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30. How to overcome imposter syndrome
8 May 2023
Have you ever felt like an imposter? Worried that someone will find out that you're not good enough to be here after all? Unfortunately we know that imposter syndrome is really common in academia and can lead to reduced wellbeing and even people leaving programmes or jobs. In this episode, I share some simple tactics that everyone can use to help feel a little less like an imposter. Importantly, I also discuss how imposter syndrome is not an individual failing, but rather a result of structural issues in our environment. Because of that, we need to address it as a community, so I talk about how we can help others feel more included and competent too.
I talk about a book chapter in this episode by Rachel Handforth. It's called "Feeling “Stupid”: Considering the Affective
in Women Doctoral Students’ Experiences of Imposter ‘Syndrome in Higher Education" and it's chapter 18 of the Palgrave Handbook of Imposter Syndrome. You can find out more here. You'll need a uni login to access it but if you're struggling, DM me and I'll send it over!
Transcript
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode 30 of the PhD Life Coach, where we are going to be talking imposter syndrome. Have you ever worried that someone is going to find you out? That you've somehow convinced your supervisor that you are better than you actually are, and that one day you are not going to be able to wing it anymore, and they are going to realize that you are not clever enough to be there?
Have you ever sat in a meeting thinking, how am I in a room with all these amazing people who've done all these amazing things, and there's me over here being little old me, and if I say the wrong thing, they're going to realize they totally should never have let me into this room?
If you work in academia, or doing a PhD, I'm pretty sure you have experienced those things, and for many of you, these will be thoughts and feelings that you are having a lot of the time. There's tons of research that shows that academia is a hotbed of people experiencing imposter syndrome, feeling like they don't belong, and that this has real impact on wellbeing. It makes people more likely to leave their program, makes them more likely to experience mental health problems, to feel that they're not part of the environment that they're part of. So in this episode, we're going to be thinking about this really real and important issue.
Now before we get any further, I want to address one thing. Often when people talk about stress in academia or talk about imposter syndrome in academia, they reassure people with the thought that it's normal. And this is something that we actually talked in one of my coaching sessions this week, with my PhD students, where one client talked about how her supervisors had told her that the way she was feeling was normal and that that had made her feel invalidated.
And so I think it's really important to recognize that when I say that something's normal, when I say that it's quite common and I see it in a lot of people, that isn't me saying it's okay. It isn't saying that, “therefore you shouldn't be upset by it. This is normal. Get used to it. This is normal. Get over it.”
This is me saying, yep. There's nothing weird about you. There's nothing wrong with you if you feel like an imposter in academia. This happens to quite a few people, but that doesn't make it okay. That doesn't make it not painful, and it doesn't mean it has to stay like that. That's what I mean when I say that these things are normal.
So if you are experiencing these things, I see you, I hear you, I understand. I've been there. I've supported other people through the challenge many, many times. What you're feeling is completely valid, but it doesn't have to feel this bad. So in this episode, we are going to be thinking about what specifically we can do to address imposter syndrome.
The other thing I see a lot is people thinking that imposter syndrome will get better when they reach the next stage. That once they've got their PhD, they won't feel like an imposter anymore. Once they're a senior lecturer, they won't feel like an imposter anymore. But again, there's evidence in the research and certainly in my coaching practice that this doesn't just automatically go away because you become more senior.
There's an article by Rachel Handforth which I'll link in the show notes for you about imposter syndrome, and she asked a bunch of PhD students to write to themselves over various different time points in their PhD. And one of the things she asked them to do, as a final year PhD student was write to their past selves, write to their first year PhD self. And she then analyzed that text to see what themes came out. And one of the quotations that she included really struck me. One participant said:
“the most striking thing that you will learn,”… so this is them talking to their past self… “is that I don't think I'm wiser than you. The same insecurities about what to do next. The imposter syndrome and the uncertainty about where we will be happy is still there. They have not gone away and I suspect they never will.”
And that really struck me because it really matched up with what I see with my clients, that people at all different levels of their academic career have these same imposter syndromes, they just have them about different scenarios. They have them about the new room they're in, the new meeting they're part of the new conference they go to, the new role they take on.
And what I really want to reflect from this is if we just expect that cause we've reached a new stage, these feelings will go away, then this person is completely right. They don't just spontaneously go away because you achieve a new thing.
However, the bit I want to dispute and that I want to address in this podcast is this idea that they will never go away. These thoughts and feelings can either go away or at least be reduced in their impact by some simple things that we can do as individuals and much more importantly as a collective. So it doesn't have to be inevitable, that we feel this way.
If you are listening to this as a PhD student, there's going to be tons of stuff that you can take for yourself.
If you are listening to this as a more senior member of staff, there are going to be things you can take for yourself, but also things you can take for your department and that kind of wider community because it is so important for us to address this as a collective.
This is not an individual failing. Imposter syndrome is not an individual failing.
Imposter syndrome is not a function of you not being good enough. Imposter syndrome is a function of the environment that you're working in and the expectations and stories that you absorb and internalize every day. That's why imposter syndrome has been shown to be worse in women, in people of colour, in people from working class backgrounds, people with disabilities, essentially anybody who doesn't fit that kind of academic, historic ideal of the white cisgender male who can devote their life to academia, who has somebody at home looking after them and doing other jobs for them, and who sort of fits all those normal stereotypes.
This comes from structural exclusion of particular groups of people and particular types of people. If you feel like an imposter, it's not because you're not good enough, it's because academia, higher education are not set up to make everybody feel welcomed and included and valued at the moment.
It's something we are trying to work on. It's something that is improving in places, but there's still an awful lot of stuff that we internalize, forget that it's almost things that we are told or that we're implicitly sold, and turn it into our own self-doubts as though it's somehow originated in us. Okay?
And the problem is because we forget where it comes from, we think it's a personal failing. We think that in addition to not being good enough to be in this room, we're also failing because we're suffering from imposter syndrome. We become imposters because we think we're imposters. We think, oh, well maybe if I'm feeling this imposter syndrome, even if it's not true, maybe the fact I'm feeling it means that I'm not cut out for academia. We turn it into a personal failing. And so my first thing here, if you take nothing else, feeling like an imposter is not a personal failing, particularly if you come from any of those minoritized groups. It is entirely not surprising that you feel like an imposter sometimes.
That's not to say white cisgender males can't feel like imposters. I coach many that do. And I think that's just a real example of how institutions and sectors that have structural inequality in them benefit no one because we've somehow created this highly competitive, highly pressurized environment that structurally excludes certain groups. It also just makes it an environment that's challenging for an awful lot of people.
So if you feel like you have imposter syndrome, this is not about you. It is not for you to individually fix. However, we also don't have to make it worse for ourselves. So what I often see is people who are beating themselves up about stuff, they're making it true. They're making it mean that they're actually not good enough, and then they stop engaging. They remove themselves from in the environment, and they tell themselves all the time that they're not good enough as though society doesn't tell them this enough. They tell themselves that this is the case too.
Imposter syndrome isn't your fault. It's not a personal failing. But that doesn't mean we have to just accept it, experience it, tough it out, or any of those things. There's a bunch of things we can do to look after ourselves better, and look after each other better.
So the first thing I want you to think about, is, I want you to stop making this binary. By calling it imposter syndrome, we give it this name, we have imposter syndrome, or we don't. We are an imposter. Or we're not. And what that means is that if we ever have doubts about our right to be somewhere or have doubts about our abilities, then we are an imposter.
You know, it's a noun, it's a thing. An imposter is a thing. You either are it or you aren't. And that sort of binary thinking just really doesn't help because as soon as you have any doubts, then it launches you all the way over there into imposter zone and we start to think that this is a massive problem.
What I would really encourage you to do is to think about it much more as a continuous variable. We're not either an imposter or we're not. We belong to a greater or lesser extent. We are able to a greater or lesser extent, we have skills to a greater or lesser extent. And when you start thinking about it like that, all of a sudden you can start thinking about the ways you do belong, the ways you are good enough, the ways that you have skills that you are bringing, and you get to also recognize the things that you're finding more challenging or that you are less able to do and not see them as something that launches you straight into the imposter zone, but as something that can be worked on, that can be accepted. It doesn't have to mean anything about all your other skills and abilities and qualities and what you bring to academia, so try to avoid having this binary of imposter versus not.
The second thing I want you to think about is not waiting for external confirmation. So one of the things we do see in research is that for short periods of time, after you've had some sort of accolade, you feel a bit better. So when you get promoted, you feel a little bit less of an imposter. And when you get something published, you feel a little bit less of an imposter.
And as I said at the beginning, these feelings don't last. They don't sustain us forever. But in that short moment where we get external validation, then we feel that little bit better.
I'd really like you to ask yourselves why external validation means so much more to you than internal validation. Why are we putting somebody else's opinion of our abilities, who doesn't know us anywhere near as well as we know ourselves above our own opinions?
Because there's problems with that. Other people have their own agendas. They have reasons for thinking things about you. They're only exposed to certain parts of you. They only see some sides of you. They don't see all of your abilities and skills and wonderful self.
And we also have far less control over when we get external validation. We don't know when a paper's going to get published. We don't know when someone's going to give us positive feedback.
What we do know is that our voices are inside our heads all the time. We hear ourselves talk to ourselves all the time. So if you feel better when you get more validation, let's start giving ourselves some more validation.
Let's start thinking of all the reasons why we do deserve to be in this room. Let's start thinking of all the reasons why we belong in academia and why it's important that we're here.
I said at the beginning that for those of you who have some influence or power over others, so perhaps you're a supervisor, you're running a program, for example, that there's going to be lessons for you, some more structural changes.
The lesson here is even if we're trying to encourage people to be more internally validating, giving themselves positive feedback, do not underestimate how much external validation helps.
I have students in my PhD coaching program all the time who get one bit of positive feedback from their supervisors, and they're ecstatic. Now we work on not being reliant on that and being more in control of our own sense of satisfaction, but if you are a supervisor, if you are in any sense of power over other people, don't underestimate how much just a little bit of external validation helps.
Saying “I can see how hard you've worked on this. I can see that this has really improved since last time I looked at it. I'm really chuffed with how much you've got done on your study this week”, or whatever it might be. Don't underestimate how much that means.
This is particularly true when you're giving feedback on drafts. So one of the things I see with my students a lot is that their supervisors focus on the things that need changing. And I used to do this, I get it. When you are in a hurry and you just need to get the comments done for somebody, you tend to just focus on the bits that need to be done. But what the students see is a whole series of criticisms and they often interpret that to mean that there's nothing good in the piece.
Now we work hard on looking at how many sections of your work had no comments on, how can we interpret no comments as positive, but if you can just take those few seconds and recognize how important it is to write “Oh, I like this bit. It's really clear. Oh, this bit's so much better than the last version I saw.”
It means so much to your students. Students, you don't get away from this either. Your supervisors are feeling under pressure, undervalued, and they worry about whether they're doing a good job supervising you too. Remember how important external validation is to you and consider when you can give it to your supervisor.
Just saying “thank you. Your support on this has really, really helped me.” I know so many supervisors that keep the emails, you send them in a special folder. If they get emails from students that say nice things about them, they keep them in a special folder to look at when they're feeling sad. Send those messages to your supervisors sometimes. We all need as individuals to work on not needing so much external validation, but as a community, let's think about giving each other a little more external validation whenever we can.
The third thing that I want to talk about is the hidden curriculum. So people have talked about this before where there's a whole bunch of things that people assume that you understand about academia. These are all the sort of unsaid things that carry a lot of power, but they often aren't explicitly taught. So, how to influence more senior academics, how to raise your profile around your university. The process for publishing a paper. Some of these things get taught, some of these things, we just sort of assume that people will pick them up by osmosis.
And the issue is that the people that tend to know these things are the people that are already privileged. So people whose parents were academics and who understand academia, people who have lots of friends who are academics, people who fit the traditional picture of what an academic looks like.
People who have time and energy and money and capacity to go to the pub on a Friday night and socialize with academics from their department. Who have the resources and ability to go to conferences and meet lots of people and get insider information that way.
There is a whole bunch of stuff that we need to find out and when we don't know these things, when nobody shares them with us, we can feel like an imposter because we don't know what these words mean. Or we feel like there's a route to promotion that some people got a map for and other people didn't.
And the first thing to say is you're not wrong. There is, and these things are not well explicitly taught, and they're not widely shared in a conscious and inclusive way. So if you don't understand this stuff, you feel like this things you're missing, there probably is.
That might sound like a depressing thing to say, but the bit I want to challenge is that that makes you an imposter. Because what happens is people think that because they don't know these things, they therefore don't belong.
What I would encourage you is to accept that there probably is a bunch of things that other people know that you don't know, but that doesn't make you an imposter. It doesn't make you any less welcome, any less important to the environment that you are working in. It just means there's a bunch of stuff that you don't know, and the annoying thing is that often you don't quite know what you don't know.
So first step is we accept this as truth. The second step is we start to think, how can I start to uncover some of these things? So if I'm somebody who can't be in the pub on Friday night, cause I've got caring responsibilities or who I can't go to conference because there's no funding for it, how can I socialize in different ways? How can I form connections in different ways? Who can I ask about these different questions? I'm really starting to pick these apart.
The thought I want you to have is “I don't know these things. I don't know what I don't know, but I deserve to know and I have the ability to find it out” instead of “there are things I don't know, that I don't even know I don't know, and that's not fair, and it means that I shouldn't be here.” Okay, let's focus on, you deserve to know and you can figure this stuff out.
Again, if you are somebody with influence, then we flip it around and we think, how can you share some of this hidden curriculum with other people? How can you check understanding of even some of the things that seem really basic to you? How can you have more conversations with people about some of this hidden stuff, about how to influence people, how to get promoted and so on.
If you have some of that insider information, how can you make sure that that's shared and is shared widely and is shared inclusively and preferably is shared in some sort of structured way so that everybody has access to it.
But at minimum, who could you have coffee with? Who might not have access to all of this information? Who could you help to understand some of the unspoken rules of academia?
My fourth tip is to stop comparing your insides to other people's outsides. And we've touched on this in past episodes, but when you are inside your own life, you have access to everything. You know, all the deepest, darkest worries, you know all the stupid things you've ever done. You know the child you were, you know the dreams you've got, you know all the mistakes you've ever made.
And we only really get to compare that to other people's outsides. So you are in a meeting thinking everybody else knows what they're talking about, and I'm the only one here who's wondering what these acronyms even mean, when you haven't said it out loud. They don't know that you don't know what those acronyms mean.
There's probably other people in the room that don’t know what those acronyms mean. There's probably other people in the room experiencing imposter syndrome. There's probably other people in the room who actually aren't even listening to what's being said, because they lost track 15 minutes ago.
Just be aware of that difficulty of comparing your own insides to their outsides. They have an internal life, and internal worries, that you will likely never know about, and you're making a really unfair comparison. A common comparison. Don't beat yourself up for making unfair comparisons, but just remind yourself that you're not on an even playing field, if you compare your insides with their outsides from the outside. I'm pretty confident you look super competent.
Now, if you are in a position of power, you can also think about sharing your insides sometimes. One of the things I know my students always used to value when I was an academic and that I certainly still try and do now as a coach, is when I tell them about the things that I still find difficult or the things that I worried about when I was at their stage.
Being honest about some of those things that you find challenging can help other people see that they're not the only one that worries about these things. Now I want to acknowledge that there are some power issues that happen here whereby it is often people who feel particularly secure in their position, so people who have permanent positions, for example, who are generally accepted by the academy.
And for them it's quite easy to share failures and to say, yeah, yeah, I struggled with this. In fact, people have got CVS of failures on the internet and those are wonderful things to see. And if you feel empowered to do that, then it is super useful for people to see them.
But I do want to also acknowledge that if you are somebody who feels more precarious that is an awful lot harder. So you might be somebody who has students, you know, you have PhD students that you're supervising. You want to be as open with them as possible, but perhaps you've got a precarious position.
Perhaps you feel like a bit of an imposter yourself. Perhaps you are one of only a few women in your department, one of only a few people of colour. Maybe you've got a disability. And it can be a lot harder then to be open and admit your failings and admit your concerns.
I get that and I see the privilege that you need to believe that you can admit all of your messy insides and no consequence will come of it. However, the more we can nudge towards that, the more we can make it okay to admit even just small things like “oh yeah, I didn't used to know what that was too. I pronounced it wrong for like three years” or whatever. The more we can admit even these small things, the more we help the people who are behind us in their academic journey, to see that we're human beings too.
Now for the fifth thing, we've already talked about reminding yourself why it's not true that you don't deserve to be here. Reminding yourself of all the things that you've achieved, all the skills and qualities that you bring. We've already touched on that. People talk about that a lot with imposter syndrome.
I want to suggest that you consider what if you have conned somebody into being here, and that's okay. What if when you sit in that meeting, everybody else in that room is more qualified than you? Is more able, more intelligent, whatever it is you worry about than you, and that's okay.
Because actually a lot of the problem with this comes from identifying it as a problem. So it's not just that we are saying we are not good enough to be here and someone will find out, it's that we are not good enough to be here. Someone will find out, and when they find out they'll be consequences.
I'll be kicked out, I'll be humiliated. I'll be told I shouldn't be here and how dare I, and it's all those consequences that are really the challenge here. What if, if we're struggling to believe that we have the right to be in the room and that we are just as clever as everybody else, what if we believe that we've somehow made it to this room, to this department, to this program, and everybody's better than us and that's okay.
Because once you start saying, that's okay, then you open yourself up to a whole lot of different emotions. You start believing how lucky you are to be here. Hey, if it's true that I'm not clever enough to be here and I'm still here, I can learn so much from these people. I can get so much out of this.
For the record, I am not encouraging you to believe that you are not good enough to be in a room, but it can be a really useful interim coping strategy. Maybe I’m not, but I'm here, aren't I? I'm here and I'm going to get everything out of it I can. I'm going to bring everything I've got.
I might not have as much as you guys, but I'm going to bring everything I've got. I'm going to bring all the knowledge I can think of, all the experience I can think of. I'm really going to try and contribute and I am going to learn from being in a room with all these amazing people, it's such a different vibe than, oh, I'm not good enough to be here, so I'm not going to say anything and I'm just going to sit here and panic about it because I shouldn't really be here and someone's going to realize.
How different is it to be “no idea how I got in this room, but hey, I'm here. Let's go. I'm going to contribute best I can and I'm going to get everything I can out of this experience.”
Such a different vibe and you can work on these things in parallel. So you can work on believing you have something to offer, that you deserve to be here and work on believing that if everyone else is more experienced, then I'm super lucky to be here.
When we're thinking as a more senior member of a meeting or a group, I want you also to think about what you can do for the less experienced people there. So if you find yourself in a meeting where there are students there when you are a member of staff, or where there's newer members of staff, when you are a more experienced member of staff, what can you do mindfully and consciously to make sure that they feel included and valued?
Can you make sure you introduce yourselves to them? Can you make sure that you take their agenda items earlier? Can you make sure that you remember to specifically ask for their opinion, to thank them for their contributions?
Now, a bunch of these things sound like they should be kind of common behaviour if we're just polite human beings, but we know when we're in a hurry and we're whizzing through the quality assurance committee or whatever it is, that sometimes these things go by the wayside.
We're caught up in finishing off our emails before the meeting starts, whizzing through the agenda, just trying to get it done in the time we got available, and we don't necessarily remember what everybody else in the room might be thinking.
So if you are in that more privileged position of feeling quite comfortable in a room like you belong, how can you take a moment just to cast your eye around and see if there's anything you can do to make other people feel like they belong in that room too.
And then my final point for anyone who feels like they're sometimes an imposter or a more general sense that they don't belong, is to build tiny bridges. Often we think about ourselves over here on an island where we don't belong, and we want to get to this island where we do belong.
And that's a huge bridge that's needed to take me from this island to that island. Whereas if we can think about it, not so much as that, but as a series of stepping stones, as a series of tiny bridges, that we can make that just help us feel more embedded in the community.
So how can you just do one thing today to feel a little bit more connected to one person in your academic community? If you are going to a conference, how can you identify one person who doesn't look too scary that you could just say hello to and have a conversation with? How could you just ask one person if they'd like to go for lunch, or how could you just slide into the side of a conversation and say hello and smile and nod along.
Try and build some of those tiny bridges because that's how communities are built. They're built one tiny bridge at a time. Because the problem with telling ourselves that we're an imposter or that we don't belong is that we often don't even try to build the bridges anymore. Because it can hurt to try and build bridges and it not work. It can hurt to try and go to something and then nobody talks to you.
And so we sort of protect ourselves from that sense of rejection and often end up withdrawing ourselves. And so often the people that feel most excluded are in some ways excluding themselves as well by not putting themselves in that environment in the first place.
And I'm definitely not saying just tough it up, you're causing this yourself. What I'm saying is allow yourself to be in the environment, maybe on the periphery, and build tiny bridges around the edges. Be kind to yourself. Remind yourself that you can leave at any time if you're feeling uncomfortable, but can you make a conversation with this person?
Can you have a little chat with that person? Can you hang around the food? I hang around the food. It's a really easy way to get talking to people. So you just start to get those little tiny bridges of feeling like you belong to your community.
If you are in charge of your department or you are in charge of your research group or any small part of that community, how can you create more opportunities for that to happen? How can you spot people that are maybe on the periphery and help them feel included? How can you make it easier for them to build bridges with each other?
How can you avoid awful icebreakers, but at the same time give people reasons to talk to each other. How can you make it normal to create bridges that help people to feel included? Because the way we address imposter syndrome is together, together as a community, because it is not a problem that's caused by individual failings.
It's a problem of the community as a whole, and we can each do our bit to solve it for ourselves and to support ourselves through this experience. But we can also each do our bit to make sure that other people don't feel like imposters and feel like they belong to a wider community.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on imposter syndrome, whether any of these resonate with you or whether you found them, any of them helpful. Do follow me on Twitter @drvikkiburns. I'm also newly excitingly on Instagram @thePhDLifeCoach, so follow me over there because at the moment I look like a Billy No Mates. So I want you all to follow me over there too so that I get that sense of belonging as well. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week.
