Links I refer to in this episode Dr Gertrude Nonterah on LinkedIn The Bold PhD 55 academics reveal PhD student secrets you won’t learn in school! Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach and I have another guest with me this week. Um, so welcome. This is Dr. Gertrude Nonterah from the Bold PhD and I am super excited to have you with us today. Gertrude: I am so excited to be here, Vikki. Thank you for inviting me. Vikki: No problem. Well, I came across you, as you know, on YouTube, so those of you listening, I will link all of this in the show notes, but if you haven't found the BOLD PhD on YouTube already, I highly recommend that you go check it out after this. And when I was looking, I was like, oh my god. There's so many things that we could talk about that you talk about on YouTube. But we picked one where you had talked up to 55 academics about secrets that PhD students don't know. And that was just so intriguing that I was like, that one, let's talk about that one. But before we get into it, Tell people a little bit about yourself, what you're doing now and how you got there. Gertrude: Yes. So, so thank you for the questions. Thank you for the introduction. I'm Gertrude Nonterah, like you said, and I got into this space of talking about career design for academics and PhDs about four years ago. So prior to that, I PhD as a postdoc for almost three years at a big institution here in the US, a research intensive institution. And somewhere around the three year mark, one day, uh, PI calls all of us in after a lab meeting, he calls all of us into a room and says, Hey, guys, we run out of funding for research. And so in 90 days, you all are going to lose your jobs. And so this is really, um, What happened? This is how this whole thing began. And this was back in 2018. And when the postdoc ended, I thought that getting a job, and at that time, I wasn't really sure, like I had an inkling that I didn't necessarily want to stay in academia and become a tenured professor. But I didn't know where else I would go. Right? Because when you have a PhD, the idea is that you're going to stay in academia to become some kind of lecturer or professor or researcher, right? This is a path that has been well trodden for most academics and PhDs. Well, I began to learn about the different paths that were out there beyond academia. And the trouble was I didn't know how to communicate my value to companies outside of academia. So I kept on submitting my academic CV, thinking that people would be impressed with my credentials and my degrees and nobody was. I had to just learn through the school of hard knocks, how to present my work and how to talk about my work so that people outside of academia would say, Oh, she's not just an academic. Um, you know, because there is that, there is that bias where people just think, Oh, she's an academic. She probably doesn't know how to do anything. Um, I'm sure, I'm sure Vikki, uh, you're familiar with that sentiment. And so like really showing people my value. And I began to document some of that on YouTube. And essentially, that's how the Bold PhD was born, and I didn't realize that in documenting that I would gain sort of an audience around this subject. I thought this, everybody knew this stuff. I thought everybody had figured this stuff out, but the more I wrote about it on LinkedIn and the more I posted YouTube videos, the more I learned that, oh my word, that a lot of us go through the whole academic system and nobody ever teaches us the basics of career development, the basis of career success. You know, it's just assumed that, Oh, they're smart people. They'll figure it out. But I cannot tell you how many, the hundreds of people, if not thousands at this point, to be honest, hundreds of people who have sent me emails or instant direct messages and said, thank you so much for sharing that. If you didn't share that, I would never know how to communicate my value. So really that's how it got started. I hope that I hope that helps answer the question. That's the short part of the story. Vikki: Yeah, so, so helpful and so true. I really, really recognize that because apart from anything else, these students are getting, I saw it where I was. Um, the students are getting supported by people who mostly haven't done that. Right? So, you know, when you're going through your PhD, you've got your supervisors who are in a pretty good place to help you explain your value in terms of getting an academic career, because that's what they did. And so they can kind of guide you through that. But the vast majority of academics who are supervising PhD students will never have done what you've done. They'll never have actually gone and had to sort of, you know, get jobs outside of academia and figure out different ways of telling that story. So it's probably no surprise that PhD students aren't getting taught it directly. But I agree completely that it's a, it's a big gap for sure. Gertrude: It's such a big gap. I feel like ever since I started talking about this, there were a few blogs here and there that talked about it, but it was just so few and far between. I think now there are more voices that are speaking up about this because More and more academics are choosing careers outside of academia or sometimes not necessarily choosing, but there's just not an option for them in academia, right? I think I read a paper a few years ago that said only about 20 percent of PhDs will ever get tenured faculty positions. And that was in the US. I don't know about other places. I spoke to a friend of mine who, um, worked in the UK and she kind of confirmed that statistic, it was even lower for the UK. So, you know, there are more and more people choosing careers or working outside of academia. So I feel like that's no longer such a black box, but still I find that there are people that are like, how do I How do I present my personal brand? How do I write a resume for industry versus academia? You know, so it's, you know, hopefully I've, I've helped enough people. Vikki: And you're going to help more. I know that for sure. And those two things you mentioned there, I know you've got videos about. So if people want to know more specifically about those things too, they can, they can go dig that stuff out as well. So tell me about how this talking to 55 academics came about. Gertrude: That's right. So I made a LinkedIn post and this is about three months ago. We're recording this in November of 2024. So this was, I think somewhere in August or September. So August and September usually marks the beginning of the school year across most countries, right? And usually it's when the new batch of graduate students, PhD students are getting started. So I said, well, semesters are starting all across the world. Okay. PhDs who are in my LinkedIn connections, give your best advice, give the advice you wish somebody had given you when you were starting graduate school. And I think that post ended up getting about a hundred comments of different academics. And I counted about 55 individuals who had responded. I'm sure it's a little more now, but the last time I checked there were about 100 comments and it was just an education in career advice in surviving graduate school and so they had given all these these pieces of advice that to be honest, if somebody had given me that list of advice when I started graduate school I think I would have been in a much better place than I was when I was looking for jobs outside of academia and was unemployed for almost a year and a half, right? And so that's how that post came about. And I, once I made that, that post and I saw how much traction it got and how, how many times it got reshared and commented on, I decided to make a YouTube video about it. And I think that's what you discovered, right? Yes. And so do you want me to go into some of what that people said? Vikki: Well, I am. Yes. But I want to ask you one thing first, because, you mentioned that you were unemployed for a year and a half, and I just think it's amazing that you went through this period where it must have felt super uncertain and things and you found it in yourself to not only get through that and carry on and do different things, but to put your journey out there, to develop these skills and stuff. I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about that. What that was like and how you, how you got yourself to do those things. Cause it would be so easy in that situation to kind of feel sorry for yourself or feel bitter about the experience that you'd had or how people should value your skills. And I'd love to just know a little more about that. Gertrude: Yeah, so I was bitter and sad that I won't lie. I cried because I think for most I'm a millennial. I in my early 40s and all my life I was always told, do your best, go to school, get good grades and everything else will work out. And that's exactly what I did. I went to school. I got good grades. I went and got a PhD. I did everything society said would set me up for success. So why wasn't I successful? Why was I unemployed and barely scraping by? That made me incredibly upset, right? Because I felt like a big failure. I felt like I'd failed myself. I felt like I'd been lied to so many things, right? There were people, I would look at people who maybe didn't have all the credentials or education I had, and they seem to be doing well. Now I have since learned to be careful about comparing myself with people because sometimes you may see somebody and you may judge them to be successful, but you know, what does that mean? It's really important to define success for yourself and not. Get caught up in other people's lives. That's a that's a losing battle. So I've since learned to be careful about doing that but I was still really disappointed in myself for doing everything I was told to do and still not be successful or as successful as I thought I would be at that point. And so I'm the kind of person that if I go through something, I begin to think, is somebody else going through this? Like, our human experiences, it doesn't matter where you're from, it doesn't matter what your experience or your upbringing, most of us have very similar life experiences, maybe just in different settings, right? Just a few things change. And that's when I told myself, well, maybe I'll put this out there and it will help somebody, because I don't want somebody to fall in the same, I'm a teacher at heart, maybe that's why I pursued a PhD, and so I want to teach people all the time, sometimes, you know, even unsolicited, right? And so, and so, um, I really wanted to just show, tell people that if you're going through this, you're not alone. You're not a failure. I just really wanted to say that. And ever since I started doing that, the number, again, the number of people that have sent me an email or something to say, thank you. I was on the job market for a year. I was in the job market for six months and I watch your videos to keep me going. And I'm like, Oh, thank you so much. I'm glad that that helped. So I didn't want people to feel despondent and helpless, as helpless as I did. And so that's why I began to do that. And if I can just reach out to somebody and give them some hope that, you know, just because you are unemployed and you have a PhD or unemployed and you have a master's degree, doesn't make you a failure. You know, hopefully I would have done part of my job. Vikki: Yeah. And it's so important. Thank you for sharing that you, obviously you went through the sadness and the disappointment and the bitterness and stuff as well because I think sometimes people think that handling things well in inverted commas means that you don't experience any of those emotions. And I think it's really important that people recognize that you can feel all of those things and it's probably completely fair and completely understandable to feel all of those things. But you can also decide to do things that will help too. I think that's super powerful to hear. So thank you. How, just on the timelines of it though. So were you, and then, okay, I'll tell you where this is coming from. So I'm trying to get fitter at the moment, right? Cause I want to learn to do like fun fitness stuff, like the kind of calisthenics where it's like handstands and things like that. And part of me is like, this would be quite fun to share my journey, right? but then part of me is like, I only want to share my journey if I actually get to my journey. Yeah. So, were you like, Were you sharing in like real time with you being, you know, you applying for things and sharing all the way through? Or was it that you kind of got some way along this journey and were starting to see things improving and so you then tried to help people that were behind you? Gertrude: Yeah, I think both of them are good approaches. I think I was a, a little further along the journey. Vikki: Okay. Gertrude: So, when I started sharing on LinkedIn, at this point, I was an adjunct professor at a college. So in the U. S., we have community colleges, and those are two year colleges. You can do community college for two years and then transfer to a four year university, and it's still considered that you did two years of university. So, usually people Get into community college after high school. And for a lot of people, it's a cheaper option. It's a more accessible option, right , to help them bridge their way into university. So I was an instructor at a community college. And so I began to share a little bit of my experiences there. And then when I finally landed my first role in medical communications, which is where I work now in the arena I work in now, I was like, Oh my goodness. Like the, the light bulb started coming on. So I started to share, you know, so I had been unemployed, for the 18 months, almost two years prior and, um, in between me, while I was unemployed, I started a writing business. So I started writing, and one of the ways I would get clients was really share my work or share the tools I was using on LinkedIn. So that's how I. I got started. I never meant to like start sharing about my career or anything. I was just trying to find a way to find clients for my business so that I can actually have money to survive. So, as I did that, I began to see it as a platform where people shared ideas. And so I just, I'm telling you, all of this was really like, I stumbled into it. I never planned for it to become anything. I just shared my journey and all of a sudden it sort of blew up , and people began to reach out. So I had gotten a little bit along the down the road with my journey. Um, I never really talked about being unemployed online, but I was talking about my freelance business and getting people so people have been following me since 2018. They know how it started and then somewhere 2020 ish. I started sharing around that transition out of academia, and then that it kind of just Vikki: Yeah, so interesting. So let's get into the secrets. What do you think the most important things that PhD students that would make such a difference if they if they understood during their PhD? Gertrude: Yes, so there's so many, the first one is faculty jobs are not prizes, they are jobs. I loved this one so much because, again, if you, if you're only tuned into the academic narrative, then usually the sentiment within academia in general is academia is sacred and pure and is not tainted by capitalism. And if you get a career there, then it's the most respectable thing you can do with a PhD. And the reality is that it's just a job. And they are not, you know, academia is not really untainted by capitalism. If you think about it, right. Now, this is not me knocking capitalism. I mean, you know, this is not me doing that. But the reality is that there are universities within this country. I live in the US. So there's so many universities now that are basically hedge funds. They have billions of dollars in the tuition that people pay that they have put in funds, you know, to, to enrich who we do not know, but it's real and it's there and these, these things are happening and yet you have academics who sometimes work at some of these institutions and are barely scraping by. So if you think that, you know, it's a sacred calling to be in a faculty member, you know, I really understood the sentiment behind the person that made that comment. It's, it's not real. It's, it's, that's, you've been brainwashed to think that, right? And so, regardless of what you choose, whether you choose to be in academia or you choose to work outside of academia, there's no real evil side. There's no real dark side. It's all just a job, right? So whether you get a job in academia or not, you're probably doing just fine and, and that's okay because people would be really disappointed. I've had people say, I feel like a failure because I didn't get this job in academia. And there's no reason why you should feel that way. Or I remember when I had one of the first posts of mine on LinkedIn that kind of went viral and I ended up making a video about that. And that video also did well, was when I talked about why I left academia. Right, and people have even, I've had, I've gotten a lot of flack for that video too. But anyway, um, I talked about the fact that I enjoy teaching my students. I really did. But ultimately, it wasn't a sustainable income and the way healthcare works here in the U. S. usually, we don't have a nationalized healthcare system, not saying that that's only the kind of healthcare system that you can have, but because of that, you have to pay if you're not working for a company that covers that, you have to pay out of pocket, and to get really good health insurance is very expensive, and even when you get good health insurance and you go to the hospital, you may, you know, if it's a thousand dollars, You know, your health insurance may cover 800 you still have to pay 200, you know, so there's just a lot that goes into not having a good job or health insurance, for instance. And so for me, because I had to think about that and have to think about my family and the needs at that time. I have a child who really needed medical care and that medical care was too expensive coming just from our pockets. And so it was imperative that I get a job that could support me in that way so that I could cover those costs. If it was just me alone, okay, whatever, I can eat ramen noodles and, and just go to bed. But now you have people who begin to depend on you. It's okay to say, I'm making this move for the people I love. I'm making this move so that I can have a better financial future and not feel guilty about making moves like that, right? Because that's what's wrapped up in that comment. Faculty jobs are not prizes, they're just jobs, is if you are in a faculty job and it's not paying you well, it's not helping you meet your financial goals. You're not able to cover your children's health care. You're not able to cover things. It's not like, and I always say this, I wasn't trying to live frivolously. I was just trying to even just survive, you know. If that's you, then, you know, that's your permission to say, hey, I can look for something outside of academia that maybe pays well, it helps me take care of my family, helps me meet those financial goals and obligations. Vikki: No, for sure. And it's so reinforced, I think, you know, I, and I'm going to keep this anonymous for the purposes of the podcast, but I've known people in my past where as a supervisor, they were like really disappointed if their students didn't follow into academia and somehow treated it as though they'd wasted this time training them and things. And even though I, I did, I spent like 25 years in academia before I did what I did, what I'm doing now. I never really got that because I, I feel like we're training PhD students to do a million different useful things. And I never really understood that, but there, there was, I saw it all the time, this kind of, that that's the legitimate route and anything else is disappointing in some way. So yeah, I loved that one. Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. Vikki: So what's next? Gertrude: Well, yes. ,Your cohort is not your competition. They are your village. So I loved that too, because, one of the things I talk about sometimes is networking. And sometimes we're like, I hate networking because we all think of networking as going to those events with a business card and maybe exchanging it and then you leave the networking events and just toss that business card in the trash. We think that that's what networking is. And, you know, I've been trying to like show people that networking is more than that. Right. And then there are people that tell me, oh, I'm an introvert. I hate talking to people. And I'm an ambivert. I can be both that depending on the environment, but I definitely have strong introvert tendencies. And so I get that, right. But one of the things we forget, one of the big networking opportunities we all miss is realizing that the cohort, the PhD cohort we're part of, whether that's your year or even the people that are before you and after you are a network, right? They are a village. They're not your competition. So like just having silly, you know how academics can be sometimes a competition, right? And so, Just falling to that silly competitive behavior like you stop it right and and really see these people as people that can help you get your career ahead. A lot of us would like to think that everything is a meritocracy. Right? Nothing is a pure meritocracy. Nothing. A lot of us love to think this and no society is a pure meritocracy. That apart from you having to do well, having to publish papers, having to do excellent work, you have to learn how to build relationships, how to navigate politics, how to talk to people, how to find mentors. And so this part of it, this part of your cohort or your, the PhD, the people in your PhD program, being a part of your village is one of the things that you're going to have to learn to do so that you're not just depending on your brilliance to get ahead in your career. And I find that this is so true. Now, recently I was interviewing a PhD who had been an academic. She had been a professor for about 10 years at a university. And then the pandemic happened and she decided to transition away from that career path. And you know, the first thing she told me was I immediately got in touch with a professor. With my alumni network, I immediately got in touch with them and just began to ask those people who were not working in academia or those people who I'd known before. Hey, how did you career switch? How do I talk about myself? You know, she just began to talk to these people. She didn't go outside of herself. She just went to the people that she had gone to school with. Right. And so really seeing these people as your cohort and developing those relationships is going to be great. Maybe you're listening to this or watching this, and you didn't develop those relationships. It's not too late, right? When you go on LinkedIn, for instance, and you click on a specific company, sometimes those companies will tell you if there's somebody from your school or somebody from your network that works there. You can tap into that and say, Hey, we went to the same product, right? You know, university, we went to the same high school, even sometimes, um, I just saw that you work at ABC company and I just wanted to, to connect. And that could be your, you know, because we, as human beings, we all love it when we find commonalities with each other. And so if I say my son swims and somebody is a swim mom. She's also going, Oh, my son swims too. And immediately we have a connection. You already have connections with people based on your PhD cohort, based on the broader alumni network. Leverage that and don't shun people or make them your competition. Make them a part of your village. Vikki: Definitely. And I, I see people not necessarily making it competition. Bear in mind, I came from a sports science department. We were as competitive as it gets. But for me, there's also a difference between the kind of competitive where you're like both cheering each other on and trying to slightly outdo each other, but it's all quite exciting and fun. Versus what I see a lot more of with my clients and people in my membership membership is people sort of being like, oh, Gertrude's already published two papers and I haven't, and I must be rubbish, and that whole kind of making it mean something. When, I don't know about your cohort, but like looking back through all the PhD students I've known going through my school, how long people took to finish their PhD or how long they were writing up for or whatever doesn't seem to relate to anything to do with where they are in academia now. It's just a really pointless metric. And how many changes you got after your viva and things like that seems so important. And then I say to people like, you know, how many changes did your supervisor get? And they're like, I don't know, it's like, because no one cares, it's fine. And so, yeah, it's just, it's almost, it's even like really stupid things that we get competitive about. The other thing I wanted to add was, it also doesn't have to just be within your own, like, department or university. One of my, so I have my kind of cohort that I went through my PhD with and things who've been amazing, bunch of them were at my wedding and things like that. Um, but then there was also the people who, I used to go to quite small conferences and it would be the same people each year and so like through the early stages of my career. And I consider a bunch, you know, they're all over, most of them are all over the U. S. And I consider them my cohort too, and that's been wonderful maintaining those relationships and just, and they're all super high flying in their field now and stuff. And so it's, it can be useful too, but more importantly, it's just been really nice. You know, sort of being part of that kind of little network of people that came up at the same time, just in the discipline, even though we were in completely different PhD programs. Gertrude: Yeah. Yeah. I know that's an amazing addition for sure. Vikki: And I know it doesn't always, you know, if you go to massive conferences and where you don't see the same people and stuff, it doesn't necessarily, or you don't get the opportunity to, to go to as many conferences, it doesn't quite work out, but I think there's lots of different places you can find your cohort too. Gertrude: Sure, for sure. Absolutely. Vikki: Well, so give us another one. Wow. So I'm loving these. Gertrude: Yes, absolutely. I like this one where it says, your dissertation topic does not need to define your identity as a researcher. Vikki: Yes. Yes. Gertrude: Like I don't know why somehow the people, I don't know whether it's everybody, but at least a lot of people I've come into contact with who have PhDs think we're locked into this one thing, right? Just because we became an expert in that for five years or six years. You're not, you're not limited. Your identity is not a genetics researcher. Your identity is not the specific, you know, niche subject that you studied. You can apply your skills to a plethora of things. And so one of the things I encourage a lot of PhDs to do is come out from the little pit, right? You've been in that pit for too long. You've got a bit of tunnel vision. Yeah, it's too dark. Come out of it a little bit and realize that your skills that you acquired on getting on the way to getting the PhD are not limited to that one subject, right. If you build the skill of literature review, it's not just for that one subject. If you build the skill of writing about a subject, it's not just for that subject. If you build the skill of designing experiments to test your specific hypothesis, that's not just what your skills are for. Your skill of asking questions and your skill of hypothesis building can be applied to various areas, not just the specific subject you studied or your specific discipline. And so helping people see that has also been one of the, the wildest things I've observed. Like when I, when I say that and the light bulb comes off in PhDs eyes, I'm like, how did we not know this, you know? And so, um, just letting people really realize that. You don't have to allow your dissertation topic to define your identity. You can, you can switch. Vikki: Yeah. Gertrude: And it can be fun. Vikki: And I think that's even useful during your PhD too, because one of the things that I see a lot is that people find negative feedback, for example, really hard to take because they've wrapped up their identity in their topic so much. So then anyone saying, Oh, I'm not sure I quite believe this bit of the experiment, or, you know, have you thought about changing your argument like this becomes essentially someone saying, I think you're stupid and your ideas are bad. And so I think that kind of just. separating yourself just enough from your work, not that it's not important to you or whatever, but that it is just your work, can really help in kind of how you receive feedback, how you develop your ideas, even aside from, from what you do afterwards. Gertrude: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Vikki: Such an important point. Gertrude: Yeah, and then I'll jump on. So the next one is ask for help when you feel lost because we all feel lost at various points. And I think this is a really important one that builds off the points you just made, that you're looking at other people and you're thinking, Oh, this person is doing so well, or she made that presentation and it was so good. Or, you know, and I remember doing my postdoc at some point I was lost. I didn't know where I was going with my question. And I told my PI, I said, I feel lost and I feel like an imposter. Um, and so it's okay to, to express those feelings. Um, because actually, very, very high achieving people tend to all have those thoughts running in their heads. Right? You're high achieving, your whole life you've gotten maybe straight A's or, you know, a few A's and B's. You've always had a high GPA. And so you tend to think that. If I don't have that, then I lose my identity. Talking about identity. If I'm not brilliant, then who am I? And so, because if I'm not, if I'm not brilliant, then who am I? I'm not going to ask the question because it's going to make me look stupid. Forget that everybody else in the room has those questions. Everybody else is feeling just like you feel. They just haven't said it. They just haven't voiced it out. And so I find, I wish I had done this more. Um, and so in hindsight, I'm, I'm giving this advice that if you find yourself in a PhD program or maybe early career and you have questions, ask the stupid question before you make a stupid mistake. Right? Because if you ask the stupid question, then everything is clarified and you know how to move on. If you don't ask the stupid question and then you go and make a stupid mistake, well, people are going to remember that way longer. So you might as well just ask and voice that you feel lost and voice that, you know, maybe you feel like a fish out of water and let somebody help you. And if somebody, if the person you're asking makes you feel less than, that's on them. That's unfortunate. That's a shame for them because we're all learning and we all don't know everything. And so if if they do that, that's not on you. That's that's again. I said stupid not to say it's a stupid question, but I put it. I'm putting it in context. So just to say that, ask the question so that you don't make a mistake that is way, way more costly than the actual question. So ask the question and have somebody who can get you back on the right path rather than feeling like everybody has figured it out. Trust me. I've been in the room. I've been in rooms with people with PhDs, they don't have it together. Vikki: They really don't. Sometimes when I'm, sometimes when I'm coaching, the clients are like, um, you know, especially like, because I have a program at my old university where I have a lot of people and they'll be like, you know, Oh, my supervisor is so brilliant. And they're always on top of this. And I'm just like, I've worked with your supervisor, are you really sure? I'm not really sure. Gertrude: Yes. Sometimes you're like, mm, I, I met these people you are talking about. They're not that impressive when it's, it's not that. It's not that. And you see, I I, I, Vikki: They're human. They're human too. Right? Gertrude: Exactly. I have to be careful with my words. They, yes, in, in some regard. They're definitely impressive, but they question themselves just like you are questioning yourself. Vikki: Of course. Gertrude: They have to carry an air of, I carry an air of confidence because I'm like, why not? But I have questions, I get insecure, I experience imposter syndrome. We're all going through that and it's okay to, to ask the questions. Vikki: And it doesn't mean you're not independent. Because that's the pushback I always get is students saying, but they say I'm meant to be independent. They say this is meant to be my project. I'm meant to be making the decisions. And I'm like, yeah, that doesn't mean you never ask for help though. Being independent doesn't mean you're just like an island that never can... in fact, the best independent researchers that I know are the ones that make the connections that you were talking about earlier and know how to like build on other people's knowledge and expertise is but while adding their own by, by like bringing it all together, so. Gertrude: Yeah, yeah. Vikki: I could talk to you all day, but I know we are slightly tight for time. So if people want to hear the rest of these, and the rest of all this good stuff that you have for them, where should they find you? Gertrude: Yes, so if you go on YouTube, you can type in Dr. Gertrude Nonterah. You'll find my YouTube channel and this video is one of my most recent videos. I posted like maybe two months ago. So you can find that there. You can also go to theboldphd. com. That's my website. Um, it has all the links. I have a, I have a newsletter I send out bi weekly to about 2, 800 academics and I just write whatever comes to mind every every other week around life and around career, because I think they're intertwined right. I think if you want to build a good life you have to have a good career and I really believe in designing the kind of life you want and then fitting your career into that versus the other way around so that you can actually have a life that you enjoy. So I write about that in my newsletter, uh, every other week. So people can join that as well. Vikki: And I'll put a link to this specific episode, as well as your website and stuff in all of the show notes. So thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. I know this will have been super useful for all the listeners. Gertrude: Absolutely. I appreciate you too, Vikki. Thank you so much. Vikki: And thank you everyone for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

