00] PhD via prior published works at the moment. So I'm writing up other work that I've done. I'm year two of a four year kind of contract with my organization. So I'm halfway through and my research is based on the impact of fresh air exposure for patients and intensive care. Vikki: Perfect. So your PhD is kind of connected to your work? You've still got the clinical duties associated with your actual job. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. And Janice? Janice: Hi everyone. I'm Janice and I also work as a nurse in the NHSI am an infection prevention control nurse consultant. I do my PhD. I'm in my second year as well for a four year program. And, uh, yes, juggling, doing both. Vikki: Perfect. And your PhD's connected topic-wise as well, isn't it? Janice: It's, I'm going to be looking at antimicrobial resistant bacteria and how we can better fight against it. Vikki: Amazing. So as I said, Janice, we're gonna get you to [00:03:00] turn your camera off. Yeah. But you will be there in the background listening in. Usually in the group sessions, people are then contributing in the chat and things as well and we will have a chat, Kate, and then Janice will come back in a bit. So give us a little bit more kind of context for what's going on for you at the moment. What's feeling challenging? Kate: So this year I have, um, I've been off work for a bit 'cause I've been unwell. So at the moment I am trying to manage the transition back into both roles. So my PhD and my academic work, and then also my clinical work. And both of them have competing pressures and competing challenges. And I find it very hard to be able to manage and rationalize the time I'm spending on each area. Kate: So I find that my operational hat, my operational job can sometimes feel that I have to be, um, as present as I possibly can and I have to be managing all the operational pressures that we have and I have [00:04:00] to be supporting the team. And it feels like when I'm trying to manage the competing pressures of clinical stuff and non-clinical stuff, I will always find it very difficult to find that balance. Kate: And I feel guilty and harassed, um, when I'm trying to do one and I'm thinking about the other. So I find it very hard to switch between the two roles. And I think that also fits with the fact that I've also got family and I've also got, you know, friendships, relationships, stuff out of other work. Kate: 'cause I'm somebody who takes on lots of other things. I'm not good at saying no? So I think probably my question is about managing transitions between two roles and two, two challenges, but also how to, I've just come back into clinical work and I'm about five, six weeks in and I found that transition back in much harder than I expected to. Kate: And then I'm finding the transition back into my academic work as hard, but in a completely different way. So it feels like my, I've got my confidence back up [00:05:00] in one half of my life, but I'm now trying to pull the confidence up in the other half of my academic life. And that was reflected when I've been struggling to write something that I can absolutely know, I can write. My tone of writing in my piece is lacking in confidence, I would say. So I sent it to a friend to read it for me and she said, well, this is, this is great, but this isn't how you write this is, this is a different style of how you normally do it. Kate: Like she's like, you need to say be more confident, be more bold, be more, you know, own the page a bit more. So it's just how I can build my confidence up academically after some time away and how I can sort out that balance. Vikki: Perfect. So help me understand it a little bit more. In terms of your confidence. What sorts of things are you finding yourself saying to yourself when it comes to getting back into doing the PhD work? Kate: I think I am more, I feel more anxious to submit. 'cause I'm looking at [00:06:00] submitting this paper and I've been writing, so this is a paper that I was meant to finish in the summer and then I'm six months after I wanted it to be submitted. Kate: So I kind of, in my head I'm saying, well, you are late. You are late already. You've, you've already let yourself down 'cause you are already six months later than you wanted to be. Um, and that it is because I'm a bit later and I've had a break from it. It then takes you a while to get back into it. And so I'm finding that kind of getting back into it a bit harder than I thought I would do. Kate: So I'm having to reread lots of the papers that. I have read previously and I know, but I've forgotten bits of it I think. Because I've forgotten bits of it, all that anxiety about having to know the topic so well. So you've read everything, um, and you feel completely prepared to be able to write down your argument coherently 'cause you understand the evidence base as well as you can. Kate: So I think it's that confidence about the evidence base, probably that is, I've lost it a little bit and I think it's [00:07:00] um, because I'm, 'cause I'm late in getting to this stage 'cause I thought I would be , further on, I kind of feel a bit cross with myself and a bit kind of frustrated. And then because I'm crossing frustrated, I think I'm under more of a time pressure. Kate: So I found myself looking at the two weeks before Christmas and I'm not working Christmas this year and this is the first Christmas I've had off in my whole career since having maternity leave. So I've never had Christmases off, like full two. I've never had a full two weeks off at Christmas ever. Uh, so I'm kind of, I really want to take a break, but I also really know I have to get this stuff done and then I kind of feel like I'm, I've lost my confidence and I'm behind the curve. Vikki: Okay, perfect. So you mentioned there that you are having to revisit things because of the time away. Tell me more about why that's a problem. Kate: It feels irritating. Vikki: Mm. Kate: And it feels like I've, it feels like I'm behind. It feels, it's just a reminder every time that I have to look at something. Again, you should know [00:08:00] this, you are behind the curve. You should have done this earlier. This, this, you shouldn't be doing this now. And I know in my, I know why I didn't do it. Now I know I couldn't have done it previously, but I'm finding it very hard to switch off that kind of critical bit of my brain, which is you are not where you thought you were going to be and being still quite angry about not where I thought I was going to be, which I know is nonsensical but is hard to come around to. Vikki: Why is it understandable not nonsensical to feel like that? Kate: Well it's, it's understandable because being unwell was unexpected. It was, you know, it's normal for me to be angry. Like, you know, I like my brain tells me that all the things that I'm feeling and all where I am is exactly where I should be and I have no control over it. Kate: But I think because of the operational pressure that is in the NHS all of the time, it feels like there is a mandate all of [00:09:00] the time that you should be working at 120% all of the time. And if you are not working at 120%, that you are kind of somehow doing yourself or somebody else a disservice. So I'm just trying to negotiate to myself, not, and trying to notice why I'm, I think I feel ang, I think I feel quite angry that I'm not where I wanted to be. Kate: And I've kind of got there for my clinical bit. So like, I feel like I've, I've got, I've come to terms with it for my clinical bit 'cause I couldn't have physically done it, but I kind of keep thinking, well, I should have maybe when I was in bed, why didn't I, why didn't I keep reading these papers when I was in bed? Kate: And I, I realized that, I realized how naughty that sentence is and I realized that isn't, that's a stupid sentence. Like, I should have done more while I was sick in bed. I realize. Yeah. Vikki: Okay. So one of the things, so for everybody listening, I know Kate and Janice reasonably well, they've been members for a little bit and we've coached before. [00:10:00] And one of the things I want to kind of just reflect back is the, the words you're using to yourself. Okay. You are telling yourself your thinking's nonsensical. You are telling yourself it's a stupid thought. All of these sorts of things. Okay. So there's the level that you are criticizing yourself for not being where you thought you would be, but there's also a level to which you are criticizing yourself for not handling this better, for not being able to think the thoughts that you know are sensible and cognitive. Kate: Yeah. Vikki: Okay. Yeah, and I want us to be really careful of that bit of judgment too. It happens quite a lot with people who have been coaching for a little while and kind of think I should be able to regulate all my thoughts by now. Yeah, we can get a bit perfectionist with coaching too. I see this quite regularly and I've had it myself. Okay, so [00:11:00] tell me why it's completely understandable that you are feeling like these thoughts are stupid? Kate: I think it's because I feel that I have come such, I feel like I've made real strides this year. Like I'm quite proud of myself of the work that I've done and the publications that I've managed to get out and I've managed to kind of feels like I've, for the first time in this whole process, I've started enjoying it. Kate: Like I think for a lot of the first bit I was terrified and thought and had huge imposter complex. And then I kind of found this community and found a level of peace and a level of calm. And I found I'm really frustrated that I found that peace and level of calm. And then I became unwell. Kate: And now I'm just trying to kind of, and I feel like I should, I feel like I, all the stuff that we do, all the coaching, that I've listened to, all of, all of the models, all everything I feel like I should be. I like, I shouldn't have to, I shouldn't be feeling this way. [00:12:00] 'cause I know, I know it. We've talked about it, we've done all of this stuff. Kate: And so I think I'm a bit like, oh, I, I thought I would be better. I thought I would be better at dealing with this than I am, which is, you know, think I just thought I was more in the middle. And then this has kind of knocked all of my confidence about how I manage myself so it's, I think it's, I think it's been a confidence knock just in lots of different ways that I didn't expect, I think. Vikki: Yeah. No, definitely. And this is so common, right? Because people come with one problem. You didn't know you were gonna get ill, when you joined the membership. You were mostly focused. I think it's fair to say on the kind of time management element of it, that you've got this very, very busy, very important, very pressured job. Vikki: Um, and you wanted, and the PhD was very important to you, and you wanted to kind of be able to balance all of those things and work out how not to stretch yourself too thin. And [00:13:00] you then made huge strides in how you were managing your division of time and your time blocking, and the thoughts about your, what level of perfection you were expecting from yourself and all of these sorts of things. Vikki: You made huge strides. And what I think is really important to recognize is that when a different challenge comes along, we have to re address that stuff. We don't, you know, coaches have coaches. There's a reason that just cognitively knowing this stuff isn't sufficient to just be able to, oh, I can just apply it to every area of my life now, sort of thing. Vikki: So we got now this new situation. I know it's not new for you, but as in it, it wasn't what you anticipated joining the membership for and we get to think about, right, how do I want to now adapt and apply some of these things that I've learned? Yeah. Okay. And one things I'd really encourage you to do is be [00:14:00] kind of gentle with yourself on that. It's not easy to apply them to a new situation. You are in a kind of new, more challenging situation than you were before, which means we get to kind of re practice in this situation. Kate: Yeah. Vikki: How does that feel? Kind of just reminding yourself that it's completely normal not to be able to just self-regulate into the new challenge. Kate: I think I hadn't thought about it in that kind of a concrete way. I hadn't thought about it that the reason I'm frustrated is because I thought, well, I've learned all the, like, you know, I've got your tick sheet. I know what to do, you know, I like a plan, I like a process. Kate: I was like, well, I've gone through the process, but it still isn't where it was before. So I think it's really important to say, well, you actually have to relearn this. You actually have to do this again. And I think you think sometimes in skills acquisition, well, I've learned all the skills, therefore I should just be able to apply it. Kate: And actually it's not really reflective of real life. And I think that's the thing with [00:15:00] maybe lots of people who are doing PhDs and academics and who are balancing lots of things. We're used to having a recipe, doing it, being able to do it, and then just being okay. Yeah. And I think probably I underestimated this as a new chunk of the challenge. Vikki: And you know, from the membership. I love an analogy, right? And particularly an analogy that's sort of specific to the person I'm working with. What advice would you give a newly qualified nurse who's like, I've learned all my skills, I've done my clinical training, I've qualified, I'm a nurse now who then finds themself in ICU or whatever going, oh, this is a whole other ball game than when I was on placement. Kate: I think, um, I would say every day and every challenge is new and different, and you have to come at it with the toolbox of skills that you've got, but recognizing [00:16:00] that actually it's about skills acquisition over a whole career. And each time you do something for the first time, you're an amateur. So you have to work out how to do it. Kate: And it's okay for it not to be perfect 'cause nothing in life is perfect and nothing in life is a straight line and it's all, you know, tricky and challenging. And actually just being in the race is, is hard enough. So well done for just joining the race. Vikki: And how does it feel if you reflect that back at yourself? Kate: Uh, compassionate and kind and relaxing and takes a lot of the pressure of, I should be better than this. I should be further along than this. I should be able to cope with this. Or I should be, I've learned the rules, I should just be able to apply them. I think that's, I think that reflection that coaches have coaches I think is really important as well. 'Cause I think you kind of think, you know, you. You've learned all the skills, therefore you should just be able to apply them all the time. And that just isn't true, is it? It's just, it's [00:17:00] not even, it's not, it's just not true. No. You just can't. Sometimes Vikki: and people listening might be interested, and Janice might be interesting, listen to this, that we are not actually talking about your confidence in your academic skills at the moment, because I actually don't think that's the first layer of this. I think the first layer of this is the extent to which you're beating yourself up for not managing this better. That you're not being patient with yourself and you're not understanding that this is exactly where you are and not kind, you know, not doing all this emotional stuff. And I think if we can start there, I think the actual building of the academic confidence will come with time. Vikki: And I think, yeah, obviously it's something we can talk about in other coaching sessions in the membership, but, um. This self-judgment that you should be able to be managing all of this makes it so much harder to be kind of creative and patient and all those things to build the [00:18:00] academic skills. Kate: Yeah. Yeah. It's like there's a voice in the room all of the time. You know, the, the critical friend that all of us have, a critical friend in our head, my critical friend is on def com, you know, is, is really chatty at the moment in a really unhelpful way, which isn't, you know, and I think I can and because I'm trying to manage the helpful friend and being like, I know that you are completely unhelpful, be quiet. Kate: That actually makes it even more frustrating. So you're right. It's that bit. That's the hard bit to manage. 'cause I know I can do it 'cause I've proved I can do it. My, you know, I've proved that I can write, I've proved that I can publish. I know I can do it. At the moment, I just can't make my critical friend be quiet. Vikki: Yeah. Now there's two things that I wanna say about that. The first you mentioned that it was useful to know that coaches have coaches. I think the other thing to bring to that is remember, and I'm sorry to have to break this to everybody, there's nothing about coaching skills or [00:19:00] self-regulation skills or anything like that that means you don't feel the crap emotions. We are never, there is no one on this planet where I don't think it's even possible to have the sort of self-regulation skills that mean, and I don't think it's even desirable to have the sort of self-regulation skills where you don't experience any of the emotions. Vikki: And if that's the goal that we think we should have, that if I was good enough, if I paid attention in enough of Vikki's sessions, if I'd been the good enough PhD life coach member, then I would be able to not feel angry and not feel frustrated by this and not get, you know, sad about it and all of that. Vikki: That's not the end goal. The goal is to be able to feel these legitimate emotions, to know how to not make them worse by spinning stories in our heads about all the things they mean, and to have a safe place to return [00:20:00] to. Okay? There's nobody who is completely regulated at all times. It's like trying to build a fence that doesn't wobble in the wind. Vikki: It's not actually desirable. It's perfectly fine for you to wobble when you have difficult things happening in your life, the point is, you know, where that point of balance is, where you've got skills that can help take you when you are down and you know, things that you can say to yourself, ways you can treat yourself to bring you back to a safe place. Kate: Yeah. And it makes sense. Like the wobbling makes sense. Like I remember you said about tight ropers, tightrope walkers. Yeah. You know, tightrope walkers wobble. And if you expect to be a tight roper and not wobble, that's not realistic. Yeah. Life is about being a practice tightrope Walker is knowing how to get yourself back in balance. Kate: And the same thing is true on this. Yeah, I think, I think I thought naively and I, I know this is massively [00:21:00] naive that because I had been in coaching for a bit and because I'd done work and because I'd planned it and 'cause I'd read loads of books. I was like, I'm ahead of, I, I get this, I can fix this. And I think I've realized that actually it's a bit harder than I thought and I wasn't as, um, kind to myself that I couldn't fix it as quickly. I think the, the challenge is exactly as you say, I didn't realize, um, how, how angry I was and the narrative I was telling myself about not being able to fix it. So actually it was becoming a double, a double beating. Yeah. If that makes sense. Vikki: Absolutely. And I'd even be careful around the words, fix it. Kate: Yeah. Yeah. Vikki: Because I don't think there is a fix it here. Yeah. I think it's a supporting yourself through it. Kate: Yeah. Yeah. Vikki: Okay. The other thing I wanted to pick up from what you said was around this critical voice. Okay. And you are right. We all have a critical voice, but you very much [00:22:00] talked about it as something that's unhelpful and that you need to shut up. Yeah. Tell me more about how you feel about that. Kate: I think that I, so I, from your coaching and from trying to be more compassionate and trying to be a compassionate leader, I try and be really careful with and with my patients as well. I talk a lot about the internal voice and about how if your internal voice is saying things to you that you wouldn't say to your best friend, then that's not a helpful internal voice. Kate: So I think I'm annoyed with myself that I can't apply the same principles that you've taught me and that I teach my patients about the internal, compassionate, turning the internal critical voice into an internal compassionate voice all the time. Like, I can do it some of the time, but I find it very difficult when the internal voice gets loud or when stuff goes wrong, because stuff does go wrong sometimes, doesn't it? You know, you make a mistake or you know, if you have a bad day or you haven't slept properly, then I can't always [00:23:00] turn the critical internal voice into a compassionate internal voice, even though I know I tell my patients to do it and you've told me to do it, and I can normally do it. It makes me more frustrated that I can't turn the volume down. And in trying to turn the volume down, actually the volume goes up. 'cause then you beat yourself up about, that's another thing you can't, like you can't do. Vikki: Yeah. No, definitely, and this is why I wanted to pick up on this, because I think this is something that is super, super common, and it's even common in the kind of pop psychology, online advice space. This notion that we need to either shut up or turn down that voice. I really believe, and this, I think you are gonna be able to apply stuff from your life for this, because I know you manage people and I know you have teenagers. So both of those things are gonna bring skills into this. Okay. I think we should stop labeling our critical voices unhelpful. I think your critical voice is trying to help. They're doing it in a misguided, unhelpful way. Just like a parent who's just nagging at their [00:24:00] child, it isn't working, no one likes it, but they're trying to help. Yeah. Your internal, this voice is trying to help. They're just, they're super anxious for you. They're worried you're not gonna get your PhD done. All of this stuff, and the only tactic they have to go with is telling you you're rubbish and you have to sort yourself out. Okay. And I think the more we can see it as a kind of slightly misguided critical voice, rather than an actually intentionally unhelpful one. Vikki: You know, you hear people talking about banish the inner critic and all of this. I'm like, no. Give you in a critic a little hug. They're trying to help, they dunno what they're doing. It's not helpful. Okay. And I don't think we have to dial it down necessarily. I just think we have to know how to engage with it. . So when I, and my, I have, uh, you know, you talk to my family, I have a healthy internal critic. Right. Um, and I no longer try and dial it down, but I'll engage with it in a kinda [00:25:00] like, yeah. Yeah. I know you're worried that I'm not gonna get this stuff done. It's okay though 'cause I'm gonna do X and Y and then the rest of it we can worry about another day. Vikki: So don't worry. I got, it's all right. I know you're just stressed out. It's fine. We are all good. And where you get to actually engage with that voice, not in a kind of, oh, okay. Okay. I'll, I'll do what you say. I'll do what you say, but in a, it's okay, dude. Don't worry. You just, you are flapping. It's okay. It's 'cause you're stressed out that we had some, we had six weeks off for however long it was. You know, you're worried about all of that. It's all good though, because we're on a new timeline. We've got a new plan. We know what we're doing next. We are not, we don't, we're not behind anything. Vikki: It's okay. I've, I've got you. And it's more of that kind of pragmatic reassurance rather than the trying to shut it up. 'cause just like with children, the more you just try and shut 'em up, the louder they get the same as unhappy employees. Right. The people you [00:26:00] manage. If you are just going, yeah. Yeah. You just need to be less critical. All right. Just shut up. I assume that's how you don't manage your teams at work, you know, be like, yeah, I get it. Yeah. It's pretty tough at the moment, isn't it? Yeah. And it, oh, and by the way, for my internationals National Health Service, when we're talking n hs, um, you know, it's like, yeah, it's pretty tough here at the moment. Vikki: I get it. That feels awful. Yeah. Well we're gonna do this bit and we're gonna do that bit and we're gonna not worry about the rest of it. 'cause that's outside our pay grade. We can talk like that to our critical voices as well. Kate: Well, that's fascinating. I have never even ever thought about treating my critical voice like that. And that makes so much sense. 'cause you're right, the management style you would use with your colleagues is not a, you know, having a go at them 'cause they're raising concerns or they're getting histrionic. You wouldn't be like, no, no, absolutely. And that clearly won't work. Clearly won't work. So it's that whole application, isn't it? So I think that's, that's really helpful. Thinking about my critical voice as a [00:27:00] you know, like an employee in my life or like a, you know, like a, like a, I've gotta listen and I've gotta be calm because if I'm calm they'll calm down. Because if the more histrionic they get, the more histrionic I get trying to make them quiet. And actually then it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of then everyone's cross and stressed and it doesn't help. That's really interesting. Hadn thought of that. No, that's good. Vikki: The other thing it's useful for is occasionally your critical friend's useful. They're just not saying it in a great way. Occasionally, so often my critical friend says, you don't have time for this, Vikki. There's just no way. There's too many things. And if I go shut up, you're just being negative. Leave me alone. Not helpful. But if I go, okay you've been reminding me lots of times, there's too many things. Is there, is it possible there's an element of truth in this anywhere? Vikki: Is there any bit of that I need to listen to? If so, what can I actually do? Is there something I could [00:28:00] delay? Is there something I could decide not to do? Da da da is like, we've all had them, right? People we work with who just moan about everything and you get in the habit of just not listening to them. And then every now and again they raise a thing and you're like, okay, yeah, that that one's a fair point. We should probably listen to that one 'cause they are quite sensible. Um, we can do that. The more we can actually kind of almost listen to understand our critical voice where it's like, I'm not gonna listen to all your drama, but what are you actually worried about? Okay, yeah, you're worried about that, right? Cool. Is there any truth in that? Is there anything I actually need to act on here? But in that kind of calm, as you say, pragmatic way and suddenly it becomes a very different conversation. Kate: Is, there's something about, I'm just trying to operationalize it in my head of how I can listen to the critical voice, but also notice when they're being a bit histrionic and so, you know, calm down when you need to calm down. But actually how to take the nuggets. Is that something that, so I reflect, 'cause every day I've got a reflection like [00:29:00] workbook or I work what I'm gonna do in the day, what my objectives are. And I write a reflection of how I'm feeling in the morning. And then I reflect at the end of the day, which is how it's gone and what's happened. Kate: And that kind of, so is that where you would put the kind of critical friend? And I find that's a good way of calming the critical friend, 'cause it's acknowledging where they are. But it's also then about rationalizing it within, actually you've done some really good stuff today and then it layers into that. So is that where you would put that or would you, how would you, how would you, how's the best way to manage your critical friend? Vikki: I think there's different ways that you can, um experiment with. I don't think there's a one size fits all with it. Yeah. I'm a talk out louder to my per self person. Um, I find I do that more consistently than actually writing about my thoughts. I have, I have probably a very unhelpful thought that I think too fast to write. Now that's just like people who say they're too busy to meditate, probably need to meditate. Someone who thinks too fast to write probably needs to write. [00:30:00] But I tend to talk out loud to myself. Interestingly, I don't think you were in our coaching session earlier. Vikki: Interesting. Um, Lee, one of our members, read out a conversation she had with herself. So she'd actually decided, right, I'm just gonna write down the things I'm telling myself. 