Do you ever wonder why you’re even doing this? Whether your research actually matters and whether the world actually cares? In this episode I’m telling you exactly why I believe your work matters, no matter what you’re researching. I’ll also tell you what bits (that we often worry about) don’t matter! This episode is designed to listen to whenever you need it, so make sure you save it somewhere for those days when you’re struggling! Links I refer to in this episode What to do when you want more reassurance Transcript Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. I am here today to tell you one thing, just one thing, and that is that what you do matters. So often we sit here in our academic careers, doing our PhD, whatever level we're at, feeling like no one even cares about anything we're doing. Hardly anybody's going to read it anyway. What impact will this ever actually have in the world? And why did I sign up in the first place? If you're feeling like that, it's totally normal. We all go through those stages. And that's why I want to remind you that those things are not objective truths. Those things are stories we tell ourselves when things are feeling difficult and when we've forgotten why we're doing what we're doing. The work you do is important, regardless of what you're researching. Sometimes I have clients who say, oh, but you know, if I was researching for a cure for cancer, or I was researching about establishing peace in the Middle East or whatever. If I was researching those things, it would matter, but who cares about my little bit of literature? Who cares about my little bit of history, but I want you to know that these doubts happen no matter what you're researching. I have clients who are researching those exact things, those things that seem so obviously valuable and they still feel often like a tiny piece in a huge jigsaw that they have no idea whether it will work anyway. The discipline that you are studying within and the topic you are studying does not inherently make you sure that your research is valuable. We have those doubts across all disciplines, all research areas. But what you do is valuable because you're a small piece in a massive jigsaw. Because you are creating and producing one small piece of a jigsaw that nobody else would have produced in the way that you're producing them. But we don't know how it's going to fit together in the future. It's not like there's an actual jigsaw where all the pieces are kind of preconceived. You're creating a you shaped jigsaw piece, a piece of this giant puzzle that we don't know where it's gonna go. And that means we can't be sure how much impact it will have in the future, but equally we can't be sure that it won't. And sometimes it's the most unusual obscure bits that capture people's imagination the most. Certainly when I ask clients in my workshops to share what they're researching on, sometimes it's the stuff that I would never have thought about. I still remember a student from, its gotta be 15, 20 years ago, who was researching the history of pantomime, and I just thought that was the most fascinating thing. Those of you who aren't in the UK, that may not be so relevant for you, but for me, pantomime is such a huge part of being a child in the UK. And the fact that most of us don't know anything about where it came from and how it developed, I just think it's fascinating. These are the things that will be in museums in the future. These are the things that will be in a book on somebody's bookshelf that they picked up just because it looked cool when they were wandering around a bookshop when they're not meant to be spending any money. The things you do are important. The approach that you take is important. The fact that we have hundreds of thousands of people out there doing PhDs, who are learning how to take huge amounts of disparate information, often contradictory information that's arguing with each other, and to turn it into a meaningful argument. The world needs that. The world needs to be able to understand the nuances between different arguments, to understand that there isn't right and wrong, that there's a whole load of grey in between, and that we can make evidence based arguments for where we sit on that nuanced continuum. The world needs those skills. The world needs the skills that you are developing. The world needs people that can manage this enormous unmanageable amount of information and turn it into something coherent so that other people can learn from it who haven't got your skills. The world needs what you do. The world needs people that can define a huge project, decide what it is, and make it happen. The world needs those people. The world needs people who have creativity and insight and who can stretch our knowledge beyond where it is at the moment. If you feel like you don't know enough, it's because you are literally at the edges of human knowledge. That is what you're doing when you do a PhD. When you work in academia, you are meant to not know enough. Because that is what makes you read the next bit and to write the next bit and to understand the next bit. We need people who can operate in that sort of uncertainty and still make it happen. The world needs your research and the world needs you. Now I said in this episode I was going to tell you one thing and that that's what you do matters, but I'm going to tell you one more thing too. And that's that the stuff you do sometimes doesn't matter. Now, that might sound like a massive contradiction, but so many of my clients flip from everything I do is completely pointless and no one cares to, I have to get this exactly right in exactly the ways it needs to be done or else I'm a failure. And that's why the second half of this is to remind you that so much of what you do doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you tell the story in this order or that order, as long as it tells a coherent story. It doesn't matter whether you include this article or that article or this quote or that quote, as long as you can justify why you've included it or why you've left it out. It doesn't matter whether you take a quantitative approach or a qualitative approach or what exact measure you use, as long as you can justify why you did and you only interpret within the realms of what you did. A lot of the decisions that you're getting het up about don't matter that much. You have to have a good reason to choose it. You have to be able to defend it. You have to understand the weaknesses of the choice that you made. And other than that, it doesn't matter. What is important is that you move this research forward, that you develop the skills that you need to push this piece of research forward. That's all that matters. And that means learning to sit in that uncertainty and move forward anyway. Learning either to be comfortable with the fact that you're not quite sure where you're going next, or to be okay with being uncomfortable. The tiny things that you are stressing about probably don't matter. But the research that you do, the fact that you're doing a PhD, the fact that you're having an academic career, those things matter. Go do them. And this episode is specifically designed to be short and for you to come back to it whenever you need it. So save it, send it to your friends who need to hear it right now. You matter. Your research matters. The little things you're worrying about probably don't. Let's just crack on and get this research out into the world where it can have the impact and bring the joy and the interest and the intrigue that it deserves. 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.

Do you ever feel like you’re only succeeding because you’re working more than is healthy? That you are subsidizing your work at the expense of your wellbeing? Then today’s episode is a must listen! I welcome Andy Brown, author of The Emotional Overdraft and we chat about what we mean by an Emotional Overdraft, how to know if you have one, and what to do about it. Links I refer to in this episode You can find out more about Andy Brown and The Emotional Overdraft here Find out the extent of your emotional overdraft by completing this assessment Transcript Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. And today's episode is one that's come about through a kind of spontaneous moment of "Oh sod it, I might as well try" on a train. So I was on my way to Stirling and I took with me a book, The Emotional Overdraft, those of you on YouTube, you can see Emotional Overdraft by Andy Brown. And I found myself loving it and I thought, you know what? I wonder if there's any chance this person who's written this amazing book would come on the podcast. Vikki: And so I messaged Andy, and as those of you who are on YouTube can already see, here he is, Andy actually agreed to come on the show. So welcome, thank you so much, I really appreciate it. Andy: Uh, delighted to be here and thank you for asking me. And to be on the podcast where, from the person that runs the How You Can Be Your Own Boss course is great. And I was listening to chunks of it and you were talking about being driven by our thoughts which drives our emotions or feelings, which drives our behaviors and outcomes. And I thought this is these are my people. This is, this is what I talk about as well. So it's great to be here and I'm very excited about the conversation. Vikki: Perfect. Thank you so much. And yes, that was the thing as I was reading it, it's always one of those wonderful moments where you read some bits where you're like, Oh, that's what I say to people. And then you read other bits where you're like, Oh, and I hadn't thought about it like that. And that's where, you know, you're in exactly the right place. Cause you're kind of, you know, you're on the same page. There's things you agree on, but equally. You're kind of bringing slightly different things to the table, which is, which is perfect. So let's start with. Let everybody know who you are and how you came to write this book. Andy: So I'm a non executive director these days because I'm old, but my career, I started out in market research. So all you PhDs going, yeah, that's not real research. But I started out in market research, uh, which took me into advertising and I spent 35 years working in and running advertising agencies. Andy: And for the last 10 or so. I've been a non exec and an advisor to creative and research businesses to helping them build more valuable businesses. And that's really where the idea of the book came from. So looking at the challenges these, these founders and these, these leaders have in their businesses that just seem to be whatever the question, the answer seemed to be "I'll do it." You know, they were going to do it. They were the answer to everything and I spend a lot of time talking to people about how you can resolve that. But the researcher in me just kept coming back to it and going, I wonder if there's something seems to be consistent here. So so let's let's ask people. Andy: So I did a little bit of research and what I discovered was that, what I subsequently called an emotional overdraft, this idea of subsidizing your, your enterprise's success at your own mental or physical cost is pretty universal. In fact, spoiler alert, it is universal. Um, and it doesn't just exist within business, although my publisher said, you need an audience, Andy, so you've got to write it right, right for the audience, you know, right for a business audience. Andy: But I do believe emotional overdraft is absolutely universal state. So I did the research and I discovered that almost everyone at some point or another is subsidizing the success of their venture or whatever they're doing at their own mental or physical cost. Andy: One where another and some people that feels like an overdraft to me. It's that sense of you dip in and you dip out when you need it And some people dip in and stay there and and that's very damaging and dangerous, Yeah. Other people can dip in and then come out again Just like financial control, you know, there are people that use their overdraft when they need to buy something expensive, they pay it straight off, they don't incur all those terrible costs, and it's gone again, but it's a useful facility. Andy: Other people don't manage their costs very well. They've permanently maxed out their credit card, they're permanently in their overdraft, and they're paying a hell of a price for it. And it felt to me that that emotional cost of running a business, or I've got a good friend of mine working on his PhD, and he's probably been doing it for 10 years, and I know that that stresses him out. Andy: I know that that pressure, it's the same thing. And his behaviour is basically contributing to that. Broadly, I'm not saying he's to blame, but I am saying it's broadly a behavioral issue. Uh, and those behaviors tend to come out of habits. And that's what the research threw up was there are a number of habits, which tend to underpin these behaviors, which we can do something about. Because if it's habitual or if it's behavioral, it's not easy, but we can change that. Vikki: Yeah. Andy: As long as we can spot it, we can change it. So that, that's what the research showed. The book took two more years to come out, but was published in January 2024. So, yeah, it was quite a relief and quite exciting. Vikki: And you mentioned that it was written for a business audience. I think I came across it first, I think you talked on another podcast and it was on the back of that, that I bought the book and thought that it would be really, really relevant. And I love this idea that when you're thinking in one setting, you know, a book that's focused. very much for people that are running their own businesses and there's bits in it that are not specifically applicable in academia. Vikki: But there was so much of it that resonated, whether that's with PhD students who make up probably the majority of the people that listen to this, but also all the way through, and maybe even more so as you go further through an academic career, and now you're not just responsible for your own research but you're responsible for grant income. You're responsible for teaching and personal tutorials and supervision and all that stuff as well. And it just, there was so much that resonated with me at every level. Andy: You talk about being your own boss. And I thought that is the boss you or the implementer you. And that's, that's the same situation. That's, you're a boss of one, you know, you're a company of one, you're the CEO. So you're still leading, even though you are the only person leading, and the only person you're leading is you. Andy: But you're still leading, and the principles all hold true, which is there are ways of behaving which will make things easier, more sustainable, more effective, and more impactful. And there are ways of doing it that will make it inadvertently harder and more costly to you. And that's, so the exact principles apply through. Andy: I get. I mean, it's this strange thing when you launch your book baby into the world, you get, it takes on its own little life. I, I get emails from mothers and that is not my audience for the book, but I had one who sent me a voicemail. And it, she just said, I bought your book on someone else's recommendation. I, and I'm not flogging the book, I'm just sharing the story, but I bought your book. I read the first chapter. And