Links I refer to in this episode Moxie Moxie's Research Dr Jessica Parker’s LinkedIn Profile Ethan Mollick's Substack "One Useful Thing" The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI Dr Sarah Eaton – Six tenets of post plagiarism Vikki: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD life coach. And this week I have another guest with me and I think this one is going to be super fun because it's quite controversial and interesting and very, very topical. So welcome. We have Jessica Parker here from the AI company. Moxie. Welcome, Jessica. Jessica: Thank you, Vikki. I'm excited to be here. You know, I listened to your podcast several months ago when you met with Alison Miller, who was the owner of The Dissertation Coach and now runs The Academic Writers' Space. She's a really close friend and colleague of mine, and I really enjoyed that episode, so I'm honored to be here. Thanks for having me. Vikki: Fantastic to have you. So we're going to be talking today guys about AI and AI's use in academia and the controversies and the misconceptions and essentially all the things that academics need to know, but before we get into that, maybe tell people a little bit more about you. Obviously you've got this connection with dissertation coach and the Moxie company as well, so tell people a bit more about that. Jessica: Yeah, so I will just put this out there as a disclaimer. I am not a computer scientist. I am not an AI expert. I think of myself as an advocate and a skeptic. So my goal is to really try to understand AI, in terms of its capabilities and limitations and helping guide my students and my clients on how to use it ethically and responsibly. Uh, but I started doing generative AI research about a year ago, and before that, I was a health care researcher. I worked in Boston for two large universities managing some large scale inter-professional health care grants. I got pretty burnout on academia. My dad got sick and I came home to take care of him. And I thought, you know, what can I do to try to bridge this gap in my career? And I started a consulting company, Dissertation By Design. And that was in 2017 and originally it was just me working with all the clients and I primarily specialized in working with health care disciplines and really just giving them guidance on research design and data interpretation. And then my team grew and that's how I ultimately met Allison Miller, the owner of The Dissertation Coach. And we really bonded so when she decided she wanted to retire from The Dissertation Coach and focus on The Academic Writers' Space, it just seemed like a natural fit for me to take over. So that happened in January of this year, and that was big. So I still manage both of those companies, but from an AI perspective, like most of the world, I started using chat GPT three, in like March, 2023. And I will never forget the moment I first started using it. I was just in shock. I could not believe how well it approximated like human like conversation. And I had both awe and then just, I felt like I had an existential crisis. I immediately thought about like, well, what does this mean for research and my industry and learning and society and just all the things. And so I'm very curious. So I set about learning. I just immediately dove in to YouTube videos and LinkedIn. I started trying to find thought leaders and just teaching myself as much as I could to understand it. I also supervise doctoral students at a university in Boston still and so I wanted to think about how they might be using it and how to guide them. So one of the first things I did, uh, last summer was I started trying to create my own generative AI tools. And that's kind of what sparks this whole journey. Like I never set out to found a tech company. Um, I'm a very non technical person up until recently. And so I think this has been as much a surprise to me as anyone else who knows me. Vikki: I love that. I love that. So then I just decided to build one. Jessica: You know, naivete is a good thing. I think if you had told me then all the challenges I would run into, I might've thought twice, but here I am navigating it. Vikki: One of my recent episodes, I was thinking about the 10 different qualities that I think we need to be good bosses to ourselves and ambitious was one of them. And I love that just getting immersed in something and seeing an opportunity and going for it, regardless of kind of what your original background was, building on the expertise that you've got now. I think that's amazing. Jessica: Yeah, I think it can be like a curse and a superpower. It's like, I'm really good at focusing and solving problems. And then sometimes I can get like completely immersed in something and lose myself in it. And you know, so like my family checks in on me and they're like, we haven't heard from you. And it's usually because I've just discovered some new capability and I'm like building some new application or something like that. Yeah. Vikki: I mean, so tell us about what you've been building. Jessica: Yeah, so Moxie, we started out really focusing on using generative AI for formative feedback, and I wanted to solve a problem. I'm a very pragmatic person, but the first problem I wanted to solve was a problem I have with my doc students and my clients, and it's this need that they have where they want feedback on really long academic texts. You know, we think about 40 page lit reviews or 100 page research proposals. And typically they haven't planned ahead and they need it last minute. And so I'm limited in my time and resources. And I thought, you know, can generative AI provide some sort of formative feedback on aspects of their ideas or their writing? And it can. And that was the first research study I did with an applied linguist. We evaluated chat GPT's capabilities and limitations for automated writing evaluation and we looked at complexity, accuracy, [00:06:00] and fluency of the writing. And we came to a conclusion then, and it's evolved, but we've kind of stuck to it, which has been interesting given how much we've learned, which is that we already have these tools available before generative AI that are really good at looking at accuracy. So you think about rule based systems like Grammarly or the spell checker in Microsoft Word. So those are rule based systems that are good at looking at accuracy. Whereas generative AI, what we found, if you use it appropriately, so it's not going to immediately do this well, it can really help with complexity and fluency of the writing. And I believe, and what I've seen, and I know to be true, is when you give it enough context and you're using your critical thinking skills when you're engaging with an AI chatbot, you can increase depth and complexity in your writing. And so that's really what we set out to do. And so the first suite of AI tools we created were tools I was using with my doc students. So I did a study alongside of them, a participatory research study to understand, like, their experiences with it, and it was wonderful. I made it clear that the generative AI was not grading them. It was not a summative assessment. It was just meant to help them get some preliminary feedback from something that I created using the same criteria I would be using to evaluate their work and try to close the gap on their own before submitting their work to me. And so they loved that. They felt like it gave them a bit more autonomy in the learning process and I noticed that it was reinforcing learning because it was using that criteria I provided it, that I was teaching the students. So Moxie is really mostly about formative feedback. So we don't create tools to write for the user. Like people don't come to Moxie or if they do, they quickly realize we're not for them to like generate their lit review or something like that. It's more like you have to bring something to the table. And then Moxie acts as like a collaborator or a thought partner with you to develop your work further. Vikki: Amazing. And you said that the students liked that and they found it useful. Tell me a bit more about what they kind of got out of that. Jessica: Yeah, so, some of the things I heard early on, and I'm now on my 4th semester with this. So every time I'm sort of tweaking and experimenting, but what I started noticing in the discussion boards and the students weren't aware of it. I became aware of it. And then we did a focus group. So then they became more aware of it is, I noticed more, metacognition. So they were thinking more about their process and I had intentionally built the chatbot to do that to force them to think about the process, not the product and to recall concepts like these students, and this was an academic writing course. I was exposing them to new concepts, such as anthropomorphism or precision or coherence and writing. And these were concepts that they were not familiar with. And so getting that feedback, maybe 10 times from an AI tool before submitting it to me gave them ample opportunity to like, see those concepts reinforced. And then I would develop the tools to encourage reflection. And then I required reflection in their papers to understand how they used it. So I started seeing these signs of metacognition and cognition where they're recalling and using the concepts that they're learning in the discussion boards, and normally I would see that much later in the semester, so that was a good sign. And what the students liked about it is, it was available any time of day, never gets tired, uh, and they, and they're not afraid to ask them questions. So sometimes I don't know a student is struggling until I see their 1st assignment or until they reach out to me, but the students through interaction with the chat bot, and they don't have to admit what they don't know or come to me right away. Because maybe, you know, there's that power dynamic. So they appreciated that they sort of had the opportunity to ask the dumb questions that maybe they're too afraid to ask me. That was something that they liked and, but the biggest thing that they appreciated was feeling like they could try to improve their work well before they submitted it to me. So it gave them like a bit more control over that process. Vikki: Hmm. I love that. So one of the things I've noticed with AI, so I've only used the kind of the bog standard commercial free chat GPT, and I've used it for a few worky bits, and liked some bits of it, not others. We talked a little bit before we started recording that I've used it to develop some examples to use in a workshop, for example, but then I haven't liked it when I've, I've tried to do like summaries of summaries of my podcasts into short articles and things, and I didn't like the way that worked. But one of the things that I noticed is that I learned a lot about my own thinking by thinking about how to give it enough instructions to do something well, if you see what I mean. Because we all hopefully know by now that if you say in chat GPT, you know, write a paragraph on photosynthesis, it'll chug something out. But if you say, write a paragraph on photosynthesis that's at the level of a graduate student, including, I don't know what recent research there is on photosynthesis, bad example, but you know what I mean, you know, giving it more and more context and more and more instruction, the better quality output you get, and for me, I think a lot of the benefit is in actually learning what you're exactly asking for in the first place. And I wonder whether that's something you see with the writing and the feedback. Jessica: Yes, you have to have an order to, so there's this age old computer science principle that I learned, which is garbage in garbage out. And that still holds true for generative AI. [00:12:00] So the more you give it, the more likely you're going to get what you're looking for out of it. And I was actually reading something recently that I think captures this really well. So. All the frontier models like ChatGPT by OpenAI, Clod by Anthropic, Gemini by Google, Llama by Meta. They're trained on everything in the internet. And the internet is a decontextualized and frictionless environment and these are general purpose tools. And so they're good at doing just a little bit of everything kind of okay. But when you give it all of that instruction, so like my prompts are sometimes a page long. Like I was just working on one of my prompts for synthesis and it requires me to have a lot of clarity about exactly what I want to evaluate. And so it's interesting through writing the prompts actually have improved my rubrics and my evaluation criteria, 'cause it's helped me see what's unclear. And that's one of the ways I use generative AI a lot. Just as an educator. So this is just not even with Moxie, but I will take an assessment criteria or rubric or template, I'll feed it into say Claude, and I'll say What's unclear? Imagine you're a first year PhD student who has no knowledge of these concepts. Which of these instructions might be a bit vague? How do I need to elaborate? Should I give some examples and sentence starters? And so it just helps me really improve a lot of those instructions and templates and rubrics for my students. I also use it as a thought partner, and this is what I encourage my students and my clients to do. You know, we as humans have a lot of assumptions and biases. I mean, writing a positionality statement is a common assignment for a first year Ph. D. student because they're learning about positionality. Well, you can brainstorm and thought partner with a chat bot and have it like point out what some of your assumptions and your biases may be by having it role play. It doesn't mean that you take everything for truth and at face value. It gives so many more opportunities to do those things where maybe before you had to have a human available and not everyone has that human available to thought partner with. Vikki: Yeah, for sure. My brain is now pinging in about 50 different directions, but I feel like for the purposes of me fully understanding and everyone else fully understanding. Can you just tell us a bit more about how it even works and therefore, you know, what it's good at and what it's less good at? Jessica: Yeah, no, that's a good question, especially cause I think with the news hype and the media, I feel like expectations are not aligned with reality. And so a lot of people do not understand. They just think it's magic. I think the easiest way to explain what a large language model does. So I'm not talking about an image generator. In particular, I'm talking about text content. It's like a mathematical model of communication. So we have artificial intelligence is like an umbrella term that encompasses machine learning, deep learning, which includes neural networks and large language models and generative AI are grouped together. Ultimately, these models have been trained on vast amounts of data, so much data, it's hard numbers that you've never heard of, crazy amounts of data, everything on the intranet. Through learning and seeing all of that data and seeing how words are paired together, it creates a database and we call that a vector database. And so a word like apple could be the fruit or it could be the company. And the way it knows the difference is based on the words that are surrounding it. So when you ask a question to chat GPT, if you say, tell me about Apple's products, it's going to know that the word Apple by product means that it's a company. So it just puts words together in a vector database and it uses numbers. So it's just a mathematical model of communication. Vikki: So what implications does that have? What people should be using it for in academia? Jessica: Well, the first is that it's not rule based. So up until now, we've all thought of technology in terms of software. Software is programmed and it's rule based, so it's predictable. We can identify where something went wrong. We just go find that code and we fixed it because it's not following the rule we gave it. Generative AI is not rule based. It produces something new and original, even if it's slightly different every time. So it's not pulling complete sentences from somewhere, so it's not paraphrasing or plagiarizing. It's generating something new each time. And it's not following rules, so it's less predictable. That's why you and I might ask ChatGPT or Claude the exact same question, and it might give us a slightly different response, which is why context is so important. I use the example of, if you were to go into ChatGPT and say, What color is the sky? Just leave it at that. likely to predict that the word is blue. It's just a prediction model. But if you give it context and say the color of the sky is blank, it's raining today. It's going to predict a different word, like grey. And so that's where the context is important, but it's still not predictable. Like the more you add on, the more complex the task is. So that's why they call it a black box. It's really difficult to trace any issues or like, I was recently reading a study where they looked at, um, I think they use chat GPT. They use it to evaluate different essays by students who were white, black, Asian American, and it scored them all very differently and it was stricter in its grading for Asian Americans compared to black and white students. And you [00:18:00] can't go into the system and figure out like exactly why and how that happened. That's very different from a software. And so everything we know about the software paradigm, which we're all used to, does not apply with generative AI. And that's really hard, I think, for people to understand. That means it's not a hundred percent accurate. It's not a fact checker. So I. I hear a lot of people using it like they would Google where they go to Google and ask a question that you expect to link to a source and get a fact from. That's not what ChatGPT is made for. It might get it right, but it's not a fact checker. It's just predicting the next word. It doesn't have Truth. So I think that is important for people to understand. And I think that's really challenging to wrap your head around because it's so good. It's so confident in its responses. It uses a lot of, when you look at the language, boosters, which makes it sound even more confident. So for someone who's not an expert, it comes across as the truth. And unless you question it, even then it's still predicting the next word. It's not thinking about your response or your question if that makes sense. So people using it like Google for fact checking is, I don't like to say right or wrong, but that's not the best use of a large language model. What's also challenging is what we're starting to see is this idea of summarizing. For instance, now you've probably noticed in Google, when you ask a question, it does use Gemini and it'll summarize and attempt to answer a question for you at the top, and it will link to its sources. But large language models are not the best at summarizing. Like, if you just tell a person to summarize, that person is going to choose what they're going to focus on in that summary. You think about summarizing a whole research article, I might really value the methods and put more emphasis on the methods. So unless you're telling it exactly what to focus on in that summary. And so what we start to see is this simplification bias, which is really problematic in research. And I've been cautioning people about that quite a bit. An example of simplification bias would be if you, especially these AI research assistants, if you ask it a question, like you put in your research question, it'll summarize maybe the top 10 papers and attempt to answer that question. If you really go through each of those sources, a lot of times it will get it wrong. And that's because it's not great at knowing what to focus on. It's not a human. It's not looking at that research through the same lens that you would. based on your experience and your perspective and maybe the theory that you're using. So I, I feel like people are going to get in trouble with this simplification bias and that's something that concerns me quite a bit. Vikki: Definitely. And Yeah, and you see people on Twitter and things talking about tools that, you know, this will take the 50 articles you need to read and put it into tabulated form. So you don't, you know, they don't usually say the words, so you don't need to read the original, but it's kind of inferred sometimes that that's why this will save you so much time and That it is really concerning that it doesn't have that element of having gone through your brain and been filtered against the things that you think are important or the things you're focusing on this time. Jessica: Well, I want to touch on that because I think you're hitting on something important and It bothers me that the marketing language that we're seeing is all about speed and efficiency. I don't know if Microsoft still uses this language, but when they released its 1st, like generative educational product, they use the phrase teaching speed, which is really interesting. To me, it seems obvious, but I do find myself having to say this, like, as a researcher, when you get, when you're an expert in something, or you're becoming an expert, you don't go get your Ph. D. for speed and efficiency. There's friction in learning, doesn't mean it has to be more painful than it needs to be, but I do worry about this focus on speed and efficiency because it does send the wrong message. I don't think that I'm conducting research any faster than I was, but that's wasn't my goal. And I think that surprises people when I talk about it, like the goal, the way I see it, isn't. To do your research faster to your lit review faster. I think you can do it. Maybe more a bit more efficiently manually, I used to build out literature matrices and word. So now I can speed that up. I can, you know, use it in a way I could just make that table, but I'm still having to read every article. So it's not saving time. It's just shifting my time. It's like, I'm just spending my time on different things. And I think if people can think about it that way, then that would be, I think, a healthier way to approach it. I see what you mean and I hear it all the time. And I think that's where sometimes expectations are not aligned with reality. Vikki: Yeah. But there's two different versions of reality as well, isn't there, in the sense that there's the reality of what it's actually good at and what it should, in inverted commas, be used for. But there is also the reality, and maybe this is worse in undergrads, one would hope, but I'm sure it filters through, there is also the reality of what people will actually just use it for. And sort of believing the truth of both of those I think is actually really challenging because we can say, you know, it's the same as we'd say to undergrads, you know, things a lot easier if you turn up to lectures and you talk to your tutors and da da da, and then they try and do it from the video recordings and blah blah. Um, we can say it [00:24:00] works a lot better and this is what it's intended for. But if it roughly does that, then there's going to be chunk of people for whom that's very attractive and that kind of tempt them over, even if they know it's not perfect, it's, it's done. Jessica: I mean, we're seeing that. I have mixed feelings on this. So on one hand, like I've been in rooms where there's conversations about how all the admissions essay now is our essays now are AI generated. One part of me, it's like, I want to give humans the benefit of the doubt and say that I think that's a sign of low AI literacy. I also believe that as long as the focus is on the grade and there's deadlines, there's always going to be cheating. What I think is great about this moment for educators. And I try to talk to faculty about shifting our focus from A. I detection because they're very unreliable to instead rethinking, which is a hard discussion because it requires a lot of effort and work rethinking, like, how are we evaluating learning? And personally, you know, for me, it's been a big shift to process over product has helped me address some of these issues. Now, I would not want to be an English comp professor at a university. Like, that's a whole other thing to tackle that I think is really challenging, but I do like to remind folks that, writing technologies have been around for a long time. There's been concerns like with the printing press and with the development of phones and text that we would lose our ability to write. And we've navigated that before. And I think we will again. We're just still very early in the process, and there's a lot of education that needs to happen in terms of just AI literacy. Vikki: Yeah, I think one of the things that it, one of the positives is I think it is going to teach, it's going to force us to teach things that were perhaps kind of expected to just implicitly pick up. Because when I think about novice academics, I'm thinking about sort of, you know, the end of undergraduate, beginning of postgraduate, that sort of level where they're doing, you know, they're doing their lit reviews and things, but they're still at the kind of beginnings of knowing how. When they're doing that in a beginnery way, it's not that different than what AI does, in my opinion. You know, they're reading stuff, and they're kind of trying to say what they say in slightly different words, and like, summarize what was in that more or less accurately and combine it up with summaries of other articles and try and smush that into something vaguely coherent. You know, this is with all respect. We've all been through that stage. And I think we've sort of, I don't know, maybe we've been lazy with just how things have been taught, but getting people to understand the difference between that and filtering literature through the particular lens that you're trying to look at it through and bringing your perspectives and comparing things that aren't usually brought together and whatever, and all those interesting things you can do to produce a good piece of work are the bits that, AI at the moment, at least, are less good at. But in order for students to see, or academics to see, what it can't do, they have to understand that actually the way they're doing it, isn't the kind of advanced version either. Does that, does that make any sense? Because I think like with reading too, you know, I spend my life trying to share with people that if when you read an article, you start at the beginning and you read to the end and your goal is to read it. You've missed a trick here, you know, you need to be going into it with why am I reading this? What is the purpose? Am I looking at the methods? Am I trying to understand the take home message of it? Am I trying to see what argument they're making? Which bits of it are going to give me that? And yeah, you'll read the whole thing at some point, but I'm a big fan of getting people to jump around in an article, reading all those things. And so I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether you think there's a role in when we're understanding the limitations of what AI does in better understanding the limitations of what we as humans do in, in the sort of beginnings of our academic careers. Jessica: Yeah, I think you're exactly right. And you're on to something. For example, I think back to when I was the first research study I ever did was as a graduate student. It was my senior year and it was like abstracts. I was reading abstracts because it was like so overwhelming. I started with too broad of a search. Like, how am I supposed to get through all these articles? I wasn't searching appropriately. And then it was just like reading abstracts. And that's what I see now when I look at simplification bias with AI systems is a lot of the information it's pulling is from the abstract of the article, which is what we know that a lot of students do. And so I, I see the point that you're making and this is where I have a hard time answering because my answer kind of depends on the context with the student. So some of it is like the level of expertise. I'm going to go back to a discussion about writing and try to, like, connect my ideas. I do this webinar that students really like, and I talk about a top down versus a bottom up approach to writing. Jessica: And experts typically have this, like, top down approach because we already know the field. We come to the table with a thesis, an idea, an argument, and we go find what we need to build that argument. And therefore, our voice tends to come through more in our writing. Whereas a student who doesn't yet know the field, they kind of have to [00:30:00] go from the bottom up and look at all this evidence and then the pressure to like figure out what is the gap and what is the question and they don't have their voice. And then there's levels like, you don't just go from like novice to experts. Like we think of Bloom's taxonomy and you gradually improve your expertise over time. When I think about a first year PhD student, first semester coming in, like, I don't know that I want them using AI for any of these things, but if I have my student who's gone through their coursework, they've demonstrated their ability to synthesize literature, critique literature, choose an appropriate research design, then I think that's a really good point to introduce them to these tools. Now, does it mean that the 1st year 1st semester PhD student isn't using? I feel like those are things that we just to some extent we can't control other than just trying to educate them and helping them understand how that might be hampering their ability and their skills later on. If they're using AI shortcuts. I think a really interesting conversation that I'm starting to hear that I don't have any answers for. I mostly just have questions at this point. Which is around, like, what are the skills that are going to be needed? Because Anthropic's Claude, they just released a video, if you haven't seen it, it's called Computer Use Capability. It's a full AI agent system that can run on your computer where you give it a goal. You could tell it to conduct an entire lit review for you, and it'll go find all of the literature, it'll execute all the tasks by going online, locating it, storing it where you want it stored, Putting the information in Excel spreadsheet, so it is able to work across software platforms on your device, and it can execute all of these tasks in a row. And that's already here. So we have agents already and then how advanced are those going to be? And the questions I'm starting to hear and with faculty and higher at, or some of them are big questions about, like, how are we going to keep up with the workforce and stay relevant to make sure that we're producing students who have skills that are valued by the workforce when this technology is evolving so quickly, what does research even look like in 5 years? If A. I. Is able to really accurately conduct a thorough lit review and come to the same conclusions as humans what is the role of the researcher then? Are we going to have fewer experts? Will it free up our time for more creative problem solving? Will writing even be the medium for expressing these ideas. I mean, notebook LM already has the ability to turn an article into a conversational podcast. So those are such interesting questions that I do not know the answer to, that I feel like everyone is just speculating on. And I think anyone who claims to have all the answers is not being honest because the reality is, is even the top AI experts who are building these models still have a lot of these questions and we don't know. Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. Vikki: Yeah. So with the formative feedback, because I think that's fascinating. How do you balance up the added kind of benefits that brings. And I don't think anyone listening will underestimate how useful that is. One of the biggest issues I deal with with my clients is their frustrations over not getting feedback. And when I coach academics, their frustrations with the requirements to be giving feedback for everything and one of the things that I coach on quite a bit is how can, particularly when I'm working with students, how can students generate their own ability to evaluate things and their own ability to reassure themselves without seeking approval from their supervisor. Now, I'm never discouraging them from getting feedback. Obviously, feedback's the fastest way to learn, and we'll talk about that more in a minute. I do see this sort of dependence on if my supervisor tells me it's good, I'll believe it, rather than being able to, like, reassure themselves or to troubleshoot their own work in a meaningful way. And I'd be interested to hear your perspective on whether the AI stuff helps them to develop that skill to do it themselves, or whether it just makes them dependent on a bot to reassure them instead of a tutor to reassure them. Jessica: Yeah, that's a good question that I get a lot. And I think we're still figuring out the implications of over reliance, using it as a crutch. This is where I think AI literacy becomes so important. Part of AI literacy is functional, just understanding capabilities and limitations. Critical AI literacy requires the user, in this case a student, to not just take all of the feedback. Sometimes it gets it wrong. It's maybe 95% on point. Sometimes [00:36:00] it leaves things out, it focuses on the wrong things. Again, it's not a rule based system. The way I train my students to use it. And when I talk to educators about having their students use AI for formative feedback, I talk about teaching the students right away to not believe it all to be true. So they have to critically think about what that feedback is. So it's not the same as getting feedback from me where they take it all to be a hundred percent truth. Like they know exactly. Vikki: I mean, not if I coach them, they don't. I teach them to read supervisor comments critically as well! Jessica: Yeah, my doc students is more what I'm referring to, like they really value. So that's like an interesting question that I was wondering in the beginning is like, are they even going to value this feedback because it's not me? And I found that because I had designed the tools and they know that I added the criteria that I was using, they trusted it more than just, trying to go to chat gpt and say, give me feedback based on this rubric. But that's more of a trust issue. Not so much how they're using it. With critical literacy. It involves. Not just uploading your paper, getting the feedback, and then walking away with that initial feedback and trying to implement it. The real value, and I just published an article I could share with you to link, with my students, is meaning negotiation. So meeting negotiation happens with second language learners, and I have had this theory about academic writing is that it's a non native language for everyone, and so there's elements of second language learning that we can see in those who are learning academic writing for the first time. And that's something that we noticed when we studied my students chat conversations, because they shared them with us, that the students who are getting the most benefit out of it, follow up. There's lots of turn taking, asking for clarification. Can you pull another excerpt for me? Can you explain that for me? Can you create an analogy to help me understand that a bit more. Just like you would if you were learning a language where you're asking lots of follow up questions and for explanations? Having that meaning negotiation with the AI is a part of critical AI literacy. I don't think all students are going to do that, but I think that's part of our job of teaching them how to use it responsibly, is helping them understand what it means to like, have a conversation and negotiate with it, not just take it all to be true and then do it. You also have to use your brain, I mean, that's why I think there's this expectation because of the media and how it's reporting on AI that it's some quick fix and that it's going to require less effort, but. I mean, we're dealing with PhD students, and these are really complex problems that are being solved. And so there's no shortcut around using those critical thinking skills. And so if a student is going into it thinking, I'm going to write this paper faster, you know, I say, it's actually probably going to take you longer because I'm going to make you reflect on how you use this tool. But hopefully you're learning more and you have a higher quality product at the end where you thought through all of the ethical considerations that maybe you would have missed in that first draft or, um, done a more thorough critical appraisal of the evidence than maybe you would have done in that first draft for me. Vikki: Have you seen any differences in the emotional responses to feedback from the, um, bot rather than from people? Because one of the things. I see a lot is clients who procrastinate submitting something to their supervisor because they're worried their supervisor is going to tell them it's rubbish and all those things. Is it just as bad? Do your students worry about the bot criticizing them or do they care less because it's not you. Jessica: Yeah, that was one of our findings was that they, and this is a small sample, but we have seen validation of these findings and the literature elsewhere. But that was one of our findings is that the students described, they didn't realize they were describing it, but that was part of my role as the researcher is teasing that out, is bypassing that, like, affective state where you can shut down because the feedback is personal. On the other flip side of that. Sometimes the AI would validate their ideas and so that would stop them from ruminating and second guessing. Like if enough times they've gotten the feedback that this is coherent, they've achieved paragraph unity or whatever it may be, then they stop ruminating on it and their confidence increases and they move on. Yeah, my students viewed it, and we hear this all the time, is like, it's this neutral, Thing machine that's giving me something valuable. It's not all 100 percent true, but it's there's something I can take away from this to improve my work. And sometimes it's validating your ideas. And sometimes it's giving critical feedback, but you don't have that emotional shutdown that you have when you get it from your advisor because you feel embarrassed or ashamed that you produced work that got that type of criticism. Vikki: I want to take you back to something you said earlier about the biases that there can be in anything that's based on stuff from the internet, right? How do you, how do you manage that in the context of giving formative feedback, Jessica: Yeah, we as humans have a lot of biases, so of course, these models are also going to have biases. Um, but yeah, when you're not aware of them, there's a lot of dangers there. There is. There's more like medium and small language models that are coming out for specific use cases to try to address some of these issues. It's complicated, but I'm encouraged by the growing field of research. That's. happening to try to understand the biases and teach others how to mitigate them. But the first step is understanding that the biases are present and reflecting on your own biases and how that might be reflected in the output. Vikki: Yeah. Cause I mean, it's not like, you know, when a human does feedback on a work, that it's not biased by many of the same things. We may tell ourselves we're trying not to be and everything. So it's not like [00:42:00] there's a kind of gold standard. I think sometimes when people are talking about all of this, there's this sort of inferred gold standard of human marking where it's, you know, it's accurate and replicable and all of those things. Which we all know isn't true, but I think sometimes when it's, maybe it is the lack of AI literacy, but when it's coming from a machine, you almost, if you don't know these things, you can sort of assume that it's being more objective than it is being. Jessica: For sure. And I think that like what you just asked is that I see a lot of different sort of debates taking place and I sort of sit in the middle where, no, I do not believe we should be using AI for summative assessment and grading students and having that final say on a student's grade. And some people will use that argument to say we shouldn't be using it at all. And then I come back and say, well, as humans, like, are you sitting down and grading the student and thinking about cultural differences in writing styles, or are you just grading according to the rubric? So it's not a binary response. It really depends on the learning outcomes, the level of the learner. I mean, I think what's amazing is we're starting to see AI products come out that help neurodivergent learners with dyslexia, ADHD, and so there's so much potential there and it's not like a, should we do it or should we not? It's more of like a how, how, and first we have to understand the capabilities and limitations before we make that decision. Vikki: Yeah, I think I've mentioned on one of these before, but there's several tools now for people with ADHD where it'll break tasks down into its constituent parts and things. And, that's a model of it that I think can be really, really useful because it's not actually doing any of the work, but it's helping you to take what feels like an insurmountable task and break it down into chunks, which I know is something that even people who are neurotypical can, can find really challenging too. And I think, I think that's one of my take homes with AI, is I actually think that the skills we'll need to develop to use AI well are skills that would make us better academics if we never used AI. So, when hearing you talk about feedback, one of the things my clients and I often discuss and I do this inside, I do supervisor training as well as coaching people, and I think this is done badly on both sides, is that students say, can you give me feedback on this 40 page lit review, and the supervisor tries to give feedback, whatever feedback is, on a 40 page lit review. I get so many students who tell me that their supervisors will only read a polished final draft. They won't read anything before that and things, which I think is ludicrous. Sorry, supervisors, but it is. Um, and well, when I say, what feedback are you looking for? They're saying, I want them to tell me whether it's good enough or not. And. we often talk about all the different levels of feedback you can ask for in terms of, you know, am I making a argument that broadly sounds like it makes sense with some evidence to back it up? Um, does it feel like it's in the right sort of order so that it follows one from the next and all these sorts of things. And so the stuff that you've had to put into designing and that your students are now having to use in order to ask it the right questions, feel like things that would be really useful for students to ask their supervisors that specifically and for supervisors to be as focused because presumably when you ask Moxie, do the paragraphs flow coherently from one to the next, it doesn't start correcting typos and things the way that a supervisor often gets distracted. Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. Every student is different. So I don't want to generalize, but I did find that instead of those vague requests, give me feedback or can you pregrade this? Can you just take a look at this really quick before I submit it, you know, in six hours for grading. A lot of times they were coming to me and they actually already had an idea of what they were struggling with. I kind of expected that, but I wasn't sure. Um, and, and so when you're using, and this isn't just Moxie, like if you were to create your own tool using a rubric and you were to consistently have that criteria, you start to notice patterns like I consistently struggle with passive voice in my writing. My hope is that if students are starting to see that feedback again and again from the AI, it'll help them ask more targeted questions to their supervisor, versus just this generic, but I understand what you're saying. I do that all the time too. I don't consult with individual clients anymore, but that was one of my approaches is I'd say, you know, you can't just ask me to read this whole thing. I need you to tell me what were you struggling with? What's top of mind for you? and I do think AI can come in handy that way. Vikki: I'm going to also take you back. So you started to talk about it, but I think it'd be useful to go in more depth in terms of when it's useful for people to start using AI, because one of the times where I've tried to use AI and found it quite limited is where I really wanted it to sound like me. So I have my podcast transcripts. Everyone listening, there will be one of this. I have all my podcast transcripts and I'd love to turn them into. Short articles. And I started doing it myself, but I'm coming up to my hundredth episode and a podcast ends up being about 8, 000 words. So it's, it's a substantial body of work. And so I messed around with quite a few different versions of AI. And I even try, you know, you see these guidelines online where you're like, here's five [00:48:00] pieces of my writing. Try and edit this one into a short thing in the same style as that. And maybe I'm not giving good prompts, or maybe I'm not finding the right AI models, but In my experience, it made me sound very, I call it kind of generic internet y. Very sort of, this is a game changing fact, kind of thing. Um, and so I've sort of, at the moment, at least divided my life into things that I can ask AI to do. You know, I've got these four things in my fridge. Are there any recipes that build from that or whatever? Happy days. Fine. I can do that. Versus things that at the moment I won't, and writing my emails, writing my podcasts, writing anything that I want to sound like my voice, I won't. And one of the things that made me reflect on is that that entirely depends on the fact that at the moment I am capable of writing in a voice that feels like my voice. And that's true, whether I'm doing this more kind of chatty stuff or, you know, I've got tons of academic publications and stuff in my academic life, I know what I sound like too. Um, and I just wondered what that's like for people who are at the beginnings of their career and whether, will this stop them learning what their voice is if they've only ever had a AI voice, if you see what I mean. Jessica: Yeah, I've heard there's this debate going about, it's like, am I starting to sound more like the AI or is it starting to sound more like me, like, which is it, uh, from a, from the perspective of, let's talk about low stakes tasks. So, and in your example, you know, you're summarizing transcripts, one of my most common low stakes tasks is maybe I'm creating notes for a LinkedIn post where I'm bringing together, you know, a lot of different ideas and I'll make like a long bulleted list. So that's low stakes. There's a lot more editing involved. So I find that instead of spending all that time on the writing, I'm now doing the editing. So I don't expect it to produce something that I'm just going to copy and paste into the YouTube description or my LinkedIn posts. So for those low stakes tasks, it's like shifting my time from where I was doing a lot of the writing to now I'm doing a lot of the just quick and dirty drafting. And then a lot of my time is spent editing. So I let the AI put together all of that, like connective tissue. And sometimes I edit a lot of it out. Um, then I think about high stakes tasks in terms of what are the boundaries of when we should use it and when we can't. And I'm just going to use some examples because I, I don't have any sort of rules of thumb, if you will, other than if you don't know how to do it yourself, like analyze data using a statistical test, then please don't use AI for it. Cause you have no way of evaluating whether it's accurate or not. So that's kind of a rule of thumb I have, especially if it's high stakes. But from the perspective of you have a novice, let's say researcher who maybe doesn't have their voice. I think about different scenarios. So fear of the blank page. Now you can just put in your ideas into AI and, and, and brainstorm with it. You know, I think about lit review outlines. Um, what are potential outlines of this is the argument I have- problem, cause solution, you know, thematic, whatever it may be. And then you can sort of take those suggestions and instead of starting on a blank page, you have some headings to start with. Like, I don't think that that is problematic or cheating. It requires you to have some clarity about your problem, going into it, to ask the right questions, to get what you want out of it. I think it is problematic to rely on it to like identify literature gaps for you or choose your research design or develop your IRB application and then you don't have to think about informed consent. Like, these are really important decisions that we make in the research process. And if we want to protect the integrity of research, I think the human has to be steering, we have to be in control and the AI is just sometimes our copilot. When it's appropriate, but I tend to, to just tell my students, like, do not use it if you don't know how to do it yourself. if you have no clue how to select a research design, please do not ask chat GBT to select a research design for you. On the other hand, if you've selected your, you feel confident you've selected it, but maybe you don't know if you've justified it well, and you know how to ask that question, I think that's perfectly appropriate because you've still made those decisions. Those are still your ideas. Now, that is very different than saying, here's my entire lit review, edit it for grammar, spelling, punctuation. Because what's likely going to happen is, well, it's unpredictable, but usually what happens when you ask that is you don't get just your lit review edited for grammar. There's going to be changes, there's going to be shifts in language that you might not notice unless you're reading every word. Vikki: Hmm. Yeah, and I think it's really, you know, you were talking about affect before, I think just remembering the role of emotions in all of this is super important because I think for us at the kind of career stage we're at, what you just said makes absolute total sense. There's things I know how to do, it's fine, I can tell whether it's done it well or not, I can tweak it, da da da. Other things, more of a copilot, totally get that. My concern, I guess, is that all of that makes absolute sense, but when a student is panicking and doesn't think they know how to do any of it, and it has to be done because there's deadlines coming and all of those things, I worry that it becomes self reinforcing, right, that because they ask too much of AI, but they [00:54:00] kind of get through, right, they're not going to get amazing anything, but it's, it's all right, it gets done. They go to the next milestone in their PhD or whatever, but now they're even more sure they can't do it for themselves. Um, And I'm just, I just think it's going to be really important, and it sounds like you are doing this, it sounds, I think it's going to be really important to remember the, and I say this with due respect to the students because it's true of all of us, the kind of lack of rationality sometimes in the choices that we make when we're feeling pressured or when we're feeling unconfident in our own abilities to analyze these things. It's not just a kind of really cognitive cost benefit analysis that people are making decisions from with these things. Yeah. Jessica: Yeah. Ethan Mullock calls it like the temptation of the button. And I think it's so true. If you haven't read it, whoever's listening, he, Ethan Mullock is a professor at Wharton Business School here in the U S and he's like a thought leader on generative AI and innovation and higher ed. And he has a sub stack that I love. Comes out every week. I read it. One of his subsects that resonated most with me was called the, like setting time on fire with the temptation of the button. Like, are we going to have a crisis of meaning? And right in the beginning has a screenshot of Google docs They were in beta at the time where there was a little button that just said, like, help me, right? And I was like, what are we going to value now? Are we even going to value writing anymore? And that's when I felt like I was having an existential crisis. Cause I'm like, I don't know. I mean, it is tempting to push the button if you haven't done any work and it's due at midnight. And it's either that or an automatic zero. We're already seeing it. We're already seeing evidence of that. And I don't know that there is a way to prevent it because AI detectors don't work. They're not reliable at all. If you haven't used one, just try putting in some of the work that you wrote well before AI existed and you'll see that they're not reliable. So AI detectors are not the way. I think it's going to cause a real shift in how we think about how we're evaluating learning and it's not going to happen overnight and it's going to be really rocky. There's going to be implications that we can't wrap our head around. Just like we had no idea what the implications of like social media would be on, you know, mental health and isolation. I think there's a lot of implications. We don't, we have no idea. I think what's scary is that it's out there. Students are using it. More students are using it than faculty are using it. And then how do we navigate that? And I don't have the answer. I'm like, I don't know. Yeah, I still have deadlines. I still expect my students to write their own work. I still know that they're going to be tempted to press the button because it's there. It's very tempting. Um, but again, and maybe this is like, overly optimistic or naive, but I do feel that as we learn more about this technology, then it'll become a lot more clear how to manage those concerns. I mean, I do believe knowledge is power. I mean, that was why I said about learning about AI is I felt honestly, my first thought was I felt very threatened by it. Like, am I going to have a company? Are my doc students are, are they even going to be writing dissertations in 5 years? what does this even mean for my entire professional life? And I've come a long way since then. Um, but I think there's a lot of faculty and a lot of folks who feel very threatened and it's leading to just a shutting down mentality sort of ostrich head in the sand. And, um, and we know that that is not going to work. But I think just to kind of try to answer your question, we need to talk to students. Like, I think a student's voice is really important in all of this, um, and helping us understand how to address these concerns that we're having. Vikki: Yeah. One thing it made me think of, and this is, you mentioned interdisciplinarity before, and I come from a, very interdisciplinary background. So I love pinging off into different disciplines. Um, one thing it made me think of a lot is all the research around, um, illegal drugs in sports. So I was a sports scientist in my, my academic background and, um, there were Couple of people there, um, Professor Maria Kavussanu, Professor Ian Boardley at my old university, who do a lot of research around the decision making process that athletes go through at the point where they decide whether they are or aren't going to take illegal drugs. So these performance enhancing drugs we're talking about here. And there's some really, really interesting stuff around the sort of moral disengagement that's involved in believing that other people do it, too, believing that your reasons for doing it are sufficient to justify the breaking of the rules. And I know AI isn't always breaking the rules, so I'm not, like, doing direct comparisons, but I think there's some really interesting stuff there around how people go from being sure that they wouldn't do these things to kind of maybe sometimes to now actually being regular users and relying on it for performance enhancement. And I'm sure I'm less familiar with the kind of criminology literature and stuff, but I'm sure there'll be parallel literature around how people make and justify those sorts of decisions. And. I wonder whether it would be interesting to look at parallels between, because we make decisions around where boundaries sit as to what's acceptable and what's not, and in what circumstances, because what they're doing with the performance enhancing drugs work is seeing [01:00:00] if they can identify young athletes that they need to intervene with earlier, try and figure out which are the ones that are heading that way early enough that you can intervene and sort of, scoop them up and bring them back to safety sort of thing. Jessica: Yeah, I mean, I would imagine I went down this rabbit hole a while ago. It's not fresh in my head, but I did start looking at the literature on plagiarism. Dr Sarah Eaton is a scholar in Calgary in Canada. She's done a lot of work on academic integrity and plagiarism, and she has this post plagiarism framework that I find to be really fascinating, and she asserts that, at some point soon human AI hybrid writing will be the norm and that our standard rules of plagiarism will no longer apply and that just got me interested in plagiarism. So I went down this rabbit hole into trying to understand plagiarism and some of the things that I learned were around. I mentioned earlier around cultural differences, so there's like inadvertent plagiarism. There's mosaic plagiarism, and then cheating overall, a lot of it does come down to circumstance. It's very situational. And then, yes, you like get away with it and then you sort of push the limits the next time, but ultimately it comes down to our incentives and our rewards. Like if the focus is on meeting the deadline and getting the good grade, and that's what we're rewarding, then that is more likely to create that situation where you're tempted to cheat or plagiarize. And so it causes you to question the systems that are in place that are reinforcing this behavior. And that makes me just think about like institutions and ethical guidelines. So what does our community, our academic community accept or reject? And I don't think we know right now. Like we've saw, I think the NSF or maybe it was the NIH originally said absolutely no generative AI can be used to develop a grant proposal, and then they shifted it to acknowledgement. I would imagine that given some time, we'll have more institutional guidance on what the standards are, the ethical standards for the academic community. Um, but I think you're right. I think there are parallels, but in some ways, like, I feel that higher education is due for a closer look at how we are incentivizing students to get the grade or actually learn. I mean, in the US our standard grades are abysmal. Like reading comprehension is at the lowest ever. And um, so in that way I think it's good. It's forcing us to really rethink some of these systems that are in place. Vikki: Yeah. Raising some really important, big issues. . Thank you so much. This has ended up being a monster sized episode, and I love it, and I could have carried on talking to you for so much longer. But thank you so much. You've mentioned a couple of things already that I will link in the show notes, so listeners, look out for those. but if people want to know more specifically about you and Moxie, where can they look? Jessica: Yeah, so Moxie, our website is moxielearn. ai. I'm on LinkedIn as Jessica L. Parker. I do most of my thought leadership on LinkedIn, but we publish our research on Moxie's website. And I also have a ResearchGate profile for Moxie in our lab, because we are actively studying generative AI in research contexts, so. Vikki: Amazing. And spell Moxie for people? Jessica: M O X I E. Vikki: Moxie. Perfect. Thank you so much for coming. It's going to be so much food for thought. People listening, let me know your thoughts. You can reply to my newsletter. If you're not signed up for my newsletter, make sure you are. You can just go to my website, thephdlifecoach. com, or you can find me on Instagram at the PHD Life Coach. Tell me what you're thinking. Are you using AI? What scares you? What do you want to know more? And who knows? We might talk about it in a future episode. Thank you so much for coming, Jessica. Thank you everyone for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.
Links I refer to in this episode How to plan your week (with special guest and ex-client Marie) How to use role-based time blocking How to manage your tasks Second Brain by Tiago Forte Zettelkasten Method Obsidian Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. This week I'm going to share with you something that is so hot off the press. I can't even guarantee that it works long term, that I'm going to keep doing this for ages, but I'm so excited about it and it's potential that I'm going to share it with you guys today. The other bonus of me doing that is you can tell me whether you do anything like this and whether there are things that I should know about that will make it even better. So, with that mysterious start, I want to tell you the problem that I'm trying to solve. I have a brain, as many of you know, that comes up with far too many ideas. Tries to think everything through, usually inside my head, and kind of seeing all the connections between the different things, but I can't decide that until I've decided this, and what if I did that, and da da da. And, I am blessed with a memory that works very well for exams, but very badly for keeping track of these multitude of ideas and thoughts, and kind of ponderings. And I've always told myself and other people have told me that I should journal, that it would be good for me to journal, that I would slow down and record my ideas and think them through and all of those things. In fact, the whole self coaching model that I use in my coaching, in my membership program starts with a thought download where you write about what you're thinking. Yet, I have always struggled to build this into anything close to, not even a routine, but anything close to even vague consistency. Like, every few months I'll think, oh yeah, I should probably journal, that'd be nice, do it for a little bit, and then don't. And I'm past the beating myself up for that, but it has always made me wonder why that is. And whilst I do buy into the idea that it's the people that struggle with journaling or with meditation who need it the most, I also feel like there's only so many things in my life at a time that I can consciously really try and work on when they don't feel very natural to me and journaling has never come to the top of that list. I do have some hilarious teenage diaries. Maybe one day I will tell you about some of the junk I wrote when I was 16. I know my sister listens to this, one of them, and she's read quite a few of these diaries and will concur. They're hilarious. But anyway, enough of that. So, I've always struggled with journaling and that sort of thing, and I also have a habit still where when my mind is racing, I put on some form of content to calm it down. Now for some of you, especially if you are neurotypical, you don't have problems with racing thoughts particularly, you aren't anxious sometimes, any of those things, that might sound really weird to you. Why, if you've got too much going on in your head, would you put on more stuff to listen to? I find, generally, that when I've got too many thoughts going around in my head and they're not particularly, you know, I don't suffer with anxiety. They're not particularly, like, intrusive thoughts. It's just like, oh, what about this? And I remember that. Like, whizzing rather than anxious thoughts. Um, I find if I put on a podcast or a TV show or something, then it gives my brain one thing to think about. And that's fine. I don't mind that in small doses, but I have realized for quite a while now that I'm probably plowing too many things into my head. And especially when I think listening to podcasts that are telling me the sort of exercise I should be doing and the sorts of things I should be doing in my business and the sorts of things I should be doing in my coaching and all of these things. It becomes, I am still, even if it quietens my brain down in the moment, I am still just filing stuff on top of stuff. And so I was thinking about all of this, and I was thinking what would be useful. And I was thinking, I even got myself a little notebook out. I didn't buy a new notebook. Good, Vikki. I got a notebook I already had. And I did one day where I was writing down what's in my thoughts. And even having done that, I was like, I'm not going to stick to this. I know I'm not. Because for me the moments where I most need to do this are the moments where I am least likely to have my notebook with me, the right notebook with me, and where I'm least likely to want to slow my brain down to write it out. And so I was thinking, well, what would be better? And two things kind of conspired to put an idea in my head. The first is that I just recorded a podcast with a woman called Dr. Jessica Parker, who runs an AI company. And her company is about feedback on writing. The podcast is going to come out the week after this, um, so do keep an eye out for that. It's a bumper episode. It's like an hour and a bit's chat. Um, she's brilliant, really, really interesting. I'm a bit of a skeptic about a lot of uses of AI, so we had really, really good discussion. She's really sensible and interesting. Anyway, so I'd had that stuff in my head. I was also very aware that for various other reasons I'd started paying a subscription to Otter. ai because I thought it might be useful in transcribing some of my coaching sessions and I hadn't really implemented it. A few of my clients hadn't been interested and then I just kind of hadn't carried it on. And I had also in the back of my mind that I should probably cancel my subscription. It's not loads of money, but I should probably cancel my subscription if I'm not going to use it. And both of those [00:06:00] things bumped into my mind while I was thinking about this problem of trying to capture my thoughts. And I realized that when I very first purchased Otter. ai, they had this Do you call it a widget where you get like a big icon on your iPhone? I don't know. I think it's a widget, that kind of thing. Anyway, like a big icon that's like the size of four of the usual ones that puts you straight into its record and transcribe function. So you can just press that, do a little voice note, stop, and it will transcribe Otter. ai system. I thought to myself, I wonder, now that would be a really interesting way of just wittering away whatever is on my mind. into something where I can then look at it later. Because that's my other problem with journaling, is that I never had a system for going back and looking at it, for collating it into something else. I am a good typist, but I didn't like typing journals. It didn't feel proper somehow, even though I don't actually believe that. And I didn't like the idea of just emptying my brain never to see it again. Then at the same time, you guys are getting like a proper insight into the ridiculous loops my brain goes through, but this is good. You're seeing my thoughts in action. Um, then I was also thinking about my morning routines and I'm in a perpetual search for morning routines that feel authentic and easy, but also move me towards my goals. And I quite enjoy, I don't get stressed about it, but I quite enjoy sort of experimenting with different things. And just by chance, the day after I had been wittering some stuff into Otter. ai, I was making lots of decisions, by the way, about next year. So thinking about what's going to happen in my membership, some exciting, I'm going to say the word festival type things. I'm going to say online festival "situs". Um, I'm starting planning for all of that stuff. And so I was on my phone. I was like, wittering into my Otter AI like, this is so good. I can really kind of talk things through, just chuck it all out there. It was great. And then a couple more times that day, I suddenly had an idea or something that I wanted to remember to do. So I whipped out my phone, voice note, witter, witter, witter. Happy days. The next morning, I thought, you know what would be amazing? Would be actually just to start my day, instead of filling my head with social media, which unfortunately is how I usually start my days, I could start my day by reading through yesterday's thoughts and trying to consolidate them into something that looks a little bit more summarized. That looks a little bit more kind of processed, not necessarily decided on, but where you sort of spot themes, clarify ideas. If there was anything that was a don't forget, I could shift over to my to do list, that sort of thing. And I did it. And it was amazing. And then, I was wittering away the next day, into my Otter AI, happy days, all good. And then the next day, when I was processing those thoughts, I processed them into the summary document from the day before. And it was like, Oh, this is so good. Cause I could already see how I was starting to reconcile some of the things that I'd wittered about the day before and other places where I'd added things that now came together and made more sense and places where I still needed to make decisions. And so I kind of created like themed categories of the things I was talking about and just shuffling it out like that was just an amazing way to start my day. I just loved it. I was so energized by it. It was like, this is something I'll actually at the moment, at least, look forward to doing it. Who knows? Maybe the novelty will wear off and I won't want to anymore. But the good thing is, if you miss a day, they're all still there. It's just going to take a little bit more processing. So, what types of things did I witter about? I wittered about ideas. Um, so, ooh, we could do this, type things. I wittered about stuff I wasn't yet clear on. So, I was making some decisions about what I might focus on in which parts of the year next year. Really important process, by the way. Sometimes it was things I just wanted to remember. Sometimes it was where I'd noticed a connection between things that I hadn't thought about before, or I'd remembered something that I thought about a while ago, but that I hadn't recorded anywhere. So it was those sorts of things. 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. I also want it, and I haven't used it for this so far, but I also want it to be where I can say, like, my thoughts and feelings. Where I can say, I'm feeling really stressed about this, where I'm worrying about that, and I'm scared that people will think this and that kind of more. [00:12:00] Like, emotion dumping. I want to put that stuff in there too. And my goal at the moment, and from what I'm about to say, you are going to see quite how new in this process we are, what I want to do is then on a Monday morning look at my summarised notes from last week and kind of consolidate it into something that leads me into my action plan for the next week. So some of it will be, yeah, that's an idea. Put that on the future idea pile, but sort of work it through into something that then informs the weekly meeting that I already have with myself. Now, if you haven't listened to that episode, I have an episode where we talk about having a meeting with yourself on a Monday. It was in collaboration with one of my old clients, Marie, and she talks about the way she does it, I talk about the way I do it. And even though I've modified it a little bit since then, how I do it, I think you'll find it really, really useful. So do make sure you go back and check that one out. I want to build these documents into that Monday morning. And even just in this short amount of time that I've been doing this, I've already found that sometimes I look at a note and I'm like, I don't even remember saying that, so yes, excellent, I'm so glad I recorded that. And then in time, as these build up, many of you will know I have a monthly review process and a quarterly review process. And I feel ridiculously smug telling you that because I've always wanted to have a process like that. And I've never, ever, ever stuck to it in my past. But I now have a process that I love, that I actively look forward to. And I actually teach it in my Be Your Own Best Boss online course that is available to buy. If you're already in my membership, check it out. It's module four, I think it is and everyone in the membership has free access to it. So make sure you have a look. What I want to do over time is figure out how I'm going to use these documents then in their kind of shrunk down again, shrunk down again form to really like inform my monthly and quarterly review process. I hope you can see this is something that I'm super excited about, but that I'm also at the kind of early stages of developing. I would love to know whether this is something that any of you guys do already. Before I invite that, there are a few kind of cautions I want to put around it. The first is that I am consciously keeping this super simple. I am aware that there is a concept out there called Second Brain that was developed by Tiago Forte. That is a much more complete system where it's about all the knowledge that you take in. I am consciously not making this a note taking system, where I'm going to try and record everything that I ever learn or any of those things. This is not a full Second Brain. Could it become that in time? I don't know. Possibly. I'm aware that I'm somebody who has a tendency to overcomplicate and a tendency to want the perfect system right away. The wiser and more experienced version of me, though, knows the best way for me to do these things and to develop these things is to start with the real basics, embed that in my practice, and then look at ways to extend it or automate it or any of those things in the future. So if you're going to tell me that it sounds like these, like a commonplace book or a Second Brain system or, um, Zettelkasten and Obsidian and all these things, thank you. Please do let me know how you use that. I am not looking for those tools at the moment. This is not a knowledge management system for me, and I definitely don't want to use this to automate these processes. I am very consciously using the transcript that I get from Otter. ai, not the summary, because I want to filter it through my priorities, my brain and my thoughts, and not just sort of accept what Otter. ai is presenting to me as the interesting things. I want to choose the interesting things for myself. So who knows in due course, but at the moment that feels really, really important to me. There is an example of where I've done this before. So many of you will know that I developed my role based time management system, and I developed an Excel file to manage my tasks to use within that role based time management system. You can look up the, there's a whole podcast episode about how to use it. Again, if you have my Be Your Own Best Boss program, or you're a member, you have access to how to do that in that course, and I developed a Google Sheet that I used to manage my tasks in that context. In fact, if you're on my newsletter and you message me, I can send you a copy of that Google sheet. It's a great place to start with all of that stuff. What I really resisted the temptation to do at the time was to find some fancy app or program or whatever that would do it in like a pretty format. I was like, nope, Excel, print it out. Happy days. That works. I've now, having been using that for over a year, I now have found a task management system that I now put it into instead, but all the principles are exactly the same as what I developed in that Excel. And starting with that basic system is I believe why my task management system now works. The only reason I changed it over was because I'm now collaborating with somebody. I have an assistant that helps me with some of my administrative work and we needed a way to, have tasks that we could both access them in a meaningful way. And she [00:18:00] uses ClickUp and that is what I've started using too. And I am loving it, but I am loving it because I know exactly how I want to set it up because I want to set it up exactly the way I was able to use the Excel document that I used initially. So I guess today's episode has got two take homes really. One, here's a fun and exciting thing that you can experiment with alongside me. You can tell me how you find it, how you're modifying it, so that we can learn together better ways to capture and straighten out the thoughts that whizz around in our heads. And two, as a reminder, that sometimes when we're trying to solve these problems, the simplest, easiest way of doing it is King. Here, literally all I'm doing, talking into an app. Next day, take those transcripts, turn them into something that vaguely makes sense. Takes me about 20 minutes while I'm having a cup of tea in the morning. And so far it's been amazing. Let me know what you think about any of that stuff, or if there's any problems that you've come up with a sort of quick and dirty solution for that's actually working for you really well. Who knows, maybe I will even feature it in a future podcast. This has been one of the more kind of pragmatic episodes that I've done recently where it's a simple tool. I try and mix these in with the more coaching y thought work type episodes, as well as the guests and the client Q and A's. The one I haven't done for a while that I want to do is another coaching one. So if any of you would like an hour's free coaching in exchange for it being available on the podcast for other people to listen to. Get in touch. I would love to coach you on any issue that you think would be relevant to my audience of PhD students and academics. I keep saying get in touch. The best ways to do that is to sign up to my newsletter and then you can reply to those or you can contact me through Instagram messaging. I am at the PhD life coach. Keep sending me any challenges for my client Q and A's and let me know what you think of this episode. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.