'cause she sort of had a side of her that was being compassionate, her version of compassionate, we talked about whether it was actually compassionate or not, and a version of her that was being very critical and she actually wrote it down and read it out almost like a play. Vikki: So there was that sort of approach where you could actually say, right. Come on then. Critical friend, tell me what is it you're thinking? Gimme it, all of it. And then you go, okay, as boss Kate, you know, we spent a lot of time thinking about the notion of you being a boss for yourself as boss Kate. How am I gonna respond to this person? Vikki: You know, I wanna be the best version of boss Kate. I want to be calm, I wanna be sensible, I wanna be empathetic to their challenges. How would I respond to this concern? Yeah. So I'm listening, I'm taking from it [00:31:00] the things that, um, you know, where actually they might have a little modicum of truth in there. Vikki: But I'm also filtering out the drama, helping them feel, listened to, deciding what we need to fit, move forward with. So I think there'd be a variety of different ways you could do that. And certainly if you've already got a bit of a journaling practice, then I'm a big fan of like building on things you are already doing. Kate: Okay. No, that's cool I like the, um, 'cause I'm quite a practical person. I like the whole kind of, right. This is, this is, and I can try and see if I can that No, I think that would work. I like the idea. I like, I, I wish I'd come to coaching earlier then that about the play. That would've been fascinating to see and like hear. Yeah. That's why group coaching is really good. 'cause you learn so many tricks from each other. Vikki: Yeah, definitely. Literally everyone with the chat was like, oh my God, this sounds like my brain. So I think even just that validation of knowing that other people have these ridiculous, ridiculous, in inverted commas, ridiculous [00:32:00] conversations with themselves. Vikki: Even just people seeing that like, oh, it's not just me. And I think especially at this time, you know, we're recording this just before Christmas, although it will come out after the new year, at this time of year that you need to rest. No, you need to get it done. No, you need to rest. Argument is happening in everybody's heads. And that was the sort of short version of what we talked about. And being able to actually visualize that and go, okay, hang on. I'm coming in, pragmatic, sensible, calm boss who's got high expectations, but cares is gonna come up with a plan here. Kate: Okay. Uh, that's, I really, really like, I really like that. That's gonna be something that is, you know, really helpful. Vikki: Amazing. Thank you. Janice, that feels like a good opportunity to bring you back in. Janice: Hello. Excellent. Vikki: How were you feeling? What were you sort of thinking as you were listening to Kate talk? Janice: There was so much there and very much, I could understand how you were feeling. Janice: [00:33:00] Um, it was interesting how you started off with frustration and anger and, you know. Being critical of yourself, moving to more of a relaxed state when actually you understand. And it is interesting how you use the analogy about obviously us being nurses, I think we are probably the worst at taking our own advice and looking after ourselves. Janice: We are the last to do that. Um, so it was just interesting to hear you say that, you know what we would advise, but you weren't taking that on board. It was just so nice to see you relax in the end and actually realize that. And it's, the other good thing was about. Um, who was it? The people who walked the tight right ropes in the circus and actually if they were rigid, they'd fall off, wouldn't they? You've got to be a bit bendy. So it is, we've got to be a bit flexible in life and so therefore we've just got to be able to flex with it and understand it. Janice: But it is completely natural that you feel that way, especially after having that period of time away. I think [00:34:00] with us as nurses and been in the job for so long, we can just go straight back into clinical practice and, and build our, we don't have time to think, do we? Whereas this is all new to us academic world, even though we're in our second year, it is still different. It's different. Yeah. So you're doing amazing. Vikki: Thanks. And how about for yourself, Janice? What did you take from it that you can kind of apply into your own situation? Janice: Interesting. It's so weird when you see another nurse speaking, I'm thinking, oh God, we're so hard on ourselves, aren't we? We are so hard on ourselves. And definitely that critical voice, um, self-sabotage for me anyway, self-sabotage. And I thought that negativity, we need to be more positive. We do work in very stressful jobs within the National Health Service NHS. And it is so true as well about how operationally we function in the NHS, you've just, it is 120, [00:35:00] 150% all the time anyhow. Janice: You drop down to a hundred percent and you're not performing very well. And we know that that's not the case, but it is like we are just constantly on the go, aren't we? So I think we just need to be a bit kinder to ourselves. And so it made me reflect about how I feel about everything that's happening at the moment with myself as well, and thinking actually I need to be kinder to myself. We've done well to get to where we are and we can't forget that. Vikki: Yeah, for sure. Perfect. Let's move on to Janice then. So I'm gonna ask Kate to turn her video off. Thank you. And maybe we can start from there. Why do you feel like you need to be kinder to yourself? What's going on at the moment? Janice: I think, um, very much what Kate was saying, you know, clinically we are very strong in senior roles. We do manage staff and we manage to help with the organization and everything. But this whole studying thing, it feels like, I suppose, [00:36:00] how can I put it? I just keep harping on about when I was younger, I used to be able to study and I used to be able to do an assignment in 24 hours. You know, you stay up all night, do your assignment, hand it in and be fine, and you just kept going. Janice: It's different now. I'm older and for me, I have very much felt the early menopause and my dyslexia. I have really felt it this time. Um, even though you manage at work and it is your day to day buzz and bread and butter, you just keep going and you know your strength, you know your weaknesses, you've got a team around you. Janice: It's different when you are doing your PhD. It is, you are on your own, not on your own, but you are on your own , and you've got to come up with the work. Not to being too critical in yourself, but you are. And I think last year I spent the whole year on self-sabotage and am I really [00:37:00] meant to be here? Janice: Um, I do feel that I'm in a position now. I can say yes, I'm, I'm meant to be here, but it's just really difficult trying to manage the time, but understanding my dyslexia even more. I used to feel it's my superpower. I very much feel now it's a hindrance. And is it because I'm just not fast enough anymore? I can't read as much as I used to be able to read. I think it's just a di completely different way of learning. Janice: And it's completely different time management skills that I used to have and that I currently have in my day-to-day job. So, um, it's been interesting. So I've spent the last year and a half I feel trying to find my way. My new way in studying, and at times, yes, I've got angry with myself and annoyed, but I think I've just allowed myself to be critical, but therefore understand that I'm in the best place I can be and it's just gonna take time , but it's [00:38:00] still, that voice is still there, isn't it? Thinking you're not good enough. Vikki: No, definitely. And I think what's really interesting is how, if I was thinking of this as like an experiment that I was doing, there's a bunch of confounders here, okay? Mm-hmm. So we are talking about how it might be harder because you're older. Yes. That it feels harder because you're menopausal. Janice: Yeah. Vikki: And we have lots of members who are doing their PhDs later in life. Both people who are menopausal, people who aren't. But you also picked up, and I think it's really important to recognize that this is a very different ball game than academic stuff you've done before. And I think it sometimes gets underestimated because I think sometimes we sort of confound young and highly structured academic courses with older and very unstructured academic courses. Janice: Yeah. Vikki: And we make it something about us. Now I am the first to say I'm not [00:39:00] gonna like gaslight year about menopausal symptoms. All right. Yeah. There's definitely bits that this becomes more challenging, don't get me wrong, but reflect a little bit more for me about the ways that the actual PhD process feels different than your previous academic stuff in ways that are maybe not just to do with you. Janice: Yeah, it's the structure, it's the format of it. It's online. That's what I was trying to compare the other day. When I went and did my nursing degree, it was face to face on site, doing it full time, not having to juggle working and that you had classes, you had assessments, but it was all very practical. Janice: Whereas this is all online. It is not as often because you were in like four days a week. This is much different. Um, and you, you are given, you know, your reference this in your modules that you have to work through, but you're not [00:40:00] given any particular time scales. Uh, so it's so easy to, to drift and then go, oh, I've got to give my assignment in. Janice: Whereas when you're in university and you're there every day, everybody else, I suppose it's that peer structure around you that encourages you to carry on. Whereas it's different because obviously I've got my colleagues that I work with my team who may ask me now and again, how's it going? Um, but you know, my cohort's really small only eight of us, not necessarily that we all keep in contact during the month. And that's why I've surrounded myself within your membership as well as others, just to give myself that peer to peer support and coworking time and just motivation. Definitely. That's what's different this time round. Yeah. Vikki: And I think that's so important to recognize. Janice: It is. Vikki: 'Cause otherwise it becomes this, I used to be able to handle it and now I can't. Janice: Yeah. Vikki: Um, [00:41:00] and yes, we need to be sympathetic to life stages and all that stuff and to health challenges and whatnot. But if we can recognize that actually this, it is a completely different ballgame. You know, even if you have an active cohort, they're not going through in the same people watching on video can see me doing ladder hand gestures where, you know, when you were an undergrad, when you were, you know, doing masters or whatever. Janice: Yes. Vikki: Your cohort were doing modules at the same time as you. Janice: Correct. Kate: You had assessments to do at the same time, so you were kind of going through it step by step together. Janice: Yes. Vikki: Certainly people that have trained in the UK anyway, you've sort of gone through these things together and it may well be that some of the things like the dyslexia and stuff were better structured where it was more practical. There was less choice about what you do when Janice: Right. There was. Vikki: It's like this module, go do it. Yeah. It wasn't, you weren't making decisions about when to work and what you were [00:42:00] focusing on and all those sorts of things. Janice: No, definitely agree. And um, I think maybe that helped me mask my dyslexia as well and masks those key, um, symptoms of being dyslexic in terms of time management, reading and things like that. It was just a lot easier, whereas now it's very evident. Now I've got to manage myself. Yes. Vikki: Yeah, a hundred percent. Because I do think, and I am, I'm not a clinician in this area at all, and I don't have specific training in this area at all. So this is opinions. Nothing else. Janice: Yes. Yeah. Vikki: But I do think that there's a cluster of people that are high achieving people who have things like dyslexia, A DHD, for whom actually they can function within a structure. They don't necessarily do it healthfully, they don't necessarily do it calmly and like in a steady pace. Yeah. But the external [00:43:00] structure of modules and deadlines and things like that along with a healthy dose of kind of good girl syndrome and trying, you know, I'm top of the class kind of vibes mean that one way or another they muddle through and actually get stuff done and it might not feel great on the way and we might pull some late nights and we might beat ourselves up about being disorganized and whatnot, but it kind of comes together. Janice: It does Vikki: in that more structured environment. And then suddenly you're in this environment and none of those things are there. Janice: Right. All those skills that I've learned before, they're not the same anymore. Vikki: Some of which, which were useful skills and some of which were probably highly unhealthy, right? Janice: Correct. Exactly. Vikki: But they got you to an end goal one way or another, and suddenly they don't necessarily apply anymore. Janice: Correct. And anyone who knows me knows I'm a very much a high performer. I've always got to be busy. I've always got to be performing. I've always got to be doing, they [00:44:00] used to say to me, another course, Janice. Another course, another course. It's just the way I was then. But I, I'm slowly falling back into it, but it's taken me longer just to get into it. But yeah, it's, it is definitely a different structure. And you're right, maybe I need to be kinder to myself because it's different. Vikki: Yeah. And I want, I think what would be really useful to pick up, just 'cause you've said it a few times and I feel like people have misunderstandings of it. What do you mean when you say kinder to yourself? What does that actually, to use Kate's words, what does that operationalize as? Janice: Good question. It's the same what Kate was experiencing, I suppose. I, I have that critical voice and I'm like, well, you're not good enough. You dunno what you're doing. How could you not know what you're doing? You've got onto the PhD, you are here now. You're gonna have to perform. They're gonna find out that you actually, you don't know what you're talking about. Which is, I know, it's silly that even say it, Vikki: not silly, everyone says it. Janice: Um, my daughter's [00:45:00] always saying to me, mom, you've got your place. You're there. You know, of course you should be doing it. But it is a difficult thing to understand and like you're saying that suggestion to write it down and see that conversation that you have for yourself. I'm very aware of my critical friends, but Yes. Vikki: But what would kind look like? Janice: What would kind look like and like, it's interesting you said that earlier, that it is not nor not normal, no one on this planet could ever not have any negative thoughts or any critical friend. So we are gonna have them, aren't we? I suppose using it to make sure that it drives me forward. It doesn't hinder me and I use it as a positive and I use it in a good way rather than I can't do it and stop. That would be a good way of doing it. A positive way. Vikki: Yeah. Love. So just 'cause you picked it up this point about no [00:46:00] one can not have these doubts. I want you to imagine, and I'm gonna say, I'm gonna put myself out on a limb here and I think this will make Kate laugh in the background. Uh, you guys have worked in the NHS I'm gonna guess, you know, some of these people, they probably are a different profession than the one you are in. Imagine a person who never entertains the thought that they have faults. They're probably in your organization. I'm gonna guess there might be a few. Janice: Oh yes, I think so. Yeah. Vikki: This is not where we aspire to be, right? Yeah. We, we don't, there is something deeply unhelpful about never, ever questioning yourself, never, ever critiquing yourself. But we wanna make it so that it's like helpful critique and not just mindless criticism. The reason I ask you about kindness is 'cause I think it's a concept that times people up in knots a bit. Because often, and certainly the conversation we had in coaching today was this battle between the critical voice that was [00:47:00] saying you are behind. Vikki: You need to crack on and get this done by Christmas. You need to cancel stuff so that you can work more. And then the kind in inverted commas voice that was saying, oh no, you've done your best. It's important to rest. And that sort of thing. And I like that voice to an extent. But I think it can become sort of almost two extremes, that on one hand we are yelling at ourselves and on the other hand we're sort of, um, almost being a little bit indulgent, a little bit like, oh, you little poppet. Have a sit down. Yeah. In fact, I dunno if you ever listened to it, but for people listening, and I'll tag it in the show notes, I did a podcast episode ages ago. It was one of like the first 20 or 30 I did, about talking to yourself as each of the different Winnie the Pooh characters. Janice: Oh, brilliant. Vikki: How you can use it to like model different sorts of self-talk. Janice: Brilliant. Vikki: I love it. It's one of my favorite episodes. Janice: Yeah.[00:48:00] Vikki: But I want us to just spend the last part of this session thinking about what would be a kind of kind but firm kind, but ambitious voice. So I want you to imagine, you know, if you had a mentor. You don't want them, I presume, just to be like, oh Janice, don't worry. You'll be fine. Do it tomorrow. You're a bit tired. But equally, you don't want them to be like, Janice, you're so lazy. Why haven't you done this yet? Dah, dah, dah. Yeah. You want 'em to kind of have high expectations, but to then support you and make you believe that those are possible. So what could, when you are thinking about, 'cause we discussed previously about prioritization and that sort of thing. When you are thinking about your time management challenges and your prioritization, what would that sort of kindly, high expectations, supportive, ambitious sort of voice sound like. Janice: What is my goal? Reminding myself what my goal is and where I want [00:49:00] to go. Vikki: Yep. Janice: Have little miles milestones. Vikki: Mm-hmm. Janice: I've only just introduced this because actually I never used to have that, but now I'm having to prepare things for over a longer period of time. I need little milestones. So I have a list and I take it off, or I have a star chart and I star it. You've got through that week. Um, yeah. My main thing is my goal step by step. So by Christmas I wanna be at this place, I would've handed this piece of work in. And then, so I like to have my bigger picture now to say where I eventually will go, but then my smaller goals. And that's something I've just started to do. Vikki: And obviously that's something we structure out in the membership, right? In terms of our quarterly planning and the midquarter reviews and all those sorts of things. Janice: Yeah. That's helped. Vikki: But what would your, so you've given yourself clarity, you've reminded yourself why you're doing it, all that good stuff. Absolutely love all of that. If you were then off track of [00:50:00] one of those. So you haven't, you know, I get this draft finished by Friday. It's Thursday night, it's not ready. What would that kind but ambitious firm voice say then. Janice: Just do it. Okay. Just get over, Vikki: you know better than this, janice, we ban the word just in the membership. 'cause just implies it's easy. So how can we, what would they say that doesn't involve the word? Just Janice: get on with it. In reality, I, what would probably happen? Why have you left it this late? And why, why are you doing this to yourself? But what I should be saying to myself is actually don't, you know, stop listening to this. Just, not just, but get on and do it. And then we were, look, we will review our again after you've handed it in tomorrow, lunchtime. Vikki: Yeah. [00:51:00] And it's amazing how hard it is not to say just do it. So for those of you who don't know, the reason we ban that in the membership because just implies that it should be easy, that you shouldn't need to support yourself, you shouldn't need to start. Why on earth don't you just get on with it? Um, but it's so habitual and often people don't. Vikki: I'm gonna suggest some sort of phrases for you in a sec. 'cause often people don't have a voice here. They have kind and indulgent sort of like, oh dear, it's okay. Don't worry. You've tried kind of vibe. Or they have critical or they get to slightly exasperated like you sounded there. Just get on with it. Vikki: Come on. Just do it. Yeah. And sometimes that's helpful, but I prefer a kind of calm, encouraging. So rather than a just do it being more of a, okay, this is tough. You are exhausted. To be fair, I've had to do this to myself a lot this week. Yeah, this is tough. You are exhausted. We have got goals [00:52:00] and they're important goals. Vikki: So, we can do this one next bit. I believe in you. We're only gonna do it for 45 minutes. I ain't gonna beat you up if it's not perfect. I ain't gonna beat you up if we don't move as fast as we usually do. But we are capable of doing this next bit. We are not the sort of tired that needs to go and pass out for the afternoon. We're gonna rest tonight. We are the sort of tired that I can crack on with this bit and do it well enough. Let's just get this bit done. Just! Let's get this bit done and then we'll reassess. That sort of positive encouragement I think can be a really useful vibe because otherwise you hear the exasperation in your voice. Otherwise, yeah, if you get into, oh, just get on with it, then we either get a bit defensive and start criticizing or we collapse into the kind of indulgent thing again. Janice: Agree. I like that. I'm gonna start throwing that now.[00:53:00] Vikki: Thank you. Okay, perfect. I'm gonna bring Kate back on. Kate, if you wanna bring your camera back up. So how did you find listening to that, Kate? What were your sort of reflections and learnings? Kate: So in the same way that you reflected that there were some themes in both of us because of our profession and because of where we work, I was equally reflecting on the same thing. And I think that, your critical voice and my critical voice could probably be besties Janice: true. Kate: Um, so that's, that's helpful. And I think that's probably it. Feels, I wonder whether it's something to do with our profession or I wonder it's whether it's something to do with our nature. 'cause we've become nurses and we are part of a caring, relatively patriarchal system with challenges. So I was really interesting to reflect on that. Kate: I really liked the whole concept of the critical friend management system that we've come up with now during this, um, thingy. [00:54:00] And I really liked, um, the confounding variables. So you said at the beginning, Vikki, you were like, right, well actually what are the confounding variables? If we were looking at this from a research perspective, what's the, what are your confounding variables? Kate: And actually you, the phrase that I like the most that you use, Janice, was you said it's a different ballgame. And it's that bit, isn't it? That I think probably we think we've done courses before, we're driven people, we've got to where we've got to in the NHS, so therefore we should know all the rules of all the games. Kate: And then you start this new game and you're like, oh, I don't know anything about anything and I'm not really sure I should be here. Oh dear. What have I got myself into? Janice: It's so true. Kate: Think it takes, yeah, I think it takes a while to feel comfy in that, in that bit, to kind of realize that, you know, you're in the game. You wanted to be in the game. You've worked really hard to get in the game. You're now in the game and you're like, oh, no different game. Oh, what am I gonna do? And I thought, I, I liked Vikki's point about your calm, encouraging voice. And one of the things that we've talked previously about in other coaching with other students is [00:55:00] about your CEO, your boss and about what would your boss say. Kate: So I was thinking about your internal voice and my internal voice, and I was thinking, we probably need to take them for a CEO meeting actually, and sit down and go, right. I'm listening to you critical voice. I'm listening to you beside me, which is like, come on, just relax. You've worked really hard. And then I'm also listening to the voice that is the mother, that is the wife, that is the volunteer, that is the manager, that is the, can we do X by tomorrow, et cetera. So it's about having kind of all of those , voices and opinions around you, but being able to be calm and encouraging. Kate: 'cause that's what CEOs need to be, which is focused, goal driven, realistic, but calm and pragmatic. And I think as nurses, we're very good at being calm and pragmatic. We're actually very good at it. And I think probably one of the issues that we both have is 'cause we're quite good at being calm and pragmatic and sensible and get anything done [00:56:00] 'cause that's what nurses are good at. Give them anything. Can they like, yeah, we can find our way around them. We'll do it. I think it's about using that calm nursing, CEO energy of right. What are we going to do next? Let's just look at next. What's the next 15 minutes gonna look like? What's the next half an hour gonna look like? What's the next day? And not allow ourselves to get too far down that spiral of, well, I haven't done it by today, therefore I'm gonna be completely, I need to work Christmas day. You know? Exactly. Yeah. Pulling that back. So, no, you aren't working on Christmas day and you're not thinking, well, I can peel the sprouts while I'm reading that scoping review. 'Cause that's not appropriate. It's not what your CEO would say, is it? No, Vikki: that's perfect. And both of you as members have access to my Christmas planning worksheet and workshop. They're both online now. So if you weren't there live, then you can plan your intentional holidays. The last thing I would add in, I love this notion of bringing like the different roles of yourself together and [00:57:00] thinking, right? Vikki: How are we gonna actually work this out between us? And actually that intentional holiday planning workshop is really thinking about that. How can you look after all the different bits of you? Um, and this is relevant to everyone, but it's particularly relevant to women of our age, I would say. Vikki: Mm-hmm. Is don't forget there is also the Kate and Janice, the human being. Okay? So there's CEO, you and researcher, you and partner, you, mum, you, whatever else you there is also you. Okay? And I want you to make sure in any of these conversations, the, you, you that wants to do just something, just 'cause it's fun or just because it's restful or just 'cause it's joyous or whatever, that that role needs to be in there too. Janice: I agree. Vikki: So it's really easy, especially when, you know, when we're the sandwich generation with parents and kids and all that fun and games. Mm-hmm. It's really easy to forget that bit too. [00:58:00] It's, it's making sure there's space for that bit as well. Janice: I agree. Thank you. Vikki: So on that note, thank you both so much for your honesty and vulnerability. And whilst we've done this very much in the context of you both being nurses who are doing PhDs, I think it is super relevant to anybody who's, any come from any other profession. You know, we have people in the membership who've come from law and technology and all sorts of other places who have, you know, their own version of this challenge. Vikki: And even people that have come straight in from undergrad and masters and who are now suddenly going, hang on, I used to be good at this. And what's happened now? I think everything you've said is super, super useful for them too. So thank you both so much for listening. When this goes out, it's gonna be the 12th of January, which means that the new quarter of the membership will be starting in two weeks time. Vikki: So make sure you're on my newsletter, everybody, so that, you know, when that's happening and you get all the invites so that if you would like to join too, [00:59:00] come and join Kate and Janice and all the rest of my community, then you'll have that opportunity as well. Thank you all so much for listening and I will see you next week.