Links I refer to in this episode How to make decisions that you love How to go from idea overload to clarity Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast and if you are listening to this in real time, welcome to 2025. This is our first episode of the new year. I hope you've all had a wonderful festive period and are feeling rested and as though you used the time period in the ways that you intended, mostly. None of us do perfectly, but that you mostly spent it how you intended. Now, this is the ideal time of year to be talking about the stuff that we're talking about this week. Because this is a time where we're all thinking about goals and resolutions and what we want to do more of, less of, or achieve this year. And often, we think about those new resolutions, but we don't think about the things that we might let go of. And I find that people get really, really caught up in this, that they don't know when to walk away from a goal. In psychology we call this goal disengagement where we decide that actually this goal that we were working towards we are not going to do for lots of different reasons and we're going to re engage with a different goal instead. So today we're going to think about why doing that feels so challenging, why it can be really important and some tips about how to make it a little bit easier for you to know when to and if to change your plans. I'm also going to use an example from my own life, which has a lot of relevance for many, many of you. I can tell you a little bit about some career changes I made as we go along, that's fine. But towards the end of this episode, I am going to talk you through a big decision that I have made about the ways that I'm going to support all of you guys this year. So make sure you listen all the way to the end to find out what is going to be out there for you in 2025. And it's good news. I think you're going to love it. So why is it so painful sometimes to decide to change a goal? Sometimes this is because of something that you may have heard of before, which is called the sunken cost fallacy. This idea that we've put so much time and effort into something that it would be a real waste to move on and not achieve that goal. So at its most extreme, sometimes this is is choosing to leave academia or choosing to leave your PhD, for example. Other times it might be a sort of smaller scale version of that, deciding not to pursue a particular research project that you thought you were going to do and move to a different one instead. We often get quite fixated on the time and effort and money and emotional and cognitive effort that we've put into this already. And there's a real human tendency to tell ourselves that that would be wasted if we decided to do something else. The reason it's called a fallacy though is that what we do as humans is we often overlook the fact that all of that time, effort, money, cognitive energy, emotional energy is already spent regardless of what we do. It's not that if we continue down this path we somehow get that effort back, that's spent. It's spent if we go down that path. It's spent if we choose to not go that way and go down another path. And when we can look at it like that, that that effort is in the past regardless of what we decide to do now, then we can be a little bit more logical looking forwards as to which would be a better path for us. So instead of sort of relating it to, I need to keep going in order to make that effort worth it, seeing that as something that's spent, that's gone, which is the better fit for me moving forwards? And often the truth is that the time, effort and energy you put into one thing may well set you up to do something different anyway. So I had two major pivots in my career. So I went into a sort of standard academic job, I guess, started out in postdocs and then got a lectureship. Um, all at the same institution and it was around then that I decided that I didn't like research anymore, but I loved reading other people's research and knowing about it and I love teaching people about it, but I didn't enjoy the actual doing of it anymore. And so I decided at that stage to pivot to a teaching career. Now, it would have been very easy to sort of lament all of that time and effort that I had spent building up a research portfolio and a research reputation and a network of people around the world who knew my research and knew me and where I felt part of that community. I could have spent quite a lot of time feeling like that was wasted and that I could have gone into a more teaching oriented career originally. But I think what I was able to do was two things. One was to accept that that was spent, as I said, and accept that whatever I decided at this point, that effort was done. And I now got to choose, which was a better path for me. And for me, that was a very straightforward decision. The teaching career was the one that I found myself doing. You know, people were telling me, you need to spend less effort on your students and your teaching and stuff because you need to do the other stuff for your career. And I just couldn't persuade myself to write my papers and write my grants and things, especially grants. I like writing grants, but I didn't want to get them. That was the real deciding factor for me was when I don't want to write this grant because if I get this grant, I'm going to have to do this grant and that's another four years of research and I don't want to. That was when it was like, oh, okay, this is, this is time for a change. So one thing was that I was able to quite easily put behind me the fact that this effort was already done and that I now needed to make a decision for future me looking forwards rather than being quite so caught up in past me. The other reason that I think can be really useful for all of us is I really recognized how all the time and effort that I put into becoming the researcher that I was would also help me in my teaching career. And I think sometimes we underestimate this. Those of you who might be considering changing your research project, or even leaving your current position, you will have learned a whole load of stuff through the process of the effort you've put in so far that will stand you in great stead whatever you go on and do, even if it's something completely different. You know, I was doing psychophysiology. I was doing stress immunology. So I was doing lab work in a kind of cardiovascular sense, electrodes all over people and all that jazz. And I was doing lab work in a kind of wet lab environment. And I was doing sort of psychological assessments and manipulations in a variety of ways. So I was learning all these research trainings that I was not going to use in my teaching. And I wasn't even teaching that stuff a lot of the time, right? I was given other modules to teach. Yet the skills that I developed as a person and as a researcher made me way better in my teaching oriented career. So remembering that that time and effort is never wasted. It's brought you to where you are now, and now you get to make the decision that's right for you going forwards. The second reason, and I think in our kind of world, this is even more pressing than in most situations. The second reason I think people find changing their plans so difficult, is that they make it mean something about them. They make it mean that they failed in that goal. They make it mean that they made the wrong decision back then when they decided on the original goal and that that's bad and that that means something bad about you that you made that wrong decision. And we make it mean that we don't have discipline or we don't stick to plans. I have people, clients, people in my membership who come to me quite regularly and they proudly say, Oh, if I commit to something, I am definitely going to follow it through. No matter what, I am someone who always follows through. And they say that very proudly. And there are some, you know, I think this comes like from childhood and stuff as well, but often people present it that way, right? You know, we as a family, we stick to our goals. Even when the going gets tough, we stick to our goals. And there's something beautiful about that, but there's also something that makes me a little bit worried because there does sometimes reach a point where sticking to your goals is not in your best interests. For example, you know, many of you will know I'm a sport scientist. I don't watch that much sport these days, but I, you know, I kind of love that stuff. Quite often in these sort of endurance events, you will see people who are finishing with horrible injuries, finishing where they're so dizzy they don't even know where they are, they're getting dragged across the line by competitors, and it's held up as some heroic thing. And I'm a bit like, no. There's pushing through uncomfortableness, there's trying to have a commitment to something that was important to you, but if it's either no longer important to you, no longer good for your physical or mental health, or no longer looking in any way plausible, It's okay to let it go. It's okay to decide I'm not doing that anymore. I'm going to do something different instead. And if we can separate that from our sense of self, if we can separate that from our sort of perspective of ourselves as somebody who does the things they intend, it's so much easier to make that decision. Because suddenly you're making decisions about things that are just, I might do this or I might do that. I might not do that anymore. I might do this now. And it becomes so much lighter than if I choose to leave my PhD, all my friends will think I'm an idiot, my family will be so disappointed, it will mean I made the wrong decision joining in the first place, it will mean I failed, I will look back on this moment and regret it for the rest of my life. If we make it mean all of our stuff, It's virtually impossible to leave, or without, certainly without, you know, trying to leave without a whole lot of unnecessary pain and awfulness. Whereas, if we see it just as a different task, a different goal, saying, you know what, I thought my PhD, my academic career, whatever it is, was going to be this, and it's not, it's not worked out like that, that's not how it's gone. Then, then we get to decide that something else might fit us better. And other people, they might be disappointed. They might not, that's their prerogative. They get to have their thoughts and feelings, but we at least get to tell ourselves that it doesn't have to mean anything about me. It doesn't even mean it was the wrong decision. It means it was the right decision at the time. You thought what was going to happen would work for you. And now you know more. Now you have more insight. You have more experience, you have more wisdom, and now you know better what's a good fit for you. And you get to make that decision. And this goes all the way down to like study designs and all of that sort of stuff. Often we think, oh, I've put loads and loads of effort in here. I've already interviewed 20 people on these topics and whatever. I've already collected this much data, this many samples, da da da, I have to keep going this way. But if you're learning that the analysis isn't working or you're learning that actually this isn't getting to the crux of the research question that you're trying to answer, it doesn't mean you were wrong. It just means you know more now. It just means you're more experienced and you get to pick whether you want to keep going or not. I remember the other big pivot point in my career was obviously leaving academia to start doing this full time. And I don't know, I feel like I'm not good at change. I was about to say, I feel like I must be good at change. I never changed universities. And that's, that's a whole other conversation for another day. We're not going to get into that one today. But when it came to major decisions about my career, I feel like I was pretty good at separating it from my sense of self. When I came to tell people that I was leaving academia in order to set up this business and coach all of you guys. I remember so many people being like, you're so brave. You're so, like I was going off to do this, like terrible. Like I was going off to war or something. It's like, it's not brave, it just sounds loads more fun than the thing I'm doing at the moment. I've achieved what I wanted to achieve over here. I've done what I wanted to do, and now I want to do something different. And I think it's important, I think people will pay me for it, and I think I can make it work. And I remember laughing because I remember thinking, I don't think this is brave. I don't quite understand. But I think for a lot of people, they're so wedded to that identity of the previous plan, that identity of being an academic, and they would make it mean something about themselves if they chose to leave. Now, as usual, caveat. The one caveat I would put in here is in both cases, when I pivoted to a teaching focused career and when I pivoted to leave and set up the PhD life coach, I was leaving from a point of success. And I do think that made it easier for me. I wasn't failing as a research , member of staff. I had, I'd got grants. I had good publications. I was successful. I'd just been promoted to senior lecturer. So it wasn't that I couldn't make it as a researcher. And similarly, when I left academia entirely in order to do this work. I'd been made full professor two years before, it was all going well, my career was on the up. And I do have to concede that I do think that helped. It made it easier for me to feel like, right, I've done that, I could keep doing that, but I choose not to. So that did make me feel a bit more empowered, I think, as I, as I went through my career. I do think it's more challenging if you're leaving because something hasn't worked out for you, because you're not succeeding in the ways that you wanted to. But even then, you get to choose whether that Fail, in inverted commas, is a fail of that specific goal and that specific task, or whether it's a fail of you as a person in some sort of kind of stable and ongoing way. Those are very different things. You cannot achieve a goal and one that you really wanted to, that you really thought you'd be able to, and things like that, you cannot achieve that goal. And you can be specifically disappointed about the fact that that didn't go the way you wanted it to, without that kind of generalization about what that means to you as a person. We don't have to be like, Oh, I learned so much, it was worth it, da da da. No, you can be super disappointed. Be frustrated, be pissed off, it's fine. Okay? Have all the emotions about that goal that didn't work for you. Just be really careful that you're not generalizing it to mean that you're a failure, that you're a terrible person, that you let people down, blah, blah, blah. Okay? We can be sad, we can be disappointed, frustrated, but it doesn't have to mean anything about you as a person. Now, hopefully that's kind of dealt with some of these reasons why it can be quite difficult to even consider changing your goals. Then the next question is often how do you choose? And here I am going to touch on this lightly, but I will also refer you back to my podcast about how to make decisions that you love, which covers this in much, much more detail. But essentially my go to always is to think about what would be my reasons. What would be my reasons to stay? What would be my reasons to go? So I'm going to give you one quick example from my career turning point, and then I'm going to tell you the new and exciting news, where I've made a change decision of my own. So in terms of my career, when it came to leaving academia, I did this. I was thinking, what would be my reasons to set up my business, to leave academia and set up my business. And my reasons were people really need this. PhD students and academics really, really need the support that I know I can offer. So I definitely felt like It would help people. I definitely felt like I was able to do it. So another reason was like, I think I can do this. I think this uses the bits of me that I like most and the bits of me that come most naturally to me. Whereas the more I progress through academia and the more it became kind of strategic and data informed and long term planning and consultative and all these things, the more I found it out of my comfort zone. So I felt like it used the best bits of me. Another reason was it seemed fun. It seemed fun and exciting. It felt like I would learn a load of new things. And then the final one was a personal one. Leaving the university enabled me to also leave where I had been living previously and move closer back to my aging parents and my sisters and things like that. So there was kind of a personal reason there too. And those were my main reasons why I would choose that move. Now when I then think about why I would have stayed in academia, at that stage I would have stayed in academia because I like the people. You know, I still miss wandering across campus and bumping into my colleagues and stuff, so I would have stayed because I liked the people. I would have stayed because it was a stable income, a good stable income. I would have stayed, I don't even know, I don't think I would have stayed because it was what people expected because I quite like doing what people don't expect, but you know, there was a career path ahead of me that would have led to lots of influence and quite a lot more money. So I would have stayed for that career path, I guess. There were reasons to stay in Birmingham, but that was a separate decision, you know, I had all my friends and hobbies and stuff in Birmingham. But, but yeah, those were my most, my main reasons. And what you then do is you look at those reasons and you say, which of these reasons do I like best? Which of these reasons can I stand behind? If this all goes wrong, which reasons am I willing for it all to go wrong for? And I knew for me in particular, I know this is different for different people who are in different environments but for me I would far rather regret doing something than regret not doing it. I would far rather have failed by trying to set up a business that was going to help people. That was going to bring me a working life that I really liked that enabled me to be near my family and that was exciting and learning new things. If that was going to go wrong, I would far rather go wrong doing that than to go wrong by doing another 10 years in a career that I was increasingly not enjoying. You know, which would I regret more? I would hundred percent regret more having allowed another five, ten years to pass without making the decision to move on. So you get to look at those reasons. And it's like, which version of you do you like best? Which of these represents who you want to be? And I knew that the version that chose to leave was the version of me that I liked best. It was the, you know, I would have stayed through some sort of risk aversion more than anything else. And I don't want to do that. And I have to say two and a bit years later, and again, I'm biased because it's all working really well. I'm getting good clients and it's all beautiful. Um, so I am maybe a bit biased, but I am so glad I made this decision. And I just decided if I'm deciding to do this, and I love the reasons, then I'm just going to have to make it work. You know, have a vague agreement with my husband when our mortgage is due. If I'm not making enough money by then, I'm going to have to do something else, but that's fine. And because I'm, you know, It's not, it's not going to happen because I'm going to make it work. So I decided these were the reasons I like best, and I decided that I would make it work. And that's what you get to do too. Now, this is where I want to share with you the more recent decision that I've been making that... I'd already planned to do this episode, but then this just fitted. beautifully into it. And that is around my membership. So those of you listening will know that I have a membership program for PhD students where you get access to online group coaching, regular workshops, a Slack community where you can ask for advice, self paced courses, all sorts of stuff. It's amazing. And I truly believe that as it stands at the moment, it is also amazing value for money. It's £97 a month and you get all of that from it. When you compare it to any of the other membership programs on the market, across the general population, it's very affordable and great value, in my opinion. However, I was also getting caught up in whether it was too expensive for PhD students. There's a difference between not believing something is good value. I, a hundred percent, you get a lot for that money. But that is not the same thing as can the key people that you want to help afford this product? And I had a couple of people who'd been super engaged members tell me that they weren't able to carry on with a membership because they couldn't afford it. The monthly payment, it was too much to commit to. And then I had one or two people that were saying, you know, can I leave for a month because I don't think I'm going to use the sessions too much this month and then come back in a month and that kind of sort of slightly in and out. And at first I told myself, don't panic. You're getting lots of new members. It's fine. And I wasn't concerned that I couldn't recruit people at that price. I absolutely could. I already have one to one clients who are paying me more than that. And so I know some PhD students can afford this. So, I sort of checked in with myself and I was like, Are you just panicking that you're going to lose some people? Because it's normal. You're going to lose some people, you'll gain some people, it's fine. So, it's normal. And I realized that wasn't it. The reason I was feeling uncomfortable was because the students that were telling me that they couldn't carry on because it was too expensive were exactly the sort of students that I wanted to be helping and exactly the sort of students that I had already seen gain so much from the membership. And so I started having this sort of, dilemma of should I drop my prices? And I could hear my brain chattering in both directions about this sort of reasons why I should, reasons why I shouldn't, and all of this. And I didn't spin very much but I started to spin a little bit on it. And I sort of took a deep breath and was like, right, let's practice what we preach. Let's think this all through. And I actually used my voice note technique. If you haven't looked at my episode about what to do when you've got a overwhelmed brain, swirling brain, can't remember what it's called. I'll link to it in the show notes. The one where I talk about using voice notes. I use that to talk through what I was thinking about this decision. And then from there, I started to sort of parse out what would be my reasons for reducing my price and what would be my reasons for retaining my price. And I realized my reasons for reducing my price were mostly things to do with being accessible to a wider range of students and I love that reason. I was talking it through with my sister and she said to me, if you could have. 50 students playing less or 25 students paying more, which would you want? And in my membership, that's a no brainer. I want 50 students paying less. Yeah, I want to help as many people as I can in the membership. One to one's different, right, because I've only got so many hours in the day, so in one to one I'd rather have fewer students paying more. But in terms of the membership, I have capacity for more people in my sessions at the moment, and I'd rather help more people. And so then I was like, well, hang on, then why isn't this an easy decision? Why haven't you just made this decision already? What would be your reasons to stay as you are? And one reason was, I already think it's good value. Okay. I quite like that reason. That's a reasonable reason. It's already good value. I stand by that original decision. My second reason was immediately thinking about my existing clients. What am I going to do with the people that have paid these higher prices? Because I said like, if I drop the price, then they're gonna be like, hang on, how did they suddenly get it for that much when we paid And then the third reason was you guys. The third reason that I was thinking that I wouldn't do it was the thought of telling people that I was dropping my prices and you guys potentially thinking that that was because I couldn't get enough people or that I was failing, I was getting desperate, or any of these things. And those were my main reasons. And so for me, it was a dead simple decision. Once I sort of pulled that out of my brain and that always takes a little bit of wiggling, you know, to figure out what you're thinking. Once I pulled that out of my brain, dead easy decision. I love the reasons to make this cheaper. And I do not love the reasons. I love the, it's good value already. That one I stand by. Other than that, the worrying about existing clients, that's fixable. I like it that I'm considerate of that, but it's fixable. I can talk to them, not a problem. And the idea that I was sort of a bit embarrassed to tell people I was going to do it, didn't like that reason. That's not who I am, how I want to be, how I want to do business. And so from there it became this, okay, I want to do this, so how, how do I transition? And that's the point you then need to make if you decide you're going to change your research project, leave what you're doing, set a different goal, whatever it is. You then get to think, okay, how do I transition from one to the other in a way that makes the most of all the benefits that you want? Plus any additional benefits that might come from it that you haven't thought of yet, and that mitigates the stuff you're worried about, i. e. your reasons to stay. And for me, what that looked like was making a decision about the price going forward, which I will tell you in a second, making a decision about the price going forward and the structure of the membership, I started with that and then deciding how I was going to mitigate the things that I was worried about. The value, I am happy if it is now even better value than it was. Happy days. That's fine. I'm down with that. If in terms of my existing clients, you will know who you are. You know what we've already agreed. I've made arrangements with them where they will get some special bonuses for the fact that they have paid more for this pro, this process than it is going to cost in future. So I have sorted them all out. You do not need to worry. We're in the process of giving them all those special bonuses. And then in terms of telling people about this, I thought, well. You value transparency, you value openness, clarity. Why don't we not just tell them? Tell people the process that you went through. Tell people why you made this decision. And I had actually already got scheduled in a How and When to Change Your Plans podcast episode that I hadn't written, but I knew I was going to do that topic. And it was like, you know what? This is a perfect example in real time of me deciding to change plans. And so that's what this episode is. It's me mitigating that final concern, the sort of public perception of this decision. I mean, as if you guys spend lots of time worrying about this stuff. I am self aware enough to know that's not true. But I thought, actually, this is a really nice opportunity to be able to talk through a real life case study. So, on to the details before we like wrap up. The details are, the one additional change I've made is that we are now going to operate in quarters. So you are only going to be able to join the membership four times this year. It's going to open at the end of January and it will open every three months after that. So if you want in for this first quarter, you need to join at the end of January. The reason for that is because behavior change takes time. I don't want people dipping in for a month, disappearing for a month, dipping in when they can, da da da. I want people to come in and have sustained support for 90 days, on a specific goal that you're trying to achieve at the moment in your PhD, and to get the support you need to actually see tangible changes in your life. And that takes a minimum of three months. So, It's going to open at the end of January. We're going to have a three month quarter. There'll be like a startup call where we identify our goals, things like that. There's going to be an instruction to the membership for new members. There's going to be all the weekly. So there's three group coaching sessions a week. There's workshops every two weeks where you get more kind of tangible tools and things like that. You'll get access to all my online courses immediately. Previously, we had this kind of two tier system where monthly members got access to some of it. Okay. And people that paid for six months got more. Now, everyone pays by the quarter. Flat rate. Exactly the same. Everyone gets access to everything. So whether it's be your own best boss or what to do if you've got too much to do or have to make decisions and prioritize, all that good stuff is all just there. And part of what I will help you do is identify which bits you want to work on, which bits are priorities at the moment, so that you don't feel overwhelmed and that you can kind of systematically work on the things that are going to help you to achieve your goals. So it's three months, it's going to open at the end of January. It previously cost 97 per month. Or, 475 for 6 months. Now, it is going to be 147 pounds, Great British Pounds, per quarter. 147. So it is virtually half price. Okay? If you're not in the UK, you'll need to translate that out into yours. It'll be a subscription, so once you've signed up, It will charge you again in three months time unless you choose to cancel. So it's sort of encouraging people to be an ongoing part of this membership. It hopefully moves it, it's still money and I'm still aware there'll be still some PhD students who can't afford it, but it hopefully moves it into a more sustainable, ongoing choice for people to make. So that's my big news. If you're sitting there going, yeah, I still can't do that. That's cool. No worries. I gotcha. That's why this podcast will always remain free. And it's why there will still be one workshop per month. So a one hour coaching session where there's going to be this, this year, there's going to be a specific topic and some coaching that is completely free for anybody on my newsletter, anybody that signs up for it in advance. So if you're somebody who's like, I am never able to pay for this, You get my podcast, you get my newsletter, you get one free seminar per month. Okay, if however, you want more sustained support, you want more contact with me, you want more interaction, you want a community around you, you want co working sessions, we're adding those as well a couple of times per month. If you want all of that stuff, you need to make sure you go to my website and click on the waiting list button. Putting yourself on the waiting list doesn't have any obligation, anything like that, but it does mean that once we're getting ready to open and once we're open, you will get all the information you need about exactly what you get in the membership and exactly how much it costs and what you will get out of it. For my existing members, this is going to be a change for you too. There's going to be more in it than there was previously because we're adding these coworking sessions. We're adding the introduction to the membership. We're adding this kind of quarterly approach where we'll have an opening session and a closing session where we really kind of set our goals over that quarter. So any of you who are in already are going to get even more than you were getting previously. And this for me is that kind of final example of how to change your plans. When you then change your plans, when you decide what it is you do want to do, I want you to make it a complete no brainer. That this is the best decision you've ever made. I am super excited. My membership is going to be twice as good and half the price and I can't wait to meet all of you who haven't yet made it to any of my live sessions and who would love to get the support that you need to succeed in your PhDs. So I am making this the right decision. And I really hope that if you are trying to change your plans at the moment, or you're considering changing your plans, that this episode has helped you do let me know if you're on my newsletter, just drop me a reply, let me know, what decisions you're making at the moment, how you might change your plans, see if I can help and, go get yourself on that waiting list. I hope I see all of you in the membership at the end of January. If you're not listening to this live, by the way, and it's not January, just have a look on my website. It will tell you exactly when the membership is due to open next. You can just jump on the waiting list and then as soon as it's open, come on in and let me give you all the support you need. Thank you everyone for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. This week, for the first time in absolutely ages, we have a coaching session. So in this episode, I'm talking to a final year PhD student, Swagata, who is struggling with overwhelm and with kind of the relentlessness of having this large chunk of work to do before she hands in. We recorded this back in November and I'm scheduling it now for you to listen to over the new year period. This is going to be perfect if you ever feel like your work is endless, like you desperately need a plan but you don't have time to stop and do it, or if you find yourself being more self critical than you'd like. So, in short, all of us. Hope you enjoy. Let me know what you think. And if you ever want to be coached on a future episode, do get in touch. You can contact me through my website or by pressing the Ask Vikki a Question button on your podcast and we can get you booked in. It would be fun to chat. Swagata: I actually need help at this moment is really to change this mindset, to keep pushing in the last few months. And there are like a lot of blocks and overthinking of what is preventing me to do that. So I want to focus mainly on, on that. And I understand there are external factors. There are, there are things that have happened, but really what would really help me in these last four or five months that I have to really have the motivation to keep going because it's also a tiring process, but, really to get out of this, almost the dread of going to the, to do the PhD because of all of these things and the, like the overwhelm. And I want to focus mainly on those things. Vikki: Perfect. Perfect. So you use the word dread there. Tell me more about this dread. Swagata: Yeah, it's um, so when I started, it's four years ago, a little over four years because I extended a little bit. It's my own project. It was not, uh, like a project that I applied to, so I made up the proposal. I applied for the funding, so it was all hard in the beginning, but I did it because I really wanted to do a PhD on this topic. So I had to manage everything by myself because I wasn't part of a PhD team. It was my project that I brought to the supervisor. I applied for funding, of course, with the help of everyone. So I really started with a lot of enthusiasm and it was also validated, because of I got a good funding, so it meant that other people thought it was, the university thought it was worthwhile, and also throughout the PhD, it seemed like it was going quite well, because I was doing well. I don't know what that meant to the PhD, but of course, like I was, whatever deadlines there were, whatever presentations, I was very, let's say, intuitive to what was needed in the presentation. And so in my head, I have the impression that it was going okay. But now that I'm trying to end it, there is a lot of pressure because it's kind of ending something that I made up and I was trying to prove. So ending, I had to end in this spectacular way because I brought it. No one else told me to do it. And like constantly working continuously for four years, I'm tired. I am also overwhelmed with, I think the scale and I think the scale of the PhD is something I'm realizing now that I have to finish because earlier I always had to make a presentation for a specific part, whether, so let's say a 20 minute presentation or like a progress meeting. So you always have a little bit focus or so I can leave out other things and really prepare it. But now everything has to make sense. Everything that I did has to come in it. And I have to link it properly. So that the scale of the whole manuscript is, you know, like making me a lot overwhelmed and because I think of the way I was working, I'm also constantly tired. So my brain, let's say it's not at the best where I really needed to be at this sharpest, because now I need to critically make these links and come up with these arguments and also make my own position more clear, which is something I'm really struggling with. So there is this constant dread of doing something that. is not good enough. So over the last, let's say one year of the PhD, I have been working, but there have been these difficult decisions I have to make, and I kind of have been procrastinating. So I leave them and then now I have to deal with all of them together because I have to make it. Okay. So that becomes very difficult for me. And now it's becoming like this dread to go back to the table to work because I feel like like these old habits that I want to procrastinate and do something easy, but I do have to do the hard things. And I really then hate the feeling that I'm not enjoying the PhD or, so it's like this constant thing. I know that I'm dreading it, but then I'm like, Oh my God, but I did this. So in my head, there is another voice that's saying that, I enjoyed it. I used to enjoy it. I should enjoy it. This is like the final thing that's coming out of this four year thing. So there is this negative thing, which I'm also judging myself for dreading it. So it's like this continuous loop happening and which is, which I'm really, really struggling at this point. Vikki: Yeah, I think there's going to be so many people listening to this who empathise with that completely, and especially this idea that we're kind of not showing up exactly how we want to, and then we're judging ourselves for that, and then we know we shouldn't be judging ourselves, so we judge ourselves for judging ourselves, and it all becomes this big, like, inception type situation, where it's just, yeah, just a lot of thoughts and a lot of drama, for sure. So I want to get clear on some of the facts. So one of the things that often happens, especially at this stage of a PhD, but to be honest, at any time in academia, is people can get very caught up in their own story. And you've got this big story around, there's a lot of it, it's big scale. It's got to connect. It's got to be spectacular. Um, you know, it's got to prove all of these things. There's a whole lot of stuff. And, you know, I'm not being disrespectful when I say story. Anything like that that's not just factually true is story. And what can be really useful is just to sort of separate that out a little bit before we start dealing with it. So my first question for you is where exactly are you at? In the writeup process. So where are you at with data collection? Where are you at with analysis? Where are you at with your chapters? Swagata: So at this point, I have kind of written a draft of all my chapters. So I'm so I'm doing a more qualitative research. So I don't have experiments, but then I do have field visits and stuff. So all of those things are done. So I just have to write everything and I have written like first drafts. I just have to write my conclusion chapter and but I, as of this week, I just need to revise them and I have received comments which are helpful, but they also need major revisions. So that would also mean that I would have to do a lot of these. Like the basic what you call experiments, not really experiments, but I have to rethink them how they fit. So I have to make a little bit changes in my basic analysis thing. So they need major revisions. But it's also at this point that I don't want to keep doing it again and again. That's what this has been happening. I want to do a good draft and be done with it. Because this is also the time, uh, because I have been writing for a long time, but it was really like unfocused and I was really like more describing things, but not critically making links. And so now I really want to do one version and okay, that's it. Vikki: It's really interesting this notion of, not wanting to do things again and again. So, what is wrong with doing things again and again? Swagata: Because I feel like I'm okay with doing things again and again, and the way in our discipline, it is actually helpful to keep drawing and redrawing things. But what I mean by Doing it again and again. And what I have an issue now is the way I have been doing it. I wasn't clear on what I wanted to say. And that's why whenever I was writing or doing something like in the chapter, I was getting lost in details. And then I find that I can't get back to the main thing I was saying and because I wasn't getting like clear in the beginning. That's why I had to redo things again and again. And it wasn't in a very like in one direction. So I was like, Oh, this is interesting. Let me do this. And then you spend your time doing these different things and you have work, you have experiments in these things, but at the end there, you have to, of course, leave something out to make the bigger story. So redoing in the sense I meant, like, I didn't, didn't know in my head or I didn't make the decision what to keep, what not to keep, so that means maybe I also redid a lot of things that over two, three times I went back to the first thing because I hadn't thought it through and I was constantly in this rush to get done and I'm half tired, but still pushing myself. So that was something I really need to be able to make decisions so that I am like, okay, this is so I'm clear with the things that I'm doing. Vikki: Yeah. Because I think the reason I ask about this is people often talk about how they want to be more efficient. They want to not be kind of going down dead ends, going around in circles, and they want to feel that they're moving, like you say, in a linear way towards the conclusion. And I think it's really important for us to separate out a normal research process, from something that's driven by unhelpful levels of self doubt. Because I think there's some bits that you've picked out that are super, super useful. So recognizing that sometimes you maybe rushed because you wanted to get it done, or you kind of questioned your right to a certain point or whatever, you know, that whole imposter syndrome thing. And so you ended up second guessing things that you could have just stuck with. I think that is absolutely worthless, thinking about and thinking about how we can make sure you can, not necessarily avoid, but minimize that stuff. at the moment. But I want us to think about the normal research process and whether you think it's reasonable for the normal research process to go in this straight line. Because I think there are things you're beating yourself up for in the past. Swagata: Yeah. Vikki: That sound to me like entirely normal deviations that happen as you learn. Swagata: Yeah, I think like I have kind of accepted that, that it's not a straight process. So I feel like the acceptance is also two levels for me. So overall, I have accepted that the research takes time and you know, like that it's also an iterative process. And every time I do it, I do it like there is something else that I figure out. So I do accept that thing. But I feel like when I'm doing it in the process, so when I'm planning it, I do understand it. I understand everything that I heard, I read to help the PhD, but I felt, feel when I'm in the middle of it, like really implementing it when I'm writing the chapter. This overwhelm takes over and somehow, even though I know that it has to go this way, and there is this overarching thought that I understand at the moment, like this day to day, it's really becomes overwhelming. And that's where, even though I remember it, it becomes difficult to connect to it. And then I, and I think it's also this habit of just pushing myself. So this way of working that I have developed over the years, so at that moment, it becomes like, even though I know it, even though I remind myself, then it becomes this thing, come on, it shouldn't take so much time. Come on, let's, it's, so I look at the plan. Okay, it's, it's not so much. Come on, why are you overthinking it? Just do it. So it's, I feel like a disconnect between these two kind of acceptance where, over the long term, I can accept, I can even accept that I am taking time to extend it, and I know the reason, but when I'm actually working on it, it feels like a waste of time to slow down and connect back to these bigger reasons why I actually convince myself that I should slow