it was like you were talking to me. So I phoned my friend up, and on the phone I read her the first chapter, and I said, who's he talking about? And my friend said, he's talking about you. Now, that's not the person I wrote the book for, but she's effectively this mother with kids, and a partner, maybe, and a family, and a wider network of friends, and societal pressure, and all those things. Andy: Effectively is the leader of that community, of her micro community, and it was speaking to her. So it has taken on a bit of a life of its own, which I love. I think the reason I wanted to come and talk to you is because of the idea. The concept of an emotional overdraft, I think, is a helpful label that we can use in the right at the right time to spot what's going on and to do something differently. Andy: And if that's when you're a mum, or a working mum, or a PhD student, or you're running a team in a university, or you're running a business, great. If it works for you, then take it and do things with it. Vikki: Absolutely. All the way up to the very top. Andy: So just to pursue that a little bit, when you find yourself in an emotional overdraft, it's okay to dip in. We've all done that. It's, you know, when I get people talking to me and they're saying, yeah, but I'm running a new, I'm running a business, I've got a startup or of course I'm working long hours. Yes, of course you are. But if it's persistent, if you don't stop and pay yourself back, if you stop doing exercise, if you don't find time for your family, if you stop seeing your friends, if you withdraw from your community, you stop volunteering or doing the things that feed you emotionally, that cost eventually catches up. Andy: So it's important to realize maybe I'm in my emotional overdraft. Maybe I've been here too long. Maybe something's going on. And in that moment, recognize that you can genuinely help yourself if you're able to change some behavior. Vikki: I think that having the name for it really helps. That really resonated with me. So you've touched on this a little bit in terms of what people might see themselves stopping doing. But how would somebody recognize that they're going into an emotional overdraft? Andy: Yeah, it's a good question, and it is different for everybody. I think what you're looking out for is physical or mental change. So, putting on weight, maybe. I mean, it is so, so different for everybody else, so I'll try not to make it all about me. But, it might be putting on weight, it might be losing weight, it might be physical change, it might be withdrawing From certain situations, your family. It might be, you know, stopping doing sports. Andy: It might be that you find you're more easily distracted, you are less able to concentrate or work for longer periods of time. That's another good clue. You can't stick to a task. Your to do list is being carried forward and rolled forward and rolled forward and stuff isn't getting done. Andy: You maybe stop looking at your to do list. You stop engaging with it because it's feeling overwhelming and a sense of overwhelm is a very good signal. And these can be tiny, tiny things and these can roll up into quite major things. So there's lots of little signals. If people call it stress, I'm feeling a bit stressed. You're already there. Andy: I'd be looking for those things that are leading up to, before the point where you might admit that you're stressed, or feeling overwhelmed, and that you've definitely got there then, but you'll recognise that. It's those small changes in behaviour. Andy: And one of the things I do encourage people to do is to, if you think that you are subsidising your PhD at your own personal cost, then get other people involved in that. Share that thought with somebody. It doesn't have to be a professional. I mean, share it with a friend, share it with someone else who's doing the same thing, who can empathize. But, but talk about it and externalize it. Andy: Because that then gives you a forum to start understanding. If you hold the thing, if you hold on to it and look at it and explore it and get inquisitive, then you've got way more chance of starting to understand what might be happening. I'm not saying it'll fix it, but it's definitely, it makes it more tangible. Andy: That's why the labels are helpful. If you can label it, it makes it a bit more tangible, then you can explore it. Vikki: And I love, I think this notion of subsidizing is so important because obviously, you know, people talked about stress, they talk about burnout and all of these things, but I think this notion that this can be what's propping up success., That sometimes there are people who are outwardly doing really well, their PhDs are progressing well, their academic careers are looking good, but it's only working because they're propping it up with their health and wellbeing, as you say, I think is such an interesting way to distinguish it from just solely a stress issue. That this is actually a structural thing that means that as it stands in its current form, your workload is not viable because you're having to sell this really important stuff essentially. Andy: And it's invisible. It's not easy to measure and so in business and I won't talk about profits and loss and all those things, but that's the analogy I use in business. But in business, it's easy to measure financial measures. What do we, you know, what do we sell? What did it cost to do it? What staff costs do we have? Those things are easy to measure and so we measure them. Emotional overdraft, that invisible subsidy that's coming from my cost to my health, me not going to the gym, me not looking after myself, me disengaging from my family and my support network, that is not easily measured. And if you can't measure it, it's far easier to ignore and kind of pretend it's not there and pretend that it's normal. Andy: It's just It just, it just is. Lots of business people, lots of leaders I talk to go, well, that's the job. It's meant to be difficult. It's meant to be hard. I'm meant to have a consistent level of low level stress. I'm meant to feel like that. No, you're not. I know loads of people who do this. Andy: I know people who run businesses and I'm sure you know people who, who, who work through a PhD who don't, it isn't fueled by stress. It's not subsidized by a constant sense of discomfort and, pain. It doesn't have to be that way. Vikki: I am going to be really cheeky. I've realised I've forgotten to feed the dog and he's crying. He's literally crying. It's going to be 30 seconds. Andy: So now we can talk about the real stuff, can't we? What do we think about Vicki's podcast? Are you enjoying it? I was just chatting to your listeners. Vikki: Oh yes, I'll leave that bit in, they all know about Marley. He was literally nose butting me. Cool, right, let's get back in the zone. You mentioned that, like, profit and loss isn't so relevant as measures in academia, and you're right, but I do think there are kind of similar things, you know, we equate publications or impact factors or grant income and things like that are some very measurable things of success. Vikki: Or even how, you know, how long to a submission. Many of my PhD students that I work with are obsessed with how long it's taking them, you know, are they going to submit within their funded period? Are they going to submit when they thought they were going to, et cetera, so I do think there's kind of comparable quantitative. Andy: Yeah, and that's, and that's, there's comfort in quantification. There's comfort in numbers. There's comfort in you know, you're making progress. You're hitting the milestones. That's great. I keep coming back to that Chinese proverb. You can't measure a pig fat. And I think it's right here in the sense that what they mean is simply measuring the pig is not the thing that's making it fatter. It's feeding the pig is what's making it fatter. Andy: Sometimes you can console yourself with the measurement and the measuring. And what you're ignoring is what are you actually having to pay to make that pig fat? What's it really costing you? Let's, let's torture this analogy to death. If you're, if you're taking food from your own table to fatten the pig, something's gone wrong there. Andy: And so that's really the point I think about this is that it, it's really hard to quantify. I think it's possible to, to identify even if you can't quantify it exactly. So we can identify it, uh, which is an important thing to do, but because we don't quant, can't quantify it exactly, It's easy to disregard it, but the impact or the halo effect of emotional overdraft can become all too visible. Vikki: Yeah, for sure. And I think, especially for my PhD listeners, I want you to also think about your supervisors and the impact that their emotional overdraft, because I'm pretty confident most of them have one, has on you potentially. And then the impact that your emotional overdraft has on other people, because when you're feeling like this, right, it changes how you're interacting with everybody else, you know, you've got much less patience, you're much less likely to be able to sort of reach out and be collaborative and all those sorts of things. Andy: You're more sensitive to criticism. You're less open to, to people helping you. Potentially, it depends on your nature, how it manifests itself. The other thing is emotional overdraft is incredibly greedy. So even if you think if you're sitting here thinking well, this isn't me I'm not dealing with this firstly you're lying to yourself because everyone has to some extent deals with this But what it can do is it can it can go and steal other people's it can create emotional overdraft in someone else and then take it. Andy: So this is the, you know, the person that's working really long hours that they're not going home until late, that they're not engaging with their partner. One day they come home, there's a note on the table that says, you know, I've left you. That, that, that is a classic case of, that person has probably been subsidizing you with their emotional overdraft for a very long period of time and you didn't realize it. So it's, it's pretty insidious. And it doesn't care where it goes to get sustenance and emotional overdraft. It will, it will go and find it where it can. Vikki: Okay. I think we have thoroughly convinced everyone that this is really important. And that lots of people are probably experiencing it. So let's get to what can we do? Vikki: If people really, if they're listening to us today and going, Oh my goodness, they're talking about me. Where do they even start? Other than reading your book, obviously. If you're not going to push your book, I will push your book. Andy: Well, interestingly, when I first submitted the book to the publisher, they said, this is great. We really liked this, Andy, but where's the rest of the book? And I said, well, what do you mean? And I'd got so excited about the concept of emotional overdraft and digging into emotions and this idea of which you talk about, which is you're thinking, driving your emotions, which drive your behaviors, which drive your outcomes. Andy: I'd not written the second half of the book, which is what the heck do you do about it? So they sent me back away. It's part of the reason it took so long, which actually just quite straightforward. So, yeah, you definitely can do something about it. Um, I think there's a couple of steps, though, here that are quite important. Andy: One is to try and measure it. We've talked about measurement a lot here, so I mean, if there's people listening who can come up with a better solution than this, then please do, but there's, you know, some brains listening, so please do think about it. My solution for measuring emotional overdraft was to think about it as a relative, as a relative thing. Andy: So if you think this might be you, set up your spreadsheet, get a piece of paper, whatever, whatever floats your boat, and track every day whether you think your emotional overdraft has gone up or stayed the same or gone down. And you need to do it on the day. It's not really journaling, but it's a simple form of that, because you won't remember, you won't remember in a few days time how you felt. Andy: So on the day, at the end of the day, find a moment to reflect and think, do I feel like my emotional overdraft has got bigger? Has it gone up today? And why might that be? Is it about the same as it was? Or have I done something, did I do something today that made me feel better? That makes me feel a little less stressed. Andy: Start with an index, so typically 100, I guess, if you want to be conventional. Add one if your emotional overdraft has gone up. Don't add anything if it's the same, and take off one if it's gone down. And what you might find across a month is that you've had, I don't know, let's say 15 days where it's gone up, 5 days where it stayed the same, and 10 days where it's gone down. Andy: So you're net 5 days up, so your index would have gone from 100 to 105 across the month. And what that tells you, broadly, your emotional overdraft has got worse in that month. Now, 100 to 105, I don't know, that might be good, it might be bad, it depends on where you are at the moment, where you started. But if that carries on, and it went up by 10 the following month, then you're suddenly at 115 and 5 the next month and 20 the next month. Andy: You really have got to be thinking, way before four months, by the way, what can I be doing differently? And that's where the notes really help. If you're making little notes every day, it doesn't need to be long, it's just a few bullet point keywords, even is going to give you the opportunity to go, is there a pattern in this? Andy: Is it the end of the week where I'm getting physically tired or is it that I'm not recharging at the weekends? I'm withdrawing and I'm just sitting on the couch and watching TV or what's happening and try and see the patterns and try and see what's going on because even just doing that will give you the chance to , to bring some data to this, really. 