It’s a time of year where lots of people are setting goals, worrying about which goals to set, and then beating themselves up if they don’t meet them. In this episode, I answer a question I was asked about how to set goals when you’re not sure they’re possible. I share five ways to evaluate big audacious goals to see if they could be a good fit for you and then share two skills that you’ll need to develop in order to pursue a goal that has the potential to be unrealistic! It’s the perfect episode if you have a tempting big goal on your mind! If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on how to achieve your goals using the self-coaching model . Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the first episode of 2026 for the PhD Life Coach Podcast. I am genuinely feeling really excited about this year. I've got some really cool stuff coming up in the business for the PhD Life Coach membership and some more free stuff that's gonna be happening soon. So keep an eye out for that. If you are new to the podcast and you are wondering what the PhD life coach membership is, it is my quarterly program for PhD students where you get all the support that you feel like you're currently lacking. You get an active community. You get a place where you can talk about all those questions that seem a bit stupid, but actually really hold you back, where you can help yourself to reduce your procrastination, reduce how overwhelmed you feel, and actually change your PhD journey so that you can enjoy it and have the PhD experience that you wanted. If you wanna find out more, you can it's all on my website. The PhD life coach.com. And there's [00:01:00] gonna be a launch at the end of January, so I'll be taking new members in the last week in January. So keep an eye on that. If you're not already on my newsletter, make sure that you sign up so you hear all about it. If you already have your PhD, you are also so, so welcome here. This podcast is here for people all the way from the very, very beginnings of their academic careers through to the very end and beyond. Much of the time, the stuff we're struggling with is exactly the same stuff. It's sort of two sides of the same coin, and I certainly intend this podcast to be a support for everybody across the board in academia. There may also even be a few listeners who are not academics at all. That's okay too. You are very, very welcome. The stuff I talk about is pretty universal. You'll have to forgive some of the framing that makes it very specific to the weird world of academia, but most of the rest of it is pretty relevant to everyone. So you are welcome here too. Anyway. With that out the way, it is time to think about goals, and it's a time of year where we're [00:02:00] all pondering this stuff, right? Maybe you've already set New Year's resolutions. Maybe you've already stopped following some of your New Year's resolutions. It happens. Here's your reminder to reengage. All good to reengage,. But today we're gonna think about one specific question that I was actually asked at one of my very rare live events. So I was doing a talk about decision making and careers in London and I was approached afterwards by a very nice PhD student who said, you know, I really, really enjoyed your talk and everything, but how do I decide whether to pursue a goal or not when I'm not sure whether I can meet that goal? And I thought this was such an interesting question. We had a really interesting discussion about it that I thought I would elaborate on it in the podcast here. So in that workshop, I talk a lot about making decisions based on reasons you love. So if you choose to pursue a goal, for example, you're doing it for reasons that you really, really like. But her point was, [00:03:00] don't you need to know, or at least be reasonably confident you can achieve a goal before you set it as a goal and the example she gave was being Prime Minister. She was like, yeah, imagine, imagine I want to be Prime Minister. How can I set that for myself as a goal when I've got no idea how that could be possible? I've got, you know, there's no reason to believe that would be possible. It's so big, it's so ambitious. It's all these things. How, how could I ever set that as a goal? Now, I think she underestimated my sport science background. So having come through a 22, 3, whatever years it was, career in sport and exercise sciences, I am very used to people setting ludicrous long-term goals. So the number of my personal tutees, who intended at some point to be Olympic gold medal winners or to internationally represent their team, win the World Cup, whatever it might be, was huge, loads of them. Okay. It's one [00:04:00] things you find with when you're teaching sport scientists. Loads of them are elite athletes themselves as well. And so the notion of having a goal that is outlandish, is audacious, is not that unusual in that sort of a setting. But what this discussion did for me was it allowed me to sort of step back and go, okay, well, in whatever context it is, how would you decide that you want to make that your goal and how would you go about achieving it? And for some of you in academic context, that goal might be being a full tenured professor, for example, which for many is like the pinnacle of an academic career. So what I wanna talk with you today is like an expanded version of that conversation that we had, where I give you five ways to assess the goal, and then two skills that I think you need to develop, in order to make [00:05:00] these big outlandish goals a reality. So the first way to assess the journey is we have to really think about what would be the route to that outlandish goal. And this is the process we went through with her example of being Prime Minister. Right? So we went through, it's like, okay, so you wanna be a Prime Minister. If you wanna be a Prime Minister in the uk, you have to be an mp, right? I think that's true. You might need, I can you be in the House of Lords? I dunno, internationals. It's a weird system over here. But anyway, the map, you're not gonna just randomly be in the House of Lords, the best way to be Prime Minister is to be a member of Parliament. How do you become a member of Parliament? You get elected. How do you get elected? You have to participate in an election. How do you participate in an election where you have to be nominated by your party? So you have to be involved in the local party and be chosen as a representative. How do you get involved in your local party? Well, you tell them you want to be involved and you start doing things. And so then as you go through this conversation, it's like, okay, so what's the goal here that does [00:06:00] feel achievable? Now if you know what political party you support, then a goal could be get involved with your local political party, and I'd want you to, you know, in the interest of making these things more specific, I want you to then define for yourself what that would actually mean. What does involved look like for you? But that would be the first step and those would be the things that you would need to go through. And this does two things, right? First of all, it gives you a route by which it feels a little bit more achievable because we don't even have to decide at this point that we definitely want to be Prime Minister. We just have to decide that we've got a vague goal of being Prime Minister, and our specific goal for this year is to do X and Y with my local political party. Now, of course if you're sitting there going, I don't even know what, like what political party represents me at the moment. I get you. Okay. Seriously there too. But the first steps for you then would be to work out how you're gonna determine [00:07:00] which political party you want to get involved with. You know, do you wanna do some sort of like visiting system where you try different things? Do you want to talk to more people? Do you wanna read more? What would it be? Okay. But the first thing this does is it makes it a little bit more achievable and gives you goals that are on the way to that big notional goal. And note, remember, at this point, we don't have to decide for 100%. That is definitely the thing we're working towards. But if it were, these would be interim goals, so we can focus on those. The second thing it does is it enables you to decide whether you actually like the look of that journey, because if you are somebody that, for example, uh, has a lot of opinions about how the country should be run and likes telling people what to do, I mean, I dunno why you're looking at me here. Um, you might think, oh, being Prime Minister would be fun. But when I think through that step by step process of like, okay, I'm gonna have join a local political party, and then I'm gonna have to win people around there, and I'm gonna have to build a reputation and I'm gonna have [00:08:00] to talk to lots of people who I don't necessarily agree with, and I'm gonna have to doorstep and I'm gonna have to do this, and I'm gonna have to do that. I'm like, no. No, no. This is also why, um, I, I no longer set myself running goals. Okay? I absolutely love running events. And I have a very bad habit that when I finish a running event, I decide that I definitely want to book another running event and next time I'm gonna train properly. But the problem is when I look at the actual process of being a good runner, I don't want that bit the, I have to still run when I don't feel like running and I have to go out in the rain and I have to spend X number of hours a week running. I don't want that bit. I just like turning up and doing the shiny bit and prancing around. So I now pick running events where you can run as little or as far as you want. So kind of checkpoint based adventure racing, 'cause then if you don't feel like it that day, you don't run as much, but you still take part. It's great. Love it. Anyway. So you get to look at that journey and go, is that actually a journey that feels like it would be fun? Okay, so you get to assess that [00:09:00] journey. I said there were five things. So the first is identifying that journey and deciding whether you even like the look of it. The second is to check in with yourself that the journey is inherently valuable even if you don't make the ultimate goal. So we want to try and pick big inspiring goals that the journey is worthwhile, even if we don't make it all the way so, sticking with my being Prime Minister 'cause it's more fun than talking about having to be full professor. Um, sticking with my idea of being Prime Minister, does it feel like I would get a lot out of, not just enjoy, I would benefit from the process of becoming Prime Minister? Would it enable me to develop in ways that I want to develop? Would it be inherently valuable for me as a [00:10:00] person? What we wanna avoid are goals that are only amazing if we hit them and are a disaster if we don't. Yeah. Sometimes you see this, I do think sport has become a lot more psychologically informed over the last 10 years than it ever was when I grew up. And so you see a lot more of this kind of journey based, participation based narrative, not where we are not trying to win, right? We're not going back to times where it's like, oh, it's all taking part that matters, but it's the recognition of what you get outta striving to be better than you were, what you get out of that dedication and commitment. But back in the day you would see people that would say things like, you know, second is the first loser and anything other than first is a fail and blah, blah, blah. And that puts an enormous amount of pressure and actually sets the goal up as something that if you don't achieve it, then all the efforts have not been worthwhile. I want you to choose big audacious [00:11:00] goals that the journey is inherently valuable. So as an example, let's say you do pick a big audacious academic goal, like becoming full professor, I want you to be sure that that journey that you are getting what you want out of your PhD experience. You're getting what you want out of your postdoc experience, out of your early academic career, et cetera, et cetera, so that if at any stage it's either not possible to achieve your goal or you choose not to achieve your goal, that you have still got a lot out of that experience. The third thing I want you to consider is, does this big goal use your strengths? Okay. All of us have strengths and weaknesses. One of the things I've noticed in academia is we are typically very bad at recognizing our strengths. We're typically really good at telling people what our weaknesses are. We are really good at setting resolutions to fix and improve our weaknesses. So little note, if all your [00:12:00] resolutions are about fixing things you're not good at, at the moment, you might wanna have a little tiny reconsider as we're still at the beginning of the year. And instead, we wanna think about things where they really maximize and use strengths that we have. Really maximize the things that we find easier than other people, where we have the potential to be seriously amazing where we are looking at honing talents, rather than fixing our weak points. So have a look at any of these big goals that you might have and think, does this play to the best parts of me? Now, some of you will have listened to my previous episode from just last week, week before. Can't remember. Recently, let's say, um, where I talked about why I left academia. For a long time, academia played to my strengths for a long time as I was pursuing my sort of career as I was trying to working way up the academic ladder, I was really valued for the things that I was good at. I was able to use [00:13:00] those strengths to succeed, and I was recognized and it was amazing. Loved it. But I realized that towards the end of my career that actually the next steps, the things that were the logical follow on for me, didn't play to my strengths and would be me trying to kind of fix weaknesses. I was perfectly capable of doing them. And if I'd wanted to pursue that goal, then I could have done, but it no longer felt like I was maximizing my strengths and instead felt like I was having to become somebody that I wasn't actually that fussed about becoming. So check in that these goals will really use your strengths. The fourth element is I want you to think about your reasons. We always want goals to be intrinsically driven. We want to be trying to achieve goals because either we value. The benefits of them or preferably that they are fun and engaging and part of who we are [00:14:00] really intrinsically motivated rather than goals that are to do with the rewards you'll get from it, earning lots of money or whatever, or because of societal or closer expectations that other people telling you, or indeed you telling you that you should do this. There is a huge body of literature talking about the importance of intrinsic motivation for goal success, for goal adherence, for enjoying that journey, for psychological wellbeing whilst trying to achieve the goals. So when you've got these big goals. Just double check. Where do they come from? Are they shoulds or are they things that you intrinsically value and want to pursue? The fifth one then is more of a like little check-in, which is to what extent have you got capacity to engage with this goal at the moment? So there's nothing wrong with having huge goals that will take you 10, 20, 30 years to achieve. In fact, I think that can be quite [00:15:00] fun and exciting, but you also need to check in with what capacity you have to engage with it at the moment. And I think in my view, there's always time to engage at at least some level. So maybe you wanna be Prime Minister, but at the moment you are doing your PhD, you've got two young children and whatever else, maybe, I'm not saying for sure, but maybe you are not in the greatest of positions to start being like a active member of your local political party. But maybe this is where you listen to political podcasts. Maybe this is where you make friends with people who are interested in politics, so you can actually have discussions about these things so that you build elements of this journey that fit with your current capacity. Then we start looking ahead to when might my capacity change or when could I change my capacity? But bearing in mind that sort of little element of realism so that we're not telling ourselves we should be doing something that we don't have capacity for. [00:16:00] Okay. So those are my five ways I want you to think about the journey. I want you to identify what the steps are so that you can actually build it back to being a more proximal goal, and check in that you actually wanna do those things. Two, I want you to make sure that the journey is inherently valuable, even if you don't get to the destination. What will you get out of the journey by pursuing it? What will you learn about yourself? What will you develop in yourself? Third, I want you to make sure as using your strengths so that you're not trying to fix things about yourself. That your goal is helping you become the best version of the bits of you that are already brilliant. Four. I want you to think about the quality of the motivation. Make sure that it's intrinsically driven from your values, your beliefs, the things that you love to do rather than things that people tell you you should do or in order just to get rewards. I always worry when people tell me they're doing a PhD, primarily either for the authority and recognition that the title will [00:17:00] give them, or because their mom or dad always dreamed of them having a PhD. I always worry about it. If that's you, it's not the end of the world, but I would really encourage you to develop other reasons, for doing it. And then the fifth one is, what capacity do you have to engage? And so when you're thinking about those sort of more proximal steps, making that appropriate to the life you are living at the moment is really, really useful. Okay, so if you've still got a big goal in mind and you've run it through those things, what are the two other skills that I want you to develop? The first is tolerance of uncertainty. So one of the things that I see a lot is that people would find it easier to work on something if they know it's going to happen. So if you knew your article was gonna get published, it can be a lot easier to work on it than if you are trying to work on it, not knowing whether it's ever gonna get published or not. The problem is that almost all [00:18:00] interesting goals are at least somewhat uncertain. Okay? Because otherwise we'd just be doing them. And so one of the things that I would want you to develop is the ability to be unsure and to work towards it anyway, and this is useful in a whole variety of settings. Any of you who find that you get a bit needy in relationships, I used to get very needy in relationships, friendships as well as romantic ones, and you'd be uncertain whether that person likes you, uncertain whether they, you know, feel the same way you do or whatever. There's nothing about trying to get more certain that makes you more attractive or makes you a more interesting friend. You have to be able to engage in a relationship whilst being uncertain as to how it's gonna go, being uncertain how they feel about you, and showing up the way you want to show up. And then it will become clear one way or another. It will either become clear they don't treat you the way you want to be treated, in which case we get to move on. [00:19:00] Or that actually it is reciprocated and it's a beautiful thing. But when we try and get that certainty, does my supervisor think I'm good? Does my supervisor think I'm doing enough? Does my supervisor think I'm good enough? Then we start turning up like a bit of a weirdo. We wanna be certain that I'm capable of doing my PhD, certain that I'm capable of getting promotion. Whereas what I want us to be is to be like, okay, I have no idea. But if I was gonna get it, these are the things I need to do and I can be okay on the way I can look after myself through the uncertainty. One of the things we talk about in the membership quite a lot is about not trying to fix your emotions with actions. Now, there's a few exceptions to that. I'm a big fan of dancing, walking, fresh air, those sorts of things to improve and enhance your emotions in those sorts of ways, but the majority of the time we're best off being able to go, you know what? I'm a bit anxious 'cause I'm uncertain. I can look after anxiety, but these are the steps I need to [00:20:00] take. These are the things I need to do as if I was more certain. And then the second skill that I want you to develop is the ability to disengage from a goal when you want to. So I mentioned that I have this sports science background. One of the most unhealthy things, I think, is when people start getting into, um, you know, the only way I'm not achieving this goal is if I'm dead. You'll have to carry me out of here before I don't follow this goal, and it's just, it all sounds very dramatic and it all sounds very like, oh my God, you're so committed. And it's like, no, that's stupid. I'm sorry. I love you if that's the way you thought yourself, but it's so stupid. Yes, we wanna pursue goals even when they feel difficult. Yes, we wanna pursue goals even when we're like, oh, what have I done? But we have to have a point at which we say, you know what? The journey's not making me [00:21:00] happy anymore. You know what? This isn't even the direction that I want to be traveling in anymore. We have to have a point at which we can disengage with goals, not interpret it as a massive failure, and choose to go in a different direction. Now, if you are somebody you know who's already given up on your news resolutions, for example, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about hitting one bump and deciding this goal doesn't count anymore. Or not recording what you eat because you're eating things you don't want to eat or giving up on your goal of reading however many articles 'cause you haven't stuck to it. Whatever. That's not what I'm talking about. But there is also a point at which this thing you've always dreamed of, whether that is a qualification, whether it's a job, whether it's a relationship, whatever it might be, the pursuit of it isn't serving you anymore. And it's useful to know that you can leave at any point. You can choose [00:22:00] not to follow that goal. And you might think, well, if I acknowledge that, then I'd just leave. And if that's your thought, i'd have some sensible considerations about whether maybe you should be leaving, but actually it can also give a bunch of freedom. A lot of the PhD students in my membership will say to me, knowing that I am choosing to continue that actually I could leave my PhD if I wanted to. Knowing that I'm choosing to continue actually empowers me. I don't feel trapped anymore because I know I could leave if I want to. It's why I believe that everybody in a relationship should always be financially independent so that they could leave if they needed to. Okay. It's my little feminist agenda drilled into me by my mother from a young age. Knowing that you could disengage is also the ultimate freedom to pick a massive outlandish goal because it doesn't have to be a massive deal if you get partway down the journey and decide that actually [00:23:00] something else serves you more. So those are my five ways that you can assess your big goals, your two skills that you'll need to develop to kind of pursue that journey. I would love, if you're not already on my newsletter, sign off for my newsletter and tell me what big outlandish goals you have either for this year or for like the next five, 10 years, things that you really want to have in your life. I really hope that you found this useful and inspiring. I have some big outlandish goals for the business. I also have.... is it a big outlandish girl? I think it's, yeah, it's a medium sized goal. I have a goal setting up a circus club in my home village. It's gonna be like for ground skills, juggling, poi Diablo, all that sort of fun stuff. It's not gonna be for children. Adults need more play in their life too. It's gonna be for adults. It's not gonna be for people who are necessarily good at it. Um, I'm really excited. It's my big personal project for 2026. I'm putting it out there so that I definitely stick to it. Thank you all so much for listening. If you are listening on [00:24:00] YouTube, I'd like to point out that yes, it is Christmas and there is a box that looks like it's got mulled wine in it behind me. It's actually hiding Christmas presents. I was halfway through recording when I noticed it was there, so I was trying to stay in front of it all the way through. You know what? If you haven't checked out my YouTube, then you might wanna see the efforts I was taking to stay in front of and therefore blocking the cardboard box. If you listen on podcasts, this makes no sense whatsoever, but go with it. It's all good. Maybe you should check out my YouTube. In fact, there's gonna be more YouTubes, special ones coming in the new year too, so make sure that you do go follow me over there. Anyway, thank you all so much for listening, and I will see you next week.
I really wanted to cut down how much I use my phone and I bought a Brick! This episode is my honest review of the experience so far, and includes some evidence-based advice about what you can and can’t expect from a product like this. I take you through my ups and downs and the behaviour change approaches that I have applied to my Brick strategy. A must for all habitual phone users! {PS this is NOT sponsored by Brick and I bought my own device!} If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on why phone addiction confession might help you too . Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the PhD Life Coach Podcast. Now, for those of you who know that I always preach the whole work life balance, intentional holiday things, rest assured this may be coming out on, I think it's the 29th of December, something like that. It might be coming out then, but I am recording it three weeks early. Check me out. I am using the last gasps of motivation that I have for 2025 to get ahead of myself for these things so that I can have the intentional holiday that I planned. I hope that it has gone that way for you too and that you have used all the skills you've learned listening to the podcast, and for those of you who are members, to have the holiday that you need. If not, before I get going on the other stuff, I just wanna remind you it's not yet the end of the year. Okay, you may be back at work to some extent. I want you to think we have got a couple of days left of 2025. We have got that little funny beginning of the year where it hasn't quite started properly. I want you to be as intentional as you possibly [00:01:00] can be. Don't say, oh, I ruined it. I didn't get any rest. Oh, I ruined it. I didn't get any work done. Any of those things. Think what have I done, what do I still need, and how can I be as intentional as possible for the remaining days? Okay, let's do it. Anyway, today's session, though, is about a topic that I started about a month ago. So you may recall, I did an episode a while ago where I was talking about wanting to reduce my phone usage and I talked about a product called Brick. Now, this is not a product placement episode. I have not been paid. I purchased it just like anybody else , based on various reviews that I had seen from people that I respected. And I wanted to check back in with you about how it's going because I. Used to have a tendency, and I still to some extent have a tendency to find a new thing, think it's the answer, and then to stop using said thing and it [00:02:00] get relegated to a cupboard somewhere. So I thought I would let you know how I've been going with the Brick and exactly how I've been using it, what that process has been like, what I've learned from it, and what I'm gonna be doing going into 2026. Now, in case you didn't listen to that episode, this is a Brick. If you're on YouTube, you can see it. If not, it's a little square plastic um Brick, um, for want of a better phrase, it's about what, five centimeters square, about a centimeter deep, something like that. Says Brick on it, and essentially it's a fancy casing for a fancy one of those, is it RFD tags or have I said the wrong letters? I'm not sure. What are those tag things that does clever things to your phone, but it's like a physical one. It's got a magnet on the back, so I leave it on the side of my fridge in my utility room. And essentially the idea is that you can pre-program it to turn off certain apps and certain websites. So depending on what your go-to distractions are, you can set it up [00:03:00] in different ways. One of the things I love about it is that you can set up different versions of that, and this is where it's better than just buying the little tags off of Amazon or whatever and setting it up yourself. You can have pre-programmed combinations of what it switches on and switches off. So as an example, and I'll go into this in more detail as we go on through the episode, I have a different version for weekends and weekdays. So during the weekdays, I will absolutely be turning off like the Instagrams and all of that sort of stuff. But on weekends, I also turn off Slack and email, for example. And within that there's quite a bit of nuance. So you don't just turn off safari or don't turn off safari. You can turn off certain websites. So I've got Facebook in there. I've got a bit of a news habit. So I've got my go-to news sites turned off. Right move. Those of you who are in the UK will know what I'm talking about. It's, uh, property looking at website, I'm not moving. I [00:04:00] have no intention of buying a house in the next five years, but, it's fun to look at houses I can't afford. Anyway, so that's what Brick is, and I was really using it because I was noticing that I was scrolling more than I wanted to, that I didn't feel better for scrolling and the kind of self-driven resolutions of just, I won't use it in these time slots weren't really working for me. I was also finding it difficult to use the leave your phone in another room strategy. Um, because there are things that I do like having access to, I do like having access to my Spotify. I do like having access to audio books, for example. I do also wanna be able to answer the phone easily if family contact me and things like that. So there were certain things that I did want to be able to have access to that made the Just leave your phone somewhere else more difficult to implement. So I [00:05:00] thought Brick could be a really good solution for me. So how did it go? Well, inevitably because I'm me for the first few days, absolutely bloody brilliant. So for the first few days I was Bricked for usually up to 23 hours a day. That doesn't mean I was using it for a whole other time, but that I was completely out of it for 23 hours a day. This was a massive reduction on my previous screen time, particularly in apps like Instagram and I was just like, this is amazing. I am the new biggest fan of Brick. I need Brick T-shirts. This is just brilliant. This is gonna change my life. All those thoughts that we have. However, because I am now Coach Vikki, and not just optimistic Vikki, I was also aware that I was in that honeymoon period and I knew that that honeymoon period wouldn't just last indefinitely. But I enjoyed it and I was riding it while I could. I had decided at that stage there's two different ways you can turn on [00:06:00] your Brick. One is that you actually take your phone. So I'm showing people my phone on the video. You take your phone, you go into the Brick app. So, mine is currently Bricked as people will be able to see if they're watching on video. But imagine it wasn't, you would press the, um, Brick there and tap it against here and that Brick it. So I was using that sort of intentional action, that active choice, because I quite liked, and I'd heard. My coach, Karin Nordin, talk about this. I quite liked the sort of ritual associated with, and now I'm tapping and therefore going into work mode so that was how I decided to try it at first. The other option is that you can schedule it to go into particular modes at particular times. So at first I did the tapping and I put the Brick in my utility room, my utility, I live in a townhouse. My utility room rooms on the ground floor, and then my lounge and kitchen are upstairs, and then the bedrooms are above that. So the utility room is kind of as far as you can get [00:07:00] from where I normally am, other than putting it in the garage, which I didn't want to do. And it's also not a particularly inviting place, right? It's a utility room. So, it's not like I'm gonna sit in there and scroll. So I thought that was a good thing. And like I say, for the first few days it went really, really well. First week in fact, it went really, really well, really fundamentally changed how I was spending my time. The other thing that really helped during that time and that I would recommend for any of you who are wanting to change your phone time, is that I had really clear ideas of what else I wanted to do. I am a hobby monster. I have so many different hobbies, and there were so many things that I wanted to be spending time doing that weren't just scrolling on my phone, that that was a really attractive draw for me. Okay. So I wasn't just trying to stop. Using my phone. I was trying to create space to do all these other things that I wanted to do, and that went really well as well for about the first week. Now you can all hear the but coming, right? There's a little but [00:08:00] coming here. It started to drift after about a week. I wasn't quite as routine about tapping in. I was sometimes going to bed without Bricking the device. There is a saving grace in it though, I have to say, which is that if you've gone to bed or you've gone somewhere without booking it, you can Brick remotely. So you can Brick without being near the Brick machine. You just can't un- Brick without being near. Or really like you get five emergency un Bricks, but that's all you get. So you have to be careful not to use those. So you can go, ah, I didn't Brick it and just Brick it there and there. But even so, I was finding myself kind of going, oh, well I'm quite tired tonight. Maybe I'll just let myself look at it. After all I. So I'd, I was starting to blur my own intentions. I thought I had been quite clear with myself, quite intentional with myself about when I wanted to Brick the phone and when I didn't, but I found myself [00:09:00] negotiating with myself. I found myself saying, oh yeah, but you aren't quite tired. Oh, yeah, but it's not for long. Oh, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, all that stuff. Okay. Now, I sounded quite judgy when I said that about myself. That's 'cause I'm a flippant sort of a person, but I genuinely wasn't. I genuinely, one of the things I'm really proud of myself about is that I didn't get crossed with myself at that stage, and I didn't, as I often would've done in the past, declare that the Brick is useless and didn't work and chucking in a box somewhere. I instead thought, Hmm, that's interesting. Gonna need a plan for that as well. Gonna need a plan for when I am feeling too tired, or I'm motivated to do the fun things that I thought I wanted to not be doing. Okay, and that required me to make another decision. Did I want, if I was too tired to do in my head, too tired in speech marks, to do the fun hobby things that I had been wanting to do, did I then think it was [00:10:00] okay to be on my phone? And for some of you, the answer will be yes. And that's absolutely fine. For me, the answer was not. Yes for two reasons. One, because I know that if I've got the option of going on my phone, then suddenly the, oh, I feel too tired is a really low barrier to get over. It's like, oh, I'm too tired. And so I go on my phone, um, and b, I don't feel better. So if I am too tired to do something else and I go on my phone, I don't end up feeling less tired. I just end up passing some more time. And that was not how I wanted it to be. And so what I realized was that I needed a plan for what tasks I wanted to do, what activities I should say, not tasks, what activities I wanted to do when I wasn't energetic or motivated enough to be doing my hobby things, but I still didn't want to pick up my phone as an option, and I found that quite difficult because anything that [00:11:00] wasn't pointed at any of my kind of hobby interests slash goals felt like a waste of time. It was really, really interesting to observe. So like I was like, I could do coloring and puzzles and things. It's like, well, that don't get me anywhere. That's no point. You know, that total like eldest daughter, high achieving bullshit that I'm sure lots of, you're susceptible to that. It must be useful what you're doing, even if it's hobby useful, it's building your skills and da, da, whatever. Right. Building a side quest, the notion of coming up with stuff that was just a bit mindless, but not my phone, I found really hard, but when