Links I refer to in this episode What to do if you want more reassurance How to manage your supervisor or boss How to have a great relationship with your supervisor What to do and think if you have a toxic relationship with your supervisor How to improve your writing Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast and this week we are doing client Q& As again. So you guys may have heard my episode a few weeks back where I answered three questions from listeners and I got some really good feedback on it. People seem to really like it and so I am going to do these regularly. So I have three questions today that have come from a kind of combination of existing people in my membership who've contacted me separately from the main coaching sessions and people who have been in my workshops who dropped questions in the chat that were maybe slightly outside of the kind of main topic of the workshop and so we didn't get to them in lots of detail, but that I said I would answer in my podcast. So all of them this week are anonymous for various reasons, which you'll see as we go through, but there's three quite different topics and I think all of them are going to be super relevant for you guys. So keep listening and let me know what you think. Question one today comes from a student who had recently handed in a major chunk of draft to her supervisor. So it'd been something she'd been building towards for quite a long time. She'd handed in and she asked me to speak about post deadline, post accomplishment lethargy. That she said, "I always feel like I lose my flow so badly after having been in a deep flow of draft writing. It's worse because, when I've been in flow, I've often thrown out my routines and structures and I don't know how to get back into it." And I thought this was just a fascinating one and one that people often don't talk about, right? Often we focus on how can I get the thing done and we don't spend quite as much time thinking about how do I kind of transition out of getting that thing done and into doing something else. Now, my first recommendation here is really often the first recommendation for pretty much anything you guys ever ask me or I ask myself, which is acceptance. This is really normal. It's really normal to have a little come down after any accomplishment, any period of long work. This is not a sign that anything's gone wrong and it isn't a sign that you are like not getting back into it, that you're being lazy or any of these things. Often it's completely understandable and it might even be beneficial. Where this sort of thing becomes a problem is when instead of accepting that this may well happen, we kind of should on ourselves. We tell ourselves that we should be able to continue working at this pace. We should be able to get straight on with the next thing because there's so many other things to do. We should be able to get back on top of routine tasks quickly because they've been mounting up while we've been working on this other thing. And none of those things are true. As usual, when we find ourselves kind of feeling guilty or feeling shame around not having done these things or not being able to do what we think we should do, we actually end up making it worse. We actually make it harder for us to transition. Because now we've got the kind of come down from having handed in the piece that physical tiredness, cognitive tiredness that comes from doing that. And we're adding on top of it a whole bunch of negative emotions. It's pretty unrealistic to expect ourselves to work really hard towards a deadline and then not have any period of transition before we start on something else. Now you might be thinking, okay, that's all very well, Vikki, but I have got a ton of other things to do. I can't just arse around for a week because I haven't, you know, because I've had to come down after handing that piece in. I've got stuff to do. But the joy is, firstly, when we do take away some of that guilt and shame, or try and like dial it down, try and dilute some of that, it actually usually lasts less time. Because it's usually the unpleasantness of feeling like we should be doing something and that we are not, that makes it last for as long as it does. Work becomes something to avoid because we feel guilty that ironically we haven't been working. Secondly, when we can accept that this happens, it becomes something we can plan for. Now, that might involve working fewer hours, it might involve accepting that we're going to work more slowly, or it could mean accepting that maybe we're just going to do some of the little fiddly bits rather than anything that takes really big cognitive effort. We can plan for the fact that this will probably happen, and therefore we're not sitting there telling ourselves that we should be getting straight on with the next thing. We can tell ourselves, I've planned this. I plan to have a gentle day today. A gentle two days, whatever you decide. That all becomes part of the plan. Now when we plan for it, we leave space. So we don't end up getting behind because we've kind of made unrealistic plans and then not stuck to them. We've literally planned to do nothing much in this space. But when we plan, we can also start thinking about a reintroduction strategy. So if we know that after a deadline, we find it difficult to get back into work, if we accept that and plan for it, We can also plan for when am I going to get back into work and how am I going to do that? So for example, are we going to have one day completely off where we allow ourselves to recover from what happened before and then the next day we're like back on it, normal schedule, normal intensity, pace of work. Or are we going to do something that's a little bit gradual? That, you know, we'll have one day completely off, we'll have one day where it's sort of lighter tasks, and then by the third day we'll be back to normal. What is going to be that transition? And when are you expecting yourself to get back on track, as it were. Because the difficult thing, if we don't plan and we just wait for when we kind of feel like it, feeling like it can take a while. Okay. Because feeling like it often comes either from active management of our thoughts or from starting doing the thing, even when we don't want to and kind of realizing that we can actually get on with it. So I would really encourage you to plan ahead for this. Decide what that kind of post accomplishment period looks like, for how long you want it to last, and what exactly you expect of yourself during that time. And if we can make it as achievable as possible, then, when the time comes for us to start working again, it's easier to tell ourselves, yeah, I've had my rest, I've had my come down period, I'm getting back on it now, I've had my great gentle break in, now we're working. And it's easier to then implement, rather than trying to implement when part of your brain is saying, oh, you really should be doing this, and the other part of your brain is going, but you really deserve a rest too. We can kind of bring that all into agreement, then it's much, much easier. The final thing I'd say, and this is stimulated by the last part of the comment that I got from this person, which is, when I'm in the flow, I've thrown off my routines and structures and getting back into them is hard. I would also encourage you, if you're listening and for everybody else, I would really encourage you to consider the extent to which you throw off your routines and structures. To some extent, it happens for all of us. If we've got a period of intense work, maybe we're not spending as much time on kind of self care or organizational tasks. I've had clients who often let some of the admin stuff slide when they're on a big mission to get stuff done. I would really encourage you, if you know that it's hard to get back into your routines after a period of hard work, I would really encourage you. consider how you can keep a version of your routines during that period of hard work. Now, I don't mean stick to everything as normal, because then it may well be hard to put in the additional work that's needed to complete the task, but spending a small amount of time each day, just firing off a few emails to stay on top of your inbox or putting aside just an hour or two a week to do some of the more mundane tasks that keep things ticking over. What we can do then is we can try and sort of minimize this transition, partly by planning the transition out, but also like, minimizing how different this period of lots of work was compared to the period afterwards. So it's kind of reducing that gradient of transition. So those are my tips. If you experience this kind of post accomplishment lethargy, there's some things I think you can think about. Let me know what you think. Have you ever experienced this? What makes it harder? Is there anything that's ever helped you transition that that I haven't mentioned? Let me know and I can talk about it in a future episode. Now, the second one comes from a regular member of mine, but I'm going to keep it anonymous because she's talking about supervisors here, and so I want to keep it all as confidential as possible. And she's asked, how can I improve communication between myself and supervisors? And in this particular case is one that we've coached on in my live membership sessions several times before. And it sort of falls into two issues. It falls into issues of supervisors not responding to emails. We're not responding to messages. This is a distance learning student. And there's also issues around Perceived, from her side at least, uh, big personality differences between her and the people that she's working with, with her supervisors, whereby she doesn't always feel she can bring her whole self to the meetings. So I'm going to try and address both of those. But I am also going to refer you all out to, I have, I think it's, Four, yeah, four episodes where I talk about supervisory relationships previously and you may well be able to draw out things from those that are useful as well. So there's one about where to, if you want, what to do if you want more reassurance, one about how to manage your supervisor, one about how to have a good relationship with your supervisor, and one about what to do if you've got a toxic supervisor. So I'll link to all of those in the show notes. I'm gonna do my best not to repeat stuff that's in those, um, but do have a look at those. 'cause they may well help too. But in terms of lack of replies to emails from supervisors, the first thing we have to is get super factual about what we're actually saying here. How often are you messaging? How often are they replying at all? How long on average is it taking to reply? The reason that's so important is that sometimes it feels like your supervisor, inverted commas, never replies, but actually when you look at the facts of it, they do reply to some things, but not to other things. Sometimes it's a couple of days, sometimes it's a little bit longer. You know, it's a bit mixed as to how in contact they are. And the reason that's important is there is a really big difference, in my view, between annoying and unacceptable. So supervisors and any academics that are listening will be right here with me on this, I am sure supervisors are pretty stressed. They're pretty busy. Pretty busy. Very busy. They've got a ton of stuff on, they're getting far too many emails, and sometimes it is easy to procrastinate replying to students. And ironically, just as with students, this is affected by their emotions too. If they're already feeling a bit guilty that they haven't replied to you, or they're feeling a bit frustrated about how many questions they're answering, or whatever it might be. If they're experiencing big emotions, they might procrastinate responding to students the same way that students procrastinate responding to them. That is not in any way to justify the unacceptable. But if what we're looking at is sometimes they reply, other times they're a bit slow, sometimes they forget, but usually when they reply, they're reasonably helpful, then we might want to categorize, and you get to decide where your boundaries are with this, but we might want to categorize that in the kind of annoying territory. And in the annoying territory, I would always take two approaches. My first approach would be in my own thought work, which is really trying hard not to spin this into a story that it isn't. So often students spin this into, my supervisor doesn't like me, my supervisor doesn't value me, they don't think I'm good enough, all of these things. And a sort of periodically unresponsive supervisor almost always doesn't mean that. It almost always means it's something about them rather than about you. Okay, so we can be really careful what stories we're telling ourselves about what this means. We can also be really careful what stories we tell ourselves about what this means about our prospects, because sometimes again we can spin these stories that and if they don't answer then I won't have time to do this and then if I don't have time to do that then I'll never finish. We can be really careful about that. We can get really specific about what exactly do we need and where can we get what we need, whether from the supervisor or from somebody else. The other part when we're in this kind of not ideal but annoying category, is working with the supervisor to see if there are ways that you can make this more straightforward. So sometimes people don't respond to emails when they perceive you're sending too many. So you can discuss with your supervisors, would it be more useful if I collated my questions into a single email rather than sending a message every time I think of something? Or would it be easier if when I ask you a question, I reattach a summary of the piece of work that I'm doing at the moment so you know exactly where I'm at? What would make it easier for your supervisors to respond to your emails more quickly? One for me is changing the subject line of the email. Often people just end up doing re, whatever the original email was, and I've got no idea what's coming up. So trying to make it so that your emails are super clear about whether it needs a response, super clear exactly what it is, making sure the supervisor's got all the information that they need to be able to respond and so on. So, spending some time figuring out either on your own or with your supervisor, whether there's anything you can do to make it easier for them to respond more quickly. Okay. So that's on the kind of not perfect annoying, but Okay. It is what it is, side of things. And that's gonna be useful skill learning, right? Because if you are gonna carry on academia or even go into other industries, you are gonna get people not replying to emails. It's just, it's a thing. So learning those skills can be really useful. However, there is then a side at which this strays into unacceptable. And it's always difficult for this specific student, and for anybody else listening, experiencing this, to decide where that boundary sits, as to when this moves from being annoying to unacceptable. For me, unacceptable is where it's happening almost all the time. Where it's happening and it's taking upwards of a week to respond to messages and where you don't get the answers in the end. So it's not just delayed, they're just not answering some of the things. For me, that's where it errs into unacceptable. But different people will have different perspectives on that and it will really differ. You know, I came up through a science program where we really had pretty close contact with our PhD students, well with my supervisors when I was a student, and then with my students when I was a supervisor. We have pretty close contact. In arts and humanities subjects where especially if you're a distance learner, things like that, then the regularity of contact may well be different. One way, if you're unsure, is at any of your schools or departments, there will be people who are responsible for postgraduate research. They'll all have different names depending on your university, where you are in the world. You can have conversations, not complaints, you can have conversations about what's happening at the moment and whether they would consider that to be acceptable. Okay, often what happens is people think I've got to tolerate this, tolerate it, tolerate it. And then they get really, really cross and go straight to sort of complaints and that sort of thing. I would really encourage you to have conversations with people who are outside of your supervisory relationship, who have direct experience of and direct responsibility for postgraduate studies, to say, this is kind of what's happening at the moment. What do I do? Is this normal? Should I just be managing this or should I be expecting more than this? If they think you should be expecting more than that, that is a really good opportunity for them to give you advice about what that might look like in your school. Sometimes it can look like them giving you advice about how to broach it with the supervisor. Sometimes it can be them broaching it with the supervisor. Because remember, what most students don't know is whether there's any history of this stuff with their supervisors. So sometimes you might go and talk to somebody about this and they'll be like, oh, that's really unlike him. Okay, that, yeah, I think there must be something going on there because that's very strange. Okay, let me have a quick chat, we'll see. Other times you might go and they'll be like, yeah, this is always an issue. These are the ways people have handled it in the past. Universities aren't always the best at dealing with long standing issues with supervisors, which I think is a problem in the sector generally. Um, so speaking to somebody else is the only way of knowing and really finding out what, what is going on here. They will then be able to advise you about ways of addressing it, whether you want to bring on other supervisors, whether this person can just be supported to respond more quickly, or to find ways that it's easier for you to communicate. So always use those structures. 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. Even more complex, to be honest. So this notion of not being able to show up as your true self in the supervisory relationship. And I actually think this is one that I would like to do a full episode on at some point, but I want to bring on somebody who's got specific expertise in this field. Because whilst this isn't the case specifically with the student who's written this particular inquiry, this often happens where people are being supervised by people who come from a different racial or cultural background from them. And particularly where the member of staff, the supervisor, comes from a racial or cultural background that is kind of in the mainstream, common within their organization. So, you know, in my situation, white British people supervising people who are from different racial and cultural backgrounds. And there's a whole thing around something called code switching, where people behave differently in order to fit in with what is perceived as being the social norms in their department. And it's one of those really complicated situations where, in many ways, it works, in inverted commas. There's a lot of evidence that people who code switch to fit in with the kind of the hierarchy are more likely to be successful, are more likely to be perceived as professional, to be given opportunities and so on. But at the same time, research shows that it comes at considerable personal cost, both in terms of their relationships with their own cultures and in terms of their relationships with themselves, physical or mental burnout and so on. And that side of it is something that I think I would like to discuss in more detail with somebody with specific expertise in that area and or who has direct lived experience of those sorts of things. So I think we'll go into that in more detail in a future episode. In this case, there is a nationality difference, but it's not a racial or cultural difference that we're talking about here. So when we're talking about personality differences, I think really we exist on a bit of a continuum here, where at one end, we can decide to show up as what we perceive as our authentic, typical, everything about ourselves, and they just have their response to that, and that's their problem. All the way through to we dramatically modify our personality and authentic self in order to fit in. I think the first thing to say is there's probably not a correct place to be. on this continuum. But I would encourage you, wherever you are on it, to make a decision for reasons that you like, and do your best to accept the consequences that come with that decision. Because there's consequences on both sides, and probably In the in between as well. So on the side of showing up as your true authentic self, which seems very different from the people you work with, the consequences there are that they are probably going to have an opinion about that. And we can make a lot of big drama about them having an opinion about that, whether it's them making snippy remarks or whether it's them not wanting to spend time with us. If we decide that that's how we want to show up, then we get to manage our thoughts about their responses. They're adults. They get to have whatever responses they have. We get to manage our responses to it so that we're not turning up as our true authentic selves and then beating ourselves up for saying the wrong thing or for them not liking us and all of those things. We have to own that decision and manage the thoughts and emotions that the consequences of that. Obviously, as usual, caveat, I'm not talking about them having unacceptable responses to us. I'm talking about them just perhaps not meeting us with the warmth and enthusiasm that we might like, for example. Okay, so we can accept consequences on that side. The other side, if we decide that we're not going to show up as our authentic selves, we are going to mimic however we think people should behave in this setting, or we think they want people to behave in this setting, the consequence of that is that we may feel that they don't really know us. We may feel that we're not bringing our true selves to work. And again, we get to manage our thoughts and emotions about that decision. Because I believe the worst thing you can do is be at one or other end of this continuum, but beating yourself up for the consequences of it, showing up as your true authentic self, then telling yourself that you shouldn't and that they should respond differently and that it should all be different to this, or turning up in the way that they expect you to turn up that's more compatible with them, and then beating yourself up about the fact that you're not being authentic at work. Whichever way you go, and there's not a right answer to this, trying to be compassionate to the fact we've had to make a decision here because it's not as straightforward as it could be, and that those decisions have consequences is really, really important. This is going to sound like maybe a cop out compromise, but I'm a big fan of trying to find an authentic middle ground. We all, no matter our personalities, no matter our cultural backgrounds, we all have a range of versions of us. People who have seen me in an escape room will have seen a version of me that I don't show everybody because I can sometimes be a little obnoxious. If I'm in a competitive environment with people that I love and that I know love me, I get very overexcited, slightly bossy. For slightly, read very, and just generally threw myself into it at a very high speed and volume, and it's a whole thing. However, there's also a version of me when I show up in a coaching session, for example, where I very much focus on listening, on understanding, on really trying to engage with and connect with the person I'm listening to, and both of those genuinely feel like authentic versions of me. Neither of those are play acting, and both of them are very different. In my day to day life, I'm probably somewhere in between with sort of fluctuations depending on what we're up to and who I'm talking to. But I want you to think about the range of versions of you that feel authentic. There will be a bunch of different versions and that gives you options as to how you show up in your supervisory relationship. I'd actually really discourage people from saying, I'm just going to do the minimum and that's it. Because I think often it then becomes a bit self perpetuating, they start to see you as distant as well. And I think sometimes in an attempt to protect ourselves, we make the situation a little bit worse. I would really ponder on what is an authentic version of you that comes out in some situations that you could use, in order to have a connection, maybe not the connection you envisaged, but to have a connection with these people that are very different from you. Again, though, if this reaches a stage where you cannot connect with your supervisory team, you feel you cannot be open or honest or authentic with them in any way, this again is an opportunity to talk to the people that oversee postgraduate research at your, your school, your university, wherever level um, to chat with them about whether this is something that could get resolved in more structural ways. So bringing other supervisors on, on board, for example. I hope that is useful. I think this is one of the really big issues in academia at the moment. And those of you who are at higher levels, those of you who are supervisors will recognize the supervisor side of it, but you may also recognize it between you as an academic and the senior academics that are ahead of you. And if anybody wants to come on and talk about the difficulties of code switching, and what we can do in those very challenging situations, then do get in touch. I would love to have a guest with expertise in this. My final question came up in a workshop. So I do workshops that are for my membership, but they're also open to universities to book as one off workshops. And this was somebody who'd come as a one off workshop, and I was asking about what's challenging at the moment in their lives and they said that they lack the knowledge to assess their own work and that meant that they were really struggling to know whether what they were writing is good enough. I just thought this was so important that I decided to like grab it out of the chat from the workshop and respond to it here. Because when we realize that we lack the knowledge to assess our own work, we often think that's a problem. That you should be able to assess your own work, and that if you can't assess your own work, then you can't do it. And when we think of that as a problem, it can be absolutely paralyzing. It's so hard to get on and do anything when you don't know whether it's good enough, and crucially, you believe you should know that it's good enough. My first response to this is, you don't. You don't have the knowledge to assess your own work. If you're a first year PhD student, second year PhD student, even more senior than that, or if you're a more senior academic doing grants and things like that for the first time, you probably don't have the knowledge to assess your own work accurately and thoughtfully. The only bit that's a problem here is you believing that that's a problem and believing that it's an irretrievable problem. At the moment, you have a pretty limited understanding of what people are looking for in this piece of work. That's why you're at the beginning of this academic journey. That's why you're working with people who know more than you do. Not being able to tell whether it's good enough or not, or handing it in thinking it was good and then getting a bunch of comments back telling you it's not as good as you thought it was, is exactly what should be happening. You're in this messy grey bit where you're becoming your next version. You're becoming an independent researcher if you're a PhD student, you're becoming a senior researcher if you're an academic, and you're meant to not know. And it's okay. It's nothing about you. Everybody has been in the position where they don't know whether what they're doing is good enough, and they've got insufficient skills to figure it out on their own. So what do we do? Well, first thing is that whole acceptance thing. This isn't a problem. This is exactly where you're meant to be. What you can do on top of that is start to think about, well, what do you understand? What do you know about how it should, inverted commas, be done? So that you can start from that understanding, so we know there's lots of nuance of how to make it a deep argument or how to be critical or whatever that we're finding really, really difficult, but there are elements that you do understand based on your previous education. Get really clear on what those things are and learn to check your work for the things that you do know need to be there. The second thing is being really systematic. Often what happens, when we're at the beginnings of learning how to write a paper, for example, we kind of expect our first drafts to sound a bit like an article, because we don't really understand how many iterations they go through. And so we actually end up spending less time iterating our work than people who are much, much more experienced, much more knowledgeable than us. We need to accept that this is going to go through version after version after version after version, and that is okay. We can be systematic in terms of only looking at one thing at a time. If you know roughly what structure it should be, then let's only check the structure. If you know roughly what should be in a paragraph, let's only check the paragraph structures. If you know roughly what an academic tone might sound like, only check that. Okay. We can do one thing at a time. Experts might be able, I mean, I still don't think it's a great idea, but experts might be able to edit for lots of things at a time. But if you're a relative beginner in this, you won't be able to and that's okay. We can do this systematically. We can work through it ourselves. The next thing is this is a great opportunity to try and get quick and dirty feedback. Now, some supervisors do not help here, and I apologize for any academics who are listening, but I stand by this, so I'm gonna say it. Supervisors who want polished drafts before they give any feedback, just stop. It's not helping you. It's not helping them. It's such a waste of everybody's time. What that doesn't mean is that you should be reading drafts. Like, every week, and you shouldn't be expecting your supervisors to be reading hundreds of drafts. But, what you can do, is ask your supervisor to give quick and dirty feedback to a short extract. Because the way we learn is by getting quick feedback, adjusting. Quick feedback, adjust, learn. Quick feedback, adjust, learn. We don't learn by huge protracted periods of time where we're stressing out about whether it's good enough or not. No one's giving us any feedback. And then at the end, well, we've polished everything, they've told us we focus on the wrong thing. That's not how we learn. So really encourage your supervisors, and if you're a supervisor, please do this with your students, really encourage your supervisors to allow you to send in 400 words and just ask them to only give you comments based on the academic style of the writing, for example, or ask them to be able to send them like a paragraph outline where you've got in this paragraph, I'm going to say this, this paragraph, that, da, da, da, where it's a line for each thing and ask them solely for feedback on the structure or solely for feedback on the argument that you're making. Try and use any opportunity to get quick and dirty feedback. Even if you've written more, one thing you can do is to learn to extrapolate from feedback. So if you've written four pages of a lit review, give one page to your supervisor, ask for feedback on it, then apply everything you've learned from that one page to the other three pages before you send that to your supervisor. So that way, if your supervisor in that first page has said, um, you know, too much passive voice here, um, try and go into more detail here or you've got repetition here. You can then go through the other three pages, looking for passive voice, looking for repetition, looking for where more depth is needed. It reduces supervisory workload because they're only reading one chunk of it instead of all of it. And it's giving you an opportunity to actually practice assessing the quality of your work, because that's what needs to happen here. Not having the knowledge to assess your own work, isn't a fixed state. It's just your current situation. And the way you learn, the way you get the knowledge and skills to assess your own work is by practicing doing it with prompts, with support. Another tip, and I'm going to confess to being a massive hypocrite here because it's not one I've ever done, but I still stand by the fact that it would be really useful and I kind of wish I did and had, is keep a journal. So when you're thinking about not really understanding what good quality looks like, try and write about what you think at the moment and what bits you don't quite understand or what you do understand and try and keep that up over time. When you get feedback from people, try and write in your journal about what did they change in your work? What is this telling you about what you should be aiming for in future pieces of work? Because I promise. I promise one day this will all feel second nature to you. You will understand what good feels like for your field, your discipline, and you won't remember that you didn't used to. And when you have your own students or when you're a senior academic supporting more junior academics, you won't understand what they're not seeing. You won't understand why they just can't see that this isn't in the right order or whatever. If you can keep a journal so you can see how your own understanding is changing over time, you'll get that sense of making progression and it will help you much more appreciate your understanding when you have it and you're taking it for granted. Because what's going to happen is you're going to start out at a place where you don't even really know what good looks like, and you don't have the knowledge and skills to assess your own work, but you're then going to move to a place that I've discussed in a previous, episode where I was interviewing Dr. Katie Peplin, who's a writing coach, where she talked about the taste gap. And this is an even more painful place, so if you're worried about not knowing how to assess your work at the moment, got a more painful place coming, I'm afraid, which is where you know it's rubbish, but you don't know how to fix it. Okay? This is where I'm at with the art things I do at the moment. So, I have a bit of an arty hobby, and I'm at the stage where I know it doesn't look as good as the stuff I look at on Instagram or whatever, but I equally don't know how to make it better. Now, Katie called that the taste gap. And that, again, is another developmental stage that feels very uncomfortable, because you know your writing's rubbish, but you don't know how to fix it. But, again, We work through that, we figure out what bits we do know, how we can change things, and in time you will get to a place where you know what good looks like and you know how to fix your writing so that it looks more like that writing that you want it to. Understanding this is a developmental process rather than as a sort of innate fixed failing in you can help take some of the sting out of that uncomfortableness and help you see how you can start taking steps towards being able to assess your own work. I really hope those three questions were useful. Please do keep them coming in. You can use the send Vikki a question button in the podcast or you can drop them as a question in my YouTube or reply to my email if you're on my newsletter. However you get me questions, ask me in a workshop, ask me in community coaching, whatever you like, but get me some questions and I will answer some more for you in the future. Let me know what you thought of today's episode. Thank you all for listening, and see you next week! Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.