down, make it more like a understanding plan of myself. So that's something I'm still figuring out how to, how to do it. Vikki: And those of you watching on YouTube will see me smiling because this is just so, so common, so normal. Okay. And, and we can, we can do stuff about this. It's brilliant. I want you to notice that, you were talking about one of the things you wanted to avoid doing is rushing to conclusions without thinking it through fully. But what you're doing at the moment is telling yourself you have to go straight to the conclusion because you don't have time to go around all the wiggly roads. And so we have to try and be cautious of this bit where we're actually telling ourselves to do the thing that we're also beating ourselves up for having done in the past, right? And I think the only thing that's happening here is totally, totally normal to cognitively understand that something's meant to be difficult, that something's meant to be iterative or whatever, and at the same time to not want to do it that way and to think you need to do it another way. That's completely, completely normal. And the bit that people struggle with, the reason this kind of crashes in your head and feels like there's a problem is because we think that because we understand it cognitively, it shouldn't be uncomfortable. Yeah, and it's the same with any of these things, it's the same as if we get negative feedback from supervisors, right? You just talked about having major revisions back from your supervisors and things. And we cognitively know they're trying to help us, this is going to make our thesis better, all of those things. But a lot of the time emotionally. It's like a little, you know, punch in the throat and it feels awful and we make it mean stuff and things. And we're like, but, you know, I know it is helping, but it doesn't feel like that. And I don't understand why my brain doesn't match up with my body. And it's because the bit we underestimate is this is also uncomfortable. Swagata: Yeah. Vikki: To stay in this place where you're not quite sure and you don't know what decision to make and you're figuring it out and you're trying it this way and trying it that way. It's meant to be uncomfortable. Just because you understand that's part of the process doesn't mean that it shouldn't be uncomfortable. Now, I'm not saying that we should just tolerate loads of discomfort, because actually what we end up doing is we make this way more uncomfortable by telling ourselves it shouldn't be like this. And if we were cleverer, we'd just get straight to the thing. Or if we were more disciplined, we'd get this. Or if we'd been better before, we'd have already written this, or it would be in better shape already. We make it infinitely more uncomfortable by layering all this judgment on. Swagata: Yep. Vikki: It can just be that sort of uncomfortable you get when you're trying to do like a difficult puzzle, you know. No one does an easy crossword or an easy wordle or whatever, do they? You know, you do one where it's like, Oh, I can't quite work this out and it's a bit annoying. And then you figure it out. And that kind of uncomfortableness can be okay if you know it's part of it. I think a lot of what's happening here is you're judging yourself for just experiencing some of this uncomfortableness of not quite having decided what way round or how exactly to argue things. Swagata: Yes. I, I really, I understand. And I feel like it's also, I have always judged myself too harshly, but it's also like really exactly what you said, like, I feel like, Oh, I have put in like, okay, I have identified the issue. I have identified that. Oh, I have listened to podcast. I have done this. I have seeked help. So now it should be okay because I have put in the work. Vikki: I've done all the things. God damn it. It should be easy now. Swagata: So now I expect myself to be magically able to just sit down and write because I have done the work. And, uh, I have, I know that I shouldn't feel this way. I know that it's meant to be difficult because cognitively I have understood it. I feel like now magically, I should be able to go back to this version where I'm like in one month I'm done, and because also I'm overwhelmed and tired. So there's this constant, I have to put in work. And there's also like these thoughts that how long do I have to do it? Like, it's also because when, when I identified or accepted that I am where I am. There was also this hope that this process will make it easier. That's why I'm doing it, but I'm still doing it. And it feels like I still have to keep doing the difficult bits. So that's where, like, there are days where I feel like I see myself where I have come a long way from, let's say last year where I was completely drowning, but still to see that I have so much more to go. And maybe it won't be the version of the manuscript that I envisioned, or I have to make changes, and so I do understand that it's never gonna be, it's never like a I understood it. I'll go back to the way I was excited about it four years ago. I do cognitively, as you said, understand it, but realizing that I still have to keep working on it. So it just becomes like, even, let's say, taking a break because I'm overwhelmed and I, I, I talk to other people and even supervisors or let's say even colleagues and, and they're like, yeah, you have to take a break. And everyone I talk, you have to take a break on the weekend. So taking a break also becomes like a pressure. Because then my colleague, like, they meet me on the, uh, on let's next week and like, are you taking a break? And then I, I become like, oh my God, I didn't take a break. So it becomes like an extra pressure that, oh, now I have to take a break. But when I take a break, I constantly am like spiraling into the things that I still have to do. So it becomes like this taking care of myself also becomes like another task. Vikki: Because you know, that's not a break, right? If you stop working, you're still thinking about your work and telling yourself you should be working and that that's just not a break. Swagata: So I have tried to take a break, where, which you mentioned wasn't a break and I didn't realize it. And now I have realized that. I can't just take a break just to take a break and chill. I have to plan something to do. So I try and plan something that I enjoy, which is outside, whatever. But then now I really make sure in the weekend, let's say I have one activity that I planned that I really want to do. So that also keeps me away from spiraling. And let's say if I want to take like a longer hike in the forest. So I really make sure I plan it on a Saturday. And that means of course I'm taking a break, but then I'm also doing something because just in the beginning when I was planning to take a break and just relax, it just didn't work. Vikki: I mean, it can so one of the things that you can do, and you get to take whatever breaks you think feel rejuvenating for you, because sometimes what we need is actual physical rest. Often what we need is kind of rejuvenation and recuperation, and sometimes that can look like things that are quite energetic or quite social, depending on what you're like and what things kind of replenish you. But the key is, whatever you're doing, you need to decide what you're thinking during that time. Now, that obviously doesn't mean that you're gonna be able to just, like, uh, think exactly what I'm telling myself to think at all times, but you need to have your kind of go to thoughts that you kind of pre plan so that when your brain goes I shouldn't be in a forest. I should be working. I've got so much to do. How did I think I had time to do this hike? Or whatever. Or you're just sat on the sofa having time off saying, I shouldn't just be sat here. I should be working. I'm not even doing anything useful. You get to plan in advance how you respond to that voice. Because it's completely normal to have this voice. You and everybody who'll be listening to this are super high achieving people. You've probably judged yourself through to lots of really nice high grades over the years and everything. These are very long standing habits. We're not going to stop your brain saying, Oh, you should probably should be writing your PhD. It's, you know, it's going to offer that. What we don't have to do is take it so seriously. And we don't have to just go, Oh, you're right. We should. Oh my goodness. We get to go, no, no, no, it's okay. I know you're worried about your PhD, but remember we planned this. Yeah. This is all part of the plan. Yeah. Yeah. And we get to reassure ourselves that this is the plan. Now the only way you can do that is if you actually intentionally plan that rest. Now that doesn't mean it has to be an organized activity. You could intentionally plan that this evening at 5 o'clock you're going to stop work for the evening. And you're going to make yourself some lovely food, and then you're going to sit on the sofa and watch terrible television for two hours. And when I say terrible, I love terrible television. You know the kind of telly I mean, like, watch Selling Sunset or something for two hours, and not feel bad about it, and have an early night, and it's going to be gorgeous. It can be that, but you intentionally decide so that you're not sitting there going, once I've watched this episode, I'm going to go and do some work. Oh, well, maybe one more episode. I'll just do one more episode because I don't really feel like it yet. And I'm kind of tired. So maybe I won't do it now, but I will get up earlier than I planned. And you're not doing that. You're going, I love this rubbish television and I love this food. And this is so nice just sat here. And tomorrow I'm going to smash on with my PhD exactly as I planned, but I'm so glad I'm having this evening. It's completely different if you intentionally plan it ahead. Swagata: Yeah. Vikki: Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. How does that feel to kind of, and we can think about what thoughts you might have to manage in order to be able to do that, but how does that feel to kind of intentionally look and go, okay, on that evening, on that weekend day, I'm gonna intentionally decide that I am definitely not working and I'm gonna tell myself, reassure myself that that's all part of the plan. Swagata: Yeah, that's really different than how I have been functioning. And that's what I said. It's, I do plan it, but then constantly in my head, I already know what I need to do after this thing. Or if even I'm having a dinner with friends, in my head, things are running. So it's, I think it's also like how I have like these habits that have formed where I'm always doing the thing that needs to be done. So one after the other. So also throughout the last four years, even though it's also working on the PhD, but it's also like what presentation needs to be made, what the next meeting I need. So everything has been directed towards what needs to be done. And then it becomes this whole thing like, Oh, I have so much work, so I have to be efficient. So it's also, if I'm watching something, I'm already planning. I felt like I'm quite good at planning, but apparently I wasn't because I was constantly thinking like, Oh yeah, I, this is the time I'm at my, my brain is good in the morning, I'll work on this. And at night, uh, maybe I will watch this thing and on the side, I will do this thing. So I was constantly trying to be more efficient and it becomes this habit where I'm If I'm watching something, I'm thinking that maybe I could also get done with something and now it becomes such a habit. And I understand it's, it's not the best because I'm constantly trying to like divide my attention and it becomes like this habit. But it's also like, I think what, what you said, like, it's, it would be amazing to do this, like really figure out because I tried. Let's say, for instance, I, I'm saying, okay, today at five o'clock, I will see how far I get, I will stop. Then I will make something. But then of course the work spills over and then I find it. Vikki: No, no, no, no. Don't. Let's not. Just don't. Talk about the work as though it's some like, sentient being that just like, of course the work spills over. No, let's at least frame that in a way where you take, and I don't mean this in a blame way, this is just in a kind of self responsibility way. It's not the work spills over. I reach the time where I said I'd stop and I choose not to stop. Swagata: Yeah. Vikki: That's what happens. The work doesn't spill over. You make a decision not to honour the time that you said you were going to stop and to keep working. Now that's fine. If you want to do that, that's absolutely fine. But let's own it. Because the work doesn't just magically keep going. Swagata: But it's also like immediately there is this kind of guilt that I planned for it. And I should have been done because when I planned it. And like, at that point, it's also the two minds, I know why it has, why I wasn't able to finish this part because something else came up. I had to do, like, this was the part I intended to do, but it opened up this whole other thing. So I cognitively, I do understand why I wasn't able to round up and I had to do other things. But there is, I chose to do other things, but there is this guilt that comes with it. And then also it links to next day's plan that I already have to do that. If I keep this, it will affect that plan. So I'm constantly like, my head is like this. I have so many timetables that I have to keep up with and somehow it's, it's also one of maybe a personality where I, I just hate being late to things. And, and it's gets into the work thing. And sometimes it's okay if I have a genuine reason, but I feel like it's, I will make myself crazy trying to just be on time, send the thing on time. So it's like this kind of personality thing, which really in these situations make it very hard. Because I know I decided that it's five o'clock, but it seems like, because it's on paper I can't extend it. So I have a kind of this. thing in my head that I, no matter what happens, I can't, it has to finish by today. So this really spills over very badly in the work where I'm really putting too much pressure to really get it done and really in like these very unachievable ways. Just so that I'm on time. Vikki: I don't think the issue then is actually the, that kind of pressure to get it done on time. I think you need to take a couple of steps back because I think the challenge here is more that you are allowing these tasks to expand. Okay, because if you think about it like, I don't know, putting water into a balloon, yeah, you're making water balloons for a fight. And, um, you've decided, I'm going to see where this analogy goes, who knows, um, you've just, you know, you've decided what size water balloons you're using, i. e. what unit of time you've got. And in theory, you put that much water in that much balloon, and you've got a water balloon, happy days, ready to throw it, whoever. And Yours keep bursting. You keep going over, you know, time and saying, Oh, I should have got a bigger balloon. I should have got a bigger balloon. You know, I need more time. But I think the problem is just that you're pouring all this water in, just way more water than fits. You know, you're deciding I've got two hours to do this piece of work and partway through it, you're noticing a couple of other references that might be useful or whatever. So you're wandering off to read them and to check that out or to actually, if I'm changing this bit, I need to go back and change all those things too. And you're doing that now in this time slot that was originally allocated for the initial task. And then you're wondering why it doesn't fit. But it doesn't fit because you're doing more than you said you were going to. Or to a standard that's greater than fits in the time. Or a level of thoroughness that, that then fits in the time. There was, I might have mentioned this on a previous podcast, but I think it's a really, really useful one. There's a coach that I really like, um, called Karin Nordin. And she said that the amount of time you have to do a task is the parameter by which you decide how you're going to do it. Okay? Usually, we have a fixed scope of a project in our head, or a fixed quality of a scope, of a project in our head, and then we see how long it takes us to do it. Where in reality, how well you do it, or what it looks like, is entirely dependent on how much time you give it. Swagata: Yeah. Vikki: Yeah. And if we want to have control over how long things take, we need to decide how long they take and then do it to the quality you can do it in that time. And sometimes that means doing it a bit rougher, but often it definitely means not going off on tangents. Making a little note of the tangent for another day perhaps, but not just going, Oh, and I'll just check that now. And then wondering why it doesn't fit at the end of the session. Swagata: Yeah, yeah, that does make sense because yeah, I do understand and I do realize, and that also causes some of the frustration when I'm making a plan that, oh, I don't know how much it will take, I will, and that's why all my future plans, I'll just put a rough number, because from the past plans, I have never, never been able to stick to it. Because I have went on tangents and I think like, okay, this was what was important. I have to do it. But then it also means that I can't make a precise plan, which really frustrates me more that, Oh, now I can't even make a plan. So it's really becomes. Then I, I'm like, yeah, so at first I was at least not sticking to a plan. Now I can't even make a proper plan. Yeah. So then it becomes. Vikki: And then we either don't plan or we plan in a really flippant, like, Oh, do this then this, then this, whatever. Cause I never stick to it anyway. Doesn't really matter. Swagata: Yeah. Vikki: Yeah. A hundred percent. So normal. What we want to try and do is we want to try and plan a plan that feels doable, like at the easy end of doable, like, yeah, you know, I can definitely do this. And then we need to try and make as much of that happen as we can. Now, no one ever sticks to plans. Perfect. I mean, some robots do. I never stick to plans perfectly, but having them, in fact, the podcast, by the time this one comes out, it'll have been a little while ago, but the podcast that came out today was about imperfect planning, so do definitely check that one out, um, So, it's trying to remember in that moment when your brain goes, oh, I just need to To have a system where you can say, no, no, that that's a job for another hour. I'll put it over there. My job is this bit. And we do that bit to the best of our ability without the other thing we need to check. Yeah, and it might mean you need to put add, reference or a little, you know, a little note saying, make sure, this is actually true later or whatever. Another episode that might be useful if you haven't listened to it, is the one about why you shouldn't read when you're writing. Like during writing sessions. So you make a note for yourself of what you need to go check, rather than going off to read during a writing session, cause that's how we get off track. Swagata: Yeah, I feel like, yeah, it becomes all of these different things. It just comes at the point where I'm actually doing the work. And as I said, like, really makes me less enthusiastic about the work. And it's, I understand, like, if maybe I also have to go back to these one by one, because there is a lot of things happening, but then it becomes really overwhelming because constantly I'm thinking, yeah, but this is time I'm not spending on the PhD, but I know it will help me in working. Vikki: What sorts of things do you mean when you're saying I need to go and do those things, what sorts of things do you mean? Swagata: Like for instance, with the planning thing, I'm, um, because my head is like, there are a thousand different things coming. Like, let's say now, for example, after this, I try and plan tomorrow. So I would make a plan. I would be like, okay, I have to do this. So I want to spend a little bit more time to really understand what I have to do. And because earlier that was also one of the issue where I was just make a quick plan because I don't want to waste time in planning, but I want to actually do the work. And now I would really try and understand how much work I have to do and really see, okay, then this means this is where I'll take a break and this. So it takes me longer to plan now, which I think is useful, but in my head constantly, I'm thinking, yeah, but I'm spending so much time in making the plan, it will not work out. So it's really like these silencing different thoughts. Vikki: Only you know, with the planning, for some people planning can be procrastination. So sometimes people are like, you know, as long as, if I had a perfect plan, then all this would just work and people can spend too much time in planning. Other people just avoid planning entirely and would actually benefit from some. So sort of, it does vary a little bit from person to person. What I would say, Always, if you're in the midst of overwhelm, that's not when to plan. So, if you're in a massive overwhelmed thing, I would just pick chunk of work that definitely needs doing. So, not silly, we're not talking references, we're not talking typos, like a chunk of work that you know needs rewriting or something, where you know roughly what needs to be said but you haven't done it yet. And just do one thing. Yeah. Yeah. When you're in the midst of, oh my God, I've got a thousand things, I've got our head's going like this. It's spinning. Just all these things. This one, I'm just doing this one. Yeah. Swagata: Yeah. Vikki: And as long as is, as it is an important task, it doesn't even matter if it's the most important task, as long as it's not silly little organizational tasks. Yeah. Because that sense of just going, I've got a thousand things to do, but this one, this is the one I'm doing, allows you to start that one thing. And every time your brain's going, but there's these other things, it's like, yeah, there are, but we're doing this one. We're doing this one. And you just pull yourself back. If you can get an hour or two hours into one thing that definitely needed to move forwards. It can just start helping with that kind of sense of calm. And then once we've made a bit of progress on one thing, we're in a much better frame of mind to then be like, okay, I need to, I need to sort out time. So for example, after this, I wouldn't go plan after this. I would pick one thing. And make an hour or so's progress on it and then plan after that. Yeah. Swagata: Yeah. But that's exactly like I, my main planning is when I'm overwhelmed. That's always, Vikki: and then you make overwhelming, overwhelmed people make overwhelming plans. Swagata: And then also the plans are quite unrealistic because I'm overwhelmed. So I already know the 10 different things Vikki: and I'm trying to put all of them in, in a way that you know, doesn't fit, but if it looks like it does, it will be fine for now. Swagata: Yeah. Yeah. Vikki: Yeah. We just pick a thing. Cool. What I want you to think about through this time is I want you to imagine that you are an athlete going into a heavy season. Yeah? So, you are coming up to the Olympics, you're coming up to like the busiest part of the football season, whatever sport resonates with you. And, They have got lots to do. Yeah, they've got all these matches, these races, whatever, they've got the training in between, da da da. So they've got lots to do. And what that means is they've got people around them, often we have to now do this for ourselves because we're not elite athletes, but they've got people around them whose jobs are supporting them through that. Yeah? And creating an environment around them that means they're ready to do that heavy period of training and performance, okay? So, if we sort of lift ourselves for a second into you being your own boss What sort of environment do you want to create around yourself if you were your employee? What kind of environment do you want to create around you that's going to make this heavy period easier for you? Swagata: I think really creating like these periods where there are no distractions. Where I can really focus on writing and thinking critically, like really, I don't have to do anything and no emails, no other, nothing. And I really have a space, preferably in my home rather than in the office because other people can drop by. So really having these chunks of really focused work I can get done, which gives me the confidence that I'm making progress. But also at other points really have some kind of, I I don't know activity, something that gives me energy because I would, during these very focused, I would, I like my, I would be drained from really working hard. So, and preferably some activity, which is not related to the PhD. Which means that I'm not thinking about it. And I, when I come back, I get a fresh perspective on things, but then also some kind of activity, which is something I have let go over the years, because I was constantly, I used to do a lot of other things that I used to enjoy and I was good at, but because as the PhD progressed, it began to take up a lot of my time and I shifted countries. So that also meant, you know, a change of environment. And I wanted to fit in. So I have given up a lot of these activities, but I felt feel like in between having those activities would really give me the energy, distract myself from these hard things so that when I come back, I really look forward to coming back. Because now these extended period is happening. What I said that I don't look forward to it in the morning to come back to the PhD because I'm constantly draining myself and it becomes this whole, I'm working on something. It's not. getting over, I'm not able to do it. So there is, I'm constantly in the same, doing the same thing. Yeah. Vikki: So what would you want to say? So you've talked about having periods of no distraction in an environment where you won't get disturbed. You've talked about having energizing activities that are nothing to do with your PhD. What sorts of things would you be saying to your employee as they go into this type of a phase? Swagata: You mean when I go to the phase when I'm working on the PhD? Vikki: Through this whole, so you've got this like four or five month heavy performance environment, yeah? So if it was an athlete, it's coming up to this really heavy training period. For you, it's this like thesis writing period. And I think thinking about it, in analogy can really help. So thinking about it as what would you say to an athlete? So they've got match after match after match, training session after training session after training session. It's going to be tiring. It's going to be hard work. it's going to be a lot of pressure. What would you say to them to help kind of as they go along? What sorts of things might you say? Swagata: Well, I think something which I'm reminding myself, also the motivation I have, I ask why you want to do it and also as things are getting difficult and I feel like, oh, for how long do I have to keep doing it? Something that one of my colleagues told me, and it's really, I'm thinking is they really said that this is, Maybe the last chance that you would have in your life to do something that you made up entirely, whether you are in an academic, later or you go to industry, it would probably be the first and last time where you decided to do something and you get the opportunity to go into the depth and make up stuff and do things the way you want and PhD is probably the one and only chance, which is actually helping me now, like since the last few days that I've started looking at it like that. So where I'm rather than trying to finish it and pushing it to finish it, I'm thinking like, somehow, when you feel like something is going to end, it gives you like this, almost a kind of nostalgic thing that. Yeah, I'll miss this for me, that is really helping. Vikki: Yeah. There's a technique called savoring, which is where you really consciously notice. It's almost like sort of gratitude in the moment where you kind, you know, if you were eating something amazing that, you know, you've only got one off or whatever, and you just like savor every bite of it, you can do that with anything. People often talk about it in the context of babies, you know, babies are such hard work, they're exhausting. Dang it. feel endless, all of these things. But one of the things that can help with that is really savoring those moments of cuddles and sniffing them and all that stuff and remembering that one day you'll miss this, even though it feels utterly relentless at the moment, one day you'll miss having, having that little baby in your arms. And I think the same is true with your PhD, that you can savour these quiet moments. And you can't expect to feel like this all the time, don't get me wrong, there's still going to be bits where it's just hard, but taking moments every now and again to be like, what a privilege, what a privilege to be sat at this desk writing about stuff I made up, that I care about, that some experts are going to give me their opinion on, and I get to talk with them about it. This is amazing. And you created it, right? You taught yourself. That's the other thing you can remind yourself in all of this, is you are in a period now that you dreamt of when you were applying for your PhD and when you were getting it started. You've done your fieldwork. You're writing your thesis. This is literally where you wanted to be. And just that kind of reminding yourself. That you're living past you's dream right now. This is, this is exactly what they wanted to be doing. And future you will look back on this with nostalgia. Be like, oh, that was so nice. I wish I could do that again. Yeah, and you can generate, you can like actively try and create those things to remind yourself of that stuff. And that makes it so much easier to be like, yeah, it's hard at the moment. Yeah. Look at this, look at what I'm doing. Swagata: And also I feel like you said it, like, it's supposed to be hard. Like at, at the moment that I'm doing it and there are moments where I'm trying to solve something like this, believe that. Yeah, but I'm a smart person. I should be able to do it, but I think like what would help, which I'm also struggling is really telling myself, as you said, it's supposed to be hard. You are making up new knowledge. It's supposed to take time and not getting caught up in the being efficient and planning and really trying to put it more in practice. And I think it's also, it starts with what you said, like, what would you say at that moment? And that is. What, what I'm struggling because at that moment, although I understand it at that moment, I don't say anything like that. So I would get overwhelmed, but really at that moment, saying to myself that, okay, it's, it's hard, but it's supposed to be hard and you have done hard things. Vikki: I love that. You've done hard things. You're gonna figure this out. Swagata: There are evidence of it. I don't, sometimes I don't believe that I can do it, but I have done harder things. I have moved countries, so this is something I can do it. And also if I can't do it, it's okay. It's just a small part of the other things. I will do other things. So I really need to remind myself at that moment to tell myself these things. Vikki: Yeah, Swagata: because when I sit back and think about it, I do remember it. But at that moment of. Overwhelmed. I just, it's, I, I'm just too hard on myself. Vikki: Yeah. And it's so common. And when we're saying it's meant to be hard, I just want to be really clear for you and for everybody else, when we say it means it's going to be hard, it means it's It's meant to be difficult. You're meant to grapple with these things. You're meant to be unsure. It's not meant to be deeply unpleasant and beating ourselves up and being horrible and all of those things. It doesn't have to be any of those things. When we're saying it's meant to be hard, it's not you're meant to be dreading it, suck it up and get on with it. It's like, no, it's meant to be challenging. One of the things I quite like online, you can often find, um, stuff that like past geniuses have written so people that have written like classic novels or philosophers of old or whatever, and they're talking about like wrestling with key ideas and that they you know they just can't figure this solution out and whatever. And you can just imagine yourself like, being like one of them. You're like somebody who's trying to work out Fibonacci's sequence or whatever it is for the first time. Like, I can't make this work, I don't understand. And that sort of staying with it and being like, Urgh, this is so annoying, I can't decide whether to write in this direction or that direction, but I'm gonna work this out, is such a different vibe than, this is awful, I must be stupid, I'm never gonna do it. It's totally different than, Urgh, wrestling with it. Swagata: Yeah, I think like, as you said, like separating it for me, at least now that you are talking like separating the two things that first it is a difficult thing, but then the dread for me is coming out of what I make out of it. The dread is coming out of, I'm not dreading the work. That's why I was for the longest time very confused that why am I dreading to go back to the PhD that I love. I have made up. I am here because I decided, but the dread was more because I made it about me about I'm not good enough. I am never gonna finish it. My supervisors are going to hate me. Everyone that over the years thought I was good enough now would suddenly be. It's also linked to the imposter syndrome, but. I do, I still want to work on the work. I still want to complete it because I think there is, it's amazing the way it has turned out. But I think separating the two things where the dread is coming from is not from the work itself. So even like subconsciously I know that even if I can't, um, let's say figure out this particular problem, okay, this is a hard thing. I want to do it. Worst case scenario, I won't solve this problem in this PhD. I'm okay with it. I have done other things. I will put my stress on, on other things that I have done well, and this is something maybe I'll have comments. I'll try to do it then. But I am okay with not being able to solve each and every problem. But the dread is not out of not being able to do it. The dread is out of what I make it about me. And I think separating that, like, as you are saying now, it's, I think it helps me and I think I should remind myself to, to do it. Vikki: Because when you're trying to solve something, if you can't solve it, you can talk about ways that you might be able to solve it in the future as well, right? So if there's bits of your thesis that you're like, I just don't even know how to do this bit, you can talk about those in limitations, you can also talk about them in future directions, right? You can say, I don't think my data actually enables us to solve this problem. But you can speculate about what might in the future and if you haven't made it mean something about you, that you're finding this difficult, it's so much easier to then be kind of curious and be like, Oh, I don't think we can solve this from the data that I've, I don't think this is something that, this isn't me. This is a, I think this is actually outside the scope of my thesis. In which case we either don't talk about it or we talk about the fact that we haven't got the right stuff and that actually maybe we need access to that field site or we need access to these people or that type of data or whatever it is, um, but that kind of curious openness comes when we know it doesn't mean anything about us that we're finding this difficult, that this is just a difficult thing and that's okay. Swagata: Yes. I feel like, yeah, there are certain things. It's also, I feel the way I have been working. So it's also out of habit. I do a lot of things and now that I'm kind of dissecting it and I'm understanding, I do understand. And I do also understand that why I find I'm finding it difficult has a lot to do with these very unnecessary thing, which is actually not helping me. So if I am saying I want to do a good PhD and I want to do it within this time, all of these other things are basically just wasting my time, because I'm just getting caught up in it and eventually I am not going in the direction that I wanted to go. So it's also reminding myself that. Maybe it's okay. Maybe if I won't be able to solve these things, maybe the PhD won't be as good. So it's all of these other things which are kind of wasting my time basically, but I'm not able to like get away with it. And it's kind of this circle. And if I can just think alternatively, yeah, those things are there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then let's, let's focus on this, which is actually helping me in the direction. That I actually want to go. Vikki: Because some of those things are unknowable at the moment, right? How long it's going to take you to finish, whether you're going to solve all the things that you want to solve. They're not knowable right now. And a lot of the pain I think is coming from wanting to know that you can definitely do those things. If we take it back to the sports analogy, right? If you think about you as a footballer, for example, you've got a whole load of matches this season. And if you're going, I don't know if I'm going to win the league. I just don't know if I'm going to win the league, but what if I don't win the league? Then if you're in that mode all the time, it makes it incredibly hard to do your training. And if, when you're turning up to play Arsenal, you're thinking, but next week I need to play Chelsea. And the week after that, I'm playing Manchester United. And I mean, I don't even know what I'm going to do there. Duh, duh, duh. Then you're not thinking about your Arsenal game. Right. Um, and I think we do that with our PhDs. We're like, Oh yeah, but I don't, I'm going to have that bit. And then there'll be this bit and there's that bit and it's relentless. It's like, but we're not doing it all at once. Yeah. We're just doing this bit now. And that's where the planning intentionally can be really useful because then when your brain goes, but we've got to do this bit, and it's like, yeah, That's December me's problem. Swagata: Yeah. Vikki: November me's problem's this section. Swagata: Yeah. This is the only bit. Yeah. I've got four months of this. That's fine. I'm gonna look after myself, but right now it's just this bit. And today it's just this little bit. It's not even this whole section. My job for today, write three paragraphs on this, read that article to find out this. I can do that. And then your brain goes, yeah, yeah, but if you don't get that done, we'll worry about everything. It's like, it's okay. We're just going to get this bit done. Okay. Don't need to worry about the rest of it right now. And that's where often when people start to have coaching, start to think about this stuff, they think that stuff will happen automatically, that, you know, you'll come to a coaching session, you'll realize, Oh, it's my thoughts, right? Okay. I just won't have those thoughts anymore. You will, you're going to have all of these thoughts and that's completely normal too, but you just get better at noticing them going, yeah, yeah, I know. It's okay. You're freaking out about that. It's fine. We don't need to think about that. We don't need to know if we're going to do this on time. What we need to know is what today's task is, and we do today's task. Yeah. Just keep doing that and we're going to be fine. Yeah. You're worried about all that, but we're going to be fine. And we generate that kind of very pragmatic, very kind self talk, where it's like, we know this bit, so we do this bit. Yeah. Vikki: The rest is for another, another day's me, and we'll get there too. Swagata: Yeah, I think that's the hardest, hardest for me. Like also this lack of control