< Pretty much every PhD student struggles with procrastination yet the advice is often very generic. In this episode, I talk about a theoretical framework that helps us better understand why each of us, as individuals, procrastinate so that we can make more tailored plans to support ourselves. I also explain why it’s totally understandable that you procrastinate and why we know it’s a modifiable behaviour – i.e. you can change! Links I refer to in this episode You can find the link to the Svartdal and Lokke paper here Transcript Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. Have you ever found yourself procrastinating and then realizing that you are really behind because you're procrastinating, and then asking yourself, ah, why? Why do I keep doing this? I know it doesn't help. I know I'm gonna have to do the work eventually. And I'm making it so much harder for myself, yet I can't stop doing it. If you find yourself thinking those things, you are so completely normal. And today I'm gonna help you figure out exactly why it is totally understandable that you do this and how you can better understand your specific reasons so that you can then figure out how to address it, and at the end, I'm gonna tell you ways that I can support you in addressing it in the future too. If you're new to the podcast, I'm Dr. Vikki Wright, the host of the PhD Life Coach. I'm an ex- professor and now certified coach working with PhD students and academics, and notably running the PhD life coach membership where we talk about procrastination all the time. So today's episode's been sort of inspired by a couple of things. This quarter in the membership, we've really been focused on setting up systems. We've been thinking about time management and task management, and how you start your days and finish your days, start your weeks, review your weeks, all this good stuff, right? It's been amazing. The students got tons out of it, but one of the things that has become really clear is that sometimes even when you have the best systems in place, we still sometimes procrastinate. I do! I'm not up to date with everything that I'm intending to do right now. It is completely normal, and so we end up talking about procrastination and overcoming it a lot already, and that it was from there that I decided that next quarter in the membership, which starts at the end of April. So in a few weeks time, if you're listening to this live, we are gonna be focusing on procrastination, distraction, and getting stuff done. So this episode's partly inspired by this being a real focus of the membership at the moment, but it's also inspired by a recent research article from a couple of years ago, that I came across recently and thought took a really interesting approach to analyzing and under standing procrastination. I'm gonna link the full title in the, uh, show notes, but essentially it's by Svartdal and Lokke. They are Norwegian researchers. It's published in Frontiers in Psychology, and they are looking at what they call the a, b, C of academic procrastination, and they conduct what they call a functional analysis, and there's many elements of this that I found really useful. I am gonna add some of my own stuff in, which is entirely based on anecdotal evidence and not the systematic research that they've done, but I still think it's useful. So I'm gonna share with you some of the stuff they talked about, some of my insights and by the end of this episode, I want you to have a much betterunderstanding of why you procrastinate and what is individual to you. Because I've talked about procrastination before. Those of you who have been here for a long time, those of you who have binged my episodes, thank you, I love you, will know that I've done eight ways that you're secretly procrastinating or how to stop procrastinating parts one and two, and I talk about some of this stuff in those episodes, but what I haven't really talked about is the individual differences. That all of you will have similar patterns as to why you're procrastinating, but your exact reasons are different and the better we can understand that stuff in a compassionate and curious way as usual, the better we can understand that the better we can target the support specifically for you. So the first argument that this paper makes that I love is that you are not an idiot for procrastinating. They don't phrase it exactly like that, but that's my translation of what they say. You are not an idiot for procrastination. Often procrastination feels like a completely illogical thing to do. We know that it's not helpful. We know it doesn't move us towards our goals yet we keep on doing it. Sometimes that feeling of it being illogical can make it so much worse. Partly because it makes us wanna beat ourselves up about it, and partly because it makes it really hard to address. If you don't understand why you are doing it, how on earth do you try and change it? And that's where we usually try and change it, either with a new system, so everyone wants to know exactly how I set up my task management systems, et cetera, et cetera. Or we try and fix it by kind of beating ourselves into it, like, I need more discipline. Must make myself do it. And neither of these things work. There's no system that's gonna fix this for you. I can give you recommendations of principles of things that'll help, but it's not the system's fault. Okay? And similarly, no one ever beat themselves into sustainable behavior change. It's just not how it works. Okay? So what this paper argues instead is that procrastination is an adaptive response to challenging circumstances. What that means is it has benefits associated with it. Now, those benefits are very immediate benefits, and we'll talk about exactly what sorts of benefits. In the long run, you get real disadvantages, but in the short term, you get real advantages. And that's the basis on which they decided to do this functional analysis, this understanding that this is a functional behavior, and if we know it's a functional behavior, we can work out what are the benefits we get from it. IE, why do we do it? But we can also recognize that it's therefore learned. That by doing it, getting positive outcomes in the short term, at least we reinforce that behavior of per procrastination, and that helps explain why we keep doing it. And the gorgeous thing is that if we know that something's functional and therefore we know how to address it, we know it is learned, then we also know that it has the potential to be modified. Because if you've ever told yourself, I am just someone who procrastinates, I am a procrastinator, it can feel like you've got no control over that. It's just who you are, especially if you've got things like A DHD, which inevitably make procrastination more common and more challenging, it can be really easy to be like, well, there's literally nothing I can ever do about this. I just have to put up with it. But if we can recognize the functions that these behaviors are having, recognize that it can still be modified, then with support, we can change the ways we are procrastinating. So what do they mean by a functional analysis? Now, I'm not gonna try and give you a full rundown of the entire paper. It wouldn't do them justice, and I'm not an expert in their methodologies by any stretch. But essentially they looked at what are the antecedents of procrastination. IE what are the things that happen before procrastination happen? That kind of prompt procrastination. What are the behaviors that we see with procrastination, and then what are the consequences of those behavior? And they're particularly focused on the immediate consequences. Okay. Antecedents behavior consequences. Now, those of you who know me well, who've been listening for a while, know that I have a beautiful black Labrador who's laying next to me, farting outrageously while I record. Um, and this is very much like dog training, right? We try to, at the moment, the antecedent of seeing another dog, means that Marley exhibits behavior of barking, unfortunately, and the consequence for him is that we usually move away from that dog, which is exactly what he wants, right? So you can see there that sort of effect of there's the antecedent, there's the behavior, and then there's the consequence. Okay? For him, barking is a functional behavior because it leads to what he wants, which is to get the hell away from that dog. And the same is true with you guys. So what we're gonna think about today is what are the antecedents of procrastination? What are the behaviors that we see and what are the consequences? And importantly, what are the individual differences that you guys might be experiencing that enables you to figure out a more kind of tailored to you reason that you are procrastinating? So let's do antecedents First. The antecedents that they identified from the literature were three main categories. The first is situational temptation. So this is where, frankly, there's something you'd rather do. So this is where maybe your phone is next to you and you find yourself scrolling online. This is where a friend comes and chats, and that's more fun than doing the work you're intending to. That's where even looking out the window and enjoying the view rather than doing your work. Okay, so there's situational temptations. If you've listened to my podcast about managing distraction, where I talk about the push and the pull, this is really the kind of pull towards something that's fun. Situational temptations pull you towards them because they feel rewarding in some way. The next category they came up with was Task aversiveness. This is what I was referring to as the push, the things that make the task something that you don't want to do. Maybe it feels like a lot of effort. It feels difficult. You don't think you're good enough, you don't know where to start. You're confused, you're unsure, all those things, okay? That's task aversiveness, and that pushes you away from doing the task that you intended to do. The third antecedent that they identified is one that we haven't talked a lot about in the context of procrastination and distraction and things before, and that is lack of energy. So many of you will have noticed that if you've slept well, you are rested, you are much better able to get on with your tasks, but that when you are tired, fatigued lacking focus. It's a real struggle and you procrastinate more that has been really evidenced in the literature. It's going to increase the extent to which you want the situational temptations. It's gonna make the kind of going and doing something warm and cozy, much more tempting, and it's gonna make the task feel harder. Now this I hadn't really thought about before, but it really reminded me of some research an old colleague of mine used to do. So there was a colleague that I worked with back in Birmingham called Frank Eves, who was really interested in stair climbing, how we get people to climb more stairs as a sort of environmental manipulation to increase physical activity. And one of the really interesting things that he did was he got people to stand at the bottom of a set of stairs. He got them to try and guess the steepness of the stairs, and he had a variety of different ways that he did that. But essentially he was trying to get them to say, did they see it as steep or not steep or anything in between? And he found that people who were heavier themselves, people who were older, people who reported being tired, people who were carrying heavy bags, perceived the stairs as steeper than people who didn't. Now, they weren't being asked to climb up it. They weren't saying, do you wanna go up there? They were just asked to perceive it and they were encouraged to be as accurate as possible. And what that shows, I think it really supports this notion that when we've got less energy, or more effort is perceived to be needed, the task looks worse. Okay, so that's the other antecedent here. So we've got situational temptations, we've got task aversiveness, and we've got a lack of energy. I want you all to have a ponder on which of those is most common for you. Is it usually that you're distracted by something fun, even when you don't particularly hate the thing that you're intending to do? Is it that it's really driven by the fact that you have so many negative emotions to do with your PhD or whatever it is that you're trying to do? Or is it that you are regularly lacking the sort of energy to be able to actually do things that are more effortful? Now they identified these three things. They identified these three things, but then they also argued that there were other factors that interacted with this, and I think we will recognize some of these. One is the temporal distance of the goal. So one of the issues with PhD is a lot of your goals are really, really distal, right? They're a little way away. And what the research shows is that the further away your goal is, the more likely you are to procrastinate. You haven't got that kind of urgency effect that you get when the deadline is looming. It feels like you've got lots of time, and that temporal distance can make you more likely to procrastinate even with the same level of temptation, aversiveness, and energy. The second thing they looked at, which I thought was really interesting, was they looked at interactions with personality traits. So those of you familiar with psychology will know the big five, kind of the big five psychological constructs that we can all rank ourselves on. And they found that some of these actually relate to which forms of procrastination are more tempting. So those of you who are higher on extroversion, you enjoy the external stimulation and you get energy from that, you are more likely to be tempted by situational factors than people who are lower in extroversion. So think whether that relates to you. If you are someone who considers yourself extroverted, are you more likely to get tempted by talking to your friends, by going online, by watching tv, and so on. They also found that people who are higher in neuroticism, so a tendency to sort of be anxious, worry and ruminate, were more likely to be avoiding the task itself. They were more likely to find it aversive, something that they were worrying about and to not like those emotions and to ,therefore avoid doing the task on that basis. So again, if you are somebody who would consider yourself to be higher in neuroticism, I want you to think about whether it's the aversiveness of the task that is driving you away more than the distractions of other things. The other factor that's not part of the big five. But the other factor was impulsiveness and people that are much more impulsive, ADHDers I'm looking at you here too, were much more likely to into situational temptations. So it wasn't so much that they were particularly averse to the task they were intending to do, but they were really impulsive about, oh, I want to do that and go off to do the situational distractions. The other big five item that they mentioned is conscientiousness. And I'm gonna tell you what they found and then at the end when I tell you my, like additions, I'll tell you the bit that I actually changed based on no data whatsoever, but my own personal opinion. Go with it. Um, they found that people who were conscientious had lower levels of procrastination across the board. So lower susceptibility to situational temptations, more ability to do tasks that were aversive and less likely that low energy would prevent them from doing their tasks. So those are the antecedents and the ways that different individual factors can interact with them. Hopefully, you are already starting to get some understanding of your own individual tendencies, and I'll just let you know now. I have my wait list open for the PhD life coach membership, and everybody who is on the wait list got on last Friday, got a diagnostic tool to help them better understand exactly why they procrastinate, which of these factors is most important to help them then build a more personalized plan for addressing procrastination. Now, if you are not already on the wait list. That's okay. I'm gonna send this to anybody who joins between now and the launch, the wait list doesn't obligate you to do anything. It doesn't mean you've got to join. It just means that you are gonna get the information about membership and you will get a variety of freebies on the way. So if you wanna join, I'll put the link in the show notes, but basically go to my website, the PhD life coach.com/membership and you'll find it there. It's the top this button that says the membership at the top. You'll find it you're clever people. So that's the A of this functional analysis. The B is behaviors, and I don't think we need to spend too much time on this. It's not rocket science, but essentially they found that some of the behaviors we saw were things like delays in completing tasks, so actually not hitting deadlines and things like that. Procrastination led to things like delays in starting tasks. So this is all those of you who put it off, put it off, put it off, and then actually get it done at the last minute. Okay. Looking at you, there's delays in starting, and then there's also procrastination where we're avoiding sustained effort at a particular thing. So any of you who avoid things that are less novel and interesting, that require just ongoing consistent action, that is also a different form of procrastination. So again, I want you to think which of those things is most you. Do you actually procrastinate past the point where it needs to be completed? Are you late handing lots of things in? Are you someone who delays starting but gets there in the end? I find myself in that category mostly, or are you somebody, I think I fall in this category too. Um, are you somebody that doesn't like sustained continued action or finds it difficult to continue to pursue something that just requires sort of consistent effort? So moving on then to the consequence, we get two different types of consequence. The first is what's called negative reinforcement. This is where when you take this behavior, you no longer have to experience the bad thing. So if you are somebody who avoids taking on a task, because it feels like it's gonna be really difficult or loads of effort or those sorts of things, then you are gonna experience negative reinforcement. You are gonna have negative feelings when you think about, or you do the task, and so you stop doing it and those negative feelings are removed so you get immediate relief. You are no longer in that short moment, you are no longer experiencing those negative emotions. And just like Marley barking, that reinforces the behavior. The dog has gone away. He no longer has to look at the dog. He's a happy boy. He is rewarded by not having those negative feelings anymore. The second one is kind of the flip side is positive reinforcement and this is often gonna be those of you who are sort of susceptible to situational temptations is where you were feeling rubbish because you were thinking about this piece of work, but you are now feeling happy because you are watching Netflix or whatever. And that's where you get positive reinforcement that this new task has come in and you now feel better. It's all about emotion alleviation. Okay, but which way round it is. Are you relieving it solely by removing the negative thing, or are you relieving it by swapping it for a positive thing? Again, can help us to make strategies to address this in the future. I think I'm a positive reinforcement girl. Now what they go on to discuss is some of the ways that we can intervene in this, and they don't go into lots of detail about this. This is stuff that I'm gonna be addressing throughout the membership in quarter two, which runs from beginning of May through May, June, July. Um, but they basically clump them into emotional regulation skills and situational modifications. so this is either learning to regulate our emotions in the sense of not generating such negative thoughts about the work we need to do, reducing the positive thoughts around the other stuff, but also around emotion tolerance. How do we allow ourselves to experience negative emotions and do the task anyway? And that's something that we work on in the membership all the time. And then the other element of is situational manipulation. If the main challenge is around distractions, we can do quite a lot by changing the way we set up where we work and how we work. Which of those are likely to be more useful for you will depend on what you've learned about yourself from the rest of this analysis. If you are mostly driven by avoiding task aversiveness, you maybe need more of the emotional regulation. If you are mostly driven by situational temptations, you probably, in my opinion, need both. This is why those of you who maybe have high levels of anxiety, find your hard work difficult and think that that's a bad thing, worry that you're not good enough. Putting your phone in another room doesn't fix it, because if your driving force for procrastination is not wanting to experience those negative emotions, your phone being somewhere else is not gonna fix it for you. Whereas if you are somebody who, the temptation of your phone is a far greater driving factor than avoiding the work, that sort of basic situational modification is much more likely to be effective. Now, I said at the beginning that I was gonna add in some completely unscientific, but in my opinion, extremely useful extras to this. And that's where we've got to now. So the first one is, I think the point about conscientiousness is different in PhD students. So what they were saying was that people who are high in conscientiousness, so that kind of desire to do the right thing, were much less prone to procrastination and I think across most employment situations, and indeed undergraduate degrees, maybe even masters. That's probably true. And that's because in my opinion, at those levels, there is a manageable amount of work. It might feel like a lot, right? But it's finite, it's defined, it's quite well, you know, instructed all of those things. And so somebody who is conscientious can get it all done. What I have seen a lot with my clients and my past students in where when I was still supervising is that at PhD level conscientiousness can become completely unrealistic. So what I often see is conscientious people who are used to being able to do it all. They're used to be able to tick all the boxes, you know, and by working hard, they just get it done kind of thing. Realize that at PhD there is no getting it done. There is no finish line where you've been conscientious enough and that can lead to procrastination. That sudden change to your sense of self where you're like, oh my goodness, being able to do all this is who I am. I can't do all this. That level of negative emotion can really increase procrastination in my experience. So I if you are someone who identifies as being very conscientious. You are always trying to do the right thing, try and get things done. I want you to think about how that affects your procrastination. The second one, and I touched on this in my episode called eight Ways You're Secretly Procrastinating. So if you haven't listened to that, go check it out is that this paper focused a lot on pleasure as the distracting emotion. That you go and do something enjoyable. You chatter with a friend, you go online, whatever it is. In my experience, probably, particularly with conscientious people, it's not just about pleasure that distracts you. In my experience, it is tasks that make you feel organized, tasks that make you feel useful, that make you feel recognized, where you can see your progress. This is talking to any of you who clean to procrastinate, who help other people to procrastinate, those sorts of tasks too. so if you are thinking, I do procrastinate, but I don't procrastinate by scrolling or eating or whatever, I just spend more time than I intended on my emails or helping other people or whatever. I want you to think, are you seeking the emotions associated with those other tasks? Feeling purposeful, feeling valued, all that good stuff, because I don't think this is just about pleasure. The third thing that I don't think they touch on is the shame people experience when they experience procrastination. So they had that A, B, C, the antecedents, the behavior, the consequence, that immediate consequence. And then there's this implied consequence of not completing the task, which it seemed, I don't wanna put words in their mouth 'cause they didn't say this explicitly, but it seemed was mostly focused on the kind of pragmatic things of being rushed, not finishing a task, missing deadlines, all that sort of stuff. I think there is also, and we know there is also an emotional consequence of procrastinating, if we allow ourselves to tell ourselves that we're terrible people, we're bad, we're lazy, we're useless if we procrastinate. And what I think that does is it contributes into the antecedents. So for me it becomes this spiral where you've had this immediate relief by procrastinating, which is positively or negatively reinforcing, whether it's the removal of the aversive thing or whether it's the giving you of the pleasurable thing. But then after that. If you allow yourself to judge yourself, you then plunge into a really aversive set of emotions where you are feeling shame, embarrassment, frustration, annoyance, all that stuff. And I think that then also gets linked with the tasks. So I think it heightens that task aversiveness. So I think there's two places this gets reinforced. It gets reinforced because you are having a pleasurable, or at least a neutral experience by procrastinating immediately. And then after that you are really increasing the task aversion, which then makes the temptations much more tempting. It makes the task aversion much more something you want to avoid. It is also exhausting. So it probably also that spiral that staying awake at night thinking you haven't done the right thing also probably adds to the lack of energy part as well. So I think that bit adds to, creates this much more steep rollercoaster. And the reason I emphasize that is because for me, that's the first bit we address. Everyone who comes to me, everyone who joins the membership wants me to like wave a magic wand and stop you procrastinating. I truly believe the first step is to get to a stage where you still procrastinate, but you don't hate yourself for doing it. Because if you can get to a stage where you don't hate yourself for doing it and you're like, oh, well that's what everybody does, it's okay. I'll get back on. So much easier to start the task again. 'cause you haven't suddenly made it way more aversive by wrapping a load of shame and embarrassment and frustration around it, it's just not as big a deal. Much easier to find solutions. So we really work in that space as well as in the actual behavior change space. My fourth and final point is for all of you who sit down intending to write, for example, as your kind of intended task, end up doing something else that was not writing, but was potentially useful. All those of you who call it like procrastivity and all that kind of stuff. Doing procrastination tasks that are actually something that needed doing, like clearing your inbox or whatever and then saying, okay, yeah, it's okay though because it, that stuff did need doing okay. This is almost the opposite of the shaming. So some of you will go to, I'm terrible, I didn't do what I intended, da, da, da. Others will go, well, I didn't do what I intended, but you know what? It did need doing, and at least I was productive. And it's done now. And actually, you know what? I'll take that. And I don't wanna make you shame yourselves, but I also don't want you to let yourselves get away with that either, because I actually think it's really dangerous. When we intend to do one thing and we end up doing something else, but that that thing is in some way worthy or useful or whatever. You can really reinforce the procrastination behavior because you are actually praising yourself for it. You can make it way more okay in the future, that if something feels difficult or uncomfortable, you don't fancy it at the moment, oh, well do something different. I. Okay. I think it reinforces the pattern and I think you need to be really careful of it. Now, that's not to say some of you will remember, I did an episode a while back with Alison Miller of the Academic Writers Space, and she talked about working with the you that turns up. I am not saying that you shouldn't sometimes mindfully and intentionally change your intentions for a session. So let's say. You had intended to write this morning and you slept really badly last night. You haven't had your comments back from your supervisor, you thought you were gonna have, and you go, you know what? I am not in the head space for this. This is not a useful thing. I could maybe make a little bit of progress, but actually I think I'll be better off waiting. Instead I'm gonna do this other useful thing. That's not procrastination, that's strategic delay. As long as you there in the moment, like, and like approve of your decision to change it. And you then stand by that in the future. That's strategic delay. If, however, you kind of don't really make that decision, but you just go, oh, I'm just gonna check my emails to warm up a bit, give my brain in gear, and then oopsies. Two hours later, I've still been doing my emails and I haven't written anything. That's procrastination. Even if you did useful stuff and by rewarding yourself for it and telling yourself it was okay, you make it much more likely you'll do it again in the future. so again, that's something that we work on in the membership is how you can tell the difference between making a strategic decision to change your intentions versus just procrastinating by doing something else that seems vaguely useful. So hopefully by listening to today, you have a much better idea about why you specifically procrastinate, what that procrastination specifically looks like for you, and what immediate benefits you get from doing it. If you want that deeper analysis of it, you want to really understand, make sure you're on my wait list and you'll get the freebie that will support you to do it. In the membership next quarter, we are gonna be working on this in much more detail, so with this insight, you will be perfectly placed to really change this behavior going forward and be able to achieve the goals that you want. If you have any questions about the membership, you can always message me through the website or DM me on Instagram. I'm at the PhD life coach. I will give brief shout outs about the membership in all of the Monday newsletters for anyone who's on the newsletter. But if you want the more detailed stuff and all the freebies gotta be on the wait list. Uh, the membership opens on Monday the 28th of April, and the new quarter starts at the beginning of May. If you join on the Monday though then you'll be in for an extra week, and so you'll have access to all the sessions and workshops that week too, so you get a little added bonus if you join early. Wait list members might even get an opportunity to join a little earlier. Just saying thank you all so much for listening, and I'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like 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 the PhD life coach com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics time.