Links I refer to in this episode Why we all need to be more intentional and resourceful Why we all need to be more encouraging and accepting Why we all need to be more compassionate and curious How to be more strategic and ambitious Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. This is the final session of my how to be your own best boss kind of mini series that we've been doing here. Regular listeners will know that over the last couple of months, I've had episodes where we talk about all the different qualities that you need to be a good boss to yourself. So we thought about being Strategic and ambitious and curious and compassionate and all of those things. And today is the final two qualities. And there's a certain irony to this because the two that I have made you wait the longest for are patient and realistic, which are both, I think, really important qualities and today we'll think about why. Before we get into the details of it though, I want to remind you that these episodes are all part of my Be Your Own Best Boss online course that is available for any of you to purchase. And in this course, we really think about how you can be a better boss to yourself, how you can change the way you speak to yourself, how you can change the way that you organize yourself, that you manage your tasks, that you plan and strategize and review so that you keep all the things that you're already doing well and develop some better habits that will support you to succeed in the future. Now, most podcast listeners will know by now that I also put this on YouTube. Hi everyone on YouTube, if you're the ones watching this there. I'm going to highly recommend that everybody whips over to YouTube this week because I am going to quickly show you what the be your own best boss program looks like. So I'm doing the old share screen. Here we go. So in be your own best boss, you get the introduction to the course. You've get this first module. Like I say, this is about being the boss you need. It's got self assessments, figure out what are you doing at the moment that's working and what is holding you back. It's going to teach you all about the self coaching model, which I talk a lot about in these episodes, how you can use it to coach yourself to achieve your goals. It's going to think about why we need to be compassionate, how we can choose thoughts that are going to serve us and really focus on being the boss we need in our own lives. We go back to modules. Module two is much more organizational. So here it gets much more pragmatic. I'm giving you specific tools that you can use to organize your time and help you think through why tools that you've discovered in the past don't work just haven't stuck and why they haven't helped you. We think about your dream week. We've got sections in there about how you can start your week that in a way that will set you up for everything else you want to do. And it teaches you, in detail, my role based time management system. which many of you will have heard me talk about here on the podcast before, but this is where I give it to you step by step, including a document you can use, to manage all of your tasks if you want to use the role based time blocking system. Module three, which I'm clicking onto now on YouTube. You can see it's all about figuring out why you do and don't follow your plans. We think about the difference between boss you, who does the planning and the strategizing, and then about implementer you, who's the one that has to do the work. And we figure out, there's some diagnostic tools in here for you, to figure out, is the problem mostly with the boss version of you and how they're planning and strategizing and decision making, or is the issue more with the implementer version of you, not following those plans? Usually it's a bit of both, but what we do here is it's a whole array of different options. If the issues with the boss, there's a bunch of different tools you can use. If the issues with the implementer, there's a whole bunch of different tools. So here we're really getting into the kind of nitty gritty of making through, making sure that we follow through. through on the things that we want to do. Section four, start looking longer term. Here, we're thinking about how we plan our months and how we plan our quarters. Often outside of the kind of university requirements, whether that's your sort of progress reviews or whatever you call them, and your university at your stage of your career, outside of that, people often find it difficult to kind of plan and figure out what systems to use that will actually work. Often we end up just making a bunch of goals, not sticking to them, beating ourselves up next time and then doing it all over again. I'm going to teach you a really specific process in this module that you can use to plan and review your months that takes into account the fact that we're driven by our thoughts and feelings. So instead of just ignoring that, instead of focusing only on what actions we need to take, we're going to think about what thoughts and what feelings we need to have in order to take those actions, in order to achieve our results. And then there's also a whole quarterly planning process that takes you through that sort of slightly more macro version, okay, where we think about what do we want to actually exist at the end of the three months? What process things do we want to change at the end of the three months? And then finally, and this is brand new, there is then module five, which covers the stuff that we've done in these past podcast episodes, but in much more detail. So, thinking about the 10 qualities that you need in order to be an effective boss to yourself. So, it's taking you through, just as I do in these episodes, what we mean by those qualities, in what circumstances they're useful, what thoughts might help you feel useful feelings, what feelings you might want, what actions you might want to take, what results those will help you achieve. So make sure you check it out. It is the perfect sort of entry level version of the work that I do. If you've been wondering about the membership, things like that, this is a brilliant way to get some self guided stuff. If you think you haven't got time for the membership at the moment, you're not ready for a long term commitment, you can buy this as a one off. You will have it for as long as it exists. If I upgrade it, there'll be additional things added. You'll get all those as they go along. So you can go to my website thephdlifecoach. com and click on the bit about self guided programs and you'll find the Be Your Own Best Boss program. So that's where this all comes from. It's all part of that program which I think is like the foundations of how to be a successful PhD student and academic. By the way, if you've been wondering about the membership and think you might jump into the membership, you get that for free in the membership. If you're a bit on the fence and you're thinking, oh do I buy that or do I go into the membership, get this with the membership as well. Plus all my other self paced courses too. Anyway, that's enough about that. Let's get on to the last two qualities that I want to discuss. So, realistic. is quality number nine. And this sounds like a funny one because often, you know, I've talked to you about being more ambitious, about setting your sights high, believing you can achieve all the things you want to achieve. And I stand by that, absolutely. But we also need to be realistic too. People listening to this will laugh. This is one I've had to really, really develop and I still have to actively manage and actively kind of keep an eye on. This is probably the one I find hardest because there is a substantial chunk of my brain that believes that if I just get on with it, I should be able to do all the things. It's a kind of mix of delusion, arrogance, and ADHD. Who knows? But anyway, so I have actively channeled my realistic boss. And what we're really thinking about here is being realistic in terms of the scope of projects, for example. So if you're designing a research project, what will the scope of that be? What's in, what's out? And how can you make sure that you are realistic about that? We can be realistic about quality. of the work that we're producing. Sometimes, particularly quality of first drafts, right? A lot of my clients have unbelievably high expectations of how something should sound when it comes out of their head in ways that are completely unrealistic at any stage of an academic career, let alone towards the beginnings of it. So, realistic about the quality of the work that we produce. We need to be realistic about the amount of work we can do, particularly in relatively short periods of time. We tend to underestimate what we can achieve over long periods of time and overestimate what we can get done today. If any of you have ever had that thing where you've got like, I don't know, a weekend where you're gonna work or, for me, it was a train journey a couple of weeks ago. I was convinced I was going to sort my entire life out on that train. Uh, being realistic about what you can do in short periods of time. There's also being realistic about how much recognition and reward and praise and reassurance we can expect to get from other people. Often people think that if I was doing well, people would tell me that all the time. If I was doing well, I'd win awards. If I was doing well, I'd get recognized for my skills. And that's simply not true. Often there's a limited number of places where you can get recognition and reassurance. And often the people that divvy it out, your supervisors, your bosses, your heads of department, etc, are often just really busy and doing that's not necessarily the top of their priority. So we get to be realistic about those things too. We also have to be realistic about the scale of our impact. So often we go into academia because of the impact we want to have on the world, whether that's kind of intellectually or practically, theoretically, whatever it is. But then we realize that we're just a tiny cog in a big machine and sometimes it can be hard to see how this little bit of work that you're doing is going to lead to something meaningful in the future. There's that saying that originally comes from like social action. I think it was Margaret Mead saying that never underestimate the impact of committed people making small actions. It's the only thing that's ever changed the world. That's a horribly paraphrased version, but you know the one I mean. The same is true in academia. Committed people making a series of small academic realizations is also how the vast majority of huge leaps of understanding have ever happened. So being realistic that we're a small part doesn't have to take away from the ambition that we can also have for the change we want to be in the world. So what circumstances is it useful to be realistic? I think it's useful to be realistic when we're planning studies, when we're planning our schedules, when we're submitting stuff or entering stuff. So if we're submitting grants or papers or entering competitions, you can be realistic about your chances of winning while also being ambitious about how much you will get out of participating and attempting to win. Okay? So this is how I see realistic and ambitious living next to each other. Winning something, being awarded something, whether it's a grant or a paper acceptance, or whatever is out of your control, somebody else is making that decision. So we get to be realistic about how likely that is to happen. But the bit that's in our control is how much we get out of it. And we can be as ambitious as we want for how much we will learn through this process. The fourth circumstance I can think of at the moment where it's useful to be realistic, is when we're judging what we've done that day. One thing I've noticed in myself and in loads and loads of my membership clients, my one to one clients, is that they, no matter how much they've done in a day, they get to the end of the day and think, oh, I didn't get done everything I would have liked. Now, in reality, everything they would have liked was an unrealistic amount of stuff. Hopefully made a little bit better if they'd been realistic in the morning. But regardless, if at the end of the day, we're unrealistic about what it was reasonable to have done today, then we end up beating ourselves up and being really critical of ourselves, or we can, when we're thinking, ah, you should have done more. If we can be more realistic, kind of goes along with compassion, I guess, but be more realistic when we look back and review about what was it reasonable that I could have got done, then we can also recognize much more effectively what we have done. So those are the sorts of circumstances, the sort of situations in which I think it's useful to be realistic. The thoughts that I think help are things like, I can do what I can do. You know, it sounds very pragmatic. It's like, yeah, I'll do what I can do. I have this amount of time. I have that much stuff. I'll get done what I can get done. I like to remind myself that I'm part of the jigsaw. You know, I would love to help every PhD student, every academic in the world to enjoy their careers more and get the stuff done that they want to get done without sacrificing their health and well being. I'd love to help every single person. But I also know I'm only a small part of the jigsaw of people who are looking after PhD students and academics. And thank goodness, because realistically, I can't do it for absolutely everybody. So thank goodness I'm part of a jigsaw. So thoughts that help. I am part of a whole jigsaw of people that are trying to achieve this. And I value my bit of the jigsaw and I'm grateful for all the other pieces. An old favorite of mine that you will have heard me talk about before, but one step at a time. When you're being realistic about things, you can see that you don't have to and indeed can't do all the things at once, but actually you can see realistically I can do this element now. And I'll do that element next. Another thought I like, particularly in those situations where we're being realistic about whether we're going to get the job or the promotion or the award, is this is worth doing regardless. And that's a question I want you to ask yourself while we're being realistic, is Is doing this thing only useful if I win or get the promotion? Or actually, could it be useful? Can I realistically expect it to be useful to go through the process? And if you've gone through that decision making and you've decided, you know what, yeah, I am doing this, then you can remind yourself, this is worth doing regardless of the outcome. This final one is, It is a thought. It's also something that I saw somebody talk about on Instagram, actually, and I can't remember who, so I'm not going to be able to credit, all apologies to them. Cite your sources, people. But I really liked it, and so I wanted to share it with you guys, which is that your best is what you can do without sacrificing your health and well being within the time that you give the task. I'm going to say that again. Your best is what you can achieve in the time you give it without sacrificing your health and wellbeing. I would really encourage you all to sit on that thought and to really kind of ponder, because so often people beat themselves up. This isn't the best I could do. I could do this better if I have more time. Of course you could. But when we're being realistic, when we're being realistic bosses to ourselves, the version of best we're looking for is the best you can do in these conditions. And the best you can do in these conditions has boundaries around it. It has time boundaries around it. It has effort boundaries around it. And it absolutely should have boundaries around it in terms of, not eating into your health and well being, whether that's by stressing you out, by going into your relaxation time, your sleep time, whatever, your best is what you can do within the time you allocate the task without sacrificing your health and well being. And we've actually, here's a secret for you, I haven't told anybody. And I'm going to see if you can guess. In fact, you can message me on Instagram or through my website or whatever, my newsletter, if you can guess. I have got a author coming on to talk about their book. It's not a PhD book. It's a, like, out there in the big wide world for all sorts of people book that is about this very notion of how much health and well being you shouldn't sacrifice in order to achieve. See if you can identify what it might be. I'm really excited. I was reading it on a train and I just decided to message him and he said yes. So I'm really excited. That will be coming soon. See if you can work it out. Anyway, so we're thinking these thoughts. I can only do what I can do. This is one, my piece of the jigsaw and I'm grateful for the rest of the jigsaw. We can do this one step at a time. This is worth doing regardless of the outcome. And I know what my best actually is. And when we think those thoughts regularly, we're likely to experience feelings like patient, calm, and determined. And when we experience those, and maybe even some pride in what we've already achieved. We're much more likely to focus on what we can do instead of what we can't do. To make progress without getting distracted, to work on through, make realistic plans and to see that longer journey. And when we do those things, we get done what is worth doing. Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. I'm going to move rapidly on to "patient" because I feel like patient is very related to realistic. Because I think we can't be realistic if we're not being patient as well. Because part of what stops us being realistic is this kind of scurrying towards I must achieve things immediately. But for me, patient is about being willing to take time over something. Willing to do something for a long time that feels difficult or that maybe you're not good at at the moment you're doing it. Again, this is one I struggle with. I, um, I love a new hobby, as many of you will know. I also expect to be good at a hobby immediately. I'm not good at most of my hobbies, but I do struggle to remember that I have to go through a learning process just like everybody else and that's part of patience, is being patient with yourself that you're going to take time to learn things. So part of being patient is tolerating that discomfort, is believing that if you give it time, if you put in effort, that those skills will develop. It's seeing that longer picture that we talked about with realistic and it's appreciating where you're at because one of the best ways to be patient is to be enjoying whatever stage you're at at the moment rather than quite such a hurry to get over there. And I think it's useful to be patient when you've got long term goals, whether that's completing your PhD, completing a grant, whatever level we're talking about. It's useful when we're doing painstaking work. I remember my laboratory days where you'd be pipetting for hours and waiting for incubations and all that fun stuff. Or when I was trying to recruit human participants to take part in my studies and it felt like it would take forever to get as many as I needed, or when I was getting people to do questionnaires. All these things are long and painstaking. In fact, I'm not even going to talk about the cardiovascular analysis I used to do. That took hours. Clicking on the most old fashioned computer you've ever seen. Anyone who's doing their PhD now, who's 22, 23, whatever, you would be shocked if you saw the state of the tech that I was using to do this back in the day, being patient with that sort of painstaking work, repetitive work. And it's important to be patient when you see other people achieving things that you haven't achieved yet. Whether that's submission of articles, getting promoted, finishing their PhDs, any of those things. Often seeing other people ahead, in inverted commas, of us, can really test our patience because we're like, why aren't we there? But it's those moments where it's so important to be patient and to keep our eyes on our own journey. So what thoughts help me feel patient? I'm doing this for a reason, remembering why. This is worth the time, and something I think about, it's okay that this is taking me longer, because often I think we think it's a problem when something takes a long time, and when it's boring and laborious. But actually sometimes what can help us feel more patient is telling ourselves, you know what, this, this is how long it takes. And this is okay. It's okay that it takes this long. It's okay that other people have done stuff faster. But this is the pace I'm doing it and this is okay. And if we can think those, we're going to feel pretty similar to when we were talking about those realistic thoughts. We're going to feel patient and calm and determined and willing. Willing is one of my favorite emotions that you may have heard me say it before. Willing to do the boring thing, willing to wait for the payoff at the end. We're willing to do the boring cardiovascular analysis then we're so much more likely to take that laborious action. So we're more likely to keep doing the thing. We're more likely to make it worth the time we're putting into it. Cause often when we're impatient, we do it badly and then we have to come back to it, or we procrastinate it, in which case it takes even longer. in the long run. When we're thinking these patient thoughts, we're also less likely to criticize ourselves. Because when we're in a hurry, when we're impatient, we're often telling ourselves, you should be able to do this faster. It means something bad about you that you can't do this faster. Everyone else could do this quicker. This shouldn't be this difficult. It shouldn't take this long. When often the truth is it, it just does take this long. And that's okay. And therefore when we can remember that, we're much less likely to whip up stories about how it means that we're not good enough. So this is an action that we're less likely to take when we're patient. And just as with realistic, we're much more likely, if we take all those actions, we don't beat ourselves up, we make it worth the time, we get on and do it, we keep doing it regularly, we're much more likely to achieve our important goals. So that is a pretty whistle stop tour through why patient and realistic are such important qualities to generate in our own bosses to ourselves. As I said, some of these, when I look back over the 10 I've discussed with you guys, some of these I've always been pretty good at, strategic and ambitious, pretty good at those the whole way through my career. I've always been quite curious . Compassionate has taken a little bit of time, but I'm a lot, lot better at it. Realistic and patient, I'm still working on. Even in this business, I want every single one of you, I get like a thousand downloads a week at the moment, I want every single one of you to buy my Be Your Own Best Boss program because I know how much it will help you. And I'm a little bit impatient about making that happen. But I know that I am much more likely to keep supporting you guys and to keep producing more self paced courses for you and keep supporting all my members and everything else when I am realistic and patient for these things to come. You guys will find me at exactly the moment you need me. You will find this course at exactly the moment you need it. And I trust, and I keep reminding myself to trust, that you guys will make that decision when it's the right decision for you. But do have a look at it, because I think it would really help. And the little impatient part of my brain wants you to get that help. Let me know what you think of this whole series. Also let me know what you're struggling with at the moment. I've got some more client Q& A's coming up over the next couple of weeks, and I'm looking for either questions or just things you're finding difficult at the moment that maybe you don't know where to get support for. Let me know, either message me through Instagram or reply to my newsletter, which you can sign up for on my website as well. And I'll answer it in a future podcast episode and it'll be amazing. Anyway, all so much for listening. I hope you found that useful 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.
Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. This week's going to be a bit of a heavier episode than usual. This is something that has been on my mind for a little while now, based partly on what I see in my coaching sessions with my one to one clients, with my membership students, and partly obviously my own experience of the world. And that is there's a lot of crap happening at the moment. There's a lot of really, really difficult, heavy things happening in a lot of different areas of the world. Some of them natural disasters. Some of them, unfortunately, man made. Some of them at a huge scale, some of them at a more personal, just family level issues. There's a lot of stuff happening. And there's a lot of times where I see clients or even find myself thinking, how do you get on with your normal day to day when all this stuff is going on around you, and by around you, I mean, either directly in your environment or within your sort of social circles or your cultural circles or your geographical areas, or just simply your humanity, to be honest. How and if do you get on with the things that you thought you wanted to do when your mind and heart and soul and everything's taking on all this really heavy stuff? And I often put little caveats flippantly on my podcast, but this one, this is a big caveat. I'm not a therapist. I'm not an expert in any of this stuff. I'm not, you know, I try to be trauma informed, but I'm certainly not a trauma specialist. And if this is something that is. deeply affecting you at the moment, whether it's in your personal circumstances or the things that are happening more generally in the world, I'd encourage you to reach out to somebody with specific expertise in helping people to identify when that's becoming a problem and how to look after themselves. So the stuff I'm going to talk about today is coming from the place of somebody who's a concerned ex academic, who's a coach that can see how some of these things can impact on the things that we want to do and who knows that sometimes we have to change what we want to do. Um, but if you think you're in need of more specific support, I'd really, really urge you to, to reach out for that too. Okay. Nothing I say today is in any way intended to be a replacement for specific expertise. For those of you who might be thinking, you know what? I'm pretty good. separating myself from what's happening in the news, and like my day to day. I'm pretty good at getting on. I'd urge you still to listen for two reasons. One, because I think you never know when something is going to hit you directly and your, your family, your friends, the people you care about directly, where this stuff will suddenly become relevant to you. Obviously, not wishing it on anybody, but you just never know. These things in the words of Baz Luhrmann from the 90s, these things happen on a Tuesday afternoon when you least expect it. But also because even if you are currently able to detach yourself from those things quite well, there's people around you who aren't. I guarantee that. There are people around you who are being deeply affected by the things that are happening in the world. And who might not be saying so, and might not be openly talking about it, and you might think that they aren't. But I promise, there are some people around you who are struggling with the things I'm going to talk about today. And so, if you feel like you don't need to listen for yourself, I'd really encourage you to listen for the people around you. So that you can just keep a little eye out, so that you can hear the things that people are actually saying and so you've got some ideas of ways you could respond if it does come to your attention that people are struggling. And this is relevant as usual for students, for academics, for everybody at any level of the academic world. We're all human beings trying to navigate this and this is all, all the same stuff for all of us. The first thing I want to say is, it's okay. It's okay to find this difficult. It's okay to not find it easy to stay focused on things that you used to and maybe still do feel are important when there's so much other stuff happening in the world. It's okay that you're finding it difficult. And so if you're saying to yourself, I just need to concentrate, this is ridiculous, you know, these things aren't directly affecting me, I need to actually just get on with it. Let's give ourselves a little bit of compassion here. It is okay to find this difficult. The news is full of big, big stuff at the moment. It always is, but it feels more than usual, right? It feels more than it has. And it's okay that you have a whole bunch of emotions about that. You are not alone. Lots of people are struggling and it's okay. We don't have to not feel those emotions. We don't have to beat ourselves up for feeling those emotions. It's okay. You're a human being and this is tough stuff. Academic work takes cognitive effort, and it often takes a big chunk of emotional regulation, right? It takes managing the uncertainty and managing our insecurities and all of this stuff that we usually coach on week to week, right? When I'm coaching on how to get your writing done or whatever, we're regulating emotions we have about our writing. And if you are using all your regulation to cope with the other stuff that's happening, it's probably not a surprise that you feel like there's nothing left to regulate your academic work. There's nothing left to, you know, overcome the procrastination, to overcome the not wanting to get on with things the way perhaps you normally would. This is not a surprise. It's not your fault and it's not a sign there's anything wrong with you. The reason that's so important to understand, the reason why I'm really laboring this point, that this is okay, is that when we judge ourselves, we layer on a whole other layer of junk that we have to deal with, and we don't look for ways to support ourselves. We don't look for ways to make it a little bit easier if we're just telling ourselves we should be able to get on. Please hear me say, it's understandable if you're finding it hard. And there are things you can do to look after yourself. The first place we're going to start though, is whether you should be working at all. And this won't apply to all of you. It may not even apply to most of you, but for some of you, if this stuff is all feeling very close to home, or it is very close to home, I want you to consider whether you should be trying to work through this. Sometimes we don't even think about that as a possibility, right? We just, we're in it, this is what we're doing, it's just gotta happen now, we've gotta do it. But, if you are affected by the stuff happening around you or to you, to the extent that you cannot engage in your studies, and that it's not in your best interests to try and, force yourself to, try and encourage yourself to. If it feels like those things are not going to be good for your mental health and for your physical health, it is worth investigating how you can take a pause. Now, sometimes there's practical things around that, those of you on stipends or with other responsibility and things, I know it's not always quite that straightforward, but a pause can be a short pause, a pause can be a weekend, it can be a week, a pause can be a month, two months, a pause can be deciding that, you know what, this just isn't what you need to be pursuing right now. You need to be doing something different. All of those things are there and you get to pick. Now, hear me when I say it, I'm not saying don't continue with your PhD, there's no way you can do it, none of those things, in a minute I'm going to give you a bunch of ways you can support yourself so that you can continue. But I want you to make sure you have all options on the table, because sometimes we don't even look at some of the options, because we consider those to be failures or to be letting people down or to be just not an option at all. Everything's an option. And I want you to look at each of the options and really consider what feels truly best for you at the moment. Because sometimes our best interests are to disengage from a goal. To say, you know what? Not now. Maybe never. Who knows? But not now. This is just not good for me at the moment. And you might think often I have clients say things like, yeah, but if I, if I take a year off, then, you know, next year I'll just be beating myself up for that wasted time. Or if I don't finish my PhD, I'll always regret it. And I want to offer that those things are optional. You could not finish and you could decide never to beat yourself up about that. And to remind yourself every time you think of it, how you chose the right thing. How you chose the right thing for your mental health, for your family, for your community, for whatever reasons it is, that you love those reasons. That yeah, it was disappointing, and we can be disappointed, and that's okay. But, we love our reasons and we did it for our best interests. Because often it's the fear of those things that we'll say to ourselves in the future that stops us from making difficult decisions. The second part of this is really for people who have decided that, yeah, I'm finding things really tough at the moment. There's a lot going on, but I do want to keep going. I'm not going to make any changes to my registration. I'm not going to take a leave of absence. I'm not going to pause my registration, any of those things. I am going to keep going. But I want it to feel better than that. And in those situations, what we can do is we can think about how can I make it feel easier by changing some of the assumptions I make. The assumptions about how much I should be working, the assumptions about how high level I should be working, when I should be working, where I should be working, what support I should be getting. We have loads and loads of assumptions about how we have to do it and lots of them aren't necessarily true. I'd encourage you to think about which bits you're finding really difficult. Is it that you're finding it difficult to get going? Is it that you're finding it difficult to focus for long periods of time? Is it that you're finding it difficult to do the harder cognitive stuff? Is it that you're finding it difficult to be in social situations? Which bits are you finding difficult? And really think through how you can make those easier. Can you limit it down so that you're only really trying to do one thing at a time? So if, for example, at the moment you're trying to collect data for one study and write up another study, can you pause one or other of those so that you can really sort of slow down and immerse yourself into one element of your work for a while? So you're not taking a full pause of your PhD or your research or whatever, but you are reducing the things you're doing. Can you tell people that you're just not gonna do some of the additional things? We all know that there's kind of core stuff that we have to do, whether it's for academic jobs or whether it's for our PhDs, and then there's kind of the peripheral stuff that is either fun or impressive or will go towards our promotions or future jobs. Are there any of those things that you want to say? You know what? Not now, not at the moment. I don't need to. So there's that really kind of practical side of it. We can also really think about our expectations of ourselves and maybe our expectations are that we sit down and start working exactly when we said we would, and we work the exact time blocks or whatever that we said we would. Maybe we just need to loosen up on some of that. Maybe we need to just say, you know what, I will, I'll get three hours done. At some point today, it might not be exactly when I intended, but I will. And you know what? I'll be proud of that. And that will be sufficient. So it's changing some of our expectations. Some of the pressures that we put on ourselves unnecessarily by taking account of the fact that you're trying to do this in a really difficult environment at the moment. We can also think about the things we say to ourselves, because when we're finding things difficult, we can use that as a reason to criticize ourselves. We can tell ourselves that we shouldn't be finding it difficult. We should be able to manage this. Or we can use it as an opportunity to like engulf ourselves in all the self praise in the world. Everything we do, we're so proud of the bits that we've done. We're so proud of how we're getting on, even when it's only tiny things, reminding ourselves of all the things we've achieved in the past, of all the reasons that we want to do this, all the reasons why it's okay if we're struggling. We can really create a sort of psychological environment through how we talk to ourselves, where we feel loved and appreciated while we try and do this difficult stuff. And that doesn't come naturally to lots of people, but it is something that gets easier with practice, I promise. So even if you can just do it a little bit in amongst everything else, then that can be really helpful. 