over. Just letting it, even though I leave it, I have to plan it, you know, even if I'm like, okay, today I'm not going to do this, but I need in my head, I need to know when I'm going to do this. Otherwise it will go away. So this lack of control when it's over this extended period of time where I, there is this, I'm not able to control the end when or how, and that constantly plays in the mind and it, it, kind of hinders the day to day, my ability to do day to day things properly. Vikki: So you lose control now. Swagata: Yeah. Vikki: And that's the bit I want you to remember and to remind your brain, is every time your brain is going, but I need to know when we're going to do that chapter, because otherwise I'm not in control. You need to remind your brain, by trying to be in control of the whole four months, I'm not in control of the next hour. As long as I'm in control of the next hour, And yeah, there'll be times when we step back and we do that planning and we have to have faith in that bit. This is why I quite often talk about separating boss you from implementer you. And only spending some time in boss mode because Boss mode is the version of you that needs to have an approximate plan of, I'm going to focus on this stuff in month one, this stuff in month two, just very notional kind of rough plan. Implementer you just needs to do what she's damn told on the day she's told to do it. And she doesn't need to, it's almost like, not your job, not your pay grade implementer. Boss is going to think about that. Boss will think about that next Monday when we're planning again. Right now, your only job. Is write bullet points on this page and do the edits that my supervisor said on those two pages or whatever. And you have to actively talk back to yourself. Hey, I know, I know you're worried about that. We're going to look at that when we're planning. Right now, this is our job. We're in control of, if that notion of control resonates with you, then use it. We're in control of what we're doing now. And what we're doing now is this task. Swagata: Yeah. Okay. I think like constantly reminding myself, as you said, because at some point it also felt like, I won't say failure, but also like, why do I have to keep reminding myself, like, I'm also judging myself Vikki: because we're human beings and we all are going to have to manage this actively forever. Um, and that's fine. Cause we get better at it, right? And we make it less of a big deal if we don't, you know, I have my little meltdowns about things, a hundred percent, but they're less intense than they used to be. They happen less often than they used to be and they don't last as long. And I know how, they just don't feel as dramatic because You know how to get yourself out of it. You know, it's like, if you have, you've been, there are people who've got like chronic health conditions and stuff. And so, you know, you get a really bad headache, headache or something, but you know, you have migraines. And so it's like, okay, this is not my favorite thing in the world, but I know how to look after myself. I know what it is. Whereas somebody who has that for the first time might be like. Oh my God, there's something terrible happening here. This is awful. I was like, no, it's fine. This is just what happens. We can get like that with our own, like, overwhelm and stuff. I am much more now like, yeah, I'm overwhelmed. I know I'm overwhelmed. I know what happens when I'm overwhelmed. I know what goes wrong. I can't make this go away, but I do know what things help. And so I kind of recognize it much less dramatically. And. I'm not perfect. I spend some time wallowing in it, but I'm much quicker and more skilled at going like, okay, yeah, you're all overwhelmed because you've been telling yourself this, this, and this is fine. We're just going to do this next thing. We'll do this thing. It's fine. And kind of, you get to learn to look after yourself. And that's why with, you know, with all the work that I do, anything, having things like the membership and the regular community coaching and stuff that you can come to. to keep reinforcing this stuff becomes so helpful because it isn't the sort of thing that you can just have a one off workshop and suddenly you've changed the way you think and if you think that's going to happen then you start beating yourself up about that, right, you're like i know these thoughts are stupid and i'm still having them this is so silly It's human. Yeah. It's just human. It's completely, completely normal. Okay? Yeah. Thank you so much. I really hope that was useful. Swagata: Yes. Thank you. Thank you very much. It was also nice to actually talk certain things because many times I know these things but talking it out, you really focus on specific things. So it was, it was very helpful for me. Thank you. Thank you very much. Vikki: Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Cage podcast. Now, I'm gonna preface this episode with a bit of a disclaimer. And that disclaimer is, I love stationery as much as any of you. You leave me unattended in some fancy stationery store or art supply shop or anything like that, and I'm going to make bad financial choices. I have cupboards full of stationery and craft supplies, beautiful things that are either going to make me organized or are going to be beautiful and I'm going to use them and I love them. I love stationery. However, however, massive however, I am also your academic coach here. I am also here to make sure that you're not wasting your work time doing things that aren't helping you. And that's why this is a pretty short episode. It's nearly Christmas when I record this. Nobody wants to be listening to me whitter about work for 45 minutes. It's going to be pretty short, but I'm here to deliver some bad news. I am hereby banning highlighters. No more highlighters. All of you who are reading and highlighting key passages and telling yourself that you're working. I'm banning them. I'm not usually very dictatorial. People who come to my membership, who come to my coaching sessions, know that I do a kind of non directive form of coaching where we figure out what you're thinking and what you're choosing you want to do. Here, no. I'm just banning them. Ban highlighters. You can use them to decorate around the edges if you want to, but that doesn't count as work. Okay, I'll give you that much. Beyond that, banned. I'm going to give you four reasons why I'm banning highlighters and then you can let me know whether you agree or not, whether you are going to abide by my new ruling. So. First reason is that it is way too easy to highlight way too much of the text. There's something very satisfying about going zzzz, zzzz, across and highlighting things. It's going all in a pretty colour and the pen feels nice and everything. And before you know it, you've highlighted four paragraphs without really fully processing why they're important to you. Okay, there's no barrier to how much you highlight. Whereas if you're taking actual notes, and I'm going to say at the end what I think you should be doing in those actual notes. Whereas if you're taking actual notes, it takes a bit of cognitive effort. It takes a bit of physical effort, especially if you're handwriting it, which I would recommend a lot of the time. And it means you kind of have to be selective, because you can't just write about every single bit of it if you're actually writing it out, or at least there's a kind of time and effort penalty to choosing to do that. When you just highlight, you can highlight way too much, and doesn't force you to be selective, and that is a problem. What we want you to be doing here is prioritizing. We want you to be thinking. We want you to be choosing which elements are most important, not just willy nilly turning all of it purple without really thinking about it. So that's the first reason, it's too easy to highlight too much. The second reason is that when you're highlighting it, you're not processing it in any way. You are merely putting a coloured strip over the top of it. What we want to do with reading is we don't want to just take it in and go, Oh, that's useful. We want to read it. We want to check our understanding. We want to kind of know what it means, summarise it. But we also, really importantly, want to connect it with other things that we already know. Other things that we've read. Other things that we're planning to do, for example. Okay? And highlighting doesn't do any of that stuff. In fact, maybe this is just a me confession. You can tell me whether you do this as well or not. But when I highlight, sometimes I start reading a paragraph and I think oh, this is going to be useful and I highlight the whole paragraph and I don't necessarily read the last few sentences because it's like oh, this whole paragraph is useful and you're almost kind of marking it in some way. It's not helpful. Much, much more helpful to be writing those notes and actually processing it through your brain, connecting it to the other things that you know, and kind of registering it cognitively, rather than almost just marking it for future. The third reason is that when you see highlighting in the future, you have no idea why you highlighted it. Okay, it's orange. Maybe some of you have a fancy colour coding system which perhaps works to some extent, you know, blue for methodological and green for whatever else. But most of the time, you don't really know why you highlighted that thing. So this notion, ooh, I'll be able to find it later. It's just completely misguided. You'll be able to find it, you'll be able to see that it was highlighted, but you won't know why. You know, it's like when you find a random phone number on a piece of paper and you're like, I have no idea who that is or whatever, okay? Just because it's highlighted, it doesn't tell you what you were thinking when you read it. It doesn't tell you why it was important, which bit of your work it was important for, whether it's still important. It doesn't tell you any of those things, just tells you it's green. Green's not helping. That's the third reason. And then the fourth reason is that when you re read that article at some point in the future, you may and probably should be reading it for a different reason. The first time you read something, maybe it's just to get a feel for what the article's about. Maybe it's to get an understanding of the background of the area you're looking at. But maybe the next time you read it, What you really need to do is really understand their methods, because you're going to use methods that are similar to this, and you need to really pick apart exactly what they did, and what controls they used, or what, you know, what ethical considerations there were, or whatever. Now you've got an article that's got loads of orange highlighting all over it, That was from when you were reading it to understand what they found and what the kind of background is. But now you're reading it for methods. Those orange bits aren't relevant anymore. You need to be in a different section and those orange bits, they're going to draw your attention. That's the point of highlighters. And now, they're just a distraction. They're pulling your eye over there when you're reading it for a different function. And, most importantly, even if you're reading it for the same function, you're reading it to fully understand their argument, for example. You are now not the same. Stuff that was important to you when you first read it is not what's important to you now because you know more, you understand more. So those bits that you highlighted because they helped you understand the basics are not going to help you understand the nuances that you're now trying to pull out of it. Highlights become a distraction as soon as you have moved on from the point at which you initially highlighted them. Highlighters are not useful research tools. So what do we do instead? You write. You write stuff. And you don't just summarize what they're saying. That should be a tiny bit of your notes. They did this, they found that, they argued this. That should be a little tiny bit of your notes. I want you to write about what thoughts are you having. What thoughts do you have when you read this? What are you confused about? What doesn't make sense to you? What has it reminded you of? What gaps have you spotted? Where does this connect to something? Where could this influence future work? Where do you wish you'd read this before? You're writing those sorts of things. Almost like a little diary of reading it. Those are the notes that are useful. You're processing it cognitively. You're connecting it together. And when you come back to those notes, you will be able to see what you were thinking then. And so it will be much easier to then interpret it and then to see how different it is from what you're thinking now. That's what we should be doing. It's more effort. Definitely. But it is so much more productive. You won't end the day feeling like, well, I've read a load of stuff. I've highlighted a load of stuff, but I don't feel like I've got anywhere. Cause that's the worst feeling. There is nothing wrong with hard work. All of us came into our PhDs, academia, knowing that we were going to do hard work. The problem with hard work is when you work hard and you can't see an outcome from it. You can't see what good it's and that is what highlighting will do. I am getting very strict. So take your highlighters, do something beautiful with them. That's fine. Create art in your spare time that uses the highlighters that you are no longer using for your research. Let's leave highlighters in 2024 and move on to much more effective ways of reading and note taking. Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. I'm being slightly flippant in all of this. If you like highlighters, figure out a system, but that system needs to have recognition of the fact that you need to process it. It needs to have recognition of the fact that when you come back to it, you want it to make some sense and that you will be a different person coming back for a different purpose. If you can figure out a way to do that with highlighters, Happy days, you go, you do you, but I would suggest ditching them entirely. The one form of highlighting I do allow, and for those of you who are on YouTube, you'll see me holding them up, are these little, tiny, transparent Stickers. So for those of you on the podcast, there may be five centimetres long, something like that, half a centimetre wide, slightly translucent, and mine are blue, yellow, pink and green. These I use not when I'm reading articles, but I do use them to pick out key items in a list. If I've got a list of five things I want to do today, I might put one of these over the top of the one I'm doing right now. And the joy of that, it picks something out specifically, but when it's done, I can take it off and move it somewhere else. So, not as part of the research process as such, but for highlighting specific things, I highly recommend these little stickers. You can find them from all good stationers and the big bad capitalist delivery place that I'm sure most people actually get them from. Thank you so much for listening. If you are listening in real time, I really hope you have a wonderful Christmas and any other festivals that you celebrate. Make sure you have planned some time off, check out my how to rest over the holidays podcast, which was really, really early on in season one, like episode eight or nine in season one, make sure you check it out. Make sure you have decided intentionally when you are working, when you are not working and that you love your reasons for those choices. There are going to be podcasts all the way through the Christmas period. That is not because I'm working. That is because I have planned ahead and got them booked. We have got various guest episodes. We have got a coaching session coming up and then some very important announcements at the beginning of January. So as they pop up, do not fear, I am not working. They are entirely automated at my end. I will be enjoying time with my family and my friends and my good old dog Marley. And I hope you have a wonderful time too. Thank you all so much for listening and I will see you in a scheduled podcast next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

Links I refer to in this episode Dr Andrew Dewar (LinkedIn) Oxygen Conservation Andrew’s podcast episode – From Hire to High Performance Radical Candor by Cal Newport So good they can’t ignore you by Cal Newport Stephen Covey’s Circle of Influence Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. And we have another guest with us this week. And I'm always excited to have guests, as you know, but this one is particularly fun because we go way back. We came through the same PhD program, although not at the same time. I'm much older, but, it meant that we've been through the same department and things like that. And I even supervised my guest's wife, which is very exciting. So my guest is Dr. Andrew Dewar from Oxygen Conservation. So welcome, Andrew. Andrew: Thanks, Vikki. It's one of the first times I've been described as particularly fun, so this is going to be interesting. Vikki: Don't do yourself down. Amazing. Right. So, now, the reason I found you and the reason that we kind of got back in touch to do this was obviously I saw you on a podcast that you did for your organization where you were talking about creating positive environments for your employees. And it was one of these things I just randomly, I think it was on LinkedIn, I just kind of randomly came across, and decided to have a listen, because I knew you, and it sounded interesting. And so much of it, I thought was applicable to academia. And that was why, as you know, why I decided to get in touch and ask you to come and talk with us today. And for people listening, maybe you can tell them a little bit first about your background and how you got to doing what you're doing now. Andrew: Yeah, of course. Well, thank you for listening to the podcast. It's always good to hear that people enjoyed it. My kind of root or career history has been quite a jumble really. So you mentioned that we met at the University of Birmingham where I was doing my PhD and I back then thought like that was me, I was going to be an academic and I did a year as a research associate, a year as a teaching associate and then I went for a job and didn't get it and that made me think, do I love academia? Do I love it enough to move away from family or to live in a different city from my then girlfriend now wife? And I thought, do you know what I don't. I felt relieved when I published a paper, but it didn't really spark like joy and loads of pride. And so I started looking for other jobs and there was this one job that said something about qualitative and quantitative data analysis. I was like, Oh, I can do that. And we turned up at an interview and they saw something in me and I worked for a social integration charity and I was leading a team of basically sales people trying to offer this National Citizen Service program to young people. And it was really awesome. The people were great, but it was that first step out of academia was just great to see how, gosh, you can take these skills, transfer them into another situation and really do some awesome stuff. And that just led me to sort of move into different places. You know, I think I'm quite an ambitious person, so I'm always looking to learn and improve. And so that took me to the public sector to do a few different bits and bobs, including business improvement, which I was really fascinated in. That then took me into an engineering consultancy firm to work on megaprojects, to do business improvement, and then cultural work with big programs, which was fascinating. And then that took me into being the Head of People at Oxygen Conservation. Vikki: Amazing. I had no idea you worked for NCS. I volunteered with NCS one summer. Andrew: Oh, very cool. Vikki: We have listeners from all over the world, but so National Citizen Service probably sounds a little more military than it actually is. But National Citizen Service is a charity that takes young people and gives them experiences during their summers, doesn't it? That they wouldn't otherwise get. Amazing organization. Um, tell us a little bit about what Oxygen Conservation do just to put us in the picture. Because I think it's always interesting for people to know, you're a sports scientist like me, how far and broad you can go with quite a specific background. Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So if you think of the starting point was basically sports science and for me, you know, sports psychology. What I now do is support an organization who's looking to scale conservation. And by that, what we mean is, acquiring large sections of rural land and then doing environmental restoration. And that's so wide and fascinating as a concept, but it's things like woodland creation, peat restoration, river restoration, there's some regenerative agriculture in there, there's properties on these big rural estates so people live there long term. We offer some cottages to people or opportunities to come and stay in the more short term so people get to experience the rural environment, and anything else that you would imagine is associated with these rural places and sort of bringing them back to what they were in the past and what they maybe should be in the future, but doing it in a way that's really right for the environment. So it's all focused on having a positive environmental and a social impact. Vikki: Amazing. So the reason we got you here was to talk about this kind of positive environment. So what do you mean when you talk about creating a positive environment for the people that work in this organization? What does that look like for you? Andrew: Yeah, so at its best, it's that people wake up and they think about starting their work day and they're excited to do it. They believe they can do something really great. They think they're part of something that's bigger than themselves, but they also have that opportunity to improve and deliver really interesting work that they love. As well as working with colleagues that challenge them, that have a laugh with them, that they really enjoy being around. Um, and we're all moving in the same direction to achieve the same vision and ultimately help, you know, in our case, it's the fact that climate and biodiversity crisis. Vikki: And what, this might sound really obvious because all those things sound great, they sound exactly what you'd want from a job, but what benefits do you see when you do create that sort of environment? Andrew: I think, yeah, it sounds really obvious, but I think it's really tricky. But the, the benefits that we see are like that spark of creativity between people, you know, when you've got colleagues that you really love working with. I think there's lots of support between people. And I think that ultimately you can achieve really amazing things. And I think more than you could achieve if it wasn't such a positive culture. Um, but there is a big part of performance and maybe we'll get onto that because there's a big positive and like, this feels great. This is a genuinely amazing feeling thing to do, but there's also a performance element around delivery and impact. So you get that, that positive piece as well as enjoying the journey that you're on with people. Vikki: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So let's think about how it applies to academia. So obviously, you know, it's been a while since you were in academia, but you did postdoc roles and things after your PhD, as you said. So what do you think academia could learn from all of this stuff? Andrew: I think, so it's really interesting because people ask me like what can you apply from sports psychology into other settings and I think there's actually very little that I found over my probably last decade doing that that you can't take from sports psychology and apply into business and I think it's a similar concept with business and into academia. I think I would start with the relationship between a supervisor and a student, be that a PhD student or maybe it's a postdoctoral researcher. I think that in business that relationship with managers is so important. Like have you seen all of the research and all of these concepts basically that you join a company because of the vision and the brand and the work that you're going to do, but you ultimately leave a bad boss and your line manager has such an impact on the experience that you have day to day because they can be the most amazing, support and source of motivation and inspiration and, you know, they've got a plan for the future and you want to do that with them. Or they can be uncommunicative, they can put their own interests in front of your own and all sorts of other negative behaviours. So I think the heart of that for me starts with the relationship and I think it also starts with... there's a great concept from Radical Candor, the book by Kim Scott, which is about this. There's a high care for the person and there's a high care for performance. And I think once you've got that relationship at the centre of that, you can then start to, you know, show that you care for that person and also that you want to drive performance. And I think that in academia it is a performance environment. I think it's a really demanding and tough environment. And I think by putting those two things together, then hopefully would help how you will feel the day to day experience. It would alleviate stress, it would, you know, more positive emotions, more excitement, and ultimately probably leading to better work performance in the future. Vikki: And for listeners, we've mentioned a couple of things. We've mentioned the podcast that Andrew was in before, we've mentioned Radical Candor, the book, I'll link these in the show notes, so you'll be able to find all those things afterwards. Andrew: And just on Radical Candor, I say this to every line manager, If you've got folks working in universities and you've got students or you've got people reporting to you, you might shy away from like in a more popular literature, you might be more comfortable with journals. But if you read one book of such, make a Radical Candor. It is basically like line management, you know, the root essence of it, the real stuff that you ought to get right in one book. And it is my go to recommendation for people who start that, or if you've been doing it 10 years and you realize actually nobody's ever trained me to do this, to be a line manager. Read Radical Candor. It's got stuff about individuals, it's got stuff about the wider organization, and some of it's corporate America, which may or may not apply to individual situations where people work in academia. But the vast majority of it's so helpful. Vikki: That's so good to hear because often, you know, there's, there's quite a lot of these books that people talk about and stuff. And coming from the sort of background that we come from and that the listeners come from, you always query how evidence based is this? Is it grounded in something? Is it just waffle that some dude made up. So, yeah, that's a reminder for me, because Radical Candor has lived in my Audible library for quite a long time and hasn't got listened to yet. So I'm going to bump that to the top of my list now. That's amazing. So some of my listeners are academics, so we're going to start there. What are a couple of things that they could do to be that sort of boss that you're talking about? Andrew: I think co creating a vision with the people that you're working with, I think that's such an important part of leadership. Over the years I've been sort of exploring this and thinking about it and the way that I like to break it down is like, an organization defines why you're doing something. Essentially by wanting to be part of that, you join up to that. But the leaders in the organization essentially decide what you're going to do. You know, what are the objectives and what does the future look like? And then other people who are working with you deliver the how, and you give them that autonomy over the how. So in that, what's the why of the organization? Why does it exist and what are we ultimately trying to do? And what's your piece in that why? Do you have a compelling vision for the future? I mean, there's like so many things like In academia, the forefront of knowledge, delivering something incredible, like that's an awesome vision, but I wonder how often, again, this maybe you can guide me here is how often are people coming back to that and reminding themselves of, actually, this is the kind of big questions that we're answering and this is the work that we're doing and moving the world forward. Vikki: Yeah, I don't think they do enough. So I have this, I have a course called how to be your own best boss, and it's all about self management and I talk one section of it is talking about 10 different qualities that you need to be a good boss and keeping that big vision, that sort of why is one of the things that we talk about and then I think you're right. I think in terms of how academics support their students, but also how students manage themselves, it's something we don't do enough. I think we get bogged down in the day to day, I need to read this and analyze that and da da da. And we almost start to take for granted, I think, the thing we're doing, of course, that's what I'm studying, it feels mundane to you in many ways. I see lots of students query whether their research is ever actually going to be useful anyway, you know, because you feel like it's such a small piece of the jigsaw and all of those things, that I think reminding yourself that you are still part of a jigsaw, even if it feels like your bit is small and your bit isn't progressing as fast as you'd like it to , I think is super helpful. Andrew: Yeah, it's really funny because I do a lot of recruitment, screening a lot of CVs and somebody came across, they had a PhD and I don't know why, but I was like, well, I'll look at like the impact factor of their journals to see, you know, was this a kind of a big deal? And they had a number and I was like, well, I've got nothing to bench that against, that's their number. So I looked at my number, it was significantly lower. I was like, okay, so this person's, their research is well read. That's fantastic. That's really good to know. But like that's the only time I've ever thought about what my research did. However, almost every coaching engagement I have with somebody, I can take the central concept of my research, which is about, which was about defining success as improvement and mastering your craft, as opposed to how you perform relative to other people. And that, that the former definition of success has a positive impact on your emotions and how you think you're performing. I can use that with everyone because you can always get better by improving and I always see people comparing themselves to others. And so. In an academic world, like, I didn't think it was particularly groundbreaking myself, but over the last decade, like so many times I've been like, oh yeah, and like I was a part of that. So that's the other thing to think about is like that perspective over the longer term. Vikki: Yeah, 100%. Just a shout out on impact factors, though. Remember, impact factors are massively disciplinarily influenced. So, sports psychology impact factors are always low, even for incredibly eminent academics, because sports psychology is a relatively small field, whereas I was publishing in biology journals or something like that, they automatically have much higher, so don't use it as a marker, maybe as the size of the kind of reach, but not as the quality of the work, just a little shout out for everybody listening. Um, so one thing I think is different about academia compared to other organizations, and I'd love to hear what you think about this, is you're talking about kind of organizations having an overarching mission, as it were. And universities do, for sure. But I always think that academia is almost like a whole bunch of self employed people who have been forced to work in an organisation. Because they've all usually got their own little visions for success, their own areas that they want to work in, and some people's research will fall very clearly within the university's priorities, and it'll get lots of attention and promotions and all of those things. Other people will find that they're studying something that's, you know, maybe not fashionable or not big at the moment. And then you've got that dynamic between the supervisor and the student as well, where the supervisor kind of wants to set the direction of the PhD, but they also want the student to take real ownership and make decisions and it to be their independent piece of work. So how does all this stuff work, do you think, or have you got any tips for where it's a much less kind of single vision hierarchical setup, as you might see in a company, where we're almost all individuals who are in this big messy place. Andrew: Yeah, really interesting. question and really interesting thing to think about. Let's start with the supervisor and the student and let's come back to the wider piece. But with that, I think that's, for me, that's my language about what and how. And so from the supervisor perspective, I think it's their role to sell the vision, to, you know, to explain the impact, to explain the future, what it would like to get the person excited about that. Particularly if they have a strong vision. I think the other thing that's really good for supervisors is around expectations and clarifying while you're building a really strong relationship, what do you expect and how's that going to work? And part of that is going to be, well, what's the expectation on the student to set the direction, or where are they getting their choice in decision making? And that was something that my supervisor did a great job of, was giving me choice about certain things. Like she recognized the importance of autonomy and, you know, she would hold the line and like really clear about, no, we really ought to do it this way. And these are the reasons, but there was a lot of choice involved. So where is the supervisor? Are you saying, I think this is the direction for us to go. And when are you giving that person the choice about the route that you take, you know, if it's an analogy of an actual journey and if you're not giving any choice, like how are you sparking their motivation? Do you understand motivation? You know, you really ought to because you're going to be working with this person for at least three years and they need to be motivated in that time. And yes, they have an individual role to play, but I think choice about what they do, is really, really useful for how they do it. That would be the other place. So you might decide that, you know, our project is going to be on this topic. You might give them choice about the methods that they go about or some of the individual decision making pieces because that then creates that sense of ownership. The other more complex thing is what happens when you're part of a research group and when that project is part of a larger piece, then how do you then communicate what everybody's doing, because if you're making that relationship as a payer, if actually that supervisor is supervising five people, how do those pieces fit together and how do you ensure collaboration? I think that's where you've got to get more of a team emphasis. So does everybody understand everybody else's role? Does everybody understand what they're trying to achieve and how those pieces link together while balancing the competition between people and trying as much as you can to avoid that and make it an environment where people are celebrating other people's success and lifting them up without feeling a sense of jealousy because people have the ability to deliver good work themselves. So I think that, the kind of individual or kind of smaller group level, I think those things would help. When it gets to the wider university level that becomes a lot more complicated, I think. Vikki: Yeah, for sure. And I think even within PhDs, because you and I have a similar, you know, background in terms that we're in slightly different disciplines, but similar background in terms of what we're used to. When I work with my clients across different disciplines, it varies so hugely. So I have everything from clients whose supervisors have got a grant. These are the projects. This is what you need to do. And there is, you know, a little bit of wiggle room in terms of exactly how you analyze it or exactly how you write up the data or whatever. But mostly, here you go, funded position, off you go, all the way through. So I have a lot of clients who usually in the arts and humanities, social sciences, that sort of end of the world, who they're self funding, they've come up with a project, they've proposed it to an academic, and the academic has gone, yeah, I can probably supervise that. Yeah. All right. You tell me what you want to do. I'll put in some effort from time to time and everything in between, right? And I think thinking through what that kind of vision for the future looks like and how you create that environment where you both feel like you're moving in the same direction and you're supporting each other and you've got the kind of, I don't know if it's the right amount of autonomy, but like a good amount of autonomy. I think across that continuum is such an interesting challenge. Andrew: I think so. And I think the advice that I would give would be probably completely different either end of that spectrum. Vikki: Yeah. Andrew: So on the end of the spectrum when it's set, you're right, you've got a lot less autonomy, but that's not the only driver of intrinsic motivation, which is really what I'm talking about. The kind of competence or mastery is another key piece. And then I guess relatedness would be my third key concept. So relatedness, we think we've covered with the relationship we talked about. Can we give them choices? Can you encourage them to be on the path of mastery? So if you've got a very set idea of what it looks like, then I would be reinforcing this idea that the person is gaining skills, learning, improving, moving forward, because you want to be building that as a source of confidence. And if you're meeting them once a week or once a fortnight, which if you're not doing at the very least, Do it. Pull your socks up, because it gives you that opportunity to build confidence, you know, know what they're doing and even just say, Oh, that's good. Well done. You know, thank you for doing that. There's tiny little nudges that help somebody build up that through positive feedback. I think that's so useful. And then on the other side, when you've got no structure, very little structure, I think that is on the student to be engaging and selling the vision to the academic and saying, okay, we need to be bought into this because this is what you're doing. And it starts as a relationship of the supervisor helping the student. You need to get them drawn in and it become at least a partnership. If not, then realizing that you're helping them as well so that they can invest the right amount of time and support that you need to be flourishing. And I think also like having the open conversation when you feel comfortable to do it. But I would think probably within the first three months of What level of support do you think you need at what stages? What do you do when you have disagreements? You know, those kind of conversations to really understand how you're going to work together and how do you know when it's going to go well and what happens when something doesn't go well, because you're going to work together for quite a long time. You're not always going to agree, but to be able to talk it out is just so helpful. Vikki: Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, thephdlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. Vikki: Now I know an awful lot of my