< In this episode, we welcome Krystina François, a third year PhD student and current member of The PhD Life Coach membership. Krystina shares her experiences of doing a PhD with chronic illness, coming to terms with being disabled, and how she balances the needs of her PhD with looking after her health. We have a mini coaching session about her writing schedule, which is relevant for all PhD students, as well as hearing her recommendations about how universities could better support students completing their research with health challenges. Links I refer to in this episode How and if to work when things feel uncertain How to stop feeling guilty when you rest How to seek the help you need Transcript Vikki: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast where I am again joined by a special guest. And this is going to be a bit of a mashup of a session because this is going to be kind of a combination between interview and coaching with one of my membership clients, Krystina Francois. Vikki: So welcome, Krystina. So I am so excited to have Krystina here. I have worked with Krystina for a little while. And one of the things that we have talked about is the fact that Krystina is doing a PhD with chronic illness, and it's something that I've wanted to cover on the podcast for a really, really long time. Vikki: And in our discussions, it kind of came around that you would be interested in doing that. And so I'm super excited to have you here. So maybe we start before you even introduce yourself, let people know why did you feel like it was important to come and talk about this stuff on a podcast? Krystina: Well, first, like, thank you so much for having me, Vikki. And I think the reason why I [00:01:00] said yes is so enthusiastically is because I had been searching for content, whether it be podcasts or books or online forums that really come from the perspective of folks who have chronic illness and are in a PhD program. And while there are some great books and like some great influencers to follow, that there's not really much out there. And so I thought that given our coaching relationship that, this would be a great, a great thing to, to participate in. Vikki: That's amazing, and you're so right. And that was something that I had recognized too. But one of the things that I try to be really cautious of as a coach is, like, staying in my lane. And so there's a whole load of topics that I am really happy to wax lyrical about on my own on a podcast. And then a few that I'm not. So listeners will know a few weeks ago, we had guests here talking about doing distressing research. That was one where I really felt I needed people with [00:02:00] proper expertise and proper experience. Vikki: And although I have family members with chronic illness, and I've supervised PhD students with chronic illnesses before, there's nothing quite like hearing the experience of somebody who is actually doing it at the moment. And just so the listeners know this reason, this is going to be a little bit of a mashup is because I think Krystina has got so much expertise just to share, I just want to ask her questions in the way I would, if she was a sort of interviewee. But equally, Krystina, I know you've got some specific challenges at the moment that we thought it would be fun to coach on. So why don't you tell people a little bit about your background and what's challenging at the moment? Krystina: Yeah, so I am one of the PhD students that had gone into industry prior to going back to school. So I'm on the older end. I'm 36. I say that because [00:03:00] it will help with the context of my chronic illness as well. I had spent the past 14 years doing immigrant rights, advocacy, racial justice organizing and gender justice work. Krystina: And I am getting a PhD in political science. I'm in my third year and I'm in the American system. The average graduation rate for my program is, I believe, seven years. So just to let folks know, we have three to four years of coursework first. Then we transition into our dissertation and we have our qualifying exams right before that. Again, I'll come back to why that's important in terms of my disability. And so I was very clear, even as an undergrad, I did political science as my undergrad degree, as well as history. And I knew from then that I would be doing a political science PhD. Krystina: I really wanted to be a political science professor, particularly because number one, I love the subject so much. And number two, thinking [00:04:00] that it would be really important to have more diverse voices in the field, who are generating knowledge as well as at the front of the classroom and so in my work life, my non academic work life, I would always have in the back of my mind like how this particular phenomenon or experience that I'm having fits into this larger picture of politics, and could be understood by others. Krystina: So I spent a lot of time doing like training. I would do trainings for legal volunteers, trainings for Undergraduate volunteers and I've realized I really liked the teaching part. I finally after spending, you know, so much time being like a service provider, then a policy analyst and advocate, and finally being in local government, I was like, okay, it's time. It's time to go back to school. And I had this deal with myself that like, I would go back to school by 30 or it wouldn't happen. So I did. I actually met my timeline. Vikki: And that's huge, right? Even that bit, even that's huge. [00:05:00] And remind me, at what stage did the disabilities and the chronic illnesses start to affect? Krystina: It actually happened by the end of my first semester. I had gone on an international trip as a part of a human rights delegation, and I had a simple ankle sprain which actually ended up being more complicated and never healed. So I returned from the trip in like October and towards the end of that semester, I had to ask for some extensions, you know, or had to receive some incompletes because of trying to treat this ankle ended up being way more complicated than I initially thought. Krystina: So I first learned about accommodations and the disability office because one of my professors at the time, you know, seeing me hobbling from class to class was like, you know what, you should register with the disability office, um, and say that, you know, you need some extra time or to be able to zoom into class because I'm really concerned about you work walking on this air [00:06:00] cast with a torn ligament. Krystina: So that was my introduction also to the formal process of having an injury, disability, chronic illness in academia, 'cause it was actually a professor, nobody else had told me. And I was fortunate that she had actually advocated for me. Vikki: Yeah. And it, it seems so haphazard sometimes as to how people hear about this. And obviously at this stage, we're talking about an acute situation, right? We're talking about what you thought was going to be a one off period of recovery and then get on. So how did you find the kind of accommodations once you finally heard about them? How did you find that process? Krystina: So the process itself seems straightforward because, there is a point person and they give you a checklist of the type of documentation that you'll need from your health care provider. There's certain language that they request and at least in the US, [00:07:00] it's because we do have the American Disabilities Act and there are very, very particular language, that the university is held liable for, right, so they have to offer accommodations. They are legally required to provide reasonable accommodations and we'll go back to this reasonable question but it was straightforward. Krystina: However, getting my healthcare providers to actually complete the paperwork was a little bit more complicated. There wasn't really advice on like how to navigate getting the supporting documentation and then once we finally able to get everything squared away with the paperwork, not all of my professors actually were providing me with the accommodation of being able to zoom into class. Krystina: So there was the first hurdle was the bureaucratic and then there was the actual implementation and it ends up being a theme of, uh, there's what the [00:08:00] university is supposed to do and then there's what actually happens, um, because ultimately, uh, you know, professors have a lot of discretion in how they run their courses. Vikki: So it's around that, that reasonable word, isn't it, right? As how do we interpret what is reasonable and it sounds as though in your case, that was interpreted differently by different professors. Krystina: Definitely. So I, yeah, I had been taking three classes, which is a whole separate story of like taking three classes my first semester and one of the professors just wasn't responsive to the disability office person or to myself. So I experienced a mixed bag just from that, that like last month of the semester of my first year, um, trying to navigate with this injury. Vikki: And what was the sort of, I guess, intangible stuff that you were having to manage during that time? Because obviously there's [00:09:00] the practicalities of the bureaucratic staff, the actual implementation of things, but like, on the inside, what were you dealing with? Krystina: I, you know, I was a bit in denial. Number one, I was just like, it's fine. I'll just hop around with my cast. But then it started to, to hit me that, you know, what if there is something wrong? What if this doesn't heal properly? It took up mental space that would have been, allocated to me focusing on my coursework. So there was the time spent that wasn't expected doing therapies and all of the scans and the doctor's appointments and everything like that, which was eating up my time. Krystina: Then there was the mental space that having this injury was taking up, which split my focus. Imagine this is my first semester in graduate school. I'd been out of school for like [00:10:00] almost 20 years. And being a student again, actually setting up your study practice, the sheer volume of reading, like, you know, for folks who remember your first semester, it's like, how is it humanly possible for me to read all these things every week? And you're asking me to write a paper that's worthy of a journal as a final paper. And I'm like, I just got here. I don't even know, like you know, the conventions of the discipline. Um, and so it was. Already a big period of adjustment and this added a layer of complexity. It's not so much that I had less time to do things, it's that I had less time to rest because I was doing everything that I needed to do school wise and doing everything I needed to do health wise. So that meant less sleep, right? Or that meant less social time, less balance and actually doing both full time. Vikki: One of the things that I notice a lot with clients that are managing chronic illnesses, tell me whether this sort of resonates with [00:11:00] you, is that there's also a lot of uncertainty about how hard to work yourself too. Vikki: And I know this is an issue for anyone, right? Grad school is hard, there's always an endless amount of stuff to do, but at least if you're mostly physically healthy, you kind of know where your boundaries are, right? But if you've got a new condition like you did, and you're in this new environment where you're not quite sure how much work you're meant to be doing, how did you navigate that? Krystina: So I had to basically listen to my body and it gave me no choice. So it was working to the point of a physical reaction. So as I mentioned, I had this like this ankle injury, what happens simultaneously, which I, you know, later on discovered this was the beginning of my autoimmune disease. Um, I start having issues with my hands. And you can [00:12:00] imagine if you have a boot, you're on crutches, you're using a walker. So I basically develop, uh, tendonitis. Uh, in both of my hands, which then impacts what? My ability to write, my ability to type, and so my hands would be fatigued quite quickly. Krystina: So, it wasn't to the point of I couldn't use my hands, but it was, okay, I would work, work, work, work, work, type, type, you know, furiously taking notes, until, oh, my hand cramps. So it was my body's alarm clock, that actually was what forced me to have some type of balance. I didn't have a strategy because again, I was just thinking about this as an acute injury and me, you know, trying to be the stellar PhD student, bright eyed and bushy tailed, until my, my body said no. Vikki: And it's so interesting, isn't it? Because in many ways, we want to try and know where the stop point is that's like half an hour before pain hits or, you know, dysfunction [00:13:00] hits or whatever, but that must be so hard, especially when it's something you're not used to and you haven't grown up with. That must be so hard to kind of figure out where that is. Vikki: I see this a lot with clients who've got like post viral fatigue, so long COVID and all those sorts of things where they've grown up healthy. If they push themselves a bit too much, okay, I'll sleep in tomorrow. Happy days. I'm fine again. Let's go. And all of a sudden they don't know where those boundaries are anymore. Krystina: Definitely. And I think that was the biggest mental shift was , how do we do that 30 minutes before we get the screaming pain? How do we build in rest, build in, um, you know, and this is where I would like to shout out occupational therapists. And I think occupational therapy is severely underrated because you learn uh, okay, work in three minute sprints and then rest for one minute or 10 minute sprints. Even if that means like putting an actual alarm on your [00:14:00] phone, which I wouldn't be surprised if may accidentally hear what alarm go off during of this session, although I did put my phone on silent, but having those reminders end up. Krystina: actually being a part of your study practice. So like just like you would make sure that you have environmental alignment of like having your pdfs open and your reference manager. You would have your bottle of water and make sure you set your timer on so that when you're in the flow you are able to actually take care of yourself. Vikki: It's just one more thing to think about though, isn't it? It kind of sounds easy when you say it like that. And it's just, it's exhausting, right? I have to do my timers. I have to do my physio. I have to do my, whatever it is just to be able to do normal things. Krystina: Exactly. And that's also where I realized that it was taking energy away from me, just reading the reading. You're not able to do that because especially well, [00:15:00] there's having the brain fog and the fatigue and all of that. And then there's the exhaustion from the medical admin. And you're trying to focus on these brand new concepts and that in and of itself is already a physical strain, like, the amount of time that we spend sitting at a, you know, at a, whether it's a cafe, library, whatever, and we're just sitting and reading, that is also physically exhausting. And I didn't realize that until I had other things that were exhausting. Vikki: No, definitely. So let's carry on with the story then, because obviously we've alluded to the fact that this acute injury did not get better and go away. So tell us a bit more about how that kind of progressed and how you managed that. Krystina: Yeah. So basically over the course of a year, I end up having other ailments. I had back to back kidney infections, which was like very random. So spring semester of, again, my first year, I was [00:16:00] in the hospital three times for three weeks at a time. Boom. That's the majority of the semester. So again, I have to advocate for being able to zoom into class. I have to advocate for extensions. As I'm trying to figure out what's going on with my immune system. And then I start in terms of my ankle, the pain is not resolving, the swelling is not going down, although I'm hitting all the marks, in terms of physio, the orthopedist is like, I don't see anything wrong besides the inflammation, and says, hey, maybe this is something systemic. Krystina: So we do some testing and the testing doesn't come back with anything. So I say this because it's something for folks who have autoimmune diseases, sometimes you don't catch, you just, the blood work is not happening at like the right time, but, your body is already making these, these changes. Krystina: And so I first end up getting diagnosed with endometriosis, which in and of itself is this, this weird, it's [00:17:00] not considered an autoimmune disease, however, it has autoimmune portions and it's inflammatory. It's a whole body disease, not just a gynecological issue and we are recording this in endometriosis awareness month so that's why there's my little quick plug. Krystina: I end up having to schedule surgery. And I'm like, okay, I'll do it during the break before the semester starts. So I have the surgery, but one of the things that develops is also the hand pain that originally was triggered by me using a cane and crutches doesn't go away. Krystina: And what first we think is tendinitis of the thumb, ends up being carpal tunnel and then cubital tunnel. And I end up, luckily having an orthopedist that was a really big advocate for me to do additional testing and to see other specialists rather than just cut me open, which surgeons tend to like to do. Krystina: Um, and doing some nerve testing and realizing that [00:18:00] I had severe nerve damage in my right hand and I'm right handed. At a certain point wasn't able to even hold a pencil or type, which ends up, you know, being two very important functions for a PhD student. So I end up doing back to back surgeries during the summer to not disrupt my academic flow. First the endosurgery and then the hand and elbow surgery. Um, and unfortunately it ends up taking me two years to see a neurologist. And what I ended up finding out is I have CIDP, which is a rare autoimmune disease that your body attacks or eats up the coating of your nerves, the myelin of your nerves. Krystina: And normally it starts in your extremities, your hands and your feet but it's happens to your entire body. And so I'm, I am officially diagnosed, and actually, I started treatment last month. And so it's been this long journey of diagnosis and surgery and trying to see the specialists, but also ends up being that I have varying levels of functionality of [00:19:00] my hands, which impacts my academic career. Vikki: Maybe let's tell people a little bit about what kind of practical impact did that then have on you at this stage of your PhD? Krystina: Right. So, oh, so I forgot to mention that I also ended up getting diagnosed with seronegative rheumatoid arthritis as well. It ends up that I am able to get into this flow of able to attend class, participate. I download apps so that I can listen to the readings instead of having to hold the book. Or I'm able to use voice to text in order to, you know, write my notes or, or whatever it may be. Um, and I'm able to attend class for the most part. There's sometimes due to inflammation and pain and whatever that I end up having to either skip class altogether or request to be zoomed into class. Krystina: And I start to get into this flow of the semester is great. By the end of the [00:20:00] semester, I'm burnt out, exhausted, like fully unable to use my hands. All of my little tricks and tips are not sufficient. And I end up not being able to finish my final paper. And so I get into this incomplete trap. So, uh, for folks that don't know, let's say if you are missing one key component of the coursework for your class, um, the university has a policy of being able to give you an incomplete, so a placeholder grade so that you're able to have extra time to complete that task, because grades, you know, are due. Krystina: I'm able to fortunately have professors who are understanding and willing to give me the incomplete because you're not they're not required to give you one, even though you are a person with chronic illness, and you have accommodations again that reasonable word comes back into play. Krystina: It is at the discretion of the individual professor whether or not they will give you an incomplete. Vikki: [00:21:00] And then a bunch of these you still then need to resolve, right? That, you know, that that's not the end of the story. You then have to figure out which ones you're going to retrieve to full grades and so on. And that's the point we met, right, that you had this bunch of incompletes that felt kind of, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but felt kind of unachievable, right? They felt overwhelming, at least. Krystina: Overwhelming, for sure. Vikki: Um, and so tell me a little bit about that overwhelm, how you felt when you were kind of looking at that, that pile of, that pile of incompletes. Vikki: Yeah, I just want to make sure the listeners are aware, it's quite so big, partly because you're a massive overachiever. And therefore had taken on more courses than you needed to take. So this is something else I often see, right? With people who are very, very able like you, and who have health problems is sometimes they're not even trying to do the minimum, they're trying to do the stuff they want to do too, right? Krystina: Exactly. I will thank you for that disclaimer because [00:22:00] it took me, it even took me a while to accept that the reason why there are all of these incompletes is because I was taking on way more classes than necessary. Um, and you know, my eager, like, I want to learn. I'm here to learn. Krystina: I want to absorb everything. That class sounds interesting. Um, why not? Uh, yeah, It, how do I say this? I wasn't in denial, but it, because it felt like a constant cloud over everything that I was doing. It was like, as I was, you know, moving forward every semester, finally learning the lesson of taking less classes. Finally, advocating for myself with the department to see if there were any other resources available. I had to completely shift my mindset and finally understand that I had a chronic illness and coming to terms with having these papers hanging over my head and my primary presentation of rheumatoid arthritis was in my hands. I'd spent my whole life with my writing process really rooted in me taking notes by hand, doing the active reading, and [00:23:00] then when I would be writing my papers, I'm a free writer where I just type. And I couldn't do either of those things. I could not take my notes. And, and we know pedagogically that like, there are some people who remember things through the act of writing by hand. And so I was hitting a learning wall. Krystina: And I was freaking out because I wasn't able to just free type for a few hours to do these papers and knock them out. That's part of why they were hanging over me, is because I wasn't able to address them the way that I had been trained to do up until this point. Vikki: No, definitely. And. I just want to go back with an additional disclaimer just so all the I know you know this but so the readers are all aware of this. When I said this is because you took so many classes. I don't mean that that was your fault. This is, oh, it's your fault because you don't know. I meant that more to [00:24:00] illustrate why, how much because of the capable and interesting person that you are, how much was on your plate when all this other stuff came along too, and this notion that your old coping strategies, stuff that had got you so far through such an interesting professional career, through all the rest of your academic career and things, suddenly weren't there anymore. How did that feel? Krystina: It was very destabilizing. So on the one hand, I'm going through an identity crisis of like, I am no longer an able bodied person. If I ever was, that's, you know, that also is like a myth. So I was coming to terms with that. And then I was coming to terms with, I can't do things the way that I always have. And I'm on a challenging new academic journey because PhD is very, very different from undergraduate learning, very different. And you [00:25:00] know, I had been really steeped in immigration law and legal training, it is a very different way of reading, engaging with the text. We're all about knowledge production versus necessarily critique. And it's really hard to do that. when you're trying to figure out how to get your thoughts onto a page, literally. With interjection. If you are finding today's session useful, but you are driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me. After you've finished go's, my website, pH life coach.com, 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's 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 [00:26:00] 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 faces 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 I think that's a really good point for us to transition perhaps into a little bit more of the coaching stuff. Vikki: I am going to ask you at the end more about what you think universities should be doing differently and that sort of stuff, because I think your background as an advocate in a variety of situations, I think you're a perfect person to comment on that. But let's get into a specific challenge at the moment. So you mentioned before we started recording that writing is still the thing that is you're finding difficult. So pick something specific and let's delve into that. Krystina: All right. So I have a plan of addressing, of completing one paper a month for this term to be able to get these, these incompletes [00:27:00] resolved. And I'm lucky enough that I'm not having to take coursework this semester so that I can focus on that. I started the year January and I think that's when we had had a conversation about the incompletes, uh, I had set out. I'm like, okay, I'm going to do one paper a month. However, I end up with these new diagnoses in January and a surgery and then treatment beginning in February. So boom, two months are off of the board. So now we're in March and now I'm like, okay, I'm going to do a. Two papers, like two, like one of the more intensive papers that is a scaffolded assignment with a professor that's highly, highly critical and engaged, I will say, I'm working on that paper, and then, one of the lower hanging fruit, which is more of a comparative textual analysis paper. Krystina: So, that's where I'm at right now. My goal is to have this done by the end of the month, and then I'm doing paper, which is more of comparing two different theorists and relating it to my own research [00:28:00] idea. Krystina: So, I mean, the first thing would be, is it a good idea to work on both of them? Like, am I being too ambitious? I think that's, that's been a challenge of mine, so I'll stop there. Yeah. Vikki: Perfect. And anyone who's heard me coach before knows I'm not going to give you like a yes, that's perfect. No, it's not. I know. But let's work it through together, right? And I think that process of thinking it through is useful. So just to clarify for me, you originally said you were going to do one per month, one in January, one in February, one in March. And you're talking about doing two at the moment. But that's still, correct me if I'm wrong, with the intention of finishing one of them in March and finishing one of them in April. Vikki: Yes. Okay, perfect. Because I thought for a second there, our response to not having being able to do one in January and one in February was doing two in March. I wouldn't want to have a conversation about that. But no, Krystina: that's not going to lie, I did think about it, but I was like, no, I can't. Vikki: And listeners, I bring that up for a reason because, not with Krystina [00:29:00] specifically, but with other clients. The tendency that if you've got behind on things, for whatever reason, whether it's a chronic illness or any other reason, the tendency to then say, well, I'm going to have to do even more than I planned within this time period now, is really, really high. Vikki: But if we weren't able to do the old plan, setting ourselves a plan that's more ambitious than the old plan is understandable, but it's probably never going to work, but that's not what you're doing. So that's okay. So take me through why, if we are trying to do one in March and one by the end of April, why did you choose to work on them in parallel rather than to get one entirely done and then do the next one? Krystina: Um, because the, one of them is, I have to do it step by step, so I have to send her the paper proposal and then I have to send her the draft and then go on from there. So [00:30:00] it's gonna be spread out over time and I didn't want to wait until next month because then that would like bring me closer and closer to the end of the term. So I have to work on it throughout the term, because there's going to be a back and forth. Vikki: Okay. So there's going to be gaps where it's on her desk rather than your desk. Right. Okay. Right. Perfect. Do you kind of stand by that decision? So do you like your reasonings for picking, doing it like that? Krystina: Um, that is a good question. I mean, I think, I don't think that my reasoning is particularly strong outside of the fact that it's more time consuming. Like, it's because it has to be spread out over time is what led me to that decision and I don't necessarily think that's a great reason. Vikki: Why not? Tell me why you don't think that's a good reason. Krystina: Um, I'm not sure. I think that I love the topic. So I think having it spread out over time is not going to be arduous work. It gives me a [00:31:00] chance to dig into the material a little bit more. It also overlaps with some of the other papers that I have to do. Um, so it won't feel like a slog because I like it. However, the, the part that I don't like is it's going to be a bit of a slog because it spread out over so much time. Vikki: Okay, perfect. So, what we get to distinguish out here is what are the bits that are the consequence of the circumstance you're in, that this is a piece of work that needs input from your tutor throughout, versus what are the consequences of your decision. Vikki: Okay. And for me, your decision sounds very logical because if you've got some time periods where it's going to be on somebody else's desk, we get to think what we're going to do with those time periods. And so the first thing, before I tell you the other reasons I think that it's logical, the first thing I want you to think about is how long do we anticipate those being? So is this person somebody who will send it back in a [00:32:00] day or two, or is it somebody where it might sit there for a week or ten days or longer? Krystina: Uh, no, she's very good at getting the feedback, like, within a day or two. Vikki: Okay, so, did you consider the possibility of resting in the gaps? Krystina: No. I did not. I was like, okay, great, and then I'll work on the other paper, the, the, in the gaps. But I probably should rest. Vikki: I mean, we're not going to do shoulding. We're not doing shoulding. All of this is your choice, right? Krystina: Yeah. Vikki: But it's a very different situation if the feedback is going to take two weeks to come, then happy days. Let's crack on with something else in between. We're still not going to call it working on the papers simultaneously, though, because that's not true. Vikki: We're just working on them sequentially over and over again. Right. But if they're going to only be short gaps, what advantages or disadvantages would there be to resting in those gaps instead of [00:33:00] working on something else? Krystina: Right. Actually, I mean, I think that I should rest during those times, especially because she gives very substantive feedback. Like, she gives both some of the more, like, grammatical structural things, and also the big questions really, um, really gives, uh, great feedback. So arresting would make sense because it is going to be a lot of work to then implement her edits. Vikki: So what would be the downsides? Can you see downsides to doing that? Krystina: I'll immediately, it would be that, you know, I still have, I still have to make progress on the other items. It could be that, given my fatigue and given my, you know, needing to have frequent breaks, um, that I don't write. I take a writing break during that time, but I can do the reading. Whether it be like, I use the listening app, like to at least get a first [00:34:00] pass at some of the reading for my other paper. But that I choose not to do anything physically intensive during that time that could be Vikki: and I think one thing that might help with this is understanding a little bit better how you structure your week because obviously I know that you do some other work as well. So how many days a week are you expecting yourself to be doing work, either PhD work or other academic work? Krystina: So I'm also teaching three classes. So full disclosure, that is the other work that I'm doing. So I am marking, course prepping and then, and presenting. So three days, three days a week I teach, and then I have two off days, off days. I have, you know, again, because of my health admin, I have treatment or therapies, basically five days a week. And so what I had put in my plan [00:35:00] was that I have like a writing and reading time block, every day. But the times of the day vary to be conscious of like when I'm most productive, considering the teaching and the health activity that I may have to do. Um, and I, I do, I actually have the writing and reading time block seven days a week instead of five. Vikki: People who are watching on video may see my eyebrow raise. Why? Krystina: That's a great question. Um, because I'm very strict about not doing my teaching work seven days a week. I really try to, like, limit it to those days or my, like, full on prof mode and my health appointments, again, are only through the five day of the week. Krystina: So I figured that I could make up some of the time that, that is, that would be needed on the weekend. And, um But no, then there's no [00:36:00] time for rest. I know that, that, that is clear after saying it out loud. Vikki: I'm enjoying watching your face as