I noticed how hard I was feeling it, it was like, oh, okay. Cool. It just needs to be things that I quite like doing, that I find relaxing, and that is where I did then start slotting in things like coloring things like puzzles, that kind of stuff. I've asked for a jigsaw board for Christmas. I'm very excited. I have to do jigsaws that have got [00:12:00] words on 'cause I'm so bad at matching colors. But you know, the jigsaws that are like covered in signs or books or whatever, I like those ones. Mom's under very strict instructions, what to get me anyway. Um, so I had to come up with things that I could do when I was feeling tired or motivated. I think this is a really important step for all of you to think about 'cause often we think about what are we gonna do when our besto set you? It's the same if you want to exercise more, right? That often we think, oh, well, if I've got the energy, then I'll do my full routine. But having an idea as to what will you do if you feel like you haven't got the energy to do your full routine, but you want to do more than nothing, what does that look like? Okay, so I realized this fitted into something I talk about in the membership all the time, which is not just planning for your best self, planning for the self that you know will also show up. So I kind of got back on it again and I started being a little bit more intentional. I started Bricking the phone a little bit more. I still wasn't back up to quite the [00:13:00] same hours of being Bricked as I was previously, but it was a bit better. And then I have my big life issue. So those of you who've been listening, you'll know that we had family stuff that happened, um, that I will not be going into on the podcast, but that was very disruptive, meant that I was away from home for a week. It's still somewhat ongoing now, but I'm back home again. But I was away from home and I didn't take the Brick with me. Now part of that was just the leaving in a little bit of a hurry and not really thinking about it. But part of it was also the kind of, um, you know maybe I need to just be able to hang out on my phone and not worry about it. Maybe this is not the time to be sort of trying to stick to resolutions. So when I look through my Brick data, I had 13 days in the end where I didn't Brick it once. Now I wasn't away for all of that time, so I can't use the, I physically couldn't thing but I [00:14:00] had 13 days where I didn't break it at all, and I'm not a hundred percent sure whether that was the right decision for me or not. I think it probably wasn't, but I'm going with it because it's what I did. Now, the reason I say that is because I'm not convinced that that kind of black and white, oh, well I shouldn't even think about it thing, is a useful way to think about anything. I think it probably would've been helpful for me to take the Brick with me and at least Brick for some of the time. I think that probably would've encouraged me to do other things, to spend time, not just on my phone, to spend time on things that were a bit more rejuvenating, so I'm not gonna beat myself up for it. It was a really tough time, but I think in future, I want to plan for those kind of emergency crisis moments as well, and I think that plan will involve less [00:15:00] usage of the Brick, but not no usage of the Brick. Now, so where am I now? Like I say, the issues are still somewhat ongoing, but I am back home. I'm back in much more of a normal routine, and the thing I'm more proud of than anything, I always encourage my members. I encourage all of you to identify things that you are proud of. What I'm proud of more than anything is that I have got back on the metaphorical Brick horse. I could easily have said that I'd screwed it up by being away, being off for that long and that it hasn't worked, Chuck it in the old tech box that we never look at again. I could equally, and I want you to be really aware if you are likely to do this at the moment, I could equally have said, I'm gonna try again in the new year. That would be a really, really easy thing to say at the moment, but I didn't. I said you are back into sort of mostly normal routine. How do you want to do this now? But importantly, I didn't just say, you gotta [00:16:00] get back on it. Gotta get back on it. You know, it's really important. I said, how can I make it easier for you? Because I am a bit distracted at the moment, I think it's fair to say. And so I thought to myself, how can I make it more likely that this will be effective? More likely that it will be helpful and something that I can be proud of rather than something that I'm feeling guilty for not doing for example. And I thought, you know what? As much as I love the kind of ritual of going down and tapping it on my Brick to signify when I'm starting. I think that is a cognitive step too far. So we often talk in the membership about initiation energy, the sort of energy it takes to start doing something and that can be really, really difficult. And that sort of like, okay, I'm going to be Bricked now. Tap. Felt like something that was easy to put off. Or I'll go and Brick in half an hour, I'll go and Brick in an hour. And I thought, you know what, what will support me at the moment? And this isn't saying this is [00:17:00] how I'm gonna use it forever. What will support me at the moment is setting up some schedules. So I set up schedules where my phone automatically goes onto different modes at different times. So it has, I think I've got four settings, something like that. One which comes on first thing in the morning. One that comes on at the time that I am gonna start work. Where roughly when I'm gonna finish work and roughly when I go to bed, and there's slightly different settings for each of those different time slots, and having that has helped me massively , because there's four changes because I don't necessarily need those four changes, it means it gets ReBricked. So as an example, if in the mornings I wake up and I decide I'm gonna go and un Brick my phone, which is not the plan, I don't intend to scroll in the mornings, but occasionally the Brick is near where I feed the dog, so occasionally I um, Brick it re Bricks again at [00:18:00] seven 30 'cause it's time to start work. Okay, those of you who, if you're worrying about me starting work at seven 30, it's because I'm on a new plan where I then exercise at nine. So it's not that I'm just working crazy hours, I promise. It re Bricks at seven 30 so even if I've got up in the morning and gone and un Bricked it, I can only scroll till seven 30 worst case. 'cause it will then Brick itself again. And it won't unb Brick again unless I go and un Brick it. So having that schedule has taken loads of the cognitive load away from me and has made it much more easy to notice what I'm doing and to stick to what I intended. The other thing I've done is I have collated easy other analog options. So I have one of those like foot stool things by my sofa, which is hollow. Used to have dog toys in it. I kicked the dog out. The dog now has his own basket under a different chair, and it now has my toys in it. So I now have right where I'm likely to be sitting and scrolling I have [00:19:00] analog things that I can do. I have a Kindle by my bed so that if I wake in the night and reach for my phone, I've got a Kindle to reach for instead. I've kind know that's not strictly analog, but it's reading, so we're going with it. I've made it easy for me to have alternatives nearby when I would normally pick up my phone. And again, that has really helped. One of the things that I think Brick is absolutely genius for is the stopping you the times that you don't even realize you're picking up your phone. It has been, frankly, terrifying. My husband has been laughing at me the number of times I pick up my phone, either without realizing I've even picked it up or picking it up to look at the time, and then clicking on the Instagram app, clicking on Facebook, clicking on whatever, and being faced with that black screen saying, uh, you've chosen not to access this app. Go and do something more interesting. Or whatever it says right. It's been really, really useful to [00:20:00] notice how intuitively and how automatically I'm doing that, and it just squishes all of that because you can't access it, so it gives you that moment. Yes, of course I could walk downstairs if I really cared and un Brick it, but I don't because my intention wasn't looking. It was just that I kind of automatically ended up there and it has stopped all of that. The other thing I'm proud of is we had to go away again because of the family issues for a day at the weekend, and I decided what I would do this time was I would take the Brick with me. I would Brick my phone, but I would leave the Brick in the car. So I could choose to UnBrick if I decided intentionally that I wanted to, but it wasn't just a free for all access to my entire phone. And that actually worked really well. I went out once to UnBrick it for a short period of time just to check some messages and things like that, have a quick scroll, but I was only out for like 20 minutes or something like that. And then I ReBricked it Happy days, and I was off the phone for the rest of the day. [00:21:00] So that worked really well, and I think that is how I will continue to do it. If I'm just going. Into town or whatever. I'll just take it Bricked. I still have access to the phone. I still have access to maps. I still have access to all my banking cards, all of that sort of stuff. I just don't have access to the social media things. In fact, it's quite interesting because there have been quite a few times where I've been with friends going, oh, there was a reel I was gonna show you. And them being like, no, I can't. Then it's like, you know what, Vic, you're gonna have to think of more interesting things to talk about than what you just saw, on instagram and that has actually been really good. You know what? We had conversation before Instagram. You can have conversation about something different. So that has been really, really good. Now, the one thing that I have not yet figured out that I'm gonna need to think about is that I have not Bricked the entirety of the internet, as in like in my browser. I have Bricked certain websites that I know suck up my time. So the ones I mentioned before, [00:22:00] plus Reddit and Medium and things like that. Now I have a bit of a plan for next year, which I'll tell you about in a future podcast, but if you've heard people on Instagram talk about personal curriculum, I got very excited yesterday and have a bit of a plan. What that means is there are a bunch of places where I could actually get quite distracted, scrolling and looking things up on the internet, and I don't think I really wanna do that either. So I'm still pondering on this, but I think I'm going to need, they have a setting where instead of having, what websites are blocked, you can have a generic, all websites are blocked except this one, this one, this one, this one. So I'm gonna have a little bit of a ponder about whether, for at least so times a day, I want to have it so that most of the internet is blocked apart from a few things. Haven't quite decided yet, we shall see. But that's okay because I'm seeing this as a process. I'm seeing this as [00:23:00] something that I'm kind of working through and working with myself, asking myself how can I make this easy rather than, does this machine work? Because the short answer to all of this is there is not a single device that will fix your phone habits. There is not a single piece of exercise equipment that will make you fit and healthy. There is not a single planner that will make your life perfectly organized. All of these are tools that come along with behavior change and emotional regulation and, general self-management. And when we can see them like that, when we can see them as tools that then need intention and strategy to use, then suddenly they become super, super useful. If we expect them to be a kind of panacea for everything, then they will inevitably disappoint and we will either blame them or we will blame ourselves. So if you have considered buying something like a Brick before, I think my [00:24:00] conclusion would be, I highly recommend it, as long as you are willing to go through an iterative process of deciding intentionally how you are gonna use it and that you have a very clear plan as to what other things you want to spend time doing if you are not on your phone. So that's my review of the Brick. I wish I could say in my affiliate links are down there. I don't have affiliate links. I just bought a Brick. So I don't have any of that stuff. I'm not biased in any way. That is just my experience of it. I would love to hear Brick strategies. So if any of you already have a Brick and are using it in a way that's different to what I've said, or if there's anything you found particularly helpful or not helpful, please do make sure you're on my newsletter. Drop me an email, let me know how you're using it. I would love to kind of further refine it in the future. If you don't have issues with your phone use, but there are other elements of behavior change that [00:25:00] you are trying to change, I want you to run the same sorts of things through and even to re-listen to this episode, thinking about it in the context of the planner that you think's gonna fix everything. The exercise machine that you think's going to fix everything, whatever it might be. Okay. Being intentional, being able to spot when your behavior is changing, being able to track, being able to choose intentionally, having approach goals, so things you're trying to do rather than avoidant goals. All of this stuff is just really good practice for any sort of behavior change. And I have just illustrated this time using the Brick as an example. I hope that is useful. This is our last episode for 2025. Thank you so much all for coming. We are heading rapidly towards 150,000 downloads at the point of recording this, which is utterly bonkers. Don't think we'll quite make it by the end of the year, but I'm super, super excited. So thank you for all your support and I can't wait to keep chattering [00:26:00] with you through 2026. So thank you all for listening, and I will see you next week.
We hear so much about people leaving academia at the moment and it’s easy to make assumptions about people’s reasoning. I realised when talking with a one-to-one client that my story is not necessarily a typical one, but it could be one that it is interesting for people to hear. So, in today’s episode, I share my reasoning for leaving academia. I don’t do so in an attempt to encourage others to do the same, and while telling my story, I recognise many privileges that led me to have the career that I have had. Instead I simply wanted to share my experience with you all. If you liked this episode, you should check out “ how I finished my PhD in just over two years (and why I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it) ”. Transcript [00:00:00] and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. So today's episode is a little bit of a change in direction from the last few episodes because this is going to be more about me rather than kind of hints and tips necessarily. And I hope in doing that partly you'll just get to know me a little bit more, but much more importantly, you'll get a bit of an insight and a viewpoint on academia and my journey in academia and how it might relate to yours, and this kind of came about based on a conversation that I was having with a one-to-one client, somebody I've worked with for a really, really long time. And I can't remember what we were talking about, but it came up about me leaving academia and she had made an assumption, understandably, that I had got fed up of academia. I had stopped enjoying academia and that that was why I'd left. 'cause that's why most people leave, right? We hear about the great resignation and all that stuff, and when I [00:01:00] explained to her why I actually did leave academia, she was firstly surprised and secondly found it quite motivating and inspiring. So I thought I would share it with you guys too. Now that makes it sound like it's going to be a exclusively positive story. It's not an exclusively positive story, but it's possibly not the one that you are expecting based on most people who leave academia at the stage I did. So let's backtrack slightly. Just for those of you who haven't been around for quite so long. Give you a bit of context. I was an academic for 20 something years. I was a very unusual case who went to university to do my undergraduate degree and stayed in the same place until I was full professor. So I did my PhD, my postdocs, and all of my academic career in the same institution here in the uk, which is really, really unusual. It's not necessarily something that I super recommend, [00:02:00] but it's also not something that I would recommend against particularly. It was sort of a combination of opportunities and circumstances that led to that. If you wanna hear more about the beginnings of my academic career and how and why I did my PhD quite fast, um, I have an episode about that. Again, might not be quite what you expect because that is definitely not something that I would necessarily recommend but you can check that out. So I was in the same place for the whole of this time, and about five years before I actually left, I had decided that I was going to leave at some point. Essentially I decided that I didn't want to retire as an academic. You know, at this stage, what would it be, I would've been about 40, I guess something like that, early forties. And I decided, you know what? I don't want to do this for another 25 years for reasons I'm gonna share. And that was when a [00:03:00] sort of vague exit plan started mulling in my mind, most of which was limited by the fact that I was living on my own at that stage and we need to be able to support myself. And whilst professorial salaries aren't amazing, they are okay and certainly do very well if you are living on your own. So I'd got this sort of vague plan that I wanted to leave, and then a combination of events meant that it actually happened. But the reason I didn't want to stay was not the so-called toxic environment in academia. It was not the pressure. It was not even particularly the workload, although the workload did annoy me more than anything. I did get overwhelmed at times, but not in a sort of burnout way, just in a, I'm knackered and this is annoying me kind of a way. So did those things contribute a bit? Yes. Were they the reason I left? No. [00:04:00] Absolutely not. I found myself in a portion of academia that I actually still love in terms of the people and the culture and the climate. I don't think you can do much better than sport and exercise sciences. They are the most remarkably normal people. They are, yeah. There's some people who are like very ambitious or whatever, but generally they were lovely. And then you threw in that I was working closely with physios who were just the most gorgeous people and a bunch of educationalists also lovely. Um, did have some medics. Some of the medics were more of a challenge, but many of the ones I worked with were absolutely glorious. And then you also add to the mix the fact that for the last 15 years of my career, I was teaching focused and so I was mixing in the teaching focused world as well. And I have to say teaching focused academics are some of my favorite people love them. Uh, genuine people who are really [00:05:00] interested in student development and in doing the right thing by their students and are just generally lovely. I was surrounded all the time by people I genuinely really liked. Now, were there some people that I wanted to boot over the garden fence because they would never fill in the forms properly that I needed them to do that I didn't care about either, but they needed to happen. Yes, absolutely. There were people, but there really were very few people that if I got stuck sitting next to 'em at the Christmas dinner, I would be sad. I really loved the people I worked with. I adored my students. The students were wonderful even when they were being a pain in the bum. They were just enthusiastic, nice kids, and I really enjoyed all the time I spent with them. Um, I even... by the time I had sort of carved my niche in teaching focused work, and maybe I'll do a podcast another day about my transition from research oriented career to a teaching focused career and why I did it [00:06:00] and how I navigated it. I'll do that another day. But certainly by that stage I had found a kind of area that I cared a lot about, that I was pretty good at doing and that I was actually quite well recognized for, you know, people were asking my advice, I was getting like awards and recognitions and all that kind of stuff, and things were good. Okay. The one time where I would say things were not good was during the 2020, the pandemic. That was pretty horrendous, but I think that was very unique to this particular situation. Did it flag some of the things I like less about academia? Yes, potentially. But mostly I see that as a kind of a blip on and otherwise very lovely career now. Does that mean I don't think academia's a toxic environment? No, absolutely not. I think there's a huge amount of pressure. I think there is a huge amount of unnecessary [00:07:00] workload. I think there is a huge amount of trying to ring every last drop outta somebody. But I genuinely didn't come across very many people that I actively disliked and I actively thought were badly intending in their interactions. Does that mean I agreed with everyone in management? No, absolutely not. I think management, senior management made a whole bunch of good decisions and a whole bunch of really stupid decisions, unreasonable decisions, and so on. And when I was quite junior, I would get quite cross about that. As I got more senior, I understood more of the nuances and I understood more of the pressures, and I could see more how it came about and why they were doing the things they were doing. Even when I didn't necessarily agree with them, I could see how it happened. I also, as I got more senior and more insightful, I [00:08:00] would say more reflective. I also saw the extent to which most of the time when people weren't behaving the way I thought they should be behaving or other people thought they should be behaving, it was because of the stress and pressure they were under rather than them being intrinsically nasty people. Now there are some things I want to clarify here. I was very privileged in a number of ways. I kind of fitted in, I think it's fair to say. There were times when I didn't, when I was more teaching oriented and some of the research intensive people, um, would judge me for that, for example. But I did my PhD in a very, very supportive research group. I was very well protected through the early stages of my career. And so sort of got through that vulnerable bit with really, really good people around me. Now, there were some bits that got a bit complicated. Well, that's a story for not on a podcast, but on the whole, I was very well protected in ways that certainly I [00:09:00] don't see all of the PhD students in my membership, for example, and for many of you don't necessarily see being protected. But for me it was a good career and it was a career that I got an awful lot of opportunities out of, that I got an awful lot of happiness out of, and an awful lot of friends out of. And to be honest, I look back with pride and celebration, so you might be asking, okay, then why did you leave? And it's a valid question. The main reason I left was because I didn't want what was next. So by this stage I achieved full professor during the pandemic in 2020. And then after that I was head of education for my school, so I was overseeing all of the academic programs and I was on a track to sort of senior teaching leadership roles. You know, it probably would've been director of education for the college, next [00:10:00] maybe deputy provost, chancellor, education for the university, things like that. Okay. And you know, I knew the people that did those roles. I think, you know, I'm not saying I was a shoe-in, but there was certainly an expectation that I would apply for those things if they were to come up. And I increasingly realized I didn't want them. I might have been good at them in some ways, but I didn't want them, and that might sound strange, right? That's how you have wide influence, right? By affecting policy and instigating widespread change across an institution is how you have really big impact. And I was really interested in impact across the whole university. I've never been somebody who sits neat and tight in one discipline. I've always been interested in working across disciplines and across different areas of the university, and it certainly would've been a huge [00:11:00] promotion. It certainly would have been big increases in salary and all that sort of stuff. Right? And I knew a lot of the senior leadership team, so I'm sure it would've been a transition, but they were broadly good people and I was, you know, I was largely excited about, about working with them. So why did I decide that I didn't want to go that way? I didn't want to wait for those roles to come up and to apply for them. Well, it was two things really. One was about what I wanted to be doing, and two was about what I was good at. Because one of the things that I don't think I realized early enough, and I want all of you guys to realize much earlier than I did, is that you really have to understand yourself. You really have to understand not only what influence you want to have in the world, but also what you enjoy doing the most, what you want to spend time doing, and where your strengths are best spent. Okay. I spent a lot of time trying to [00:12:00] fix my faults instead of deciding where my strengths were best spent. And what I realized as I got further up through the tree was, whilst I had lots of good ideas about how things should be done, I was not a good people manager. Okay. Now some of you might be surprised by that, I get on with people, right? My saving grace was that people liked me. People generally knew that I was well intended and liked me personally. However, that doesn't make you a good people manager. I was not good at letting people kind of have their heads, so like, you know, give them an idea or give them a project to do and let them do it the way they want to do it. I have my ideas about how I want things to be done, and I'm not necessarily good at letting other people crack on and do it their own way. Is that a failing? Yeah, probably. Does it mean that, it made those things difficult? Yeah, probably. But it is a useful thing to recognize and don't get me wrong, right? I did all the leadership training and all those things, but when I got stressed, when I [00:13:00] felt under pressure, my general tendencies came back, and so I wasn't necessarily very good at letting other people do things their way. I also wasn't necessarily very good at doing all the kind of behind the scenes, collaborative discussions, stuff that enabled people to come along with me when I did have a new idea, I could sort of see it. I could see how obvious it was, and I could see that it was clearly the right thing to do, and so I couldn't understand why people needed a bit longer to sort of come round to it or to get past some of their objections and all that sort of thing. I was also somebody who was quite comfortable with big change, who was quite excited by big change, and I didn't necessarily under stand, people who would prefer things to stay as they are, even if it's not quite as good or whatever, just because it feels comfortable. My brain doesn't work that way and I wasn't always very good at, recognizing that other people were [00:14:00] feeling like that. I'm also somebody who can do a lot of work at the last minute, so I was also not very good at seeing out into the future to give people lots of notice for when we were gonna get things done. And I realized that the further I would go through my career, the more I would be managing others, the more I would be allowing other people to implement their views on things and just kind of guiding strategically or whatever, the more I would be having to sort of win hearts and minds, et cetera, et cetera and the more I realized that it wasn't really what I was great at and then I realized that actually the more I did that stuff, the less I was doing the things that I feel that I'm good at. The one-to-one conversations with people, the running small group sessions, the doing interesting keynotes, coming up with innovative new ways of explaining new ideas and that sort of thing. I'm good at that stuff and the [00:15:00] more I was doing teaching leadership, the less I was actually doing the stuff that I loved and that was genuinely 90% of the reason I left, I didn't want the things that were ahead of me. And I'm not someone who can tread water in circles. 'cause you could say, you know what? It's fine. Do some school level admin roles. You don't have to go for that ones. Maybe they'll try and talk you into it. Perhaps you do a few years of it, tolerate it, whatever. If I don't have something to work towards, I get really bored and grumpy. It's no surprise that these thoughts all accelerated a bit after I got my professorship 'cause I'd been wanting that for a long time. I'd been working hard for it and things and then we went into pandemic and that was a whole thing. So we survived that and then it was after that. It was a bit like there's nothing I'm striving for now. I could, I, you know, there's plenty of teaching related research I can still do. There's plenty of stuff I want to implement and things to [00:16:00] improve our programs, look after the students and all that stuff, but it's all going round again stuff. It's, here's another academic, yeah, here's Freshers, here's this, here's that. And I loved so much of it, but I can't tread water and stay in the same place. So for me, I didn't leave because I hated the environment. I didn't leave because it became intolerable or because I was bored of being burnt out or any of those things. I never did burn out. I was pretty overwhelmed at times, but it was that the positives were no longer sufficient for me. The striving, the thing I wanted to get to next was no longer there for me, and then the workload didn't feel worth it, and I think this is a really, really important thing to recognize is workload is not an absolute measure of this is enough, this is too much, this is not enough. Workload has to be proportionate to [00:17:00] how much you care about the other end of it. Now, does that mean we should have unlimited workloads? Obviously not, but I got annoyed by the workload. I got tired and stressed out when I had to stay too late and things like that. But when I was working towards something I believed in and that something I mostly enjoyed and was surrounded by nice people, I could cope with the workload just fine. If I had really wanted those jobs, really believed that I was gonna be great and would be able to do them in a really, really good way, and that I would enjoy that process, then absolutely I would've carried on with the workload. It was fine. It. It was fine. I was healthy. I was able to do it. Perhaps if my health had changed, that would be different. I realize, again, I'm speaking from a position of privilege, but genuinely my experience was it was a load of work, but it was really cool. So I left academia 90% because I felt like I'd finished it. [00:18:00] I'd done all the things I wanted to do. I don't wanna say ticked all the boxes, 'cause that sounds a bit kind of arbitrary, but, I'd achieved all my goals. I'd treat, you know, I wasn't somebody who grew up dreaming of a career in academia. I didn't even know that really existed until I was offered a PhD. But once I knew what academia was, I've done all the things that I wanted to do. And so then it was time to do something different. The 10% is that I had personal reasons to move back home to where I grew up , and. You can't really, there's nowhere where I live where you can teach what I used to teach. I was a sport scientist. I'm near one of the greatest universities in the world at home, Cambridge, but they don't have sport science. So it wasn't something that I could definitely carry on if I came back here and I certainly wasn't gonna commute for it. So that was the kind of 10%, but the vast majority was a sense that I had completed it. I'd done all the things I wanted to do, and then I was so [00:19:00] excited. Where it all became reality was two things. One where I got a gorgeous husband who would ensure that I could still eat while I was making my business start running and two, I came up with the business plan. I knew I wasn't gonna leave just to do anything. But I came up with the idea of the PhD Life coach membership specifically, and from there it was just, this is what I wanna do. This is all the bits of academia I adore. This is everything I like doing. I think there's a huge need for it. I can see the benefit that it would have, and I can do it. I will be good at it, and I don't need to lead a big team to do it. So some of you might be wondering, you know, will I ever get to a stage where the PhD life coach membership will have, um, you know, other coaches And I'll take a step back in a more leadership position. We might have guest coaches, keep a little eye out next year just 'cause [00:20:00] I think it's good to have more voices in there rather than it all being the Vicki Wright Show, but. I do not wanna take a step back. I want to be hands-on in the membership, talking to my students, knowing my students, coaching them, supporting them, and being there with them the whole way through. I wanna be producing these podcasts. I wanna be speaking to you guys. I wanna be writing your emails. I wanna be coaching you. I want to be with you guys all the time, whether you're a PhD student all the way through to full professor, because I think we all struggle with the same things. Now, once I've got enough people, if I can employ people who will do the behind the scenes stuff that I don't have to do anymore, happy days, I would love that. Somebody to do my invoices and all those things. Beautiful, perfect. But I wanna be hands on with all of this stuff. And so that's why I wanted to tell you this story because I think actually some people who are, especially in the early stages of their career, you hear so many horror stories about academia. And I do [00:21:00] not doubt for a second that those are true and that those are people's experiences. And I certainly saw elements of that throughout my career. But I think it's also important to hear the other bits. I think it's important to hear that it can be amazing. You have to remember I came into it at a different time, but even my last few years were still amazing. And I want you to know that you can choose to leave something that's really good. You do not have to stay doing something until you absolutely hate it. You can do something, love it, and then leave. That's all fine too. You can do whatever you want to do, and I think we need to be told that a little bit more often. Now, does that mean academics? Listen as I speak, does that mean I'm recommending you leave academia and become a coach? No, I'm really not. I would actually say that for 95% of people that would not be the decision you think it is. I [00:22:00] really mean that. I think it's often seen as an easy get out. It is far from an easy get out. If anyone wants to talk about it, you can let me know, but that's not what I'm saying. What I want to say is that you can make any decision you want to make for whatever reasons you want. I thought people were gonna think I was stupid. I thought people were gonna be like, whatcha doing? You're a professor. You've got such a secure job, you've got an amazing pension. You are gonna do these great things. We thought you were gonna be pro vice chancellor, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I thought people were gonna say that stuff. Some of them said that stuff. Most of them said, congratulations, you got out. Which probably says more about them than it does about me. But you can choose these things for any reason you want to. If you want a positive experience in academia, you can choose to have one, and you can choose to think about it in the ways you want to think about it. Put yourself in the places that you want to put yourself in and achieve all the things that you want to achieve. And when you feel like you've had enough, [00:23:00] you can use your skills elsewhere. There are so many options and so many ways that you can do this. I really hope that was a useful insight and helps you understand a little bit more about me. Please feel free to ask questions if you're on my newsletter, you can always just reply to that and I will try and get back to you as quickly as I can. I hope that was a interesting different sort of story for this week. So thank you all for listening, and I'll see you next week.