listeners are PhD students who are on the kind of receiving end, as it were, of a lot of the things we've talked about, and you've started to touch on it there, but if people are listening and they're thinking, I don't think the environment is exactly how you say it is, what can they do? What can they do from their side, assuming they can't change their supervisors, what can they do to change their experience of it? Andrew: So I'm going to give you one concept which I'm going to just going to put my cards on the table. I've never looked into the research behind it so you can like contact me via LinkedIn and fact check me and tell me I'm wrong, I would love that, that would just be the best. But I take people towards this concept of circle of influence, have you come across that before? Vikki: Yeah, Stephen Covey, yes. Andrew: There we go, yeah, which, you know, um, Cal Newport is doing a pretty good job of unpicking all of Stephen Covey's work, but that's, but the concept is good, which is that at the centre, if you imagine a diagram at the centre, you've got the things that you can control, your thoughts, your actions, your effort, for example. There's another slightly bigger circle outside that where it's things that you can influence. You know, other people's perceptions of you, some things that have, you know, um, things that can happen in your life. And then you've got things you can't control, such as the weather or, you know, big geopolitical events. Vikki: For the people listening, this is coming out probably January time, something like that. We're recording this on the day of the U. S. presidential election results, so Geopolitical events are out of our control, especially as people who aren't American and can't vote. Andrew: Exactly. Very much right outside of that. Um, bring it back and focus on what you can control. This is an old sports psychology trick because you are going to feel... like it's anxiety in sports settings, isn't it? If you're a part of a team, you don't know if you're going to win the league, and actually your level of ability to control that is pretty limited unless you're a star player who can somehow win the game, all the games by yourself, but I was never that person, I was very much a small cog. But what you can do is focus on your piece, so am I putting in the effort, am I focused, am I doing the right things? So I think that's the first thing for people. The second thing I would say is just some really simple interventions. Like, okay, are you starting your day with a clear picture of like, one thing that you want to get done today? Or at the very least, even if it's a couple of things, it's not like 20 things that you're never going to get done. If you were honest with yourself and looked at, And then are you ending your day by looking back at the things that you have done? Like, how simple is that to do? I think if everybody paused at the moment and said, Are you actually doing it? Like, the vast majority would be like, No, no, what I like to do is set a massive to do list that I think I can get done, but I know deep down I never will. And then at the end of the day I take all of the things I haven't done and I put them into tomorrow on top of another massive list of things to do. And I don't look at any of the good things that I've done, because why would I do that? Vikki: While beating myself up about the fact that I didn't finish this unreasonable list. Andrew: Exactly. It's not, to make you feel better, if you're doing that, you're not alone. People do it in business. I'm coaching a lot of people with the same thing. So I'm really trying to flip that dynamic of saying, actually, What's the most important thing to do and do that once you've done that big tick well done Recognizing you did that and then you get to a few more things great and then at the end of the day actually looking back and thinking I did some good stuff today. Like it's not gonna be perfect It's not gonna have changed the world in a day But every day that you look back and think Yeah, I did some good things. That's building the confidence when, you know, great things happen and not so great things happen. So that's another thing. And then the other one is, I just mentioned Cal Newport in passing, and he's jumped back into my head. He's doing some really interesting things. Started with a book, Deep Work. Now, Cal Newport is an academic. He's a computer scientist. So he probably is pretty well researched, but he writes books on productivity. He's also got a podcast. Something around his work would be really helpful. He talks about lots of ways of planning time, so multi scale planning, how to be productive, and he is a professor in an American university, so he knows the demands during term time, he knows the demands out of term time when it comes to writing. So if people, like, this is something that I don't think people tell you is, you can be more productive, you can stop berating yourself for not achieving things, and you can learn ways of doing more. And actually, when you learn those tools and techniques, your life becomes a lot better. Vikki: Yeah, for sure. There's another book that he wrote, and I'm looking over there because it's my books, but I don't think Andrew: There's Slow Productivity, that's his recent one. Vikki: There was one earlier than that that was, So Good They Can't Ignore You, I think it was called? Yeah. Was that called? Andrew: He also wrote books on like, how to be a grade A student. That's how he got started. Yes. He came up doing his degree. Vikki: That one I haven't read. The So Good They Can't Ignore You, I love. It's all about, I'm 90, I will double check and make sure it's in the show notes. I'm 90 percent sure it was Cal Newport. If it wasn't, it's a good book anyway. It was all about, rather than necessarily following, like, your passion, you know, when people don't know what they want to do. It's like, oh, follow your passion. I was like, what's that? Um, his argument is get really, really good at something. And I think, I mean, you're a really good example of that, right? You went and you did your sports psychology PhD. You got really good at understanding what motivates people to do things and what motivates them in a healthy, sustainable way. And now you're off, you know, you might have thought that your passion was applying that to sport originally, I assume, as you came to the sports science department, but now you're off applying that in so many different settings across your career. Um, that's a really good one. I love those really tangible tips for what people can do. And I want to, I mentioned the course that I run, Be Your Own Best Boss, which is like an online self paced thing that people can work their way through. And one other thing, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. One of the things I love to, recommend to my clients and that that whole course is about is the notion of if you think about what you would want from your very perfect boss, how they would treat you, how they would organize your time, how they would keep you motivated, how they would help you feel engaged, all of those things. You kind of invent that boss. And usually when you ask somebody to do that, they don't come up with a boss who's yelling at them and berating them and reminding them of all their failures and those things, but they equally don't come up with a boss who's like, Oh, it doesn't matter. You can do it tomorrow. It's fine. It's no big deal. They can usually come up with, it varies a bit with different people, but something in the middle where that person kind of believes in you is ambitious for you, but is also compassionate and understanding that everything's not perfect, like you say. And what I try and encourage people to do is channel that boss for themselves. Because often we have some control over who our bosses are. You know, we can move, we can change supervisors and things. But especially if you've started a PhD, you're often wedged into a relationship for a few years. You can't necessarily control, maybe influence, you can't necessarily control what they do, but what you can control, what is very firmly in that circle of control, is how you treat yourself. And I think that giving yourself clear guidance of what's an appropriate amount of work for today, recognizing when you've done it, all of those things, for me comes into that being a really good boss to yourself so that you can succeed and you speak to yourself in a way that you would want a boss to speak to you. Andrew: Yeah, I think that's a really useful concept. I think that, you know, would you speak to your friend the way you speak to yourself? Sometimes it's a good prompt. And I think, I think you're right. I think that what would be those expectations because you're ultimately trying to do something and achieve something really big and being held to that is really important sometimes, but also being like knowing it's okay to make mistakes or it's okay to get things wrong is absolutely critical as well. That's the other thing about, I guess, cultures that's important is you can have a really high expectation of performance, but you can't drive a perfectionistic culture, because you think you should, like, and we see things. If you watch Simone Biles at the Olympics or some, like, other elite performer, you think they're perfect. But if they're, if you are trying to constantly be perfect, it actually moves you further away from being any good. So like recognizing that you can make mistakes and giving yourself a break. And then the other thing is what you spoke there for me, Vikki, was it's sometimes difficult to know how much to work because that's quite an endless, you know, challenge and there's always things that you can do. Sometimes I find it better to think about, well, how much time do you need to recover? And almost this sports psychologist coming at me again, like if you just played a game of tennis or you just on a big weights workout? You've just done whatever your sport of choice is. How much time do you give yourself to recover until you do it again? And what are the things that you do when you're recovering? So do you sleep and eat? And maybe sit and watch Netflix? Or sit and do a puzzle, like whatever that thing is? Well, what's your recovery at the end of your work day? Yeah. You know, what do you, what do you do? What brings you, what fills your tank and gives you energy? And I, I went through a period of burnout at the end of 2023, was it? Yeah, 2023. And I really had to do a lot of thought about like, is this what I want to be doing with my life? Is this giving me that positive environment and sustaining me and giving me energy at work? And it was like, no, this is pre Oxygen Conservation, just to make that very clear. But then I had to get really good at, well, what am I doing? What, what gives me energy? And what are the things I do that I think I do for fun, but actually take an energy in a weird way, in that either mental, emotional, or physical sense. So that'd be another thing for people to think about is like, how are you recovering? And like, If you can't stand reading at the end of the day because you've spent your entire day reading and writing, don't do it. Just like put on Netflix or go for a walk or whatever it is. Vikki: Yeah, I love that. That is such a good way of framing it. And now I feel like this discussion is going on forever, but I wanna share with you one other thing. So I took part in like an online retreat thing for solo business owners that was run by Karin Nordin, who is a coach that we've talking about before we came on recording. Wonderful coach, people listening, follow her on Instagram. She's amazing. I love her. She has a PhD in behavior change as well and in this teamless retreat, one of the things she said is that the time that we allocate to tasks is the parameter that determines how we do them. And I loved that because so often people ask me, I don't know if I can get this done in the time. I don't know how long this is going to take. All of these sort of slightly vague questions that imply there's an amount of time, that is the right amount of time, to get this task done. And her argument was that you decide in advance how much time you have to give this task, and on the basis of that, you decide how you do it. So if you only have a short amount of time to give it, it's going to be limited scope, so it's going to be focused on something quite small, it's going to be quite short, it's going to be a bit rougher than perhaps you would intend, it's going to not have as beautiful slides or whatever it might be, you decide what bits you prioritise. But by deciding how long you have to do it, you then decide exactly what end product you're expecting to get during that time. And it works so much better than having a kind of endless, I'll see how long this thing takes, and then realizing that you can't get it done. I love that. I thought that was so useful. Andrew: Yeah, that's a brilliant concept. I think I've used something similar in my working life, which is when somebody asks something of you, I generally want to say yes, because I want to perform and you want to be, you know, seen as being doing good work. But the trick is be like, if you want that tomorrow, I can get you this, maybe an outline. If you give me to the end of the week, I can give you like a full PowerPoint presentation with beautiful photos and the whole thing's done. Which would you prefer? Oh, I'll take it at the end of next week. Thank you. And like, so that's much better. So it's that piece of it. Establish the time and then when you've got the time, then you can work as, you can work really hard in that time and get it to the level of quality you get it to. But there's also an element of realism in that, isn't there? Because, you know, you ain't writing a paper in a day, like a fully formed, completely high quality paper, unless you're amazing at it. I mean, I certainly wasn't. Vikki: Oh, well, um, yeah, absolutely. But that's when you then decide, if I've only got a day to give myself, then I'm not writing a paper. Andrew: Exactly. And that's where you might get an outline or you might get a paragraph. Vikki: Yeah. Thinking of it like that, the realism then forces you to actually make a decision because that's what I think all of us do. And I do think this connects with the kind of positive environment because it's a problem when supervisors don't make decisions either. I think what lots of us do is we sort of vaguely look at our tasks, vaguely think they don't all fit, tell ourselves they kind of have to all fit, And so just start work. And we avoid the uncomfortableness of having to decide that something definitely doesn't fit, and we're going to have to either tell someone it doesn't fit, or we're going to have to deal with our emotions about the fact that we'd love to do it but we're not going to be able to. And so yeah, it's absolutely not about just going, oh I've got four hours I can write a lit review, happy days, let's go. It's, if I literally only have four hours, I can't do a lit review. I could do a blog post about this and talk about one or two articles. I could, you know, happy days. Let's do that. You know, it can be a little bit research informed, a little bit informal, go up on the internet, happy days, but I can't do a lit review because I've only got four hours. And yeah, I think it sort of encourages you to make decisions that can feel uncomfortable, but it will need to be made at some point when you realize that you can't do it. Andrew: And it's, it's such an important life skill, the ability to make those decisions. Because ultimately what we're talking about is most often not the things at the really top of your to do list, the most important things, it's the things at the bottom. And what are the multiple things at the bottom that I can either stop doing or delay in order to allow me to do the really important things. Learning that skill early in a career is brilliant because it sets you up for success in the future. But a question for, for you and the students out there, if you've got a supervisor who's setting a task and the timeline doesn't be realistic, Do you think that they know, the supervisor, knows how long it will take you, the student, to do that work? Like, do you think they've gone through the cognitive processing of, Okay, this needs to be done, but, you know, my student will probably take, hmm, eight hours to do that. So what I'll ask them to do is do it in four. Like, I just don't, I don't think people know. Vikki: I don't think they do. And this is, this goes back to the whole thing about universities being a performance environment. One of the problems I see is that because universities are so pressured, um, time pressured, money pressured, all of those things at the moment, um, supervisors are often, and I say this with love and respect having been one, um, because it was definitely true for me, supervisors are not showing up as their best selves all the time because they're under pressure for 47 other things other than your projects. And so sometimes we simply don't have either the time or the cognitive capacity to go through and go actually, I don't think they can write a lit review because they've also got that teaching they've also got this da da da and that's where I'd say to students One way to push back on things like that is to say, can we just take a minute to go through what the steps involved in doing what you're asking me to do is just so that we can clarify, how long it's likely to actually take and whether it is that much of a priority. I remember doing this and I won't name anyone. I think they were around your time. I'll tell you when we stopped recording. I was second supervising with a member of staff who was quite enthusiastic, shall we say, on what he wanted done and had lots of ideas and things. And he'd be like, yeah, yeah, just run that analysis again doing this. And he was doing like lab work stuff. Um, and I remember sitting there as a second supervisor with relatively terrified looking students and I'd be like, that's probably four days full time work. Do you care about it four days worth? Oh, no, no, definitely not. Don't, ignore that. Forget I said it. And I think sometimes it was easy for me. I was the same level as this person. It was easy for me to say that. It's harder if you're the student in that situation. But being able to go let's break that down and work out what the steps involved are because partly supervisors, when it comes to the practical side of things, it's a long time since most of them have done it. Whether that's accessing archives, whether it's collecting data in the laboratory, running biochemical tests, whatever. It's a long time since they've done it themselves and often they forget how fiddly and how long these things take and when things go wrong and all that stuff. But also I think they forget that, you know, you and I could knock up an introduction to a paper, if it was on a topic we'd written about before, we could knock up an introduction to a paper relatively straightforwardly. It'd take a bit of thought, but it wouldn't be that big a deal. Because even if we weren't up to date with the literature, we'd know roughly what people we needed to be looking for, we'd know what keywords to search for, we'd be able to understand them quickly and put them in context when we read them. And I think the other part of it is the supervisors often forget that what they could do in that period of time is not necessarily how long it will take somebody who's got less context, less skills, less experience, less confidence often. You know, when you're experienced, it's easy to say, you know, Oh yeah, I think that covers pretty much. The key points. I think we're good to go. Let's go. And so I think remembering that when they're setting goals is really, really important. Andrew: Yeah, I totally agree. I think them not knowing the time associated. I think also if you could approach that with the genuine, as the student with a genuine curious mindset and you can go to somebody and say, they asked you to do something and you can say, right, well actually I've probably got about, let's say 12 hours this week because I've got these other things on my to do list. I think what I should do is prioritize X and Y and drop this. What do you think? That's such a good discussion because it shows, you know you're on top of your time, it shows you know what you're supposed to be doing. And it also then you offer some element of prioritization. And then the supervisor can then be like, Oh, why are you doing that? And you're like, I would hope it's in a very gentle way. Talk to me about this. Why is that important? And then you can realign on priorities because if you haven't done this, like you will be drifting. You won't know about it, but you might be drifting on what's important. So taking things and maybe presenting them in that kind of way, I think really allows for a positive discussion, you kind of lead the supervisor to what you're seeking. Vikki: That is brilliant advice because I think so often students think that the way to impress their supervisors is by being able to do everything and being able to be on top of it and not worrying and not being anxious and all of those things. And I think it's a huge sign, like you say, of confidence and maturity and all those things to be able to go, okay, I have this many hours this week. Does this fit? Is there anything I should be doing? And there are times, you know, I've had people in the past when I was supervising them that would have that sort of conversation and they'd say, you know, and I spend eight hours, I don't know, updating my reference manager or something and I'll be like, Oh, okay. Let's have a conversation about that because if that's what's filling up your time, we can, there's ways I can help you. There's ways we can make this more streamlined for it. And we definitely don't want to be spending that much time on that. Or you go, Oh yeah, if you're spending eight hours doing this really important thing, whatever it is, then I understand why it might take a month to get this piece of writing done because you've only got this much time to give to it. That, that makes sense. I hadn't thought about that. Andrew: Yeah. I will have a say. My supervisor gave me one of the best pieces of feedback that I think I've ever got, which was probably in second year. She sat me down and she was like, do you want to finish on time? And I was like, yeah, of course. Like I have no money, like there's no option. So she was like, you need to work more. And I went back and I said to Jo, my then girlfriend, now wife, I was like, how could she say that? I'm working nine to five. I'm doing all this kind of stuff. I had a bit of a rage. And I was like. Oh, she's, she's right. This takes more and it did towards the end. Now, if I was doing it again, the more sustainable version would be to work on productivity to really like really prioritize and to put in a lot of work and recover really well over the time. But there are times you just have to put in the work, like you have to do that a little bit more. But again, those skills that you've learned about recovering and prioritizing are going to help in that regard because that's what's going to get you through that. So, we're saying this, and yes it has to be realistic, but don't be concerned if your supervisor pushes back and says there's a time to push. Before a conference, for example, and you haven't written your presentation, that's a time to push. You might have to do a bit more. Vikki: But I think even within that, I agree completely. And it's something I coach a lot of write up students. And it's something we talk about that yet you're not necessarily aiming for a work pattern that is sustainable year in, year out, you're looking for a work pattern that's sustainable for the period of time you've got left. Um, and one of the things we talk about then is, okay, if you're going to work more hours, A, how are you making sure that those hours are useful? So the productivity piece that you're talking about, but B, how are you going to speak to and look after yourself during that? So if we go back to your sports analogies that you've talked about before, if it's a period of heavy competition, then those athletes, yeah, they're training really hard. They're competing really hard. They're very physically, you know, Busy, for want of a better phrase. But their team are going to wrap around them, things that help quicker recovery, support, you know, psychological support, all of those sorts of things, so that if you are putting in tons of hours, let's at least sort of cushion that around with sleep and very easy to grab healthy food. So like not just having pizza, but equally not deciding that you're going to start some new regime where you're cooking from scratch and blah, blah, blah. Easy stuff that you can grab. Um, what things can you drop from your life for a little while? Take the pressure off you and say, you know what? There's just not space for those right now. I'll come back to it. Um, and how can you, you know, going back to your thing about how you start and finish each day, how after those long days, can you be congratulating yourself about how hard you're working and how I'm not sure how proud you are of how much you're doing and how you, you know, you're really pushing on rather than ending your days going, oh my god, I'm working so hard and I still don't think I'm going to get there. I still don't know this is possible. I'm not. It's probably not good enough. They're probably going to tell me I'm rubbish and all these other things. Because I think often we add a whole load of baggage on top of the hard work. that just make it really, really unpleasant. Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so recognising the positives is really key in that. The other thing that I did as well, I played a lot of music growing up and music really changes my moods and I can use it to manipulate how I feel. So I had certain albums that I would put on at the start of a day to get me into writing. And I knew that , literally to get you in that right mindset. So that's another sports psychology trick. It's almost a pre performance routine. It might not be music for everybody, it could be me like brewing a cup of tea and just taking a mindful moment to enjoy that or having a lovely coffee or whatever. But something that gets you into that mindset and then just getting moving can be really useful too. Vikki: Love that. So, for me, one thing that's been really useful in this is, obviously there's all the advice that people can use to create their own positive environments and to create positive environments for other people. But I think there's a bigger piece here about using research to optimise environments and performance. in universities or, or any other organizations. And I think we're often quite bad at doing that. We sort of talk about research led in terms of the teaching that we do and perhaps our impact on the outside world. But I don't see lots of evidence of universities using research, like you're talking about sports psychology research, to guide how we actually work. And I just wonder what views you've got about that, whether we should be doing that more, and if you've got any ideas why people don't at the moment. Andrew: I think, I think there certainly should be. I think if you move outside of academia, There's some more barriers to getting that research, like, you know, paywalls and such, but not massively, so there's more and more that's freely available, and there's loads of other things online. But I think universities and other big organisations are difficult to change, you know, notoriously so, and if you think about big change projects in terms of reorganizing, like 20 percent of them are really ultimately successful. However, what we can be looking to do is like, what are the incremental improvements that we can make? And so that starts with understanding really what you're trying to achieve, I would think, and then trying to look at ways of doing that more effectively, most likely through making small incremental steps that people are going to be more likely to be comfortable with. And I think that's the other thing is that I guess humans are ultimately pretty self serving in an extent. Like we can be, there's amazing capacity to do things for other people, but if you want to get somebody to change the way that they're working, you have to make it better for them. So I think that's something I, I honestly don't know how you do it at the big, Institutional level because partly because it's a big organization to change, but partly because I don't understand like what is most important. What are you optimizing for as a university? Is it student experience? Is it academic record? Is it something else? Is it profit and loss? Like, what is the driver? And it's probably all of them. And how do you make and square that circle of it? How do you do the research and the student experience incredibly well, and then drive the positive outcomes that you want? Like, that's essentially what we're trying to do at Oxygen Conservation, which is why we're leading with quality environmental improvements done in the right way to deliver social impact. We think by doing those things really well, we will generate profit as a result down the line. Whereas if we flip that situation and say actually we want profit and we want to be an environmental company, you wouldn't do it right. You'd end up sacrificing your quality and your decisions, and then ultimately you wouldn't make any money anyway. So I guess that, from a very naive perspective from the universities is, what are you trying to optimise for and how can you do it in a way That gives you positive outcomes. Vikki: Yeah, I love that. And the reason, if people who are watching this on YouTube will have seen that I was smirking while you were saying that. That wasn't me smirking at your naivety. Because I think what you've put your finger on is the absolute essence of the problem. And it's not that you don't know that. It's that the vast majority of universities haven't decided that. The vast majority of universities still think that they can be sector leading in research, sector leading in teaching, sector leading in student experience, da da da. And those things do and should relate to each other. Um, but any change project is usually run by Pro Vice Chancellor for research, for research, Pro Vice Chancellor education, for the teaching ones or whatever. And so they're very siloed within one of the aims of the university. And often they don't take into account, not in any meaningful way anyway, the kind of trade offs between well actually if we're putting all this effort into performing well in the research measures, how are we gonna relieve pressure a little bit on what we're doing on the teaching side or the student side or vice versa, right? And some universities do it better than others but I think that is one of the massive things is that when you refuse to make a decision, going back to the things we talked about at an individual level, when organizations refuse to make decisions or don't see the need to make decisions about if we prioritize this, that means something else steps back, then you end up in that position that we've all found ourselves, where you're trying to do everything and everything has to be great. And that's just a recipe for burnout, as you say. Andrew: Well, absolutely. Because, you know, academics by nature, just have like, far too much to do. And across, are they still working with those three main elements of research, teaching and administration? Vikki: Uh, yes, but then people have then thrown in, obviously there's much more on impact and influence now. So that knowledge transfer, that side of things is a much bigger thing now. So certainly in the UK where we have the research excellence framework, something like 10 percent of the score is to do with, with your impact. So there's all that side of things. There's a much bigger, understandable, I agree with it on principle, emphasis on outreach and trying to inspire people to come to university who wouldn't otherwise necessarily consider themselves a university person and all that stuff, so schools outreach and all that good work, and then obviously all the kind of, there's the administration of the doing of the jobs but also the kind of broader leadership and strategic leadership, and um, Yeah, there is a huge issue with universities and academics, feeling like they should be able to excel at all of those, all the time as well. Andrew: Whereas, if you take it into an organisation, let's say you take it into a random business doing whatever, what you'd be talking about is a senior person in a business, a manager, a head of, maybe a director, depending on if we're talking about lecturer, senior lecturer, professor, reader, whatever. And what we're saying is we want you to do all these things is really important for the business. You don't really have anyone to support you or to delegate to you. Like, yeah, you've got some people supporting you with research, but who's supporting on teaching and on outreach and all these other things. And let's be honest, like the admin probably isn't very fun. So you don't want to do it. I mean, have you ever been taught how to do outreach? So there's all sorts of challenges there, but I guess that's an opportunity for the students is to offer to support in those elements, because if that's your career path and you want to be doing that in the future, that's what we do in organization. We pair them up with somebody and say, right, well, you supervisor teach the person how to do it and then they'll take some work off your plate and then they can not do some stuff that they didn't think that they, like at the bottom of their to do list and everybody gets freed up a little as a result. Vikki: Yeah for sure and that opens up whole other conversations about how then the academics have to make time to support the students so that it becomes a learning experience and not just a dumping experience and all of those things. Andrew: We should do a part two where we have an actual academic and we can put these ideas in and they can tell us that it's terrible and it'll never work. Vikki: They'll tell us why it will not work. But I think my take home from that is not so much, it could be a really depressing take home that higher education is fundamentally broken, which I do think to some extent it is. But. What I think is really important for our listeners to take from that is that means if you can't do it all, if you are finding that you're having to do some things to the best of your ability, some things a bit shoddily and other things you just forget entirely, it's not about you. That is not a personal failing. That is an inevitable consequence of the way academia runs at the moment. And yes, we can try and change academia, but as you say, that's a really slow moving ship, but what you can change is how you manage yourself within that. Stopping expecting yourself to have to do all these things, even if the university is telling you that you have to do all these things, in reality, no one is doing everything brilliantly. And so what we can do is sort of, try to make some decisions for ourselves about at the moment, I'm putting my foot down on this thing and trying to push that forward. These things, I'm just going to take over and maintain. So a colleague, ex colleague of both of ours, Jennifer Cumming, who's a professor still in Sports Science at Birmingham. She had a brilliant rotation of how often she would update her courses, for example. So some people would never update their modules. Other people think they have to update every lecture every year. And she would have a brilliant, she had kind of brilliant structured rotation of which ones she would redevelop in which years. So that it all got refreshed at an appropriate rate, but she didn't try and do everything every time. And that freed her up just enough that she had a bit more capacity for her research work or for other commitments, which is just, you know, it's those sorts of things is thinking, okay, what's on maintenance mode? What's on really pushing forwards on this mode so that you accept that you can't be a hundred percent on everything all the time. Andrew: But you just, you just can't. And if you try and live at that absolute, you'll just become nihilistic and you'll get really sad because you won't be successful on all those fronts, but that's a great example of being practical about what can I do and what am I focusing on? And the other things can be done quicker or a little later in some way, make it manageable, because then you get to focus your essentials on what you're trying to do, not berating yourself for the things you don't do. Vikki: Perfect. Love it. That has been absolutely amazing, even better than I'd hoped for, so thank you so much. Whenever I have somebody on who has a PhD but who's working outside of academia, I ask them to tell us a little bit about their route. You've obviously told us a little bit about how you got to where you are now. Maybe just take a moment to tell us what you love about what you're doing at the moment and how it's different to academia. Just in case there are people that fancy that sort of thing. Andrew: Yeah, very cool. So I, I really love the teamwork. I think we've got this amazing group of people. I'm fortunate to lead on recruitment. So I get to meet everybody as they come in and offer a bit of a perspective. So I love that. I love that we're working together towards something. And I think I've got this great ability to build things in terms of processes and ways of working, get some good challenge and feedback on those, and then make them a reality and then run them. That to me just is, is really exciting because and you don't always get that in bigger businesses. Sometimes you're given things. And I think that's one of us being, I would call us a scale up. So we're 32 people now. So we're not quite scrappy startup. We've matured beyond that, but we're still at this position of how do you want to measure performance, Andrew? Oh gosh, I don't know. Okay. Go away, have a think, do some research, put something together, get some ideas. And then we do, and we do it. And When it gets positively received, it's a, it's a great feeling because you know that well, I got to take my knowledge and apply it to something and it is having this positive impact on people that I work with. So yeah, I just think that's awesome. Vikki: Amazing. And I just love how you're using your academic knowledge completely out of its academic context, but in such an effective way. And I think, I think that can really hopefully give hope to lots of people listening that the skills they're developing, even the specific knowledge they're developing in a very niche area could well be applicable across lots of different places in the future. Andrew: It so is. Every time I see a CV and I've seen over a thousand if not more now if I see somebody with a PhD I know it's not going to be in our like if somebody if they did have a PhD in environmental restoration fantastic but we've just hired somebody who had a PhD in like Butterfly behavior, and they work in Wales doing a really practical role. The PhD's great, they did loads of good work on it, but the transferable skills are the thing that's really important from an employer perspective. So yeah, loads of hope in that regard. Vikki: Fantastic. Now, if people want to find out more about Oxygen or even get in contact with you, what's the best places for them to look? Andrew: So. If you want information about the company, the website's fantastic. There's a LinkedIn page as well, and we've got newsletter, we've got the Shoot Room Sessions podcast. To start with the website, it'll direct you towards all of that awesome content, which our marketing team and others do a great job with. If you want to get to me, probably LinkedIn's the best place. I'm going to be honest, I'm not a massive fan of the feed of LinkedIn. So I don't see that all the time, but I do respond to messages and requests for connections. And if you just want to ask questions, then reach out to me there. Vikki: Amazing. Thank you so much. And thank you everyone for listening. I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