you hear yourself talking about things, because like, making up the time is such a common thing that people talk about. Vikki: And for people listening, I know a lot of people will be listening to this who have chronic illnesses, but there'll be a lot of people who listen to the podcast every week, listen to this one as well. And this is true for anyone. If there's been reasons that you, you know, personal family things or whatever it is that means that the week hasn't gone exactly how it is, I want you to be really careful around this notion of making up. Vikki: Because whilst it sounds dead productive and it sounds what's going to keep you on track, especially if you know you've got health problems, then that making up might be the bit that delays you if it adversely affects your health. Krystina: Right. [00:37:00] And this is where having pause, like having rest is something that should be built into my schedule as well, like just as much as the other time blocks. Vikki: 100 percent and that's true for anyone right but it's crucial for people with chronic illness. So just to clarify, just for me a little bit, so I can see quite how high my eyebrows go in, um, how many hours time block are you talking about on Saturdays and Sundays? Uh, I can see your face that my eyebrow is going to be high. Krystina: Um, so I, so it's like about, it's like a five hour time block, which sounds Vikki: pretty substantive. Krystina: Yeah. Vikki: Okay. So, yeah, we are learning to deal with, I think, four maybe autoimmune disease interventions so far, and teaching three classes. And catching up our incompletes and trying to look after our health while [00:38:00] we do this. Krystina: Yes. Vikki: And our plan is to do this by working seven days a week. Krystina: Yes. That does not seem realistic when I think about, especially because, fatigue is such a big part of, um, you know, like between like the lupus and just generally autoimmune diseases, and like fibromyalgia and stuff like that. Krystina: The fatigue is the one symptom that we don't have a medical intervention for. You can't just pop a pill or like have some matcha and like, you're gonna power on. It's, it's not. It's, if I fall asleep while reading, it's out of my control. Then, you know, it's, it's juggling this, this still, this notion of making up time and having to let go the notion that you will never make up time, just like having a sleep deficit, like you, like it's gone, like it's happened and it's coming to that acceptance that, um, You know, [00:39:00] you have to deal with whatever the situation may be and whether you hit your goal for your time block or or not. Um, that time has passed and then you just adjust. moving forward. So I do think maybe instead of having a five hour block, I do a three hour block. So the week the my week day blocks are either two hours or three hours. So maybe break either breaking it up my weekend time blocks to not be like, okay, from one to five, I'm going to do this. Krystina: But rather, from 10 to 12, I will work on this, get some rest, do something restorative or something else, and then maybe have another time block for two hours? Vikki: I'm gonna push you here. I understand this notion of sort of accepting that we can't make up time. I actually think it's an irrelevance because time spent is not what gets your work done. Completing tasks [00:40:00] is what gets your work done. We don't have to make up hours. We have to complete tasks. Okay? And we have to complete tasks to a sufficient standard. One of the examples, I want to go back to something you said earlier, was that because you were doing it over a longer period of time, you could delve deeper into some of the interesting papers. Krystina: Don't do that. Vikki: We are resolving incompletes. If you want to read papers for fun, you can do that later. We're resolving incompletes. And this is the danger when we give ourselves more extended periods of time to do things because it feels compassionate. We start saying, Oh, but I could probably do more than one at a time if I'm doing that. Vikki: And Oh, I can probably do more. So anyone listening, if you've ever asked for an extension for whatever reason, and then you've convinced yourself it needs to be better now because you asked for an [00:41:00] extension, this is speaking to you. Okay? I know a high achiever like you isn't going to enjoy the notion of bare minimum, but we just need to get these done at this stage. Vikki: You have your whole dissertation phase to dive into your specialist topic, be the leading expert in it. These we need done. And I would argue, especially if you've got chronic illnesses associated with fatigue, if you work fewer hours, you will complete more tasks. Because when you have lots of hours available to you, it's easy to go, Oh, I'll read this other thing too, because I've got time. Vikki: I'll do this bit because I've got time. I'll spend ages making a decision how to write this sentence. Whereas if you've got less time, you're going to write the sentence and you're going to read what you need to read and you're going to get it done. Krystina: That really resonates because [00:42:00] also, as a person with extreme fatigue, if I am able to do more with less time, I'm also able to rest. And that's the only thing that is the only medicine for fatigue is actually listening to your body and resting. And so by forcing myself to work in a smaller amount of time, a more realistic amount of time, to get the task done. And just when the task is done, it's done. And then I can take a rest rather than moving on to the next task. That would also be something, like, when we find a cadence as a person with chronic illness, it's really to say, if you have available time, rest. Like, my doctor is very much around, like, if you can fit in a 20 minute nap, do it. Vikki: Hundred percent. And I want to emphasize, when I say that resting more will probably enable you to get more done, that is also not a reason to rest more. You get to rest more because your body needs rest. [00:43:00] Because you as a human need rest, even if it didn't enable you to get more done, if you need it, you need it, right? Vikki: But where you've also got these tasks, I've seen it countless times in clients that when they decide to work fewer hours, they power through their tasks more quickly. So I want you to spend some time thinking about two different things. One is about your weekends, okay? How much of your weekends can you clear out? Vikki: I'm a big fan of two days. That feels like a weekend to me. But then also, building, breaks into the ends of bits of work. So whether it's taking, you know, if you decide not to do that other piece until after this first one's done, and taking the days while your supervisor's got it to rest, it might be that. Vikki: It might be planning that, okay, when that finally goes in, I have three days where I don't do PhD work before I start the next one. So [00:44:00] that it's not this relentless train. It's periods of getting stuff done and then recovering. How does that feel? Krystina: I think that that makes a lot of sense. It resonates. Um, it also, you know, in terms of motivation, unfortunately, I am a power through kind of person, which is part of how we are in this situation. Krystina: But I mean, that's just, uh, my, my innate reaction is like, okay, if I just hit this goal, um, knowing that there's this reward at the end. And so whether that be the three days off in between papers or a certain amount of time between papers, or rewarding myself with, like, a weekend where I don't, like, actually do any academic work. Vikki: I mean, that's just a weekend. That's not a reward. I still remember, there was a postdoc I worked with years and years ago, and I remember her talking about the Easter holidays. She was like, it was amazing. I had two whole [00:45:00] days where I didn't work. Dude, that's a weekend. You're meant to do that every week. Krystina: Oh, you mean it's not a seven day, like life isn't seven days? Um, yes. So, also, honoring, I would say, honoring the weekends would be another thing to think about. Vikki: Yeah, the one thing just from something you said, I want you to be cautious of is, these little mini rewards at the end of handing things in, I don't want you to let that become boom and bust. So I want you still to be thinking about how am I doing my three minutes on one minute off? Or how am I doing my 20 minute naps? How am I only working my allocated time blocks and all of those things? Because what we want to be doing is working in a sustainable way and then having a gap. Working in a sustainable way, not, Oh, I am a bit sore, but I'm going to power on through because if I can just get this done, I'll have three days off. We're not talking about that. We're talking about maintaining this kind of maintenance level of activity [00:46:00] and adding the, the periods of time off. Krystina: I think that sounds right. Vikki: And one of the things, and you can let me know whether this is okay to share, but obviously you're in my PhD Life Coach membership. One of the things that I'd like to work on with you in the future when we're in our group coaching sessions, is the sorts of thoughts you're going to have to nurture during those rest periods, so that they're actually restful and don't consist of you going, I should be working. I should be doing something. Why am I just laying here? I should be able to get on with my stupid body doesn't let me do it. Those sorts of things. So it's kind of beyond the scope of today. Maybe it's something I'll talk about in a future episode. But we can certainly work on that in the membership so that in those periods, whether it's during the day or in kind of blocks off, you're like, look, you know, if you go to like a spa or something, you're like so fancy and so nice. So you get that sort of vibe when you take a break, rather than [00:47:00] say, oh, I'm slacking off today. Yes, yes, we want the bright sunshine down on your face. It's like, ah, it's so nice to have a rest kind of vibes. So we can work on that together. Krystina: Definitely. We're going to need to work with that. Vikki: Perfect. So, before we finish up, I want to ask you what you think, and we're not going to talk specifically about your members of staff, your university, but at a more general level, because academics listen to this too, and I'm actually going to send it to some universities as well. what do you think that universities should be doing more of, less of, better, to, um, support PhD students working with chronic illnesses and disabilities? Krystina: So the first thing that comes to mind is definitely, there's this deference to the person who is facing the illness on what it is that they need, but we actually are often overwhelmed with even just coming to the understanding of what our health needs may [00:48:00] be, but like, we have no idea, because most folks that are coming to request accommodations, it's because it is a new illness. Krystina: And so it's not fair to put the burden on what is it that you need the university to do or what is it that you need from your professors, to put that burden on to the student who is already trying to navigate so much. It would be helpful if you all if folks had like some commonly requested accommodations or, you know, if a student, if somebody has fatigue, here are some common things. If, if folks have a physical limitation, here are some common things. And I will say that like my university has been like helpful in some ways of that, like the person who serves in the role of the disability advocate. Also resourcing the disability office in your university, having one person or a few people really be the advocate and the point person for hundreds of [00:49:00] students or thousands of students, depending on how large the university is unfortunate, and it does a disservice to both the students and the professors, because neither one is getting the support that they need in order to successfully progress forward. Krystina: So properly resourcing, your disability office with enough staff, and making the investments in the support technologies like Otter AI and Grammarly, and these are not plugs specifically, I am not sponsored by any of these people, but there are a whole slew of technologies now that are AI based or are just better than some of the old, desktop based softwares. Like we're not all sitting at desktops anymore. We're on our laptop or we're on our iPad or tablet, or we're on our phones. So Investing in app based, or web based interventions is, is way more helpful. Krystina: Um, and then lastly, there needs to be some reform around [00:50:00] incompletes. Incompletes can't be the only solution for students who need extra time, or whose disability or chronic illness interrupts the semester because it ends up being a trap, and I think that institutions are aware which they've responded by giving less time for the students to complete their incomplete to motivate them to get resolved faster, but actually, when you have a chronic illness that is unpredictable, It increases the burden and the stress and emotional dress on the students. Krystina: And my very last point is the culture shift, that if you're not meeting deadlines, that doesn't mean that you're unreliable because your illness is outside out of your control. And I think that's one of the, the biggest learnings for me in unpacking my own internalized ableism is that you're not unreliable, you're sick. Vikki: That's huge. I'm sure so many people need to hear that. I'm going to add a couple that I've learned [00:51:00] from you, just to add them in. And one is around this definition of unreasonable. So for me, I don't understand why at least an individual university doesn't decide what's reasonable. I just think the idea of individual academics being able to determine what is reasonable. Now I know, teaching in like sociology is different to physiotherapy or whatever. I get it. There needs to be some level of sort of local understanding. But It seems to me there should be much clearer expectations that at least normally, this would be reasonable, this would be reasonable, this would be reasonable, and for those professors to then be properly resourced to do it, right. Because there is the other, you know, I've been, we're both academics, we both teach, we have both been, I'm sure, on the receiving end of accommodation things. Vikki: Some of which are dead easy, you know, extensions or whatever, fine, no problem. But when [00:52:00] it's then, you know, you've got a blind person who's going to be in your laboratory class or whatever, it's like, absolutely, I 100 percent want to accommodate this. What specific expertise and extra resource are you providing me with so that I can do this properly, and I'm not making it up as I go along. Vikki: And so I think the university's investing in that sort of, so there's a much clearer structure and support for the academics, because there's some academics who are just idiots about this stuff, but there's a huge number who want to help, but are already overwhelmed. And when requests come in, it's just one, one thing too many to think about. Right. Um, and that, but yeah, before I say this, is there anything you want to say on that one before I give the final one? Krystina: I think that it's a hundred percent right. That universities should invest in preparing professors, how to respond to, um, to request and actually sharing best [00:53:00] practices. I think that is, the low hanging fruit is here are some best practices. Not so much, there's this emphasis on terminology and, like, it is extremely important, but actually being able to ensure that your student is able to participate at the level as anybody else, regardless of their ability status is what is most important. Vikki: Definitely. And for me, not even just training, but actually people to help you do it. Because like, if I need to provide my learning materials in five different formats for five different disabilities, I want to do that, right? I want to make this as accessible as possible. But that's just quintupled my workload in many ways, and that's not always feasible. Vikki: So yeah, so actually having some kind of done for you service as well, where the professor, if you have somebody with X disability, you get access to these people who will annotate your pictures and put all the alternate text and all that jazz. Vikki: And then my last one, [00:54:00] and this is unfortunately U. S. specific, and so it just blowed my mind, is around when people have to take time off for things, is thinking about implications for healthcare, which I know we've talked about in your situation, and thankfully makes me grateful for the UK every day that we don't have to think about these things, but in countries where there is health insurance, universities having really clear policies around their students in terms of what happens to your health insurance if you need to take leave of absence, if you need to take suspensions and things, because the fact that you even had to consider that just blows my mind. Krystina: Right. And I think that is one of the biggest challenges for students with chronic illness or disability is when you actually what you really, really need is a medical leave of absence and you can't take it because you need the health insurance from your student health insurance, and I think that, um, also like for any administrators that are listening, often [00:55:00] there are academic consequences for not performing or meeting a certain deadlines. However, there's often not an awareness of what the consequences are in terms of your access to healthcare because access to healthcare is tied to your full time enrollment status. So let's say if you are not able to be enrolled full time because you have a registration block on your account because of an incomplete, that actually has health care implications, at least in the U. S. Vikki: And the version of that that is across the whole world is visa implications as well. So, right, for any international students who are experiencing chronic illness while they're overseas, I've seen that be a real issue as well, where they need to take a leave of absence. But if they take a leave of absence for more than three months or whatever, they lose their visa status or their family loses their visa status or whatever it might be. Krystina: Exactly. Vikki: Amazing. Thank [00:56:00] you so much. That was absolutely incredible. I appreciate you so much for sharing all of that. I hope the little coaching block was useful too, and I can't wait to keep working on it all with you in the membership. So thank you so much for coming, Krystina. Krystina: Thank you so much for having me. And this was such an important conversation and I hope that it leads to folks taking action. Vikki: I'm sure it will. And feeling so much better for hearing your experiences. So thank you so much. Thank you everyone for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like 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 the PhD life coach com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and [00:57:00] academics time.

< In this episode of The PhD Life Coach podcast, Dr Vikki Wright explains why chasing ‘perfect efficiency’ is actually making your PhD harder. Many students think that taking flawless notes or writing excellent first drafts will save time — but this mindset often leads to procrastination and stress. Instead, Vikki reveals why starting imperfectly is the key to progress. She explains that writing is part of the thinking process, reading evolves with your understanding, and connecting with others can be the most effective use of your time. If you're overwhelmed by the pressure to be ‘productive’, this episode will help you work smarter — not harder. Ideal for PhD students and academics feeling stuck, behind, or anxious about their thesis. Listen now to learn how embracing imperfection can help you finish your PhD with less stress. Links I refer to in this episode Why you shouldn’t read when you’re writing Why perfect plans fail: embracing imperfection in academic writing How to get started on a task How to use the do know don’t know list Transcript Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. I'm getting a bunch of new listeners at the moment, which is amazing. So if you don't know me, my name is Dr. Vikki Wright. I was an academic and PhD supervisor for 20 something years and in a large research intensive university in the UK, where I made it to full professor specializing both in how stress affects health and in how to effectively train PhD students. I now run the PhD life coach full time, meaning this podcast, my membership program, my online courses, and my workshops. Today is actually something that came up in one of my membership conversations. So I had a student who was thinking about writing and reading and was getting quite stressed about how much she had to do and I'm sure we all kind of empathize with that feeling. And one of the things that she kept saying was that she wants to be efficient. She needs to know how to read things, how to take notes in order to be efficient. She needs to know how to write things in order to be efficient. And I asked her what she meant by efficient while this is going on. So this is in a group coaching format, by the way. So I'm talking to her on screen, but then we've got the rest of the members online as well, watching this happen. And they're jumping in the chat going, "yeah, yeah, me too, me too. Tell us how we need to be more efficient. I need to be more efficient too. I'm so inefficient." And so everybody was really getting on board with this. And I asked her. What are you meaning by efficient here? And her definition of efficient was when I've read an article I want my notes to be good enough that I don't have to go back to it over and over again to find the stuff I need, I've got my notes. And when I write, you know, I know I have to do drafts first and stuff but I don't want to be editing it 47, 000 times I want to know enough that I write it to a level that will need some editing, but that I won't have to do tons and tons of rewrites too. And everyone's in the chat going, "yeah, yeah, definitely, yeah, tell us how to do this, Vikki, tell us how to do this." And it was one of those moments where I had to break to them that what they were desiring was the wrong thing. It's completely understandable that we want to be efficient. In fact, people are telling us we need to be efficient all the time. But if your definition of efficient is only reading things once or twice because your notes are so good and only having two or three iterations of writing because you're writing so good Then what you're actually doing is making yourself enormously inefficient because when you come to do the thing, you come to read the paper, write the notes, start the drafts, all you can hear in your head is, this has got to be good or I'll be wasting time. I've got to get all the notes down that I need or I'll be wasting time and then what we end up doing is spending four hours reading a single research article which is only going to contribute to one or two sentences of our introduction but we need to make sure we've got everything we need to be efficient. Or we procrastinate writing because I can't start writing until I know exactly what the structure should be and exactly what I want to say, because that would be inefficient. It's such an understandable response to uncertainty and time pressure and high workloads and all that stuff that you guys are struggling with. And by the way, this isn't just a PhD student thing. I see this with academics saying this too. You know, I only have an hour a week to write, so I have to be efficient. I have to use my time perfectly. But that's not efficient. Asking yourself for perfect notes and asking yourself for excellent first drafts is not efficient. What it is instead is denying the very research process that we need to be engaging with. Let's take reading as an example. When you read an article at the beginning of your research project, you're reading it with your naive, uninformed, open and intelligent, but not very kind of knowledgeable brain on. And so the stuff you need from the article then is completely different than the stuff you need from it when you've read around the literature, you've got a really good overview and understanding and you've got much more nuanced questions now. It's completely different than what you need from it when you're deciding on your methodology and you just need to look at that bit. It's completely different than the stuff you need when you're trying to interpret your results and you don't understand why it's showing what it's showing. Every time you read an article, you're reading it for a different reason. And if you, at the very beginning of your research project, are trying to anticipate every possible thing you might need from this paper, it's just a losing battle. It's a waste of time. But you're doing it with a beginner brain instead of coming back and doing it with an expert brain later. The efficient thing to do is to read the article for the purpose you need to read it right now and keep a record of where that article is. So that later, when you need to read it with your more educated, more informed brain or with a specific goal in mind, you know where to find it, right? But you don't have to make notes that cover all of those eventualities. The same is true with writing. When we put pressure on ourselves that we have to have a good first draft or I'm going to spend forever editing, what happens is you instead spend forever reading and faffing about and not getting on with doing your writing because you don't quite know enough yet. Okay, that's the inefficient bit. Not starting writing is the inefficient bit. Not just because it will get you going, but more importantly, because writing is part of the thinking process. I'm going to say that again because it is absolutely crucial. Writing is part of the thinking process. Writing is not something you do in order to record your kind of final, perfect thoughts. Writing is a tool that you use to work out what your thoughts are anyway, to work out what you do understand and what you don't understand and what you actually think about it anyway. Cause there's nothing like seeing it written on a piece of paper or on your document for you to go, Oh yeah, I really don't understand that concept. Do I? Or, Oh, actually, yeah, I do think that I have an opinion about this. So what the most efficient thing to do is, is start writing immediately. Not with the intention of any of that text being in your final article, but with the intention of that text helping you learn to write, helping you figure out what you're thinking, helping you keep track of what you're reading, and what thoughts you have about it. I'm going to give you an analogy from my own hobbies. You, those of you who know me know, I love a good hobby and I have all the stuff, all the hobbies at the moment, it's kind of collage and abstract art and lino printing and gelli printing. That's exciting. I'm getting distracted, focus Vikki. But I used to get really cross that I wasn't better at art. I do stuff and it wouldn't be that great. And I'd look at other people's and I'd be like, oh, that's disappointing. And then I realized the problem was I was. Trying to paint a painting where anybody who's good at art knows that way before you paint a painting you do like 50 different little squiggles of what might it look like and a page of 10 pages of like what colors might I use together and what happens if I do this and what shapes do I like over here and what materials might I use that's why it's so fascinating to look at like real artists sketchbooks and stuff because you can see where all this stuff came from. My uncle gave me an amazing book about architecture sketches and seeing these like incredible rough sketches of buildings that ultimately became these incredible architectural detailed drawings but seeing them at that very early stage. That's the process. It wasn't inefficient for that architect to not start with a technical drawing. You know, that's the equivalent. We think when we go, I want to start with a good first draft. It's like, Oh, well, I want to design a building. Better get into my building computer program, whatever architects use. Um, and start drawing up some architectural plans. They don't do that. They just grab a sketchbook or a virtual sketchbook and start squiggling. There might be a little tower here and some doors over there. They come up with concepts and they come up with loads of them. And that's how they figure it out. If there's any architects listening, I apologize for that very un technical explanation, but hopefully the analogy works. So what I want you to do is recognize that a lot of the things that you are calling inefficient are actually the process. They are actually research. Making mistakes is not inefficient. Making mistakes is part of the process. Going down a way and then realizing that you're wrong or that the argument doesn't stand up. isn't inefficient. It's research. That means we've eliminated that version or we've come up with an argument as to why and now we're going to do this version instead. This isn't inefficient. 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. If I can be really, really frank with you, regular listeners, you're used to this. Everybody else, remember it comes from love. If I can be really frank with you, the bit that's inefficient is you keep telling yourself you have to do it perfectly. It's inefficient to keep telling yourself you're not good enough to do this. It's inefficient to tell yourself that at some unspecified point in the future you're going to know enough to do this well. It's inefficient to keep telling yourself that your supervisor's useless and everything's awful and if only things were better you'd be able to do this really well. That's a bit harsh. That is not making excuses for bad supervisors. If you have a bad supervisor, find my podcast episode about how to deal with a toxic supervisor and check it out. This is not that. But when we use up our brains on worrying about us not being good enough. That's the inefficient bit. When we go and do some pointless bit of, like, color coding or labeling or scrolling on social media because we're not ready to write yet, that's the inefficient bit. If you want to be efficient, I prefer the word effective, but if you want to be efficient, you want to get stuff done in the timescale you want to do it in, the best thing you can do is get on with it imperfectly. The other thing that's inefficient is spending more time looking for answers in other people's writing instead of in your own brain. I am, once again, I always have to put my, my caveats in. I'm once again saying, not saying, you don't need to read. Of course, I'm not saying you don't need to read. Of course you need to read but if you don't know what argument you're going to make or you don't know how you're going to write something and you are looking for the solution in somebody else's article you are looking in the wrong place. You need to read that stuff but the answers to what you're going to write are in your brain and you just need to decide them. So stop being inefficient by looking for your answers outside of yourself. Do your research, read the stuff, but then spend time in your own brain making decisions about what argument it is that you're making in your article. The other, here's a little bonus one for you. The other thing I see when people are focused on being efficient is that they don't engage with some of the extras that are on. They don't find time to come to coaching sessions they have access to. They don't find time to go to research group seminars or to just hang out in the department and chat to people. They don't find time to talk to other people about their research because they need to be efficient. They need to use it. I haven't got much time for this PhD. I need to fit it all in. I need to focus on the important stuff. Sometimes those connections are the most efficient thing you can have. They are certainly the most effective thing you can have. When during the pandemic, I really limited myself in terms of how much time I spent talking to staff because I had so much to do. It backfired horribly. It meant I was out of touch with how people were doing. It meant I was miserable. It meant I wasn't getting the support I needed. I wasn't giving the support that I was able to give. My attempt to be efficient made everything work less well. If you are missing the social community things because you're like, Oh, I don't really have time. I should probably just get on with my writing. Please reconsider. The community will strengthen your work. Having connections with others will give us the kind of strength and knowledge and feeling of relatedness that we need in order to complete our work and to enjoy our experiences. Being efficient is not about knowing what the most important things are and only doing those and never doing anything outside them. Being efficient is getting on with tasks that are core parts of your research. And that's talking to people, telling people about your research, writing reams of drafts that will never do anything other than clarify your brain and making notes on papers that are what you need to know from that paper right now. Let's stop aiming for this kind of clinical structured sort of efficiency and go for the kind of efficiency that makes up this actual messy fun academic process. I hope that's useful. I think it's crucial. I am so grateful to the student who bought it to my group coaching sessions. I know everybody in the room really needed to hear the conversations that we had about it. I know they got a lot out of it and have already been telling me about the ways it's changed their practice. Make sure you let me know To, um, if you're on my newsletter, you can always send me an email. Let me know how you've applied the stuff you've learned in the podcasts. If you have any questions, just email me too, and I will answer them in future episodes. 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.