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: I'd just add one thing on the, the measurement which I think is in line with the stuff that you talk about but sort of reminded me of some of the stuff we talk about too, which is, if you're making a note about why it went up or down, I'd really encourage people to think about circumstance stuff, but also about their own thoughts, because I could imagine a world in which somebody would say that their emotional overdraft has gone up because they got negative comments from their supervisor, and they'd write that down as their reason. And I'd really, really encourage people to write negative comments from my supervisor. I made this mean I'm not good enough to be here, or I'm worried that I'm now not going to finish the paper, or whatever, because I think, and I know we'll talk about thoughts and things in a minute, but I think noticing where there's circumstantial stuff that might be shifting this, but also noticing where it's coming from the things you're telling yourself is really powerful to separate. Andy: You're right. Not just look at the circumstances, but look at the thinking and what's behind that thinking, how you created it. Uh, the second thing I'd say is in the research, what what I discovered was that there are approximately 10 broad areas of behavior or drivers as I call it, which every response I got was a combination of some of these 10 and whatever feedback I got from from the research I could drop it into these 10 areas. So there's 10 drivers. I won't talk about them all but It's different for everybody And I'm no psychologist. So I can't tell you why you've ended up like this Why you are a J. F. D. I. Which is just flipping do it as my publisher insisted I call it or why you have a challenge with trust or why you feel the need to be loved by people. That's not really the point for me. I mean, go ahead and explore that if you wish, but that is what's manifesting in your behavior and online at the emotional overdraft dot com I've created a kind of a very simple. Online, it's sort of a quiz. We called it the Cosmo quiz the whole time I was writing this. I don't know if Cosmo magazine still does these 50 quizzes. Vikki: I don't know, but I remember them from being Andy: Do you know what I mean? I have a younger sister and we used to read them. Vikki: I think we are of a certain age. Other people might not get this. Andy: But there was 50 questions that will tell you whether you'll still be with your boyfriend at the end of the summer. It was ridiculous stuff like that. Has he bought you flowers? Yes, no. And this is 50 yes, no questions, and the output of which is a spider chart, which identifies where your behaviors are contributing to your emotional overdraft most. Andy: And your shape will be different to everybody else's. Everyone's different but it's a really useful exercise. Mainly it's pretty accurate given that it's a 50 question quiz and it's, you know, it's invented by a marketeer, not, not a scientist, um, but it seems to be fairly accurate and people tend to, I see people nodding when they get it. Andy: And even if it's not do some honest reflection and go, well, why do I think that's wrong? And why do I think that isn't me? And is that really, am I really as good at that bit or is it wrong? And why is it wrong? So it's just a vehicle for reflection. But it definitely creates some, for me and for most people I know who've completed it, it creates some thinking around what are the things that are happening typically for you that are almost triggers for you? Andy: What's the sort of thing that's going on? And if you do that, then you get what that does is that sensitizes you to the particular drivers that, that might be causing you the most problem. Andy: So, JFDI is a good one actually. It's quite a good one which is the, just flipping do, I'm a doer. These are people who identify as doers. They get stuff done. Um, I've learned to say, get stuff done as well. I'm a doer. I make stuff happen. Andy: That's great. It's a bit like a SWOT analysis, this, you know, when you did these at universities, every strength is a weakness, every opportunity is a threat. And being a doer and getting stuff done and not hesitating and making stuff happen is brilliant on one hand but the flip side of it is that it can be, it can lead you to do the things that aren't necessarily the priorities. Andy: It can lead you to do things that are giving you the hit and the buzz. But that aren't really getting the important things done. You're leaving things back on your to do list that actually would move the dial. The things that would have the most impact. But as we all know, every tick on a to do list is created equal. Andy: You get the same amount of endorphins from, I don't know, rewrite my list tick. I mean, I've been known to add things to my list which I've done which weren't on the list just to tick them off. I'm sure lots of people have done that. Vikki: I stand by that technique. Andy: It's legit because if you reflect on your list. Vikki: Yes. Andy: I think that's okay. I also, by the way, don't call it a to do list at all. I called it a don't forget list and that changes my relationship. I was a slave to my to do list. It was to do. You've got to do this. This is, you fail if you don't complete, whereas a don't forget list is great for me because I'm a little bit forgetful and actually it's the same thing, but it's just saying this is stuff you mustn't forget to do and then each morning I prioritize a few things off that list. Andy: So it really, that helps me as a technique. But, uh, so what I'm saying is, is JFDI can be very helpful to you, but it can also lead you to behaviors, which particularly start to get an emotional overdraft and you start to develop signs of stress or burnout, it then becomes worse. You can feel like you're getting stuff done, but you're getting the wrong things done and you're smart people and then you know it. And then you feel bad about it. You feel you haven't achieved things, and that piles on into your emotional overdraft. So again, you're starting to feel worse. This, this thing feeds on itself. All of these behaviors in and of themselves can be a good thing. Empathy is one I talk about. Andy: People say, how on earth can empathy be a bad thing? Everything in business certainly is talking about empathy is the great, everyone needs to have empathy. And that's totally true. But the other side of this empathetic feeling is the need to be liked, the need to feel belonging, the need to feel that you are one of the gang or that you're accepted and that's driving the wrong behavior. Or can be driving the wrong behavior, and it might not be behavior that's serving you. It might be behavior that's not serving your PhD. In the end, it's not serving anybody. Andy: So being aware of of where your behavior is coming from, I think is extremely helpful. Vikki: And I will link to the site that you mentioned in the show notes. Andy: And it's so easy because it's the same name as the book. So emotional overdraft. Go there. Um, and then you really can do something about it because you can go, okay, let's get, let's get organized about it. And I, I don't mean to add things here to do this. I don't, I'm, someone said to me, Andy, you've written this book and I feel like I need it, but I haven't got time to read it. I said, well, that's okay. Don't read it if you haven't got time to read it. And that's gonna make you feel worse. Vikki: Also, I found it sneakily on Spotify this week as well. So, if people have Spotify Premium, you can find the audio version too. So, um, Andy: Tuck in everybody. Vikki: There's that option too. Andy: So, yeah, and I think there's a sense of, I'm listening to this Andy, I get it, I see what you're trying to say, but I'm so busy, I'm so stressed, I'm so stretched. Andy: How do I make this time to reflect? How do I make this time to stop? How do I even start to change this stuff? I feel like I'm on a hamster wheel. Or worse, I'm sort of careering downhill on a, it's been snowing in Dorset today. I'm on a sledge just hammering down the hill. I'm not stopping until I get to the bottom. Andy: And I know that's how it feels. And I know that's what your brain is telling you. But there is a finite amount of time in every day. And your job, as being a better boss of yourself is to make the time to be the boss you, I'm not going to just steal your idea here, Vikki, be the boss you, and what's the difference between the boss you and the implementer you? The implementer you is hammering away, getting things done, piling along, taking the to do lists, maybe doing the wrong things, that's all the stuff we've been talking about. The boss you's job, and I talk in analogies as you've spotted already, um, is to stand on the bridge of the ship and look at what's coming. What risks? Is there a storm coming? Are there pirates? Is there land? Is there a shoal of fish? Is there opportunity? Your job is to be up on the bridge of that ship looking forwards, looking out, planning, having some kind of vision for what you want to happen, some direction. It is not simply to be down in the boat, rowing like crazy. And if you stop for half a beat and think about that, you know it's right. Andy: And that's the time, that's the moment that you go, Okay, now I'll stop for a second. I'll just take a moment and recognize that working on me is just as important as working for me. And, and work on yourself a little bit. Andy: And if you're finding that really difficult, I'd encourage you to talk to someone else about it. Andy: Because it's so much easier to find time to talk to someone about this. Just put the words out. That's why we have coaches. That's why we have mentors. That's why we have tutors. That's why we have people whose job it is to listen to us. Find, find that person or find those people and in the book I talk about a board, a personal board and this, everyone has this. So in a board in a company is a group of experts who come together and their collective skills are what drive the business forwards. Andy: But you can have a personal board and that might be someone who just listens to you, someone who's just what I call a cheerleader. Just someone who is there who goes you're great I don't care what you do. You're great. Sometimes you just need that. Vikki: Yeah, Andy: you just need the cheerleader You might need a mentor. You can maybe find a mentor. You may already have someone in your network of contacts who could be your mentor. A coach. So a coach is different. I mean, a coach and mentor, there's a slight distinction there. Um, someone who's going to help coach you through the specifics of what you need to get done. Andy: Someone who you can lean on in that moment. So that's three people on your board already. You might have someone who's a physical coach or a trainer, and I have a personal trainer because I know I would not go to the gym unless Luke was down there tapping his watch going, you're late again, Andy, let's do it. Andy: But I do go, I go twice a week, and I run twice a week, and Luke, when I, if I don't run, Luke whatsapps me, because he can see on Strava that I haven't run. So, I'm all for personal accountability, but sometimes it helps to have a little external accountability to so you can build a group of people around you and I would encourage you to let them know they're your personal board and those people then are the ones you can lean on without feeling guilt without feeling like you're putting on them without feeling embarrassed or awkward. Andy: Ask them if they're prepared to do that. And it doesn't mean you'll call on them, even. It's just that they, they know they're there. And in my experience, most people, if you say, I'd like you to be my mentor, I'd like you to be my, my supporter and my cheerleader, they're flattered. And they're up for it. Andy: So that, I think that's a really good idea to, well, I would think it's a good idea. It's my idea, isn't it? But it's not, conceptually, it's not my idea. The idea of a personal board is not my concept, but I did jam it in the book. So, yeah, I think that's a really good way to start and the other thing is about yourself. And the way we talk to ourselves, I think, is very important and very helpful. Vikki: Yeah, and there was a part when you were talking about the impact of thoughts in the book. One thing that I really liked was you were talking about how positive emotions can feed your resilience and how you can sort of reduce or make yourself less susceptible to the overdraft by making sure that you create space for joy and interest and things like that. Vikki: And I, I think that's fascinating because I think we often focus on reducing negative emotions, and we often think that the way to move ourselves out of emotional overdrafts and things like that is that we inevitably have to do less, we have to reduce our workload, we have to sort of take things off our plate, and maybe it's the bit of me that likes to be able to do everything, but I think it's really interesting this idea that actually you can do the same things sometimes, but if you can do them with joy and interest and fun, then they don't deplete overdraft as much as if you're doing them in a, Oh, and I've got to do this and I should have done it before and I still haven't done it, so we should probably do it, but I don't want to kind of vibes. I wonder if you could. Speak to that a little bit, because I love that part. Andy: I don't know, you kind of nailed it, but we create the world we live in. Our brains are amazing at controlling how we think about everything and you genuinely can re reset your thinking about any given circumstance. So if you get up in the morning, you think, Oh God, it's just I couldn't do enough work yesterday and I've got piles to do and I've got to send this off by five and it's going to be long day. I had a day today that was going to be many, many, many meetings. Monday this week was awful on Sunday night. Andy: And I was thinking, I literally, even my lunchtime had been taken with a meeting. I was thinking it's ridiculous. Why does no one care about my, my physical wellbeing? And no one's who's scheduling this stuff. And it was me, of course. So what an idiot. Uh, but I had a little word with myself because I said, well, firstly you're busy because, you're in demand and your clients want to talk to you and those people really value what you have to say. You're having an impact on their businesses and you're having an impact on them and I get amazing texts. At the end of Monday I got a beautiful whatsapp from one of my clients who said after our conversation I felt completely different and she was in a not great place. She said I felt completely different. I cannot wait to get into work tomorrow. So this is why you do it and I reminded myself on Sunday night before I went to bed. That there'll be a lot of meetings. That's a fact, but I can go into those meetings thinking, and this is nine opportunities to make a real impact on people. Andy: Or I can spend the rest of the evening feeling like a grumpy old codger going, you know, who is it that does all these things? It's ridiculous. I've got a horrible day coming up tomorrow. I went into that day. I had an impact. As it turns out, I got feedback that I had some impact on some people, which is the buzz I get from my job. And at the end of the day, I felt fantastic. That, that, that idea, you can translate again and again and again. You genuinely can, and it's a question of practice, really. I use the "I wonder" exercise, which I know you may have spoken about before, Vikki, but Andy: no, Vikki: I haven't, but I Andy: it's really useful. And you can use it on yourself. But traditionally you use it in front of somebody else. So if there's someone with a with a challenge that are dealing with, You can get two people sit in front of them and they do an I wonder exercise. So they talk out loud. The person they're talking about isn't allowed to say anything. They just have to listen. And the two people exchange, they start the sentence, every sentence with, I wonder. So it's not judgmental. It's not factual. It's just, I wonder if the reason that Andy got so cross was because he hadn't realized that there might be another reason why that person did what they did. And you can have that conversation backwards and forwards and you can have it with yourself. So if you can catch it and stop and go, well, I wonder why that, that busy day is making me feel so cross. I wonder why my 5pm deadline is stressing me out. Andy: Well, you could go, well, I know why it's stressing me out. I have, I've got too much to do and I can't do it by 5pm. But it's not the 5pm deadline. It's your thinking that's stressing you out. So what, what, what's