< Imposter syndrome often affects the most high achieving people yet it can still feel so true that you’re “not good enough” and “conning” other people into believing you’re better than you are. In this episode, I discuss a paradox that I see a lot in academics experiencing imposter syndrome - the tendency to simultaneously believe that you are an imposter AND hold yourself to higher standards than you hold other people. I’ll discuss the five past experiences that may influence why you have these paradoxical beliefs and why recognising this can be the first step to overcoming some of these imposterish thoughts. Links for the transcript If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on how to overcome imposter syndrome . Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast, and this week I'm gonna be thinking about imposter syndrome again. Now this is something we've been talking about quite a bit in the PhD life coach membership 'cause it's part of the theme for Q4 of 2025, and I think this topic is relevant to everyone, right? I coach people all the way from the beginning of their PhDs through to very senior academics, and imposter syndrome shows up at all stages. But the more I've talked to people, the more I've coached people on this sort of topic, the more I've noticed a paradox that doesn't often get talked about. And so that's what I'm gonna talk about today, this paradox of imposter syndrome. Now, before we go any further, before I explain the paradox, I do have to just say one thing, which is, I hate the phrase imposter syndrome. Okay. Everyone uses it. I've mentioned this on the podcast before. It makes it sound like it's a medical condition. It makes it sound like there's something psychiatrically wrong with you. None of those things are true. It makes it sound like it's fixed, that you can't do [00:01:00] anything about it, that you need to cure yourself in some way. None of those things are true either. Other people use the phrase imposter phenomenon. I kind of prefer that, I think, although I think people don't generally understand what it means, but whenever I'm talking about imposter syndrome, imposter phenomenon, I'm thinking about this tendency that some people have to consider that they are not as good as other people think they are. To believe that they are in some ways, conning other people around them into believing they're better than they are and that is at least in part, a consequence of the environment that you are in. Often we see imposter syndrome, imposter phenomenon as some kind of like individual failing, that we should just think better thoughts and be more confident and build our resilience and all those helpful things, uh, helpful things. When in reality many people are treated like imposters simply because they don't fit the kind of stereotype of what somebody in academia should be like, look like, sound like, behave like. [00:02:00] Okay, so everything I say today is within that context that I'm somewhat skeptical of these imposter behaviors and thoughts as being part of a syndrome, and I'm skeptical of the extent to which they are an individual thought mistake rather than a consequence of the way that people are treated. However, the mindset piece is the one piece that we have most control over, that we are actually able to work on as individuals. And I think there are many ways that we are maybe not creating our own imposter syndrome, but we are exacerbating it and making it more uncomfortable than it needs to be. So. All those kind of caveats in place. What do I mean by the paradox of imposter syndrome? Now, some of you may have heard of something called the Dunning Kruger effect before. This is where people who have the highest abilities are most likely to feel likely they're imposters. And I did a little bit of reading around this, there's some [00:03:00] controversy around the original mathematics, the original analysis that demonstrated this, as to whether it was a real effect or whether it was an artifact or not. But essentially what they demonstrated was that if you were a high achieving person, you were much more likely to feel like an imposter than somebody who was not. Everyone I work with are already in the kind of top end of educational experience, educational performance by virtue of the fact that they're either doing or have done a PhD. I certainly see a very high rate of imposter syndrome amongst these people. I don't have other people to compare them to, so I can't say it's necessarily more than the general population, but it's certainly a very high level for people who are objectively excellent at what they do. The paradox that I've noticed though, takes that one little step further. It doesn't seem to me that it's just that people who are more capable are more likely to perceive themselves as imposters. [00:04:00] It's that these high achieving people who are having all these imposter ish thoughts are also holding themselves to a standard that is not realistic. So in my experience, most people are not criticizing themselves for being a bit too average. They are simultaneously telling themselves that they are worse than everybody else. That everyone else can do this more easily. Everyone else is more successful than me and at the same time, they are telling themselves that they shouldn't find this difficult, that they should be able to write a good first draft, first attempt, that they shouldn't need multiple redrafts, that they shouldn't get this much feedback. And even when you kind of try and normalize those processes that everyone writes a [00:05:00] somewhat shoddy first draft, unless it's something they've written in many formats before, they somehow still believe that that's true, but that they shouldn't, that they should be able to perform at this exceptionally high standard. That they should be able to do things easily without too much effort and in a way that is pretty good quality first time. Okay. I want you to reflect. Does that feel like your thinking? Are you holding these two really contradictory thoughts in your head? That you're not good enough, that you've convinced everybody that you are, but you've conned them in some way. Yet at the same time, there's an expectation that you should be exceptional. If that feels true to you, it's okay. I see an awful lot in academia and I have some ideas as to where it [00:06:00] comes from. Now, this is not based in research, what I'm about to say. This is based in my experience of talking with hundreds of PhD students and academics about issues like this and working with them over a period of 20 something years. So this is very much anecdotal, but I really think it is worth reflecting on. Where I think this paradox is coming from is rooted in the background of people who end up working in academia. The vast majority of people who work in academia have been highly successful in either their previous educational experiences or in previous professional experiences. Many, many of you who are going into PhDs who are in academic careers now will have excelled at school. Not all of you. Some of you are going, oh, I didn't, that's okay. I'm gonna come to you in a minute. Okay? But many, many of you will have excelled at school. And the problem is that sounds great, right? We all wanna excel at school. That's brilliant. The [00:07:00] problem is when you excel at school and when you excel, then into maybe your early university careers as well, is that actually that becomes something that you are really rewarded for, that you really value in yourself, and that kind of becomes part of who you think you are. I am somebody who excels in these ways and often we then wrap up in that a bunch of stories about the ways in which it's okay to excel. And I sort of identified five things that I see really regularly with my members, with other PhD students and academics that I work with, that show the way their pasts shape the expectations they now have of themselves. The first is around being the best. So many people who have excelled in [00:08:00] their previous lives, they've excelled in their previous educational experiences take a lot of value from coming top of the class. They expect to be one of, if not the better performance. You know, maybe your class used to rank you, maybe you went to top universities, you got top grades, you beat other people in these various different, relatively arbitrary often performance measures, and that becomes part of your sense of who you are, that I should be somebody who is the best? I'm not used to being somewhere in the middle of the pack. I should be somewhere near the best. Now the trouble is when you start putting in a room into a university, a whole load of people who've all been top of their class in the past, suddenly you are much more normal than you are used to being. And suddenly this notion that you should be the best doesn't feel so plausible anymore. And the problem is that if [00:09:00] you've spent your whole childhood believing that success is being the best, then you suddenly feel like an imposter. Or you can tell yourself you're an imposter if you are not the best. That somehow some part of your brain believes that you don't deserve to be there if you are not the best. You are not used to making up the numbers. You're not used to being an average contributor to a particular degree, program, career, whatever it might be. And by the way, that's not saying that you are not the best now, but not all of you can be the best. I'm sorry, I hate to break that to you, but if we have been brought up believing that being the best is what you have to do in order to belong, then suddenly we're in a position where we're telling ourselves we're an imposter, but we're holding it up against the really unfair criteria that the only way to belong is to be the best. My second thing I've observed, and this [00:10:00] might be different people, okay, might be the same, might be different people. These are people who've been brought up believing that the way to be valued, the way you get rewarded is not just to be very good at what you do, but to be good with seemingly no effort. There's people that take pride in having winged it, that actually if they can do well in a school test, they can do well in exams, whatever it might be, you know, they've written their undergraduate dissertation at the last minute, that that is somehow better, that that is proof of how good you are, that you haven't had to put effort in. And even if you don't believe that, even if you don't actually believe that you shouldn't have to put in effort, if you are somebody that academic work has often come easily to, you won't necessarily have experienced having to put in lots of effort. Now, that's not the same thing as not having to work hard. Okay? Everyone who has got to where you guys have got to has worked hard at some point in their lives. [00:11:00] But that is not the same thing as spending lots of time sort of tussling with something that you don't understand. Usually the people that have done really well in school have never really experienced or rarely experienced that sensation of, I just don't get this, but I'm gonna need to figure it out 'cause I've got to do it. Usually you've got it reasonably quickly. And so again, when we then find ourselves in this kind of hierarchical performance oriented environment where we are all pushing the boundaries of our knowledge, suddenly having to put a bunch of effort in, finding it difficult, having to sort of wallow in that confusion and keep moving forwards and doing it anyway and trying to figure it out a bit at a time that feels like you're doing something wrong, where for the vast majority of the population that's doing it. That's literally how things get done. [00:12:00] They were doing that at school. They were doing that in their undergraduate degrees, if they did them, they were doing that in their early careers. That's just doing it. But when you've grown up as somebody who hasn't had to put that much effort in, who hasn't had to sort of force themselves to kind of really stay engaged with something they really don't understand, then suddenly it feels like failing. It suddenly feels like you're an imposter. When in actual fact you're not an imposter at all, that is literally doing it. The third thing, 'cause some of you might be listening to this going well, neither of those things are me. I was never the best at school. I've always worked really hard, I've never got found things easy. The third one I've observed is people who believe that they could and should be able to do it all to the best of their ability. This is where those of you who are kind of consider yourselves hard workers and stuff often come in that you were able to do all of your homework and you were able to do it all to a good standard [00:13:00] because you worked really hard, you were committed. Maybe it didn't come easy. Maybe you persisted. But through that persistence, through that hard work, you were able to tick all the boxes. You were able to do all the things. You did all your readings, you finished all your homeworks, you made your notes beautiful, I'm sure. And suddenly you find yourself now in a place where it's not possible to read it all. It's not possible to write it all. It's not possible to research all the ideas that you come up with, okay? And it's perfectly unreasonable to consider yourself to be able to, but if you have spent your whole life, being somebody who has been able to do it all, who has completed all the extra readings, who does do things for extra credit, has always managed all of these things, then that again, can feel like a fail. Where again, to the average person, to the normal person, [00:14:00] they accepted it ages ago that they weren't gonna do all the readings, that they weren't gonna be able to complete everything to their best of their ability, that they were just gonna have to get some bits of it done and it will just have to do, and they'd have to suck up getting a C on it or whatever. Many of you won't have had to experience that before because even through undergraduate and possibly even master's, depending on the nature of your program, it was still possible to do it all. It was even clear what all is. 'cause some of this with PhD, it's not even, and even academics as well, it's not even that you can't do it all. It's that there's no defined boundary of what all is. Anyway, we get to choose the scope of our research. We get to choose what we should or shouldn't have read. We get to choose what we know about and don't know about. Whereas even if you are going, well, you know my master. I definitely didn't do all my reading or whatever you still knew what doing it all would look like. It would be doing all that reading, for example. [00:15:00] Okay, so now you're in a place where there's no clear definition of what all means. There's no way of doing it all anyway. And again, we have a tendency, people like us have a tendency to interpret that as being an imposter, that in some way other people managing to do it all, or it's okay that they're not doing it all, but I should be doing it all. 'cause my conception of being good enough is doing it all. So we've done being the best, not putting effort in and doing it all as three of my five things so far. The fourth one is around not needing help. So a lot of people who've been high achieving through their lives, whether that was initially at school or whether you went off and did another career first and excelled there. A lot of people really take pride in not having needed help along the way. They were able to just do their homework. They were able to just prepare for [00:16:00] exams. They didn't need lots of help. And remember, by the way, you're not expected to resonate with all five of these. You might resonate with all, but others you'll resonate with some of them. Not others. Okay. I really resonate with the doing it all and probably sounds awful the being the best as well. I resonate with those ones a lot. I resonate less with the not asking for help side of things. I always quite liked asking for help. It was fine. So you'll resonate with some more than others. And again, if you are somebody who has traditionally been able to do everything without getting any extra help, without actually having to ask about things that you didn't understand, suddenly when you're in a position where you do need to do that again, it can feel like you're failing. It can feel like you're an imposter. Where in reality, for most people, that's just normality. That just is what you do. You dunno how to do it. You are someone, they help you. You do it. It doesn't mean anything about you as a person, but if you've pinned your self worth on the fact that you don't ask for help, then suddenly you're [00:17:00] holding yourself to a standard that you are never gonna meet. We can't do academia. Whatever stage you're at, we can't do academia without the help of others. Ironically, as you get more senior, for academics listening, as you get more senior, you start relying on the help of those senior to you as before, but also to those junior to you as well. Most academics can't maintain a research profile without the support and assistance of their PhD students and postdocs, particularly in the sort of science, engineering, maths, medicine end of things. But we all need help in order to succeed in academia and believing that we don't, again, positions this imposters in a way that's really unfair. The fifth thing that I've recognized, and I resonate with this one hugely, although I have overcome it, is that it's okay to do well as long as you don't brag. Now, I don't know what your school was like, but at my school it was not cool to be clever. [00:18:00] It was not on any level cool. To be clever, I was usually top of my classes, certainly until I went to sixth form, and to some extent there as well, to be fair and trust me, the boys did not like the girls who did well at school. Now that sounds like it shouldn't matter, but when you are 14, that really, really matters. And so the last thing I would do at school is tell people what marks I got on a test. The last thing I would want anybody to know is whether I've done all my homework or not. I mean, I usually hadn't, 'cause I'd usually forgotten it existed, but that's a different story. Um, the last thing I would do is brag about my achievements because no one thought they were cool. And when you are 14, being cool is very important. And this doesn't stop when we get past being 14, right? There can be a real tendency in a wide range of societies to penalize [00:19:00] people who brag about their achievements and to be honest, to particularly penalize people who were socialized as being female, people who come from minority backgrounds, et cetera, et cetera. So then we've had this whole life where we've reinforced that we've got to do well. We've preferably got to do better than other people. We preferably got to do it with minimal effort. We've preferably got to do all the things and we preferably got to do it with very little help, but we also must be careful not to acknowledge those achievements too much because other people will judge us as being bigheaded. And then we wonder why we have these screwed up conceptions of who we are and what we're actually good at. Because the problem is if we tell ourselves we're bragging to tell other people about our achievements, what we also do is spend less time telling ourselves about our achievements too. 'cause it somehow feels like bragging, even if it's happening inside your head. And so we end up in this place where we've rewarded ourselves, where other people have [00:20:00] rewarded us for all this kind of complicated performance that we've put on, and where we can't compliment ourselves on it too much, and where we can't even be seen to be enjoying other people complimenting on it too much. 'cause that might make us look like we are bigheaded too. So we have to like poo poo any compliments or praise that we get from other people. And that's where we end up with this paradox of imposter syndrome, where we are simultaneously telling ourselves that we're simply not good enough and that we've conned other people into believing that we are, and that the standard we are holding ourselves against is completely unfair and unrealistic. So what do we need to do? Okay, that's a whole, like when things are determined by our background experiences, our kind of formative thoughts and all that stuff, it can be really hard to then go, okay, what do we do about that? The first thing is I want you to recognize it. I want [00:21:00] you to recognize where the reason you think you're an imposter is because you are expecting yourself to do something that is unrealistic. This is not about the times where we think we're an imposter because we literally don't know what we're doing. It's the times where we're criticizing ourselves for being an imposter, for taking multiple drafts to get a decent draft together, for example. Things that in reality are absolutely normal. I want you just to notice and go, oh, I'm doing that thing where I'm holding myself to an unrealistic standard again, aren't I? We don't have to change it. We have to notice it as a pattern notice as that, oh yeah, I do that thing. And we're gonna notice compassionately, right? We're not gonna be like, oh, I'm being that awful person again. We're gonna notice compassionately, but we're gonna notice it. The second thing I want us to do is I want us to really normalize effort and confusion. Now, people have talked about normalizing failure a lot in the past. So they've talked about, you know, people sharing their CV of failures, all [00:22:00] the grants. They didn't get, and all the papers that were rejected and everything, and I think that's great, right? Big fan. I do think it comes from a place of privilege where there's certain types of people that are able to share that information without it adversely affecting them. So I don't think it's perfect, but I do think it's useful, right? It's useful to know that other people have had these experiences, but what I wanted to focus on more is normalizing kind of the storm before the calm. I know that's the wrong way around, but the storm that's before the calm, I want us to normalize the confusion, the difficulties that happen before you get to the version you make public. Because again, people really believe that their research questions should come outta their head fully formed, that they should be able just to sit down, decide what it is, and this is what it is. That drafts should come out mostly coherent the first time, and [00:23:00] anybody who's been in this game for a while knows that that's not true. Hey, even if you've been in this game for a while and you still think it should for you, you also know that it's not true for other people. You also know that these things are iterative processes that we'll spend ages in a bit of confusion about being unsure as to whether to take it this way or take it that way. What argument will make sense, da, da, da, and that on some random Tuesday in three months time, we'll figure it out. But in the meantime, it's all a bit of a mess. We need to normalize that. I used to show my students the number of drafts it took me to get from like starting writing a paper to the final finished article. People don't even think about the extent to which articles are changed during the review process. There's this sort of general belief that if you were good, you'd be able to produce a first draft that was something in the order of what you read in a journal article, and no [00:24:00] one does that. So we need to normalize the kind of confusion, the changing of mind, the figuring it out, the not being certain, but muddling through anyway kind of stages, as being part of the academic process, not a sign that you're not good enough to be here. That is literally doing the research. One of the things that I often talk about with my members is that anybody doing a PhD or working in academia is working right at the edges of human knowledge. You are truly doing things that no one has ever done before. That's the whole purpose of producing original research, and that means we are gonna go in the wrong direction sometimes. That means we're gonna be muddling around in the dark. Sometimes that means that sometimes it's not gonna work, or you are gonna change your mind, or you're gonna find evidence to the contrary, or your model is broken and you need to rerun it, whatever it might be, right? That is literally what happens when you are [00:25:00] at the edges of human knowledge. It is not a sign that you aren't good enough. It is a sign that you are doing really difficult work with your incredible human brain at the edges of human knowledge, and you will figure it out. And the figuring it out bit is the important part. So when you are next telling yourself that you are an imposter, that you have conned them into believing that you are competent enough. I want you to remember. That having a process where you are confused and unsure and figuring it out behind the scenes, and then able to ask for help when you need it, able to kind of present it in its half-formed state and then able to get it to something that looks vaguely competent, IE convincing them, you are competent. That's doing it. That's not you doing anything wrong. That's not you pulling the wool over anybody's eyes. That is [00:26:00] literally doing it. It's meant to be a mess inside your head. It is meant to be a mess your first draft, it is meant to take a process of figuring it all out. You are meant to make mistakes. You are meant to get help. You are meant to pull it together one way and then change your mind. Do it a different way. All of those things are doing it, and if you can do all that stuff and then get it to a stage where you can calm somebody into believing that you are competent. That means you are competent. That literally means you are competent. If you can be confused and then get it to a stage where somebody else is believing that you know what you're talking about, and suddenly it is actually clear, that's competence. Competence doesn't start at the beginning of doing something. Competence is where you get to. No one cares if it took like 30 drafts to get it to this stage. Is it adequate for what you want it for now? Yes. And that means [00:27:00] you're competent. That means you're not an imposter. Does it mean you don't have things to learn? Obviously not. I think half the time imposter syndrome is not imposter syndrome, it's just being a beginner. And that can be at any stage of the career, beginner in the thing you are doing at the moment. Sometimes imposter syndrome is simply a gap in your skills between where you are at and where you want to be, and we get to focus on actually just practicing and training and getting support and developing those skills rather than telling ourselves, we don't deserve to be here, but the vast majority of the time we are telling ourselves we're an imposter because we're holding ourselves to unrealistic standards, and we're expecting and believing that having a bit of a shambles before you get there means you've done it wrong, rather than it literally just being how you do it. I really hope that's helped you. I know that I can't magically come in and just take out those impossible syndrome thoughts from your head. I wish I could, but please [00:28:00] notice where there is a paradox. Notice where you are holding yourself to unrealistic standards. Notice compassionately, and remind yourself that this is literally you doing academic research. I'm so proud of you all. Thank you all for listening, and I will see you next week.