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. Other ways you can try and make these things easier is thinking about the scaffolding that you have around you, right? If you were learning to ride a bike or something and you didn't know how, you'd have stabilizers, you'd have somebody supporting the back, you'd do it in a safe area, all these things we put around ourselves to keep ourselves safe when we're learning a physical skill. In this situation where things feel kind of wobbly like that, I want you to ask yourself what scaffolding you can put around yourself to make it feel a little easier. Do you want to have a conversation with your supervisor or your boss about the fact that you're struggling at the moment and that just a little bit of understanding would really help you. Do you want to reach out for more structured support in terms of things like writing groups or organizing co working sessions with your friends? If maybe you're struggling to get going on your own, would having that sort of support network around you make it feel a little bit easier? Could you ask support from somebody in terms of really breaking down your tasks into very achievable things so that when you are trying to do work, you make it as easy as possible for you to do it? Could you use tools like the Pomodoro Technique where you work for a very short chunk of time and then have a break. Maybe you use Pomodoro anyway, but maybe you could shorten the amount of time you spend working and increase the amount of time that you spend resting. So that instead of expecting yourself to sit down and write for two hours, you expect yourself to write for 25 minutes and then to have a break. Are there certain environments that you find more conducive to focus? Do you want to work with your computer disconnected from the internet? So those of you who've listened to my episode about not reading while you're writing, one of the ways that you can kind of encourage yourself to do that is completely turn your Wi Fi off, turn your internet off, put your phone somewhere else, and then it's just you and your computer, or you even and a notebook if you want to go that far. Would detaching yourself so that when you have the urge to check the news or to look at social media or the other things that are going on, you're just that little bit further away. Would that help you to be able to put yourself in a little bubble for a minute in order to be able to do the things that you want to do? There's also a bigger motivational element here, and this one we have to be careful with, because I don't want you putting pressure on yourselves. But sometimes it is worth remembering why you wanted to do this PhD, why you wanted to do the research you're doing at the moment, to do the work you're doing. Often when there's other bad things happening, it's easy to feel like everything you're doing is pointless, especially if you're doing a PhD where it's not got sort of direct application, right? So some people's PhDs, it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, easy to see how that's useful. And other people are like, oh, I don't know. But there's a reason you chose it, there's a reason you thought it was valuable, there's a reason you thought it was interesting, there's a reason you cared about it. And we don't just have to accept that those reasons have gone away just because other things feel really important right now. You can choose to reinforce those reasons for yourself. You can choose to spend more time reminding yourself of that, giving yourself prompts, having notes, whatever it is that makes you think of the reasons that you decided to do it. So that when there's a whole load of stuff over here saying, Oh, I really, you know, I don't even know why I'm doing it. You can go, I do, I do know why I'm doing this. It's because of these things. And I can do a little bit of it now. We then get to think about how we look after ourselves around all of this. The first thing is keeping a little handle on what we're doing in our minds. Now, one of the very, very first self help books that I ever read when I was, I don't know, probably an undergraduate or early PhD, something like that, was Stephen Covey's Seven Habits. Absolutely classic. Bits of it I'm not so keen on, but lots of it that I love. And one of the things that he talks about is the difference between your circle of concern and your circle of influence. Now your circle of concern are the things that you worry about, the things that you think about, that you care about, that take up space in your mind. Your circle of influence are the things you can actually do and have an impact on and change. And when these circles are different sizes from each other, in both directions, which I'll talk about in a second, when these circles are a different size from each other, then we get problems. Now for a lot of you guys in the context that we're talking about here, your circle of concern will be much bigger than your circle of influence. You will be worried about the stuff happening in the world, the stuff happening to your families, that's way out of your control. And when we have a big circle of concern and a smaller circle of influence, we can feel very powerless. And when we feel very powerless, we often don't take the actions that are within our control. Often we fixate on scrolling through news articles, for example, and make it very difficult to do small things we could do. that might help. Now the flip side is bad too, right? It's probably less of the issues that we're seeing here, but if people have a very big circle of influence and a very small circle of concern- often we see this in big, powerful people who have a lot of impact on people's lives, but don't necessarily care- then that causes problems too. So what we're trying to do at all times is to try and keep our circle of concern as close to our circle of influence as possible. And that doesn't mean we can't care about things that are outside of our control, but it does mean we can think about what things within that are within our control. So, for example, if you are understandably concerned and upset and scared and angry about all the things happening in the Middle East, you're probably not in a position where you can do anything to change it. However, you might be in a position where you could offer comfort to somebody who is struggling in your own community. You might be in a position where you can write to somebody in power or whatever form of protest feels comfortable or appropriate for you. You might be in a position where you can amplify the voices of people who aren't being heard right now. These are things that whilst the sort of overarching issue is far, far, far outside all of our circles of influence, we have mini pockets. of influence within that. And if we can spend more time in those pockets of influence doing the things that we can do, and less time immersing ourselves sort of passively in the awfulness of things, in that circle of concern, It's much better for our own mental health and it benefits the world because we're then not just making ourselves feel terrible, we're actually doing the small actions that could make a difference in one or two people's lives. The next parts are looking after yourself in all of this is remembering that when a lot is going on, you need more care for yourself, not less. Often what happens when we're struggling for whatever reasons is that we eat worse. We stop exercising. We stop seeing our friends. We stop going out. We stop spending time in the fresh air. We sort of hunker down. And sometimes maybe that's what we need. If we're hunkering down in a kind of supportive and loving way. But often what we're doing is actually neglecting ourselves when we really need that extra support. So I want you to think about how can you make it easier to spend a little bit of time outside? How can you make it easier to go to sleep at night? How can you make it easier to eat food that nourishes you? Without starting some big regime. This isn't a health kick. That's not what we're going for. But food that makes you feel warm and cared for. Okay, how can you give yourself these things? How can you nurture yourself while you're struggling with all this stuff? I want you also to think about how you can give some of this stuff space because we don't cope with any of this by just squishing it down and telling ourselves we've got to go get on. If you've got these emotions inside yourself, it doesn't help to just say, Oh well, nothing I can do about it, let's crack on. Because these emotions are there and they're going to come back up one way or another. So giving yourself space where it's okay and safe to express your emotions. Finding people where you can express your emotions and it be okay is really important. Allowing yourself those moments where you can scream or cry or get angry and rant or breathe or give yourself a space where you can experience all of this. And you might think you don't have time, but the irony is if you give yourself that space, It gives you back time. If your mind and body is existing in a really tough time, let's look after that mind and let's look after that body. The other thing that giving yourself space to experience emotions does is it enables you to defer emotions sometimes too. So if we're constantly telling ourselves that we shouldn't be upset, we shouldn't be getting this wound up, then we're sort of permanently squashing it down and then it will just burst free at some point. Whereas if we can say, you know what, at the moment I'm in work mode for the next 40 minutes. I'm in work mode. I'm going to keep my brain in this room. If I feel it drifting off to think about other things, I'm going to gently, gently nudge it back to my work, but I've got two hours clear this afternoon where if I need to get upset, if I want to actually think about this and wallow in this and be there with it, that's okay. I've got space for that. Right now I'm doing this. I am going to spend time just, just being later. Knowing that you have put that time aside can really help most importantly with your own psychological health, but also with your ability to then focus in the moments that you want to. And then I have one final thing, especially for people who perhaps aren't experiencing this strongly themselves, but know that they have friends and colleagues who are. this is a tip that I got from a friend who suffered a personal loss. I'm not going to go into the details, but a very, very difficult personal loss. And her tip was, ask me how I am today. Don't ask me how I am because I don't even begin to know how to answer that question. But if you want to express caring and you want to like, see how I am, ask me how I am today, cause I can answer that. I can tell you if it's a good day or if it's a bad day. I can tell you a little bit about how I'm feeling today. Make it really specific. Don't expect somebody to be able to answer the, how are you question, because if it's too big, they will just lie to you and tell you they're fine. But if you ask them, how are you doing this morning? You might just get an answer where they're able to be authentic and you're able to provide the support that they need. I found that tip really, really useful and have used it with several people that I care about who are going through difficult things at the moment. I hope you find it useful too. I know this has been a kind of heavier episode than usual. I hope it has been of use to some of you. This is a little bit of me reaching into my circle of influence to say, what could I actually do in these situations that might be useful? Where do I have a skill set that might be helpful and making this is one of the things, one of the things that I decided that might be of use. And so I hope it has been for some of you. If anybody has specific things that you're struggling with, specific questions, please do let me know. You can either contact me on Instagram at the PhD life coach, or through my newsletter. You can then reply to that. You can sign up for that on my website. I'm still doing my client q and a podcast episodes. So if any of you have got comments or questions based on what I talk about today that you want me to go into in more detail or things you think I should have covered that I haven't, or anything where you think I was misguided in anything I said today, please let me know. Please let me know and then I will try and expand on and respond to those in a future episode. To finish on a lighter note, it's been my husband's birthday this week, so I'm recording this the week before it goes out, and it's been my husband's birthday, and he's a massive child about his birthday. He has just turned 46 years old. You'd think he'd just turned six years old. He was so excited. He was running around like a small child. He couldn't sleep the night before cause he was too excited. He told everybody about it because he likes attention on his birthday. And so he tells everybody about it. He was fit to bust with every single present that he opened. And so to finish, my question for you is, I want you to think about what things did you get super excited about when you were a little child? What games, what toys, what activities did you adore when you were 10? And how could you bring a little bit of that into your life now? Because I think sometimes we focus on relieving the negative and that is hugely important, but sometimes it's useful to try and inject a bit of silliness, of play, of fun as well. So I want you all to have a think about how you could inject a little bit of fun and play into your lives this week and just lighten it all a little bit. 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.
Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. And this week we have another guest with us. I am super excited to introduce Rosa Smith, who is from The Brilliant Club, a really cool public engagement organization in the UK. And she is going to talk with us today about inspiring the next generation. And, you know, Just tiny little tasks like that. So, hi, Rosa. Rosa: Hi, thanks for having me. It's lovely to be here. Vikki: It is wonderful to have you here. Anyway, tell people a little bit about yourself and about the Brilliant Club. Rosa: So, I'm Rosa. I've worked at the Brilliant Club for seven years now, which I can't quite believe, and my background is in secondary school. So before I joined the Brilliant Club, I was a secondary school English teacher and then a head of sixth form, uh, which led me to kind of being interested in, in access to university and I realized from that point, really how challenging it was for some young people to even get their foot in the door to get into university. Um, and that's one of the things that Brilliant Club tries to tackle. So my current role at the Brilliant Club is Tutor Engagement Director. All of our tutors are either current PGRs or people who've completed their PhD. So they're all researchers, and what they do is, is go into schools and share their research expertise with young people, which I'm sure we'll come on to later in the podcast. Um, but really my job at the moment is, is overseeing their professional development while they work with us. Making sure that we've got the right researchers in the right places to work with our schools and as a charity, and I think I alluded to this at the start, but our real mission is to support students from non selective state schools who haven't got the same advantages as other students to access university and to really thrive when they get there. Vikki: Amazing. Thank you. And for our international listeners, state schools are public schools in the U. S., I believe. So state schools are our non fee paying, sort of bog standard ordinary schools. Rosa: Yeah, non fee paying and non selective as well. So, you know, we're working with students who haven't had the advantages of being in a more selective school. Vikki: Amazing. And we were just talking before you came on, just to let people know a little bit about you as well, you have had a very productive weekend. Rosa: Yes. Well, I don't know if it's very productive actually, because it stopped me from doing any other productive things, but I've just a lot of running. So I did a half marathon yesterday, so I'm a little bit creaky today. Vikki: And how was it? Rosa: It went well. Yeah, it was good. It was dry, which was a benefit because it's been so wet here recently. I'm in Shropshire. So I did the Shrewsbury half marathon yesterday, and it was long, but fun. Quite good fun. It was a good atmosphere. Um, and I had lots of lovely supporters. Vikki: And have you done it? Have you done this before? Is this a one off? Is this? Rosa: I have done one half marathon before, but seven years ago. So it was, uh, yeah, quite, it felt like quite an achievement to finish it yesterday. Vikki: Absolutely. Absolutely. Cool. So, and thank you for telling us a bit about the Brilliant Club. It sounds like an amazing organization. One of the things I want to say just for everybody in, if you're in the UK, this will be super, super relevant to you because you could engage potentially with the Brilliant Club yourself. If you are international, we have tons and tons of international listeners. There is also going to be lots of stuff in here that you can use when you're thinking about engaging with young people, helping raise their aspirations, outside of the context of the Brilliant Club. So there are different, even your universities may have these sorts of schemes going on and stuff. So if you're not in the UK, don't worry, there is still a bunch in this episode for you. So let's start by, let's start by thinking about what the actual students do, right? So most of my listeners are PhD students. I have some academics as well, who I'm sure will be interested for their students. So what do the PhD students actually do in this scheme? Rosa: So our PhD students act as tutors, and they're trained by us to be tutors in school. And what that means is they are tutoring students in school about their specific research and their. area of academic expertise. So, in comparison to other programs, they're not going in and doing, say, for example, English or maths tuition. They're going in and teaching a program of study that they've designed based on their area of research expertise, and that could be absolutely anything. So, as you can imagine, we have wild and wonderful courses created by our tutors that are based on whatever is their specialism. So we might have something, for example, about the chemistry of baking that someone has created and they've linked their chemistry research to what students might be interested. We've got courses that are about literary history. We've got courses that are about AI. We've got courses that are about climate change. Absolutely anything that you're researching, we can support you to create a course for young people based on that. Um, so what the researchers are doing when they create that course is setting up a series of sessions that they go into school to deliver over the course of a school term. So they'll go into school once a week for, around seven, eight weeks, and they'll deliver their program and they'll support the students to work towards a final piece of writing at the end. Vikki: Amazing. And why do you find it so important for them to do their own research? I've seen schemes before where either it's like a one off research talk or where the PhD students go in and, as you say, act as tutors on more kind of curriculum stuff. Why did you choose, I mean, I love it, but why did you choose to get them to teach their, their actual research? Rosa: Yeah, it's a really good question, and I think the answer is twofold. For the young people in school, it's very much about getting them to expand their critical thinking skills. And to, to really apply those critical thinking skills to something brand new, so something that's completely outside of their normal curriculum, and that exposes them to the type of study you might do at university that is completely different to what you might do at school. So it's about exposing the students in school to new ideas, complex concepts that they might not have otherwise had access to, and really being inspired by the PhD researcher's passion for a particular subject. So I think that's the benefit for the young people and it, you know, it's supposed to really foster that love of learning and that curiosity. For the PhD researchers, we hear from a lot of researchers that they have got opportunities to teach, but very rarely have they got an opportunity to teach their own specialism. They might be teaching undergraduates, but convening on, on a course that's set up by somebody else. They might be doing other outreach, but it's curriculum focused, for example, or it's very much about information and guidance about university, but not sharing their research. So for our PhD tutors, it's the opportunity for them to take their research and write it into a course that's really unique and bespoke to them. Um, and they tell us that that's a really beneficial experience. It helps them to really condense what is the most important thing about my research, that if someone couldn't learn anything else, this is what I want them to learn and to really get that experience designing a program of study, or, you know, a scheme of work that they might not otherwise get the opportunity to do. Vikki: Remind me, I can't remember whether you said this, what age group are they going in to work with? Rosa: We actually work right from the top end of primary school to the top end of secondary school. So, the youngest students you work with might be 9 years old and be in year 5 or 6 in primary school, and the oldest students will be year 12, so the first year of their A level study. We do have pre designed courses for the very youngest pupils, so if you're working with students at the top end of primary or the bottom end of secondary school, we've got some off the shelf courses that our tutors can deliver, and for the older students, it'll be a self designed course by the tutor. Vikki: And what do you see the PhD students get out of doing this? Rosa: I think there are lots of things. I think, obviously the thing we talk about the most as a charity, externally really, is the impact that they will have on the young people, so that kind of opportunity to really change the lives of young people. And that might sound grand, but actually we've got lots of evidence that, I suppose both qualitatively and quantitatively, that this work that PhD tutors do really has a lasting impact on the outcomes of those young people. So they do better in their GCSEs if they've done the scholars program, even though it's not GCSE tuition. And we think that's because of those critical thinking skills and independent research skills they develop and that confidence they develop. And students are also more likely to apply to and progress to a more competitive university after they've done the scholars program. So a big one is that impact on those young people. And, you know, the young people say really wonderful things about how inspiring their tutors been and, you know, that they really set them on a path that they might not have otherwise been on. Um, but it's not just altruistic. We think there are lots of benefits for the researcher's professional development, really. So we see benefits in terms of their, I suppose professional skills. So things like resilience, you know, it's nothing like having to deliver your research to a group of 14 year olds to make you resilient, you know, lots of the sorts of questions they ask, the challenges they might come up with. The, the lack of understanding perhaps of one of your ideas and you having to think, Oh, how am I going to present this in a different way? How am I going to restructure next time so it goes better. So I think there's a lot of resilience built in, in working with young people. There's also that experience of a professional work setting and having to fit into a school timetable. So that sort of time management and organization skills that you'll have to bring with you really and you'll develop over the course of working with a school. Communication skills. It's another huge one. So again, communicating something that you've spent years probably thinking about, researching, you might know more than anyone else about this particular niche topic, but having to really go back to basics and think, how will I explain this and break it down for someone that hasn't got the base of knowledge that I've got and doesn't understand perhaps the particular terminology and doesn't have that, that academic background. So yeah, excellent communication skills. And I think not just breaking down your research, but also just dealing with a group of students in front of you in a classroom environment. Um, there's nothing like that to develop your communication skills as well. Um, so that is a huge one. We also teach quite a lot of specific pedagogical skills. So there's a chance to really hone those if you, you know, if you want to stay in academia, for example, or you already are post PhD and you're teaching at undergraduate level, for example, there's lots of transferable teaching skills and training that we offer that you can take to other, other teaching. Even if you're not going into teaching in the future, those teaching skills I think can be really helpful in other jobs. I think in most careers you probably have to do some training and some presentation to colleagues. So, the sort of skills to structure a session, to break down ideas, to communicate them clearly, to anticipate misconceptions and tackle them. So lots of transferable skills as well as those benefits socially. Vikki: And I think we can't even, I mean, you talk about those social, the sort of social benefits as being a kind of purely altruistic thing. But one of the things I see with my coaching clients a lot is they've sometimes forgotten the excitement of their research. It's so standard to them and they're so aware of the things that they don't know and they're not good at and all these people in the world that know more about it than them. As a PhD student, you can feel really like the kind of bottom of the tree and that this is the most mundane thing ever and you've just, you know, you can, you can get kind of bogged down in that, , having something that you were really excited about first and then you can get quite, I've seen lots of clients get quite, quite bogged down in the like, oh, it's just really long journey now. And I think seeing other people being interested and excited and even impressed with you and what you've done and that sort of thing, I think can really give a boost that then makes it easier on those long days where you're just trying to get your analysis done or just get your writing done or whatever. It can give you a real boost to know that actually, people think this is quite interesting. This is actually quite cool. You know, when you get out of the kind of get your head out the weeds a bit and share it with people out there in the community, it's actually, it's actually really interesting and I think that can really help people. Rosa: I think you're absolutely right. And I think a lot of our tutors tell us that, that it, I suppose it forces you to think about why do I think this is so important? And why was I passionate about it in the first place? Because you've got to communicate that to other people. So I think you're absolutely right. And also, You might be surprised at the sort of questions that young people ask in a classroom that make you think, Oh, I really hadn't ever thought about it like that. And that might sound a bit mad, you know, given that they're 14, 15, 16, and you've been studying this probably for years, or at least a version of it for years, but actually, I think young people can really, um, I suppose, distill what you want to say with your research and get you to think about it in different ways and lots of our researchers tell us that yeah, young people, I suppose, reinvigorate some of that passion for their research. Vikki: Amazing. Do you have any stories about, obviously anonymous, but stories about students that you've seen make big developments by being involved in the program? Rosa: In terms of, of the PhD researchers? Vikki: Yeah. In terms, no, in terms of the PhD students themselves. Rosa: Yeah. I mean we, we've definitely had researchers who've talked about, I suppose particularly if they, they're maybe coming into this in the first year of their research where they're still developing their, their thesis idea. Um, we definitely had researchers tell us that they've sort of shifted direction of their research and, you know, thought actually I had the kind of several routes this could go down, but I've really explored this one idea in my scholars program course, and that's made me kind of want to hone in on that area of research in particular. We've also definitely had researchers who working with us has really ignited a passion for teaching in them that they perhaps didn't think they had before and made that, kind of, I suppose, consolidated that as being their career choice, which is wonderful. So we have, you know, some people who worked with us as tutors and then, and then gone into careers in teaching, which is always lovely. Vikki: So I guess the flip side of that is, what do you see the PhD student finding most challenging when they're doing it? Rosa: Yeah, I think, great question and probably lots of things and slightly dependent on what your previous experience has been. I think lots of researchers find what I've just talked about as being a real benefit really challenging. So, actually, what do you choose? You know, you've only got, you know, We say sort of five sessions of content delivery on the scholars programme and then preparing for final assignment. So really, you've got five hours to teach something to a group of young people. So really distilling what you're going to teach in those sessions and what you want that final assignment to be. So how, how do you condense such complex ideas into something that's understandable for non experts? I think that's, that's a massive challenge for researchers. And, and linked to that, the sort of. the way you communicate with young people and getting that right, getting the pitch right, so that it is academically challenging, but it's not inaccessible. And I think that's a challenge for every teacher to an extent, but it's particularly difficult if you're bringing your research into a school setting. Another challenge, which I'm sure isn't unique to the Scholars Program or Brilliant Club, It's just the time management aspects of it and kind of fitting this sort of work alongside a really busy research schedule, often other commitments, you know, most people doing a PhD have got multiple other commitments as well. So fitting this in, in your schedule, I think those two things are probably the biggest challenges that our researchers face. Vikki: And there's such useful challenges to face that I'm sure they are difficult. They're the sorts of things, again, that my clients talk about it with other contexts, things they're involved with. But if you can develop the ability to condense down complex ideas to something achievable or something sort of understandable, it's such an important skill. Cause I see so many people who are trying to shorten work. It's one of the biggest things that people talk to me about in my membership sessions, you know, I need to shorten this piece of work and there's no way, there's no way I can take out any words. I need all of them. And it's like, well, how many words is in there? Like 7, 000 words. Like you definitely can. And that ability to go, you know what? Yeah. To talk about it in this much depth, maybe I need 7, 000 words. But actually, there's a 200 word version of this that tells you the key stuff. And there's a 1, 000 word version of this that tells you the key stuff and elaborates a little bit more. And then there's a 3, 000 word version that probably covers most of it, to be fair. And I think anything like this that helps students to develop that ability to see that whatever the topic and whatever the scale of the topic, you can kind of choose a level and choose a quantity and make it work. I just think sets them up for everything. Rosa: Yeah, absolutely. It's such good practice for condensing complex ideas in a work context or just sharing your research with maybe academics that are outside your specialism, for example. So yeah, definitely lots of transferable skills in doing that. And we don't just leave researchers to do that by themselves either. I think what they can learn from is the expertise of other tutors who've come before. You know, we've got lots of example courses where a tutor has done it really well. Yeah. We've also got a template, what we call what, what the tutors go in and deliver a course handbook and we've got a template for that. So in our training, we'll cover kind of how do you use an existing structure? How can you use these ideas of how to structure a lesson to break down your ideas? So our training will really help with that and in a, in a transferable way, I think. 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: Fantastic. And that was what I was going to ask actually, is what support, and I guess this is a two part question because some people will have access to the Brilliant Club if they're in the UK, and for everybody else, what support do you provide these students, and what support should, if people are looking for this in other countries or in places where you guys don't work, what sort of support should they be looking for? Rosa: I think they should be looking for a structured program if they're going to go and deliver their own research in a context outside of an academic setting. So I think looking for things like logistical support from an organization, which we do provide. So support to make contact with a school, for example, support to schedule sessions, support to communicate appropriately with students and teachers. So, you know, What we do on the Brilliant Club is allocate, the school allocates, sorry, a lead teacher and we allocate a program officer and those two people will liaise and then bring the tutor in when it's appropriate to organise what times to go into school, for example, and all the logistics of a placement. So I'd be looking for some sort of structure so that you've got support. in your very busy schedule, and you've got support about how to do a program like that in a way that's really professional and go into school and meet the school's requirements. I'd also look for training, you know, both pedagogical training and some training about the sort of expectations of a particular context. So if you're going into school anywhere, you want to know what the expectations of schools are. We have lots of international tutors working with us if they're living in the UK, who might not have gone to school in the UK. So we do try and cover kind of expectations of UK schools and things. So yeah, I'd be looking for training. I'd be looking for logistical support. We also pay our tutors and pay travel expenses. So we pay for, preparation time for training and for delivery, and travel expenses. You know, it depends what sort of program you're doing and, and how much time you've got on your hands, I suppose. But you would at least want to find out what the remuneration is, and, you know, consider how you can make that work alongside your other commitments, but you know, it is a benefit of, of programs like this. I think if you, if you can be paid given, we know it's, you know, really challenging financial time for lots of people. Um, I'd also look to make sure that there's a really clear safeguarding policy that both protects you and young people. So we offer safeguarding training and we've got a really clear system. We've also got a very safe way to communicate with young people on a virtual learning environment so that it's moderated and protected. I think also you'd, you want to make sure that if you're working with a supervisor, if you're a current researcher, that you get their support as well and that they understand what you're about to do and how you plan to fit that around your research. Vikki: Yeah, I'm going to ask you about supervisors in a minute because that can always be a whole thing in my experience. But before you do, I just want to, I think the pay thing is so important. I mean, I am thoroughly in favor of PhD students volunteering and all that stuff. And there's a lot of good that can be done and can be got out of that. But I think properly recognizing what the PhD students are bringing, and the fact that you pay them for the preparation time as well as for the training, I think is huge, because so often you get a kind of like an okay hourly rate for the thing you're actually delivering, and you're like, okay, that's all right, but then by the time you've added up how much time you've actually spent getting ready for it, then suddenly is not looking like a good deal anymore. So I think that's hugely important, not least to make it accessible to more students. Cause one of the things I saw when I was an academic and now through, through my clients as well, is that so many PhD students are having to hold down other jobs just to be making enough money, particularly people that are self funding and all that sort of thing that you can kind of end up in a position where it's only a certain type of student that can afford to do these things. And I think the fact that you pay them so this can be a way that they bring in money that they can actually live on, whilst also getting all this training and support. I just think, I think it's brilliant. I think it's such a good model for how to do this. Rosa: Yeah. And it's really important to us that it's accessible for anyone doing a PhD. What we really want is role models going into school. So we want Our, our school students to see tutors that look like them or have come from similar areas to them and, you know, share some of their life experience and not in every case, you know, and there are benefits both ways. We, we want everyone to, to think about coming to work with us if they're doing their PhD, but we do want a really diverse range of tutors to go into our schools and we don't want. kind of finances to be a barrier to anyone. Vikki: Amazing. So let's talk supervisors. How do you hear, so I'm presuming you don't talk to the supervisors directly, but how do you hear through your PhD students about supervisor opinions on all this stuff? Rosa: So we don't work with supervisors directly, but we do often work with doctoral colleges or graduate schools who are very supportive of our work and generally very interested in seeing the sort of professional development outcomes for The researchers. So we do report back to universities on the sort of professional development of a group of researchers at their institution if they're a partner with us. So we tend to get support from them, but they tend to also ask us, like, what can we tell supervisors? How can we, how can we promote this to supervisors and get them on board? Um, So I think, you know, I think the age old concern of supervisors is that anything that isn't your core PhD research is going to be distracting. What I would really want them to understand is that actually it's, it's a benefit. Compared to a different part time job or even other outreach opportunities, doing something like the Scholar's Programme, where they're actually using their research and sharing it with