going on in your thinking? I'm not going to complete everything by five o'clock. Is that true or isn't it? Because sometimes that's not true. But if it is true, then if you can take that moment and go, well, okay, what would be the best thing to do at this point? Would it be best for me to let someone know that? Because they'd much rather know before five o'clock, I'm going to let them down. And it's nine o'clock now. I can phone them now. At least they know I'm not going to deliver, then they may be able to, you know, if they're depending on me for it, or if it's a deadline, they might be prepared to extend that deadline, or they might be prepared to help or do something differently. Andy: So, just by stopping, you can go, wondering what, what you're thinking is doing for you. If you're feeling something, just look at it briefly and go, is that serving me? Is that telling me that maybe my thinking is not of the quality it might be? So you're stressing and panicking about five o'clock. I'm in panic mode. What can I do about it? How can I think differently? It's such a good exercise. So I wonder why I'm thinking that way. I wonder why that's where I'm getting to. It's not easy. It takes practice, but again, talk to other people about it and see if you practice with other people. Vikki: The other one where you were talking about things you can do about it that really struck me as relevant for this audience was the one around self worth that a lot of the problems here come from people attaching their self worth to their productivity or their work and that's something I see with my clients a lot. Vikki: What can people who are running up this emotional overdraft because they're convinced that they have to be good at what they do, they have to do lots of it, they have to be the best in order to be worthwhile. What can they do about it, do you think? Andy: So I think if your self worth is tied up in, in your work, you are setting yourself up. You're putting yourself in quite a risky position, because if your self worth is purely about the quality of the output of the work that you're doing, of the writing that you're producing, or the thinking that you're producing, or the time in which you're producing it, other people's opinion of the work that you produce, you're giving your power to other people and other things all the time. So you're giving that away. Andy: And I think that's, if you're striving for that there's almost no upside to it. You could be proud of the work you produce. That's the only upside. But the downside potentially is that you, you really are putting yourself at risk of of judging yourself purely in one dimension or in one direction. Andy: So that the answer to it is really to understand where your self worth comes from and to look, look for other ways of justifying yourself or understanding your worth within your society, your community and so on. So I think it's it's almost limitless number of options you have open to you. Working with the working with the scouts keeps coming to my mind on this Vikki: I'm a Guide Leader. Andy: Maybe there you go. And that's what I mean. It's sort of finding something that's beyond you is particularly valuable. Andy: If you find that your self worth is wrapped up in the production of that paper or simply achieving the, the grant, you know, the funding you were talking about, and then you don't, where does that leave you? Vikki: Yeah. Andy: Whereas what you might realize is that I might get another chance that might open up a different opportunity. That's, that's a shame. It's unfortunate. I, but I tried my best and now I can do other things I can focus on other stuff. So it's, it's a really bad place to be from an emotional overdraft point of view because it's, it doesn't really have any upside. Andy: And even if you do really well and you get the grant or, you know, the paper's published or you get the peer recognition or whatever happens, what happens next? Vikki: Oh, those goalposts move quickly. Andy: Yeah, yeah. Vikki: For sure. Andy: And we never stop. You know, we are still being chased by the saber toothed tigers in our brains, our monkey brains. So, we are not geared up to stop and dwell on the good. We don't spend time reflecting on how marvellous we were and how fantastic it was. We immediately start thinking, how could I have done this better? What am I doing next? What's happening? We're thinking about, we still don't want to get killed by the thing. Andy: Back in the day when we lived in caves, if we stopped and congratulated ourselves every time we killed a deer or something, we'd get eaten. So we don't think that way. We're not wired like that. So, even if you succeed and your self worth is boosted in that moment, it will not last long. Vikki: And some people, one of the things I often try and remind people is that even if you're somebody who thinks that your work is your main purpose, I mean, I'm saying, I encourage people to have lives outside of academia, to have their hobbies and their fun and all that stuff. Andy: And I see, I see emotional overdraft as my mission. I actually, my mission is to talk about this to everyone I can because I think it helps people. So it is my mission. I'm driven by it, but not to the point where other things are excluded. Vikki: I agree. And the thing I try and remind people, is that if you're going to attach your worth to your work, at least attach it to your life's work, not to this one paper, you know, I think this is why we see it so often with people who are at the beginnings of their academic careers is they've had this whole time through school and university where they're usually the brightest people. They're usually scoring amazing marks and everything like that. Suddenly they become PhD students. Vikki: It's not quite as straightforward anymore for them and Their worth is tied up in this one chapter they're writing and so getting critiques from their supervisors or submitting to a journal and getting rejected is suddenly an indictment on their entire kind of ability and thoughts and the stuff they're trying to put out in the world. Vikki: I try and remind people, at least see your worth in terms of the body of work you're going to do over your 40 years in academia, for example, because then this one little thing isn't like a massive mark on your self worth, it's just going to be one little part of the story of all the great things you contribute through, through your academic work. And I think sometimes that can help separate it out a little bit. Andy: Definitely right. And this is, again, an opportunity for reframing, isn't it? Because you could look at that rejection and go, well, that's it. I'm, I'm not good enough. I'm, I failed. It was, it reflects on me. I'm poor at this stuff. I'm not cut out for this or, or they are stupid. They can't see my brilliance or whatever. You can react that way to it or you can go, this is an opportunity to learn. This is an opportunity to maybe, maybe the time is right for me to stop. Maybe actually I could be doing something way more practical, that that would be contributory in some way, because I do think everyone should have a sense of where they're trying to go, not just not the end of the paper, but a north star something further on. Andy: Because if you don't have that, you're basically jumping, you know, like a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad. You're just, the success is not getting to the lily pad, the success is getting across the pond. That's, that's that goal. So, um, another tortured analogy for you. Andy: So I, I think you're absolutely right. And, and it's such an opportunity to see the world in a different way. How could I have done that differently? What could I have done? How can I change this? How good am I at taking criticism? Is this an opportunity for me to hear criticism and become a total criticism ninja, take this on and do amazing things with it? Well, that's the opportunity it presents. Vikki: Now, one thing I wanted to ask you about. I really enjoyed the final bit of your book, because often people talk about, you know, "and here are all the things you can do to get over this problem" and you had, you had that big chunk. Vikki: But then you had the sort of, and then other things you can do after that. You know, if you want to take this further, you want to think about it in more depth. And I really, really enjoyed that chapter. And one of the things that really stood out to me as a really clever idea was this notion of a relapse kit. And I wonder if you could tell the listeners a little bit about the relapse kit. Cause I thought, I thought that was really clever and it was something that I hadn't heard about in other places. Andy: Yeah, so, it sort of came from, um, as an amalgam of other people's ideas. So it's not, there's no new ideas in the world, of course there aren't. But I struggle with my weight and my weight's gone up and down over the years. I'm 59 now and it's probably never going to change, but I, I keep hoping and I'm pretty harsh on myself, and my self speak is pretty, pretty horrible, and I'm very judgmental, and, and it's, it's, yeah, it's not, it's not great when I fall off the wagon, and particularly with me at snacks, and a coach I was working with said, it was chocolate biscuits at the time, he said, if you find yourself going to the cup and having a chocolate biscuit, he said, That's a relapse. You know, we're trying to go through 28 days without having one and you find 14 days in, you, you, you have, you haven't failed, really, you've had a chocolate biscuit, but you're not going to eat the whole packet. And if you do eat the whole packet, say you've just eaten a packet of biscuits. Failure would be doing that every day and going back to that sort of behavior. So that's just a relapse. Andy: And that happens in all sorts of walks of life in all sorts of ways. All the behaviors, particularly in trying to change habit. So he said, put a little note in that cupboard with the biscuits. He said, I just want you to write a little note where you tell yourself what, what you think about yourself in that, what you really think about yourself in that moment. And what I really think about with myself when I, when I'm being rational about it is that's normal. It's human nature. You've just had a damn biscuit. It, it doesn't really matter. Don't have another one, Andy. Don't, don't just carry on because my, my brain goes, you failed now. So it doesn't matter. Andy: You might as well. And by the way, go to the shop and get another packet. So that's what the note said. And he said, and just tuck it by the biscuits. And when you have a biscuit, if you relapse, get the notes out and have a little read. And I just thought this was such a good idea, such a strong idea. So, a relapse kit could be if you find that you're struggling to get down to some deep work and you're distracting yourself again with YouTube or social media. That's a typical sort of thing that might happen, I guess, your relapse kit could be a note to yourself, which just to remind yourself. What that does to you and why you, why you're probably doing it and, and to be kind to yourself and give yourself some helpful advice, it could be, someone's phone number. Andy: So maybe in that moment, the best thing actually you could do is phone. You've agreed that you're going to phone one of your personal board and you can phone one of them up and say, I've just spent 2 hours watching YouTube videos about cats on skateboards. And I'm really not getting down to my work. I'm starting to spiral a bit and it's now kind of getting down on myself, which means I still can't work and it's getting worse, so I'm going to watch some more and you can chat about it. And maybe that's your relapse kit. Andy: Maybe it's it's what's your motivation. It might be something that reminds you your motivation, but have it available and have it, not out and on your table or on your wall. I think you have to, with a relapse kit, you have to go and think of it like a first aid kit with the white cross on the top. You're going to open this box, open this thing, and it's going to help you in that moment. It's going to be like a emotional bandage. It works every time, particularly if when you, when you plan it, when you structure that relapse kit, you do it with absolute kindness and generosity towards yourself. You have to be thinking. I love this person. I want this person to succeed. They're just human. I know they do great stuff when they can really get down to it. So I'm, I'm going to forgive them. They need to forgive themselves and have another go. If you do that, it works incredibly well. Don't have a sign there that says. You weak individual. That's not what we're talking about here. That's like putting rusty razor blades in your first aid kit. That's not helpful. Yeah. It's got to be something helpful. But it, yeah, I get lots of feedback on that and it really does work. Vikki: No, and I really like that you emphasize the kindness and the reassurance and then I think not making it too big a deal that you've realized because I think often when we wrap that up in a load of shame and a load of self criticism, we end up avoiding our goal for much longer because suddenly you hate yourself because, you know, you said you were going to write this much every day and you haven't today and then you start avoiding it. Andy: Day one, a thousand words a day. Day one, I haven't written a thousand words. Vikki: Yeah, and so you then avoid it for a month. I've failed. Yeah. Instead of being like, oh, okay. I was going to do a thousand words today. I haven't still got an hour left. Maybe I could do 200. Let's crack that bit out. We'll get on tomorrow. Andy: You know that expression if you've only got 40 percent to give that day and you've given 40%, you've given a hundred percent that day. I love that idea. If that's what's available to you and you've given it all. So this sense of kindness is really important. That's not, I'm not a new age woo woo thinker, but genuinely self kindness is one of the rarest commodities and it's something to cultivate in yourself if you're listening to this. It's really important. Vikki: And you can even bring that into the goal setting. So as an example, I would never recommend somebody sets a no biscuits for 28 days goal, because you screw that up one day, you've missed your goal. If you set yourself as few biscuits as possible in 28 days, for example, or even better 28 apples in 28 days or whatever it is, giving yourself something alternative to do, then it becomes something that you can work towards throughout. If you have one day where you have a biscuit, then okay, crack on. I can still have 27 days where I don't eat a biscuit and that's pretty awesome. Andy: Exactly that. So designing the goals are really important. And talk to someone like you who, who understands the precise nature of what you're dealing with and can give you some practical hands on help. That's, that's really important here. So that. You know, that's the point. You don't have to do this alone and doing it alone is not heroic. Vikki: I love this. You're telling people to come to me for caching. I'm telling them to buy your book. It's like a mutual promotion. Andy: Sorry, everybody that wasn't set up. Vikki: We're just that good. Anyway, thank you so much, Andy. I really, really appreciate you coming on. We've already mentioned your website a little bit, and obviously the book, but if people want to know more, where can they find you? Andy: I'd say go to emotionaloverdraft. com. I produce a podcast myself, and there's lots of interesting case studies on there. I write about it a lot. Just knowing more about it is a helpful thing to people, and yeah, everyone knows where they can buy a book. Go independent if you can. Vikki: Yes. Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on. 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 You can find links to Dr Lilia Mantai’s research here How to build your own academic community If you sometimes feel lonely or like you haven't got the support that you need around you, unfortunately it's not that unusual. Often when people feel like this, they feel like they're the only one, right? That everybody else is part of this like fun and vibrant academic community and has got friends around them supporting them and cheering them on, when in reality I speak to PhD students all the time who feel really disconnected from their studies. Maybe you don't get on with your research group as well as you thought you might, and outside of that you're not sure where to find an academic community, or perhaps you've had to move away from family and friends and you're really missing that. Maybe you're a part time student, a distance learning student, whatever it is, there's tons of reasons why you might currently be feeling lonely, and you might feel like you haven't got the community you need. As usual though, I'm here to tell you that although it's normal, it doesn't have to be like this. And in today's episode, I'm going to tell you about six different types of social support. Five of them grounded in some quite interesting literature that I found and one of them, which I haven't found in the literature and I think is really important. We're going to use this framework to kind of audit where you're at and to think through what's what types of support you might want to actively try and build over the next few months. Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach and this week we are talking about social support. Now many of you will know I stayed in the same university all the way from undergraduate through to full professor so I was there 25ish years in the end and you'd think that would mean that I had. a pretty stable community. Now the fact is that actually in academia, at every kind of milestone you hit, you have a big change of people. So when I finished undergrad, they left. Then when I finished my PhD, lots of the people I did my PhD with left. And then over the years, I kind of made friends with different groups of people, many of whom then got jobs in other places, moved on and so on. So there were several times during that academic career where I really felt like I was having to rebuild the support around me. And at that stage, I was kind of winging it, I guess. I was feeling like I didn't necessarily have people at some stages to, like, go do fun stuff with, at other stages, who were kind of at the same place as me in their careers, where we could share ideas and things. And so when I noticed that, I made efforts to build those connections. I'm quite a social person. I'm quite extroverted. And so once I noticed what I needed, I didn't find it too challenging to go out and at least start creating those bonds. To tell you the truth, I'm having to do it a little bit now because, um, many of you will know I left my university job back in 2022. I'm living in a much smaller place than I used to, and I'm still finding my friendship group. I've got an amazing family network around me. I've got a few old friends near here , but in terms of those sort of fun, hobby connections, and I used to have a lot of them in Birmingham. I'm still figuring that out, right? But often it can feel either like not a priority, or it can feel a bit like you don't know where to start. Or it can all feel a little bit like luck that you either meet people you get on with or you don't. Now, I did make an episode quite a long time ago called How to Build an Academic Community. And if you haven't listened to that one, I will link it in the show notes for you. I highly recommend you go back to listen to that because there's some really important stuff about the kind of how to connect with people, where to connect to people, um, in that I'm not going to touch on in today's episode. What I want to do today instead is to give you a framework to assess where your support is at, to better identify what type of support you might need more of. And some of this builds on, as you know, I always try and be a kind of evidence based practitioner. I'm trying to stay up to speed with the literature, bring that into my practice. You guys want to be connected to an academic for a reason. You don't want me just making stuff up. So I was looking for some stuff to do with social support and PhD students and academia, and I found some really interesting work by somebody called Dr. Lilia Mantai. Now I am hoping, I'm going to contact Dr. Lilia to see whether she'd like to come on the podcast at some point in the future. But one of the things that I pulled out of her work were these different types of social support that she identified and the different roles that they play in academia. And so what I'm going to do today is I'm going to introduce you to the four that she outlined in her first pieces of work. A very important fifth one that she then uncovered when she did some more detailed research. And I'm going to finish up with one that I think everybody overlooks and I'm going to explain to you why I think it's overlooked, why it's so important, and what you can do about it. The first four that she identified is built out of the social support literature. These were moral support, emotional support, guidance and mentoring, and companionship. So let's think about those. The first one is moral and I was a little bit like what do we even mean by moral support. How it's usually framed is around inspiration and encouragement. This is having people around you who support you and cheer you on in what you're doing and give you a kind of image of what it could be like. So for some of you, those of you who are in positive supervisory experiences, you might find that your supervisors are an amazing source of moral support. That you look at them and you're like, oh my goodness, one day I could be like them. If I work hard, if I do all the things, I could be like them. You see the change they're making in the world, see the impact they're having, the publications they're getting, and you're kind of inspired to make that kind of change. For others, maybe it's senior people in your research group, so the PhD students or academics who are a few years ahead of you, whatever stage you're at, right, there's people that are kind of ahead of you, and those people may be encouraging you, they may be sort of showing you what's possible. Now this is really important because whether you're doing a PhD or working in academia more generally. We often don't spend too much time in the big picture. We often spend time in the day to day of, I need to do this. I've got that on my to do list, that needs writing, that needs researching, whatever it is. And we don't always take that time to kind of take that step back and remind ourselves why we're doing it. Having somebody who is inspiring or encouraging or both can help you recall that big picture. When, in the best circumstances here, when you see that person it reminds you of why you're doing this stuff. For others of you, maybe you're thinking that you don't get that from your supervisors, from your research group. And that's okay too. You can look further afield in academia for people who are perhaps more in line with your priorities or doing things more the way that you would like them to be and maybe think about how you can remind yourself of those people more regularly. Do you want to follow them on social media? Do you want to try and meet them at conferences? How can you make those people a more tangible presence in your life? For others of you, that moral support might come from other parts of your life. It might be your friends or your family. Maybe you've got a reason you did your PhD. Maybe you know somebody who has a condition and you're now researching that condition. Maybe you've grown up with somebody who always inspired your interest in archaeology and now that's what you're studying too. I'd really encourage you to think about who in your life inspires you, who in your life encourages you, and to think about not only how can you have them in your life more often, but also how can you have those conversations and those reflections more often. Because there's something very energy giving about being encouraged and inspired. So try to identify who that is for you and how you can get more of them in your life. The second type of support that she identified is emotional support. This is somebody who really provides a listening ear. So they don't necessarily have to inspire you to great things, they have to be there for you when you're struggling. They need to be somebody who you're willing to be vulnerable with, at least to some extent. You're able to share your worries and concerns with, and who will give you that safe space for you to be able to talk about the things that are bothering you. Now, I think this kind of divides down into different sorts of support in that sometimes you want somebody who totally gets it and who'll perhaps moan along with you, right, so that you don't feel like you're crazy. So that you feel like other people experience this and they will say, yeah, tis is rubbish, I hate it when that happens, that happened to me too. Other times, the listening ear you need is somebody who's completely detached, who can help you sort of retain some perspective and who can help you see that perhaps outside of academia the things that we're stressing about aren't as big as we're making them out to be. Who in your life provides that listening ear? How do you feel about sharing with them? Do you feel comfortable? Do you feel like you burden them? Do you feel like you talk too much or not enough? Do you feel better after you speak to them? Ideally, that person doesn't necessarily fix the problems that you've got, but helps you to feel heard and helps you feel like these problems are both legitimate and manageable one way or another. Again, for me, I kind of have my insiders and my outsiders, right? I had really, and I still do have really close, lovely colleagues who would be my emotional support who knew exactly what I was going through, knew the people that I was moaning about, knew the types of situations that I was talking about, and so could really empathize and understand without me having to explain it. And that has been absolutely crucial at so many stages of my career and that builds over time, right? Some of those people who I feel like are my closest people now started out as people I didn't know that well. They started out as people that I invited for a coffee every now and again and we had a little chat and slowly you get to know and trust each other. So you can build these things over time. Then on the other hand, there were people that are outside my academic circle who are a listening ear, but in that slightly more detached way. So I have friends that work in the corporate world, and they don't get it at all. They don't, you know, they don't understand what I do, and why the things that feel like a big deal to me are important. But they love me so they listen to me talk about it and sometimes they give an angle that maybe I hadn't even thought of a different way of looking at it based on their experiences in their different world that they live in. So this emotional support can come from inside the academy, it can come from outside the academy. Some of you may also have professional support in the sense of counsellors, therapists, that sort of thing. And again, you can never underestimate the impact of having that really neutral space that is solely about you, unlike with friends where it goes both ways, where it's solely about you to be able to talk through the kind of the deeper aspects of the emotions that you're experiencing. The third type of support I want you to think about is guiding and mentoring. Now the obvious person who should be providing this is your supervisor, your supervisory team, your dissertation committee, if that's how your structure's set up. The people that are actually, it's their jobs to provide this stuff. And I want you to think about how that's going for you right now. What sorts of support is your supervisor good at providing? What support do they automatically provide that you find useful and that's working well? What elements are working less well? Either they don't provide it unless asked, or that you don't like the sort of support they provide, or that you just don't feel like they're there for you. This is one of the reasons why it's important to separate out these forms of social support. Because when we think about our supervisors, there can be a tendency to expect our supervisors to provide all of this support. They're going to be a listening ear, they're going to inspire, they're going to enthuse, they're going to guide and mentor us. Maybe we even expect to have social time with them as well. I want to encourage you, your supervisor doesn't have to provide all of these. Hopefully your supervisor is providing at least some of these, at least some of the time. They don't have to provide all of them. So think, in terms of guiding and mentoring, where is your supervisor really useful? Where are they expert? Where are they willing to help? Where does it fall within their comfort zone? You can then think though, where are the gaps in that? Where's the sort of guiding and mentoring that I'm not getting? So for example, one I've seen is people where the supervisor is amazing at teaching research skills. They'll be in the lab with them, they'll be hands on, they'll be helping them develop whatever technique it is they're doing. Super, super helpful at training in the laboratory, testing the equipment, you know, learning new techniques, all of that stuff. But if you want guidance and mentoring about organizing your time, or you want guidance and mentoring about how to write effectively, this person might not be your person. Maybe they're really bad at it too. Maybe they're naturally amazing at it and so have never really thought about it before. And I want you to think if there's gaps in that guiding and mentoring. Where can you fill those gaps? Think about where are there gaps and where can you fill those either within your university or beyond. So it might be bringing in collaborators. It might be accessing support for things like writing, for example. Most of your universities will have how to write effectively courses and all that kind of thing. How can you fill the gaps instead of spending time sort of bemoaning the fact that your supervisor doesn't provide everything? How can you find the bits that you're not getting from your supervisor and fill them from elsewhere. Or how can you identify the bits you're currently not getting from your supervisor and consider whether it's something that you could legitimately ask your supervisor for. Sometimes they don't do it automatically but it doesn't mean that they're