< One of the most paralysing thoughts in academia is “I don’t know what to do”. Whether it’s about your next career move or how to analyse your data or what argument you want to emphasise, we can get stuck in the “don’t knows” for weeks or months. In this episode I help you break “I don’t know” down into “I can find out”, “I can’t know”, and “I get to decide”, so that you can plan a route forwards. Perfect for anyone who is bored of feeling stuck in indecision! Links I refer to in this episode If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on how to use a “ do know don’t know ” list. Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast and this week we are gonna be talking about a phrase that comes up in my coaching program all the time. And that is the phrase I don't know. You probably hear yourself say this a lot as well in the context of all sorts of things. I don't know where to start. I don't know if I can get this all done. I don't know what argument I'm trying to make. I don't know whether to go to the conference. I don't know if I'm ready to apply for promotion. I don't know if I'll pass my Viva. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And the problem with that phrase, and we've touched on it in the podcast before, the problem with that phrase is that it is just infinitely paralyzing. When we tell ourselves we simply don't know something, it becomes almost impossible to decide what we're gonna do next. And what we usually do is when we think, I don't know, we think therefore I can't decide what to do, then we end [00:01:00] up feeling some really uncomfortable emotions, right? We feel overwhelmed, we feel anxious, we feel worried, whatever it might be. When we feel negative emotions, we all know, or at least any of you who have been here, when I've been talking about procrastination, when we feel uncomfortable emotions, the tendency is to try and avoid them. So what happens is we tell ourselves we don't know something then we feel uncomfortable emotions, and then we avoid those uncomfortable emotions by doing something different, whatever it is for you, I'm a scroller, I have to say. So we avoid our uncomfortable emotions by scrolling and then at the end of the day, we still don't know. We're still no closer to knowing, but now we're also beating ourselves up about the fact that we've wasted the day procrastinating. If that sounds like you don't worry. This is totally, totally normal. It happens all the time, whether you are a PhD student or all the way through to full professor or anything in between. There are so many things that it feels like we don't know and that we should be able to know [00:02:00] that it can be really, really overwhelming. What I'm gonna do in this episode is help you break down that sensation of, I don't know, into four different types of, I don't know. And from there, once we've identified which type of, I don't know we are in, it's a lot easier to start planning a way forward. So what are these four categories that I've identified? Well, the first is, I don't know, but I could know. So this is, I don't know if that journal accepts qualitative research or I don't know if it's possible to apply for that job when I have a PhD, but I don't have postdoctoral experience or a publication or whatever, or I don't know what the word limit of my PhD thesis is. So these are issues where there's something that actually is identifiable, [00:03:00] that is objectively true in some sort of meaningful way, and which you are able to find out at the moment. You may not know it right now and you may not fully see what routes there are to you finding it out, but it would be possible to find it out. So these are usually to do with rules and regulations or specific ways to do things where there is a set way to do it. How to perform a particular analysis for example. Whether an archive has the thing you want to find there. If we identify this as a, you know what, there actually is a objective truth here somewhere, then we can spin our brain off into, okay, how do I find out? Who might know about this? Where can I go to figure this stuff out? What do I need to do? What are the steps I need to take to identify the answer? To move from, I don't know, [00:04:00] to, I do know. Identifying that there actually is an objective answer out there makes it so much easier to then start brainstorming about how you can figure it out and how you can move forward. The second category are things where we don't know and we will find out, but we can't know right now. So these are things like, I don't know if my PhD is good enough. I don't know if my article will get published. I don't know if my promotion will be accepted. So there is an answer. It's just not accessible right now. And the problem with that is where there is an answer and it's not accessible right now, we can often feel quite discombobulated, right? We can feel quite uncomfortable where we're having to work towards something that [00:05:00] we don't know if it's going to work. This can also be true if you are doing analysis and things where there's maybe not a right way. Maybe you are developing a new methodology or something like that, and you are having to kind of figure it out. You will find out whether this way of measuring whatever it is you're measuring is working or not, right? Say we're doing lab work, for example, you will find out at some point whether you get a meaningful result, but you don't know yet. And in these situations, what we get to do is we get to accept that there are gonna be some uncomfortable emotions associated with the not knowing bit. Often we want to know because we want to take away those uncomfortable emotions, that sort of feeling of certainty and confusion and stuff, we're often not used to tolerating that, and so we sort of convince ourselves somehow that if only I knew this was gonna work, it would be fine. Or if only I [00:06:00] knew whether I was gonna get the job or not, it would be okay. What we often then do in these situations is we look for reassurance, right? If we are not sure that our paper's gonna get accepted, we, you know, go on our co-authors or our bosses or whatever to reassure us that they think it's good enough. We get 20 different people to read it so they can reassure us that it probably will be good enough. And in actual fact, none of those things really help 'cause they can't tell you that it's definitely good enough. They can only give you their advice, and in many ways it just doesn't actually fix the uncomfortable feelings at all. The magic here is accepting that we don't have to fix those uncomfortable feelings. That we can tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing whether we are gonna pass or not, whether we're gonna get the job or not, whether we're gonna get promoted or not, that we can tolerate that uncertainty and therefore we can live in a world where we don't know that yet. Now, how do we do that? [00:07:00] Part of it is about being kind to ourselves, so it is not sort of spiraling and making it very dramatic the consequences of it not being okay. Part of it is having faith that whatever happens, future you is gonna figure it out. So one of the things I often say, whether it's work related things or home related things, is we cross that bridge when we come to it. So well known phrase for a good reason because when we try and sort of cross all the bridges before we even get to them, you don't know what problems you're solving. And so many ways what we end up doing is kind of solving every eventuality, which is awful, right? So we end up in this situation where it's like if that article gets rejected from there, then I'm gonna submit it to this one. But if it gets rejected there as well, then it's gonna be this one, but then I'm gonna need to shorten it or lengthen it or change the framing of it, or whatever it might be. But then if it does get accepted, then this is gonna be a, you know, you can hear from my voice how exhausting it is to try and cover off every eventuality, and that's what [00:08:00] happens when we get ahead of ourselves on these paths. We don't even know what bridge we need to cross, yet we're trying to plan for all of them in the mistaken belief that we think it will help us feel better. It doesn't, we have to be able to stay here and say, at the moment, I can tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing. I can reassure myself that whatever happens, I will figure it out when I get there and that it's okay not to know at the moment. And what we then get to do is we get to say to ourselves, okay, if I can't know at the moment, whether this is gonna be okay, if I can't know at the moment what the outcome is going to be, how do I want to behave in that period of not knowing? What sort of person do I want to show up as? What kind of thoughts do I want to be saying to myself? What kind of actions do I want to be taking? And from there, we get to look after ourselves during this period of [00:09:00] unknowing, and then we indirectly make it feel more comfortable because suddenly we are moving in a way that is coherent with the person that we wanna be, that feels authentic, that feels like our future self, even though we don't know. As an example, if you are coming up to your Viva or a promotion interview or something like that, and you don't know if you're gonna get it or not, what do you want to have done between now and then in the not knowing? What actions do you wanna take? How do you wanna reassure yourselves? What emotions do you wanna be trying to induce in yourself to support yourself through that unknowing and to have as positive as possible an influence on that outcome? Because that's the thing we have to remember. One of the reasons that we don't know what's gonna happen is that there are so many variables, and some of them you are in control of, not all of them, [00:10:00] right? Which is why no one can ever reassure you fully. We are not in control of what the interviewer says, what the viva examiner says but there is a bunch that we are in control of, and that's the bit we get to focus on when we stop trying to fix the uncertainty with certainty, and instead try and support the uncertainty with kind of care and sensible actions forward. So we've got, so far, we've got the, I don't know where it's possible to know, and I'm gonna go and find out. We've got the, I don't know yet, but I will know in the future. Okay. Where we get to decide what we're gonna do in the meantime. The third type of, I don't know, I want to talk about today is the, I don't know, and I'll probably never know stuff. This can be some of the hardest to get used to because it can really spin in your brain and there's [00:11:00] no point in your life at which you will know for sure, and the problem is, this is, to be honest, most of the big questions in our lives. Was it the right thing to take this job instead of that job? Will it be the right thing to move countries or to not move countries, to stay at the same institution, to pursue this line of research instead of that line of research? Now, we'll obviously get some subjective information in the future when we see whether we like where we are, whether we're enjoying the research and all of those things, but we'll never know for sure whether it was the best decision or not because we didn't take the other decision. You can't decide whether staying in this country was a better decision than moving to a different country because you didn't do the other one. You don't know how it would've worked out if you had done the other one. It's the same as big personal decisions, you know, is this the right [00:12:00] person to marry? Is this the best possible person to marry? Well, we don't know 'cause we didn't live all the other lives. So what we get to do here when we identify that this is something where there is no knowing, then we get to make our decisions from that place. And I have a whole episode about how to make decisions that you love, in fact, I have it as a workshop that I run for universities as well. So how to make decisions that you love. So if you are thinking, okay, there's decisions I need to make that I will probably never know whether it was the right decision, best decision, or whatever, then I would really recommend that episode. Now some of these become an I get to decide problem, which is my fourth category of don't knows, which I'll talk about in a second. But not all of them will. Some of them are gonna be things like I don't know if my supervisor rates me or not. I don't know if my head of school likes me. These sorts of things [00:13:00] you are probably never gonna know. Maybe something will happen at some point that will convince you one way or the other, but usually when it comes to other people's opinions of you, things like that, we are never going to know. And so it's really useful to practice being okay not knowing, and again, this is an example of where the trying to find out in order to reassure yourself can make it worse. So this is where we end up being needy with people. Do you like me? Do you like me? Can I come to this? Do you want to come to that? You my friend, are you really? Do you love me? All that stuff. None of that makes you more attractive, right? None of that makes people wanna spend time with you. But that's us trying to shore up our own sort of self-esteem by feeling more certain about these things. When instead where we can identify that this is a, I'll never know for sure problem then we get to [00:14:00] ask ourselves, how do I look after myself? How do I look after myself when I'll never know for sure whether this was the best thing I could have done and whether I'll never know for sure what these people think of me. Again, we then get to say, okay, how do I look after myself in that environment? What do I wanna say to myself? What emotions do I wanna induce in myself? What actions do I want to take? What sort of person do I want to be when I'm not sure? This is something, especially the, what do people think of me? Think This is something that I struggled with a lot, especially growing up, but even into a long way into my adulthood, to be honest. I think it is part of having a, not really a DHD diagnosis. But lots of tendencies in that direction. People have lots of opinions about whether you talk too much, whether you interrupt too much, whether you do this too much, that too much, whether you don't do this. Yeah, you get lots of opinions. I don't have super strong rejection sensitivity. I do to some extent, but not as bad as some people with A DHD have [00:15:00] it but as I got to understand. This all better and understand myself better. One of the things I decided was I'm just gonna assume people like me it 'cause it just struck me that it doesn't really help to behave in any other way. Now, does that mean I force myself on people? No, absolutely. I vaguely read a room. You know, if you are not making tons and tons of effort to spend time with me or to talk to me, that's fine. Uh, you know, happy days, whatever. But I'm not gonna assume it means you hate me. I'm gonna, you know, my baseline assumption is that people like me and also that if you don't, that's okay too, because there's a lot of people... I was about to say, there's a lot of people I don't like. I don't think they're actually, I don't think that's actually true. There are a bunch of people I dislike. There are elements of a bunch of people I [00:16:00] dislike. I don't think I'm someone who really dislikes lots and lots of people. But there's people, right? We all got people. And so if I'm allowed to dislike people, then people are allowed to dislike me too. So that's one of the ways that I've kind of managed that uncertainty of not knowing what people think of me, is to kind of act as though I assume people like me and to try not to ruminate too much if evidence to the contrary comes up. Is it easy? Not always, but as a general rule of thumb, that has really, really helped me. Now that's the, I don't know, and I'll never know stuff. And then the fourth group is the, I don't know, but I get to decide group. And to be honest, this is the biggest group of all. There are some things that we'll never know. There are some things that we'll know in time we can't know now, and there are some things where there's a truly factual answer, but the vast [00:17:00] majority of things fall into the, I don't know, but I get to decide category. And this is essentially anything to do with choosing a direction moving forward. So this can be what research to focus on, how to make your argument, what to do first. Most of the, I don't knows, that you have in your life are I get to decide things. I don't know if I should do this or I should do that. I don't know if I should apply for promotion this year or next year. I don't know if I should change institution. These are all I get to decide problems. Will we ever know if it was the right decision? No. Is there such a thing as a right decision? Probably not, but we get to decide. And when we really grasp that, suddenly we get to start asking ourselves, how am I gonna decide, on what basis am I gonna decide? What do I want to prioritize? What's important to me right now? What sort of person do I want to [00:18:00] be? One of the biggest causes of, I dunno what to do, is getting conflicting opinions. So particularly as a PhD student, but even into your academic career, one person's saying, oh, you should focus on this. And someone's saying, focus on that. Or someone saying, include this stuff or exclude that stuff. You're like, I dunno what to do. I'm getting different advice. That is the perfect example of a, you get to decide problem. If people have got different opinions on it, that is like living proof that there's not one right way. That if that one person was in charge, they'd have done that and if that person was in charge, they'd have done something completely different. And you get to decide. So those are my four different types of, don't knows. I don't know but there is an objective answer that I can find out. I don't know, but I will know at some point in the future. I don't know and there's no way to ever find out and I don't know, but I get to decide. If you can pick apart your particular problem, I want you to think [00:19:00] now, what do I keep telling myself I don't know about? Pick which of those it is. And then you get to explore what your route forward from there can be. Before we finish, I'm gonna take one example that people often find difficult to put into one of these thing categories, and that is, I don't know if I've got time to do this. So let's work it through. Is it a, there's an objective answer to this? Possibly. So the first step would be to figure that out. Is there an objective amount of time that this thing takes? So is it fixed scope, fixed quality, and therefore a kind of predictable amount of time? Is there a way of knowing that? Often there's not, right? Often there's a variety of different scopes and qualities, and sometimes we work faster than others when we're up against the deadline or whatever, but [00:20:00] you can go, you know what, actually it takes me two hours to process each person's data. I've got 200 people, I've got this many hours. Actually, this just isn't possible. So it is useful if you are asking yourself, I don't know if I have time to do this, to say, okay, is there a way that this is actually quantifiable that I could work out whether it is or isn't possible. Now, usually it's hard to say it is possible, but you should be able to work out whether it is objectively not possible. This is always particularly relevant for those of you who are balancing PhD with other full-time part-time work. If there's not an objective answer, we get to say, is there, is this a problem where we will know at some point? Well, yes. When we hit the deadline and we either have or haven't done it, we're gonna find out then whether it was possible to do it or not. However, because of the way our silly little brains work, there will still probably be a part of you that are saying, oh, but if I had done this, then it would've been possible. [00:21:00] If I'd just worked hard, if I'd stayed up later, if I'd been more focused, if I'd procrastinated less, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. So is it gonna be possible at some point in the future to know whether you did do it or not? Yes. Absolutely. We will find that out in the future. Will you ever know for sure whether you could have done it? No. That falls into the, I don't know whether it would've been possible and I can't know because I can't do all the versions of it, so I don't know whether it was possible or not. The only way I guess we get a definitive answer is if you do get it done and then you know it was possible. So then what we get to say is, okay, I either need to accept that i'm gonna find out at some point, and I need to decide how I'm gonna behave in the meantime or we get to decide whether I'm giving it time or not, and I would always recommend you go this way. Most people go for the, okay, I'm either gonna stress about the fact that I don't have time to do this, [00:22:00] or I'm just gonna have a go and see how I get on. So that's the deciding. It's a, I'll find out at some point if I have enough time, and in the meantime I wanna work hard answer. Okay. There's nothing inherently wrong with that way of doing it. The problem is it does often lead to burnout. It often leads to overwork. It often leads to other stuff getting neglected because you're putting everything into this one thing that you don't know whether it's possible or not. I would always encourage you to consider, I don't know if I have time to do this or not a I get to decide problem. The reason for that is most tasks don't have an objective amount of time that they take, and most lives don't have an objective amount of stuff that has to be done. Now you might feel like it does. Okay. Often there's a lot of things that we do with our lives that we just take for granted as have to be done, where actually it's, it's often [00:23:00] not true. You know, if you are somebody who has to walk for an hour every day, there's lots of people who don't walk for an hour every day. If you are somebody who has to cook, cook all their kids' meals from fresh, there are lots of people who don't cook all their kids' meals from fresh. Many of these things are decisions. Okay. The reason I really like going for the, I don't know if I have time as being an I get to decide problem is because what you then get to do is you get to decide, okay, how many hours do I have access to that I am willing to give this, that I am able to give this, what am I able or willing to stop doing in order to buy myself some more hours? How fast or how limited in scope or quality am I willing to do this in order to get it done? And then I get to decide whether I want to do that or not. It might be that sometimes you get to decide that you wanna put more of your own resource into it, that you wanna work more hours than you normally would in order to get this thing done, in which [00:24:00] case we then get to decide how we look after ourselves. Or it might be that you get to decide that you are gonna limit the scope of it, or you are gonna limit the quality of the piece of work that you are doing, or that you get to decide, you're gonna have to just be decisive on your first idea and go with it. For example, rather than exploring all the different ways this could be written. We get to decide how long things take. So I would always encourage you to make the, I don't know if I have time for this problem as an I get to decide how much time I'm giving it and therefore what it's gonna look like by the end. If you have other examples, if you can think of, I don't know, questions that you have that you can't fit into one of those four categories, I want you to let me know and I will help you out. So all of you who are already on my newsletter know this, but if you're not, you can sign up for my newsletter on my website, and then every week you'll get [00:25:00] an email from me, which tells you about the podcast, but also gives you the opportunity to reply to me, ask any questions, follow up, tell me anything you disagree with. I'm an academic. I love nothing better than people disagreeing with me about things. So if you can think of a problem where you are saying, this is an I don't know problem, and I don't think it's any one of those four. Let me know and I will reply to you and I'll talk about it in a future episode. I hope that helps you see a route forward from that kind of place of confusion. Thank you all for listening, and I will see you next week.
Short one this week - I am using a current example from my own life to talk you through how to look after yourself when it all goes wrong. I talk through how I decided what work I am and am not going to do, and how I am looking after myself in the process. It’s short and the audio will be less crisp as I’m recording on my phone but I think it will be useful for many of you. Transcript Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. Um, I'm not gonna lie, I nearly didn't record this podcast. Um, a lot is happening over here and I am not gonna go into the details on the podcast. But suffice to say that life is complicated right now, if you're concerned. I am fine. I don't want you to be worried about me, but there is a lot of stuff going on that means that things are more difficult than I would like them to be. Um, and I need a podcast for this week, and so when, when I found out all the things that I've recently found out, I had to stop and think, right? What am I actually doing? What do I need to do? What can I do? Defer. What can I decide not to do? Essentially, how can I look after myself while I navigate all this other stuff? And for a moment I thought, right. I have a podcast episode that I've already recorded, intending to cover off the one of the Christmas period podcasts. And I thought, you know what? I can just move that forward and share that with them. Um, and so I was like, okay, we'll do that. That's fine. But then I thought actually for two reasons, I didn't wanna do that. Firstly, from my perspective, I don't want to disadvantage future me. Okay? I am super proud of the fact that I have already recorded one of the podcasts for the Christmas period, and I didn't want to then put myself back behind that if I. Used that one. Now. I was proud that I had the option, right? I was proud that I had something in the bank that I could use, but I didn't want to mess up my carefully lay plans to be ready for Christmas. I also thought that actually it might be useful for you guys. To hear a little bit about how I am navigating managing my workload while things are challenging. And actually that decision was reinforced when I sent a message to my membership, explaining to them how I was gonna handle it and what implications it might have for them. And I got a lovely email back from one of my members saying how much she values that I not only coach them, but I model. Like in my own life, how I navigate things. So I thought it was a really good opportunity. So this episode is about what to do when the bad stuff hits the metaphorical fan. Um, it's gonna be short. Um, you can already probably hear I'm recording on my phone because I'm away from my usual setup. There's not going to be a YouTube version of it. So this, and I'll explain in the podcast why all that is so. The first thing is pause and breathe. Okay. I am a few days into the situation unfolding, and I haven't made all these decisions immediately. Sometimes we think we have to like just. Immediately cancel everything or immediately decide that we're doing everything or whatever. I gave myself a little bit of time to pause and breathe. I decided that there definitely would need to be some adjustments, but that I could take a little bit of time to figure that out, and I would always want you guys to do that too. Just take a second to have a deep breath, a few deep breaths, and give yourself some time to think about it. Um, the second step always is to gather a small network of support. And I'm saying small because sometimes when difficult things are happening, some of you will want to retreat into your shell and not tell anybody at all. Others of you will feel a kind of urge to tell lots of people. Um. I was probably in the latter half where it was like, I kind of wanna talk about this stuff. Um, but actually sometimes having a large network of people just adds, you know, trying to help you can add to your cognitive load. So I basically told a few people what was happening, people that were able to help me either pragmatically or emotionally. And I haven't talked, I've got lots of very close friends that have no idea of anything happening. Um. But having a small network of support is easier to navigate and it means that the sort of, you get the things that you need. Um, one tip for when you're asking for support, partly, you know, we have to balance our own feelings of guilt and whatever that they're doing. This, I try to. Acknowledge that that's okay to feel like that, but it's also okay to ask them. Um, but one practical tip is, um, ask people to take the cognitive load, not just give them tasks. So as a really small example, I'm away from home at the moment, so, um, my dog is with my mom and my sister will be taking the dog to the field. Now I could be messaging her with details about what time 'cause he gets a secure field 'cause he's a naughty barky boy. Um. I could be messaging her with details about what time the field is and how to get in and what the code for the padlock is and when to pick him up and blah, blah, blah. I'm not, I've just told my sister to talk to my mom. They can sort it out between them. So do your best to ha wherever you can to hand over cognitive load as well as needing to sort of navigate the, like, give out the tasks yourself. Next step is cancel anything unnecessary. Now, thankfully this week I actually had a relatively light week. I do do workshops for other universities as one-offs. Um, and I didn't have any this week. I have a small number. I have my usual member member sessions, and I have a small number of one-to-one sessions, but I didn't have any other workshops. I don't know, I don't think I would've canceled them, but have a look through. I did have a few other bits and pieces that I was intending to do that I have let people know. That. Um, so to go immediately canceling anything that you can truly go, yeah, that's just not necessary this week. When you are considering the rest, when you're considering what you do wanna do and what you don't wanna do, really avoid all or nothing thinking. There can be a real tendency to either tell yourself, I've just got to keep going. There's too much to do. I can't, you know, I can't cancel anything or to tell yourself I absolutely can't do anything I need to just. Cancel everything now. Sometimes nothing might be the right answer. For some of you, depending on what's happening and everything, doing absolutely nothing might be the right answer for me this time. I don't think it is the right answer. I think I, I am perfectly capable of doing some things and in some ways it's quite nice to return into a little bit of normality for a period and do the things that I do normally and that I get, like I get nice feelings from doing and whatnot. Um, so for me, nothing was not the right answer. And remembering that it's not an all or nothing thing is super important because then you can kind of pick and choose in a intentional way what things you want to do. And for me that means balancing up two things. It means balancing up what is kind of most important, what will cause the most disruption if I don't do it, for example. Um, but it's also thinking then about what things do I have cognitive space for and what things do I. Get some benefit from doing. Okay. So at the moment I'm actually recording this, sat in a coworking session with my members. Um, and I, I love seeing my members. My members are great people. They always make me feel better. I love being with them. And so it's actually really nice to be, to be doing this. So thinking about what things actually give you those little bits of joy and what things you don't need to do. The other thing I would really encourage you is to think about your future self as well as your current self. So I gave you an example of that at the beginning of the podcast. Okay. So I, um, I could have just used a, um. A prerecorded podcast for today, but that would have penalized future me. 'cause I would've then need to think of something different to talk about for the Christmas podcast, for example, that I've had planned for a while. Um, and I decided not to, I decided to be kind to future me and do this now. Now, does that mean that I'm doing a slightly half-assed version of a podcast? Yeah, absolutely. There's no YouTube. The sound's not gonna be great. It's gonna be shorter than usual. Is it gonna be super useful for you? Yeah, I think it probably is to be fair. Um, and. So it, it, it does the job. And I think, to be honest, I think it does the job in a good way. And I'm really pleased that I'm not adding to my list of now having to think of more things for the holiday, for example. The other thing is once you've decided what things you are doing or what things you aren't doing, think about whether there's anything you can either reduce or preempt. So for me, I've sent a message to my members saying, look, at the moment I'm intending to go ahead with all of our sessions. I enjoy talking to them. It's about, it's a load I can manage. Um. But I have also given them a heads up that it's possible I may change my mind about that. It's possible I may need to cancel some sessions and I've given them some, um, practical information about what that will look like, that I'll essentially delete it from the calendar or I'll send them a message in Slack that I might not be able to access the membership site to send a, um, send a specific message. So by doing that, I sort of. Preempt the fact that something unexpected might happen, if you see what I mean. And it just means that I know that they're kind of aware and it means that, um, I will have less logistics to sort out if I do decide that something needs to change. And you can think about how that applies to you. For example, you know, maybe there are deadlines you still want to try and hit or something, but you can then, um. Make sure that you, you know, if you've told people that there might be a problem, then it's much easier to quickly send your supervisor a message saying, yeah, it turns out that was optimistic, not gonna hit it, or whatever, than it is to have to explain it all in that moment. Um. Final thing is just be really kind to yourself. Even this sort of planning, even trying to think through what you do and don't want to do can take a lot of cognitive load at a time when you don't have much to go around. So keep it really simple. And my final message is don't forget that you are a body. You are a human body, a human being body, as well as just a brain. Um. I just took a break in the, um, body double session to have a big stretch on the hotel room floor and I feel a lot better for it. We've been really mindful to make sure we are drinking water and trying to eat some food and all those sorts of things, so when it is all going down for you, don't forget those basics. Looking after your body, I am keeping it really simple this week. So that is your podcast. I suspect it will be something that is useful for some of you when, when these things happen. Um, thank you all for being there as usual, and I will see you next week.