the community, is helpful to the research itself. It helps to distill a researcher's thinking. It helps them to break down what's really important to them about their research. So we want them to understand that. And we also want them to see that, you know, we know that a really large percentage of PhD researchers do not go into academia and jobs are often quite hard to come by in academia, even if researchers want to do that. So equipping them with the skills to explore a broad range of careers when they finish their PhD is sort of everyone's responsibility who's involved with that researcher at their institution. So we want them to be on board with the professional skills that can be gained through working with us. And also, most supervisors, one would hope, are interested in diversifying the future pool of researchers that they work with, and we know that, you know, the PhD population is not as diverse as it perhaps could be, and we think that putting a broad range of role models into schools and allowing researchers to really inspire young people that doing a PhD is amazing and exciting and something they might want to do one day will really improve the diversity of the future pipeline into postgraduate study. So, you know, we'd hope that if supervisors saw it through that lens, they'd be more supportive. So we'd encourage our tutors to articulate that to their supervisors as much as they can. Vikki: Definitely. I've seen it from both sides, I think. I used to oversee the postgraduate training for one of the colleges at my university. And we'd really struggle with those supervisors that you talked about who are just like, no, you need head down in the lab, get the work done. Anything else is a distraction. So we definitely had to try and manage that side of things. But then we also had the other side, where you had the serial volunteers, where you had PhD students who were doing Brilliant Club, and they were doing three minute thesis, and they were a postgrad rep, and they were a ambassador on open days, and they were a this and a that, and they were teaching this module and that module, and it's like, when are you doing your PhD? I don't understand. So I think for me, I would probably with for the people listening, I would probably really encourage people to think about what are they actually doing at the moment? Where are they getting their money from? And what's their what's their focus of their PhD? And what are they doing kind of co curricular stuff, so stuff that's related to their PhD but not it directly. And to think about where are they full and where could they be doing more things, because I think something like this is an amazing way of gaining all this experience and all this money and all this influence and impact and all this stuff that we've talked about. But it may be that for some of our listeners, now is the perfect time to do it. Get in contact with Brilliant Club, go do it. And for other people, it may be a case of, you know what, this is not right for the phase of my PhD I'm in right now. Right now I'm on, you know, I'm on the writing home straight or I'm on just establishing this study or whatever it is. I have a past episode about working out what phase of your PhD you're in and how you can then use that to make decisions. So I think it's one of those things where it's really important to kind of look at everything you're doing and see where this fits. Does it fit now? Does it fit at some point in the future? And then make the kind of decisions from there. And I think if supervisors see students doing that, then I think they're also much more likely to be supportive because they can see how you're going. Okay, we're doing these things this semester or this year. And then we'll focus on those things more next year, for example. Rosa: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And that in itself is a really transferable skill, like being able to navigate that and think through what is the best time to get involved in this when I can really commit to it. to it properly and I'm not committing to too many things that, you know, we do see researchers struggle sometimes because they've over committed and they say, yeah, I can do four placements in a term and then it's too much. So yeah, we want that too. You know, we want you to do it at a time that's right for you. It's also worth saying that it's never too late. You know, we've got people working with us who completed their PhD many years ago and have either been working in academia or not, you know, and want to come back to their research and use it for something later down the line. So we'll work with you at any stage post PhD too. Um, so it doesn't have to be immediate. Vikki: I love that. I think it's always useful to remember as well that the supervisors aren't perfect at this stuff either. I coach all the way through to full professor and the tendency to overcommit or the tendency to put your head in your sand and say I can't possibly do anything else except this. If you don't get the sort of skills you're talking about or the sort of support that I provide, some supervisors never, never develop past that. So sometimes the, the lack of understanding from supervisors is from their own tendencies and their own kind of challenges in balancing all the things that academia asks of them. So yeah, I think these are making these decisions and figuring out how to balance things and how much you can do, I think is a huge part of all of this. Just to finish off, what would you say to anybody who was considering getting involved in something like the Brilliant Club? Rosa: Obviously the first thing is what you've just touched on. You know, really think about what commitments have you got? What time have you got? How are you gonna fit this in really to everything else that you're doing. But I would urge you to go for it at a time when you feel it's right. I think there's so many benefits to how the way you think about your research, but also to your future career. Working on something like the Brilliant Club or another outreach program, you know, if you're outside the uk. It's such a brilliant thing to put on your CV and to talk about in interviews. You can talk about the way you've navigated it alongside your research, the way you've built communication skills, the way you've navigated a really different professional setting than that of a university. Um, so my advice would be do your research. Find a program that looks and feels right for you. Have a good look at the Brilliant Club website. And if that doesn't feel right, there'll be outreach opportunities at your own institution, you know, that you can find out about. Um, so have a look what's available. And just really think through before you apply. What skills have you already got? How can you articulate your communication skills, your passion for your research, and really why you care about the mission of that organization? What we're looking for in applicants is that they're passionate about their research and that they have great communication skills, because everything else, we can work on in training and communication skills are also something we expect you to develop over you over the course of your work with us, but we just want someone who can talk confidently and excitedly really about their research. Vikki: Amazing. And I remember you said, so mentioning the website, we're going to link to various different links to do with the brilliant club in the show notes. So for any of you listening, who desperately trying to grab pens or whatever, that will all be at phclifecoach. com in the podcast section but I remember like when we talked previously, that there were certain bits of the country that you were really keen to try and find more people. I know you want people all over, but do you want to give a shout out to areas that you're specifically interested in finding people or particularly interested to get more people to? Rosa: So as I say, you can apply from absolutely anywhere. We're particularly looking for researchers at the moment in Essex and sort of Southend, Thurrock area. We have lots of interested schools there and you know, if you're a researcher that either lives in Essex or can get to Essex easily from London, that would be amazing. Similarly Hertfordshire. and also kind of Bexley, Bromley, that, that kind of top area of Kent. So obviously some London tutors are easily able to get out to those places, but often our schools are somewhere, you know, as you know, schools are not always in the most obvious next to a train station place. So if you live in, in any of those areas, thinking about the South. Then we're also very keen for more tutors in Coventry, Rugby, Stoke sort of area. So if you're there, then, then we'd love to see an application from you and then finally Bournemouth, we're keen for some more tutors there because we've got some new schools interested in Bournemouth, that we've not worked with before. Vikki: Amazing. And that list is obviously as of, like, the end of September 2024. So if you're listening at another time, because my podcast episodes stay up for do check the Brilliant Club website. I'm sure there'll be information there about what specifically places you're looking for, but it's good to know which areas you, you particularly need people at the moment. And before we finish up, Rosa, one of the things that my clients and my listeners are always thinking about is the different careers that they can have after, doing a PhD. As you mentioned, lots of people won't go into academia and I think you've shown brilliantly how all this sort of work can set people up to do that. But maybe you could tell us a little bit about what it's like working for the Brilliant Club and what type of opportunities there are there. Rosa: Yeah, I'd love to. So obviously my background is not in PhD research. I was a teacher, but I've got lots of colleagues who have come to work for the Brilliant Club post PhD. Several of them were tutors with us, a couple of people have done internships with us and then become a member of staff, which is also worth checking out. If you're a funded PhD through a doctoral training partnership, lots of those, as I'm sure you know, will fund a placement, and we offer a limited number of placements if you've already got funding. So do get in touch with us if you're interested in that and that applies to you. The sort of careers that are available somewhere like the Brilliant Club are really varied. So there are jobs in any organization, in any charity that are HR focused, finance focused, those sorts of things. Our staff who've done research often go into our research and impact team, for example, so we've got a team who really are solely focused on evaluating the impact of our programs and other educational interventions. So, Evaluation is really important to us, and making sure we're measuring impact is really important to us. So we've got quite a good track record of doing that, and now we do that for some other organisations too. So we're looking for people who are experts in analysing data, are experts in presenting data in accessible ways, I'm really thinking through, a small scale research project essentially. So those sorts of jobs are really appropriate for someone who's done a PhD. But also often people who've completed their PhD want to do something that is supporting other researchers. So the person in my team, Katrina, who is our head of tutor engagement on our tutor engagement team. She is really interested in making sure that all of our PhD researchers are getting the best professional development, the best support, and, and she really advocates for her community really of researchers. So she's gone more into a support role, but I think she would say that having done her PhD has been really beneficial in thinking about what sort of support our tutors need. Vikki: This is why I always try to remember to ask this question of people who come on the podcast because I think so often people only see the route into a traditional academic role or kind of leaving it all behind and going off into some corporation somewhere. I had a guest on a while back, Holly Prescott, who talked about academic adjacent careers. So check out that episode, everyone, if you're interested in this stuff, and I think these are such interesting examples of academic adjacent careers where you're still working with research, you're still working with people from universities, but in a different context and with a different aim. And yeah, I think it's just really useful for people to know these sorts of things exist. Rosa: Yeah, definitely. Do check out our website and have a look for vacancies, because things do come up and we're always interested to hear from people who've finished their research. Vikki: Well, thank you so much for coming in, Rosa. I hope that you have inspired lots of the listeners either to engage themselves or if they're academics to encourage their PhD students to engage. If people want to find out more, where should they be looking? Rosa: So first and foremost, look on the Brilliant Club website. There's a whole area there about being a tutor. There is a little video, there's some FAQs, there's lots of information. You can also sign up on our website for an information event where you can find out more and come along to a live session. We are on LinkedIn and X and Instagram, so do check us out on any of those platforms. If you've got specific questions, you can also email apply at thebrilliantclub. org to find out more. We'd love to engage with you and if you've got any questions, do just reach out. Vikki: Amazing. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you for such a useful episode. And thank you everyone for listening. I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.
Links I refer to in this episode How to write the thing when you’re struggling to write the thing How to improve your writing with Dr Katy Peplin How to plan your academic writing with Dr Jo VanEvery How to work with the version of you that shows up Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. This is a super exciting week because it is my first client Q& A session. I should have some new theme for that. Anyway, we're not going to have a new theme for that. Stay focused, Vikki. Here we go. People can send me questions. You can send me questions and I will answer them on the podcast. Now I launched this last week and I already have three questions to answer so we are going to go right ahead and answer these questions and they are all clustered around a topic which is even better and it's a topic that comes up so much with my clients and members which is how do I get it done when I don't really feel like getting it done. So we are going to go through three specific questions that listeners submitted to me which are all about getting it done when the motivation is low. If you have questions you want me to answer, I'm going to give you all the details at the end of how you can go about doing that. But essentially get them submitted. I will answer them on a podcast for you soon. So the first question, question one comes from Gill, who is a PhD student in Canada. She is a part time distance learning PhD student. So shout out to all our part timers and our distance learners. And she asks, I struggle most with writing when there is too big a gap between where I am, sitting with my notes, and where I need to be, writing sentences. What do I do? Now, I absolutely love this question, because I think it already shows quite a lot of insight and understanding. Often when people come to me, they say, I'm just struggling to write. I just intend to write, and then I can't write. And if that's where you're at, there's a bunch of episodes on the podcast already about how to write when you're struggling to write, which is one of my early podcasts, and then a couple of episodes, three episodes. Three different episodes with guests, with JoVan Every, with Alison Miller, and with Katie Peplin, all about, writing and getting going on writing. And I'll link those in the show notes for you. However, this is more specific. What I love about it is Gill is showing real insight into the problem here. She says she struggles most when there's too big a gap between where she is and where she needs to be. If you can get specific the way Gill is getting specific with her challenges here, you are already five steps along the way to solving this, even without me helping along the way. So she's showing real insight. She also went on to say, and this is where she's already starting to be curious. She's already starting to figure out approaches for herself. So she says, what I'm slowly learning is that there are several iterations of working my notes to get them from high level sorting by theme down to I want this paragraph to argue point A backed up with evidence points B, C, and D. And essentially here, Gill is answering her own question, which is amazing, which is that often, if we can notice what the real problem is, ie that there's a really big gap between sitting with your notes and having coherent sentences, then we can already start to speculate about what the solution might be and what's happening here is Gill is already recognizing that she needs to see that there are several steps. Often we think that if we've got our notes here, we should be able to write paragraphs there. And we get really frustrated when that's not possible and when we struggle with that. We make it mean something about us, rather than making it mean something about our technique. And the technique that we're missing here is this understanding that there's several iterations in between those two points. However, Gill is still talking about struggling with this, so she's gone a really long way to identifying the problem, but let's think about some additional suggestions. So the first thing is, if we're trying to identify these interim goals, we need to be really clear on what they are. So often you hear people say, just write something bad first. And the difficulty is, partly, we're all kind of high achieving people, we don't really like writing things that are purposefully bad. But also, what does that even mean? And how do you then turn something that's bad into something that's good? I think it works better, instead of thinking about it as a bad first draft, try to describe what it really is. So, for example, if you're starting from your notes, you might want to next go to having the one bullet point that sums up what that paragraph needs to say, the one point you want to make. Now, lots of you will say, yeah, but I don't know, I've got all these notes and I don't know what point I want to make. Perfect. We've now identified a new problem. So what we now need to do is figure out what point we want to make. And so what we can then do is set ourselves a different interim goal. So a next step for you might be to write down what you are thinking. So this isn't even a draft to be a bad draft. This is a draft to get it out of your head. This is a draft where we're just saying, I kind of want to say this, but then I don't really think that makes sense. So maybe I should say this instead, but then I don't know whether that links back to blah de blah. So you're literally doing sort of stream of consciousness of your thoughts about these notes. Because if we can get it out of our head and onto a piece of paper, it then is so much easier to do this next iteration, which is to start to pick that apart and kind of go, Oh, well, could be a key point, I suppose. And that could be, and maybe my next step would then be to decide which of those points I want to make, for example. But by really turning it into very tangible steps that aren't just, write the next sentence, write the next sentence, but instead identifying actually different steps that will move you from having your notes to having sentences. You may have seen on my Instagram, if you're not following me, by the way, make sure you are. I have more people on my newsletter than I do on my Instagram, which is a bit strange. So make sure you're following me at the PhD Life Coach. I'm going to be posting much more regularly for reasons I'll tell you about at the end. Anyway, I said on my Instagram recently, a little quote that I came up with when I was coaching some people in my membership last week, which was, if you're struggling to see the light at the end of the tunnel, shorten the tunnel. If you're struggling to think, right, I'm only going to celebrate when this paper's finished, for example, and that feels like a really, really long way away, we need to shorten that tunnel, give ourselves much smaller tasks to do and then celebrate the light on those tunnels. So in this case for Gill, when she's starting with sitting from her notes, that first light, that first short tunnel might be to get from sitting with my notes to writing two pages of whatever comes out of my head, including what I don't know, so that I've got something to work with. And then we celebrate, we enjoy that. And then when we're ready to enter another tunnel, another task, we look at that and pull out, what are three points that I could make, for example. Okay, so we're sort of creating something where it feels like you're going through distinct steps. And many of these steps are just for you. These are not for anybody else to ever read. These are to get your head straight. Now, one of the reasons that so many of you will find this challenging is because people very rarely talk about these steps. And the reason I think for that is partly people who are highly skilled don't understand exactly what they've done to get to be highly skilled. They kind of take it for granted. So have you ever been like taught to drive or anything by somebody who's really good at it? So my stepdaughters, one's just learned, one's about to learn. And my husband grew up on a farm. He's been driving tractors since he was nine. He knows exactly how to reverse a vehicle, reverse a vehicle with a trailer, all sorts of things like that. But he can't explain it to someone who doesn't know. Cause he's just like, well, you just back it up over there. Yeah. into the space. And he can't give step by step notes. And you will find that your supervisors are very similar. They often won't be able to describe the steps they go through in order to write a paper. In fact, especially if they often write on the same topics, they may not even go through all these steps because they can go from vague ideas in their head to a plan, to a draft. They don't need all those steps in between. And then the people that are taking all these steps, the people that are doing postdocs, the people that are at the beginnings of their academic career, or people who are more senior but have always found their writing more stressful, they don't really have the platform to talk about how they do this. And often they do it in a way that's driven by panic and self hatred anyway. They haven't necessarily discovered sort of a fun, iterative process that you can go from notes to an okay draft. So that's why if you're finding this hard, don't worry. No one really teaches this stuff, or very few people teach this stuff. Very few people know it themselves, and even fewer are telling you about it. So don't make it mean anything that you don't know this. The final thing to say is to keep an eye on some of those thoughts. So often when we're describing this stuff, we're talking about things we have problems. We, like Gill, we talk about it as being a struggle. I struggle with writing when there's a big gap. Well, of course you do. That's not a struggle. That's just the process. This is the route that people take to getting writing done, and the fact that you're wrestling with it means you are engaging in an academic pursuit. The fact that you're thinking, oh, shall I say it like this or shall I say it like that? means you're doing the thing. This is not a sign you're doing it wrong. This is the sign that you are an academic. So don't problematize the fact that it takes you a bunch of drafts to write something that sounds half decent. That is literally how it's done. So, for all the rest of you, copy Gill, get really specific about which bit you're struggling with, And then, as I've demonstrated hopefully today, it's quite straightforward to identify steps that you can take to close that gap between where you feel like it's all difficult to actually doing the thing. Let me know whether that resonated with you. So when you send me questions, let me know how you feel about that one as well, how that could get you writing something you're finding difficult at the moment. Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. Now my second question came in the same message from Gill. And this is, my other sticking point is when I feel that the task in front of me will somehow judge work I've already done. And she said yes, I know how that sounds. Don't worry Gill, I totally totally empathise. So today I'm feeling resistance about reviewing my chapter structure because I'm afraid I'll discover I need to rewrite pages of it. Again, so, so common. I'm sure lots of you listening will resonate with that. Especially at the beginnings of our academic career, we really attach our work to ourselves and to our worth. And therefore, if the task we need to do is to pick holes in something that we kind of self identify with, that we think is part of us, that's not a fun job to do. You know, anything where you're critiquing your own performance, isn't fun, if you make that mean lots of negative things about you. So, if by looking at a piece of work that you've done in the past and you're trying to pull it apart to improve it, the narrative that's going on in your head is, Oh God, you should have done this before. Oh God, this is rubbish. I can't believe you rate this so badly. We're going to have to do so much work now. This is terrible. Then of course it's going to feel awful. But I want you to imagine an expert. I want you to imagine somebody who's a high performance in something you care about, so like an athlete or a musician or something, and they're watching their race or they're listening to their performance and they're almost gleefully looking out for things that they're doing wrong because they know if they can identify things they're doing wrong, they can make it better and making it better is what they want to do. I want you to imagine those people in whatever context works for you. That's the vibe we want to bring to analyzing our work. Not looking for mistakes in a kind of, I don't want to find any, because that means I've got to do some work. And that means I've been rubbish and I've wasted time and da da da. But I want to find things I can improve here because I'm going for peak performance. I want this to be as good and as clear and as articulate as I can make it. And it's fun to look for places that I can shave off a bit here and add a bit of nuance there. So that's the first thing is really thinking about how we can change the way we're thinking about this as a task. The second thing kind of takes that on a deeper step. Why is it a problem if you find things wrong with it. And this will differ for different ones of you. Sometimes it's because it feels like a lot of effort. That if I identify that it needs restructuring, it feels like I'm going to have to do a whole load more work and that feels like a lot of effort. Other times it's because we allowed ourselves to believe it was done and now it's going to be a bit disappointing if it's not. Or we're worried that however much we pick it apart, it's never going to be good enough. I want you to identify, really specifically for you, why it's a problem that you might find something wrong with it. And this will differ a bit for all of you. And then what we do is instead of avoiding looking for those faults, instead of avoiding finding the problems, we look after ourselves through that problem. So if you know that it feels like a lot of effort, that's why it's a problem because it feels like so much work to do and that's a lot of time and effort, then you reassure yourself on that stuff. You reassure yourself that we don't have to do it all today, that we're going to support ourselves to get it done, that it could be fun to do a bit more. I remember I took part in a, like, I won a mentor award thingy for fiction writing, last, two years ago, and, um, maybe even three, three years ago. Three years ago. Blimey, time's running past. Anyway, and part of my sort of process through that, reviewing the novel that I'd written, made me realize... I may have told this story before... but made me realize that I needed to write it in first person instead of third person, which meant completely rewriting the whole thing. And I had a feeling that it sounds as though you guys have sometimes, where it's like, Oh, man, that's a whole lot of work. But I also knew it was the right thing. And so instead of avoiding it, what I did was I looked after myself while I did that. It made it easy for me to make the changes I needed to. I made it fun. I reminded myself how much better I was making it. And I actually plowed through it pretty quickly. So if you're feeling that judgment, totally, totally get it. Think about why it's a problem and think about how you can support yourself through that. What do you need to say to yourself so that it doesn't feel quite so bad to need to rewrite the things you've done? Finally, just as an aside, let's just start from the place that you're going to have to rewrite this more times than you think. Because part of the problem here is when we kind of set ourselves up our expectations that a first draft, once we've done a first draft, all we'll have to do is tweak it and it'll be fine. Let's just not start from that place. Let's just start from the place that I'm going to rewrite this ten times and that's fine. Because actually, if we just get on with that, like I did with my novel, if we just get on with that, you can actually get it done way faster than if we're procrastinating even looking because we're scared of what we'll find. Let's just look. Get on with it. Look after ourselves as we go. Let me know what you think about that question, whether that's brought up other questions for you. And then the third question came through on my podcast. So you may have noticed in your podcast app, I'm going to find it on my phone so that I can show people who are on YouTube. Cause if you don't know, these podcasts come out on YouTube as well. Anyway, if you go, wherever you get your podcasts. So here, I'm just showing you, um, on the screen, it says PhD Life Coach, it's got last week's episode up, and then it says, send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show. And if you click on that, then it takes you through to a form that you can fill in and it sends me questions. Now, the only downside, and I have to apologize to the person who sent this, if you don't put your name in it, I don't get any contact details. So this is an anonymous PhD student who the app tells me is based in the UK, but beyond that, I don't know who you are. So, apologies for not being able to shout you out by name. In future people, if you want to get shouted out by name, you want to know it was you, then please do leave your name in the message as well. Anyway, this person has said, I keep saying that I'll do the work when I feel motivated, so I keep trying to find ways to motivate myself. So, could you answer something like, how to get stuff done when you feel unmotivated? Now, this is a huge one, this one I actually have an episode planned for in 6 8 weeks, something like that um, but I'm going to give you some quick tips now. And the first one might sound counterintuitive. The first one is, why are you expecting Did you guys hear Marley shake then? That noise was my Labrador shaking because it is nearly an hour till tea time and therefore he's clearly starving to death. He'll be fine. Chill your beans. So, the first step might sound counterintuitive and that is asking yourself why you expect to feel motivated. Now, I remember talking about this recently, and I can't remember whether it was on a podcast, whether it was in a membership call, so do apologize if I'm repeating myself, but I think it's useful for everybody to remember this, is that motivation doesn't have to be feeling super excited and like really wanting to do it. Often, I think people expect to wait until they feel motivated because on the times that they have done that, everything's felt so much easier. But I promise what feels enormously easier is to learn to do things when you don't feel motivated. Even just remembering that you don't need to feel motivated in order to do the thing can help in and of itself. Because when your brain says, I don't want to, you can go, okay, that's alright, I know you don't want to. That's alright, we haven't got to argue with that. We are going to do it. You don't need to want to. Okay, so even just remembering that there is no need to feel motivated can really help with getting on with stuff. Another little trick, like mental trick that I use when I need to do something that I don't feel like doing is I remind myself what the genuine alternatives are here, because often the only two alternatives we give ourselves are I do this thing, which I don't want to do, or I don't do this thing that I don't want to do and I do something else instead. That's more fun. I eat, I scroll on social media. I go talk to my friends, whatever it is. Okay, so we let ourselves be in this world where those are the two options. Do the thing I don't want to do, or don't do the thing and do something fun instead. And in that case, with those two choices, obviously, we're going to pick don't do it. Unless you're one of these very disciplined people, in which case you're probably not listening to this podcast. We allow ourselves to believe that those are the two options, when in fact that's not true. Our two options are do the thing we don't want to do, or sit here having a massive negotiation with ourselves about whether we're going to do it now, or later, and why we don't really want to do it now, but we probably should do it now, and have a massive old blimmin debate about it with ourselves. That's an option. Or we have the option, which is that we decide not to do it now, but we still need to do it later. And that option often comes with a whole bunch of self recrimination. Now, obviously, we can manage our own minds. We've been learning about this stuff for a long time now. And so there could be an option over here, which is, I decide to do it later, I'm completely fine with that decision, and when it comes to doing it, I then do it. We quite like that option too, if you can pull that option off. But what we want to do is be at one extreme or the other. We either want to be, we do it now, even though we don't want to do it, or we don't do it now, we don't beat ourselves up about it, we decide when we are going to do it, and when that time comes, we get on and bloody do it. Okay. Except most of us don't go for either of those. We go for the bit in between where we negotiate with ourselves. We argue with ourselves. We don't do the thing we don't want to do, but equally we don't do the thing we do want to do because we kind of half arsely sit around our desk as though that counts. Or, we decide we're not doing it, but we beat ourselves up about the fact we're not doing it, we dread the day we have to do it, and we turn it into this bigger deal, so that when we are meant to be doing it next time, it's even harder to motivate ourselves to do it now, because not only is it a task we don't want to do, it's now got a whole bunch of shame and guilt thrown in for shits and giggles. Excuse my language, feeling feisty today. We'll go with it, this is an adult podcast. Okay. That's the bit we want to avoid. And so sometimes when I'm thinking, I really don't want to do this thing, I remind myself that I don't want to have not done this thing either. I really don't want to do this thing, but I don't want to have not done it either. I don't want the consequences. I don't want the stupid arguments in my head. I don't want the need to coach myself through the fact that I didn't do what I said I was going to do. You know what? It's less painful just to do the thing and I'm going to do the thing. When we remember that self negotiation is the most painful part of this process, it is often easier to just do the thing. My final tip is remember there is a difference between the energy it takes to do a task and the energy it takes to start doing a task. Often what we're lacking is initiation energy. Actually, once we start doing something, it often gets quite a lot easier. That's something else I want you to remember and I want you to remind yourself of. It's the initiation energy that's painful most of the time, that bit of energy that requires you to start writing, to think about what you're going to do and so on. But once you get going, it's usually easier. If you can remember that, it's a lot easier to then get started because you're reminding yourself it's actually only a short burst of willpower that's needed here. Only a short burst of kind of self talk and geeing yourself up to do it. Because once you get going, it's almost always easier to do it. Okay. Remind yourself it's only initiation energy. In the longer term, we can think about ways to build your motivation, ways to make tasks more intrinsically motivating. And as I say, I am going to cover that stuff, but I want you to start, whoever sent this to me specifically, at the moment, I want you to start Forget trying to make yourself motivated. Try to work on doing things when you're not motivated. All the rest can come later. I really hope that you guys found that useful. I loved answering these questions, so please do send more. You can do it if you're on my newsletter. You can send them in, just by replying to the email and I will always give priority to my newsletter crew so make sure you're signed up for that, but also if you're just a podcast listener, that's cool. I get it. You've got to get to know me first. Make sure you press the send Vikki a question button. Let me know your question. Let me know your name, maybe where you are in the world. What stage of your PhD you're at. That would be amazing. And I will answer all your questions in the future too. Anyway, let me know how you get on with getting things done when you don't really feel like it. Thank you all for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.