Links I refer to in this episode Why you shouldn’t read when you’re writing How to plan your academic writing (with special guest Dr Jo Van Every) How to break your work down into chunks Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. Do you have a word count goal at the moment? Whether you're a PhD student or academic, do you have a notional idea? You want to have 5, 000 words written by the end of the year or a chapter finished by the end of January? I'm here, not to tell you you're wrong, because we all have those goals, right? But to help you shape goals that are going to help you way more than simply using word counts. Now this actually came from a question from one of my members. She was talking about having a word count goal, but how some days she's doing stuff that feels important, but that doesn't progress her towards her goal. And she asked me, Vikki, should I be using word count goals? Is that the best way to do this? Cause it doesn't seem to be working for me at the moment. And as you know, I have episodes where I go through client questions, but this one was such a cracker and so important for so many of you that I decided to make a whole episode about it. So let's start with what's wrong with word count goals. Now, before I tell you why you're wrong, it's completely understandable that you have word count goals. And actually, I think they do have a really important place. But there are a number of problems with them. The first one is it doesn't tell you anything about the quality of those words.So do you mean 6000 words of polished, virtually finished, ready to submit chapter. Or do you mean 6, 000 words of a rough first draft just so that the whole thing exists? Or do you mean something in between? We rarely specify what we actually mean. And actually at times like this, so I'm recording this the end of November, it's going out early December, often we start to kind of change what we mean. Maybe when we first set the goal, we meant 6, 000 words of polished, finished chapter, and now we mean probably 6, 000 words of rough draft, if we're lucky. So rarely do we actually specify the quality and the number of words doesn't tell us that anyway. The other thing is my client recognized is that word count goals don't recognize all the different elements of writing that there are. Now I teach these in my workshop about how to write when you're struggling to write in lots of detail, but essentially we all know that there's the kind of planning phase. There's the fleshing out your plan phase. There's the turning it into a rough draft element. There's the checking structure, reorganizing things. There's the checking for flow, checking for accuracy, all of those sorts of large scale editing stuff. There's the, does it all sound nice and academic- y stage. There's the proofreading stage. And often, we don't follow that as a linear process, right? We're kind of going backwards and forwards between these chunks. And there's some of those tasks that will contribute to a word count goal. And there's some that don't. And so you can finish a day feeling like, well, my word count didn't change at all. Okay. Or, on some days my word count got lower, right? And unless you're really kind of conscious of what you're doing, it's hard to tell the difference between days where you were doing things that were absolutely what you should have been doing, that were appropriate to moving this piece of work forwards, It just didn't change the word count. Or days where actually you got distracted faffing about with your references or diving into articles that you were panicking that maybe you should have read but maybe you didn't need to. If we only have word count goals it's really hard to differentiate between those things. To think what we should do instead, we need to really understand what the purpose of these goals are. Now, goals, in my view, should help you recognize progress. They should inspire action. And they should tell you when you have done what you said you were going to do. Now, I think a word count goal at a kind of macro level is a really good way of knowing whether you've done what you said you were going to do. So when we're looking at planning for a month or planning for a quarter, which is something I teach in my Be Your Own Best Boss course, then having a word count goal for those kind of large scale goals can be really, really useful. In fact, I always argue that goals should be something you are producing, not just something that you're doing. So a goal isn't to read for your thesis, a goal is to screen these 10 papers to see whether they are worth reading in lots of detail for the chapter I'm on at the moment, for example, and to produce a list of which ones need to be scrutinized further. Okay, so having a goal that is actually something you're producing, and a word count is absolutely something you might be producing is really, really useful at that kind of monthly and quarterly level. However, this is where it's simply not enough, and where it will rarely be the only goal you should have when we're thinking about it in a daily and weekly level. So what I want you to think about is taking that macro goal of writing 6, 000 words in the next month or whatever. That may sound like loads or not and much depending on what stage you're at and how that process is going for you, but insert your own numbers there. What we now want to do is think about what interim goals, what micro goals we need that will actually reflect the different steps that are taken. And I don't suggest that for a monthly goal or a quarterly goal, you work out every single micro goal you're going to need to get from where you are now to there. That's simply not necessary. But what you can do is think about some sort of midterm goals. So ones that, you know, where you need to be, this week, next week, in order to stay on track. So if you've got a goal in the next month of having 6, 000 words of polished draft, when do you need to have 6, 000 words of rough draft, if that doesn't exist already, for example? So you can start breaking down that, and then you can start thinking, okay, so this week, what does that mean? And this is where we get to think about the whole myriad of goals that we could set that would actually reflect the tasks we need to do. So instead of saying, right, if I'm going to get 6, 000 words by the end of this month, then I need to be doing, what's that, do the maths quickly, 200 words a day in order to do that. Well, that doesn't allow for planning. That doesn't allow for redrafting, restructuring, shortening, polishing, editing, all that stuff. But instead we can say, okay, if I want to get to 6, 000 words polished draft by the end of this month, I want to get to 6, 000 words of rough draft by two weeks time, what do I need to do to get to that rough draft? Well, one goal might be to produce an approximate outline of what the major sections need to be. One goal might be to turn one of those sections into a more detailed paragraph plan. One. My goal might be to put bullet points into each of my paragraph plans to show what roughly needs to be covered in that paragraph. A goal might be to produce 200 words around that paragraph plan to flesh it out into a rough draft. Okay? And there's so many good things that happen when you break down the work like this and you have goals that are much more specific to what you have to do. Firstly, it recognizes all these different sorts of work that you need to do. You might, for example, decide that in order to produce 6, 000 words of polished draft, you need to produce 8, 000 words of rough draft. I always recommend overwriting at the rough draft stage. It's a little bit like, I always used to tell my students, it's like if you're trying to produce a good pasta sauce, right? You don't start with the volume that you want your sauce to end up being. You start by making something that's bigger than that, yeah, that's got more juice in it than that. And then you slowly simmer it and the rubbish bits steam off so the water disappears and you end up with a really lovely concentrated pasta sauce by the end of it. And the same is true with writing, so you may decide actually I need to produce 8, 000 words of rough draft and then actually part of my goal for that later period is to take this section of two pages and bring it down to one page, or bring it down to a page and a half by taking out repetition, by taking out unnecessary sentences, by changing my sentence structure to make it more elegant and efficient. And then actually on those days, your goal is to go from having 800 words to having 600 words, for example. Okay? So, giving yourself a much wider range of types of goals, especially these micro goals, can enable you to recognise the different things there are to do when you're writing, get much more specific about what your tasks are, and to also then recognise progress. Because progress is doing what you intended. Progress doesn't have to be generating new words. Progress can be completing the tasks you said you were going to do on that day. I talk about this a little bit. I have an episode about how to break your work down into chunks. And it goes through why you might find that challenging, and why it can be super beneficial. But this is an example of how you can do it when you're writing. Setting these interim goals, these micro goals that are more specific than just producing wordcount can also help you to finish a day and know exactly what you did. There's nothing worse than that feeling that you did a load of work and you're not really sure what you did and your work counts no bigger than it was. So it enables you to finish a day going, yeah, I plan to take that from 600 or I plan to write three bullet points under each section, or whatever it was, and look. there it is, check me out doing exactly what I intended. So it can allow you to reinforce when you did do what you planned. It also makes it way easier to decide what you're going to do tomorrow to actually go, okay, that's my job. Let's crack on because you're not having to kind of go, well, 200 words Goal, because that's what I said I'd need to do every day to generate my 6, 000 words, but really I feel like I probably should edit what I've done already, but then I won't generate that. It enables you to go, Okay, that's my goal. Do my goal. Boom. Did my goal. Check me out. And then it becomes this kind of self fulfilling thing where you become someone who plans what you're doing, does what you planned, and then rewards yourself for it. So that's why word count goals are crucial. We've got to produce work, but they are not sufficient. They are necessary, but not sufficient. And hopefully in this pretty short episode, you can see the benefits of having a far wider variety of goals than that. Let me know what you think. What sorts of goals do you set yourself when it comes to your writing? How do you know that you're making progress? And how do you know that you've done the things that you intended. Today is quite short because it's the 9th of December that this is going out. Americans, you'll be coming off the wave of your Thanksgiving. Anyone who celebrates Christmas will be building towards that, and most universities will be having a winter break for all the different festivals that are happening at the moment. You're busy, you've got lots going. I want you to just Pause listening now. Go double check your to do lists. Have you got word count goals? Have you got other sorts of goals? How can you make sure that your goals are realistic, the things you want to get done before that winter break, and so that they're actually recognizing the tasks that you're doing to move yourself in that direction? Use this extra time to go check your goals and tweak them so that we can really recognise all the work that we do between now and the winter holidays. If you didn't sign up for my membership, by the way, it's okay. I want you to love on that decision. But if you were telling yourself that, you know, maybe in the new year, don't need it right now, but maybe in the new year, I want you to go to my website and jump yourself onto my waiting list. It doesn't commit you to anything at all, but it does mean you get all the information about when the doors will open, what's coming up in that month, and give you the opportunity to answer any questions. So by putting yourself on the waiting list, it doesn't mean that you're definitely in, but it does mean that you'll get the information that you need if you're telling yourself that you might join in January or February. So make sure you are on that list. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. Let me know how you set your goals, whether you use word counts or some other mission, and maybe I'll share some of your expertise in future episodes. Thank you for listening, and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

Links I refer to in this episode How to go from idea overload to clarity Hello and welcome to the PhD life coach podcast. We are doing more client questions this week, where anyone who is a listener, who's on my newsletter, who's one of my members, for example, can submit questions about things they're finding challenging at the moment and I will try and answer them for you. This week I've got three questions that I think are going to resonate loads with all of you. And make sure you stay for the third one because the third one is 100 percent relevant to all of us. So, first up, have you ever had that sense that your PhD is just not working out quite the way you thought it was going to? Maybe you're in your second, third, more years along and you had all these high hopes at the beginning of your PhD as to what you were going to achieve and what you were going to do, and things are just not quite working out the way you thought they would. And you're kind of ready to write up, or you're in the process of writing up, and it just all feels a bit disappointing. Well that was the situation of a student that I met at a workshop I ran in London for the Wellcome Trust, which was amazing, really, really able, motivated students, we were talking about career decisions and things like that. And she asked me afterwards, how do you stay motivated to write your thesis when you're a bit disappointed that you didn't do all the things that you intended to do? And she explained that this was just making it really hard for her to sit down and do the difficult work of writing when she was managing all these frustrations and disappointments with it not looking the way that she had dreamed it would look when she first started. And I just thought this was such an interesting question and you can hit this kind of disappointment at any stage in your PhD. So don't worry if you're not as far along as she is at the moment, you might still be experiencing this. Now, I answered it for her there in the workshop, but I thought it would be useful for all of you to hear this answer because she found it really, really beneficial. And that is that you have to remember that the reason things are disappointing or frustrating now is not because your PhD is bad and it's not because you've let yourself down or any of these things that we often tell ourselves it means. What it means is that you know more now than you did when you started. When we start our PhDs, we are necessarily optimistic and excited and hopeful. If we weren't, we wouldn't take on a 3, 4,5,6, year project. If we weren't experiencing those sorts of emotions and having those sorts of thoughts, we wouldn't even begin this thing. That period running up to the PhD and in the first bits of it, we need to be really hopeful and excited about what we might achieve. We need to be dreaming big about the impact that we'll have and the discoveries that we'll make and all of that stuff, because that's what gets us through the application process, that really uncertain period at the beginning where you don't really know what you're doing. You kind of need to believe that it's going to go somewhere afterwards. So, that past you that was hopeful and optimistic was super necessary to get you going on the PhD journey. However, you are now much more informed, you're much more knowledgeable, and you're much more immersed in what you've done. And that's a wonderful thing, but it has some negative effects as well. One of the negative effects is that we have, by necessity, had to reduce the scope of what we'd hoped to do. We've realized how over hopeful, over optimistic we were at the beginning. We've learned more about the details of the research process and how complicated some things can be. And we've necessarily had to change our project to accommodate that. Those are all exactly right. Those are exactly the things that you should be doing as you develop into becoming an independent researcher. Taking big dreams and turning them into something that you can actually achieve and managing the disappointment that that might not be everything you thought, this is a sign that you know so much more, that you have learned so much more during this period, which is a wonderful thing. It just makes you super attuned to any of the flaws and the kind of reduced scope of your work. The other thing is that you are more immersed in and kind of focused on this piece of research than you ever will be with anything you do in your life again. Because if you go into universities, carry on as a researcher, go into lecturing and all that stuff. You'll have multiple research projects. You'll have your own students. You'll have your teaching. You'll have your leadership, your admin. But while you're doing your PhD, you are fully immersed in this thing. And the downside of that is it also comes super mundane to you. Anything that we do every day, we can take for granted and not realize the wonderful things that we're doing because it's just normal. It's just what we do. I remember being at a conference once and some students from an American university were like, Oh my God, it's Doug Carroll, your supervisor. Oh my God, you'd introduce us? Because he was quite a big dog in his field at the time. And, I was like What? Him? Doug? Yeah. Fine. Whatever. Come on. I don't understand why this is exciting, but sure, we can talk to him. Because for me, it was completely normal. I mean, don't get me wrong. He was a great mentor and I really enjoyed working with him and all those things. It's not to criticise him, but it's like, you don't get excited about your own parents, right? You know, your own supervisor. Pretty dull. See him all the time. But! For them, he was this big academic and they were really excited to meet him. Familiarity had made it mundane. And the same is true when you talk about research. In the workshops that I run from universities, I always get people at the beginning to tell me about their research. And it all sounds so amazing. It's one of the reasons I love to work with PhD students and academics. You're all doing such cool stuff that brings so much interest to the world or solves big problems. Yet to you it can feel really mundane because you've been doing it for the last three years. Now, how does this help? Well, the first thing is to recognize it, because often we think that because we're disappointed and frustrated, it means our PhD is bad. It means that we haven't fulfilled our promise. And I want you to see that it doesn't mean any of that at all. What it means is that you have hugely progressed since that hopeful, optimistic first year that started off. You know loads more, you've done it so much that it's become mundane, and all of this is exactly how it should be. Final year PhD students are a little bit like older teenagers, where like, they're ready to leave the house, okay? They're at that stage where their parents are annoying, everything they're doing is annoying, they're ready to move on to the next thing. And that's what final year, whatever age you are, that's what final year PhD students are like. You are ready to move on. So this does feel a bit mundane and a bit just boring and long. Okay, nothing broken here. The other perspective that I want to bring to this is the perspective of future you. Because future you is going to know more than you know now. And future you is going to have a perspective on your PhD that you don't have right now. They are going to realize what a big deal it was. They are going to be so proud of you for completing it. And so all we have to do is look after ourselves in this moment, this moment between the kind of hopes and optimism and dreams of past us and the future perspective where we will look back on this and realize what an achievement it is. We need to look after ourselves here and that means saying things to ourselves that reminds us why it's important, reminds us why we're capable of it, reminds us why we wanted to do this in the first place and really recognize the progress that we're making. Let's not make these worries or concerns into anything they don't need to be. They are just a sign that you are ready to finish your PhD. Let me know if you're, if that resonates with you. So let's move on. Question two. We often think that when we finish our PhDs, it's going to be like this wonderful moment of clarity and confidence and suddenly sure that we can take on the world because we've actually done this huge thing that we've been working for all this time. And the reality is the other side of thesis submission, the other side of your viva, you're still the same person. You might be pleased. You might be happy that you've done this. You might be proud of yourself to some extent, but we then start to worry about other things. We start to worry about what we're doing next, whether we're well set to get a job either within academia or beyond. And I see this in my members. So some of my members have actually stayed on post PhD for me to support them in that kind of postdoctoral period. And so I got a question from one of my members who is post PhD. She is now a doctor, and she was asking how does she apply all this stuff when she's trying to write up papers so that she can apply for jobs. She wants to be an academic. She doesn't think her CV is quite ready for that yet. And so instead of getting a job at the moment, she's using this time to try and improve her publications. And what she's finding is that without that kind of external accountability, without deadlines set by other people, she's really struggling to get on and complete that piece of work. She's finding herself setting targets and then when the day comes to work on it, talking herself back out of it again. And we've all been there, right? I want you to think about the last time that happened for you. I think it's really, really common, especially in anything where you're trying to work independently. I have a few tips for this. The first is to really think about what sort of boss you want to be to yourself. So some of you may be familiar with my Be Your Own Best Boss course. There we really talk about how to provide yourself with the support and structure that you need to succeed. So in this sort of a situation where you're trying to work even more independently than you were during your PhD, I would really take some time to sit down and say, Okay. What do I want this to look like and how can I try and set it up for myself in a way that feels good, makes me want to do this, makes me want to live these days rather than filling it full of I should be doing this but I don't want to. So spending a little bit of time in boss mode, just kind of planning how to make this work, is really useful. Sometimes this is around time blocking and deciding in advance exactly when you're going to work, but a lot of it is about self talk. If you're spending your time telling yourself that you should have done this before, you should be further along by now, it just becomes this painful thing that nobody actually wants to do. So we get to decide when we work, what we work on, and how we speak to ourselves about that work. Now, whenever we're trying to motivate ourselves, you know, people tell me they want more motivation so they'll get on with things. And, like to say two things. One is, one of the best things you can do in the world is learn to work when you're not motivated. And that is that you choose to work because that's what you said you'd do and no other reason. You don't need to want to, you don't need to feel like it. You don't need to have deadlines. You're just doing it because you said you would. And trying to cultivate a sense that I'm doing this because I wrote it in my diary and I want to be someone who does what she said in her diary can really, really help. We don't want to be kind of pressuring ourselves and kicking ourselves to do it. But just reminding yourself I'm someone who does what they said they'd do can really, really help in this situation. The other thing is we can try and increase the motivation, right? And what people often do is they either remind themselves of the big picture, you know, I'm doing this because I want to get a job or whatever, or they promise themselves some sort of reward immediately after it. Now I've talked about this in a past episode, but what I would encourage instead is aiming for proximal, intrinsic motivation. So what do I mean by that? Intrinsic motivation is to do with the enjoyment and motivation by the task itself. So rather than I'm going to complete this piece of work because then I get to spend the evening with my friends, or I'm going to complete this piece of work because it will get me a job, we try and channel a sense that I'm completing this piece of work because I value this piece of work and because I enjoy the process of writing it. And this is especially true if you want to be an academic, writing these papers is going to be a part of your life for the rest of your career. So we need to channel a sense that we actually like doing this. Because if we don't like doing this, we might want to reconsider that whole academic career thing. Okay. Now for most of you, I think you do actually like doing it. You just don't like the negative self talk and the judgment and the pressure that comes along with it. So we get to remind ourselves of all that intrinsic motivation. How lucky we are to be able to write this stuff that's about something we care about. That's about something we chose, for reasons we want to, for the benefits of our own career. And we get to delve in and be an academic and sit at our desk and do our thing. That can be hugely, hugely motivating. So remind yourself of those intrinsic reasons why the actual process of doing this thing is so nice. And the reason I'm saying proximal rather than distal, distal would be things that are important to you in the future. Proximal are the benefits you get right now. So an equivalent here in exercise is a distal motivator to exercise will be so that you're healthier in old age. Now, I'm getting to an age where that's starting to feel proximal, right? So for me, that's starting to become a key motivator. But for many of you, it won't be. It's something that's too far in the future to make you want to do something that feels a bit uncomfortable now. A proximal motivator for exercise would be something like, I always feel better when I move my body. It's such a nice sensation to have been outside running and to come back in and be all warm and cozy. The mental health benefits of exercise are another one. I always feel much clearer in my mind after I've exercised, for example. So this is where, again, you're reminding yourself of the benefits you're going to get from this immediate piece you're going to do. Oh, I'm going to feel so good when this bit's written. It's going to be so fun to really straighten out what I'm doing in this part of the task. So try and make your motivations proximal and intrinsic. Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. The final thing to say is, if you are repeatedly telling yourself that you want to do something, and you are not doing it. There is another decision. You can just decide you're not going to do it. If you actually just don't want to write this paper, don't. Apply for jobs without the paper. Will it make it more difficult to get the job? Maybe. But you're not writing it anyway, so you may as well just decide you're not going to. And you're going to put your efforts into applying for jobs and making yourself marketable in other ways. Same for exercise, to be fair. If you're repeatedly telling yourself you should be exercising and you're not exercising, you might as well just not decide to exercise. Now often we respond to that with horror. It's like, no, but I really want to. It's like, okay, why? Why do we really want to? Then how do we make it happen? But it's when we're in this murky middle where we're definitely not ready to say we're not going to do this thing, but equally we're not doing it either, then it's just unpleasant. You're not getting any of the benefits of doing it. And you're getting all this extra self judgment. Because you're not. So you can just decide not to do it. If you decide to do it, be your own best boss. Structure it. Speak to yourself well. Be proud of yourself when you complete things. Recognise the stuff you are getting done. And chip away and get this done. And then question three is the one that I promised was relevant to absolutely everyone. And that's because it's about listening to podcasts. I got contacted by one of my regular clients who's finished her PhD and she sent me a message saying, this is going to be a bit meta Vikki, but how would you recommend that people listen to your podcast? Because she likes to listen while she's doing craft or something like that, because she finds that if she's just listening, then she ends up picking up her phone, looking at other things at the same time. Not offended, Sophie. I get it. I get a bit like that with podcasts too. I'm not very good at just sitting listening either. But then she finds that she doesn't make notes and she feels like she's not necessarily getting maximum use out of the podcast. And so she asked whether I had any tips about how to listen to a podcast. Now, there's many, many different ways you can do this, but I'm going to give you some tips that I have found useful for me. I have a bunch of podcasts that I listen to regularly. And I think there's a few things that are useful here. The first is don't overthink this. Don't make it more complicated than it needs to be. I have some podcasts that I listen to because I find them broadly interesting, broadly motivational, and I always end up feeling like I want to get on with things afterwards. Does that mean I implement the exact things they talk about? Often no. Often it's just like, Oh, that's an interesting idea, but I don't actually do it. But there's something about hearing them talk it through that just puts me in a frame of mind that I like. And for many of you listening to this podcast, that might be it. Maybe you just like listening to me, wittering away, sounding vaguely motivational, making you feel like you can actually do your PhD. Perfect. If that works for you, that's enough. Do your crafts, walk your dog, listen to me while you're driving, whatever it is. And don't worry too much that you're not implementing everything that I say, if you're still getting benefit from just listening to me witter, okay? Don't overthink it. However, if on occasions you're like, you know what, there are some of these things that I actually want to try out. I don't want to just be consuming these ideas anymore. I want to actually make sure that I'm trying them and practicing them in my life. And, to be honest, if you want to change your behavior, that's a really, really sensible thing. Then the first thing to say is let's get specific with that. Let's not try and implement everything I talk about in every single episode. I don't implement everything I talk about. I try to, but all at the same time, it's too much for my little brain. I can't implement everything all at once. You definitely can't. So if you're kind of going, you know, I find Vikki's podcast really useful, but I feel like I want to move to the stage where I implement things. Let's just pick one. One episode. What is the biggest pain point in your life at the moment? What's the one thing that if you could make some progress on that, it would really, really help? Then, go to my website, thephdlifecoach. com, and go to podcast, and you'll find all of my episodes there. I am soon going to have some better kind of tagging system, but at the moment you can just scroll on through, okay? Find an episode that answers that pinch point, and side note, if you notice that there's no episode that answers your problem, let me know. I want to record that episode. I want it to feel like when you go there, there is everything you need to succeed in your PhDs in academia. So, have a look, find one, and then you've got three different choices of how you consume it. There's video, if that helps on YouTube, there's the podcast version, and there's a full transcript on my website. So if you are somebody who is better when you're wanting to implement things, better off just reading it, it's right there for you. Word for word transcript of everything I say in the podcast. So just pick one episode, go to the website, consume it in the way that you find best, and then do it. Pick one thing from it that you want to do. If this is something you want more support with, make sure you're on my newsletter. I know my client already is on my newsletter, but if any of you aren't, if you're on my newsletter, you get a little summary of the podcast. So you get three take home messages. You get two reflective questions to try out that are connected to that topic. And you get one specific action to take. So if you're a bit like I want to implement from this episode, but even looking at the transcript feels a bit overwhelming, make sure in your newsletter, you will get those week by week. Now, secret for you. I am currently looking at a way to create a repository of all those newsletters and to go back and create them for old episodes so that we end up with like a summary bank of all of those things. It hasn't happened yet. It's the middle of November right now. Who knows whether it will exist by the time you listen to this. If you listen to it live, it does not. But it is on my agenda. So keep an eye out for that because I think it would be super useful. My final thing connects back to an episode from a few weeks ago where I talked about using voice notes to kind of capture your ideas. And I tried this one out the other day and it was amazing. A little bit disjointed, but amazing. So I like to listen to podcasts while I walk, because I'm similar to Sophie. I'm not very good at just sitting still and reading these things. But there are sometimes, not necessarily even things that they say that I want to implement, but that while I'm listening to them, it made me think of something. And so what I did the other day, I was listening to a book because I have an author coming up on a future podcast. Uh, he's going to come out in January. I think it is. I recorded it last night. He's amazing. You're going to love it. But I was finishing up listening to his book. And it was making me think of loads of things that I wanted to ask him and talk about. And so what I was doing was I was walking around my village with my headphones in, listening to my book, March, March, March. And whenever I had something that I wanted to remember, I paused my podcast, I opened my Otter. ai, I whittled into my phone for a minute. Stop, go back to the podcast, do, do, do. It's actually quite similar to how my husband and I listen to podcasts in the car. We'll listen for like three minutes and then one of us will pause it and we'll talk about something. And then we'll go again and then somebody else will get another idea and we'll press pause. And for anybody else quite annoying. We love it. Um, so that's another way that you can do it, is either having a notebook with you, or using voice notes on your phone, so that as you're listening, even if you're doing crafts or you're walking or whatever, you can just pause and add notes into that. Obviously it doesn't work so well while you're driving, but hopefully having the transcript and the notes in the newsletter will enable you to return to the things that you want to return to. On that, if you find this podcast useful, I have one request. One teeny tiny request for you. Send it to somebody, find an episode that you think is particularly useful to something that one of your friends has told you they're stressed about and send it to them. Send them and say, I love this podcast. This will really help you listen to it. Now, call me when you've done it. We'll have a chat about it. Make sure you listen. Or, suggest it for one of your university, like, journal clubs or something like that. Suggest, everyone listen to this episode and then we'll talk about how we can implement it and how it could change the way we do things. Please, please, please share this. When people listen to the podcast, they tell me so many nice things about it and I just want to make sure it's getting to all the people that could benefit. I really hope today's been useful. I feel like those were three really, really insightful questions. So thank you to the people who sent them in. If you have questions, there's a bunch of ways you can get them to me. You can send them on Instagram through messaging. I am at the PhD life coach. You can reply to my newsletter, if you are on my newsletter. If you're listening on podcasts, then there's a send Vicki, a question button on all the places you get your podcasts. So you can press that, just send them through. If you do that one, make sure you tell me your name. Cause otherwise I don't get your name. Just let me know. I want to answer any specific challenges that you have at the moment. Let me know what you think of the episode, what things you might be implementing and thank you all so much for listening. I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