< We’ve talked before about celebrating tiny wins, so now we’re talking about big wins. If you feel uncomfortable celebrating papers being accepted, finishing your PhD or getting a job, or any of the other big objective successes, then you’re not alone. In this episode we’ll talk about why this can feel so uncomfortable, how we can expand our definition of “celebration” and how we can ensure that we recognise and remember these important events. This is particularly relevant for you if that sounds much too embarrassing and social awkward to even consider! Links I refer to in this episode If you liked this episode, you should check out “ how to be kind to yourself ”. Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the PhD Life Coach Podcast, and this is really building on an episode I did a few weeks ago about celebrating tiny wins, and if you haven't listened to that one, don't worry. This one entirely stands alone, but this is sort of the other end of the scale, right? Because I think all of us can benefit from learning to celebrate our tiny wins a lot more. Those day-to-day things that we either take for granted or disregard as easy, where actually we have that opportunity to fill our lives with positive reinforcement and praise for doing the small things, but we then also have this question of what to do about the big things, what to do when we get a job, what to do when we get a paper accepted, when we get a promotion, whatever it might be. at the moment I'm doing a lot of work helping my members and other people who attend workshops that I run to identify their strengths. And one of the things that comes up over and [00:01:00] over is that people are really worried about being too big for their boots. They're really worried that people will see them as big-headed or arrogant and conceited. And so many of them find it really difficult to identify their strengths, and many of them find it really difficult to celebrate their big wins. They somehow feel that by celebrating their wins, that means they're diminishing other people or they're making other people feel uncomfortable or any of those things. And so this episode is really about how can we celebrate big wins in a way that doesn't feel like we are getting too arrogant and we're making other people uncomfortable, or how can we at least reframe that so that we're comfortable celebrating our big wins. So one of the things I always teach my members is that when we have little anxious thoughts, um, not big anxious problems, but like little anxious thoughts. It's useful to put 'em on the table in [00:02:00] front of us and ask us before we do anything else. Is there any truth here? Okay, so we're gonna do that with this one. Is it possible that you do sometimes get a bit too big for your boots, as it were, that you do sometimes behave in a way that is perceived by general people, not by just one person? By is perceived generally as a bit arrogant, a bit conceited. Is that true? Okay. Now I'm gonna put a rule on this. We don't count childhood. When we are kid, we're all idiots, right? When we are kids, we don't know. We almost all have probably been told at some point, oh no, don't say that. Or whatever. So this is', I don't want you traipsing up some memory from when you were 10 years old and going, oh, Mrs. Knight told me that I'd get too big for my boots. Screw Mrs. Knight. Mrs. Knight was my Class five teacher. Screw Mrs. Knight. She doesn't get to live in your brain anymore. You were a kid. You were finding out what was okay, what wasn't. So we're not gonna use those [00:03:00] memories. But if in your adult life you can genuinely think of times where people who care about you have had a quiet word and said, dude, maybe tone it down a little bit. You're kind of going on about yourself much more than you go on about other people , we're gonna touch on that very briefly at the start of this episode. And the reason I'm doing it very briefly is because I don't think that's most of you in my experience, the people who are perceived as too arrogant and conceited usually aren't the ones asking, how can I celebrate this without appearing too arrogant? They're not the ones asking it. And that means they're probably not the ones listening to this episode. The vast majority of you are probably worried about this in a kind of hypothetical. I don't want people to judge me way, but with no grounds for thinking that they actually do judge you in that direction. But let's touch on it. And when you're thinking about this, I want you to remember this is not just somebody who like feels bad 'cause they haven't succeeded this in the same way as [00:04:00] you have, or that you know, you've reminded them of something they haven't done in their life. The definition of arrogant is unpleasantly proud. With overconfident, with being conceited, there is an element of dismissing other people's wins as well. So this is not just about you celebrating yours to an excessive or unpleasant amount. It's also that you dismiss other people's achievements as well, if that still feels like you. I have a few small tips. The first one is don't generalize your wins too far. And this is true for all of us, right? Is that just because you've got one paper published, it doesn't mean you are the greatest thing ever. It doesn't mean that it's gonna be easy forever. It means we get to be proud of this one thing. So we get to make sure we are not generalizing too far. We need to make sure that we are feeling and expressing gratitude for the things and the people that helped us along the way. Usually when people are unpleasantly proud they're sort of taking all the credit without [00:05:00] recognizing how other people have contributed. We wanna make sure that we're all so celebrating other people's wins. And again, this is true for all of us, however loud we are about our own wins. We wanna be that loud about other people's wins as well. And finally, if this is something that you struggle with, I want you to take some tips from this episode where we think about quiet ways of celebrating, because sometimes if you are somebody who feels you have something to prove, you are somebody who has often been told that maybe your own self celebration is a little bit much. It can be useful to practice some quiet celebrations, not to manage other people's emotions, but to see what that feels like. So if you feel like you genuinely actually are in danger of being a bit arrogant and self-absorbed, then those are some tips for you, but we're gonna move on now 'cause I think for the vast majority of you, that's not the case. For the vast majority of you, this is something that you are worrying about that probably isn't based in much [00:06:00] other than either your own brain or like the occasional comment you've got from somebody who probably had other motives anyway. So the first thing that I would remind you, which is always, always true, is that other people are allowed to have thoughts and feelings about you. If you are behaving in a way that you think is appropriate, if you are celebrating in a way that you think is appropriate and that is in line with who you want to be and comes from your best self, other people are allowed to have opinions about that. That can be hard to stomach sometimes, but it's true. Everybody isn't. You are entitled to your opinions about people. You can think that people around you should behave differently than they do. It doesn't necessarily mean that we then have the right to make them change or anything like that. So we get to remember, yeah, there it is possible that by saying, I'm celebrating this, somebody will get upset about it. And that's their responsibility. Okay. [00:07:00] As long as we're comfortable that we've behaved in a way that's in line with our own personal, like code of ethics, our own personal ways of being, other people are allowed to have that, those emotions and the reason that has to be true is sometimes us just existing can have those impacts on each other. Okay? We all know, and I agree with the kind of the sensitivities around this, we all know, you know, companies who give you the option of opting out of Mother's Day celebrations, for example, if that's something that is really upsetting for you, for whatever reason. It doesn't mean that we can't celebrate our mothers. Those of you who have had children, there will be people who will be upset when they see other people having children, having families, because that's something they weren't able to do. For those of you celebrating professional success, there will be people that will find that upsetting because it will remind them of the things that they haven't done. We can be compassionate, we can be understanding, but it doesn't mean we have to not celebrate ourselves. [00:08:00] People are allowed to have emotions about whatever they have emotions about, and we don't have to micromanage ourselves in order to eliminate that entire possibility. Because apart from anything else, it's not possible. You just existing means that people will have opinions about it. If you never celebrate anything, people will have opinions about that too, right? There is no way of avoiding other people having emotions, so we get to check in and say, is this an okay way to behave as far as I'm concerned? And then we can just be compassionate to other people's responses to it. Now, why is it even important to celebrate? Well I think there's a bunch of reasons it's important to celebrate. We wanna make sure that we are getting a nice reward for the hard work that we put in. Now, I'm a big believer, this is why I talked about tiny wins first. I'm a big believer that we should focus on enjoying the process as well as [00:09:00] waiting for that end goal. But we can give ourselves a lot of positive reinforcement by then celebrating that end goal. What I see in academics and PhD students so much is the second that thing has been achieved, we somehow discount it in our heads and move on to the next thing that we haven't done. And what that does is it doesn't give us any positive reinforcement for having achieved the thing that we've achieved and if we don't get positive reinforcement, it's much, much harder to work towards these things in future. So we wanna be positively reinforcing the process on a day-to-day basis by celebrating our tiny wins, but then also celebrating the actual achievements so that we get that bigger scale positive reinforcement as well. The second reason I think it's important to celebrate is so that our wins are just as memorable as our losses. I want you to think about how much time you have spent, thinking about times where you failed or where you got embarrassed 'cause you did something wrong or you didn't live up to [00:10:00] your expectations or whatever it might be. I want you to think how much time you have spent ruminating on those experiences, I bet all of you can think back to times in your childhood and the ones that will be very vivid, that have popped into your head many, many times, are the ones where something really embarrassing happened. Where you were ashamed, where you were, you know, where people were judging you, where you were getting to hold off. Those things live rent free in our heads so often, and we reinforce them by rehearsing them over and over again. One of the things that celebrations can do is make the wins more memorable too. So that when we are feeling a bit nervous, we also have vivid memories of times that we've celebrated. Celebrations also give us the opportunity to learn from our experiences, and I'm gonna tell you more about that in a second when I give you some ideas about how we can celebrate. But when we just move on quickly past our [00:11:00] wins, without truly celebrating them, without truly analyzing them, we often miss the opportunity for a lot of learning and self-improvement as well. Finally, I don't want you to underestimate the extent to which you can serve as inspiration or example to others. So for everybody who sees your win and goes, oh no, I've never achieved anything like that. I, you know, I feel bad about myself now because they celebrated their win. There's somebody else going, oh is that possible? Is that possible for someone like me? And this is particularly, this is true for everyone, right? But it's particularly true if you come from demographics that are traditionally underrepresented in academia. Every time you see somebody who looks a bit like you or comes across a bit like you achieve something, you get to go, oh this is something that's an option for me. This is something that could happen. Somebody else who [00:12:00] looks a bit like me or sounds a bit like me or experiences a bit like me has done these things. Maybe I could do this too. Now I'm gonna give you an example there. And this is a combination of tiny wins and celebrating success. So when I was a academic, you have all these sort of admin, leadership service type jobs and one of the ones that I have for quite a long time was a sort of welfare tutor. Now, this was back in the day, right? This was way before the university had kind of minor counseling services, but beyond that, there really wasn't the focus on wellbeing that there is now. And so a lot of that really fell on academics. And I took my job as welfare tutor probably a bit too well, but anyway, that's a story for another day. And we're also personal tutors, so we have people who don't necessarily have problems, but they're allocated to us throughout their undergraduate degrees and we're like their first point of pastoral care. Anyway, so I was welfare tutor, I was personal tutor, and that meant I got thank you cards, right? And I loved my thank you cards because frankly, I am not organized enough to ever write. I write [00:13:00] thank you cards for my Christmas presents. Thanks, mom. I definitely do that. But beyond that. I rarely get round to it. So if anybody ever thinks to send me a thank you card, I absolutely love it. And they used to say really lovely things and so I used to stick them on my wall and I didn't stick them on my wall to show off. You know, some people may have thought that, that I was saying, oh look, students love me. I stuck them on my wall because when I was having bad days, I would notice them and I would remember why I do what I do. So it was very much positive reinforcement of tiny wins for me. I'm sure some people had opinions about it, but I knew that I benefited from it and I knew that some people probably had opinions about it, that I was trying to demonstrate how popular I was with the students. That's fine, they can have opinions. But the bit I had underestimated until somebody said it to me was the extent to which they also served as inspiration for my students. So I had a gorgeous personal tutee who I loved. She was a really, really lovely girl. And she didn't have many particular problems [00:14:00] as we went through and stuff, but she was good at turning up for her personal tutorials, which anyone who's personal tutor will know that's not necessarily expected. So I knew her reasonably well anyway, when she was ready to graduate. And it was her final post, final personal tutor meeting of her degree program. She came to see me and she'd got a card and that was really, really lovely and she said to me, I remember coming in here for my very first personal tutor meeting, and I looked at all those cards and the first thing I thought was that I'm gonna be well looked after, because if all these students are saying thank you, then I'm gonna be well looked after. And the second thing I thought was that I can't believe in three years time I am gonna be giving her a thank you card having done my degree, it feels like such a big thing. I can't believe I'm gonna get there. But seeing those cards reminded me that I will. And she said, and every time I come from my personal tutorials, I look at the cards and I think I'm going to give you a thank you card. When I finished my degree [00:15:00] and it became her, like it was her symbol that she was going to get there, and I had no idea. They had never been put up with that intention. But that little mini celebration of myself, that little mini, I'm proud of the impact I've had, that little mini, I want to remind myself of this, when things are tough was also unbeknownst to me acting as inspiration for somebody else. And anytime you celebrate anything, that is also true. So if I've sold you on, then it might feel a little bit uncomfortable, but there might be benefits from it. What are ways that we can celebrate without this sense that we are bragging about ourselves. So the first question I want to ask you is, what would be a really you way to celebrate? And you might be going, the you way to do it would be not celebrating, but if we look at you and the things that make you different, the things that make you interesting, the things that make you, you, what might be a really you way to celebrate. As an example, I was celebrating a good [00:16:00] launch last summer. I went for a flying trapeze lesson. I can't think of anything more me than going for a flying trapeze lesson. It's something that people go, what really? At your age about, it's something I'm not. I'm o, I mean, I say I'm okay at it. I'm okay at flying trapeze compared to the population. I am not okay at flying trapeze compared to flying trapeze people, but compared to most people, I've done it a few times. I can vaguely. Do it. Um, if people want me to, you have to have to reply to my emails and tell me you want this. If you want me to, I will post a video on Instagram at some point and you can see my best catches anyway. I booked that, that was a very me thing to do. That might, that is probably not a very you thing to do, although if it is, I recommend it. It's incredible. So what would be a very you way to celebrate? Are you a crafter? Could you make something to commemorate your success? Could you, you know. Do a little embroidery or make a piece of art or something like that. I [00:17:00] also did that. I don't even know where it is now actually, which is bad. I'm looking around my office madly. I made a piece of art to celebrate the people that entered my very first round of the quarterly membership, so I did that as a little mini celebration 'cause I love craft too. What could be things that just make you stay in that moment a little bit longer and commemorate it in some way so that you are sort of spending more time on it at the time, and so that it's something that you think about more regularly than you would if you haven't got something that exists like that. And the nice thing is it can be different every time. I tend to do something different every time, 'cause you know my brain. But you might find that you wanna be somebody who has a little tradition that maybe you do a little mini cross stitch every time you get a paper published or you add a crochet tile to, to a blanket every time you get a paper published or something, um, they might have to be quite big. 'cause otherwise that's gonna take a while to make a blanket unless you're a genius, but you get [00:18:00] my point, right? You can set up little traditions where you do something like that. I've seen people get their abstracts printed onto mugs and things like that so that they remember when they got their first paper published, for example. Could you start or continue some sort of collection? So if they're, you know, I don't know by yourself, a little Lego figure for every time you get a new paper or each time you get an achievement of some description. I keep my, I Haven hadn't even thought about this celebration, but it's totally true. I have a whole row of champagne bottles in my lounge. People always think I'm an absolute alcoholic, but they represent many different achievements generally in my life. So I've got one from when I got my undergrad degree. I've got one from when I got my PhD. I've got a couple from two different PhD students. So my first PhD student and then another PhD student bought me a bottle of champagne. So I'm gonna keep it. I've got it from when I got my professorship, that was a little tiny one 'cause it was during the pandemic and so I was on my own and one of my best friends came and put it on [00:19:00] my door step and then retreated an appropriate distance with a party popper. So that was a mini one. And so I always remember that that one's my professorial one 'cause I drank it on my own. Could you start little mini collections of something that you only get when you've got some sort of big achievement? And these don't have to be big, expensive things, right? In fact, often it being something little that kind of accumulates over time can be a really nice way of doing it. Essentially what we're trying to do is you celebrate as the verb that means to recognize and make special. It doesn't have to be shouting about it to other people. If you find the idea of telling other people really uncomfortable, then you know, I think we should probably coach on that. But we can start from these kind of quiet personal celebrations. The other thing is they can be a route to sharing, right? 'cause it's very different matter what you think. You're scrolling LinkedIn and you're saying, I'm happy to announce blah, I'm happy to announce blah, and you're going, yeah, whatever. [00:20:00] Anyway. Or then somebody posts, um, I dunno. Here is a cushion I made to celebrate getting promoted, whatever. It's such a different vibe, right? People are gonna engage with that in a Oh, it's beautiful. You are so clever. Oh, and by the way, congrats on that. It's gonna change the nature of the interaction. Others of you, you might be like, I'm not crafty. I don't make things. That's okay. Let's make it memorable in other ways. So maybe you love hiking. Okay. Maybe every time you get a big celebration in your life, paper, published, promotion, whatever, you hike a new hill. So some new summit that you haven't been up to before, maybe you take with you the paper. So you have a photo of yourself at the top of a hill with the paper pointing at it grinning like a maniac. So that you've got a memory and a photo where you are doing something very you to celebrate it. Maybe, you know, you're a canoeist, you go to a new river every time you get published or something. Anything that makes it memorable, [00:21:00] recognizable, where you are commemorating it in that way. Now, I also mentioned that the other really important reason to celebrate is so that we can properly learn from the experience, and this is not to take the joy out of it, right? I don't want you to be like, oh, this is a learning experience. But we dissect our fails. What should I have done beforehand to avoid this? What should I have done during it? How could I have been better? How can I be less crap next time? I want you to bring that level of forensic analysis, but I want you to bring it positively to your wins. This is something I do in the coaching sessions all the time, and I can see people get uncomfortable with it because it feels weird to talk about it, but I promise it is super, super rewarding and that is I want you, when you have had a paper published, when you have got promoted, anything like that, I want you to ask yourself, what strengths did I bring? Then enabled this to happen. If it helps you feel less uncomfortable, also [00:22:00] express gratitude for the support that you got. But I want at least as much time on what am I grateful that I did? What strengths did I bring to this? What difficulties did I overcome in order to achieve this? What can I take from this to move forward? Okay, and I want that. What can I take from this to move forward to be two different elements? Firstly, how can I replicate what I did? So where did I use my strengths? Where did I overcome difficulties in a way that I liked and in a way that feels sustainable so that I can replicate that? How can I basically reinforce that this is evidence that I know how to do this thing? The second bit that I want you to do though is I also want you to notice where you achieve this in ways that aren't how you want to achieve things in future, because some of us are still a little bit stuck in that I achieved it, but I beat myself up, I [00:23:00] worked hours that weren't sustainable, but I hated that were unhealthy, I thought in unhealthy ways, et cetera, et cetera. Right? So we also get to learn from, if I achieved it in ways that aren't how I want to achieve things in future, what can I learn from those lessons? Okay, but don't go straight to that. Strengths first. Okay. Strengths first. What you're proud of first. And I want you to talk to somebody else about it or write about it or speak into a voice note recorder about it. Anything that really kind of emphasizes that stuff so that it really reinforces it in your mind. You then, if you have got a kind of planning and review process, like the one that I teach in my membership I want you to insert this into there, okay? I want you to have some notes. These are strengths I used when I achieved my last thing, so these are things I want to do more often, and you can build that into your planning and review process. Finally, and I suspect most of you [00:24:00] are a long way from this, but finally I wanna reiterate the same advice I gave the people who were actually in danger of appearing a bit arrogant, which is we try not to associate our wins with our self-worth. So what I want you to be doing, I want you to be celebrating the wins for the fun of achieving those wins. For the fact it was a challenge and you met the challenge and you made it happen. What we don't want to do is take lessons of, this is evidence I fit in academia. This is evidence I deserve to be here. This is evidence that I am a worthy person, because the downside of that, if you use objective achievement as evidence that you are a worthy person. If you have. A period of time where you have fewer objective achievements, then you are gonna use that as evidence that you are not a worthy person, that you don't deserve to be in academia. You all deserve to be in academia. You are all capable of being in [00:25:00] academia. So we wanna separate those two things out so that we are super happy that this thing's happen. 'cause isn't that fun and exciting and it's out in the world and I'm doing my thing. Yay. And yeah, it showed some of the strengths that I have. But it's not the reason I deserve to be here, and it's not the reason I'm a worthwhile person. All those things, I have intrinsic worth. I don't need to achieve things in order to have intrinsic worth. And so I want you to make sure that when you are celebrating, we're staying in the, I'm celebrating this fun thing that I've put out there that I'm really proud of, not, oh, finally, I'm good enough. Finally, people might believe that I'm enough. Again, if that side is something that you really, really struggle with, then that is a little bit of evidence that maybe you need some coaching and you could consider looking at the membership in the future. My final tip, and this is true for everybody, the best way to feel comfortable about celebrating yourself is to celebrate everybody else at the same volume you celebrate yourself. If we all [00:26:00] celebrate each other's successes, if we all spend more time feeling proud of others, reminding them of their strengths, emphasizing, commemorating, making memorable their achievements, then partly it just makes it such a nicer place to be. And then it also makes it much easier to celebrate our own successes 'cause it all just feels like the same tone, right? We are people who celebrate, so celebrate each other's successes, celebrate your own successes, and let's make academia feel like a much more fun and pleasant place to be making these achievements and making our contributions to the world. I hope that's useful. Let me know what you think. If you have any questions or wanna let me know what you think, you can always reply to my newsletter, or if you're not signed up, you know how to do it. Go to my website, PhD life coach.com. You'll find a sign up for my community button right there on the front and I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you all so much for listening, and I will see you next week.
< THIS EPISODE CONTAINS MASSIVE SPOILERS!! Imposter syndrome is top of my mind at the moment because it’s the focus of my membership this quarter. I’m also utterly obsessed with The Traitors and have been loving the UK Celebrity Traitors which just finished. If you want to hear how the final five (and the winner in particular) made me reflect on imposter syndrome, and hear my tenuous links to an academic context, then check out this episode! If you haven’t seen it, and have no intention of watching it, no worries - you’ll still get some useful insight into overcoming imposter syndrome! Links I refer to in this episode If you liked this episode, you should check out “ eight things PhD students and academics can learn from The Traitors ”. I am apparently obsessed…. Transcript [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. I'm so excited because I'm gonna talk about my favorite topic, but I promise I'm going to try and make it relevant to PhD students in surviving academia and all that stuff. As usual, the topic, as some of you will know or suspect at least, is Celebrity Traitors. I am mildly obsessed by like social deduction, reality TV type game. So I'm not so into the sort of let's get married ones, although I have watched those too. Not mocking anyone who watches those, but my favorites are the ones where there's a game, there's a puzzle, there's deceit. They're having to kind of figure each other out. There's challenges and just lots and lots of shenanigans. To give you an example of quite how obsessed I am, when I knew Celebrity Traitors was coming out in October, and I was super excited about it, I rewatched [00:01:00] all series of the UK Traitors, all series of Australian Traitors, all series of New Zealand and i'm currently on season two of US Traitors and I'd like to emphasize rewatching now. Any of you're like, hang on Vikki. How do you have time to do that? Is 'cause I have them on while I'm doing other things. I'm a TV while cooking TV while cleaning my teeth sort of a girl. Anyway. So suffice to say I'm a little bit obsessed and we were all super excited about Celebrity Traitors here in the UK because whilst many of the people may not be globally famous, international students you may not know who they were, in the UK, this was quite the lineup. This was not yet average. I'm a celebrity, get me outta here, kind of are you really a celebrity kind of vibe. These were proper celebs and it was super, super exciting. It lived up to absolutely everything that I wanted it to be, and to be honest, all the way through, I was like, where's a little tenuous [00:02:00] connection to academia that I can use as an excuse to do another Traitors episode? Because if you haven't seen, oh, you did already do a Traitors episode, a year or two ago when it was series two on in the uk, the Harry and Paul series. Um, so if you haven't checked that out, make sure you check it out. I'll link it in the show notes for you. But I really wanted there to be some tenuous reason for me to talk about traitors on the show, and I had to wait all the way to the finale, not just the actual final, but the spinoff show, Uncloaked actual finale, where they had all the celebrities in a theater like celebrating their finale and blah, blah, blah, and talking about their experience. It took me all the way to there. Then I saw it, and then from there I was just super, super excited and that is what we're gonna talk about today. So first thing before we go any further, big warning, huge spoilers. Huge. So especially if you are not in the UK [00:03:00] and you are gonna watch the Traitors at some point when it comes out in your country or you are not up to date. Massive spoilers. I'm gonna talk about the winner. Um, so winner or winners, um, in case you haven't turned off yet. So if you do not want to know what happens in Celebrity Traitors, you have to save this episode for another day. Short version. Everyone feels like an imposter and it's not true. There you go. That's the short version. You can now leave without having any spoilers. My second request is at the end of this episode, I'm gonna talk about what I'm waiting for next, which is Irish Traitors, which is gonna come out in the UK any minute. We've been promised it in November. I'm super excited. If anyone spoils it for me, I will cry and I dunno what else, but you'll make me sad. So don't please do not spoil it. I'm aware that it has already been broadcast in Ireland. It is probably already been broadcast [00:04:00] in other places. I am super in love with the host, they're amazing, and I'm just really, really excited about it. So please don't, spoil it, please. Thank you. Appreciate it. Right. So what was the moment? The moment was when the winner, alan Carr was being interviewed have immediately after he left the castle, so this wasn't like live in the finale. He was being interviewed immediately after he'd left the castle as he had just won. Celebrity Traitors and Ed Gamble was asking him about his experience and whether he thought that he was gonna win, and he conceded that um, I love this so much, that apparently his agent had booked jobs for him during the second week of the filming because they'd all assumed that he would be knocked out by then. And so he was starting to hint at this sense that he hadn't expected to do well. You know, this sense that he wasn't gonna be good at it and things and my little brain was like, Ooh, [00:05:00] imposter syndrome. Um. But then it went further and he said, and I've got it. Actually, I recorded it into my voice recorder so I have a transcript. It's possible I have too much time on my hands. Go with it. It's all good. And he said when Stephen Fry talks, or David, now David is, David Olusoga, who's an academic, a celebrity academic who is on the show and got into the final five. He says, I go quiet. I'm not worthy. I'm not intelligent, but I've learned maybe sometimes you do need to question stand up for yourself. And Ed said, well I think you winning has absolutely proved that and Alan said "idiots can do well". Some of you'll know that I'm not considering, I am actively going to do merch that you guys are gonna be able to buy. Um, idiots can, well might be one of the greats. 