< If you dread presentations, or would just like to be a bit more confident when speaking, then this episode is for you! Linda Ugelow, author of Delight in the Limelight, is talking about why so many of us struggle with public speaking and what we can all do to improve. If you listen carefully, you’ll also find out what happened when I was live on stage in a wetsuit too 😊 Links I refer to in this episode You can find out all about Linda here or follow her on TikTok , Facebook , LinkedIn , or YouTube . You can also buy her book, Delight in the Limelight or find it on Audible. You can get her Speaker Preparation Checklist to feel grounded, focused, and energized when you speak. If you want a giggle, you can also watch my FameLab disaster video and my response Transcript Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD life coach podcast. And this week we have a guest author with us. So welcome Linda Ugelow, the author of Delight in the Limelight, who is an expert in all things presentations and overcoming your fears of speaking in public. So welcome Linda. Linda: Thank you for having me, Vikki. Vikki: No, it's exciting to have you here. Tell people a little bit more about yourself and how you came to write a book about this. Linda: I became an online coach back in 2014 or so, and when it came time after I built my website and I decided I was going to help people overcome stress in their lives, I had to put myself out there. And all the marketing gurus at the time said there was this amazing new technology called live streaming. And there was this app called Periscope. And what they said is, you got to get on every day. And I thought. Okay. I'm going to get on every day to build my following. What they didn't tell me was it was terrifying. And every day my heart was pounding like a caffeinated race horse, but I figured, you know, after a few weeks I'll feel better and I'll Google how to get over my nerves and I'll utilize deep breathing and power poses and meditation. Linda: And I'll reframe my mind. To like pretend it's excitement and not to think about me, but to think about the audience. And sure enough, I got to day 75, 10 weeks later, daily broadcasting. And my heart is still racing like a caffeinated racehorse. And I'm thinking, what is going on? You know what, you know, why hasn't all this experience, this daily live streaming gotten me to a place of feeling confident. Linda: And I realized that I'm managing it okay. With all those things I mentioned. But I didn't want to have to manage it. I didn't want to have any fear at all to have to manage. So I decided that day I'm going to get rid of the fear. And I had background in expressive arts therapy, a psychology background, movement, like dance movement therapy. Linda: And I thought, I'm sure I've got the answer to this. The first thing I decided to do before I got rid of it was to investigate it. I thought, what is this fear anyway? So I closed my eyes and I asked if the fear could talk, what would it say? And what came back was you're going to be attacked. Vikki: Oh, wow. Linda: And all of a sudden I thought, wow, have I been attacked? And what thought, Oh my gosh, I have. In fact, my sisters used to attack me all the time. When? Whenever my mom put me in the center of attention saying, why can't you girls be more like Linda? Cause I was the good girl. I saw the punishment my sisters got, and I decided that was never going to happen to me. Linda: So I became the goody, goody, I never got punished by mom, but I did get punished by my sisters. for having my mother's favor. Then it hit me, duh, so I'm not comfortable being the center of attention, being on camera, or I was a performer on stage for, I think, over 30 years at that point with my Women's World Music Group. Linda: Hated, hated having to introduce a song. No wonder why, because there was a part of me that remembered it was dangerous to be the center of attention, and then a light bulb went off in my mind. Maybe this is what the fear of speaking is all about. It's not about that nice audience that's encouraging us, but it's about those times that we had in the past that eroded our confidence that made us feel it wasn't safe to speak. Linda: Now, in my case, with that particular memory, I was being elevated but it invited the jealousy of my sisters. They hated me for it. But I also had times that I was bullied when I was ignored by all the other kids at school. Times that my mom would say, why an A minus and not an A plus? You know, giving me this feeling I have to be perfect. Vikki: I'm only laughing with that one. I'm only laughing because I empathize. So we have a running joke with my mum, thankfully it doesn't seem to have caused too much trauma, a running joke with my mum that I'd come home with a 98 percent on my science test and she'd asked me what happened to the other 2%. And I've asked her about it and she's like, what did you expect me to do? To be like, oh my goodness, you're so amazing. She's like, yeah, we'll talk about the other 2%. Linda: Exactly. Yes. Give me some credit. That was a really, really good outcome. Vikki: She was like, you got enough credit from getting a 98%. You didn't need more from me. Linda: Yeah. Well, these are the inadvertent slights. That we get and they may be minor and on the, on their own, they may not be sufficient to create this anxiety speaking, but when you have that, plus maybe an embarrassing experience in public, or you are hurt in some way, abused, you have, like, my father also told me he wasn't interested in what I, you know, what my thoughts and opinions were, he wasn't interested in the things I was interested in. Linda: That led me to believe that what I had to say wasn't interesting and other people wouldn't feel that way either. So when you have these different items and stories and memories from your past, plus you know, those messages like silence is golden, children should be, you know, seen and not heard and don't stand out, keep your head down. Linda: All of these things that are meant probably in some beneficial ways to help us get through life more successfully. You know, to create compliant children who are good and get good grades, those things don't necessarily translate and us feeling bold and being able to take risks and stand out and take up space because we're so busy going by the rules and trying to be good students and good kids that we don't realize it's working against us. Vikki: For sure. And I loved your, the dedication of your book, the way you said it's to the speaker inside waiting to be set free. And I just, tell a bit more about why you chose that. Linda: Because I felt like I spent most of my life hiding. And I think that's the question I like to ask people. And I think we should ask ourselves is like " When did we decide it was safer to hide?" Linda: And yet there's a part of us that wants to be seen and heard. That's our nature. That is our human design. Children love being the center of attention, especially when it's, you know, positive one, like the first steps we take, or when we laugh and people laugh with us. Or think of about children at the playground hanging upside down saying, look, and it could be the 50th time that day. Linda: And they, they just love that positive regard at, but somewhere between then and later on, it all changes. We give that up for caution. So my dedication is to that person who, which I do think is most of us who really want to be seen, heard, valued, respected, feeling like we can participate fully in the lives that we are living and in the areas that we feel passionate about. Vikki: So many of my listeners, almost all my listeners are either PhD students or academics. So they're working in that university world. And there they might have speaking that's teaching or it might be presenting to their research groups, or even externally at big conferences and all that sort of stuff. So there's loads of academia, as you know, that involves speaking to other people. So for the people who are listening, who really empathizing with the things you say. Where would you even start? Because most of the things you talked about at the beginning as not having worked for you, are the stuff that we're told most of the time, right? So, where would somebody who's struggling with this start? Linda: I really believe that it is worthwhile to investigate the source of our speaking fear, because what happens is that unexamined, it continues to crop up. It's a trigger for, you know, past wounds and yes, we can manage it. And if you're only going to be speaking once in a while or if it doesn't bother you that much, it may not be as important, but if you do want to feel like this is not an obstacle for you, it's really worthwhile to say, where did I feel dismissed? What were my family relationships like with my parents, my caretakers, my siblings? My school relationships, were there any times in school that I felt rejected or dismissed or ridiculed in public? Linda: Once we know what these issues are, we can then address them. What we want to be able to do is change our relationship to them. Because what happens is when we have these experiences, we think it means something about us. We ascribe meaning to it. And what we want to do is find a different meaning. Of how it sits inside our neurophysiology and in our memory so it's not activated. It's not sore. It's not a sore wound, but it's a healed wound. And we do that by forgiveness, by giving compassion and love and maybe understanding to our younger self who maybe didn't have the same resources that we have as an adult, it could just be a matter of journaling, it could be a matter of doing some forgiveness but to yourself and to other people who may have been involved, I love using a particular modality called emotional freedom technique, which people may know as tapping or EFT. I've just had wonderful results with it myself and with a lot of my clients. It's kind of a way of interrupting the pattern of how a memory or story lives inside us and opens us to a wider possibility, a bigger palette or canvas for that story to sit. And so it feels like, it has a right place in our life because truthfully, we're not going to get through life unscathed. Things are going to happen, but it's how we're able to look at them and address them and move on from them. Linda: That allows us a sense of inner freedom. I feel like there's no shame in having stuff. We all have stuff. Vikki: Hmm. I find it fascinating. This is probably beyond the scope of how you deal with it now, but I find it fascinating the difference between whether these experiences kind of lodge themselves in you in that way or not. So, the listeners know that there's, there's a whole bunch of the stuff I talk about normally that I am still working through with. Procrastination, overwhelm, all that stuff, I am very much still working on myself with my clients, whereas public speaking is one, occasionally I get a bit nervous in a kind of like, oh, there's 4, 000 people out there kind of way. Vikki: But beyond that is one that I've just I've never really had an issue with, yet I can think of a whole bunch of times. I mean, I was told to shut up and talk less pretty much my entire life. And I can think of a whole bunch of times that things have gone wrong on stage and stuff and it's interesting why these things lodge with some people and mean something, because I don't think it was anything clever or special that I did at the time that means it didn't. Linda: Like I said, it depends on the meaning, the meaning we ascribe to them. So I actually invite myself to make mistakes now and to mess up so that I get practice in handling them not only for myself, but so that I can model for other people. If we're somewhat amused by ourselves, it's not going to be an issue. But if we feel like it's about our self worth and it's about our ego and we're not valued valuable because of it. Someone's going to be angry at us. Vikki: Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? I think for me, looking back, I knew I'd get told off but I think I generally entertained myself. I'm going to get told off, but I think I'm really funny. Linda: So that's what I mean by you feel amused by the mistake, that you have a way of handling it that you feel like your sense of self is intact. And, and that's where we want to get to. We want to feel like our sense of self is intact in spite of our imperfections. In spite of our mess, you know. Vikki: The listeners will know. There's a bunch of other imperfections that I have that I am very much still working on the not beating myself up about. It's just interesting in the kind of how some of them work out and in fact they're finding it amusing. I can't remember whether I've ever mentioned this on the podcast before but I did a competition called FameLab which is a sort of public communication of science competition and you have three minutes to talk, it doesn't have to be your research, but you have three minutes to talk about research in a way that's fun and engaging to the general population but you're not allowed slides so you can bring props if you want but you're not allowed to have a presentation. Vikki: And I took part in the local heats, and I won the local heats. And I went to the regional finals, and I won the regional finals. And then we had this training weekend and stuff, and the training weekend was amazing. People listening, if you haven't checked out FameLab, make sure you do, it's really good. Vikki: And then the final was in the Bloomsbury Theatre in London, so like a full, proper, like, big ass theatre with, I don't know how many people, hundreds of people. We were streaming live on the internet, my dad was in the audience, my then boyfriend was in the audience, mum was watching from her, you know, it was, it was a whole thing. Vikki: And I had been way too ambitious about what I was trying to fit in this three minutes. Because normally when I'm presenting I'll make it up as like, you know. I'll, I'll have notes, but it won't be scripted. But this, I was like, I'm going to have to script it. Cause you know, three minutes. Linda: It's three minutes and you can't go over. Vikki: I can't go over. Gotta be precise. And I had tried to jam too much in. That was my error really. And I got about halfway through, told a joke. Everybody laughed way more than I'd expected them to. I relaxed and enjoyed it. And then I had no idea what my next line was. And I was like. And I stood on stage, I was in a wetsuit for other reasons, and so I'm still on stage, it's like, this is like an actual stress dream. Vikki: I'm live on stage wearing a wetsuit in front of my family and I can't remember my words. And I then remembered and carried on, but I ran out of time. And they were really lovely in the questions and let me catch bits up and stuff. But I remember, I was a little bit mortified, but I decided to make a video about it afterwards, about the experience, why it wasn't as bad as it could have been, and doing the talk I wanted to do. Vikki: And that, it was just a really interesting experience, because It really wasn't that awful. Even though, like, the worst thing that could have happened, pretty much, happened. And everyone was really nice about it. And nothing awful came afterwards, and I wasn't attacked, and it was just a re it was actually a really good experience. And that's why I wanted to share it afterwards so that other people could be like, you know, if this is what you're scared will happen, it can be okay. Linda: Yes. Yes. I love that story because what it shows to me is that by your willingness to not hide it because of mortification, but to share it, it gave you the opportunity to really reflect on it. To make it into something that was positive as well as a good story. Cause I always make great stories and if we could only see it in that way, we would be much more content and happy and satisfied with the speaking that we do. So I think that, I think you have a wonderful handle on how to frame your own speaking experiences. Linda: You know, it sort of reminds me right now I'm working on a speaker log and journal for this very thing. So like going into it, you can think through your mindset and how you want your attitude and why you're excited about it and what you're concerned about and, you know, lift, build yourself up. Linda: And then at the end, you can go back and do exactly what you did. What did I like about it? What do I wish was different? What do I want to remind myself for next time? And the idea behind it is that every speaking experience we have is an opportunity to grow in some way. And if we look at it through that lens of this is an opportunity for me to try something out, or this is an opportunity for me to just explore, what does it mean to be more myself? Linda: What does it mean? If I let myself be a little more dynamic or whatever, or be more grounded. And this time I'm going to just feel my feet on the floor. I'm going to notice my, my breathing more so that I feel more relaxed or I speak more on my breath or, you know, any, any thing that you pick out and you say, this is my point of exploration and experimentation, then you see speaking more as a journey rather than a destination. Vikki: I love that. And I love the thing of preparing beforehand, because I think people often they're preparing the content beforehand, right? And then they're thinking about managing their nerves when they're there doing it. But the idea of planning in advance what you want to be thinking and feeling and stuff as you go through why you're doing it and stuff. Vikki: That's yeah, that's such an interesting idea. And I also think that is something that's useful even for people who are confident, because one of the things I've noticed is I'm now so comfortable speaking that I'm sometimes a little slapdash with it that I'll be like I'll talk about this and I'll talk about that and I'll talk about that and it's like that'll be fine, happy days. Vikki: And someone gave me some advice a while ago that sometimes actually if you've got things that you're really strong at, rather than worrying about your weaknesses, getting amazing at the things you're strong at rather than alright, you know, I think I'm pretty good. I definitely don't think I'm like world leading. And so something like that, I think is, is actually really interesting, even for people who don't suffer from nerves, but who want to maximize their skills as a speaker. Linda: Yes, that's it. 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: Amazing. So when people have sort of had some journaling they've done, you know, sort of delve back into their memories and things like that. Um, they've sort of maybe identified some things and you, you obviously talked through some techniques and we'll link to where you can get a copy of the book in the show notes for people who want to know more detail about that. What are things that people can do there and then in the moment to look after themselves if they're feeling scared. Linda: Well, I think that in the moment is really not the place to start. I think it's beforehand. And there are many things that you can do beforehand. One of the most powerful things is mental rehearsal. And what I mean by mental rehearsal, I'm not talking about rehearsing what you want to say, but rehearsing how you want to feel and rehearsing how you want to express yourself. Linda: And when you imagine yourself feeling good and seeing yourself, let's say in front of classroom or in front of the jury, you know, for your thesis and your, you see how passionate you are and how happy you are and excited to share this body of of material with people. Then you are pre paving that experience to happen. Linda: If you do that 2 or 3 times before you speak. You're going to have so much more fun and you're going to feel more grounded in your speaking because when you get up there, you will be ready to be on. So, and that is part of the mental rehearsal is like, imagine yourself starting out, like, the walking to the front of the room, you know, what does that feel like? How do you want to feel and how do you want to see yourself, you know, grounded and confident and relaxed and excited or whatever it is, it'll be different for each person. So mental rehearsal is really, really important. Linda: Another thing that's very important is to warm up your body. Because you think that speaking is a mental thing. No, it's a physical thing. And if you are tight in your body, if you are, you know, anxious or jittery, you're going to want to move your body, stretch out, just feel a little looser and more open. Likewise with your voice, because your voice is your instrument of speech and a lot of people say, I'm not sure what's going to come out of my mouth. Well, that's why we warm up. No singer would get on stage without warming up their voice. No instrumentalist would start to play for a concert without warming up. It's like you want to. Linda: Again, with the neurophysiology, you want to get in that groove that you want to be in. So if you want a strong voice, if you want a resonant voice, open your mouth and if you may know some singing, you know, exercises, you can do those or just go, ah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, so that you feel like when you open your mouth, you know what's going to come out. Linda: Well, one thing that I do is I love to take a line from whatever it is I'm going to say or likely to say, or maybe it can be anything else and I slow it down. So I'll speak a bit like this. And as I do it, I feel the back of my throat opening and I feel all the vowels sing because I want my voice to ring when my voice rings. First of all, it feels really good, but second of all, it's more articulate. People can hear and understand the words I'm saying rather than if I'm speaking a bit like this and I don't have much ring or my, my, it's just constricted in my throat. And it doesn't feel as good first of all, but it's also harder for people to hear and it limits my ability to be more dynamic. Linda: So if you have resonance in your voice, you can speak more loudly. If you're like this and you try to get louder, it's going to be scratchier. Yeah. And it also limits our ability to use the melody of our voice. What we want to be able to do when we speak. And I think this adds a hundred percent to the fun that you can have when you speak is we want to feel like we have all of the notes available to us. Linda: In order to describe what we want to say with the feeling that we have behind it, with how we want to emphasize certain words so that people really can understand, not just like if I was going to be very monotone in my dynamics, it might be like this and you can hear me, but after a while, your brain's going to get a little tired and you're not going to feel the same thing as if I'm really like being a tour guide with what I want to say by how I say it. And so this, this is, I think something that one can really have fun with and play with before either you're teaching or you're doing a presentation to practice with a sense of big expression, maybe even over the top expression, not to say that's how you have to present that, but it allows you to incorporate and see what is the extent of your personality here, because when you have a personality and you let it come through, people are going to really enjoy it and take in what you are talking about. Vikki: I love this because I come from a science background, and this is just not stuff that we talk about. And I think this is the joy of having somebody who's got the sort of performance background that you have, and obviously all your sort of expressive therapy work and things. I think this more kind of artistic performance side to this is so useful for everybody. Vikki: My sisters were the ones that did the performance stuff. I was very much on the sports pitch and definitely nowhere near a stage and definitely don't want me singing. So I have like no performance background to put to this at all. So are there any other examples of a quick exercise that somebody could do that would get their voice warmed up and enable them to kind of play with these melodies that you talk about? Linda: So, I'm thinking into my speaker green room, it's a program I have that I make videos where people can do these things alongside me, but I would, let's say, start with my body and I would shake things out, like shake my hands, shake my shoulders, shake my hips. Linda: I would, rotate my joints around my neck to loosen up my neck, my shoulders. I might put on some music and dance a little bit just to kind of like raise my energy. I would then open my mouth and say things like blah, blah, blah. I've already given you a bunch of things that you can do, either saying words or just making sounds. Linda: I would also allow myself to, after kind of like doing some big stuff like that, I would bring my mind into focus because I think it's important for us not to feel just like we're splattering ourselves out there, but that we need to have our brains focused. So I might do something where I just stand still. I might bring my fingers together and draw a line down from my head in front of my body and just like physically in envision, like bringing, bringing myself into alignment, you know, whatever that means. But I physicalized that. Linda: I might, there's something called pacing where it's from something called brain gym that I like to do where. Linda: You do something called cross crawl, which you lift up one knee and you touch it with your opposite hand. You lift up your other knee, you touch it. And the idea is that you are crossing your body across the midline and supposedly what they say they're doing is they're bringing both sides of your brain together. Linda: I don't know if that's true or not, but I do know that when I do this, I feel more focused. There's something else where you can rub right underneath your collarbones and you put your other hand on your belly and this does a similar thing that just brings you into your body. Brings you into focus. Linda: I do feel like when I'm speaking. I like to remind myself to feel my feet on the floor, to feel my body relax. You can practice this by any time of the day, just doing a quick body scan and say, Oh, what's my body up to right now? What's my posture feeling like, where are my hands, where are my legs? Linda: And when you do this repeatedly, it becomes part of your somatic awareness, and the more somatic awareness you have in your everyday life, the more you can bring it into your speaking. So like right now, while we're speaking, I feel my feet on the floor. I feel how my arms are moving through space. I feel the breath that I'm taking. Linda: I'm feeling the sound coming out of my breath. Now you don't, you don't occupy all these spaces all at once. You kind of layer. And that's what the fun is of the growth of becoming a more grounded speaker is that you can start in one place, start with your feet, start, then add your breath, then add your arms, then add the visuals. Linda: Like, where am I looking? Am I looking into the camera? Am I looking into people's eyes? What does it feel like to look at people's faces for years? Oh, my God. I was afraid to look into people's faces. I, I, I, it was like I had this resistance, but I added it on by experimenting. So this is what I recommend for people to do is to experiment like, what is my experience like? What do I like about my experience? What would be nice to add? Vikki: I love that. And it's so interesting hearing how intentional it all is, you're increasingly making me feel like I'm, I am getting by with some slightly misplaced confidence and charisma and not a lot of else. It's like, I have so much pleasure having people listening, even if they're, you know, they feel comfortable with talking, there's, there's so much here I think for everybody. Linda: Me too, Vikki, you know, I feel like I, it's not like I feel like I have arrived. By any means, but I feel like I'm part of my journey, which is so different than 10 years ago when I was avoiding doing anything in public in that way. Linda: I was on stage as a dancer, singing with a group that was okay, but to get on stage like I do now and speak or to get on a podcast and talk like this. No way. I mean, it was like beyond my comprehension that I could do that because I had had some very negative experiences. Embarrassing experiences speaking and I did not come out of it the way you did. Vikki: Oh, I mean, you were talking about the dancing and singing that seriously, the idea, you know, we always take, take people on like team building things, whereas outdoor pursuits and stuff. And I'm fine. I'm there. I'm loving all of it. It's great. And other people like a fish out of water. I always say, if they did a team building exercise at work that involved me having to sing or dance on stage, I might actually die. Vikki: I once did a performance, which again, I'll link in the show notes, cause I'm super proud of it. An aerial silks performance in a community circus. And that is literally the only thing I've done since I was about 10. And the idea of doing that stuff. There will be a whole load of trauma in my past as to why that's so terrifying. So I, I very much empathize when I think about it and you know, I don't have it for speaking, but I have it for those, those other forms of performance. Linda: Yes. And you know, if those other places of performances are interesting to look at, if they're relevant in our life, because they also show us, well, where do I have, again, that inhibition? Where did it feel unsafe for me? Like, did I, did someone make a comment about my dancing ever? Vikki: Oh, it's the sisters. Same as you, it's all about the sisters and one of them will will listen and laugh a lot. So Nicola, I'm talking to you right now. Anyway, I have one last question for you, which is thinking about that time after the talk. So same as we said, the bit before doing a talk often gets neglected, other than the actual rehearsal of the content, then you've got the doing of it. I think there's a really key period afterwards, and it sounds as though you do too. So what can people do after they've done a presentation that will make it? It's more likely that the next one will feel less scary. Linda: I think whenever it's possible, if we can have more speaking opportunities set up together rather than singularly, it's going to help us feel like it's more of a growth experience. So let's say you do have to present to a jury. If you can set up other experiences like that, several, before you have to do that one. That's going to help you. And each time, if you're looking at how can I grow with each one, that's going to set you up for better success for the highest stakes one. And even after that higher stakes one, if you can do something public afterwards with what you presented, do that, like set it up, go to the library or invite peers or other people from different departments to come and listen to you that or do a panel or something that extends the experience. Linda: And then, as I mentioned, you know, in my, in the speaker log and journal, the kinds of things that we have is taking time to reflect and say, what did I like about that? What was great? What do I feel proud about? What do I wish was different? There're still going to be things. And if I want it to be different for next time, what can I do to make that happen? Vikki: Yeah, definitely. And I think there's something around generating compassion as well at that time, isn't there? One of the things I always talk about with my clients, you know, sometimes we're preparing for a viva or a job interview, all those sorts of things, is you don't have to believe it will go well, because we don't necessarily know whether it will or not. We can try and make it go well, but we don't know that it will, but we can decide in advance and afterwards that we're going to be kind to ourselves about how it goes, no matter how it goes. Linda: Yes. Absolutely. I'm really glad you brought that up. One of the prompts in the journal is I forgive myself for, yeah, yes. And the other thing to remember is that oftentimes imperfection is more relatable. And I can't tell you how many times when I've made, I mentioned making mistakes on purpose or not on purpose necessarily, but allowing for them every time that's happened. People have always come up to me and thanked me for showing what to do when I forget what to say or when I put up a slide and I didn't know what it was, you know, was there for, and I admitted it to the audience and then it turned out, you know, everybody laughed. Linda: And I even got a client from that one time because they said that was my favorite part. So we shouldn't try to avoid our imperfection. Just know that it makes us relatable. So allow yourself space to be relatable and not always be so perfect. We don't want perfect people all the time. Vikki: Thank you so much. We will link to where people can get copies of the book in the show notes and everything. Is there anywhere else? Are you on social media or anything like that? If people want to know more, where can people find out about you? Linda: Well, I'm Linda Ugelow everywhere, U G E L O W, but I would love to be able to share like a checklist of these preparation rituals because I think it's good to have it in mind. And you can get that at LindaUgelow.com/rituals. Vikki: Perfect. Perfect. I will link that all in the show notes and I'm sure lots of people will check it out. Thank you so much for coming today, Linda. I really appreciate it. I think that is super useful information that I'm going to be trying to take on board. And I know for people who find presentations deeply stressful, that's going to be super useful. So 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.

< In this episode I answer three questions from listeners on different topics, but that are all loosely connected to the idea that we want to be able to “do it all”. I give Julia some tips on writing up a PhD with small children, I advise Susan on how to prepare for her comprehensive exams, and I give Sajini some ideas about managing overwhelm when balancing writing up with working as an international student. Interestingly, these are all topics that I don’t have direct experience of, but stay with me as I apply our mindset principles to these very real challenges. Links I refer to in this episode How to prepare for your viva Transcript Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. Today I'm going to be answering questions from you, the listeners. I have three people who have submitted questions about doing their PhD while parenting, dealing with the anxiety to do with examinations. And balancing work and PhD as a part time student, even if none of those specifically resonate with you, there is stuff in here that is going to be relevant for all of you, I promise. So stick with it. If you have questions that you want me to answer in the future, do make sure that you send them on in. If you're on my newsletter, you can just reply to that each week. And if you're not on my newsletter, why not check out my website, the phdlifecoach. com and you can join the newsletter right there from the front page. Alternatively, if you're listening to this on podcast, there should be a question, send Vikki a question box. If you do that, make sure you tell me your name because otherwise I won't be able to shout you out when I answer your question. You can send me questions that way. Or if you're watching this on YouTube, use the comments down there and I will answer them in a future episode. Before I get any further into the episode, while I remember. Are you guys on Instagram? If you're on Instagram, please follow me. I'm starting to build more of a presence over there. I'm sharing advice and tips and general motivation and cheering on. And somehow in a weird world, I have more people on my newsletter or my podcast than I do on my Instagram. So if you're not following me, I am at the PhD life coach. Please follow me. Please. Retweet, that's not Instagram, reshare, you know, post, share my reels, comment, do all that good stuff that means that your fellow PhD students and academics will also find me too. I would really appreciate it if you can help me out with that. And in return, you get that daily dose of motivation, inspiration, tips, and hints. So, let's go with the questions. My first question comes from Julia, and she asks, Is it possible for you to ,talk about writing up your PhD while also being a parent to small children, without going crazy, in her words. So it's PhD, last month of writing, having two small children, both under five. Now, the first thing I'm going to say, I don't have children. I have stepdaughters, but they didn't come into my life until they were teenagers. I definitely did not have children when I was doing my PhD. And you might say that means that I've got no kind of grounds to give advice from, and I certainly don't have grounds in a do it like me kind of way. However, think that you can still really apply lots of the mindset stuff that we talk about to this specific challenge, even if you haven't experienced it yourself. And to be honest, I have unbelievable respect for anybody who is trying to do their PhD alongside a family, whatever age your children are, balancing those different really important roles is something that it's, it's inherently difficult. So I want you all first of all, Julia, you particularly, to start by giving yourself a massive congratulations and a massive amount of understanding that this isn't that you're not good enough here. This isn't that you're bad at this. This is an inherently difficult thing to balance. Okay? That's not to say we're not going to try and improve the way we're thinking about it, the way we're managing it, or anything like that. But when we can start from that place of compassion, the kind of problem solving becomes a lot easier. And the next thing I'd say is it's really important who you're comparing yourself to. And this is going to be true for lots of you, not just parents. Often what happens is we simultaneously compare ourselves to somebody who is doing their PhD full time with no dependents, who's potentially fully funded, somebody who's in a very different situation and we see what they're doing and what they're achieving and we think, Oh my goodness, I'm not doing it like them. But then we also look at parents who are perhaps not working outside the home or certainly not doing PhDs and think, Oh, I'm not being a parent like them. And this is where you're being really unfair to yourself by comparing yourself to two essentially 24 hour jobs, the PhD student who's doing not other things, there's 24 hours there, this parent who's not doing 24 hours there. You're trying to tell yourself that you should be able to live up to both of those people when in reality you've only got half the time that they have. So we get to be really careful about who we're comparing ourselves to. What we want to get to is a place where we can say I am doing. a really good job at being a parent who's doing a PhD. Okay, a PhD student who's parenting. The way we do that, instead of setting ourselves completely unattainable targets of doing all the things they're doing and all the things they're doing, is we get to identify what are meaningful metrics for ourselves. And this is true whatever you're trying to balance. I used to work with a lot of people who were balancing, being elite athletes with academics, for example. The same is true there. Some of you may be doing part time work. We'll talk about that more in detail later on. But a lot of you will be balancing other things alongside your studies. We get to decide what are the meaningful metrics for us. And we can do that in our PhD, our professional lives, and we can do that in our