Links I refer to in this episode How to use role-based time-blocking How to plan when you hate planning Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. I often notice patterns when I'm coaching when many of my clients are coming up with similar issues at the same time and what I'm seeing a lot in my membership at the moment is this feeling that they're really bad at planning. They're bad at planning because they don't always make a plan, they are worried that they're not very good at judging how long anything's going to take, so their plan kind of goes wrong, and then they don't follow their plan, and then they beat themselves up for not following their plan, and so they then avoid making plans for a while. Or when they do, they end up making unrealistic plans and the cycle starts over again. And if that feels like you, don't worry, you're in exactly the right place. I was like this for a really, really long time. And when I tell people that things are different now, they usually think that that means that now I make perfectly realistic plans and implement them exactly as I intended. And anyone who knows me knows that's a really long way from the truth, okay? And what I want to say in this episode today is I don't think that's even the goal. Some of the most important coaches in my life who have really brought me to where I am today do emphasize that that's how you do it, right? That you only put things in your diary when you're sure you'll do them, and then you absolutely robotically do everything in your diary, and that as long as you do that, you'll be fine. And whilst I've learned a lot from these people in other areas, this is one that never landed with me, because I'm like, well, I don't see that's ever going to happen for me. And that made me feel like I didn't really have any options for to feel better than they did. What I've realized instead, and what I work with the clients in my membership on much more, is how we can accept imperfect implementation of our plans, how we can not only accept it, but expect it, plan for it, and not make a massive drama out of it when it happens. And you might think that that will make you really bad at planning. But actually, in this episode, I want to really convince you that planning for and accepting imperfect implementation will make you a way better planner than expecting perfect implementation and getting upset when that doesn't happen. Now, before I get into that, I do want to say I'm recording this in November. It will be coming out to you on the 25th of November 2024. If you're listening to this live, you have got one week, one week till Saturday night to get into the membership if you want in before the end of this calendar year. The membership is going to be open until midnight UK time. GMT, American listeners, please notice. Midnight GMT, November the 30th. The membership is going to close until the end of january. It will reopen again and then next year it's only going to open in the final week of each month. I'm introducing some new sessions which will take place at the beginning of the month, welcoming new members, teaching you the self coaching model, getting you up to speed with how all the membership stuff works, and because of that you're only going to be able to get in at certain times of the month. So if you've been umming and erring about whether the membership is right for you or not, now's the time to join if you don't want to have that whole fear of missing out thing. If you're not sure what the membership's about, you can check out on my website, thephdlifecoach. com. If you click on the membership at the top, it will tell you all about it, but essentially, it gives you access to three sessions a week of online group coaching. Some of those are open coaching sessions where you can bring any topics. Others are around specific topics that are really relevant for PhD students. You get access to two workshops a month, on all sorts of things. Like this afternoon when I'm recording this, I'm doing one on what to do when you've got too much to do. Next month we've got one on how to manage your time and energy. We've got one on imposter syndrome. All sorts of really important topics. It's a lovely community. Everybody really looks after each other. Get the support you need from me and from the other people around you. So definitely make sure you check that out if you're not a member already. You also actually get access to some online courses, one of which, Be Your Own Best Boss, covers a load of stuff about planning. Gives you some really specific tools that allow you to practice some of the stuff that we're talking about today. So check it out for the end of November. Perfect. Now back to the topic, imperfect implementation. Well, let's start with what's the problem with expecting yourself to implement things perfectly. Now, the first thing that's a problem with that is that if we expect perfect implementation, then it makes us much more likely to make unrealistic plans. Because we're looking at going, well, okay, as long as I do all the things I said I'd do at exactly the times I said I'd do them in exactly the amount of time I said I'd do them, then all of this fits. So having this kind of belief that you're going to be able to implement them perfectly and that you should be able to implement perfectly can tempt you not to leave any wiggle room in your planning. And I see this all the time. And the reason people don't want to put wiggle room into their diaries is because they think it means they have to accept that they're not good enough, you know, they should be implementing perfectly. So why would they plan to be less than perfect? It also means you have to make some difficult decisions, right? Because if you've realized that not everything fits into the time you've got, then you have to choose what things you're not going to do, who you're going to have to disappoint, whether you're going to have to disappoint yourself, what you're going to miss out on, because you can't do everything. And so instead of making those difficult decisions, instead of accepting that we're not going to implement this perfectly and we can't fit it all in, what we do instead is kind of avoid those decisions, jam it all in anyway, expect perfect implementation and then don't implement perfectly. The reasons we don't implement perfectly are partly stupid plans that don't allow for breaks, that don't allow for transitions, that don't allow for unexpected things to come up, that don't allow for us just not being on top form that day. But I think it's also driven in large part by the fact that although we told ourselves we should be able to implement this perfectly, we also told ourselves it probably wasn't reasonable to implement this perfectly. So it's almost like there's two different voices in our heads. I have to plan it like this because I should be able to do it, and this is the only way it all fits. And a voice that says, yeah, but you're probably not going to stick to it, are you? Because this looks exhausting, and you never know how long things take anyway. And then we're almost starting it with an expectation that we're not going to do it like that anyway. So we don't go at it a hundred percent because we think, you know what, this probably was never going to work, which makes it really hard to go at a hundred percent. And then when we do miss something, then I don't know about you, but me and my clients then often end up really beating ourselves up about it. We failed again. This plan was pointless. This plan didn't get implemented. It was useless. I'm useless. We're never going to finish. And then we have end up avoiding the entire plan, avoiding our tasks and then until we get so frustrated that we start saying, we'll try again, we're just off plan. And I think this will sound really, really familiar to lots of you. And that's okay. This is really, really common. One thing that doesn't happen when we assume we're going to implement something perfectly is any strategizing about how to make this plan robust to non perfect implementation. Now what do I mean by that? When I used to do my GCSE revision back in the days when I was at school. I would make super perfectionist plans and they would be really unrealistic about what I would fit but they'd also be super specific so in this hour I would cover this topic and this topic and in that hour I'd cover this topic and that topic. And it meant that if I ever missed an hour, I had to reshuffle the rest of the plan. The plan didn't work anymore. Suddenly I was trying to jam in extra hours, or I was having to move things down, and then I was spending more time reorganizing my plan than actually doing the work. And I hadn't thought anything about what would happen if I didn't do these things in those hours. Whereas if we know we're going to implement something imperfectly, then we're much more likely to say, I'm going to try my best to implement this as close to what I planned as possible, but on the basis it's probably not going to be bang on, how can I make this more robust to imperfect implementation? Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. And that might be things like making sure you have a system for knowing what you have done and what you haven't done. Maybe it's things like prioritizing more clearly so that you know which things you would drop if you are then running out of time. It might be using a more role based approach rather than a task based approach. And if you want to know more about that, I talk about it in my episode about role based time blocking. But essentially, instead of blocking in, in this time I am going to do this specific task. You instead say, I'll be in operations mode and you then look at the operations part of your to do list and choose the thing that's most urgent, or you'll be in writing mode and you'll then decide which bit of writing is most urgent or the highest priority and you do that rather than specifying the exact thing that you will write weeks in advance. I usually recommend picking maybe the day before or that morning so that you're not having to decide in the moment, but not deciding so far in advance that if you then miss a session, it messes everything up. Everyone's built a Gantt chart, right? That you then get off track with, and then instead of adapting it, you just delete it or shove it in a drawer somewhere and never look at it. Again, that's what happens when we make plans that only work if we turn up as perfect humans, which we never do because we're humans. So, what do we do instead? How do we make plans if we accept that we're going to implement them imperfectly? Well, the first thing we do is we think about the quantity of work that we're trying to do and we ask ourselves, does it still fit if I implement this imperfectly. If I only did 80 percent of the time that I said I was going to do, would this still work? And if the answer's no, then we get to make some decisions about which bits of it we are going to do, which bits of it we need to do first, which bits are the highest priority, so that if it does slip, we know exactly what we need to change. And it makes it much more likely that we're going to start with a realistic plan in the first place. What we're also going to do when we plan that we're going to be imperfect, or that we're likely to be imperfect, we also start to let go of the idea that anything less than perfect implementation is a fail. Plan is useful if it inspires action, not just if we follow it perfectly. If you make a plan and it gets you going on something that you really want to do, it was an effective plan, even if you didn't carry out every single thing that you intended to do within the time that you had available to you. Planning is at best guesswork. Even when we're really good at it, we're never quite sure exactly how long things will take. Obviously, we can adjust the quality to fit in the time we get it, but even within that, we don't always know or decide in a way that we're happy with. So, sometimes, we do underestimate how long things take. I still do, even though I try to get it done in the time I said. Sometimes, that's just not possible. To be honest, I planned to record this this morning. I didn't record it this morning because it took me longer than anticipated to edit the last podcast that I was doing. You know, we all get it wrong sometimes. It doesn't have to mean that there was a fundamental flaw. The joy is that by making a plan, It means that you've sat down and thought about what your intentions are for the week. What are the things that are most important to you this week? What's top of the agenda? What's got deadlines coming up? And even if you don't follow that through to perfection, you're still aware of those things in a way that you wouldn't have been if you hadn't made the plan. So, I very rarely stick to my week plan perfectly, but if I don't stick to the plan but I have planned, then I'm at least aware of what things were important that I haven't done, and I'm aware of what I was doing that wasn't what I'd planned. And that gives me a whole bunch of information that you simply don't get if you don't plan. My weeks that get away from me are the ones where I decide that I'm too busy to make a plan, I've just got to get on and do some of the things, and then I usually end up three quarters of the way through the week going, I don't even know what I've done this week and where I'm at. When we plan, we identify that framework and then how we deviate from the framework can be really, really informative. It might start telling you that you're not allowing enough time for routine tasks, for example. It might tell you that there are things you're avoiding. If you notice that there are tasks you keep putting on your list each week and then not doing, we get to look at those and go, I wonder I wonder why I'm not doing that? It gives you a load of information that if you just do what comes top of mind all the time without planning, you never ever get to find out. Making a plan and knowing that we'll stick to it imperfectly also helps us appreciate the things we do do. So I want you to think of the last time you made a plan and then didn't stick to it, especially if it was a time that you were beating yourself up a lot about that. What usually happens is as soon as we fall off that wagon, we now hate the plan. We now hate ourselves. And therefore we just go back to doing whatever comes into our inboxes, whatever people shout for loudest, right? When in reality, if we have a plan and we know we're going to fall off it occasionally, we're not going to do it perfectly, as soon as we realize we have, we can nudge ourselves back to doing the plan, without judgment, without making a massive drama about the fact that we missed some stuff, and then we can recognize how much of the plan we did do. Because if you sometimes fall off it, don't do exactly what you thought you were going to, but then you nudge yourself back onto it. By the end of the week, you might find you followed 40 percent of your plan or 60 percent of your plan. Now, if you hadn't got a plan, or if you'd got a plan that was only acceptable if you do all of it, you would never have recognized all that stuff that you got done. Whereas if you can look at it and be like, look at me. I got 60 percent of my plan done this week, that's awesome. Check me out. Okay, we need to look at the bits I didn't do, why I didn't do them, how I can make them easier, all that stuff. We're going to strategize for that. But part of strategizing for that, for anything, is recognizing what we are already doing well. And having a plan, knowing you're going to implement it imperfectly, and then recognizing the extent to which you implemented it, can really help recognize what you did do, as well as notice what you didn't do. Now, none of this means that we're going to just let ourselves off the hook, make unrealistic plans, know we're not going to stick to them anyway, dick about, and then moan about it later. That's not what we're doing. Our goal. is to still stick to a plan. Our goal is to still design a plan that makes it as likely as possible that we can do it. A plan that feels like it might be fun to try and do, that's kind of challenging but achievable. A plan that's designed to kind of structure our day in a way that feels nice and feels like we'd want to live it. And then during the week we want to look at that plan in a kind of slightly eager teacher's pet sort of way and be like, oh, I wonder if I can do this bit. Oh, I think I can do that bit too. Oh, I missed a bit this afternoon but I reckon I could catch up and do this bit this afternoon and then I'd have done most of it. We want to channel that kind of eagerness to do our best to hit the plan by making it much less important if any of that goes wrong. Okay, so this isn't about just going, oh, I'm a little bit tired today. I don't think I'll do it. It's about going, okay, I'm a bit tired today. Might not do all of this, but I said I was going to spend an hour and a half working on this piece of writing. How about we do 45 minutes and see how we go. And then at least I've stuck to 50 percent of my plan. If after that I'm feeling really rough and I'm not getting anywhere, we'll call it quits. But you know what? Better than nothing. Rather than if we have this kind of black and white, yes or no, did or didn't approach to whether we completed our task or not, as soon as we know we're not doing 90 minutes that we'd planned, might as well not do it, right. Might as well just not bother. So by cultivating your kind of, eager to please, trying to do the bits that you set yourself, then we sort of scurry to catch all the bits we could do and just accept the bits we didn't get done, and we learned from those. I think this episode actually even fits really nicely with last week, so if you haven't listened to last week's, do go back and listen to that after this. I was talking about using voice notes to capture ideas, because one of the things that my members have been talking about that derails their plans is when they suddenly think of or remember something else that they needed to do other than the thing they'd planned. So they'd put aside 90 minutes for writing perhaps, and then they remembered that they needed to look something up, they remembered they needed to do something for their supervisor, and they're so worried that that thing's more urgent or that they'll forget that thing. The, they sort of go, Oh, I'll just do that now. Now, sometimes that's true. Sometimes they're worried they're going to forget it. Sometimes we have to concede it's because that other thing is a lot easier than this difficult cognitive task that you're meant to be doing right now. But I think if you use this in combination with that voice notes episode from last week, that can really help. So that if you're, you know, you're in your 90 minutes, you're working away. Do, do, do, I'm doing my writing. You think of something. You can grab your voice notes. Whatever system you're using and just say, need to remember to talk to my supervisor later, record it into, your voice notes, jot it down in the notebook, if that's the approach that you prefer, but do it more as a kind of memo, knowing that you're going to go back to that tomorrow. You know, if you look at the system I talked about last week, knowing you are going to look at that tomorrow is much easier to kind of, okay, I'll dump it over here, back to this thing I planned. So that's another kind of approach when we know we're going to get distracted, we plan for us being imperfect, we then start to put structures in place. It's like, it's okay, my brain is going to come up with some random stuff that either I'd rather do, or that feels more important, or that I'm worried I'll forget, that's okay, I can plan for that. I can have a system for that because I know it's going to happen because I'm not perfect. I'm planning for imperfect implementation. I would love to hear from you what you think about this episode. How could it change things for you to plan for someone that you know is going to be imperfect? It kind of refers back to this whole notion of being your own best boss, right? If as a boss you give your employees a plan that only works if they're perfect, it's not a very good plan. It's not a very motivating plan. Whereas when we remember, when we're being good bosses to ourselves, we're planning for the real and authentic version of ourselves. Not the version of ourselves that turns up at its very best, but the kind of normal day to day version of us. We're planning for that version. We're making it as easy as possible for them. We're trying to make it as clear for them as possible. We're trying to make it so they want to try and implement this plan because it looks achievable and great fun. And like, it will take them all the places they want to go. Then we get to create this kind of motivating work environment, even when we're working on our own. Let me know what you think. Let me know what things have helped you to implement imperfectly but better than you ever imagined. I have certainly found that since I've accepted that I am never going to implement this perfectly, I get way more done than I did when I was making unrealistic plans. I get more done. I feel better about it. And I make the difficult decisions about what I'm not going to do. And to be honest, I always feel really good about them. So let me know what you think. I really hope you found this useful. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

Links I refer to in this episode Moxie Moxie's Research Dr Jessica Parker’s LinkedIn Profile Ethan Mollick's Substack "One Useful Thing" The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI Dr Sarah Eaton – Six tenets of post plagiarism Vikki: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD life coach. And this week I have another guest with me and I think this one is going to be super fun because it's quite controversial and interesting and very, very topical. So welcome. We have Jessica Parker here from the AI company. Moxie. Welcome, Jessica. Jessica: Thank you, Vikki. I'm excited to be here. You know, I listened to your podcast several months ago when you met with Alison Miller, who was the owner of The Dissertation Coach and now runs The Academic Writers' Space. She's a really close friend and colleague of mine, and I really enjoyed that episode, so I'm honored to be here. Thanks for having me. Vikki: Fantastic to have you. So we're going to be talking today guys about AI and AI's use in academia and the controversies and the misconceptions and essentially all the things that academics need to know, but before we get into that, maybe tell people a little bit more about you. Obviously you've got this connection with dissertation coach and the Moxie company as well, so tell people a bit more about that. Jessica: Yeah, so I will just put this out there as a disclaimer. I am not a computer scientist. I am not an AI expert. I think of myself as an advocate and a skeptic. So my goal is to really try to understand AI, in terms of its capabilities and limitations and helping guide my students and my clients on how to use it ethically and responsibly. Uh, but I started doing generative AI research about a year ago, and before that, I was a health care researcher. I worked in Boston for two large universities managing some large scale inter-professional health care grants. I got pretty burnout on academia. My dad got sick and I came home to take care of him. And I thought, you know, what can I do to try to bridge this gap in my career? And I started a consulting company, Dissertation By Design. And that was in 2017 and originally it was just me working with all the clients and I primarily specialized in working with health care disciplines and really just giving them guidance on research design and data interpretation. And then my team grew and that's how I ultimately met Allison Miller, the owner of The Dissertation Coach. And we really bonded so when she decided she wanted to retire from The Dissertation Coach and focus on The Academic Writers' Space, it just seemed like a natural fit for me to take over. So that happened in January of this year, and that was big. So I still manage both of those companies, but from an AI perspective, like most of the world, I started using chat GPT three, in like March, 2023. And I will never forget the moment I first started using it. I was just in shock. I could not believe how well it approximated like human like conversation. And I had both awe and then just, I felt like I had an existential crisis. I immediately thought about like, well, what does this mean for research and my industry and learning and society and just all the things. And so I'm very curious. So I set about learning. I just immediately dove in to YouTube videos and LinkedIn. I started trying to find thought leaders and just teaching myself as much as I could to understand it. I also supervise doctoral students at a university in Boston still and so I wanted to think about how they might be using it and how to guide them. So one of the first things I did, uh, last summer was I started trying to create my own generative AI tools. And that's kind of what sparks this whole journey. Like I never set out to found a tech company. Um, I'm a very non technical person up until recently. And so I think this has been as much a surprise to me as anyone else who knows me. Vikki: I love that. I love that. So then I just decided to build one. Jessica: You know, naivete is a good thing. I think if you had told me then all the challenges I would run into, I might've thought twice, but here I am navigating it. Vikki: One of my recent episodes, I was thinking about the 10 different qualities that I think we need to be good bosses to ourselves and ambitious was one of them. And I love that just getting immersed in something and seeing an opportunity and going for it, regardless of kind of what your original background was, building on the expertise that you've got now. I think that's amazing. Jessica: Yeah, I think it can be like a curse and a superpower. It's like, I'm really good at focusing and solving problems. And then sometimes I can get like completely immersed in something and lose myself in it. And you know, so like my family checks in on me and they're like, we haven't heard from you. And it's usually because I've just discovered some new capability and I'm like building some new application or something like that. Yeah. Vikki: I mean, so tell us about what you've been building. Jessica: Yeah, so Moxie, we started out really focusing on using generative AI for formative feedback, and I wanted to solve a problem. I'm a very pragmatic person, but the first problem I wanted to solve was a problem I have with my doc students and my clients, and it's this need that they have where they want feedback on really long academic texts. You know, we think about 40 page lit reviews or 100 page research proposals. And typically they haven't planned ahead and they need it last minute. And so I'm limited in my time and resources. And I thought, you know, can generative AI provide some sort of formative feedback on aspects of their ideas or their writing? And it can. And that was the first research study I did with an applied linguist. We evaluated chat GPT's capabilities and limitations for automated writing evaluation and we looked at complexity, accuracy, [00:06:00] and fluency of the writing. And we came to a conclusion then, and it's evolved, but we've kind of stuck to it, which has been interesting given how much we've learned, which is that we already have these tools available before generative AI that are really good at looking at accuracy. So you think about rule based systems like Grammarly or the spell checker in Microsoft Word. So those are rule based systems that are good at looking at accuracy. Whereas generative AI, what we found, if you use it appropriately, so it's not going to immediately do this well, it can really help with complexity and fluency of the writing. And I believe, and what I've seen, and I know to be true, is when you give it enough context and you're using your critical thinking skills when you're engaging with an AI chatbot, you can increase depth and complexity in your writing. And so that's really what we set out to do. And so the first suite of AI tools we created were tools I was using with my doc students. So I did a study alongside of them, a participatory research study to understand, like, their experiences with it, and it was wonderful. I made it clear that the generative AI was not grading them. It was not a summative assessment. It was just meant to help them get some preliminary feedback from something that I created using the same criteria I would be using to evaluate their work and try to close the gap on their own before submitting their work to me. And so they loved that. They felt like it gave them a bit more autonomy in the learning process and I noticed that it was reinforcing learning because it was using that criteria I provided it, that I was teaching the students. So Moxie is really mostly about formative feedback. So we don't create tools to write for the user. Like people don't come to Moxie or if they do, they quickly realize we're not for them to like generate their lit review or something like that. It's more like you have to bring something to the table. And then Moxie acts as like a collaborator or a thought partner with you to develop your work further. Vikki: Amazing. And you said that the students liked that and they found it useful. Tell me a bit more about what they kind of got out of that. Jessica: Yeah, so, some of the things I heard early on, and I'm now on my 4th semester with this. So every time I'm sort of tweaking and experimenting, but what I started noticing in the discussion boards and the students weren't aware of it. I became aware of it. And then we did a focus group. So then they became more aware of it is, I noticed more, metacognition. So they were thinking more about their process and I had intentionally built the chatbot to do that to force them to think about the process, not the product and to recall concepts like these students, and this was an academic writing course. I was exposing them to new concepts, such as anthropomorphism or precision or coherence and writing. And these were concepts that they were not familiar with. And so getting that feedback, maybe 10 times from an AI tool before submitting it to me gave them ample opportunity to like, see those concepts reinforced. And then I would develop the tools to encourage reflection. And then I required reflection in their papers to understand how they used it. So I started seeing these signs of metacognition and cognition where they're recalling and using the concepts that they're learning in the discussion boards, and normally I would see that much later in the semester, so that was a good sign. And what the students liked about it is, it was available any time of day, never gets tired, uh, and they, and they're not afraid to ask them questions. So sometimes I don't know a student is struggling until I see their 1st assignment or until they reach out to me, but the students through interaction with the chat bot, and they don't have to admit what they don't know or come to me right away. Because maybe, you know, there's that power dynamic. So they appreciated that they sort of had the opportunity to ask the dumb questions that maybe they're too afraid to ask me. That was something that they liked and, but the biggest thing that they appreciated was feeling like they could try to improve their work well before they submitted it to me. So it gave them like a bit more control over that process. Vikki: Hmm. I love that. So one of the things I've noticed with AI, so I've only used the kind of the bog standard commercial free chat GPT, and I've used it for a few worky bits, and liked some bits of it, not others. We talked a little bit before we started recording that I've used it to develop some examples to use in a workshop, for example, but then I haven't liked it when I've, I've tried to do like summaries of summaries of my podcasts into short articles and things, and I didn't like the way that worked. But one of the things that I noticed is that I learned a lot about my own thinking by thinking about how to give it enough instructions to do something well, if you see what I mean. Because we all hopefully know by now that if you say in chat GPT, you know, write a paragraph on photosynthesis, it'll chug something out. But if you say, write a paragraph on photosynthesis that's at the level of a graduate student, including, I don't know what recent research there is on photosynthesis, bad example, but you know what I mean, you know, giving it more and more context and more and more instruction, the better quality output you get, and for me, I think a lot of the benefit is in actually learning what you're exactly asking for in the first place. And I wonder whether that's something you see with the writing and the feedback. Jessica: Yes, you have to have an order to, so there's this age old computer science principle that I learned, which is garbage in garbage out. And that still holds true for generative AI. [00:12:00] So the more you give it, the more likely you're going to get what you're looking for out of it. And I was actually reading something recently that I think captures this really well. So. All the frontier models like ChatGPT by OpenAI, Clod by Anthropic, Gemini by Google, Llama by Meta. They're trained on everything in the internet. And the internet is a decontextualized and frictionless environment and these are general purpose tools. And so they're good at doing just a little bit of everything kind of okay. But when you give it all of that instruction, so like my prompts are sometimes a page long. Like I was just working on one of my prompts for synthesis and it requires me to have a lot of clarity about exactly what I want to evaluate. And so it's interesting through writing the prompts actually have improved my rubrics and my evaluation criteria, 'cause it's helped me see what's unclear. And that's one of the ways I use generative AI a lot. Just as an educator. So this is just not even with Moxie, but I will take an assessment criteria or rubric or template, I'll feed it into say Claude, and I'll say What's unclear? Imagine you're a first year PhD student who has no knowledge of these concepts. Which of these instructions might be a bit vague? How do I need to elaborate? Should I give some examples and sentence starters? And so it just helps me really improve a lot of those instructions and templates and rubrics for my students. I also use it as a thought partner, and this is what I encourage my students and my clients to do. You know, we as humans have a lot of assumptions and biases. I mean, writing a positionality statement is a common assignment for a first year Ph. D. student because they're learning about positionality. Well, you can brainstorm and thought partner with a chat bot and have it like point out what some of your assumptions and your biases may be by having it role play. It doesn't mean that you take everything for truth and at face value. It gives so many more opportunities to do those things where maybe before you had to have a human available and not everyone has that human available to thought partner with. Vikki: Yeah, for sure. My brain is now pinging in about 50 different directions, but I feel like for the purposes of me fully understanding and everyone else fully understanding. Can you just tell us a bit more about how it even works and therefore, you know, what it's good at and what it's less good at? Jessica: Yeah, no, that's a good question, especially cause I think with the news hype and the media, I feel like expectations are not aligned with reality. And so a lot of people do not understand. They just think it's magic. I think the easiest way to explain what a large language model does. So I'm not talking about an image generator. In particular, I'm talking about text content. It's like a mathematical model of communication. So we have artificial intelligence is like an umbrella term that encompasses machine learning, deep learning, which includes neural networks and large language models and generative AI are grouped together. Ultimately, these models have been trained on vast amounts of data, so much data, it's hard numbers that you've never heard of, crazy amounts of data, everything on the intranet. Through learning and seeing all of that data and seeing how words are paired together, it creates a database and we call that a vector database. And so a word like apple could be the fruit or it could be the company. And the way it knows the difference is based on the words that are surrounding it. So when you ask a question to chat GPT, if you say, tell me about Apple's products, it's going to know that the word Apple by product means that it's a company. So it just puts words together in a vector database and it uses numbers. So it's just a mathematical model of communication. Vikki: So what implications does that have? What people should be using it for in academia? Jessica: Well, the first is that it's not rule based. So up until now, we've all thought of technology in terms of software. Software is programmed and it's rule based, so it's predictable. We can identify where something went wrong. We just go find that code and we fixed it because it's not following the rule we gave it. Generative AI is not rule based. It produces something new and original, even if it's slightly different every time. So it's not pulling complete sentences from somewhere, so it's not paraphrasing or plagiarizing. It's generating something new each time. And it's not following rules, so it's less predictable. That's why you and I might ask ChatGPT or Claude the exact same question, and it might give us a slightly different response, which is why context is so important. I use the example of, if you were to go into ChatGPT and say, What color is the sky? Just leave it at that. likely to predict that the word is blue. It's just a prediction model. But if you give it context and say the color of the sky is blank, it's raining today. It's going to predict a different word, like grey. And so that's where the context is important, but it's still not predictable. Like the more you add on, the more complex the task is. So that's why they call it a black box. It's really difficult to trace any issues or like, I was recently reading a study where they looked at, um, I think they use chat GPT. They use it to evaluate different essays by students who were white, black, Asian American, and it scored them all very differently and it was stricter in its grading for Asian Americans compared to black and white students. And you [00:18:00] can't go into the system and figure out like exactly why and how that happened. That's very different from a software. And so everything we know about the software paradigm, which we're all used to, does not apply with generative AI. And that's really hard, I think, for people to understand. That means it's not a hundred percent accurate. It's not a fact checker. So I. I hear a lot of people using it like they would Google where they go to Google and ask a question that you expect to link to a source and get a fact from. That's not what ChatGPT is made for. It might get it right, but it's not a fact checker. It's just predicting the next word. It doesn't have Truth. So I think that is important for people to understand. And I think that's really challenging to wrap your head around because it's so good. It's so confident in its responses. It uses a lot of, when you look at the language, boosters, which makes it sound even more confident. So for someone who's not an expert, it comes across as the truth. And unless you question it, even then it's still predicting the next word. It's not thinking about your response or your question if that makes sense. So people using it like Google for fact checking is, I don't like to say right or wrong, but that's not the best use of a large language model. What's also challenging is what we're starting to see is this idea of summarizing. For instance, now you've probably noticed in Google, when you ask a question, it does use Gemini and it'll summarize and attempt to answer a question for you at the top, and it will link to its sources. But large language models are not the best at summarizing. Like, if you just tell a person to summarize, that person is going to choose what they're going to focus on in that summary. You think about summarizing a whole research article, I might really value the methods and put more emphasis on the methods. So unless you're telling it exactly what to focus on in that summary. And so what we start to see is this simplification bias, which is really problematic in research. And I've been cautioning people about that quite a bit. An example of simplification bias would be if you, especially these AI research assistants, if you ask it a question, like you put in your research question, it'll summarize maybe the top 10 papers and attempt to answer that question. If you really go through each of those sources, a lot of times it will get it wrong. And that's because it's not great at knowing what to focus on. It's not a human. It's not looking at that research through the same lens that you would. based on your experience and your perspective and maybe the theory that you're using. So I, I feel like people are going to get in trouble with this simplification bias and that's something that concerns me quite a bit. Vikki: Definitely. And Yeah, and you see people on Twitter and things talking about tools that, you know, this will take the 50 articles you need to read and put it into tabulated form. So you don't, you know, they don't usually say the words, so you don't need to read the original, but it's kind of inferred sometimes that that's why this will save you so much time and That it is really