'cause I feel like it kind. Sums up what we all need to hear sometimes. And when I heard this, my heart just went out [00:06:00] to him. So for context, those of you who are not based in the uk, I have no idea how globally famous Alan Carr is. Probably not at all 'cause I get the vibe he's very British, but he's. Like big, big, chat show, host, presenter, um, you know, he would be hosting like Saturday Night Live or something like that if he was in the US. He's hilarious. He is also one of the guest judges on RuPaul's Drag Race. He's had tons of different series of his own. He is a big name. This is not a sort of C list celebrity. And the fact that when he's then around other celebrities and particularly celebrities who are well known for being very intelligent, he is having this sense that he doesn't have anything to say. And if you've seen it, he actually like almost shrinks in on himself. He's like shoulders round and his head goes down. He almost like folds in like, I don't have anything to say when these intelligent people are there. And I just found it fascinating. This man's job is [00:07:00] talking to other people as well as being a comedian in his own right. And it just really struck me that if someone like Alan Carr can feel like that, then anyone can feel like that. It actually reminded me of another story, which is not quite imposter syndrome, but it made me laugh. And if there are any parents out there, I feel like you'll appreciate this. I saw Michelle Obama being interviewed about her daughters and the interviewer said something like, they must be so grateful to have all your wise advice and help. You know, that's such a privilege to have you as a parent. And she just started laughing and was like, are you kidding? She's like they think I'm an idiot. They don't listen to a word I say. I try and give them advice and they laugh. And then I say, people pay me millions of dollars for my advice. And they're like, yes, shut up, mom. And I'm just like, I'm done. This is great. If my stepchildren don't take me seriously, it's fine. Michelle Obama's kids don't take her [00:08:00] seriously either. Loved it. Anyway so it just really struck me that imposter syndrome can hit anybody at all. And from there I thought, you know what, Vik, you could probably stretch just that thought to a whole episode. But is there anything else in the Traitors that has something to say about imposter syndrome? And it made me reflect on the final five. So those of you familiar with Traitors, the people that get through to the final really are kind of treated as winners in their own right? Yeah. It's the next step to be the one who wins the money. But if you make it to the final five, then that means you've done. All the missions you've seen off like 15, 20 other people, you are to all extents and purposes a winner. And particularly in this celebrity version where, you know, they were doing it for the money was for charity, not for themselves. Then really what these people win is exposure. If they are in need of further exposure in their career and things like that. Making it to the Final Five really, really counts as winning in this context. [00:09:00] And I looked at the photos of the people who made it to the final five -more spoilers coming up- and it just struck me what a range of people it was. What different approaches they had taken to the game. How personalitily, is that a word? I don't think that's a word. How personalitily and demographically they were very different from each other. Yet somehow they had all succeeded in their own way and they all seem to adore each other. That's one of the things, if any of you don't watch The Traitors 'cause you don't like the nastiness watch this version, 'cause they're gorge. They all adore each other. It didn't make them bad at finding traitors. It had to be said, but they just all adore each other. So we had Alan Carr, the eventual winner who is giggling [00:10:00] and blushing. The dude couldn't even say, I am a faithful with a straight face without starting giggling yet somehow he still got away with it and won the entire competition. Okay. He is bumbling. He is hilarious. He is the exact opposite of cool, calm and collected, yet he was the one that carried out, well, two proper murders in plain sight, plus another one where they met on the chess board overnight. Obviously, as you do, and so managed to show that somebody who appears to be just a silly guy who's got no idea what's going on, actually was running the entire show under the surface. Then we had Cat, Cat Burns the singer, who was the other traitor, and I think Cat Burns was pretty famous around amongst young people, amongst the youth , but she's not a household name by any stretch until now. [00:11:00] She is now very much a household name, and Cat Burns is literally the opposite of in terms of demeanor of Alan Carr. She is calm, she is cool. She keeps her head. She can kind of fly under the radar a little bit, but people really like her so they don't criticize her for it. She talked quite a lot about being autistic and about feeling socially awkward and needing time to herself and not being sure whether she was gonna be able to play these sorts of social deduction games when she usually finds people exhausting. And she came all the way to the final and she did absolutely amazing. And in fact, pretty much everyone who came out beforehand had nothing but amazing things to say about how she was, the type of person she was and what an incredible job she was doing as a traitor. In fact, she was many people's pick for the [00:12:00] winner. Then we had David Olusoga, who is an academic. He's not, again, not super famous before this obviously a celebrity, but not super, super famous before this, he's got various TV shows where he talks about clever history related things, and he is. cool, calm and collected, but in a very different way from Cat. Cat is cool as well, right? She's a musician, she's young, she's fashionable, she's very, very on trend, um, in the sorts of way where she doesn't follow trends. She kind of sets trends. David is very intellectual, very deep thinking. He's quite quiet. He wasn't as insightful as he thought he was gonna be. I think it's fair to say, but he got this far, right, and he was one of those people who really took his time to think things through often. I think we think that cleverness is kind of a, quickness is the first one to understand something. He was much more of a, I need to [00:13:00] carefully ponder this kind of man, and he was amazing. He was probably I don't know my age, a little bit older, that kind of vibe. Lots of sort of slightly older people in this, which I think really, really added to the sense that this program was for absolutely everybody. So he took a very, very different route to the final. He'd been kind of accused a couple of times, but then managed to talk his way out of it. Again, not in a smarmy way, just in a kind of calm and considered way, presenting sort of feasible alternatives. He got a little bit of luck with the draw. That's a whole other story that we don't have time for, but it's good. So he, again, a third really different character. And then we meet Nick Mohamed, who I adore at a level that is probably slightly unhealthy. You may have seen him in Ted Lasso. You may have seen him on Task Master. He is glorious. I adore him. He is how somebody [00:14:00] manages to be like the sweetest politest way. The only way I can describe it is his mom must be so proud of him. In the very first thing before even the challenges started, they had to dig for a shield in their own grave, and he went and dug Celia's grave for her because, he didn't want her to have to do her own digging. So he looked for a shield for Celia before he'd even found his own shield. This is the type of man he is. He's then ludicrously talented. You know, he just, oh, I play the violin. Who knew? He's a comedian, he's a magician. He's in the magic circle. When it got to the puzzle bits, he was just like, just let me, and did all the puzzles and like two seconds flat and. At the same time, he's just gloriously sweet and kind and humble, and I adore him, but he's very different from all of the others. Super intelligent like the others, but just very sort of personable and [00:15:00] understated. All about the personal relationships. Really insightful. It still baffles me that he messed it up at the final stage. He got almost too clever at the final stage. But he has just secured himself as the nation's darling. I think it's fair to say. And then finally last but certainly not least, was Joe Marla, huge rugby player, he's got big beard, he's massive, he's got cauliflower ears. He's hilarious. He is the king of the kind of one-liner put down that he has just enough twinkle in his eye to get away with. And he played the game completely differently to any of them. He was, as you would probably expect, unbelievably competitive, unbelievably determined, really insightful, could totally spot not just what people were doing, but also what the people who made the program were likely to have chosen. So he came up with a whole big dog theory. And he really [00:16:00] went hard on several of the traitors, and in fact, he knew who the traitors were. He just got super unlucky at the end. But he was a very, very different person. And it was just looking at physically, they're very different people. Joe Marler is a man mountain, Nick Hamed is miniature . You see them together, they're a whole range of ethnicities. They range of genders, they range of sexualities, and you see them all together and you're like, there's no way. How can you have one competition that all five of these very different people essentially excel at and where they all love each other and where they've all got completely different strengths that they're bringing to it? And yet they all belong in something really important. And I think that's really important for us all to recognize 'cause I think sometimes we have this conception that there's a particular way you have to be to succeed in [00:17:00] academia and that there's a particular type of behavior, the particular personality style, a particular intellect style, a particular demographic, sometimes too, and. I think this just really personified in that setting something that I see in academia, which is that that is simply not true. There are things that are traditionally more rewarded. That is for sure, and I'm gonna talk about some unconscious bias stuff in a minute, because this imperfect in traitors or in academia. But there is a whole variety of ways to succeed. There is a whole variety of personalities right at the very top of academia. There is a whole variety of personalities and skills that are succeeding and doing really well in academia. Remembering that what we really need to be is the best version of ourselves and bring that to academia, I think can be a great way of reducing and in time overcoming, our imposter syndrome. I get to [00:18:00] be the very best version of myself and bring that to academia. Now even amongst those that didn't make it to the top, so let's count the final five as like the professoriate, right? That they made full professor, they got tenure. That's the equivalent. There was a whole load of other people that participated in the game, participated in my academia metaphor, who didn't make it to the top, but had incredibly successful games. I mean, no one is going to forget Charlotte Church on her knees, in her white dress digging the grave, trying to look for shield covering herself in mud. Plunging her head into the well to listen to the music. If anybody threw themselves into that game, it was Charlotte Church. Everyone will remember her for that. Everyone will love her for that. Even though she didn't go all the way to the final five, she had a hugely successful game. Celia Imrie, I [00:19:00] said to my sister, what would I do if I told you this before? I can't remember. Might, should have done anyway, going with it. I said to my sister, Celia Imrie got called a queen and an icon in traces, and I said, what do I need to do to be called a queen and an icon? And the Lindsay said, I think it's too late already, Vikki, which I was hurt by. But Celia Imrie is, she's got 30 years on me, I reckon in 30 years I can do something to be called a queen and an icon. Anyway, I digress. Celia Imrie, amazing actress, known for being like super posh, super amazing actress friends with all my Judy Dench and all that lot like literally girl dreams. Who knew she was hilarious? Who knew that she was going to absolutely carry it there. We had a castle full of comedians and Celia Imrie was the one that on multiple occasions made people laugh more than anything else. If you're not familiar with the fart incident, you need to check it out online 'cause I'm not even gonna describe it 'cause it's too [00:20:00] good. And you need to see the video version if you haven't already. Um. My favorite was her honesty and authenticity. When it came, they were doing quizzes about who was the most, you know, who's leader of the pack and all that stuff. And they said, who's the most two-faced? And this is the one no one wants to receive. And Celia just shoved her hand up and goes, oh, I think that's me. I tell people I like them all the time, and I don't really, just the best thing I've ever heard in my entire life. I love her. She didn't win. She should have win. She was robbed. Alan, I'm not forgiving you for that one. But she went in there with people thinking she was one thing, demonstrating that she was something else and massively, massively winning in a metaphorical sense, the game in the sense that the entire country adores her. And once this goes international, it has already, I'm sure to some extent. Everybody is going to completely adore her and just again, demonstrated a completely different way of [00:21:00] succeeding in this game. Now, was it perfect? I adore the traitors, but it has issues, issues that I believe are not specific to traitors, but that actually reflect the world that we live in, which is that there is a really, really troubling tendency across the entire traitors franchise for the people that are, eliminated initially to be disproportionately people of color, people who are not straight or not cisgender , people with disabilities. Essentially, people who are different in some way to others, and I don't actually believe that in the vast majority of cases that people are consciously saying, I am gonna eliminate the people who are different to me, or I don't want those people here. But what I think is happening, which happens in life as well, is this unconscious bias where if somebody is different to you, you give them less benefit of the [00:22:00] doubt than if they're more similar to you. And I think this is what happens a lot of the time in the traitors is that if somebody, so for example, we've had people who have later told us they have autism things being eliminated first. For example, when if at the beginning of the game you've got very little to go on. Somebody behaving in a way that seems a little odd to you, can be enough reason for them to go. Now in celebrity traitors this had another level to it. 'cause it had a level of celebrity hierarchy to it as well. 'cause I think it's fair to say that whilst it was a way better lineup than any of us anticipated, there was still a range and a range, not just in degrees of famousness but also in terms of who you were famous with. And I think it was apparent that the people who were either slightly less famous or who were more famous to younger people, so people who were famous through YouTube and things like [00:23:00] that went earlier than people that were kind of household multi-generational names. And I think that's mirrored in academia too. I think there is a tendency that if people conform to the what might be considered the sort of norm, I guess, or the historic norm , people who conform more closely to that or people who have hierarchy and prestige on their side are given the benefit of the doubt more, or it's assumed that they fit and therefore these other people who are a little bit different maybe don't fit so much. And I think unfortunately, the same sorts of biases are very much true in academia. This is not the episode for a whole, how to deal with that. Maybe that's an episode I'll do in future. It's something that I'm addressing in the membership at the moment. What to do if people treat you like you're an imposter. I will translate some of that into a future episode. Give you a little glimpse of the sorts of things we do inside the membership. But the [00:24:00] short version is that we don't beat ourselves up for experiencing it. Sometimes we can kind of gaslight ourselves that it's not real. Let's not beat ourselves up. That is evidence of intrinsic biases, unconscious biases in. Academia, there absolutely is. There's evidence of conscious bias in academia, so if you are experiencing it isn't just the figment of your imagination, however, what we do get to choose with support and love 'cause this is not straightforward. We get to choose how and if we internalize that, whether we make that mean that yes, we actually don't belong in academia and how we choose to respond, to what extent we choose to advocate, to what extent we choose to ignore. We get to make those decisions from a intentional place so that we show up as the best versions of ourselves as well. And importantly to recognize how we get support to do that. Because I do not believe that this is something that is for the people who are being discriminated against to solve on their own. These are structural [00:25:00] issues that we all should be trying to reduce. So. Celebrity Traitors is not perfect. Academia is not perfect, but both are settings where a whole variety of different types of people can and do succeed. This has given me the perfect excuse to whitter about Celebrity Traitors to you all. I did a workshop last week. We got talking about Celebrity Traitors in the break. 'Cause it was the day of the final that evening. So at that stage we didn't know who'd won. We talked for so long, I forgot to start the next session and we had to run over. Oops. Anyway. It was super exciting. I hope you enjoyed listening to me squealing. I hope most of it was audible. I'm told that sometimes I'm only audible to dogs when I get excited. I hope all you can hear everything that I wasn't squeaking too badly. I hope you're excited about watching Irish traitors if you are based here in the uk and it is coming out to you soon too. No spoilers. Anybody. Please don't make me [00:26:00] cry. If you have any questions about imposter syndrome, make sure you're on my newsletter. You can just reply to that, ask me questions, and I will answer them in future episodes. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week.
< This week I’m confessing my dirty secrets. Have a listen and compare your screen time to mine! I talk through why I’m unhappy with my current phone usage, why I’m not beating myself and what I’m doing instead. If you’ve ever felt like you can only change by “being more disciplined” or “criticising yourself into wanting it enough” then this is an important episode for you. I might not have a success to report back yet in terms of reducing my phone usage, but I’m feeling very proud of how I’m going about this challenge! Links I refer to in this episode If you liked this episode, you should check out “ how accepting where you are is the first step to getting where you want to be ”. Transcript [00:00:00] I hadn't decided that I was gonna talk about this, but I've decided I'm gonna, I feel like it's something that lots you gonna empathize with and I. I'm gonna tell you some secrets that I'm hoping my mother won't listen to and what I'm gonna do about it. So let's go. Welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast, and I am talking mobile phone usage. I'm recording this on the 3rd of November. It'll be coming to you in what, a week's time? Something like that. So it's a weird time for New Year's resolutions, right? But. I've just, I've reached a point where I have so many things that I want to do and where I really want something to change with my phone use, and I'm gonna share with you today [00:01:00] why that is. I'm gonna share numbers, which makes me want to cry, but I'm going to tell you anyway. I'm gonna share numbers. I'm gonna share my screen time numbers and all that sort of jazz. I'm gonna tell you why I think it's. A problem why I am bringing a lot of compassion to myself. So I'm gonna try and demonstrate how I'm practicing what I preach with all of this stuff. And I'm also gonna tell you what I am doing about it. And whilst I don't believe in sort of external accountability, I do hope that by sharing this with you and potentially updating you on my journey as I go through it, it might be interesting for all of us, so let's crack it out. Let's crack my gorgeous little phone here out which wastes far too much of my time and let's go to screen time. We are going to screen time, see all app. So we'll go week. Why not last week's average, I don't even [00:02:00] wanna say it out loud. Last week's daily average was six hours and 54 minutes. Before that it was 5 44, 6 11. So it's that kind of ballpark of which last week, apparently I spent 12 hours on Instagram. I'm just. Outraged. In fact, when you throw in Facebook as well, it becomes 15 and a half hours. I'm not gonna count WhatsApp, WhatsApp's talking to my friends. Talking to my friends is important. This makes me wanna vomit, genuinely makes me wanna vomit. I am somebody who feels like she has a hundred thousand things she wants to do. There's things I want to do for my business. There's things I want to do for my health. There's hobbies, there's interests, there's friends. And I don't tell myself I'm too busy as much as I used to, but I do tell myself I'm too busy [00:03:00] and I'm doing that, and I'm gonna bring a whole load of self-compassion 'cause I'm feeling the judgment in myself. Even as I talk to you about this today. I'm not unusual, right? I am pretty confident if you guys open up your screen time now, there'll be a whole bunch of you. There'll be a whole bunch of you, probably parents who are going, what, how on earth. And there'll be others of you going, mate, you should see mine. Okay? So I'm well aware there's a whole range of this. I'm also well aware that this isn't by chance, right? These things have been designed specifically to engage us, to draw us in, to keep our eyes on their information so that they get our information and so they can sell us stuff. So I am not holding this up as a me being weak or me being stupid or lazy or any of those things. I genuinely don't make it mean those things about myself. And I [00:04:00] have been quite careful in curating what I look at. So some of you, yeah, I'm sure you've all heard the phrase doom scrolling, and I'm sure a lot of you do engage in it. I do a little tiny bit. So I follow this. Have you seen the, there's, there's a brother and sister on Instagram who are very liberal and their parents are very right wing and they interview them essentially so I do scroll things like that sometimes. I'm not gonna give you links. You can find them if you are going to spend more time online. So I do doom scroll, things like that from time to time. I do look at the news from time to time, but it's mostly not that right. I've quite carefully curated, particularly my Instagram feed, so that it is essentially hobbies that I like and dogs, lots of dogs. The problem is that I'm spending far more hours looking at pictures of dogs than playing with my dog or looking at people doing circus tricks than [00:05:00] practicing my circus tricks or looking at people doing calisthenics than doing my calisthenics or looking at people doing art than doing my art, et cetera. Can you tell, I have a lot of hobbies. You hopefully know that about me already. And so whilst i'm not blaming myself and whilst I'm not kind of beating myself up in a sort of, you're so weak and stupid sort of a way, I do also wanna take control over this because this is not what I want my future self to be like. I wanna be able to do some fun stuff. You know, when I'm, if I'm laying on the sofa, showing my husband cute dog videos, I wanna do that. Sometimes It's cute. We laugh together, we enjoy it. It's fun. But if I'm designing my dream day, my dream day doesn't start with an hour scrolling, and my dream day isn't punctuated by scrolling all the way through the day, and it doesn't end with an hour scrolling. [00:06:00] So that's one big reason. This is not what I want my future to look like. Another reason is I've become increasingly aware of when I grab my phone and I grab my phone when I haven't made a decision about something else. So when it's not clear what else I want to be doing and I grab my phone when something gets difficult. So I do genuinely, you know, I'm being really open with you here, right? Because I think you guys value that. But I think it's useful to know that somebody who gives you lots of advice doesn't have it all figured out. I notice that if I'm saying, oh, should I do this or should I do that? Should I write it like this? Or write it like that? I grab my phone and the only explanation is I'm grabbing my phone to avoid the mild, and it's only mild discomfort [00:07:00] of not knowing what I'm gonna say or not having decided what I'm gonna say or not having decided how I'm gonna do something. And the other thing that scares me is how often I go on my phone to do one thing and then 15 minutes later, get back to what I was doing and realize I never did the thing I intended to do on my, you know, I'm going on my phone to check the weather for tomorrow or something, and I come back 15 minutes later and I've, you know, I've answered something on LinkedIn. I've liked somebody's, whatever, and I've, you know, just double checked my emails for no reason whatsoever. It is just so unintentional, and when I spend so much time talking to you guys about time blocking and being intentional, and I do that stuff right and I'm much, much better at time blocking than I used to be. But those interstitial spaces, those [00:08:00] gaps between the blocks and sometimes in the blocks, I'm not gonna lie, but mostly between those blocks are pretty full of phone time, and I think it becomes a crutch. I think it becomes something to look at, to avoid thinking about anything else. You know, I pull it out in queues. I pull out on the train. I pull out when I just finished driving before I go into the house. I'm told that might be an A DHD thing, right? That trouble with like transitioning from one area to another. And so again, I see that with kind of curiosity rather than judgment, but it does slightly freak me out how, if you ask me how many times I've picked up my phone in the last hour, I wouldn't be able to tell you. I have no idea. Half the time I don't even notice I've done it. I've [00:09:00] decided I want it to change, and I'm a big believer that one of the best ways to make things change is to make it easier for yourself. I used to think that the key was to be better. I just needed to be more disciplined next time. I just needed to be stronger next time. And in reality, I don't think that's true. In reality I think we need to make these things easier, especially when we're up against something that is technically designed to draw you in. And that is, you know, filled with a perfectly curated a load of stuff you're interested in. Of course, we need to make this easier and so I wanted to share with you what I'm gonna try and I'll give you an update and we will see how we go in the future. But the things I'm gonna try, I already got myself a little. I already got myself a Fitbit. Joby. Garmin, that's the word. Which means that if my phone isn't with me, then I [00:10:00] hear it go off 'cause it buzzes on my wrist. And that's helped a little bit, but my phone is still almost always with me. And so I decided that I needed to try something a bit more extreme than that. And I am trying, and I'm telling you right now, ain't doing a review 'cause it hasn't even arrived yet. But I will share, I'm trying one of these Brick joby, the little, little devices where you can tap it and it bricks your phone. You can decide which apps it blocks, and then in order to, um, un brick it, you have to tap it back on the thing. And for me, that is a, it's not a barrier, right? I could just walk back to the brick and unbrick it whenever I wanted. For me, it gives a definitive decision that I'm not using my phone for a period of time, and it is also forcing me to think, encouraging me to think, I should say, encouraging me to [00:11:00] think about when do I actually wanna check my phone because this is one thing in my life where I get a bit all or nothing, and I go, well, I, why would I want to spend any time scrolling? This is ridiculous. It would be stupid to block an hour of my day to scroll, Instagram. Why on earth would I do that? Completely separate from the fact that I usually do that before 7:00 AM. Um, so. What I'm hoping, and the way I'm planning to use it, is to make it so that I'm much more intentional about whether I'm intending to use my phone during that time period or not. I'm not gonna set any automated things. You can set it so it comes on at particular times a day and all that sort of stuff. I'm not going to do that at first. I'm gonna experiment with it a bit, but my intention at the moment is to use it to physically tap, I'm gonna allow WhatsApp still come through 'cause [00:12:00] connecting with my friends is very important to me. That's not the bit that I'm worried about. Spending too much time doing chattering on WhatsApp, that feels worth it to me. I'm gonna block the things that lead to unintentional scrolling. I'm gonna block Facebook. I'm gonna block Instagram. Thank goodness I never started TikTok. Thank goodness Elon ruined Twitter for me. That used to take hours of my life too. But that's gone. I am gonna block Rightmove as well. I'm not moving house guys. I moved house like three years ago. I have a very bad Rightmove habit of just looking at houses that I'm never gonna afford and I don't like covet them. I just make plans as to, oh, I'd put this in there and I'd put this in there and Oh, that wouldn't work 'cause I couldn't possibly not have two studies or whatever. So I'm gonna block Rightmove as well. And I'm gonna try and be really intentional and I'm gonna try and kind of experiment with it. 'cause I can already feel my brain overthinking of well, exactly when will you block it and what exactly when will you not and [00:13:00] dah, dah, dah. I'm gonna try and be experimental with it. And the other thing I'm gonna be really clear about, and this is the bit that I'm naturally very good at, is what do I want to do with that time? Because I think it's one thing to tell yourself to stop doing something, but you also have to decide what you are going to do with that time, and I am really excited to actually go a lot more analog. So often what I do is I'm looking on Instagram for inspiration to do some fun art or crafts or something. Well, I've got a ton of art books. I've got a brain, I've got a ton of art materials. I don't need a phone to do that. I watch people doing circus tutorials. Well, I've got a load of circus toys. I know some stuff. I've got some books. I've got friends who do this. I can. You know, I can figure out that stuff. Calisthenics, I don't need, I don't need some guy off the internet telling me how to do pushups. I have been physically active my entire life. I have a [00:14:00] PhD in sport and exercise sciences, which was, it wasn't specific to that. I used to teach anatomy for God's sake. I know how to do this stuff. I know how to broadly, not at specialist level, whatever. I know how to broadly structure exercise programs. I know what I need to be doing. I need to actually be doing it. I tag loads of healthy videos and then I spend so much time scrolling, I eat toast. It's craziness. I have a load of recipe books, I can use them, and so my goal is to swap my screen time for actually specifically using stuff I have already, and this is where, other than buying the Brick, it kind of fits into this sort of less spending thing as well, right? This kind of being more sustainable. So my intention with it is to use this as a way to be [00:15:00] more present, as a way to use the stuff I've got and to actually do the things rather than watch people do the things. The other reason, and this actually directly relates to you lot, and I'm not gonna tell you the details, but on Friday I decided that I wanted a strategy day. I wanted to really think about my business and what I was gonna do next and how I would serve you guys next and what that would look like and everything. And I decided that I needed to get away from it all. And one of the joys about being your own boss is that you can decide to do whatever you want. And so I booked myself into a very lovely spa for the day. And I took a notebook and a pen and I designed and then printed out some reflective questions. And so in this spa, they don't let you take care, or at least they discourage you strongly from taking your phone into the spa itself. So I locked my phone in the locker for the whole [00:16:00] day and I took my notebook and a pen, and I scribbled so many notes. I nearly finished my entire notebook, of ideas, of things that I think would help you guys. Things I want to do over the next year or two, ways I want to support the community, a whole load of freeways. That I want to support the community. I'm going to say. So many ideas about so many things, and because I have a coach too, I discuss them with my coach tonight and we've narrowed them down and I have a plan and you guys are gonna get to hear about them soon. But let's just say getting a little bit more analog and getting a little bit more connected and being more intentional and stuff like that might be coming your way in the PhD Life Coach world. So keep a little eye out. You'll hear more in the new year. But it just really reinforced to me that my brain's got some quite good stuff in it if I [00:17:00] stop spending hours watching a lady's shrimp mantis called Ludo, he's so cute. I'm gonna miss Ludo. I am gonna still have to check in on how Ludo's doing. But anyway. If I spent less time filling my eyeballs with things like that, or why apparently skinny jeans are now coming back in again, I'm too confused, looking at those things. If I spend less time doing those things, my brain actually comes up with a lot of good ideas and insight and clarity and energy. So yeah, this is my plan and I'm trying it now because as my coach always recommends Karin Nordin who I've recommended before, um, now is the perfect time to practice New Year's resolutions. So I haven't decided. I might have a screen time goal next year. I don't know. I haven't decided yet, but now I'm gonna practice and I'm gonna see what's useful and I'm gonna see, [00:18:00] okay, if I'm not gonna wake up and scroll for too long. What am I gonna do instead? What works well? Do I wanna get up and work? Do I wanna get up and exercise? Do I wanna get up and chill out? What do I wanna do? I'm not sure, but I'm gonna experiment and I'm gonna see what happens when I'm not just filling my brain with whatever the machine sends my way. Lemme know whether this resonated with you or not. I wasn't really intending to talk about it, like I say, but it was been top of my mind, and so I thought I would share it with you guys instead. If you have already been on this sort of journey, message me. I am often, I say, you know, I'm not looking for tips and whatever, but particularly if you've ever used Brick and you've got suggestions as to how to set it. The only sort of advice I'm not interested in is don't use Brick. It's a waste of money. Or don't do that. Do this instead. I've bought it now, I've bought it and I'm going to experiment with it. So I don't want to hear that [00:19:00] advice. But if any of you've got tips about setting it up, tips about how you've used it, other ways that you've reduced your phone use, uh, let me know because I intend to really give this a massive shot and keep you guys in the loop about what I've been spending my brain and energy and intention doing when I haven't been doing that. So let's see I hope as well as hearing a podcast about phone use, I hope you are also hearing the tone that I'm speaking not just to myself, but about this. I'm not trying to fix myself. I'm not criticizing myself for being where I'm at, and this is unusual, right? I used to, but I'm really not. I'm curious. About how I'm gonna do it, curious about how it's gonna work out. I'm feeling creative [00:20:00] about what I'm gonna try and what I'm gonna do instead. I'm feeling enthusiastic, and enthusiastic is a really big value for me. I'm feeling really enthusiastic about trying this, and I'm open to kind of collaboration and interest and all those sorts of things from other people too, so that I can explore options and I'm pretty confident that at some point I'm gonna, you know, scramble downstairs in the middle of the night 'cause I'm desperate for my fix and un brick my phone or whatever. I'm sure it'll go wrong at some point, but that's okay. I'm not gonna make that mean anything about myself either. And so hopefully hearing me work this through with you like this, as you can tell. I mean, this is even less scripted than usual. Um, hopefully hearing me work it through like this might help you think about how you could address some of the things you're trying to change in your lives. We don't have to be more disciplined. We don't have to criticize ourselves until we have to do it. [00:21:00] I just think, I think being kind to ourselves, thinking how we can make it easier and seeing what happens. Being optimistic about the possibilities is such a more fun way to do this. I'm gonna keep you posted. Let me know if you have been inspired or if you have any advice for me. Thank you all so much for listening, and I'll see you next week.