personal lives. So I want to ask you, Julia, as a PhD student, what are the most meaningful metrics for you? And a lot of that will depend on why you chose to do a PhD. Did you just need the qualification for the progress that you wanted to make? Is it a passion project about this particular topic? Are there specific skills that you wanted to learn? If we can get back to our why, then we can prioritise what the meaningful metrics are for us. Because lots of people will have lots of opinions about what makes a good PhD student, a good academic, whatever stage of your career you're at. But only you get to decide which are the things that are most meaningful to you. Do you just need to get this qualification done? Do you want to have publications? Is widespread networking and connections important to you? Is public outreach and engagement and impact important to you? And you might say all of those things are important, but based on the why behind your career, you get to choose which ones you're going to prioritize at the moment and make those your meaningful metrics. Does that mean that you will sometimes be disappointed that you need to say no to things that could be an amazing opportunity? Yes, absolutely. But you get to decide what those meaningful metrics are. And remember, I say metrics as though they all have to be super measurable. It could be, and it is often the case for many people, that what is most important to you is that you love your topic, is that you love doing the research and being part of that research community. That can be your meaningful metric. You can decide that, you know what, I am not going to spend time chasing down every single bit of funding, every possible publication, but I do want to engage in departmental seminars and talk about intellectual stuff and make space and time for collaborative discussions. Okay, when you decide your meaningful metrics, you can put those in the diary first. The same is true on the parenting side of things. What are your meaningful metrics for parenting? Do you definitely want to be there for bedtime every night? Is that important to you? Do you always want to eat as a family? Do you want to be the mom or dad, who turns up at all the school events? Do you want to be on the, you know, the parents committee and providing cakes for all the cake stalls. Do you want to always be the one that drives them to their activities? Whatever it might be, what are the meaningful metrics for you? And again, it might be lovely to do all of those things, but some of them will feel more non negotiable than others. Now, with all of these, whether it's your academic side or your parenting side, I want you to also really ask yourself where those choices come from. Do they come genuinely from your true heart and beliefs, or are they influenced by the people around you, the things you see online? Because what we want to separate when we're choosing these meaningful metrics, we want to separate the kind of shoulds from the I actually want to and I actually think it's important. And then we can narrow it down to a much smaller range of non negotiables, much smaller things that you're committing to. And then from there, we think about our thoughts. We think about what we tell ourselves when we say, Oh, I, you know, I haven't been to their school play. We say no. I know, but that's not the bit I decided that makes me a good parent. The bit that makes me a good parent is that I'm there for bedtime so they can tell me about their day. That we spend time together on the weekend, whatever it might be. It might be that your meaningful metric is spending time actually with them and engaging with them. Even if that's only a shorter amount of time, rather than being present but not really present because you're worrying about other things or doing your work or whatever. There's no right answer to these meaningful metrics other than you get to choose them for reasons that you like and then you have your own back about it. The final thing I would add in is remember for all of you, you are not just an academic and a parent, you are not just your roles, you are also first and foremost a human being in your own right. And so when you're working out your meaningful metrics, I would really encourage you to also think about what are your meaningful metrics for you as an individual person that is separate from your PhD or your academic career, that is separate from your parenting. What is your kind of minimum commitment to yourself? Whether that's something you go and do once a week outside the home, whether it's a period of time that you need to transition from one role into another, or what you do at bedtime, or what it might, whatever it might be. What's the meaningful metric that means that you're looking after you as an individual? We don't have to be perfect at any one bit of this. We don't even have to be perfect in our attempt to pull it all together. We just have to be doing our best to hit the things that we think are important. The few prioritised things that we think are important. And we have compassion for ourselves and each other when that doesn't go exactly to plan. If we can prioritize like that, we can look at it in the round and go, you know what? All of those things considered, I'm doing a pretty good job 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. My second question comes from Susan and she has comprehensive exams coming up. So I have a really international audience. Those of you in the US and some other countries will know exactly what I mean. Others will not. Comprehensive exams are usually the culmination of the first few years of a PhD. So in North America, for example, PhDs are typically longer than here in the UK. They start out with more structured courses, with coursework associated with them. The comprehensive exams are usually the bit that are the transition from those taught courses into being able to start your dissertation. They're structured very differently. Most places in the UK don't have them. But even across North America, they're structured differently between different institutions. But even if you don't have those sorts of exams, the advice that I'm going to give Susan today is relevant to any kind of upcoming stressful thing that you've got. So maybe you've got a presentation to do, or maybe it's even your viva , it's relevant across all of those things. Susan's question was, how do I get over the anxious feeling of comprehensive exams? I have no clue. My professor explained it and the questions he asked as a simple trial, scared the living out of me. They've now been pushed to the full. There goes my summer. Okay. The first thing to say, same as with Julia, I want you to recognize this is stressful. It's okay to be anxious about something that you haven't done before. That is completely normal. Sometimes, you know, you're talking about wanting the anxious feeling to go away. We don't have to make the anxious feeling go away. It's understandable to be anxious. But what we get to do is we get to decide how we're going to look after ourselves through that anxiety. And the first thing we're going to look out for is where we're making it more anxiety inducing than we need to. Now, one of the things I noticed in the question is a lot of drama around this, which is understandable. We all do this, right? I want you to think in your own examples where you add drama to stuff. But you talked about having no clue and it scared the living out of you that your summer is over now because of this. There's a lot of what we call all or nothing thinking there, where you know absolutely nothing, you definitely can't do it, your summer is definitely over. And the problem with all or nothing thinking is it feels terrible and it's almost always not true. I don't believe you when you tell me you have no clue about your exams. You may feel like you have no clue, you may be telling yourself you have no clue, but I think you know some stuff about it. Okay, and when we keep this all or nothing thinking, we don't give ourselves the opportunity to find that grey area where, okay, I know some stuff. Okay, maybe my summer's not ruined, but there is going to be these challenges. We don't allow ourselves to find that kind of nuanced area that is actually probably much more accurate. If you know you experience all or nothing thinking a lot, I have a whole episode about how to recognize all or nothing thinking and what to do about it. In this case, let's look at them in turn. So first of all, I highlighted this idea that you have no clue. Is that true? Is it really true? One of the tools that you can use to help yourself with that, again I have a whole episode on, is called a Do No Don't No list. I want you to grab a piece of paper, divide it in half, write on one side I do know, one side I don't know, and I want you to really brainstorm about these exams. What do you know about them already? What do you know about how you prepare, and what they expect, or what topics might come up? What do you know factually? What actually are you able to answer questions on? And then at the same time, I want you to be writing on the other side the things you don't know. What are you not sure of? What areas of your research are you less confident on? Because when we give ourselves that I've got no clue, there's nowhere really to go for that. Where do we even start? But if we can get ourselves to, okay, you know what, I do know these things. There's these factual things I don't know about how they work or how to prepare for them or whatever. There's these topics I'm okay, confident on, need a bit of a refresh, but they're not too bad. There's these topics I really struggle with. Suddenly we get to a place where we can actually move forward, we can action plan from here. Suddenly it becomes me, you, and this small thing, rather than just, I have no clue what's going on. Again, I'll link the episode, uh, for the do know, don't know list in the show notes for you as well. What that then allows us to get from is going from, I've got no idea. This is all gonna be terrible not to, this will be fine. Okay, most people think we need to get to this will be fine. I don't feel anxious, but that's not plausible for most people and it feels so far away that we don't even try and get partway where I want you to get to is I can figure this out and I can look after myself if this is hard. Okay? Those are two really important places. Let's take them one at a time. So, I can figure this out. We're not telling ourselves we know everything. We're not telling ourselves we're ready for these exams. If these exams aren't until fall and autumn, then you're probably not ready. But that's okay, because they're not till autumn. Okay? So, telling yourself you'll be fine, we don't know you'll be fine, and we don't know you know everything, so let's not bother telling ourselves that bit. But I do know you can figure this out. I do trust that you are somebody who can identify the things you need to know, and you can get a long way to knowing a lot of them. So we get to tell ourselves, I can figure this out. We also get to tell ourselves, I can look after myself when this is hard. Because again, if we tell ourselves that we're going to somehow become so amazing, it's not going to be hard, and that if it's hard, it's a problem. Then It's just not really true, is it? You're doing something difficult. Doing a PhD is difficult. Having an academic career is difficult, whatever context you're applying this to. These things are difficult, but that doesn't mean they have to be unpleasant. So, if you know that you're going to have a period of time where you're going to be studying for these exams, how do we make that okay for you? This is where we go into boss mode. Those of you who have done my Be Your Own Best Boss course will know about this. If you haven't, check it out on my website. It's a self paced course that you can just buy for yourself. If you can go into boss mode and make sure that you're doing a appropriate amount of work, that it's clearly defined tasks, that you are supporting yourself logistically through that. And you can decide how you want to speak to yourself through this process, then you can make something that is going to be difficult much less unpleasant. You can do challenging things by virtue of the fact you're in an academic career, you've done challenging things before. If you can be careful and caring to yourself while you do these difficult things, suddenly they're enormously less intimidating and you can feel supported while you get them done. Remember also, if you struggle to apply that stuff to yourself all the time, that you kind of know that you want to structure your time a bit more, you kind of know that you shouldn't criticize yourself so much, but you find yourself falling back into old habits, that's completely normal. That's why most people need ongoing support with this stuff. My membership program is going to open back up at the end of april 2025. So if you're listening to this before that, you can get yourself on the waiting list. Doesn't commit you to anything, but it means that you will find out all the information as we go along. So where you've got something where you're like, you know what? I want to learn how to support myself to do hard things, but I'm struggling doing it on my own. Come on into the membership. Let us support you because we have a whole community of people who are all trying to learn the same things alongside you. My third question comes from Sajini, who says that she's working part time, she's doing her PhD at the same time, and she's feeling really overwhelmed with her material, she's feeling really overwhelmed with balancing both of those things, and she's very worried about the future. And to add on top of this, she's an international student, which is bringing her a whole bunch of complications that she feels are kind of heightening this experience of feeling overwhelmed. As with the others! Let's just recognize that doing a PhD or working in academia overseas, away from the place that you grew up, is a challenging thing to do. It can be super exciting, don't get me wrong, super fun, loads of amazing opportunities, but it is inherently challenging and it's challenging in ways that we often don't think about. We often think about the big things to do with visas and funding and language and all those complications, but sometimes it can just be as simple as not understanding the difference between certain brands of food. I remember a good friend of mine, I don't know whether I've told this story on the podcast before, a good friend of mine is Dutch and when she was first over here she was just so frustrated because she didn't know which was a good brand of ketchup, for example, and she'd find herself in the supermarket just wanting to make some simple decisions and just not knowing which brands she liked and it was just one more thing to think about. For other people, it will be things like cultural norms, like understanding what time to turn up for things, what's considered too early, what's considered too late, things like that. How close do you stand to somebody? How direct can you be in your communication? Some of you will find that you're expected to be a lot more direct than you're culturally comfortable with. So you're having to choose between doing something that you feel is rude and doing something that gets misunderstood. Others will find the other way around that your way of communicating is considered too direct and is considered rude by the people around you. And so you're having to kind of hedge what you say in ways that feel ridiculous so as not to be judged by others. There's a whole bunch of cultural considerations that happen when you're working away from where you grew up. Okay. So let's give ourselves some credit here. You're balancing a lot of things. Being a part time student is a big enough balance. And then when you throw being an international student on top of it, it's not surprising that this feels difficult. So where I want to go first is to give yourself a load more credit. And again, I have a whole episode on being more proud of yourself, but I want you to recognize all the things that you're doing here. Often the overwhelm comes from focusing on all the things we haven't done and all the things we're not good at. We can work on not telling ourselves those things. But another way is to squeeze it out with the positives. Is to squeeze it out by recognizing how amazing it is that you're doing the things you're doing. And you can get really specific here, really specific about exactly what you are proud of. You're proud of the friends you've made where you are, you're proud of the fact that you've got through your first year, whatever it may be. You're proud of the fact that you have now got a favourite ketchup in the country that you're working in, and that is one decision you will always be able to make. You can be proud of all the big things and the small things, and the more we spend time telling ourselves those things, the more we believe that we can get past the next set of obstacles. The next thing that I would say is that when you feel overwhelmed, a key thing is to have tasks that you can grab and move forward. So often when we're overwhelmed, we think we need whole new systems. We need a whole new approach. We need to do things differently. Usually it means we need to pick a thing that we need to do and get it done. Okay, preferably an important thing, not just like little admin tasks. We need to have something that we can say, you know what? If I'm overwhelmed, I work on this document. I work on this manuscript. Let's go. Okay, and we try and break those things down into achievable chunks. Again, if you find that hard, I'm referring you to lots of other podcasts today, but there's a wealth of info for you. I also have an episode about breaking things down into chunks. If we can say, okay, I haven't got to think about all of that job, all of this academics, all of my, you know, missing people from home, all that stuff. Here's one thing I can do this thing. That can really help us to manage overwhelm. One thing, do that one thing. And when your brain's telling you you should be doing the other things, this is the thing. The other tool that can really help with that is role based time blocking, which again, I've talked about in another episode, but especially when you are managing part time, so you're doing your PhD and doing something else. And to be honest, Julia, this one's for you too, because this is really useful for parenting as well, is get really clear which role you are in at any one time. So in this hour, I am in writing mode. I am not thinking about things to do with my job. I'm not thinking about stuff I need to do for my family back home. I'm in writing mode. In this hour, I'm in parenting mode. In that hour, I'm working for my job, whatever it might be. If we can get really clear of which role we're in, then we can use that to nudge our brains. When our brains say, Oh, yeah, yeah, but you actually also need to do X. Or, Oh, yeah, yeah, you actually need to do Y. You go, I do. But not right now, because I'm in writing mode right now. I'm in parenting mode right now. Or I'm in part time work mode right now. Okay? So you get to decide when you're in which roles, how much time you're willing to give to each of those different roles. And use that as a way of managing the thoughts that are constantly telling you you should be doing something else. I really hope that that was useful for you all. If you have questions, either about anything I talked about today, or if you have new questions that you think I haven't done an episode on yet, then do let me know in the ways I said at the beginning. Maybe I will answer yours next time. Thank you to Julia, to Susan, to Sajini for sending their questions in. 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.

< All research can be stressful but if your topic is inherently distressing, it becomes even more important to look after your own wellbeing. In today’s episode, I welcome Dr Tina Skinner and Sarah Warbis who are experts in researcher wellbeing. They talk about how researchers can support themselves and, even more importantly, what support institutions should be putting in place to ensure that those conducting research in distressing topics get the help they need. Whatever your topic, there is useful advice about caring for your own wellbeing. *Please note that there is a brief mention of some distressing topics from the start.* Links I refer to in this episode The Researcher Wellbeing Project Join the Researcher Wellbeing Group You might also be interested in this new research by Dr Mary Quinton on Best practices for supporting researchers’ mental health in emotionally demanding research across academic and non-academic contexts . Transcript Vikki: Hi everyone, just a quick interjection before we start. Today's episode is about researcher wellbeing, and particularly researcher wellbeing when you are researching distressing topics. I think will be relevant to everybody regardless of what you research but the nature of the topic is that we will be mentioning early on examples of the types of research that people may find distressing. That means there's going to be mentions of things that some of you may find triggering or distressing or that you may want to think about what little ears you've got around you while you're listening to this episode. We don't go into lots of detail, the focus is very much on how we support researchers doing this sort of work, but I didn't want those things to come as a surprise to you. I hope you find this episode as valuable and important as I think it is. Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast and this week we have a particularly important topic. Now, those of you who listen regularly know that most topics to do with PhDs and academia, I'm willing just to witter on and give you my views and opinions, but this topic has come up a few times and it was something that I felt I wasn't in a good place to talk about. And that is how we look after researchers when they're doing emotionally challenging research. So I have two expert guests with me instead, who can give us their views and advice on all the ways that we can look after ourselves. And importantly, that our institutions should be looking after us as well. Vikki: So let's welcome Dr. Tina Skinner and Sarah Warbis. Thank you so much for coming. And, let's introduce yourselves. Sarah, should we go to you? Sarah: Yeah, sure. So I am Sarah Warbis. I am literally just finishing my PhD in psychology at the University of Bath. My PhD has been looking at bystanders who witness a sexual assault and how we can encourage them to intervene and using virtual reality to see. But I a few years ago kind of realized the emotionally challenging nature of my research. So I'm basically here because I run a early career researcher, researcher well being group. Vikki: Amazing. And Tina? Tina: Hello, I'm Tina Skinner. I'm also from the University of Bath, but I completed my PhD in 1998. So a little while ago. I'm here because I run the Researcher Wellbeing Project, which started off at the University of Bath, but we're now taking it across several different universities to try and improve and address researcher wellbeing, in emotionally challenging studies. I have studied, gender-based violence, for the last, 30 years or so and more recently and by recently, I mean in the last 15 years, I've done research around, uh, disability and, uh, employment. I'm. Disabled myself, I'm neurodiverse, I'm dyslexic, ADHD, and I have long term pain, so I became particularly interested in that kind of field as well, so I come at the kind of researcher well being, area from both doing an emotionally challenging topic, such as gender based violence, but also from a kind of a neurodiverse, and long term pain perspective as well. Vikki: Perfect. Okay. So. Let's start right at the beginning. What do we mean by emotionally challenging research? You guys have obviously given some specific examples there, but what types of things are we including? Tina: I tend to talk about emotionally challenging studies now, not just topics, um, because there are, you know, topics, such as rape and sexual violence, which we've already mentioned, or, being unwell or disability that, that can be challenging. Tina: And those topics can be challenging because we are ourselves experience those things, or because they are intrinsically difficult to study. But then there are also things beyond things like, crime or injustice, that might mean that the context where we're studying is challenging. So it could be that we're studying something fairly innocuous, but the location where it's where we're studying is perhaps, be challenging and, and unsafe. Tina: But also the methods that we use might be particularly difficult as well. So in the, in the biosciences, for example, there might be experiments that are being done, with animals, which could be particularly challenging as well. And no matter what our perspective is on that, those can be particularly difficult for the people doing the experiment. So there's a whole kind of range of different ways in which we can see that studies can be emotionally challenging. Sarah, can you add? Sarah: Yeah, I mean, definitely, as Tina said, it's not just the topics, it's the methods and everything. And yeah, if you're testing something, or if you're doing research in a war zone, obviously that's going to have an impact regardless of the topic. I think just to give a few other examples, obviously I've spoken to researchers who study death, which obviously is one of the most upsetting topics we can talk about, and how people grieve, um, how we kind of had the funeral process and everything. I think also things like studying mental health, that, people especially that are doing longitudinal bits of research with the same participants all the time, obviously, if they're working with people with depression, there is always a risk that someone could self harm or commit suicide during the study, and it's how you deal with that. Sarah: There's also, kind of something I'm appreciating more and more a lot of people who research climate change as well can be really upset by their research of climate anxiety around dealing with basically researching the end of the world to a degree, and the anxiety that comes with that. So there's so many different topics that can be emotionally challenging, but I think the important thing is it's down to the individual to define what that is for them. So it might be that there's a topic that I don't find particularly challenging emotionally, but actually Tina might, or vice versa. And yeah, it's important that the individual researcher defines what's upsetting to them. Tina: Yeah. And there's, there are things that, that some people might think, studying, managing your finances or food, might consider those things as not particularly challenging. But of course, if the person that they're interviewing has a very difficult relationship with food, or if you're studying poverty, and the people that you're interviewing are. really finding it very, very difficult to feed their children and to make ends meet, you know, sitting and listening to those stories, can be particularly difficult as well. Vikki: Yeah. I think this intersection between, the topic that's being studied, the people that you're working with, the methods you're using, your own experiences and your kind of location. I think that's such an interesting way of looking at it. Vikki: The one that struck me that I don't think we've mentioned is sort of structural inequalities and that kind of thing. Racism, sexism, all of those sorts of issues where if the researcher comes from the groups that are also being studied, then I imagine that is the sort of thing that would be potentially very emotionally challenging as well, to be studying racism as a black person living in the UK, for example. Sarah: Absolutely. Exactly. And that's often why you get people researching certain topics, to be honest, is a lot of the time it's because they're passionate about it, because they're angry. Like, I, I research gender based violence because I'm fed up with the world and how we treat women and, the proportion of women that are assaulted. Sarah: And obviously that's even more extreme for if you are a victim of gender based violence yourself. So obviously you're going to have even more of kind of a motivation behind it. Tina: And there are, there's also something that we also need to consider. So there might be, different things that will be, uh, emotionally challenging to, to different people. So if, if that person has, who's doing the research has directly experienced the thing that they're researching, they might find it emotionally challenging to, to simply do read the literature. Tina: Whereas for, for others, the challenge comes to when they're generating their data, for others, it might be that that that has all gone well, but when they start to try and disseminate the information, and their findings that they're passionate about, they might get kind of really aggressive responses back, or they might the policymakers might not want to listen to them. It might be that people are studying extremist groups and they start to publish on that and then get threats themselves, so the stage is actually the dissemination stage when you've gone public. Tina: And then, you know, you're getting a person is getting targeted with hate speech and sometimes physical threats, because of their findings. So, there's all sorts of different stages as well that, that may not be challenging. Vikki: That's such an interesting perspective because I think often we don't think about that side, or at least I hadn't thought about that side of it. Sarah: And I've heard similar stories where it was people publishing research and then the media really oversimplifying the research to a drastic degree. And then obviously social media running wild with that. And then suddenly these researchers are having to do all this kind of like press damage reduction afterwards. They just weren't expecting in their line of work. Vikki: Absolutely. So before we go on to the kind of what we can do about it stuff, what sort of impact do you see this having on researchers? Tina: Okay. We did some research with social scientists, humanities and social science academics and, there were a range of impacts from, water off a duck's back, I'm completely fine, and might have felt feelings of empathy at the time, right the way through to quite marked trauma responses. So kind of vicarious secondary trauma responses. Between that, there's a whole range, it does very much depend on some of the things we've already said about, you know, whether people have had shared experiences. It depends on the training that they've had and the things that they have in place, so less likely to have a more severe um, impact if, they've got training in place and got the support available, which is why we're going to be talking about that later on. But also, you know, the amount of power and control that they had in that context. So, you know, actually, PhD students have often chosen to do their subject and chosen to use their methods. But for those early career researchers where you might not have a choice about what you're doing and what methods you're using or whether you have to continue in a particular field of research might be more impacted and those who have different but unrelated issues. Tina: So it could be, I talked about neurodiversity before, but it could be that you're going for a divorce at the time or that you're caring for your mother and things like that. There could be also physiological responses. So, you know, that kind of feeling unwell. Feeling sick, because of what we're listening to or, uh, the injustices that we might be studying. Some of them can be cognitive. So our ability to think, you know, our job is about thinking. And if we've got disrupted thinking, because we're stressed and, feel traumatized around the that particular issue, then that. can be highly problematic as well. Um, so there's a whole range of different ways in which, we might react to greater and lesser extents. Sarah: Yeah, I guess just to add to that, obviously you can have things like any, uh, any person, or any academic, but any, in any job, you can have things like burnout, in your work, but also things like compassion fatigue, that obviously we see lots in the news to do with kind of nurses, um, when they're interacting with patients. Sarah: And also, as Tina says, secondary trauma, which, it's It's, it's kind of terrifying when you start to think about it, thinking, well, doing our line of research, we can have the same symptoms as someone who been traumatized, that individual who has primary trauma, who say, has been assaulted. We can have the exact same kind of physical and emotional responses from doing our line of work. Sarah: So it's important that we tackle it. I think just kind of giving my own experiences for me. It's things like, realizing that I was almost hyper planning my own safety being a woman walking around, outside on my own. And obviously I'm, I'm very lucky. I live in Bath. I live in a very safe neighborhood. Sarah: I shouldn't really have to worry about this stuff but finding that actually I was thinking, okay, well. I'm going to go on a walk along a canal on my own. I need to make sure that I've got, like, escape routes. I've got this. What if this person's following me? And I'm just thinking, like, this is too much kind of overplanning, but also it comes with thinking about these things on a daily basis. Sarah: And it also can come out in kind of strange places, like watching films, and I, I try to avoid watching films that have any kind of gender based violence topics in them, but I'm, I kind of found myself watching a film the other day that I didn't realize had content on that until you're kind of further in, and then afterwards just being in floods of tears, just really angry at the world, because obviously this is what I'm thinking about on a daily basis, so it's, it's kind of just heightening your thoughts on those, for me at least. Vikki: Yeah, and I think even take those things are all sort of the really serious psychological and physical and social consequences of this stuff. I think even at a really practical level, you know, I coach people all the time who struggle with things like procrastination, right? And I imagine if you're doing topics that are so emotionally challenging, it adds a whole other layer to that just in terms of your actual productivity and how fast you can move through material and your, how much sort of effort it takes to get yourself to sit down and do it. You know, there's a lot of people I'm working with who aren't doing topics like this at all. And it's taken them a lot of effort to get themselves to the desk to work because they find it difficult for example, if you then also know that you're studying something that whilst important to you is so deeply unpleasant to experience some of the time. I imagine there's a load of sort of just knock on effects. Tina: Absolutely. So one of the symptoms of vicarious and secondary trauma is avoidance. And that's something that's wasn't hugely common in the sample of researchers that we talked to. But for some, they might not want to encounter the subject again inside of work. So avoiding analyzing data that they know is going to be quite traumatic for them. So, those things that are difficult anyway, as researchers analyzing data can take a huge amount of time and it's really hard. And, if you've got really emotionally challenging data as well, particularly if you were involved in generating it, and you've already heard that, um, then, you know, that can be really, that can be really difficult. So my experience that was particularly emotionally challenging, early on in my career was when I was analyzing, a couple of hundred case notes of young survivors of rape who'd reported to the police and it was qualitative data, but I was coding it for, for a quants, piece and reading their, their cases was particularly difficult and writing that paper was, very, very difficult. Tina: And in the end, um, I didn't use that data. I felt by the time I actually got to the stage of it almost being publishable. I thought, no, it's kind of, it's out of date now. And I hadn't understood at the time, this is over 20 years ago, hadn't understood that the reason I was finding it so difficult to engage with that data and finish that paper was because I was myself suffering from secondary and vicarious trauma. Vikki: Now, in a previous conversation, Tina, you raised something that I thought was fascinating, but again, I hadn't really thought about in terms of how there are some people with. Vikki: Other things that are nothing to do with what they're studying that mean that they're more likely to be impacted by this stuff. And the example you spoke about then was dyslexic students having to spend more time with qualitative data. And I wondered if you could speak to that and any of the other types of groups that, that maybe. Tina: Absolutely. So, as you know, I'm dyslexic and, transcribing is a pain for anyone. Transcribing can take a huge amount of time when you're dyslexic and processing speeds are different but then you're having to re listen and re listen to really emotional recordings. Tina: So you're spending more time with the data then, but when you're analyzing the data as well, reading and rereading. Now, I am now an average reader. But, some of my academic colleagues are 10 times the speed of average. So if you take a lot longer to read things, you're spending a lot more time with your data as well. Tina: so in that context, you're spending more time, but also you're less likely to be able to have breaks, which is something that's really important when you're working with data really emotionally challenging stuff is to have breaks and take time off. Um, but you might be working around the clock to be kind of pretending that you're normal and you don't need reasonable adjustments and so that can be really challenging too. So you're spending much more time with your data. And so it appears like you've done only so many interviews and it appears like you've, analyzed only so many things, but It will have a substantially longer amount of time associated with it. Tina: There's also, different people are more likely to take on other people's feelings. So that kind of, I'm much more like an emotional sponge and some people argue that that's associated with being neurodiverse. I don't know. I think it's probably just a difference that we all that we all have. Some people are, you know, it's water off a duck's back. Other people are much more likely to be empathetic as well. So I think we're talking about neurodiversity rather than specific, learning difficulties, but those, that can impact on, how we are with our, with the people that we're researching and with our data and how we analyze it as well. Tina: So it's really important that we're aware of how we react, and are able to manage that proactively. So I know that I'm a sponge, and so I, I make sure that I've got lots in my kind of wellbeing toolkit to look after myself and, also to make sure that my research participants are looked after because, um, if I don't, then I worry about them. Tina: So, um, you know, there's lots of ways in which you might need to prepare really effectively. I mean, we should all be preparing effectively, but if we understand ourselves, that can really help us to think about how we look after ourselves. Vikki: And I think that's such an important thing for supervisors with students, especially if the supervisors perhaps