not willing to help with those things. The fourth type of social support is companionship. This is often not anything to do with academia. This is having people that you can just have fun with. Now this might, if you have your own families or you live close to your family, it might be your family. It might be friends, it might be people, like I was saying at the very beginning, from hobbies that you're involved with. One of the things I adored about where I was before was I had sort of little pockets of random people. I had my paddle boarding club and my circus club and my people I knew from kids camp and my people I knew from the adventure races I worked on and things. I had my little random pockets of people, whose company I loved, who I always had a giggle when I saw. And where I felt like a part of a little group. Now one of the problems in academia, whether you're a new PhD student all the way through to a senior professor, is we often convince ourselves we don't have time for that stuff. That by the time we've done our work and dealt with our responsibilities, particularly those of you who have children that you're looking after, we think we haven't got time for that stuff. I should be working. You know, academics work all the time. And I'm here to wipe away that. I guarantee that you will be more productive if you have some times of companionship every week, if not every day. There is something about having playtime, having time where you can relax and just enjoy somebody's company and not have to think about work and not have to think about performing well or any of those things that is so good for the mental health, so good, I believe, for your physical health that it will infuse everything else you do. I think we're going so far as to say. I think it's super important, even if it doesn't make you better at your job. Even if it does take a bit of time away, and you don't make up for that time by being more effective, I think it's still super important. I think you need it to be a functioning human being. The people that I saw being most miserable in their PhDs and academia more generally, are the people who didn't have any of that stuff, are the people who only worked. If you feel like you've let that slip, if you're listening to this going, I just don't have that, I'm in a country where I don't know anyone, or a city where I don't know anyone, I haven't had time, don't worry, it's okay, this isn't some like big failing of you that you haven't, we're, you're under a lot of pressure, and that's okay, it's fine that you're under, and that's okay, it's understandable that with all the pressures on you, you've prioritised other things. But this is my little call to you to do one or two things to just try and build some of that companionship. That might be taking people for coffee at work, just suggesting catching up for a little zoom chat with people you don't know that well, maybe, or preferably please do some stuff outside of academia, even if it's one off stuff, even if it's going to be, you know, I'm not saying you have to join a club and go every week or whatever. Find something that's fun to do once in a while where you might see the same people. If you go back at the same time, you might see the same people and where there's little opportunities for interactions. So I've just joined a netball club. I can't remember if I've told you guys that before. It's like slow basketball. Um, And this is perfect. I don't go all the time. I've only been going a few weeks. So I haven't made any good friends yet, but we chatter before it starts. We have a giggle while we play. We chatter afterwards. At some point, I am sure that we will suggest, you know, probably when the weather improves a bit and things, we'll suggest going for a drink afterwards or meeting up for a coffee during the week or whatever it is, there's opportunities there for it to progress into more friendship type things. I want you to look for things like that, whether it's going to the gym, whether it's going exercise classes, art classes, whether it's just regularly going to the same coffee shop. So you might see the same people working in the same coffee shop and you can sort of strike up a bit of a conversation with them. Introverts, I know this may sound completely painful, but we don't have to do it with lots of people. We don't have to do it hundreds of times, but just putting yourself in a position where you might have that kind of regular contact can be an amazing way to build that sort of companionship. So those were the first four moral, emotional, guidance and mentoring companionship. And then Lilia Manti identified a further one. She did research with PhD students and their supervisors and really identified how social support can also help you in your developing identity as a PhD student, as an academic. And like I say, I don't want to go into this in tons of detail because I do hope that I'll be able to get her to come on the podcast at some point in the future to talk about it in more detail. But essentially, when you go from the beginning of a PhD to the end of a PhD, or starting an academic position to becoming a more senior member of staff, you're not only learning new skills and doing new things, you're changing who you are as a person. You are becoming an academic. You are starting to identify as somebody who has academic skills and who has academic opinions and belongs to an academic network. And your social support is hugely important to this. So, I've seen over the years, particularly at undergraduate, but to some extent at PhD as well, people who do their PhD without ever really engaging outside of that direct supervisory relationship. They've got their friends at home, they've potentially got family at home, they turn up, they do the things they need to do, they leave. And that can be, if your goal is simply to get a PhD, happy days, do it, let's go. But if your goal is to become somebody who is an academic, whether that means you want it for a career or not, but if your goal is to identify as belonging to an academic group, then we need to have the connections in place in order to do that. Now I'm going to refer to the how part of this. I want you to listen to that podcast I mentioned called how to build your academic community. I also want you to listen to an episode that I recorded with Jen Polk a few months back where we looked at networking. So if you're just like, Oh my God, no networking, definitely not. That's awful. Check out that episode. We kind of debunk a whole load of thoughts around networking. But when we surround ourselves by people who care about the research that we're doing and where we care about their research and who think about things the way a historian or a biochemist or whoever you are think about things, that starts to change who you are too. It starts to change the way you see yourself. Suddenly it's normal to be somebody who can experience a critique of their work and not internalize it too horrendously and respond to it in a constructive way. Suddenly you become somebody who is part of that broader academic community. And again, for some of you, your supervisor will be a real kind of gatekeeper, facilitator to this, introducing you into different networks. They'll really see that as part of their role. Others won't. Others will take a more functional approach to supervision. They won't necessarily, they'll see getting you through the PhD as their prime concern, not so much sort of enculturing you into these sorts of academic communities. But that's okay. You can do this in your own ways. You can build that sort of network for yourselves. This doesn't necessarily need to be within your direct group if your supervisor is not providing it. But it does need to be within your kind of academic setting or discipline more broadly. We are trying to develop ourselves as somebody who is capable within this setting and who feels they belong to the setting. Again, if that doesn't feel like you right now, that's okay. This is a kind of, this is an audit, right? We're checking in. There are some of these that you'll be like, I do not feel like that at all. And that's okay. What I want you to do is just start thinking about where you can build tiny bridges towards these things. Now, I promised at the beginning that I was going to share with you the five that Lilia Mantai talks about, and then I was going to share with you the one that she doesn't talk about, and I, to be honest, I haven't seen people talking about. And I think the reason we haven't is because most of these data collections are kind of bottom up. They ask PhD students, what sort of support they get, what sort of support they want. They ask supervisors, what kind of support do they provide? What kind of support did they have? And you can do that super thoroughly, but the problem is, if there's a type of support that people don't even recognise as a type of support, don't even realise that it could be helpful, then it's not going to come up in that sort of bottom up exploration. And the type of support that I think is missing is self developmental support. What I mean by that is support that helps you develop your processes, that helps you organize yourself more effectively, but also helps you with thoughts and emotions. That helps you to manage yourself more effectively. To self regulate. To make decisions. To show up as the person that you want to be. Now, many of us seek this out in the form of podcasts or in the form of self help books, right? But often it doesn't progress far enough to become an interpersonal relationship. Now I found when I started reflecting on this, I found that I actually did have this in some elements of my life before I got into coaching and things because I made friends with people who were interested in that sort of stuff too. So you guys have heard me talk about Professor Jen Cumming a number of times. She and I are very close friends and we were both into kind of that self-help vibe and working out ways to be more effective without having to work harder and all of that stuff. And so we used to swap tips. You know, we used to learn about bullet journals and both try out our bullet journals. Hers are beautiful. Mine did not last. Didn't always work. We'd look at different project management software or different ways of managing the stresses that we were under. And so we sort of made this kind of very informal, very kind of unintentional in many ways, support network for that kind of more human side of self development. And lots of people don't, right? Lots of people don't find people who are interested in that stuff. I was lucky that the person I found who was really interested in that stuff, was also a psychologist, was also an expert in self regulation, was actually trained in all of this stuff. And so in a good friend, I found somebody who had professional expertise too. So I was super spoiled. Most of you don't have access to that. Most of your supervisors can't support this stuff. They might talk to you about Gantt charts, they might talk to you about to do lists. All those things, but they don't have, most of them won't have the expertise to support you if you said, I tried it but I couldn't make it work. You know, I had good intentions but I didn't follow through because they don't have expertise in behavior change. They don't have expertise in habit management. They don't have expertise in emotional regulation. Most people don't have access to that sort of support. And it's such a shame because that support underpins everything else. Because I guarantee that every one of those other sorts of support I talked about, you probably have thoughts about. You probably have thoughts about being too nervous to turn up at a club where you don't know anybody. You probably have thoughts about whether you're burdening somebody by sharing your emotions with them. You probably have thoughts about how much help you're allowed to ask for from your supervisors. Seeking out all the other types of support is affected by our thoughts and emotions and our ability to self regulate those things. Even the practical stuff I was talking about, whether you have time for it or not, whether you have time to seek out those things, and more importantly, you believe you have time to seek out those things, is dependent on your ability to manage your tasks, to prioritize, to make decisions, to manage your own overwhelm, to manage your general life organization. This sort of support underpins everything else. Some of you who know me well will know where this is going, but I promise it's not the only place it's going. So one place this is going is I can provide that support. The PhD Life Coach membership specifically does that. It creates a community of people who are all trying to figure out what their best realistic selves looks like and how they can make this whole thing feel more fun, more engaging, more purposeful, and more intentional. So, in the membership, not only do you get access to me and my expertise, more importantly, in many ways, you get access to each other. My members are cheering each other on, they're offering each other bits of advice in the background, they're connecting each other to tools and techniques and books and opportunities that they might not have seen. They're doing co- working sessions where they give accountability to each other and show up just to help the other person to work. So they're kind of mutually assisting each other. So it connects you with a community that actually can provide quite a bit of this. It can provide some inspiration. You see people in the membership go on and finish their PhDs when you remember them being coached about how they didn't think that would be possible. That is hugely inspiring. It can provide emotional support and emotional support that isn't. Indulgent, that doesn't just go, Yes, it's terrible to be you, isn't it? Which, sometimes we need to hear that, but often we actually need something a little more neutral to help us think about what we're struggling with and to potentially reframe it or handle it in a different way. It can provide that. We don't provide guidance or mentoring in a technical sense, but there are times where we provide guidance and mentoring in things like reading effectively, and organizing your studies, and organizing your time, and all of those sorts of things. So there's elements of guiding and mentoring there. There's definitely elements of companionship. I have people who jump on Zooms with each other all around the world, just to catch up and just to be cheering each other on and helping each other out. I think it also hugely helps with developing identity because one of the biggest limits to developing identity is a sense that if I was an academic, if I was a good PhD student, I wouldn't worry about this, I'd be able just to do that. It wouldn't be this hard. And being in a community where you see other people experiencing those things and being effective and succeeding makes you realise that I can feel like an academic, even though I often am finding things difficult. That I doubt myself sometimes, that I don't know how I'm going to do something. None of those things stop you identifying as an academic, as a PhD student. And finally, I think it is one of the unique places to support you to develop yourself. To develop the way you want to speak to yourself. Develop the way you want to treat and