concerning that it doesn't have that element of having gone through your brain and been filtered against the things that you think are important or the things you're focusing on this time. Jessica: Well, I want to touch on that because I think you're hitting on something important and It bothers me that the marketing language that we're seeing is all about speed and efficiency. I don't know if Microsoft still uses this language, but when they released its 1st, like generative educational product, they use the phrase teaching speed, which is really interesting. To me, it seems obvious, but I do find myself having to say this, like, as a researcher, when you get, when you're an expert in something, or you're becoming an expert, you don't go get your Ph. D. for speed and efficiency. There's friction in learning, doesn't mean it has to be more painful than it needs to be, but I do worry about this focus on speed and efficiency because it does send the wrong message. I don't think that I'm conducting research any faster than I was, but that's wasn't my goal. And I think that surprises people when I talk about it, like the goal, the way I see it, isn't. To do your research faster to your lit review faster. I think you can do it. Maybe more a bit more efficiently manually, I used to build out literature matrices and word. So now I can speed that up. I can, you know, use it in a way I could just make that table, but I'm still having to read every article. So it's not saving time. It's just shifting my time. It's like, I'm just spending my time on different things. And I think if people can think about it that way, then that would be, I think, a healthier way to approach it. I see what you mean and I hear it all the time. And I think that's where sometimes expectations are not aligned with reality. Vikki: Yeah. But there's two different versions of reality as well, isn't there, in the sense that there's the reality of what it's actually good at and what it should, in inverted commas, be used for. But there is also the reality, and maybe this is worse in undergrads, one would hope, but I'm sure it filters through, there is also the reality of what people will actually just use it for. And sort of believing the truth of both of those I think is actually really challenging because we can say, you know, it's the same as we'd say to undergrads, you know, things a lot easier if you turn up to lectures and you talk to your tutors and da da da, and then they try and do it from the video recordings and blah blah. Um, we can say it [00:24:00] works a lot better and this is what it's intended for. But if it roughly does that, then there's going to be chunk of people for whom that's very attractive and that kind of tempt them over, even if they know it's not perfect, it's, it's done. Jessica: I mean, we're seeing that. I have mixed feelings on this. So on one hand, like I've been in rooms where there's conversations about how all the admissions essay now is our essays now are AI generated. One part of me, it's like, I want to give humans the benefit of the doubt and say that I think that's a sign of low AI literacy. I also believe that as long as the focus is on the grade and there's deadlines, there's always going to be cheating. What I think is great about this moment for educators. And I try to talk to faculty about shifting our focus from A. I detection because they're very unreliable to instead rethinking, which is a hard discussion because it requires a lot of effort and work rethinking, like, how are we evaluating learning? And personally, you know, for me, it's been a big shift to process over product has helped me address some of these issues. Now, I would not want to be an English comp professor at a university. Like, that's a whole other thing to tackle that I think is really challenging, but I do like to remind folks that, writing technologies have been around for a long time. There's been concerns like with the printing press and with the development of phones and text that we would lose our ability to write. And we've navigated that before. And I think we will again. We're just still very early in the process, and there's a lot of education that needs to happen in terms of just AI literacy. Vikki: Yeah, I think one of the things that it, one of the positives is I think it is going to teach, it's going to force us to teach things that were perhaps kind of expected to just implicitly pick up. Because when I think about novice academics, I'm thinking about sort of, you know, the end of undergraduate, beginning of postgraduate, that sort of level where they're doing, you know, they're doing their lit reviews and things, but they're still at the kind of beginnings of knowing how. When they're doing that in a beginnery way, it's not that different than what AI does, in my opinion. You know, they're reading stuff, and they're kind of trying to say what they say in slightly different words, and like, summarize what was in that more or less accurately and combine it up with summaries of other articles and try and smush that into something vaguely coherent. You know, this is with all respect. We've all been through that stage. And I think we've sort of, I don't know, maybe we've been lazy with just how things have been taught, but getting people to understand the difference between that and filtering literature through the particular lens that you're trying to look at it through and bringing your perspectives and comparing things that aren't usually brought together and whatever, and all those interesting things you can do to produce a good piece of work are the bits that, AI at the moment, at least, are less good at. But in order for students to see, or academics to see, what it can't do, they have to understand that actually the way they're doing it, isn't the kind of advanced version either. Does that, does that make any sense? Because I think like with reading too, you know, I spend my life trying to share with people that if when you read an article, you start at the beginning and you read to the end and your goal is to read it. You've missed a trick here, you know, you need to be going into it with why am I reading this? What is the purpose? Am I looking at the methods? Am I trying to understand the take home message of it? Am I trying to see what argument they're making? Which bits of it are going to give me that? And yeah, you'll read the whole thing at some point, but I'm a big fan of getting people to jump around in an article, reading all those things. And so I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether you think there's a role in when we're understanding the limitations of what AI does in better understanding the limitations of what we as humans do in, in the sort of beginnings of our academic careers. Jessica: Yeah, I think you're exactly right. And you're on to something. For example, I think back to when I was the first research study I ever did was as a graduate student. It was my senior year and it was like abstracts. I was reading abstracts because it was like so overwhelming. I started with too broad of a search. Like, how am I supposed to get through all these articles? I wasn't searching appropriately. And then it was just like reading abstracts. And that's what I see now when I look at simplification bias with AI systems is a lot of the information it's pulling is from the abstract of the article, which is what we know that a lot of students do. And so I, I see the point that you're making and this is where I have a hard time answering because my answer kind of depends on the context with the student. So some of it is like the level of expertise. I'm going to go back to a discussion about writing and try to, like, connect my ideas. I do this webinar that students really like, and I talk about a top down versus a bottom up approach to writing. Jessica: And experts typically have this, like, top down approach because we already know the field. We come to the table with a thesis, an idea, an argument, and we go find what we need to build that argument. And therefore, our voice tends to come through more in our writing. Whereas a student who doesn't yet know the field, they kind of have to [00:30:00] go from the bottom up and look at all this evidence and then the pressure to like figure out what is the gap and what is the question and they don't have their voice. And then there's levels like, you don't just go from like novice to experts. Like we think of Bloom's taxonomy and you gradually improve your expertise over time. When I think about a first year PhD student, first semester coming in, like, I don't know that I want them using AI for any of these things, but if I have my student who's gone through their coursework, they've demonstrated their ability to synthesize literature, critique literature, choose an appropriate research design, then I think that's a really good point to introduce them to these tools. Now, does it mean that the 1st year 1st semester PhD student isn't using? I feel like those are things that we just to some extent we can't control other than just trying to educate them and helping them understand how that might be hampering their ability and their skills later on. If they're using AI shortcuts. I think a really interesting conversation that I'm starting to hear that I don't have any answers for. I mostly just have questions at this point. Which is around, like, what are the skills that are going to be needed? Because Anthropic's Claude, they just released a video, if you haven't seen it, it's called Computer Use Capability. It's a full AI agent system that can run on your computer where you give it a goal. You could tell it to conduct an entire lit review for you, and it'll go find all of the literature, it'll execute all the tasks by going online, locating it, storing it where you want it stored, Putting the information in Excel spreadsheet, so it is able to work across software platforms on your device, and it can execute all of these tasks in a row. And that's already here. So we have agents already and then how advanced are those going to be? And the questions I'm starting to hear and with faculty and higher at, or some of them are big questions about, like, how are we going to keep up with the workforce and stay relevant to make sure that we're producing students who have skills that are valued by the workforce when this technology is evolving so quickly, what does research even look like in 5 years? If A. I. Is able to really accurately conduct a thorough lit review and come to the same conclusions as humans what is the role of the researcher then? Are we going to have fewer experts? Will it free up our time for more creative problem solving? Will writing even be the medium for expressing these ideas. I mean, notebook LM already has the ability to turn an article into a conversational podcast. So those are such interesting questions that I do not know the answer to, that I feel like everyone is just speculating on. And I think anyone who claims to have all the answers is not being honest because the reality is, is even the top AI experts who are building these models still have a lot of these questions and we don't know. Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. Vikki: Yeah. So with the formative feedback, because I think that's fascinating. How do you balance up the added kind of benefits that brings. And I don't think anyone listening will underestimate how useful that is. One of the biggest issues I deal with with my clients is their frustrations over not getting feedback. And when I coach academics, their frustrations with the requirements to be giving feedback for everything and one of the things that I coach on quite a bit is how can, particularly when I'm working with students, how can students generate their own ability to evaluate things and their own ability to reassure themselves without seeking approval from their supervisor. Now, I'm never discouraging them from getting feedback. Obviously, feedback's the fastest way to learn, and we'll talk about that more in a minute. I do see this sort of dependence on if my supervisor tells me it's good, I'll believe it, rather than being able to, like, reassure themselves or to troubleshoot their own work in a meaningful way. And I'd be interested to hear your perspective on whether the AI stuff helps them to develop that skill to do it themselves, or whether it just makes them dependent on a bot to reassure them instead of a tutor to reassure them. Jessica: Yeah, that's a good question that I get a lot. And I think we're still figuring out the implications of over reliance, using it as a crutch. This is where I think AI literacy becomes so important. Part of AI literacy is functional, just understanding capabilities and limitations. Critical AI literacy requires the user, in this case a student, to not just take all of the feedback. Sometimes it gets it wrong. It's maybe 95% on point. Sometimes [00:36:00] it leaves things out, it focuses on the wrong things. Again, it's not a rule based system. The way I train my students to use it. And when I talk to educators about having their students use AI for formative feedback, I talk about teaching the students right away to not believe it all to be true. So they have to critically think about what that feedback is. So it's not the same as getting feedback from me where they take it all to be a hundred percent truth. Like they know exactly. Vikki: I mean, not if I coach them, they don't. I teach them to read supervisor comments critically as well! Jessica: Yeah, my doc students is more what I'm referring to, like they really value. So that's like an interesting question that I was wondering in the beginning is like, are they even going to value this feedback because it's not me? And I found that because I had designed the tools and they know that I added the criteria that I was using, they trusted it more than just, trying to go to chat gpt and say, give me feedback based on this rubric. But that's more of a trust issue. Not so much how they're using it. With critical literacy. It involves. Not just uploading your paper, getting the feedback, and then walking away with that initial feedback and trying to implement it. The real value, and I just published an article I could share with you to link, with my students, is meaning negotiation. So meeting negotiation happens with second language learners, and I have had this theory about academic writing is that it's a non native language for everyone, and so there's elements of second language learning that we can see in those who are learning academic writing for the first time. And that's something that we noticed when we studied my students chat conversations, because they shared them with us, that the students who are getting the most benefit out of it, follow up. There's lots of turn taking, asking for clarification. Can you pull another excerpt for me? Can you explain that for me? Can you create an analogy to help me understand that a bit more. Just like you would if you were learning a language where you're asking lots of follow up questions and for explanations? Having that meaning negotiation with the AI is a part of critical AI literacy. I don't think all students are going to do that, but I think that's part of our job of teaching them how to use it responsibly, is helping them understand what it means to like, have a conversation and negotiate with it, not just take it all to be true and then do it. You also have to use your brain, I mean, that's why I think there's this expectation because of the media and how it's reporting on AI that it's some quick fix and that it's going to require less effort, but. I mean, we're dealing with PhD students, and these are really complex problems that are being solved. And so there's no shortcut around using those critical thinking skills. And so if a student is going into it thinking, I'm going to write this paper faster, you know, I say, it's actually probably going to take you longer because I'm going to make you reflect on how you use this tool. But hopefully you're learning more and you have a higher quality product at the end where you thought through all of the ethical considerations that maybe you would have missed in that first draft or, um, done a more thorough critical appraisal of the evidence than maybe you would have done in that first draft for me. Vikki: Have you seen any differences in the emotional responses to feedback from the, um, bot rather than from people? Because one of the things. I see a lot is clients who procrastinate submitting something to their supervisor because they're worried their supervisor is going to tell them it's rubbish and all those things. Is it just as bad? Do your students worry about the bot criticizing them or do they care less because it's not you. Jessica: Yeah, that was one of our findings was that they, and this is a small sample, but we have seen validation of these findings and the literature elsewhere. But that was one of our findings is that the students described, they didn't realize they were describing it, but that was part of my role as the researcher is teasing that out, is bypassing that, like, affective state where you can shut down because the feedback is personal. On the other flip side of that. Sometimes the AI would validate their ideas and so that would stop them from ruminating and second guessing. Like if enough times they've gotten the feedback that this is coherent, they've achieved paragraph unity or whatever it may be, then they stop ruminating on it and their confidence increases and they move on. Yeah, my students viewed it, and we hear this all the time, is like, it's this neutral, Thing machine that's giving me something valuable. It's not all 100 percent true, but it's there's something I can take away from this to improve my work. And sometimes it's validating your ideas. And sometimes it's giving critical feedback, but you don't have that emotional shutdown that you have when you get it from your advisor because you feel embarrassed or ashamed that you produced work that got that type of criticism. Vikki: I want to take you back to something you said earlier about the biases that there can be in anything that's based on stuff from the internet, right? How do you, how do you manage that in the context of giving formative feedback, Jessica: Yeah, we as humans have a lot of biases, so of course, these models are also going to have biases. Um, but yeah, when you're not aware of them, there's a lot of dangers there. There is. There's more like medium and small language models that are coming out for specific use cases to try to address some of these issues. It's complicated, but I'm encouraged by the growing field of research. That's. happening to try to understand the biases and teach others how to mitigate them. But the first step is understanding that the biases are present and reflecting on your own biases and how that might be reflected in the output. Vikki: Yeah. Cause I mean, it's not like, you know, when a human does feedback on a work, that it's not biased by many of the same things. We may tell ourselves we're trying not to be and everything. So it's not like [00:42:00] there's a kind of gold standard. I think sometimes when people are talking about all of this, there's this sort of inferred gold standard of human marking where it's, you know, it's accurate and replicable and all of those things. Which we all know isn't true, but I think sometimes when it's, maybe it is the lack of AI literacy, but when it's coming from a machine, you almost, if you don't know these things, you can sort of assume that it's being more objective than it is being. Jessica: For sure. And I think that like what you just asked is that I see a lot of different sort of debates taking place and I sort of sit in the middle where, no, I do not believe we should be using AI for summative assessment and grading students and having that final say on a student's grade. And some people will use that argument to say we shouldn't be using it at all. And then I come back and say, well, as humans, like, are you sitting down and grading the student and thinking about cultural differences in writing styles, or are you just grading according to the rubric? So it's not a binary response. It really depends on the learning outcomes, the level of the learner. I mean, I think what's amazing is we're starting to see AI products come out that help neurodivergent learners with dyslexia, ADHD, and so there's so much potential there and it's not like a, should we do it or should we not? It's more of like a how, how, and first we have to understand the capabilities and limitations before we make that decision. Vikki: Yeah, I think I've mentioned on one of these before, but there's several tools now for people with ADHD where it'll break tasks down into its constituent parts and things. And, that's a model of it that I think can be really, really useful because it's not actually doing any of the work, but it's helping you to take what feels like an insurmountable task and break it down into chunks, which I know is something that even people who are neurotypical can, can find really challenging too. And I think, I think that's one of my take homes with AI, is I actually think that the skills we'll need to develop to use AI well are skills that would make us better academics if we never used AI. So, when hearing you talk about feedback, one of the things my clients and I often discuss and I do this inside, I do supervisor training as well as coaching people, and I think this is done badly on both sides, is that students say, can you give me feedback on this 40 page lit review, and the supervisor tries to give feedback, whatever feedback is, on a 40 page lit review. I get so many students who tell me that their supervisors will only read a polished final draft. They won't read anything before that and things, which I think is ludicrous. Sorry, supervisors, but it is. Um, and well, when I say, what feedback are you looking for? They're saying, I want them to tell me whether it's good enough or not. And. we often talk about all the different levels of feedback you can ask for in terms of, you know, am I making a argument that broadly sounds like it makes sense with some evidence to back it up? Um, does it feel like it's in the right sort of order so that it follows one from the next and all these sorts of things. And so the stuff that you've had to put into designing and that your students are now having to use in order to ask it the right questions, feel like things that would be really useful for students to ask their supervisors that specifically and for supervisors to be as focused because presumably when you ask Moxie, do the paragraphs flow coherently from one to the next, it doesn't start correcting typos and things the way that a supervisor often gets distracted. Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. Every student is different. So I don't want to generalize, but I did find that instead of those vague requests, give me feedback or can you pregrade this? Can you just take a look at this really quick before I submit it, you know, in six hours for grading. A lot of times they were coming to me and they actually already had an idea of what they were struggling with. I kind of expected that, but I wasn't sure. Um, and, and so when you're using, and this isn't just Moxie, like if you were to create your own tool using a rubric and you were to consistently have that criteria, you start to notice patterns like I consistently struggle with passive voice in my writing. My hope is that if students are starting to see that feedback again and again from the AI, it'll help them ask more targeted questions to their supervisor, versus just this generic, but I understand what you're saying. I do that all the time too. I don't consult with individual clients anymore, but that was one of my approaches is I'd say, you know, you can't just ask me to read this whole thing. I need you to tell me what were you struggling with? What's top of mind for you? and I do think AI can come in handy that way. Vikki: I'm going to also take you back. So you started to talk about it, but I think it'd be useful to go in more depth in terms of when it's useful for people to start using AI, because one of the times where I've tried to use AI and found it quite limited is where I really wanted it to sound like me. So I have my podcast transcripts. Everyone listening, there will be one of this. I have all my podcast transcripts and I'd love to turn them into. Short articles. And I started doing it myself, but I'm coming up to my hundredth episode and a podcast ends up being about 8, 000 words. So it's, it's a substantial body of work. And so I messed around with quite a few different versions of AI. And I even try, you know, you see these guidelines online where you're like, here's five [00:48:00] pieces of my writing. Try and edit this one into a short thing in the same style as that. And maybe I'm not giving good prompts, or maybe I'm not finding the right AI models, but In my experience, it made me sound very, I call it kind of generic internet y. Very sort of, this is a game changing fact, kind of thing. Um, and so I've sort of, at the moment, at least divided my life into things that I can ask AI to do. You know, I've got these four things in my fridge. Are there any recipes that build from that or whatever? Happy days. Fine. I can do that. Versus things that at the moment I won't, and writing my emails, writing my podcasts, writing anything that I want to sound like my voice, I won't. And one of the things that made me reflect on is that that entirely depends on the fact that at the moment I am capable of writing in a voice that feels like my voice. And that's true, whether I'm doing this more kind of chatty stuff or, you know, I've got tons of academic publications and stuff in my academic life, I know what I sound like too. Um, and I just wondered what that's like for people who are at the beginnings of their career and whether, will this stop them learning what their voice is if they've only ever had a AI voice, if you see what I mean. Jessica: Yeah, I've heard there's this debate going about, it's like, am I starting to sound more like the AI or is it starting to sound more like me, like, which is it, uh, from a, from the perspective of, let's talk about low stakes tasks. So, and in your example, you know, you're summarizing transcripts, one of my most common low stakes tasks is maybe I'm creating notes for a LinkedIn post where I'm bringing together, you know, a lot of different ideas and I'll make like a long bulleted list. So that's low stakes. There's a lot more editing involved. So I find that instead of spending all that time on the writing, I'm now doing the editing. So I don't expect it to produce something that I'm just going to copy and paste into the YouTube description or my LinkedIn posts. So for those low stakes tasks, it's like shifting my time from where I was doing a lot of the writing to now I'm doing a lot of the just quick and dirty drafting. And then a lot of my time is spent editing. So I let the AI put together all of that, like connective tissue. And sometimes I edit a lot of it out. Um, then I think about high stakes tasks in terms of what are the boundaries of when we should use it and when we can't. And I'm just going to use some examples because I, I don't have any sort of rules of thumb, if you will, other than if you don't know how to do it yourself, like analyze data using a statistical test, then please don't use AI for it. Cause you have no way of evaluating whether it's accurate or not. So that's kind of a rule of thumb I have, especially if it's high stakes. But from the perspective of you have a novice, let's say researcher who maybe doesn't have their voice. I think about different scenarios. So fear of the blank page. Now you can just put in your ideas into AI and, and, and brainstorm with it. You know, I think about lit review outlines. Um, what are potential outlines of this is the argument I have- problem, cause solution, you know, thematic, whatever it may be. And then you can sort of take those suggestions and instead of starting on a blank page, you have some headings to start with. Like, I don't think that that is problematic or cheating. It requires you to have some clarity about your problem, going into it, to ask the right questions, to get what you want out of it. I think it is problematic to rely on it to like identify literature gaps for you or choose your research design or develop your IRB application and then you don't have to think about informed consent. Like, these are really important decisions that we make in the research process. And if we want to protect the integrity of research, I think the human has to be steering, we have to be in control and the AI is just sometimes our copilot. When it's appropriate, but I tend to, to just tell my students, like, do not use it if you don't know how to do it yourself. if you have no clue how to select a research design, please do not ask chat GBT to select a research design for you. On the other hand, if you've selected your, you feel confident you've selected it, but maybe you don't know if you've justified it well, and you know how to ask that question, I think that's perfectly appropriate because you've still made those decisions. Those are still your ideas. Now, that is very different than saying, here's my entire lit review, edit it for grammar, spelling, punctuation. Because what's likely going to happen is, well, it's unpredictable, but usually what happens when you ask that is you don't get just your lit review edited for grammar. There's going to be changes, there's going to be shifts in language that you might not notice unless you're reading every word. Vikki: Hmm. Yeah, and I think it's really, you know, you were talking about affect before, I think just remembering the role of emotions in all of this is super important because I think for us at the kind of career stage we're at, what you just said makes absolute total sense. There's things I know how to do, it's fine, I can tell whether it's done it well or not, I can tweak it, da da da. Other things, more of a copilot, totally get that. My concern, I guess, is that all of that makes absolute sense, but when a student is panicking and doesn't think they know how to do any of it, and it has to be done because there's deadlines coming and all of those things, I worry that it becomes self reinforcing, right, that because they ask too much of AI, but they [00:54:00] kind of get through, right, they're not going to get amazing anything, but it's, it's all right, it gets done. They go to the next milestone in their PhD or whatever, but now they're even more sure they can't do it for themselves. Um, And I'm just, I just think it's going to be really important, and it sounds like you are doing this, it sounds, I think it's going to be really important to remember the, and I say this with due respect to the students because it's true of all of us, the kind of lack of rationality sometimes in the choices that we make when we're feeling pressured or when we're feeling unconfident in our own abilities to analyze these things. It's not just a kind of really cognitive cost benefit analysis that people are making decisions from with these things. Yeah. Jessica: Yeah. Ethan Mullock calls it like the temptation of the button. And I think it's so true. If you haven't read it, whoever's listening, he, Ethan Mullock is a professor at Wharton Business School here in the U S and he's like a thought leader on generative AI and innovation and higher ed. And he has a sub stack that I love. Comes out every week. I read it. One of his subsects that resonated most with me was called the, like setting time on fire with the temptation of the button. Like, are we going to have a crisis of meaning? And right in the beginning has a screenshot of Google docs They were in beta at the time where there was a little button that just said, like, help me, right? And I was like, what are we going to value now? Are we even going to value writing anymore? And that's when I felt like I was having an existential crisis. Cause I'm like, I don't know. I mean, it is tempting to push the button if you haven't done any work and it's due at midnight. And it's either that or an automatic zero. We're already seeing it. We're already seeing evidence of that. And I don't know that there is a way to prevent it because AI detectors don't work. They're not reliable at all. If you haven't used one, just try putting in some of the work that you wrote well before AI existed and you'll see that they're not reliable. So AI detectors are not the way. I think it's going to cause a real shift in how we think about how we're evaluating learning and it's not going to happen overnight and it's going to be really rocky. There's going to be implications that we can't wrap our head around. Just like we had no idea what the implications of like social media would be on, you know, mental health and isolation. I think there's a lot of implications. We don't, we have no idea. I think what's scary is that it's out there. Students are using it. More students are using it than faculty are using it. And then how do we navigate that? And I don't have the answer. I'm like, I don't know. Yeah, I still have deadlines. I still expect my students to write their own work. I still know that they're going to be tempted to press the button because it's there. It's very tempting. Um, but again, and maybe this is like, overly optimistic or naive, but I do feel that as we learn more about this technology, then it'll become a lot more clear how to manage those concerns. I mean, I do believe knowledge is power. I mean, that was why I said about learning about AI is I felt honestly, my first thought was I felt very threatened by it. Like, am I going to have a company? Are my doc students are, are they even going to be writing dissertations in 5 years? what does this even mean for my entire professional life? And I've come a long way since then. Um, but I think there's a lot of faculty and a lot of folks who feel very threatened and it's leading to just a shutting down mentality sort of ostrich head in the sand. And, um, and we know that that is not going to work. But I think just to kind of try to answer your question, we need to talk to students. Like, I think a student's voice is really important in all of this, um, and helping us understand how to address these concerns that we're having. Vikki: Yeah. One thing it made me think of, and this is, you mentioned interdisciplinarity before, and I come from a, very interdisciplinary background. So I love pinging off into different disciplines. Um, one thing it made me think of a lot is all the research around, um, illegal drugs in sports. So I was a sports scientist in my, my academic background and, um, there were Couple of people there, um, Professor Maria Kavussanu, Professor Ian Boardley at my old university, who do a lot of research around the decision making process that athletes go through at the point where they decide whether they are or aren't going to take illegal drugs. So these performance enhancing drugs we're talking about here. And there's some really, really interesting stuff around the sort of moral disengagement that's involved in believing that other people do it, too, believing that your reasons for doing it are sufficient to justify the breaking of the rules. And I know AI isn't always breaking the rules, so I'm not, like, doing direct comparisons, but I think there's some really interesting stuff there around how people go from being sure that they wouldn't do these things to kind of maybe sometimes to now actually being regular users and relying on it for performance enhancement. And I'm sure I'm less familiar with the kind of criminology literature and stuff, but I'm sure there'll be parallel literature around how people make and justify those sorts of decisions. And. I wonder whether it would be interesting to look at parallels between, because we make decisions around where boundaries sit as to what's acceptable and what's not, and in what circumstances, because what they're doing with the performance enhancing drugs work is seeing [01:00:00] if they can identify young athletes that they need to intervene with earlier, try and figure out which are the ones that are heading that way early enough that you can intervene and sort of, scoop them up and bring them back to safety sort of thing. Jessica: Yeah, I mean, I would imagine I went down this rabbit hole a while ago. It's not fresh in my head, but I did start looking at the literature on plagiarism. Dr Sarah Eaton is a scholar in Calgary in Canada. She's done a lot of work on academic integrity and plagiarism, and she has this post plagiarism framework that I find to be really fascinating, and she asserts that, at some point soon human AI hybrid writing will be the norm and that our standard rules of plagiarism will no longer apply and that just got me interested in plagiarism. So I went down this rabbit hole into trying to understand plagiarism and some of the things that I learned were around. I mentioned earlier around cultural differences, so there's like inadvertent plagiarism. There's mosaic plagiarism, and then cheating overall, a lot of it does come down to circumstance. It's very situational. And then, yes, you like get away with it and then you sort of push the limits the next time, but ultimately it comes down to our incentives and our rewards. Like if the focus is on meeting the deadline and getting the good grade, and that's what we're rewarding, then that is more likely to create that situation where you're tempted to cheat or plagiarize. And so it causes you to question the systems that are in place that are reinforcing this behavior. And that makes me just think about like institutions and ethical guidelines. So what does our community, our academic community accept or reject? And I don't think we know right now. Like we've saw, I think the NSF or maybe it was the NIH originally said absolutely no generative AI can be used to develop a grant proposal, and then they shifted it to acknowledgement. I would imagine that given some time, we'll have more institutional guidance on what the standards are, the ethical standards for the academic community. Um, but I think you're right. I think there are parallels, but in some ways, like, I feel that higher education is due for a closer look at how we are incentivizing students to get the grade or actually learn. I mean, in the US our standard grades are abysmal. Like reading comprehension is at the lowest ever. And um, so in that way I think it's good. It's forcing us to really rethink some of these systems that are in place. Vikki: Yeah. Raising some really important, big issues. . Thank you so much. This has ended up being a monster sized episode, and I love it, and I could have carried on talking to you for so much longer. But thank you so much. You've mentioned a couple of things already that I will link in the show notes, so listeners, look out for those. but if people want to know more specifically about you and Moxie, where can they look? Jessica: Yeah, so Moxie, our website is moxielearn. ai. I'm on LinkedIn as Jessica L. Parker. I do most of my thought leadership on LinkedIn, but we publish our research on Moxie's website. And I also have a ResearchGate profile for Moxie in our lab, because we are actively studying generative AI in research contexts, so. Vikki: Amazing. And spell Moxie for people? Jessica: M O X I E. Vikki: Moxie. Perfect. Thank you so much for coming. It's going to be so much food for thought. People listening, let me know your thoughts. You can reply to my newsletter. If you're not signed up for my newsletter, make sure you are. You can just go to my website, thephdlifecoach. com, or you can find me on Instagram at the PHD Life Coach. Tell me what you're thinking. Are you using AI? What scares you? What do you want to know more? And who knows? We might talk about it in a future episode. Thank you so much for coming, Jessica. Thank you everyone for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.