aren't neurodiverse, don't have disabilities, perhaps are more of a sort of water off the duck's back type person, to not assume that the people they're working with are going to respond in the same way when they start supervising people in these sorts of topics. I think those are sorts of things that it's really important to remember that not everyone will respond the way you do. Tina: And that goes both ways. Yes. And I think that that was one of the things that was really helpful for me when I did the Researcher Wellbeing Project study, was to be able to understand that there are people this really doesn't affect, , but they're in the minority. Those who are more extremely affected, like me, are also in the minority, but everyone else is a continuum in between. And when we're, when we're starting off in, I thought I was really quite tough and before I was, you know, before I was 30, I pretty much didn't cry very much at all. We don't know if we're going to be the people that are affected or not. And so the important thing is to prepare to have resources in our toolbox to look after ourselves, such that if It does start to affect us, then we have these things in place, but that we're also already looking after our well being anyway. Tina: But of course, you know, some of the people listening may have already undertaken their research and be already analyzing the data and feeling a sense that this is affecting me and be thinking about, okay, so what can I do now? And we're going to kind of start to talk about that too. Vikki: Absolutely. And should we start there in terms of what people who either are looking to do this sort of research or find themselves in the midst of it can do to look after themselves and we'll think about the impact of what can be set up at kind of institutional research team level in a second. But what can people do for themselves? Tina: Um, one of the things that I've been trying to advocate for, and I use myself for myself and with the students and staff that I work with is what I've called a researcher well being plan. And I specifically call it a researcher well being plan rather than self care plan because I don't think it's just about self care. Tina: It's about thinking about how we can care for ourselves, but also how we can draw on family, friends, supervisors, teams, groups, um, networks to help us, um, cope with this kind of work and the kind of things that we're talking about are, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Uh, at the base level, you need to get the, the food and the sleep and all of those kinds of things sorted. So what are we eating at decent times? Are we looking after ourselves in that way? So that's good for any student, right? Tina: And then if we're thinking about the next level up, we're thinking about, you know, safety and security in terms of our body, our health. So Looking after our physical health, is really important. So, uh, exercise, getting that stress out of our bodies, being able to do something where we're not thinking about the work. So it might be that we're going gardening, or it might be that we're going socializing with people and things like that, but, to make sure that we also ensuring that we're secure in the research that we're doing. Tina: So when we're generating the field work notes, making sure that we, are in a safe environment, that we've got all the protocols in place that we need in order to do that. And then, that kind of next level of Maslow's hierarchy is kind of feeling a sense of belonging, and making sure that we're working in a team or a sense of a team. Tina: And that feels quite difficult when we're talking about, you know, you might just be working on your own with your supervisor, but actually that's a team, right? So, trying to make sure that we're working cooperatively in a supportive way, really effective. And particularly when we're doing emotionally challenging work and that sense of being part of a team. Tina: So it could be that there are the students who are doing work around a similar topic to you. So it's that kind of sense of kind of connection. And then trying to nurture our confidence and well being as well. So, when we're disseminating our research or doing our first presentation and things like that. One of the things that's really important is that teamwork happens. So it's not just the student who's presenting on their own, but they've had an opportunity to practice with their supervisor or with their peers and, to be supportive. So it's really important that The student is in a kind of a supportive collegiate environment in order for them to thrive and, and do well. Tina: So there's lots of different levels from the basic stuff to the, you know, exercising to get stress out of our bodies and, doing hobbies that distract us or that we enjoy and we can really kind of, focus in to trying to make sure we've got a collegiate environment to work in. and that's really quite difficult if you're, a student, because that is often something that is very much set by the supervisor, and it's quite hard to ask for that as a student. But if you're not able to ask for that or you're not getting that, then you can reach out to networks like the network that Sarah runs to get that kind of collegiate support and sense of the team trying to go in the same direction. Sarah: I think just to add to it, the key point for me is just prevention is the best way forward. It is much easier to, prevent things like secondary trauma happening than it is to deal with it when it does happen. So the kind of the quicker you can get ahead of it, the better. I think as well, it's remembering that everyone is different and obviously there are broad techniques that can work for everyone. But actually, when you're thinking about the content of something like a research well being plan and the strategies you're planning to bring in, it's really thinking, okay, what does work for you? Sarah: So for me, that was talking to my support network. So talking to my husband and saying, okay, I'm just about to start my PhD. I'm going to be researching this really upsetting topic. What are, for me, what are the cues that I'm not doing well. So asking my husband, like, how can you tell when I'm really upset with work? Sarah: Like, what are the things we need to be looking out for? What are the things, we should worry about? And as well, it's thinking everyone's different when it comes to relaxing. So for me, it's. It's odd, but it works that if I've had a stressful day, I want nothing more than to curl up on the sofa and watch a horror film, because that works for me. Sarah: But for most people, that'll be your absolute nightmare, I get it, and not very relaxing at all. And in the same way, um, I know Tina does a lot of swimming, whereas I can't think of something more stressful than having done a full day's work and thinking, right, I've got to go out to a swimming pool. Like, I would much rather stay home, do some kind of yoga, or I, I love doing kind of angry feminist dance workouts and stuff like that, that it's, it's really thinking, okay, just because someone else's wellbeing plan works for them, doesn't mean it necessarily works for you, and just remembering that. Sarah: And yeah, I can't stress enough that, Tina has a wonderful set of resources, which she and her team built as part of the Researcher Wellbeing Project, which I'm sure you'll, share the link to, um, with all these kind of details of templates of research wellbeing plans and ideas for how you can kind of implement that and prepare and they are absolutely fantastic for that. So I tend to send people straight to her website when we're talking about this topic. And I think obviously we'll get onto in a minute institutional support in this area, but I think another thing is until the institutions start stepping up their game a bit, it is kind of okay. Well, we can take the lead like we can make a difference. We can have an impact in this area. So for me, that was, um, in my first year, realizing that there wasn't any kind of ongoing support in this area for PhD students at our university. So with myself and Sam Hooker, who's a PhD researcher in the Center for Death Studies and Society. Sarah: That we kind of got together and thought, okay, well, should we just start by setting up maybe like a monthly coffee meeting or something that's just researchers at the university who are all researching upsetting topics like doesn't matter what the topic is, which we just get together and just chat about how it can be pants sometimes. And then from that, that then evolved to, okay, well, let's have more structured sessions. Let's have guest speakers like Tina talking about their work, how they've overcome challenges. And then from there, this has kind of evolved into what is now a group of, I think, just past 200, I think, students across different universities across the UK. Sarah: I think we've got some international members as well, and some people from beyond academia, so we've got some members from the police, where we all come together once a month and either discuss topics that are particularly important related to research well being, or, yeah, have wonderful guest speakers come and talk about their different areas of work. Sarah: And, yeah, just having that pair space to really acknowledge. Okay, yeah, this, this can be rubbish sometimes. And we should be talking about that very openly. It's not a taboo topic, but something like that, as Tina says, with kind of thinking about belonging can do absolute wonders. So I think my suggestion to people of, okay, well, what can you do? Obviously prepare, but the other suggestion would be, okay, if your university doesn't offer support where you want it, make it, just set it up yourself. Obviously, if you have time, do not over overload your workload at the same time. Tina: Yeah, I think the one of the things that Sarah said that's really important is that, um, it's it's different for different people but also it changes over time. So I used to use lots and lots of meditation. And they just stopped working for me. So now I just listened to a story that I love, but I know really well, and it sends me to sleep. Not because it's not very good, but just because, you know, it's a comfort thing. And those things might. What works for you at one time might not work for you at another time as well. So it's being prepared to kind of get something else out of your toolbox, um, and, and try it out. And, there are also, you know, counselling and support that you can get through the NHS, but also from the university and some counsellors are not great. And you might turn up and think I'm not talking to them, but others might be really good. So it's worth kind of trying. So having that in your kind of toolbox as well. Um, one of the things that we've been pushing for is if you know that it's an emotionally challenging topic, beforehand to have a clinical supervision available, which obviously is that cost. Tina: That's a monthly thing that, um, you know, costs about 75 an hour. So it's building that into a research proposal at the start and if you haven't got that, then it's asking your head of department or your doctoral training partnership lead and trying to find that funding. Tina: Clinical supervision is a preventative thing. Trauma focused counselling after the event is another thing. So we recommend 10 to 20 sessions of trauma focused counselling. And again, that's something that you have to convince your university that there is a need for that and because it goes over and above the kind of standard six sessions of stress management counselling that you can access through student services or through staff services. Tina: Wellbeing services have become infinitely better than they were over the last 20 years. So there's some great services available but, if you've experienced secondary or vicarious trauma, you might need more support than that. So it's well worth going to student services for support, but it's also thinking about if something has gone wrong and you'd need further support, reaching out and trying to get funding for that additional support. Tina: So, you know, there's lots of, there's, it's that kind of whole range of different resources can go into that toolbox. Tina: That is the research wellbeing plan. But. It really does also need to be supported by your supervisor by your department by your university and by our whole research culture as well. And that's something that we're pushing to change too. Sarah and I are founding members of the Researcher Wellbeing Strategic Change Group, which is now an international group, which is trying to make positive change around well being. Tina: The culture so that we talk more openly about these kinds of things, because it's only really in the last five years that I've been talking about these kinds of issues and start to support people's needs proactively, and help them plan , so they're not just trying to care for themselves, but they feel cared for as well. Vikki: Amazing. And listen, listen to you both speak one of the other groups that kind of came into my mind. I work with a lot of part time students and distance learning students and people who've got other jobs, they've got caring responsibilities, all those sorts of things. And it just struck me that a lot of the things you're talking about take time, they take often access to things that may be campus based. Vikki: I know we have more online services these days, but certainly that sort of sense of belonging, something that I see that a lot of part-time and distance learning students really struggle with, and I wonder what advice you could give to students who aren't on campus maybe when they're doing field work, as you mentioned at the beginning, or where they just haven't got a lot of time to put towards nourishing self-care activities. Tina: Be compassionate to yourself. Because we can often put a lot of pressure on ourselves, particularly if we're part time, we're working, we might have children and unless we prioritize our own wellbeing within that context, being able to do all of those other things becomes much more challenging. Tina: So, yeah, as a mother of of two children, both of which have now gone off to university is a lot easier for me to look after and stick to my wellbeing plan than it was when they were small children. So absolutely I empathize with what you're saying. And when you're working part time and you have less resources and you have less funding, then that's also really challenging. Tina: What I've heard in our research and also in the interactions me and Sarah have had with other researchers doing challenging topics is partly scaling back what we're doing. So, one of the things that I often recommend is, is don't do more than two challenging interviews in a day. Tina: One in the morning, one in the afternoon. Now that's not always practical. It's not always possible. You might be interviewing in a prison, for example, and you've only got one day access or two days access, and it's all been arranged for you. It's not always possible, but where you can plan to have breaks, both for you and the participants, if that's relevant, that's really important. Tina: So you don't have to be perfect. But try and make sure that you're thinking about your own well being within every decision that you're making and sometimes that might mean needing to scale back. Sometimes that might mean pausing, study for a particular amount of time. Tina: The other thing I would say is it's okay to ask for things and it's okay to ask for support too. So from your supervisor, and from your department and institution, because they're as invested as you are in you being able to actually effectively complete. It doesn't look good for them if you don't and so asking for what you need and perhaps drawing on the resources of the research wellbeing project and Sarah's fabulous group and saying, you know, this is, this is something that's now becoming recognized as an important issue. Have you thought about how you might, how we might incorporate that into how I'm supervised and into my own work. Sarah: Exactly. And I think as we kind of collectively move forward in that way of recognizing this more and more. I think it's definitely something Tina and I have spoken about that these things shouldn't be an add on that you're having to do in your own free time. Sarah: It should be these are part of your work day. That it may kind of feel quite strange at first, but things like going to the gym, if that's for your researcher well being, should be part of your work day. In the same way as kind of any health and safety thing, when we think about kind of physical injuries, should be part of your work day as well. Sarah: And yeah, I think obviously, must be incredibly tricky. This is coming from obviously someone with no dependents or anything and kind of working full time, but I can imagine, yeah, it must be incredibly difficult when you are working part time, trying, I don't know how enough people manage a PhD alongside kind of a full time job as well, but as Tina says, I think it's being compassionate for yourself. Sarah: There are a lot of kind of things online anyway, post COVID, so things like our Research Wellbeing Group, because, uh, it's across universities, it made no sense to have it in person, so some resources are available online to pull from. And, yeah, I think it's Uh, kind of coming back to something Tina said, I think it's thinking about what looking after yourself means to you. Sarah: But that might not be you are doing everything under the sun. You are doing clinical supervision, gym, yoga, meditation, extra therapy. It might be you are just giving yourself a 30 minute break in between transcriptions, having a cup of tea and just focusing on yourself for a bit and like before you pick kids up like that might be what it is for you. So it's just, it's, it's trying to be compassionate with yourself as well. Tina: Absolutely. And sometimes looking after yourself is, you know, just thinking, okay. The only way I can cope is thinking about what's the next right step. So not putting huge amounts of pressure on yourself because a PhD is a huge amount of pressure, jobs, huge amount of pressure, family responsibilities, a huge, huge amount of pressure. But in this moment, what's the next right step? What can I do? It's also thinking, um, although we don't, we feel like we can't, we don't have time sometimes that taking that break allows our brains to work better. So, just taking a break, closing your eyes, breathing, you know, is it, it's basic, but, you know, taking a, you know, a breath in for four, pausing for five and then, breathing out for six. That calms down our whole bodies and tells our bodies that, you know, there is no danger right here. It's just a computer. Don't worry, you know, so there are small things that we can do. And if we start to build them into our standard daily practice, if they become the automatic thing, if the automatic thing is take a breath. Take a break, have a drink of water rather than let's just soldier on I'll be fine. Tina: Yep. Then that those things only take a few minutes, but they can make a huge difference to how we feel about things. Exactly. Lots of researchers also talk about taking things. A bit slower so that they can cope with the emotional, emotional challenges and that has does have a potential impact on how quickly you get your PhD, how quickly you get your promotion, et cetera, but looking after ourselves is really important if we're going to be compassionate and kind to ourselves. And so it's thinking about, okay, so what are my priorities in this, in this context? Sarah: Exactly. And just to add to that as well, I think, we often kind of panic during a PhD about, oh God, like, I want to finish within three years and I've only got so many months left and it's kind of a mad panic. And obviously, it is incredibly difficult when funding does not cover beyond a certain period. So, I do get that, but I think it's just knowing, with hindsight, in five, ten years time, obviously, you will look back and you will see I got a PhD, you won't see I got a PhD in two years, nine months and five days versus three years and two months and two days, that it doesn't matter in the long run how long it takes and you should be looking after yourself. Sarah: And also just thinking about people who have kids or are carers for family members, that it's something I, always say to like friends and family with young kids when they're kind of going through a stressful period of You you aren't any use to them if you're not looking after yourself That if you are emotionally distressed if you are really struggling to function Because you're upset by, Be that your research or anything else in life that you're not necessarily in the best position to help them is the whole put your gas mask on first before anyone else is that you do need to look after yourself in order to help other people. Vikki: One of the things you mentioned there, Sarah, I think is really interesting, this idea of it not being an add on and it being structural. So one of the things I was thinking about is, are there ways of designing studies to sort of be cognizant of all this stuff? Vikki: So I'm thinking in terms of like being realistic about the number of interviews that you need for an article to be usable, etc or when you're designing studies, if you know you're going to be doing really in depth interviews with a really vulnerable group for one study. Is there something connected, but perhaps less emotionally charged that you can do for your other study and things? And I just wondered. How much that side of things is something that's sort of taken into account, or even examiner expectations, I guess, in terms of how, what quantity of work you would expect to see in a thesis that's about these kind of topics. Sarah: Definitely. I think. I guess in research in general is first off, when we talk about kind of incorporating things, the reasoning behind it is something Tina and I have kind of talked about a lot that really the university, be that your employer or the university you're studying under has a legal obligation to look after you, be that through health and safety laws or rules around well being, they should be looking after you. Like, it is your right as a student, as an employee, to be protected. So it isn't just us saying this, it's, there is a basis to it. And again, coming back to the point of kind of prevention is key. It's one of the things that, um, I guess Tina and I are working on as part of the Research Wellbeing Strategic Change Group, of trying to get research wellbeing embedded throughout an entire project and in institutions. So it should really be the first time you're talking about research. Well, being is during the bid process that it should be. You are putting in money for things like clinical supervision, even gym membership, things like that. And it should be that when you're working on timelines of a project, you are allowing more time to, um, account for emotionally distressing topics and things like that so that it's not a sudden crunch of, oh, well, we've got to have this data collected by next Tuesday, that it should be thinking right from the offset of, okay, how can we prepare for this anyway. Tina: Absolutely. And, building that into our well being plans too. So if we know we're going to be doing some particularly difficult analysis or data generation, is there something else that we can do to, you know, if we need to take a break from that, to do something else instead, rather than just feeling like, I don't know what to do. I don't want to do this, but I don't know what to do. Tina: So having a plan for that too. So might write something or, put in an abstract for, you know, for, for a conference that you really want to go to that's in a year's time. But, you know, just taking a break from doing that really difficult stuff right now and doing something that's that's fun, but also, I mean, I'm now at a stage where when I go swimming, I have my best ideas. Tina: Yeah, so I used to go swimming to forget about work and was desperately trying to forget about work. Now I'm going, Oh, that's a good idea. And so if we have a different attitude towards looking after ourselves, so if I'm doing a, if I'm running a tutorial, which. Loads of PhD students might be running tutorials for students and things. If I can, and if it's not raining, we go outside and we go for a walk. Um, so we're out of the office, but we're also, you know, we're walking along having a nice chat. The same conversation that we would be having around the study that they're doing, or they might have a particularly difficult thing that's happening. But, um, I'm building my wellbeing into the way that I work. Um, at the start of lectures, I now bung on some music because like Sarah, I like to dance out any stress. I get really stressed before a lecture. So I, you know, put the music on. Um, and you know, the students are not many, but occasionally I get one bopping along with me um, but you know, it's so it's building those things in. So it is about, I think trying to change the culture that we're working in as well, the idea that we should be strapped to a, to a desk, uh, while, I mean, as a, as a person with ADHD, that was the only way, the only way I could stay at a desk and work was to imagine myself chained to it. Tina: So that's not a healthy way of working. So thinking about alternative ways that we can, we can work in order to, um, do things. So, so now, for example, when I'm doing the first listen through of interviews, I will listen through while I'm while I'm walking, I have to get special permission to do that because I'm on a mobile device. But one way of doing things to help stimulate my thinking around how we're going to analyze this data. So there are there are different ways that we might be able to build that in. Tina: And If a university has guidance that has these kinds of recommendations and these kinds of options that people don't have to continually be rethinking. Oh, how can I do this? How can I manage my wellbeing a bit better? Um, you know, if they've got guidance around this kind of stuff, that's helpful. We've produced some guidance from the research well being project of how to write a well being plan and we've got template and, um, you know, what kinds of things might go into your well being plan but also how to manage the well being of your research participants and what to do when you get And so we've got, we've written those as drafts that anyone can take and cut and paste, just reference and at the University of Bath, the plan is that eventually we will be making those mainstream documents. They have to be edited and developed and approved for this university and I've set up something called DW4R Well which goes across Bristol, Bath, Exeter and Cardiff and we're all trying to work together to have similar guidance and recommendations around these issues. Tina: So we're trying to get a kind of a cultural shift Where we're thinking about our well being as much in the ethical procedures and the initial design of a research project as we are our participants well being. We're not there yet but the arguments that I'm having around these issues are fewer than I was expecting. Tina: And I think one of the advantages post COVID is that people are now much more aware of people's mental health and the impact that it can have and the cost that it can have, actually. So if people have to go off on sick leave. That's a cost. So actually, if we can avoid that by looking after each other appropriately and as Sarah was saying, due diligence, actually, because it's a legal requirement under the Health and Safety at Work Act to do risk assessments, including not just physical but mental health. Tina: So if we have research that has the potential over and above, the standard risks to impact on our mental health, then the university has to indicate and your supervisor and you have to indicate what you're doing over and above the standard in order to help yourselves and be helped. Tina: And so, if you're finding that your supervisor and your institution aren't being helpful in that, it's always helpful to have the law also on your side, that they are supposed to be looking after you. Tina: And, there are various different groups that you can get involved in, including Sarah's network, who will give you top tips on how to, if your supervisor doesn't really want to talk to you about this, where do you go? And what do you do? So we've written some guidance around. That as well, if you're not in the ideal situation, and someone like Sarah isn't your supervisor, then how do you then approach this as an issue as well. Sarah: So, exactly. Yeah. And I think I just wanted to jump in and build on something Tina was saying, it currently feels like. In, in research that it's everyone having to reinvent the wheel and everyone is, is having to do such like an individualized approach because there isn't anything out there suggesting, oh, well, here's what your university is doing. Here's the protocol in place at your university, there isn't a lot of stuff out there. Um, so it feels like everyone's having to say, oh, how could I look after myself? And yeah, what could I do here? Whereas the big thing we're trying to work towards at the moment as well is, is leveling kind of universities together so that we have standardized procedures across them. Sarah: And there is an expectation as well, not just in the institutions, but also with funders that it's not an anomaly to suddenly have someone asking for clinical supervision in a bid, that actually it's expected that, oh, okay, yeah, you're doing an emotionally challenging topic, why haven't you asked for this? Sarah: So that should be part of it. And yeah, this is a big thing we're trying to do of getting everyone on the same page with this. of collecting all the knowledge that we have because there are so many incredible people working in this space. and it's pulling that all together and saying, okay, what, what's the ideal look like? Sarah: And this is one of the things I absolutely adore that Tina and her team created as part of the research wellbeing project of having these, bronze, silver and gold standards. of what the institution should be doing, but also what the individual could be doing. So it's , this is the standard, this is what we need to be working towards, so that everyone is on the same page. Vikki: Perfect. And I think checking even just as basic as checking what your university actually does provide. So I remember when I, my old institution, they put on a session about looking after yourself on social media and what you do if you suddenly find yourself, you've gone viral for reasons that aren't great. And you're, you're getting, you know, unhelpful messages and all that stuff. And I've been there 20 years. I had no idea that there's a 24 hour phone number at the university where if you find yourself receiving abuse on social media because of work related social media posts, you can contact them and they'll advise you what to do. And I guarantee that many, many, many people at the university, I don't know if it still exists, I presume it did when I was taught about it anyway, it did. I guarantee there'll be loads of people who didn't know that that's the case. And so I think sometimes it's, it's not even having to reinvent these things at universities, it's even just making sure that people within these huge institutions actually even know what the different bits of the university are providing. Tina: Absolutely. Tina: And so, one part of the wellbeing plan is okay. So what are the services that I can access? And one of the things that, I asked master's students, I was running session for masters and PhD students at the University of Bath around, you know, researcher wellbeing and how to write your own plan and stuff is, for them to just go and pop into the counselling service. And just into reception and ask, okay, so what do you do? What do you offer? Not because they necessarily need it now, although I think some of them might have done, but so that they know where to go and who to talk to, if things do go not so well for them. There are kind of great talking therapies that you can access depending on your area, through the NHS. Now, most of them are cognitive behavioral therapy, which doesn't suit everybody, but I've used it three times and eventually it's quite helpful. Um, so there are different stages at which you might be able to and different services that might be effective for you many of which are free. Um, so they have waiting lists. So, you know, the NHS tends to be a year's waiting list , you know, but sorting out and working out before you get to a crisis stage is, is really good. And, our university now does have a crisis counseling service that you can just ring up 24 hours and then you're able to have that person to talk to, to help you plan and to help you think through those different issues. And again, it's, it's, you know, planning, but also, you know, if the first one you try isn't, isn't terribly good. Try someone else. Vikki: And remembering that certainly in a university, these things are likely to be provided by a variety of different teams, right? You know, I think back to my experience, sometimes it's counselling and wellbeing that provide this stuff, but sometimes it's the staff support unit, sometimes it's the graduate school, sometimes it's disability services. Sometimes it's library services. It's all these different bits of universities that often have their own bits to do with specific well being, to their part of it. Also, just to contextualize, we have worldwide listeners here, so we've been quite, um, UK centric in terms of talking. NHS and all those things, but eventually that message of doing your research as to what's available in your country, your institution, your program. Tina: Well, if you're in, in, in, um, other Northern European countries, your access to services might be infinitely better, um, than, than, than ours. You know, when I'm doing training, In Norway or Denmark or Sweden, the need for having trauma focused counseling as an option that's already prefunded within your funding bid is not necessarily there because you can get a, you can get a clinical psychologist much quicker, much easier in that environment. Tina: There are other environments where the likelihood of that is really small and it's about, um, how you can draw upon different resources in that context so yeah, there's a range of diversity and it's, it's thinking about what will work for you in your context, and what is available and finding out what things are available is part of that process. Sarah: Exactly. But I do think also it's important to note that It's obviously incredible for researchers to be taking a proactive approach, especially PhD researchers, with finding those resources. But again, coming back to that institutional change, there should also be training for supervisors so they are aware of this to begin with, so they know the resources that their student has that they can use. Tina: Yeah, 100%. We provide training through the research well being project, which is we've kept the fee really, really small. So I think it's £20 for a PhD student and £40 for a member of staff, just so that they can access that training. But the other thing that I find really hopeful is, you know, PhD students are the academics of the future, right? So you might not have had this support. Right. I didn't have this support, but you can make sure that your own students do. You can make sure that your own teams do. You can make sure that your next funded proposal, and as you become more influential, you build that in. So, it's learning from your own experience, putting in place what you can now, but then having the aim to increase and improve, um, in the future as well. So, this kind of learning around how we look after our wellbeing isn't just for you now, it's for you, you know, when you, when you're in the position where you can make those decisions and when you can make those applications yourself, and building in what is needed for you and your team. Sarah: Exactly. And even when you are a PhD researcher, that I've been lucky that I've had, I think about seven research apprentices work under me on my research, who are all volunteers. But one of the first things I do is talk about researcher well being and how we're going to prepare for that. And talking about what they can expect and yeah, how to look after themselves so that it's ingrained from the first step. So even as a PhD researcher, we still have responsibilities for others, even at this stage of our career. Tina: Yep. I mean, Sarah's in the psychology department and it's quite different from I'm in, criminology, sociology and social policy and it's managed quite, quite different. I quite like the way it's managed in psychology, so it does depend on your department, but you also have PhD students who are tutoring, who are supervising dissertations and mentoring other PhD students and, all of those are opportunities to help other people think about how they look after themselves while you're looking after, you know, yourself as well. So it's a, yeah, it's a lot of potential for your listeners to make a big difference in this area. Vikki: Yes. And thank you so much, not just for coming in and giving so many wise words, but for all this work that you do, the, the actual research that you do is emotionally challenging, but I'm sure running these networks, while very rewarding is emotionally challenging and time consuming in itself. Vikki: So the, the whole sector thanks you. So where can people find out more? You've mentioned a couple of resources. I will link them in the show notes, but if there was one place that you would send people, each of you, where would that be? Tina: Well, I was going to say the research wellbeing project web page, which has, I think you're going to provide the link has all has the report that we wrote, but it also has all of the things that we were talking about. Tina: So it has a link to Sarah's wonderful network, and other networks that you can use, if you're not an early career researcher, so, there's those things, but it also has all the resources that we've been talking about in terms of wellbeing plans and guidance and things like that, as well as there's also a section that has the researcher wellbeing strategic change group, where if you want to influence change around this, and you can do that if you're a PhD student as Sarah is one of our founding members, has demonstrated. There is the information there too, and under that information is top tips if you're trying to bring this into your department, and you want to start a discussion around this. So, Yeah, that's where I would recommend you had a look. Sarah: Yeah, I was going to say the exact same thing. So yeah, I would go straight to Tina's Researcher Wellbeing Project web page. And like she said, it has links to my group. But also you will be providing Vikki the more direct link, to sign up to my group, if you, if you want a kind of more peer support aspect, but, um, as Tina mentioned, there's so many resources on her projects web page. Sarah: There's things as well, like, what to do if your participant becomes distressed in this situation. Again, thinking about more broadly about it being emotionally challenging topic for participants as well as us. There's so many fantastic resources on that and so many links to other kind of networks and and resources. So I would definitely check it out. Vikki: Amazing. Absolute wealth of support for people. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thank you everyone for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for having us.