organise yourself. You're not going to be perfect. I didn't get out of bed this morning at the time I intended to. I'm still working on that. But I am on track to get done today everything I said I was going to get done, including recording this podcast. And that's because of the skills that I've learned in this sort of setting and because of the skills I teach in this membership. Now, if you're not interested in that, hold fire for two seconds and I'm going to tell you some alternatives. If you are potentially interested in the membership, this episode comes out on Monday the 27th of January. If you are listening to it live or anywhere close to live, you can literally join the membership now. We are open from Monday, the 27th of January, 2025 until Sunday, the 2nd of February, 2025. Okay. A full seven day week. If you go to my website, the phdlifecoach. com, click on the membership, you will find all the stuff you need to know. It is £149 for three months You'll get all the details on there, but there's workshops, there's themed coaching sessions, there's open coaching sessions, there's online courses, there's co working sessions, there's access to me through Slack if you can't make it to the live sessions. So there's a ton of stuff. Check it out. Join now. We start on the 3rd of February. You do not want to miss out. Now, if you're sitting there going, there's no way Vic, I'm really sorry, this sounds great, but definitely don't have any money for this. Um, you know, PhD student can't do it. It's okay. I gotcha. First thing, make sure you're on my newsletter. I mention it every week. Make sure you're on my newsletter. You'll get structured support every time. You will sometimes get hear me talking about the membership and encouraging you to join. Feel free to ignore it. If you're not in a position to pay for it, you don't want to pay for it, just skim past those bits. It's all good. I'm not offended. Happy days. And keep an eye out. I'm going to do a monthly webinar on a specific topic this year. You can sign up to as many of those as you want. Get the free support that's there. So you've got my podcast, you've got the newsletter, you've got those workshops. But if you want that little bit more, and you think you can prioritise £149 for three months, not per month by the way, total, £149 total, if you think you want that little bit more, if you've tried to implement stuff on your own before and it just hasn't worked out, Let's go. Quarter one is going to focus task management, time management, how we can build a kind of structure to a life that feels fun and doable and that helps us achieve our goals. I mean, three months to do that. Amazing. I'm so excited. I've already got a ton of you on the waiting list. I'd love to have even more on too. So jump in, go do it now. If you're listening to this and it's past February 2nd, don't worry. We're going to open up again at the end of April, go to the same place. Make sure you're on the waiting list and you will be the first to hear about it. Thank you so much for listening, everyone. I want you to think back, take a moment after you finish listening, especially if you're currently driving or walking or whatever, and you can't make notes. Think about those six areas. And even if you're not going to join the membership, I want you to identify one other area where you want to make a concrete step. Where you want to do something to improve your support in that area. Have a think, let me know what it is. You can always email me vikki at wembury coaching. com. Let me know what the one thing that you might do to improve your social support is. I promise it will make everything else feel easier. 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 Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People How to do role-based time blocking Total Workday Control by Michael Lindenberger If I have a deadline, I have always been able to hit that deadline. I'm not going to tell you that I hit it in some kind of calm, organized, working methodically all the way up to it kind of way, but through pulling some late nights, a bit of overenthusiastic working, whatever it might be, I will hit that deadline. The tasks that I've always had problems with, and I know a lot of you have problems with too, are the tasks that don't have an externally imposed deadline. Maybe we try and put our own little fake deadline on it, but we know it's fake so we're able to push it back. Or maybe the task is really vague and there's not even a point at which we know it's complete, read more or whatever. It's those tasks that I always struggled with. Now, as usual, I'm not going to lie and tell you I'm perfect at this now, but I have found a tool that massively helps me schedule and get done some of those important but non urgent tasks that often fall by the wayside. The other thing that this tool has helped with is smoothing out that runup to a big, actual formal external deadline. So rather than kind of skidding in at the last minute, I am now getting better, not perfect, but better at starting work on it earlier and working towards it in a more consistent way, and that's the tool that I'm going to teach you in this episode. So keep listening. Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. The first thing I'm going to say before we get started properly is you might notice my voice is a little croakey. This is actually the improved version. I had flu all over the Christmas and New Year period. I'm now feeling fine, but my voice has not yet recovered. So it's not too bad, but if I squeak a little bit in this episode, please bear with me. It's all good. But, voice or not, I've got a really important tool that I know is going to help you guys loads and loads, so I want to get this podcast done, and even more excitingly, I want to tell you about the membership program, which if you're listening to this live, is opening in one week's time. So at the end of this podcast, I'm going to tell you a little bit about what that involves and some of the new structures. So even those of you who are current members need to listen to this because it's going to be super cool. I'll tell you a little bit more about what you're going to get out of it, what it's going to look like and how you can join if you want to be a part of this very special community. So Before I tell you what the tool I'm talking about is, I want us to think about the problem with deadlines. And for me, the big problem with deadlines is that they tell you when something needs to finish. But that doesn't tell you much about the process of getting it done. And some things have very hard deadlines. So usually a grant deadline, for example, is very fixed. You can't just write to the grant offering body and say, can I have longer, please? So there are some deadlines that are like. super clear, super hard, it's got to be done by then. If you're booked in to do a talk, your talk needs to be done at least at some level by the time it's time to do your talk. Then there are kind of externally set but somewhat fluffy deadlines. So these might be submitting a chapter for a book to the editor, submitting a draft to your supervisor, any of those sorts of things. So notionally, there's a deadline. Somebody else will know if you don't hit that deadline, but there may be some flexibility. Often you can message your supervisor and say, this came up, that's taking longer than I thought. I've had this issue, can I have an extra week? And it usually works. And to be honest, same with submitting to books and things like that. I used to feel really bad about asking for extensions to those deadlines. And then when I spoke to the editor, they're like, yeah, everyone's taken the extension. Don't worry. And then there are things where there's no real deadlines. I have a bunch of tasks around CPD, for example, I'm really keen to make sure that I'm an evidence based practitioner, that what I'm teaching you guys is based in the literature and the research. And so those CPD tasks, unless I specifically decide that I'm going to talk about that thing in that podcast, in which case I have more of a deadline, they don't have real deadlines. I can set myself deadlines, but no one else knows what they are, and they're not real. There's no consequence for missing them. And what that means is, whilst deadlines can be a useful motivator for certain tasks, it means we often end up prioritizing tasks that have deadlines over tasks that don't. And that's not necessarily a criteria of what's most important. Just because it has a deadline, it does not mean it's more important. If you have to fill in some boring form, which you have to do in academia, and there's a deadline it has to be done by, that task is not more important than reading a research article to stay up to date in your field, for example. But the fact that it has a deadline associated with it will usually mean that we will prioritize it over tasks that don't have specific deadlines. Now, many of you may be familiar with Stephen Covey's work. He wrote Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I highly recommend reading at least a summary, maybe not the entire book, but if you Google, you'll find loads of summaries. And one of the things he talked about was the four quadrants of tasks. Some of you all heard this before. This is not the new thing I'm teaching you. I'm just making sure everyone's up to speed. And in this he maintains that you can classify tasks as important and not important, and urgent and not urgent. And if you use those two scales, you end up with a quadrant where you've got one quadrant which is important and urgent, one quadrant which is important but not urgent. And those are the ones that we're talking about that we often neglect. Then there's urgent but not important. See little forms, that kind of jazz, and then there's the not urgent not important stuff And he maintains that you start with the important and urgent stuff Then you move to the important but not urgent stuff, the stuff we usually neglect. Then you do anything that's urgent but not important. And you try and either ignore or delegate stuff in the other box. Now, I find that quite a useful framework to kind of think about my tasks. But I have to say, it never worked for me. Certainly not when I was an academic. Because by the time I'd finished all the important and urgent tasks, I had run out of time. If you don't pre schedule the other stuff, if you don't block time for the important and not urgent tasks, the important and urgent tasks expand to fill the time you've got, in my experience. I was also never very good at defining what I mean by important. You know, I would I was the person that said, you need to make a priority list. My priority list would be like 40 things. So that's not a priority list. That's just a list. So for me, it kind of gave some insight into the types of tasks that I was neglecting. Those important but not urgent tasks. But it certainly didn't solve the problem. Now I mentioned there time blocking. If you want to know more about time blocking and specifically about my version of time blocking, I want you to check out my podcast episode about how to use role based time blocking. I'm not going to go into lots of detail now, but essentially this is where you're putting time in your diary for particular categories of work. So for me, I block time in my diary for CPD. I don't decide weeks in advance exactly what I'm going to read or watch or learn during that period, but I'll block in time that is specifically for the role of continuing professional development. Do go check out that podcast. I will link it in the show notes. If you can't find it. The other thing that I think deadlines don't help with is the sense of having an overwhelming to do list. So, deadlines. You guys might have deadlines all the way for like the next three years, right? You know roughly when your PhD is going to finish if you're doing that. You know roughly when you might apply for promotion and what the deadlines are. You might have a conference booked in October. You might have a module that needs delivering by December, whatever it is. You've got deadlines often that are not just these imminent deadlines. You've got all the way through to six months, a year, three years. What that means is without careful management, your to do list could be huge because you've got write talk for conference, which actually should be around 12 different actual tasks within that, but let's just call it one for now. And it's on your to do list because you know you need to do it and you know what the deadline is. So there it is. So every time you look at your to do list, thinking, what do I need to do? There's too many things. There's all these things that some of which you don't need to think about yet. Because it's not till October. It's not till December, whenever. But you look at it and it takes up cognitive space because your brain goes Oh yeah, I need to do that too. Yeah. And I've got that coming as well. And then next month I need to do that. And da da da. It fills up our kind of cognitive capacity. Now, how some of you get around this is having a kind of master to do list of all the things you need to do. And then more kind of daily and weekly to do lists where you pick things off this, which is brilliant. Love that system. We want to be getting it right down so that we can see these are the things. You, me and these two tasks. That's all we're doing. Okay. Makes it much, much more manageable. But the tool I want to talk about today is a way of semi automating that and strategically deciding what you're doing when. Because I don't know about you, but when I just have a master list and then I pick things off it for what am I going to do today or what am I going to do this week, I pick off stuff that I want to do and I abandon stuff that I don't fancy or that feels difficult or feels boring or long winded or whatever. I never pick it off. So the tool that I want to teach you today is about using start dates as well as deadlines. And in many cases, instead of deadlines. I actually got this from a pretty old school now book. I read it at the time. This has been in my shelves for a long time. Called Total Workday Control, by this guy Michael Lindenberger. Okay, and I want you to see, it proudly announces, covers Outlook 2007, 2003, 2002. So the actual kind of technical stuff, people on YouTube will be able to see me flicking through. The technical elements of this are pretty out of date because it is a system that is designed to work through using Microsoft Outlook. However, there are some principles in it that are enormously useful. I actually want to re, I was going to say reread, I want to reread, I want to re flick through this to see if there are other things that I can pick out of it too. But the one I want to teach you today is his notion of throwing things over the horizon. So he talks about this idea of having too many things on your to do list so that they're all sort of there in your mind when you need to just get on and focus. And what he suggests is that you go through your tasks and you decide which of these do I need to work on now or do I choose to work on now? Now, some of that decision making may be to do with deadlines that are coming up. Some of it may be choosing which are going to have the biggest impact, which are the most important for you, those sorts of things. And what you then