One of the most frustrating moments in a PhD or academic career is reading through your first draft—only to realise it’s a mess. It doesn’t flow, the arguments feel clunky, and now you’re stuck figuring out how to fix it. In today’s episode, I’m sharing practical techniques to help you transform that rough first draft into a polished manuscript—without the overwhelm and self-criticism. Whether you’re writing a thesis chapter, journal article, or conference paper, these strategies will make revision smoother, faster, and far less painful. Links I refer to in this episode How to shorten your work How to handle negative feedback What to do when you get contradictory advice How to break work down into chunks How to improve your writing (with Dr Katy Peplin) Transcript Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. This week, especially for any of you who are editing writing, or who have edited writing in the past, or who will be editing writing in the future, because there's something about editing. We often think that when we've got that first draft down, it's going to be easier. At least we're not generating new stuff from nowhere, right? But then we sit down to do it. And it's so hard, because you're trying to focus on what you need to do, but you're not really clear what you need to do. You know it's not good, but equally you don't really know how to fix it either. And the whole time, I don't know about you, but certainly often for me and my clients, running through the back of your head is this narrative that you should have done a better first draft, that it's never going to be good enough, you don't know what you're doing. All of that kind of self criticism. Now, we talk about writing a lot on this podcast, and there's going to be various episodes that I'm going to ping you off into. But, for today, what we're going to be thinking about is how to do that editing process without hating yourself in the meantime. High standards. That's all we're looking for here. Not hating ourselves. So, what do I mean by editing? I'm meaning anything that comes between a first full draft and a completed manuscript. So this might be your initial run through of it. It might be responding to your supervisor's comments, your examiner's comments, reviewers comments if you're submitting things for publication, all the way through to that point at which it is declared finished. And one of the reasons I think that it can be so painful doing it it's It's that self talk that happens while we're doing it, that these edits not only mean something about this piece of work, about how good it is. They also mean something about us as an individual. If the supervisor says this isn't clear, often we hear this as you're not clear. So the first thing we're going to do before we get to any of the practical tips. And there are going to be practical tips. Before we get to any of those practical tips, I want to remind you, editing is a normal part of the process. Writing a first draft is a really, really long way from submitting an article. That doesn't make it any less onerous knowing that. But it can make it a little less painful if you know that everyone goes through that editing process. I used to label my files with like new versions each time I worked on a paper. And by the time I was submitting for publication, I'd be on like version 35 or something, okay? And I used to show that to my students because they were always amazed because they saw me as somebody who published a lot and who was good at writing. And it never crossed their mind that my first draft didn't look like that published article. Even the version I submitted didn't look like that published article because I improved it based on the reviewer's comments. I know it's occasionally made it worse based on the reviewers comments, but that is a story for another episode. But mostly, it was improved because of what the reviewers asked us to do. Okay? Nobody writes that way first time, even your most talented and amazing supervisors. So editing is a normal part of the process. It is not a sign something's gone wrong. It is not a sign that you did a bad first draft. It is a sign that you know the difference between a first draft and a finished piece of work, and you can slowly work through those changes. Now, if it's specifically responding to comments that you struggle with, in terms of handling negative feedback, I want you to go find, after you've listened to this episode, I want you to go find my episode on handling negative feedback. Okay, it's season two episode five something like that, you'll find it. Go to the phdlifecoach. com website, click on podcasts, you'll find them all. That episode really acknowledges that receiving feedback and editing your work is an emotional process, that that's okay, but that we also don't need to feed that. We also don't need to kind of buy into this narrative that it's this big, terrible, stressful thing. It's completely normal to feel overwhelmed, to feel frustrated, to feel disappointed, all of those things, but we don't need to feed it. And if that's something you really struggle with, do go check out that episode. What we're going to think about more today is the actual how to go about the edits that turn it from being a big nebulous task into something that's actually doable. And the first tip here is to separate editing from writing. And then we're going to separate editing into a variety of different tasks too. So, why do we separate editing from writing? This is because they're two completely different activities. Generating new text is a completely different skill to making text sound better. Checking whether text does what it's meant to do. If you do them both at the same time, what happens is you write a bit, delete a bit, write a bit, delete a bit, smack yourself a bit, write a bit, delete a bit, decide that it's rubbish, go and drink more Diet Coke. It doesn't help. So, same as any of you have heard me talk about different writing roles before in the workshops that I ran, I want you to think about text generation as one job, okay? Creating the substance. Some people refer to this as like filling the sandpit before you start to create your sandcastles. Text generation is simply putting some stuff there to work with. Filling the sandpit. And then we're going to do editing. As a separate process, and as I've said, what we're going to then do is not do that as a single process either. Instead, what I want you to do is think about editing as a series of layers. Okay? And we are only going to do one of these layers at a time. Some of you, I know, are going to argue with what I say today. Some of you are going to say, that's so inefficient, Vicki. I could do it all at once. Some of you are going to say, I couldn't possibly ignore a typo. It will ignore, it will annoy me too much. You've got to. Okay, I've had that conversation with people on here before. Sometimes you just got to suck it up. What we're going to do is we're going to do one thing at a time and whilst that may not feel efficient, I promise it is hugely more effective. And I actually have an episode planned for you where we're going to talk about the difference between efficient and effective and when you want to be one and when you want to be the other. But until then, trust me, go with these layers. Now, that means I've got to explain to you what I actually mean by layers. What I mean is that we're only checking for one thing at a time. Okay, I want you to imagine that I asked you to go for, go for a walk and I want you to look for anything that's yellow. By the way, that's a good mindfulness activity if you ever need one. Go for a walk, look for anything that's yellow. And you will start to spot all the things that are yellow and you'll be like really good at spotting yellow things. Do do do do do do do do do. And you'll go and it'll be a really pleasant walk. Okay, now if I told you to go for a walk and spot everything that's red and yellow and blue and green and spot trees and spot cars and spot postboxes It's going to be super overwhelming because you're gonna be like, uh, postbox, uh, yellow, red, you're gonna miss things You're not going to enjoy that walk That is what's happening when you try and edit everything at once when you're correcting typos as well as making your sentences sound better as well as checking whether it actually makes sense or not It makes no sense to try and do all of this at once. We're gonna do one thing at a time, we're going to start with the macro editing, the kind of editing that really is content focused, structure focused, and then we're going to polish later. Because apart from anything else, there's no point polishing the bits that you may well just delete anyway, okay? It's a waste of time. So, it doesn't work, can be a waste of time. So, where are we going to start? Our first job is, does it actually say the things we want it to say? And one way that I have found really, really useful, and I can't remember whether I've ever talked about this on a podcast before, I do talk about it in one of my courses, is what I call a reverse plan. Okay. I didn't invent this. I have no idea who invented this. I used to use it back when I was a student and I used to teach it to my PhD students as well. What you do is you get your manuscript, your whole manuscript, and you look at it one paragraph at a time. And you say, what does this paragraph say? And you summarize it in one sentence. What did this paragraph say? Summarize it in one sentence. And you do that in turn for each paragraph in your writing. Now this is going to tell you a number of things. First thing is, is that easy? Because it should be, if it's right. So if this is a well structured, well written piece of work, which it won't be from your first draft, but if it was, then it would be really easy to say, this paragraph says this, this paragraph says that. You'd just whiz through it. If you find yourself going, I have no idea what that paragraph says, or that paragraph says about four things, or whatever, happy days! We've realized, okay? So, but you try. So the first thing it tells you is how easy is that? You make a note where that paragraph kind of says too many things, that paragraph didn't really make a point, that paragraph kind of said the same as the previous one. And then we get to look at that plan, right? That list of things you've got, those list of sentences. So now instead of trying to manage a 15, 000 word manuscript, we're now trying to manage, you know, 40 sentences or whatever it is. And that's when we get to say, well, hang on a minute. That one and that one are exactly the same as each other. That one and that one. Why do I talk about that up there and that down there? That makes no sense. You can even compare your reverse plan back to the original plan. Does it even look like what you thought it was going to? Because sometimes we have a plan and then we deviate from it, which isn't a problem, by the way, but sometimes it can be. Sometimes if we've deviated and now we like this new version. Happy days, but if we deviated and we're like, oops, I didn't even cover that section anymore. I forgot I didn't do that. So you take it back to that plan by doing that reverse planning process. And that's where we look at the really broad strokes stuff. Does it say what we thought it was going to say? Is it roughly in the right order? Does each paragraph represent a specific point? Okay, so we're checking we got the right pieces before we get any further into anything else. Now, when you are reading these paragraphs, do not decide to make the sentence sound more elegant. Do not correct typos. Do not, if you notice that you've got the same word six times in a paragraph, I don't care. It doesn't matter. Our only job, our only job is to turn that manuscript into a reverse plan, to compare that reverse plan to our original plan, and to look and see whether things are roughly in the right orders. Okay? Does our paragraph structure roughly make sense? And that's quite, I say that's our only job. That's quite a big job. Okay? Especially if it's on a pretty rough first draft. Fully, fully expect at this point to be talking about wanting to merge paragraphs, talking about wanting to shift things around, delete entire sections, all that stuff. Completely, completely normal. And that's why we're not going to polish anything until after this bit's done. Okay, this can be a point that's useful to have chats with your supervisors. Kind of go in, you know, I'm thinking I might need to leave this bit out or split that into two sections. That kind of big structural decisions you might want to discuss perhaps. Expect a bunch to change. Then once you've made those decisions, you go back in and roughly action those in your document, okay? Those of you watching on YouTube, you can see me kind of flapping my hands around, which shows you're on the podcast, so I'm not getting the full joy of it. But imagine me moving things with my hands in the air. Um, so you're going back into your original document and going, Oh, I said I should move that paragraph there. Okay, let's do it. Boom. Okay, and you move them around, you put them in place. We're not worrying whether the transitions work perfectly anymore. We're not worrying about whether we introduce our definitions in the right places or not anymore. We're not worrying about any of that stuff. We're just dumping stuff roughly in the right places. This is the equivalent of, if any of you have moved house, this is the equivalent of roughly getting the right boxes in the right rooms. Okay, you don't bring a box in the front door and start opening it up and going. Oh, here's a toilet brush that needs to go in there. Here's a whatever that needs to go in there. I don't know why toilet brush was the first thing that came to my head. Okay with it. Um, You roughly dump boxes in roughly the rooms they need to be in. Okay? That's what we're doing here. We are roughly checking that the boxes are roughly where they need to be. Now, I mentioned that we don't need to look at transitions. Once you've done that, now we're going to start looking at transitions. And the first two transition points we want to look at is the start, and the end. So for me, one of the first things you want to check is, does this article start where it needs to start? And this is where, in my experience, an awful lot of PhD students and academics start too far back in the story. Now let me explain what I mean by that. If you imagine your introduction to a paper as an inverted funnel, so it's wide at the top and it's getting narrower and narrower and narrower, that should be the shape of your writing. So the top of the funnel, the top of that triangle, is the kind of broad brush background to what you're talking about. So for me, it was stress and immune function. I'd always start with things like psychological stress has been demonstrated to have an impact on a variety of health conditions. Reference, reference. You know, that kind of vibe, right? And then it gradually gets closer and closer. This is particularly apparent in immune function where blah blah blah blah. The impact of stress on psychological, um, the impact of psychological stress on vaccination response has been particularly explored in with blah blah blah, right? It gets gradually more and more specific. I was talking stress and health, then I was talking stress and immune, now I'm talking stress and vaccinations. Okay? It gets more and more narrow. I want you to translate that out into your own topics. Now, there's a variety of places you could start in that story. I often think we start too far up the triangle. So, if I was writing an article for a journal like the ones I used to write for, so Brain Behaviour and Immunity was a big favourite of mine, um, if I was writing for Brain Behaviour and Immunity, They already know that stress affects health. They literally all do that. They all know that stress affects immune function more specifically. So I could chop off the entire first two paragraphs of something set up like that and start with stress has been shown to impact antibody response to vaccinations. That would be a great place to start. I don't need any of that other stuff. In the rest of my field, you know, I was a sports scientist, um, people do paragraphs, two, three paragraphs about why obesity and physical inactivity impact various health conditions. Any sports scientist reading it knows that. Now, if you think it's crucial that that information is there, you can consider turning it into sentences instead of paragraphs. So instead of a detailed paragraph on each of those things introducing it, you just say one sentence. It impacts health. This is often through markers of immune function, for example, vaccination. Okay, so my first tip, transitions, where are you starting? Make sure it's appropriate for your audience and see whether there's anything you can chop off the top. There almost always is, in my experience. You then look and see whether you finish at the right place, whether your transition at the end, i. e. your conclusion, finishes in the right place. Usually, in my experience, people here lack specificity. They take their, so a discussion is a triangle the other way around, where you start narrow after your results and you get wider and wider, as you start to apply your findings back to how they fit with the rest of the literature, what impact they might have, where the weaknesses are, what future studies should be, and then your conclusion should be your kind of final, like, implications or whatever. In my experience, the conclusion is often pretty shallow and needs either beefing up or deleting. So check your conclusions as well. Does it actually say anything or is it just a nice little, and that was what I did on my holidays type paragraph, in which case let's turn it into something more meaningful. So check your two transitions. The next transitions we're going to look at are the transitions between paragraphs. Okay, what I want you to do here is each of your paragraphs at the beginning of the sentence, the paragraph should tell you what the paragraph is about and the end of the paragraph should lead nicely in some way to the next paragraph. Okay, there shouldn't be some weird jump that requires me to take some leap of logic that isn't logical. Okay, you've now roughly put these in the right order. We're now checking that one leads to the next. Is any terms that you use in that paragraph defined previously or at least defined here? For example, is there any assumptions you're making that they know things that you haven't said yet? So you can then go through checking for transitions. So notice how each time we do this, we're doing it with a specific job. I want you to see how easier that will be than trying to do everything at once, both in terms of that kind of overwhelm while you're doing it, but also in terms of putting it on your to do list. Because one of the things I get told so often in my group coaching calls, in my membership, is I don't know how to break tasks down into smaller chunks. And if any of you, I want you all to look at your to do list. If edit introduction is on your to do list, I'm talking to you. You, okay? I'm talking to you right now. Editing is not one job. It should not be a task on your to do list. Check introduction for transitions between paragraphs is a task. Check paragraphs for repetition is a task. Check. Sentence structure for errors I often make. Now there's a little aside that I wasn't planning to put in this episode, but I'm going to. Um, when you get feedback back from people, I want you to take a note of stuff you often get pulled up for. So, um, run on sentences was one I always pulled people up on. If you don't know what a run on sentence is, look it up. You definitely need to know. Uh, split sentences is the flip side of that. Incomplete split sentences. Check what that is, look it up. Um, all of you will have things that you often do. I tended not to do those things. I tended to repeat myself. I tended to get fixated on a particular word that would end up being used lots of times. I would fail to notice that I'd started calling something one word and then later on changed the specific word I was using later on, if you see what I mean. So inconsistencies. So I want you, whenever you get feedback, I want you to have a browse through it from a kind of what am I often doing here? point of view. Okay? Because then we're going to put them on our to do list to check in future. There is no excuse. If your supervisor regularly pulls you up for having run on sentences, there is no excuse for you not to have check for run on sentences in your, like, list of things that you edit for, so that you never make them do that again. Use your supervisors for the stuff that's useful, that's cognitively demanding, that's subject specific, not for stuff they've already told you you're doing wrong. Okay, so what we're going to do is we're going to run through looking for different things each time. Does this mean you're going to read the same article a hundred times? Yes, probably. Does that make it less efficient? No, because each time you're doing it, you're doing it better. Okay, I'm getting fired up on this because people spend so much time trying to do this in an efficient way and it just ends up not working very well and being really painful. So trust me, I want you to try this. Don't just blindly trust me. Have a go. See what a difference it makes if you're only looking for one thing as you scoot through. Okay, and then what we're going to do is we're going to order those things you're doing in sort of reducing magnitude. So the first things that you're looking at are the kind of gross macro structure stuff. Does it say what I need it to say? Um, yeah, that kind of stuff. Then you're going to get into the kind of what order does it sound nice ish kind of stuff. And then you're going to get into the is it grammatically correct? Are my references in the right place and my punctuation good? All that stuff later. Okay, so you're kind of working your way through this list. Any of you are like, Oh, but I should probably correct things as I go. No, you'll find them later. If you saw them this time, you'll find them later. At best, just highlight them or something like that. Okay, because otherwise you really will be like, Oh, I'm just correct this one. Oh, there's another one over there. And then 15 minutes later, you're meant to be restructuring your article. And all you've done is correct typos. Okay, stay with the one more focus. One of the things that's really important, especially when you are up against a deadline, whether it's handing in your thesis, handing in for a journal deadline, or whatever it is, is remembering the big picture here. So, there is an almost infinite number of things you can check for. Having a good run through that kind of gradient from the macro stuff to the micro stuff. Brilliant. But I also want you to ask yourself a very important question. And that important question is, is this a pass fail issue? Okay, because if you're going, Oh, I don't quite like how this sentence goes. Not a pass fail issue. Does it make sense? Is it vaguely clear? Happy days. Let's go. Okay, especially if we're tight for time. Is it a pass fail issue? Is my argument unclear here? Yes. Okay, right, we're going to deal with that. Do I use too clunky words in consecutive sentences? Yes, I do. It's fine. People will cope. Okay. Is it a pass fail issue? The flip side of this, I'm now going to shout out my gorgeous stepdaughter. I was helping her with a piece of her schoolwork the other day. And there was one part that I was like, can you see how this, this couple of sentences isn't necessary to answer the question? And her reply was, but I like them. And I said, I know, but they don't do anything in this essay. And she said, I like them. And she decided to keep them. And because I'm the bigger person, I rose above it and I let her keep them. That's fine. But my warning to you guys is hanging onto sentences just because you like them is not the route to writing your best writing. Okay, I tried to tell her that, but she's 17. She doesn't listen to me. I'm her stepmother, but you guys, you listen to me. You choose to listen to me. So you need to listen. Don't hang on to sentences just because you love them. Okay? Try it without it. If you've got a sentence you just think sounds amazing, delete it. See what happens. Okay? It can often solve the problems that you didn't realize it was causing. Now, those are the different levels and many of you will be saying, Okay, Vikki, that's great. I understand. But sometimes my issues are kind of more vague than that. And to be fair, sometimes your comments from supervisors or reviewers will be more vague than that. Supervisors, I'm shouting you out here, okay? I love you dearly. I know you're busy. I know you're trying to do your very best with your students. I am there with you. I've been there. I've done it. But, feedback that says you need to go deeper here, or clarify this, or flesh this out, not, not helpful. Really not helpful. Okay. And I know it's down to the student to or the person who's writing the article to come up with this stuff. So equally, I'm not saying you have to tell them exactly what they should say. But comments like that are incredibly difficult to answer because. They're not just thinking, how do I make this clearer? They're still trying to understand what you didn't find clear in the first place. And so they're trying to answer it, partly by what they think will make it better, but also trying to guess in some weird way what it was that you wanted them to do. Um, and so they don't help. So, supervisors, if you're listening. A little more detail in those comments. Super helpful. I know it takes more time, but it hopefully means there are fewer iterations of feedback going through. So in time, it should speed things up. But even just saying, it's not quite clear what you're saying here. Are you claiming X or are you claiming Y? I found it hard to understand the difference or something. Okay, just giving a little bit more depth as to what you mean. Students, obviously I can't coach all your supervisors, so some of you are going to have to deal with getting comments like that. It's fine, what we're going to do is we're going to clarify them for ourselves. Okay, so whenever you get a comment that you think is vague by your supervisor, I want you to turn it into a more specific piece of guidance, because otherwise you're going to avoid answering it forever. If you're not quite sure what they mean, you either need to ask them what they mean, or you need to kind of try and guess what they mean, and turn it into something more specific. Okay. Now, if they've said, I need to go deeper here, um, and you read it and you're like, yeah, I do. I know I do, but I don't know how. That is firstly completely normal. I'm going to refer you, I also have another episode, with Dr. Katy Peplin, who's a writing coach. And she talks about something called the taste gap, which is that when we're at the beginning stages of our academic careers, we are able to recognize something that's not good enough and not able necessarily to do something about it. I'm a bit here with my abstract art at the moment. I can appreciate which art I like and which I can't. I can't produce art I like yet. Working on it. So not sort of going, oh I recognize that it's not quite clear or it's not in depth enough but I don't know what to do is completely normal. The big tip I would give you is if, especially if you're regularly told you need to go deeper, you need to explore this more. I would find an article or ask your supervisor to recommend an article that they think does it well. And then we're going to do some proper, like, text analysis, okay? And so, those of you in the arts and humanities, this will come easy to you. Scientists, this is not something we do quite so often. But I want you to look, how do they write? Find a paragraph, ask your supervisor to help you, or identify it yourself. Find a paragraph where you're like Yeah, that is a really good paragraph, okay? So clear, so in depth, so precise, love it. What do they do? Let's understand, like, you know, like you look at art and you're like, oh, okay, how have they built this up over time? How have they, why do I like the way this is composed or whatever? Analyze a good article. Realize what they do. And then what I want you to do is give yourself much more specific instructions as to how to answer that question. One way, and I've used this example before in other things, one way to help to give yourself better instructions is to imagine you're giving instructions to somebody else. So either you've got a research assistant or you're giving it to an AI prompt. Please don't. I would recommend generally not giving it to an AI prompt, especially early in your PhD. But imagine the instructions you would give them. You wouldn't just say, go deeper here. Who knows what they'd do, it'd be chaos. Um, you'd give them much more detailed instructions, right? I want you to do that. Find three more pieces of evidence that back up this point. Find a counter argument to this and present it. Get way more specific about what that actually means, and then you're creating yourself tasks that you can actually do. If there are comments that you are regularly skipping past, it's usually because you haven't defined what they mean. All the way through this, there's some really practical tips that you can use to edit your work. And all the way through this, our other job is our own emotional regulation, okay? Editing work is laborious, which means it takes cognitive energy. It's easy to interpret as a, like, critique of ourselves, which means it takes emotional energy. All of that is okay. It's okay if you find that hard, particularly if you're newer to this, but to be honest, throughout your career. Recognize that. Use that as a reason to praise yourself for the stuff that you do. To recognize the steps that you're going through, the progress that you're making. Look out for the chunks of text where you didn't get any comments. That's amazing, like that's a compliment in itself, okay? Give yourself space, allow yourself to do this work, allow yourself to feel the feels, but make it as easy for yourself as possible by having these clear tasks that you're going to do. I really hope that's useful. Let me know which of these you've tried before. Maybe I've talked about some of them in past podcasts. I've got to the stage now, there's so many episodes I can't remember. Um, Let me know if there's any other techniques that have helped you with editing. I'm going to mention my sneaky Comic Sans one before we go. If you're just finding this all a bit stressful, and it all feels a bit too important, a bit too meaningful, and you can't deal with it, turn everything into pink Comic Sans. One of my clients came up with this. Love it. Turn everything into pink Comic Sans. There's only so upset you can get about a thing that's written in pink Comic Sans. Can't take it seriously. Okay? So use colour. Use colour if that helps you. If you found that useful, do make sure you're on my newsletter, jump onto the website to find it. and let me know what you've tried out, any issues you've had or suggestions you've got for, um, other ways of editing your work. Now, I am building up to do a client Q and A episode soon. So if you have a specific topic that I haven't talked about on the podcast before, a question that you have, Please do submit it. You can either submit it through my website on the email address or on your podcast thing, there should be a send Vikki a question button. If you use that one, make sure you tell me your name. Cause otherwise I will never know who you are. It comes through anonymously and I will make sure that I answer your questions in a future episode. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you next week.