do is you decide which things you don't need to be thinking about yet. So, for example, if you're doing a presentation in November, make slides for November's presentation should not be on your to do list right now. You should not be seeing that. Now, you might want to think back and think, Okay, what data am I going to be presenting? Is there any data collection or analysis I need to be doing now that's going to feed that? You know, do I need to be doing ethics applications? Do I need to be doing project planning? What is it? What am I actually going to be talking about? You don't need to be making your slides. And so what he suggests is that we throw making those slides over the horizon. i. e. we take it out of our kind of current to do list and make it pop up in the future. So I might think, right, I need to make sure that I know what data I'm going to be presenting so that I can backtrack and work out if there's anything I need to do now. But let's assume I'm presenting data I already have. So if my presentation is in November, I probably want to be making my slides mid October, depending on when in November it is. Some of you might want to take longer than that. I'm now pretty fast at making slides. It's not something I have much drama about. So I'd probably put it in for mid October. Okay, that's your start date. The deadline is maybe two days before the conference so that you can send off your handouts or whatever it is. But the start date is mid October. And you can do this with a bunch of things. If you have, here's 10 articles that you need to read to stay up to date with your field. They're not for a specific piece of writing you're doing right now, but they're new. You could, instead of looking at that list and going, Oh God, I need to read all of those. You could throw nine of them over the horizon and set one of them as a start date for this week. Okay. So at some point this week, you want to read that. Now you could give it a deadline. You could say, I want it gone by the end of the week so that next week I do the next one. But even just having it as a start date means it appears on your to do list and puts in your consciousness that that's actually one you're intending to work on this week. And the joy is if you use either my role based task management sheet, which you can email me to ask for, so you can email info at wenburycoaching. com, email me, you can find it. It's a kind of interactive Google sheet where you put your tasks in, it uses the system that I use. If you use something like that, or if you use Click Up or Notion or any of these kind of automated task management systems, you usually have to add a column that start date is not usually one of the default columns. Most people don't use it, but you can set up a column that start date as well as deadline. And then what you can do is you can set filters. So in my Excel sheet that you can all get, I have filters already on the columns, so you can filter by start date. And in ClickUp and things like that, so I now use ClickUp, the version that I share with you guys, teaches you the basic system to see if you like it. I've now transferred it into ClickUp. I've made filters, so that I have a filter that is started tasks, so tasks where I have passed the start date, i. e. I should be making progress on them. . What that means is there's a whole bunch of things on my task list that I don't see pop up until I need to start working on them. And that's amazing. Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one-to-one coaching or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. Now, you might ask, yeah, but I don't know when I'm going to start working on it, because it depends how long the other things take. Perfect. I have a system for that, too. What I do there is I have a specific date that I throw them to. So what I will do, for example, is I will book some time in my diary on, let's say, February 2nd. I'm recording this on the 16th of January. I'll book some time on the February 2nd and I will throw all my tasks that I don't know when I'm going to do them to a start date of February 2nd. That doesn't mean I'm going to start them on February 2nd. What it means is I'm going to review them on February 2nd. So on February 2nd, I'd block an hour into my diary to look through my tasks and decide, Do I actually want them on my start list now? I. e. I'm intending to do them in the next week or so. Or do I want to throw them over the horizon again? Some of them you might just throw over the horizon again until March 2nd or April 2nd or whatever your next one is. Or you throw it, say I'm not doing it this week, but I am going to do it next week. So you set a more specific task, set a start date for it. Now, what this does is many things. It simplifies your to do list so that you only see the things you actively want to be working on now. So it really reduces overwhelm, makes it much more straightforward. It gives you a structure by which to review your to do list every month so that you can make decisions about what you are and aren't doing. And this one's very important for me, is the act of having to throw it over the horizon every month. And I do this, I have tasks that just go and go and go. Next month, next month, next month. And then at some point I will say to myself, Vik, are we actually doing this thing? Because at the moment we've put it off month after month after month after month. Are we ever doing it? Or are you just accepting that this one's not going to happen? It kind of encourages you to review whether you're going to do the thing you said you were going to do anyway. So it kind of clears up those historic to do lists. Now that actually reminds me. Those of you who've stayed this long on the podcast , I'm going to give you a sneaky extra tip. And I planned to do this, then I got sick, so it didn't happen, but I'm going to replan it into my diary. Little tip for you. If you've got a bunch of little bits on your to do list whether they're, for me they're usually crappy little admin tasks. Things I just, I need to talk to my website host about something. I need to, I need to talk to Microsoft. That's a whole other story. We're not going there. Anyway, I've been not doing those things. You might have those sorts of things. You might have reading. You might, there might be a bunch of things that you've kind of pushed backwards. I would really encourage you now, go and grab your diary. And, Look a few weeks ahead and block in something, time where a week doesn't look too bad. Block in a couple of hours and mark it as historic to dos. Okay, so this isn't a specific role. This isn't I'm going to be doing marketing things. I'm going to be doing operational things, whatever. This is historic to dos and your job in that two hours is to do as many things that you've been putting off as possible. This works perfectly at home as well. So if you found that there's jobs around the house, or maybe things like booking dentists, that kind of stuff that you haven't done, book in a time to do historic to dos. And the joy is A. It blocks time where that is your job. Other things aren't more important. But B. It removes a little bit of the shame. Because one of the things that stops you doing these things isn't that they're particularly difficult. It's that you've got a bunch of emotions about the fact you haven't done them yet. Whereas if your task is literally to get done things you haven't got done. Much less shame about it. So it's like, that's literally the job. That's literally what this time slot's for. I don't need to feel bad about the fact I haven't done this so far because I've literally blocked in time where doing things I haven't done for ages is my job. So there's a sneaky bonus for you. The other thing that you can use start dates for, let's take that example of a conference in November, is you can use it to support your project planning. So a deadline in November tells you nothing about what you need to be doing during the year. But what you could do is break that task down. Let's imagine now you do have to collect data for it. You could break that task of the conference in November down into all of its constituent parts. And so you've got to, let's go backwards, you've got to make this. Slides, you've got to, well, you've got to make the slides content wise. You've got to make the slides beautiful before that. You need to know what you're going to say. You need to have planned it, before that you need to understand your findings before that. You need to have findings before that. You need to have collected data or whatever your. Before that, you need to have designed the project, recruited participants, found your resources, whatever it is. Before that, you need to have a big picture idea of what it is you're intending to do. Before that, you might have to apply for funding, you might have to get ethical approval, you might have to get access to an archive, whatever it is. There's a whole bunch of different tasks. What start dates allow you to do is you can spend time identifying what those different tasks are, and then you can give each of them a start date. Now, if you use something fancy like ClickUp, like I do, you can set the map as dependencies where the next thing doesn't appear until you've done the one before it. I actually quite like it appearing because if you're are still in the habit, as I am still a bit, of not doing the things on your to do list when you said you would, the next one pops up anyway, so it stops it kind of getting you a bit like, Oh, blimey, I need to have done that and that. So it kind of gives you that little sense of urgency. You can set in all the start dates, so you know that even though you don't have to do the conference until November, realistically, You need to be project planning now so that you can collect data in March so that you can analyze data in June so that you can whatever, you know, you put your time scale in depending on how, how much pressure you're under and how much time you have. So you can then put start dates in for all of those subcomponents. So this start date idea is brilliant for your tasks that have no deadline, that are really important but don't feel urgent. It puts them on your agenda in a specific week, but it also helps you avoid that crazy run in to a deadline where you've only just realised that actually there's a billion things you need to do in the deadlines then. It helps you to pace that out over the year. And of course, when you're looking at start dates, you can put into your diary your other constraints. So if you have children, you might want to be more gentle about what you put start dates during the school holidays for. If you have a period where you're going to be on holiday, you don't put any start dates during that period. So you can structure it around your life. If you know you've got a heavy teaching period, let's not put lots of research start dates during that time. Okay? So you get to, by using start dates, which you're in control of entirely, rather than deadlines that are either fake or set by somebody else, then you can also schedule the work around your key things. Now, if you're telling yourself, yeah, yeah, but I don't always follow through, or that sounds great, but it sounds a bit complicated, and I don't know where to start, that's something I can help with. And that's my final announcement for you all, which is the PhD Life Coach membership is opening to new members at the end of January. And how it's going to run is instead of joining monthly and kind of coming in and out whenever you want. We're going to be a quarter. If you join at the end of January, you are in until the end of April. You are going to have three months specialist support, and it is focused on structures. It is going to be focused on time management, task management, designing a day and a life that you love, so that you can do the things you want to do in a way that feels good. You're going to leave the quarter feeling clearer, feeling more capable with a personalized time and task management system that you know how to practice, you know how to iterate, and that you can work on with minimal self judgment. Because I ain't going to teach you a tool that you do this perfectly. I ain't found a tool that I do this perfectly. But I have found tools that enable me to do this with minimal self judgment and still achieve my goals, even though I don't do any of it perfectly. And that's what I want for you guys. If you're interested, I want you to go to my website. I want you to click on the membership and I want you to put your name on the waitlist. If you're listening to this live, so in the week, beginning the 20th of January, put yourself on the waitlist. If you're listening to it in the week, beginning the 27th. You could just join. So just go to the same place on my website. You'll find a button. If you're listening to this afterwards, we are going to reopen again at the end of April for the second quarter. So keep an eye out for that. Put yourself on the waiting list. You'll be amongst the first to know when what's happening and when it's open and when I announce the new theme for the second quarter. All important question, cost. I hate people when they don't tell me what the costs are, make you go and search through pages. I've reduced the prices. It's cheaper than it used to be. It, the quarter is going to be 1 49 Great British Pounds, which for people more familiar with US dollars is 180, 185, something like that. That's for the entire quarter, not per month. For that, you get access to six two hour workshops about things like how to write when you're struggling to write. You get access to 12 themed coaching sessions where I teach you all the specifics of the various time management task management systems and support you to adapt them to meet your needs. You get access to 24 coaching sessions. The sessions are going to change in time over the day to try and make each week to try and make them as accessible as possible for as many people as possible. And you also have access to all my self paced courses. So if you can't make the live versions, there are self paced versions of all of these courses that you can access. You get access to my Be Your Own Best Boss program, which is like my flagship big course . Access to that. You can also ask me questions in Slack. So if you're ever in a position where you're like, Oh, I can't come to the live session. I really want some advice. You can ask me questions in Slack and I will give you personal responses. It is so good. The members love it so much. Make sure you check it out. Go to www. thephdlifecoach. com Click on the membership you'll find all the information and I would love to have as many of you in there as possible. Current members. How exciting is it that we're going to have this more structure to it? You're going to get, uh, sort of your own worksheets that you can work through if you're not able to attend sessions. It's going to be amazing. I'm so excited to continue working with you. Thank you all so much for listening. Go away, look at your task list, see whether you can allocate start dates to just a few things, and see how it works for you. Let me know. You can always message me if you have questions, anything you're unsure about. Thank you all so much for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

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.