Want more people to read your research? This week, I’m joined by Tony Stubblebine, CEO of Medium, to explore the benefits of writing for a general audience. We’ll discuss how sharing your ideas beyond academia can boost your visibility, strengthen your writing skills, and position you as an expert. If you’ve ever wondered whether anyone will actually read what you write—or how to reach more people—this episode is for you! Find out more about Tony Stubblebine and some of his most popular articles here Transcript Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach. And I have a very exciting guest with me this week. So I would love to welcome Tony Stubblebine, who is the CEO of Medium, the online blogging platform. So welcome, Tony. Tony: Well, thank you for having me. Yeah, I sure am the CEO at Medium, and I'm excited to talk to you, uh, because I used to be a coach before this and, uh, at Medium we have, uh, a strong affinity for academics. So hopefully we find something exciting and useful to talk about today. Vikki: Definitely. Definitely. Now I'm sure the vast majority of the listeners are already aware of Medium and probably regular readers as well, but just in case there are people that aren't, because we do have listeners from all over the place, just let people know a little bit more about what they can expect from Medium and what your role is within that. Tony: Sure. Medium is a modern blogging platform. You know, blogging has been something that's been a big part of the internet since, let's say, the year 2000. And Medium is the latest incarnation. And our aim is to be a great place to read and a great place to write. That's a very broad mission, you know, could be about your personal life, but a lot of what gets written on Medium is people that are trying to share their knowledge and experience with other people. And that's what I've always liked about blogging is that it's a way to transfer someone's one person's wisdom to a big audience. And before blogging, there wasn't as much of that as I would like. Vikki: For sure. And how did you go? You mentioned you were a coach before. How did you go from coach to what you're doing now? That feels like quite the journey. Tony: I remember when I joined Medium, there was a head of PR, who had to kind of write the announcement of who I was and I thought, Oh, she's never going to be able to package this up. There's too many things. And, uh, and she just went with the headline "industry veteran". Tony: Okay, that's actually pretty good. Um, I'm a programmer originally had to have a computer science degree and had a whole career in startups, both in helping to build them. Uh, most notably is on the team that launched Twitter, and then later as a founder and for me, the whole trajectory was to find more and more meaning in my work and I would say I started like this almost like a Maslow's hierarchy. Tony: I defined meaning when I graduated as money, I just wanted enough money to be comfortable, then I got that because I'm very lucky to have graduated into a field that paid well. And I was like, okay. You can only look at mortgage calculators so long before you think, well, what else do you want in life? And, so this kind of kept moving up, trying to find work that mattered more, and eventually it just dawned on me. Um, and I, this is not for everyone, but it dawned on me that the only way I was going to have the meaning I wanted was to be in charge. And then it dawned on me also I needed to pick a certain type of work that was attractive to me. And what's always been attractive to me is helping other people grow. And I think blogging is a way to do that. But there was a period before this where I was running, I would call it a self improvement company. It was the first habit tracker on the iPhone. And then we expanded that into habit coaching and then to more general coaching. Yeah, coaching was tended to be pretty productivity focused, or pretty behavioral. Uh, but I got a, maybe a 10 year period where that was the sole focus of my life. Yeah. And that's, that's why I go by Coach Tony still because to some people that's who I am. Vikki: Perfect. And then what led you into Medium? Tony: Ah, well, bigger opportunities. I've been close to the company since launch. It launched in 2012 and, uh, I actually, like I was so close that I shared an office with them. And so I was involved in kind of attracted to it and I'd worked in other types of online publishing at various parts of my career. Tony: And then I just kept getting more and more involved as I fell more in love with the platform and with the product. And at some point they opened up a potential for some partnerships and I became a publishing partner and because I was already close to the company, I spent a lot of time advising them and I think it turned out that I'm not smart about very many things, but about Medium, it turns out I'm exceptionally smart. And so a lot of the things that I had advised turn out to be very true. And at some point, the founding CEO, who was fairly famous internet person, he had founded Blogger, he had founded Twitter, and then he had founded Medium. He wanted to step aside. And so I made the case that I could, take over and that there was a direction that I wanted to take Medium that would probably be healthier, better for the Internet and better for the company itself. So that's what happened. We made a transition about a little more than two years ago, basically because, you know, he had run the company for more than 10 years and was ready for a change in his own life. Very fair. and the timing worked out that I was also ready for a change and had been so successful on Medium I was able to make a good enough case that they, they handed me the reins. Vikki: Amazing. I love hearing these sorts of stories because often you sort of see it in retrospect, right, you know, the person who had to write a bio of how you ended up where you are, you sort of see this like neat package in retrospect. And I love hearing how it sort of, I'm not saying there wasn't direction. I'm sure there was direction in all of this, kind of, you know, Oh, I, I was here. And so I made these opportunities and then, cause I was good at that or I contributed this, it went that way. I think it's really useful. We don't often hear stories in that kind of organic way. Tony: I heard this thing said about startups, but I think it's really true of careers too. It was a startup is a process by which the founders come to understand themselves. And I always liked that quote. Because you think a startup is that you create a business from scratch and you create the quote unquote optimal business. But the truth is that every decision you make along the way is edited by your own personality and your own desires. Tony: And I think that's the same thing that's true in careers, is I understand myself better, I guess I'm 25 years into this career than I did on, on day one. And that's kind of how I told the story to you, right? It's like, I just wanted money on day one. And then I came to realize that's not actually what I want. What a surprise, right? And so. It was, it was directed, but definitely it was not directed with any real self knowledge, uh, that came, that came from experience. Vikki: I love that. Now, we are going to talk about Medium and the benefits of writing Medium and things like that, but I heard you talk about something a while ago that I just thought was fascinating and would be so interesting for our listeners. I think it builds both on what you do at Medium and on your background as a coach. And that was, you were talking about moving beyond habits, which for somebody who developed a habit tracker, I thought was just really cool. Moving beyond habits towards thinking more about values and identities. So I just wonder, why should we be moving beyond habits? Tony: There's all of these tactics that work and like I've come to find, kind of the main misunderstanding in all self improvement is the idea that there's like one quick fix. And it's like, you know, we see that fail over and over again, and yet, on the other hand, we see all of these people succeeding. Tony: Right? And so what did they actually do? They succeeded through a lot of work. And I like, I almost, like, I try to steer people in that direction, right? Like, we hope for a quick fix, and then as a result, we're afraid of doing, like, quote, unquote, all that work, right? But when you see people who succeed, and then you actually interview them and talk to them, it's not that much work, right? Tony: It's more than you want, but less than you fear. And so I'd actually rather be more upfront with that. And so I got obviously a lot of value in really structured habit building, and I gave a lot of value to, you know, a couple million people. And now it's like a form of software that's established. Tony: And so just even we laid the groundwork for a new type of tool that's well used by a lot of people. But then I also got to touch every other kind of modality of intervention. And I found kind of surprising to myself, the combination of meditation, which is a skill, I think a skill for introspection essentially, you know, I know Calm is a famous app. Tony: And so you might think meditation as a skill for calming yourself. I think the real thing is like noticing what's going on in your head. That's the thing that is cross applicable to other things and that and therapy. Like I was better in therapy because I was a good meditator. And at one point in therapy, I think, and there's probably a lot of people's, uh, um, experience in therapy, we essentially just worked on self acceptance. And I was so shocked how much that work did for my productivity. I was just like, just blown away. Right? Tony: And, kind of the understanding, you know, when I'm fighting myself and when I'm not fighting myself. And, if, and this is really true, the word if, if you can reach deeper into yourself, you'll make more progress. Sometimes you can't, right? If you can't get there, then, the surface level habit building, well, that's the best available tool to you. ,if you can, you'll get further and, Bye. So some of the, some of the ways that you can reach further is like, is can you change your identity would be one? Like, who are you? Tony: And, um, I would say, again, to make it personal, I struggled as a CEO when I thought I had to be someone different than myself, right? Like, you know, we have stereotypes of CEOs out in the world, and I'm not any of those stereotypes. And it was through this is connected back to self acceptance and through identity is like I wanted to be a CEO, but I didn't want to be that type. Vikki: And so what sort did you think you had to be? Tony: Like very aggressive, pushy, manipulative, those sorts of like kind of aggro kind of uh, things. I'd gotten feedback, even fundraising that I was too soft. I thought that was very interesting, and it was costing me the ability to build the business I wanted to build. Tony: And, so I had to come at it some other way that was congruent with who I am and what my strengths were. And it's hard to do that if you don't have any self acceptance because you're sort of rejecting your strengths constantly rather than, you know, accepting them and building off of them. Vikki: Yeah. It's such a different vibe, isn't it? It's one of the things. That was a real transformation for me, moving from trying to fix your flaws to building on your strengths. You know, I've never been somebody who's been that kind of methodical, just carefully and consistently stick to exactly what I said and work my way through it kind of thing. And for years in academia, I told myself that was who I had to be. I bought every planner you can possibly, every habit tracker. Stopped filling it in after a couple of weeks because I felt bad because I hadn't ticked enough of the boxes and it became a little symbol of shame. Um, and it wasn't until I had coaching, that yeah, realizing that actually some people succeed that way and it's wonderful. But actually there's, there's a lot of different ways that you can do this and consistent enthusiasm is one I've never struggled with and that can take you quite a long way. Tony: Right, exactly. Um, so you had a good coach, like they could kind of, this is what I love about a good coach is they'll give you a new view on the world that like kind of the power of a coach to reframe, you know, the opportunities about available to you. It's so powerful. Um, and so, yeah, I mean, I love this story just for you. Like you got, you were able to flip from shame and fighting yourself to love and acceptance and hey, guess what? Along the way, you became more successful. Vikki: And ironically, more organized too, right? Yeah. That's the thing. It's often you even end up making progress in the things, you know, like ,you must have had your moments where you had to be firm and you had to be some, you know, I'm not saying aggressive or any of those things, but where you had to be like strong in your decisions and all of those things, you know, sometimes we accept ourselves. It's then easier to do the other bits as well. Tony: I, you know, I, I didn't, I hesitated to go too deep on like what it takes to be a CEO, because sometimes it very different from, you know, what your listeners might need, but like the way I would simplify it is it's true. The people I interact with do need some level of strength from me that I was not presenting. It turns out that there's more than one way to get it, and I actually got it through, um, uh, mindfulness, uh, self reflection and clarity, which then changed to a different presentation of steadiness. Tony: So I think anytime I'm able to kind of exude the strength that I think people need from me It's based on a really firm foundation, which is different than like naked aggression, Yeah, which would be a different strategy that might work for somebody else, but I knew it wasn't great work for me so I was able to find a different different path and I think there's some version of that for every person's career. Vikki: And I think it is actually, I know it's a different context, but I think it is super relevant in academia because whilst I don't think academics have the same stereotypes about them that CEOs of startups might have, there is absolutely an issue with PhD students and junior members of academic staff leaving academia because they don't want to be that person. Vikki: They look at the people above them and they see them working or allegedly working 80 hours a week. I don't think anybody works 80 hours a week. But allegedly, you know, they're in the office all the time. They're sacrificing their family and personal life. They're, you know, they're selfish with their, like their ideas and, you know, cautious around collaboration and all that stuff. They're kind of trying to get recognition at the expense of others and all these kinds of worst stereotypes. People look at that stuff and go, well, I'd like to be an academic, but if I have to do that to succeed I don't want to. So I think I think this translates out probably more than more than is obvious to some people. Tony: That's great. Yeah, there's more than one way to win at politics. And sometimes you can. Benefit from doing it the opposite of everyone else. You'll take a lot of shit for it and a lot of people who are expecting you to behave the way that they, they do will continue to counsel you that way. Um, but you know, like, as, as you say, I think over and over on this podcast, probably like there's more than one way to succeed. Vikki: A hundred percent. Now, one of the habits that a lot of my listeners want to change is the habit of writing more regularly, writing more consistently and all of that. And I wonder what thoughts you, how you can kind of use maybe thinking about it in terms of values and identities in term to actually work on that sort of a habit. Tony: Um, uh, we've done so much work on writing and I've seen so many ways. This is one where I actually think strategies do really well, like the whole world of strategies just boil down to make it easier. Like, you know, essentially. To put, to go from zero to a fully formed, coherent thought that you would like to share with people is too big of a leap, and especially if that's from zero to a thesis that's going to, like, get published in a journal, that, there's a lot that has to happen in between, and a lot of writers, uh, just benefit from building the muscle, the daily muscle of some writing every day. Tony: But what I found when I looked at productive writers, the number one thing that stood out to me always was consistency that if you look at the daily schedule of Stephen King, or I know these are not academic writers, Stephen King, or, uh, how do you say your last name is Ursula K. Le Guin she's also a sci fi writer. Tony: They're done writing before two o'clock in the afternoon. And I just think about like every, every person I ever met who was writing, you know, like an academic paper, they were their initial question to me was, how can I stop procrastinating so that I could write eight hours a day? And it's like, well, it turns out no one who's a productive writer writes for eight hours a day, you know, and so just reframing that to, could you just have 30 productive minutes tomorrow often gets a lot of the way. Tony: And so I've tried, I've seen it, um, and then even more generally for writers everywhere, uh, there's a reason the phrase shitty first draft exists. It's just like, your first draft does not have to be your final draft, right? Write whatever you're capable of today and make sure your fingers keep moving and that's then it's possible to build on that. Tony: The kind of, to me, the most amazing transformation I ever had with an academic writer who came to me specifically with this question. How do I stop procrastinating so I can write for eight hours a day. So that's interesting. And, you know, as a coach, you don't want to lead with the fight, right? Tony: Like, I hear that question. And, there is absolutely a part of me that's like, that's impossible, you know, like, um, and, and so this is the most amazing transformation. As I asked him, I said, Well, let's get to that. But first, could I give you a challenge? Could you get a stopwatch? And tomorrow when you sit down to write, start the stopwatch the second your butt hits the chair and stop it, uh, the second you finish your first sentence. Tony: And just tell me how quickly can you write one sentence? And then he came back and he said, Wow, that was surprisingly effective. And, you know, I took them like 32 seconds or something and he said, and then I kept going, I wrote for about an, about 45 minutes and it was the most that I'd written in six months. Tony: And he said, maybe I only have to write an hour or two a day and I'll be fine. And I think, you know, what we kind of discovered through experience is that, the framing and the shame is coming from an unrealistic expectation. Tony: So in coaching there's a framework that comes from Robert Dilts called logical levels. And, I'm a little bit out of practice as a coach, but my memory is identity is near the top and then belief is, is below this. And so, this academic that I was working with, they were struggling just because they had a toxic belief and that belief was productivity was eight straight hours of writing. And if we were able to work our way out of that belief, everything else became easier. And that's what I was saying earlier about if you can change something deep in the person in yourself, then things will get much easier. Tony: But you can't, of course, you know, we need progress today sometimes, but we can use these more surface level approaches, but the example I just gave was an example of the power of belief change, you know, and this is something a coach can do a lot to help you with, is kind of help you introspect on some beliefs that might be holding you back. 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: And you must see with people that write regularly for Medium, you must see a shift in. identity as well, right? Because, I mean, I think about the people that I coach and the PhD students in my membership and they have these beliefs, they have beliefs about how much they should be working and how easy other people find it and all these things. Vikki: But they also have this identity that they're a high achieving person, but they're probably not good enough to be doing what they're doing. And so they sort of have this very wobbly academic identity, And they definitely don't, if you ask them if they're a writer, they definitely don't identify as a writer. Um, you know, they write. Vikki: Most of them, you know, they've all done undergraduates. Most of them have done master's programs. They write loads, but they don't identify as writers. I just wonder what sort of transformation you see in people's identities as they write for you more and more. Tony: Right. Blogging is a nice way to lower the bar so people can have that identity change because we all hold writing and such high regard, you know, I think it's one of the most common ambitions or aspirations that I hear from people, which, you know, there's something you kind of put your finger on how illogical that is like, we all write, we text, we email, we write thank you cards, like, Like, if we graduated middle school or elementary school, then we write, right? Tony: And so that, so that the majority of us don't have an identity as a writer is literally false, but it's true, you know, and even, you know, even the highest achievers. They'll tell me, like, I wish I could find a way to write. And, um, so there's some fear that can only be overcome through experience, right? Tony: And then you do it and you realize, Oh, I do have something to say and people want to hear from me. And maybe sometimes you learn these, I would call them like mechanical or tactical lessons, like a lot of people who write regularly do it by simplifying their message. So, a lot of times, I'll have in my head an essay. Tony: And there's going to be 10 points that ladder up to one, right? And I was like, well, that thing's never going to get published because I don't have time to write that. And then and so I'll have to remind myself, what if I just picked 1 of those points and satisfied myself with this is what I'm going to write and publish today. Tony: Um, and then you do that and you feel the joy of the experience of having succeeded that way, and then you feel, yourself smarter. I think there's always something inherently healthy about writing for the writer, right? Like, it forces you to articulate your thoughts and your ideas, and that sticks with you forever. Tony: Um, and then you get the feedback from an audience. You're like, oh, I actually was helpful, you know, like, I think we're all looking for some sense of meaning in the world. And sharing our knowledge and wisdom with other people, which, you know, who's dripping with more of that than academics? That that just gives people an important sense of meaning. Vikki: Yeah. I think it's so funny because I think academics seem to have this kind of balance between on one hand, lots and lots and lots of them want to have more impact. They want people to know about their research, they're excited about their research and things like that. And then on the other hand, this kind of belief that their work's too complicated, you know. Vikki: I couldn't possibly reduce that down to something small. Now I have a little mini background in science communication when I was still a still an academic, and I believe that if you fundamentally understand an idea you should be able to really whittle it down to its, to its key points, but lots of people don't believe that. And I wonder how you, what you've seen in terms of people kind of learning how to do that. Tony: I think one thing that is like the most practical and simple advice I could give someone is just flip it and react to something instead. Right. That like you can see if people in the world are not understanding a topic. Tony: Right. And, um, It's that's a good way to blog, because then, you know, you don't have to think, well, what is the idea that I'm going to pick today? And then you also, you know, people are interested in the topic. And a lot of times it has built in motivation. There's something frustrating about seeing other people misunderstand something that you know, well, right. Tony: And, uh, like, I found that just that advice on its own is enough like you just, you know, you figure it out, right? Um, so. I in America right now, we have some strange ideas, especially around health, popping up. And so I'm running into a lot of academics sort of like, I have to correct that. That's not right. Tony: They're not thinking about it the right way. But before that, like, just like, even, you know, I think kind of scientific or academic information right now feels more politicized than it used to. But before that, it was still in a system of kind of a traditional media system That really likes to oversimplify a topic. Tony: So you'd see in psychology, all of the psychology kind of, um, ideas that hit the mainstream, because the pattern, as I understand, like, as it looked to me, where they were all essentially in the, like, one simple trick, because that's the kind of psychology idea that the media ecosystem is set to expand. Tony: And so. Maybe like a lot of, you know, a lot of psychology research ended up not replicating well, but the stuff we heard about was like that was wrong with all in that one category. It's like, um, you know, postures and and whatnot. And so, if you actually have that deep information, a lot of people just want to correct it. Right. And this is, someone's wrong on the internet is one of like the fundamental, like, feelings of being on the internet. Like, that's what sparks participation. Vikki: That's there to get angry. My husband says that to me, says that to me quite a lot. Why do you read this? I was like, because it's fun. I enjoy getting angry. It's fun. Tony: That's right. It's good to feel alive. Vikki: Exactly. Nothing I like more than having a little rant. No, for sure. And it's often, I mean, I, I often say to people that if you think what you understand. is too complicated, that means that people who know a lot less than you are going to be the ones putting their voices out there. Vikki: That's what then gets everybody riled, right? Because as you say, you know, that's where we end up with the, you know, what is it, the blue Monday? You know, I'm sure we're recording this now in the middle of December, it'll come out in the new year. I'm sure we will probably have seen all the news articles about the most depressing Monday of the year and all that stuff that is based on no science whatsoever. It then ends up being the people that know less whose, whose voices are heard. Tony: Yeah i, and that's what, I mean, this is what attracted me to blogging originally is I felt like I was actually working in publishing. I was working for a book publisher that focused on software engineers and programmers, but it's the same as traditional publishing was in the role of educating the world and like I worked for a company that took it as seriously as anyone, but I could still see the flaws in it and what happened in the early days of blogging is that we started to hear directly from the source that maybe had never been given a voice before, and they would get into niches that the, kind of, mainstream publishing was not able to get into like, you know. I work for a book publisher and it has to be big enough to warrant a book, you know, right? Tony: And a lot of times they would cover it with more depth because you would hear from the world's expert on something or you'd hear from the person that cares the most about researching that topic or explaining that topic. And, you'd hear about it faster sometimes, right, like, especially I felt this as a book publisher is that, you know, take us a year to get a book out. Tony: And sometimes people want the information today and think about, like, how long does it take for good research to move from academia to the mainstream, right? To take years, it could take decades sometimes, right? Um, and so I thought, like, I always thought this is. The good side of blogging and what we call user generated content is like, Oh, we're, we're really going to give everyone in the world a voice. Tony: Um, well, some of those voices have information that the traditional publishing routes, journals included, just don't cover and so it could be a really big improvement and in some cases a really big improvement, regardless of all of the flaws that have seemed to come with it as well now, you know, misinformation and division and anger and whatnot. Tony: Inside of it is this core of, you know, really helpful people and voices that you just never would have heard from and that's, I mean, that's why I'm here before, because so many of those voices are academics. Vikki: I found, so I, as I say, I did a bit of science communication when I was a relatively junior academic. And it was hilarious, because I was doing, you know, I was, I was publishing, I was going to conferences, I was doing all this stuff that I was dead proud of. And I don't think my granny has ever been more proud than when I had a short article in the Daily Telegraph here in the UK. And it wasn't even about my specific research, it was about some stuff that had been done in my school by other people and because she could find, it was on a piece of paper, she could show it to her friends and all of this. She was just absolutely so excited about it, in a way that people outside of academia just don't really get publications. So I think there's just something very sort of immediate about it. Tony: That's the thing that I wish academics actually shared more is how much reading you've done. So all of your incentives are to publish your own research, right? Or for the most part. But along the way, you've done so much reading. So, one of the things I'll see when academics come to Medium is that they'll just cover a topic and some of it will be their own research, but they'll share so much more of what they read. Tony: I think before we started recording, we're talking a little bit about procrastination, and this is a piece, I mean, a pretty like niche piece that I think actually your audience would like to read is from this guy, this guy, Tim Pychyl, P Y C H Y L, who is one of the premier researchers of procrastination. Like, he is an academic, and he just wrote, What is procrastination? And he wrote it as a blog post. And he, like, summarized all of the pieces of research, some of which is his own, and I've never highlighted more on a piece of writing or understood, you know, this, like, topic that we all struggle with more deeply than Tim coming in and writing an explainer. Tony: And, I think that's, like, kind of this incredibly valuable service that we don't, you know, we don't give a lot of room for academics to do and share, share with the world because you do so much reading and you're so positioned to understand it. Right? Like, it's really problematic when I personally go read it an academic paper because I'm not evaluating it very well. Tony: I'm not really evaluating probably the methods and the analysis and the behind it very well. But you all are in the position to do that and not to say, well, here's what the research says, but also I would counterbalance it with this other research. And, you know, here's about how trustworthy I think it is and, um, and the general public would be a lot smarter if there was more of that going on, in my opinion. Vikki: That's such an interesting idea because I think often when academics think about this stuff, they think about it in terms of sharing their own research, which obviously down the line when that's appropriate, brilliant, happy days. Um, but I love it as a, as actually as a reading, learning exercise for the students. So obviously great for the public, don't get me wrong, but thinking about it, you know phD students and academics are super pressed for time all the time. And so sometimes things that are nice to do sort of go by the wayside. Vikki: But one of the things I often try and coach students on is writing when they're reading. So often people say, I don't know enough to write yet. I just need to read a few more articles, read a bit more, read a bit more, read a bit more, and then I'll be able to write my academic piece. And. I try and encourage them to write as they go about what they're experiencing as they're reading the articles and what their thoughts are and things like that. Vikki: And I hadn't really thought about kind of public for a way you could do that. But the notion of sort of identifying five or six articles from a topic that you need to get to know, and deciding that you're going to write a short blog piece about what they find. I think. I mean, it'd be great for people who are interested in that stuff to read, but as a kind of learning modality, I think that would be really interesting. Tony: I do too. Absolutely. Right. And, as I was saying, kind of the kind of, as I was making the case for why this would be so valuable, I was thinking, we should, you know, the two of us should connect this back to a person's goals, because there's so many different goals for writing. And I, like, I kind of, I want to give some nuance to straight altruism, right? Like a hundred percent what originally drove blogging was just that I have something to share and I want to be heard on this topic. And it wasn't about forwarding your career or anything really practical, but as the kind of the blogosphere and the, you know, the internet has expanded. Tony: There are actually a lot of really specific goals that people have in mind and sometimes it is furthering your career. Sometimes it's like getting more visibility with your peers, but sometimes it's getting more visibility with the business world because you want to do consulting on top of your work There's definitely a lot of academic specialties where that's a big part of people's careers sometimes it's about transitioning from your PhD program into a job like your writing is sort of like the de facto portfolio, right? Tony: Like, like, oh, now I understand what you're about because I can read your writing. And sometimes it's, I just want to do good in the world. And sometimes it's, I want to get paid for this. Like, these are all plausible reasons to write. And like, I always hate for someone to hear one reason and think, Oh, that's not for me. Tony: Right? Like, there's a lot of different reasons for writing. I would say most writers that I run into do have at least a little bit of the, I just really want to share something and be heard. You know, like, that is a big underlying desire. Um, but that's just such a common desire too. Vikki: Yeah, and then I think connecting it back to when we were talking about values and identities as well. I think it, well, I wonder whether it would also, help to establish your own identity as an expert as well, especially for my more junior listeners, the PhD students, who are very used to being at the bottom of the, in their academic lives, at least the relative bottom of the research tree, you know, their supervisors know more than them. Everyone around them knows more than them. Vikki: And it's quite easy to get yourself into, Oh my God, I know nothing kind of vibe. And The more you talk, the more I'm sort of thinking that actually writing about stuff that's directly relevant to your research, but for a more general audience, whether that sort of develops that sense of, you know what, I do actually know that some of this stuff, I might not know as much as my supervisor yet, by the end of the PhD they will, but during the PhD, not, but I know loads more than most people. And. I can demonstrate that through this sort of writing. Tony: Yeah, I just, I love it for kind of a, a self esteem practice in a period when you're like sort of at your lowest point, like, cause we all go through these ebbs and flows and yeah, you're at the bottom of the totem pole, maybe by surprise, like you're not used to it. Maybe, you know, if you're working at the same time that you're in school, especially maybe you have seniority at work, but not, not as an academic. Um, yeah, I love it for that and, but it just like, I don't know, maybe I'm like too wired for ambition. Tony: It immediately occurred to me this one simple trick. Which is, this is a marketing trick, but I think it works for what we're saying here, which is, um, the shortcut to being the number one at anything is this marketing shortcut called category design, where you take this goal of being number one, and you take the category and keep making it more and more specific. Tony: So, even though I'm not a practicing coach. I am the best coach in this building right now. I happen to know that because I know who's in the building, right? That's like the simplified version of doing it, but had told me that some of your clients and maybe a lot of your clients are doing kind of the paired, like working while, um, so if like if their academic program is in any way tied to their work, boom, that's category design. They're now the world's expert on how those two things connect, right? That's something their professor doesn't know yet, right? Because they don't have the same experience. And so I think, you know, that's almost like a ladder of increasingly sophisticated reasons to write like. One is just to build the muscle of writing. Tony: It's fun. It clarifies your own thoughts. Maybe you, maybe you make other people smarter. That's the next run. Um, but eventually you can think of it as a way to really represent your own expertise. And kind of the shortcut to that is, I'm going to find these pairings of topics that, yeah, there's no competition for it, right? And, um, I've like, I almost like try to be shameless about that, right? Like it, it doesn't help to be an also run, especially in sharing information, you know, find some niche where you can really contribute something original is a lot easier than people people realize. Vikki: Amazing. Thank you so much. Now, if people, and as I am completely sure they will be, are now convinced they want to at least have a go at doing this sort of public facing writing, whether for Medium or anywhere else, where would you suggest people start? Tony: I think the trick on Medium that will help people the most, is to understand that there's already a lot of publications on Medium. They're sort of community run publications with sometimes very narrow focuses. And I mean, like, there's a publication of paleontologists. There's multiple publications of geologists. And so what's so cool about that for Medium is it means if you're a first time writer, you don't have to go it alone, you don't have to feel alone. Tony: Um, and it's not going to feel like publishing for a journal. And these people want to hear , from your listeners. And I think that ends up being probably the best starting point for a new writer on Medium, is to find a publication that covers the topic that you care about, and just submit to them because you'll get a little bit of feedback about kind of the learning curve of blogging. Tony: There is some, um, but it's a learn by doing experience. And so that's the tip I would give to anyone who's thinking about publishing on Medium is it's to look to our publications as the people that can help you get your, get your feet wet. Vikki: And you mentioned when we were chatting before that there was a guide for academics. Tony: Oh, absolutely. We just wrote up an excellent guide. It's been super well received and we'll send it to you and hopefully it'll show up in the show notes. Vikki: Yes. Absolutely. Well, I'm certainly convinced that I'm going to be looking for some publications to see who I might approach as well. So thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. I feel like we've gone from sort of thinking about habits and values and identities and really wrapping that all into writing and writing practice. So I know this is going to have been so useful for our listeners. So I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you. Tony: It's been a joy. Thank you. Vikki: No problem. 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.

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.