Links I refer to in this episode Why we all need to be more intentional and resourceful Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast and today we are back to our be your own best boss little series. So those of you who listen regularly will know that over the last couple of months I've been doing episodes where I think about what qualities we need in order to be better bosses for ourselves. This is all based on the notion that how we speak to ourselves and how we treat ourselves is really important, not just for what we get done, but also how we experience doing our PhDs and working in academia, and often we're not doing this well, right, often we're being judgmental bosses, we're being confusing bosses, we're being one minute very kind of indulgent bosses and the next minute very disciplinarian. And it doesn't have to be like that. We can learn, it is a skill and a practice to develop the ability to lead ourselves in a way that's more effective and that feels better. Now I have a whole online course about this to be your own best boss course which will take you through the whole process of identifying what sort of boss you're being to yourself at the moment, and then developing the habits that you want in terms of self talk, planning, organization, reviewing, and generally achieving success. Now I identified 10 qualities that I think all good bosses should have, whether it's your actual boss, or in this case, the boss you're being to yourself. And I've been talking about those in these series of episodes. So you may have heard me talk already about being more compassionate and more curious. There's another episode about being more encouraging and accepting. And then a third about being more intentional and resourceful. If you haven't listened to those yet, don't worry, you don't have to listen to them all in order, but I would recommend that you go back and find them. I'll link to them in the show notes on my website phdlifecoach. com. Today, we're going to be thinking about two that I think link together really well, and that is being more strategic and being more ambitious. And if you hear those and go, Oh, no, that's not me. That's not my vibe at all. Please stay with me. Trust me. I am going to define strategic ambitious in ways that I think will feel good to all of you. And I hope by the end of this episode, you'll not only see why I think this is important, but also understand how you can implement this in your own life. I'm going to follow the same structure as before, where I talk about what I mean by strategic and ambitious, what circumstances I think it's useful to have these qualities, what thoughts you need to have in order to be strategic and ambitious, what feelings those thoughts will generate, what actions they'll allow you to take, and what results they'll allow you to achieve. And the reason I use that structure for those of you who aren't familiar is that's the self coaching model. This notion that our thoughts create our feelings, our feelings create our actions, and our actions create our results. If you want to hear more about that, again, I will link to an episode where I talk you through how you can use that model to coach yourself and help yourself achieve any goals that you want to achieve. But I structure these episodes around that, so that we've got a really concrete plan about how we can implement this stuff into our lives. So let's start by thinking about being more strategic. Now, one of the things we all know about academia is there's just too many things to do. There are so many options. You could do this study or that study. You could go to this conference or that conference. You could volunteer for this, volunteer for that. So many things. And often, it feels as though you have to do all of those things in order to succeed. And we all know that what happens when you try and do all of them is that we end up exhausting ourselves and not doing any of the things as well as we could do. Now, in the last one of these, I talked about being intentional, and that was about choosing our behaviours as well. But the difference with being strategic is we're choosing our behaviours not just on the basis of what feels good and what aligns with what we want, but we're also choosing our goals and behaviours in terms of what aligns with the organisation or powers or people that can influence our careers. So for example, when you're strategic, you're choosing which activities you take partly on the basis of which ones you want to do, but also on the basis of which ones are likely to be recognized by your examiners, which ones are likely to be recognized by reviewers, by promotions panels. It's understanding that whether you're a PhD student, academic, or a senior professor, you are part of an institution, of a discipline, of a sector that has particular priorities. And when we can understand those priorities, we can choose which things to spend more time on. Sometimes being strategic can sound a little bit self serving. It can sound a little bit like we're sucking up. We'll do whatever the big man wants us to do. And it doesn't have to be like that. It can be like that. Some people do that form of strategy. I like to think of it as a Venn diagram where you've got a circle of all the things that you care about and that you want to spend time doing, and you have a circle of all the things that the organization wants you to do, whether that's for your qualification or for your job, and what we're interested in is finding the places that overlap, finding the places where the things that feel good and important to you overlap with what feels good and important to your organization so that we can strategically put our efforts in those places most so that not only do we enjoy what we're doing, we value what we're doing, but that we get the recognition that we deserve. Does it mean that you can't do some of the things that are just for you? Things that you think are important, but your organization, your supervisor, whoever it is, doesn't seem to value. No, of course not. You can do whatever you want, but choose it mindfully. Choose it knowing that you're doing those things because you think they're morally important or you think they're important to your discipline and you recognize that they're not things that shift the needle in terms of your actual career progression. That's fine. You get to pick that. We're people. We are not just career building machines. You get to do whatever you want here, but do it knowingly. Don't sit over there doing all the things for all people and then wondering why you don't get any recognition for it. So if you can be a more strategic boss for yourself or develop your understanding of strategy, then we start to recognize and understand some of the complicated structures there are in academia and then decide how and when our goals align with those and what we need to therefore do in order to achieve our professional goals. So, in what situations, what circumstances is it useful to be more strategic? Well, I'm thinking about things like if you're asked to take on a new role, whether you're asked to be a postgrad rep, or whether you're asked to be a head of department, or whatever it might be. That sort of thing, where you're choosing whether or not to take on a role. I think it's important to be strategic when you're choosing which goals you're going to focus on. We get to be strategic when we're going to new events. Now again, this doesn't mean going and being that networking weirdo that only wants to talk to important people, not everybody else. But being strategic when you're choosing how many of the sessions you go to, which sessions you go to, whether there are specific people that you want to try and speak to for specific reasons, we can be strategic around all of that. And if you want more help with networking, again, I'll link in the, in the show notes, but I did a really good interview with Dr. Jen Polk about networking. So do check that one out. The fourth circumstances I came up with is when you're invited to get involved in a project. Whatever level of academia you're in, you might get asked to collaborate on something, to contribute towards something, and you get to decide. Often we don't see it as a decision, right? It's just like, oh my god, thank you so much for asking me. But if people invite you to do those things, it is a decision, and you can be strategic when you decide whether you're going to do them or not. It's those sorts of circumstances. That's not an exclusive list, but it's that kind of thing. And what thoughts would I try and generate if I was trying to be a strategic boss to myself? It's things like, I can decide where and if this fits with my other commitments. So it's that acknowledgement that there's choices to be made here and you get to choose. It's reassuring yourself. Things like, I don't have to do it all. I need to choose what things I do do, but I don't have to do it all. It's thoughts like, at the moment, I'm focusing on X, so that other thing can wait. And again, I feel like I'm sending you off to loads of other episodes here, but I think there's so much good stuff on here for you. I also had an episode about thinking of your career in phases and this can really help with this idea that I'm focusing on this thing now and I'm doing that thing later. That's a thing for after my PhD. That's a thing for after the teaching term's done or whatever. The final thought that I think is really useful is accepting that sometimes we need other people to help us navigate this stuff. So it's thinking things like there are people that will help me understand what I need to do and how to take these next steps. Universities can feel like really complex, weird, arcane places, and understanding that there will be people, they may not be the people you're directly around day to day, but there will be people who can help you navigate that, is part of being a strategic boss. You don't have to know this all yourself. You just have to know that these things exist and that there are people who can help you figure this out. Now, if you think thoughts like that regularly, I think you'd end up feeling emotions like calm and committed and focused, and maybe even relieved because you're not chasing your tail. You can choose what you're doing. And if you're feeling all those emotions, I think you take actions like reaching out for advice, getting clearer on your goals so you can check you're aligning with them, getting clearer on the goals of your organization or your degree so that you can choose how much you align with them, saying no to things that don't align with your priorities or that don't serve your current goals. And doing some things well, instead of trying to cram everything in. And I think the results of those actions would be things like a streamlined work plan, a calmer work life, clearer progress towards goals that you actually know why you're pursuing them and getting advice that will actually help you implement all of this. So I want you to think, to what extent do you think you're a strategic boss already? Is this stuff that kind of comes naturally to you or it seems a bit of a mystery? If it seems like a bit of a mystery, don't worry. That's really common. Especially if you have any demographic characteristics that means that higher education doesn't reflect you as much as it could. It's not unusual to feel like you don't know any of this stuff. That doesn't stop you being strategic. I want you to identify ways that you're already being quite strategic. I know you all will be to some extent. And to think about things that you could do that would make it a little bit easier to be a little bit more strategic in future. Now, the second part of this is going to be thinking about being more ambitious. And again, this is another word that people can make sound quite negative sometimes. I remember once I got criticized for being ambitious. I was talking to somebody quite senior about some ideas that I had and there were quite a lot of things that I was keen to do, and he was like, You're quite ambitious, aren't you? And I was like, I don't know how to reply to that, because, I mean, kinda. But also, you make it sound like that's a bad thing, and I don't quite understand why. It was almost a, you don't have to worry about all of that, dear, sort of vibe. And it was definitely not how it was intended. The person who said it was very, very well intentioned. But it was still this slight negative, and I think particular sectors of society, women, people of colour, will experience being called ambitious differently than other people. Now, again, in this, I'm not talking about being ambitious in any negative sense. I'm not talking about being ambitious in the sense of squashing other people to get to the top or any of those things. I'm talking about being keen to achieve the things that you want to achieve. To reach your definition of success. That you are someone who strives towards things that are important. And importantly, somebody who's willing to face proximal challenges. So stuff that's happening now. So feeling uncomfortable, working hard, feeling embarrassed, potentially all of these things, you're willing to risk those proximal challenges in order to achieve your broader goals. Those broader ambitious, that's what being ambitious means in this context. Circumstances where I think it would be good to be ambitious are when you're trying to decide whether to do something that feels difficult. Often we allow the fact that it feels difficult to say, well, maybe I shouldn't, maybe I'm not quite ready yet, maybe later. When actually if we can be ambitious and we can be like, you know what, I'm willing to do something that's difficult in order to achieve these important goals, then that's us being ambitious. I want you to be more ambitious when you're worrying about whether you're good enough to do something or not. We so often compare our insides with everybody else's outsides and we say, surely there's somebody better for this role. Why? Why not you? In fact, that's a great thought to have. Why not me? Why shouldn't I do this role? I want you to be ambitious when you're thinking about middle to long term goals. Often we're over ambitious when it comes to what we can get done in the next hour or the next day, but we're really unambitious in terms of what we can get done in the next three months or the next year. Be ambitious when you're setting your goals, you're setting the things that you think you can contribute to the world, when you're deciding on your definition of success. There's uncomfortableness in any goal. If we pick silly little goals, there'll be uncomfortableness around, Oh, maybe it's not good enough. Maybe I, you know, maybe I didn't try hard enough. Maybe I should have done more. There's uncomfortableness in going for ambitious goals. So if there's uncomfortableness either way, why not be ambitious? Why not set our sights high and try and make that happen? Now, there's a whole bunch of thoughts that you can have if you're being a more ambitious boss to yourself. And this is things like, I've done difficult things before. So this is about reminding ourselves of our capabilities. I have the capacity to learn to be good at this. We don't have to already think we can do it. So often people won't take on a role because they're not sure if they can do it. And I'm like, dude, if you can already do the whole role, don't take on the role. How boring. Do a role for the next three years that you're already sure you can do? Dull. Take on a role that you think you can learn to be good at by about the middle of your term. So at the beginning, you'll be a bit like, this is hard. In the middle, you'll be like, you know what? I think I can do this. And by the end of the three years, you'll be like, yeah, I'm kind of done with this now. This is, this is straightforward for me now. That's perfect. So I have the capacity to learn to be good at this. Remind yourself that you're willing to be uncomfortable. So that you can achieve your goal and remind yourself there's going to be uncomfortableness regardless of what you decide. So you may as well choose the ambitious goal. Reassure yourself, you have something important to offer. I saw a lovely interview with Kamala Harris, where she was talking to a young girl about public speaking. And she was saying, you might be scared. You might be nervous when you're public speaking, but the audience needs to hear your ideas. So we have to be willing to be uncomfortable, willing to have that period of time where we're doing something that makes us nervous so that people can receive our ideas. And I just loved that as an approach to nerves. It's not that you have to not be nervous and it's not that you have to make all of that go away. We have to be willing to experience it so that people can get the benefit of the things that we have to say. We have to remind ourselves that this thing, this thing that feels difficult, is the next step, is the next step to achieving the goals, the things that are important to us. And we have to remind ourselves that it is safe for us to put ourselves forward for it. And we can know it's safe by pledging that we will look after ourselves, that if we go for these ambitious goals and then we fail, we don't reach them in entirety, we will be kind to ourselves. We won't beat ourselves up for having attempted it in the first place. We won't tell ourselves we were stupid for even considering having gone for it. We'll be kind to ourselves, whether we succeed or whether we fail or anything in between, because that's what makes it safe to have ambitious goals, knowing that you will be okay, whatever happens. And the final thing is to have that glimmer of what could be. It's that whole cheesy, you know, the little motivational things you get on Instagram that are like, um, you know, yes, what if you fall? But what if you fly? I want you to keep the thought this could be amazing. Imagine, imagine if this all goes well, imagine if we achieve this goal, how amazing that could be. And if we think thoughts like this, we might at minimum feel resolved. If we're thinking thoughts like I'm willing to do the difficult things, then we might feel resolved. And we might feel willing to do the stuff. But we might even get glimmers of excitement and hope and optimism and meaning by trying to achieve ambitious goals that actually we've selected intentionally, we've aligned strategically and now we're supporting ourselves to achieve. That might feel amazing, mightn't it, don't you think? Now, if you're feeling excited, hopeful, willing, resolved, you might put yourself forward for a challenging role or opportunity that you'd perhaps been a bit worried about. You might make a suggestion for how things could be improved, step up to be the one that makes things better. You might start planning out a route that even if that goal feels like a really long way away over there, you might start planning a route to getting to it. And you might start visualizing what it would be like to actually be someone who can achieve those goals. And I want you to notice the two different types of results that are out here. One is achieving the goals. That is one amazing result. That you go off and do those things that you dreamed of. But the other result, and this result is even more important than the other result, is that you have become somebody who can do difficult things. By being ambitious and then putting in the work to try and achieve that goal, you become somebody who can do difficult things. Who can take steps towards an ambitious goal. And the one I love about that result more than anything is that it doesn't matter if you achieve your goal or not. If you set an ambitious goal, you work hard towards that ambitious goal, you coach yourself through that process, then regardless of whether you get to the actual specific ambitious goal or not, in the end, you have become someone who is willing to be uncomfortable, who is willing to do difficult things, who is willing and able to learn, who can take themselves through these things of believing that it's possible, even when it doesn't feel like it is, and who can get really close to achieving their goals. Becoming that person sets you up to do everything in the future. I want you to think about yourself at the moment. How ambitious are you at the moment? What ways are you already ambitious and what tiny ways could you be a little bit more ambitious? Is there an ambition? Is there a goal that you've been worrying about or avoiding or thinking, there's no way I could do that? How could you make it a little bit easier to believe that it might be possible and to start supporting yourself? I really hope you found today useful, been thinking about being more strategic and more ambitious. Do go back, check out the three others where we were thinking about those other six qualities. We've got two more coming in a few weeks time. If you want any more support with this, I have my Be Your Own Best Boss online course where I take you through all of it. But if you're someone who's like, yeah, I could buy the course Vic, but I probably won't finish it, then maybe you do better in a community setting, in which case check out my membership program, because not only do they get all the coaching and the support, they also get access to all the online courses, so you would get Be Your Own Best Boss for free as part of that membership. You can find out all about it in the phdlifecoach. com. You can contact me through the website if you have any questions, you can find me on Twitter at Dr Vikki Burns, on Instagram at The PhD Life Coach. And if you already get my newsletter, you can always reply to that with any questions. If you're interested in the membership, I can set you up with a free seminar so you could come and see it in action. So let me know if you want to try that. I hope today has been useful and I've got your brain buzzing about what goals you could achieve this year. Thank you all for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.
Links I refer to in this episode How to use the Do Know Don't Know List How to break your work down into chunks How to use Role Based Time Blocking I've noticed a lie that a lot of my clients are telling themselves. And it might sound a little bit harsh to accuse my clients of lying. I don't mean they're actively misleading me, but I do think they're misleading themselves. And maybe you guys are misleading yourselves too. The lie I hear is that I can't get into my work unless I've got a big chunk of time. It's the clients who are convinced that if they only have an hour, it's barely worth starting because they need to get into it and flow doesn't come unless they've got all day. It's usually the same clients who are struggling to find those big chunks of time because other things come up or get in the way. And the irony is that I also hear from lots of clients that when those big chunks of time finally come up and you're like, yes, I can actually get some stuff done. I'm going to get in the flow. Today is the day. That somehow those hours disappear and we don't do all the things that we said we would be able to do in those big chunks of time. And the reason I call it a lie is because even in those big chunks of time you're doing the work one block at a time. It might feel easier sometimes if you can hit that kind of magical flow where things come easily but an eight hour day is still a series of one hours. And what that means is there's nothing except your thoughts preventing you from using these smaller blocks of time. Now. This episode is not about chunking your work. That episode already exists. Go back and check it out. I'll link it in the show notes for you, but instead it's about getting started. The reason I told you about this lie to start with is because this is one of the reasons why people struggle to get started. They struggle to get started because they're telling themselves that it isn't long enough, that there isn't a big enough chunk of time for them to do anything meaningful. It's just a really good example of how our thoughts sometimes prevent us getting started on the tasks that we want to do. So in today's episode, we're going to think about some other thoughts that get in the way of starting, and I'm going to give you three specific tools that you can use to get started. I'll also refer you back to some other podcast episodes that are going to help as well. There's tons of support for you here. Hello and welcome to episode three of the third series of the PhD Life Coach, and we are talking about getting started on a task. As I said, first we're going to identify some thoughts that make it more difficult to get started, and one of them is that I don't have enough time to do anything meaningful. If we believe that, we make it true. We start slowly and indecisively. We warm up on things that maybe don't really need doing. And suddenly it's an hour and we haven't even got into it. And now we need to be somewhere else and we've wasted our time. We make it true by believing that it can't be useful. I was recently chatting with one of the clients in my membership about this and she really believed that she needed time to gradually warm herself up into working and that that meant these shorter bursts of time just weren't enough for her. And I can't remember how we... I love an analogy. I mentioned last week that I'm really creative. I love an analogy. And it made me think of tennis lessons. I want you to imagine that you went down to tennis lessons at your local sports centre and you turned up for the lesson. And the person said, Yeah, the thing is, we need to do backhand and forehand and serve, and we need to do ground shots, and we need to do volleys, and we need to do placement, and we need to do footwork. So I don't think it's worth us having this lesson. Um, come back when you've got a full day. How, how would you react to that? I think if you were anything like me, you'd be like, well, we could do a bit of it, perhaps. You know, and it's not that they're lying, you know, to play tennis, you do have to work on all of those shots, but do we need to work on them all in this hour? Does that mean it's not worth working on any of them in order to have a tennis lesson? No. Obviously not. We would pick one bit and we would do that bit and we would come back next week and do some more and we wouldn't wait until we could play eight hours of tennis in one day. When we think of it like that, suddenly it becomes obvious, well of course I could just do a bit of it. We could get a bit better at one part of it, but somehow when we're thinking about our thesis, it doesn't feel like that. Now, the client that I was talking to, we were also talking about the need to warm up, that sometimes she likes to do some emails, do some reading, kind of get herself in the mode for writing, and that often by the time she's done that, suddenly the time she'd allocated to writing had gone away. And again, we went back to that tennis lesson and I thought, well, okay, what if you turned up to this lesson this time? They don't send you away. They're like, okay, you're here for an hour, but they tell you about the importance of warmup and they get you a bit warmer. And then we start doing something easy. We start doing a little gentle rally or something like that across the net. And And you just kept doing that until the end of the lesson. And you were like, well, hang on, what happened to the tennis? I came because I wanted to do some drills, I wanted to play some games. And they said, yeah, yeah, but we had to warm up. And you said, well, yeah, I know, but I came for an hour's session and we haven't done any of the things that we said we'd come for. And they said, yeah, yeah, but we have to warm up. You know, takes us a while to get into it. And again, I don't think you would be paying for that tennis lesson. I don't think you would be returning to that coach. Because we might say, well, yeah, okay, maybe I need a warm up, but maybe I need 10 minutes and then we get going anyway. Is it the most perfect warm up ever? No, but we could warm up by playing tennis. How about that? How about we do just enough warm up that we don't injure ourselves, we kind of get vaguely in the mode, and then we hone the rest of our warm up, do the rest of it while we're actually playing tennis, i. e. the thing that we came to do. And again, the same is true in writing or in any of your kind of harder academic pursuits. Sure, if you want to start by doing 10 minutes of reading, 10 minutes of editing, okay. But why are we allowing that to turn into 50 minutes? Because that's when warm up becomes procrastination. That's when we're not getting into it, we're avoiding it. And one of the things I suggest, if you're someone who feels like you need to break into it gently and you sometimes get sucked into, okay, I'll just answer a few emails to get in a work mode, and then suddenly it's two hours later. If that's you, it's okay. That's understandable. But I also have a suggestion for you, and it builds on that tennis analogy. I'm an ex sport scientist, and one of the things that we know is that the way you need to warm up for a sport is with movements that are relevant for that sport. You wouldn't warm up in the same way for a gymnastics meet as you would to play football, for example. That very first bit of just getting your heart rate up may be, but beyond that you want to be mirroring movements that you're likely to be making in that sport. But we do them more gently, we do them more slowly, and we do them so that they're not at the extremes of your range of motion. You can do the same when you warm up for writing. Instead of warming up for writing by doing some other academic task, like answering emails or reading papers, warm up for writing by writing slowly, gently, and within the realms of what you know. i. e. not at the extremes of your range of movement, your range of knowledge. So instead of distracting yourself by doing something that maybe gets your brain going, but doesn't actually get you into this task, Write a gentle paragraph on something you do already know about, without worrying too much about whether it's good or not, this is a warm up after all. Just write a quick paragraph about the topic that you're about to write on. Give like a little rough introduction to what you're about to say. Warm up by doing the thing you came here to do. Warm up by playing tennis, by writing, rather than disappearing off over there and doing something that feels a lot more manageable but doesn't move you towards your goals. Other lies we tell ourselves are that we don't know where to start. Now, I've mentioned this in previous podcasts, but I'm going to reiterate now because I think it's really important. I want you to always be clear between the difference between don't know, i. e. lacking information, and don't know, i. e. haven't decided. And where you're starting on the piece of work that you're doing is almost always a haven't decided issue, not an actual I'm missing information issue. And that's because it doesn't really matter where you start, you just need to start somewhere. And that means you just get to pick. So again, if you're struggling to start and you're telling yourself you don't know where to start, Remind yourself that this is a decision to make, not something that you don't know. And again, I was talking to a different client in my membership about this as well, this idea of making decisions. And her decision was around where she was going to go to work, whether she was going to work at home or work at the library. And she often procrastinated making the decision, wasted time, and then kind of didn't really do either. And one of the things that I reminded her is not deciding is a decision. So if you've got a piece of writing to do and you haven't decided yet where to start and you allow that to mean that you don't start yet, you do something else instead, that means you are deciding not to start. It's not that you haven't made a decision. You had a choice. You could start with this, or start with that, or start with this other thing, or you could not start. And at the moment, you're just not starting. That is a decision. Same as for this client. If you don't decide that you're working here, or you're working there, then you're deciding that you're not working. And that's not, again, not to beat up on you. I'm never trying to beat up on you. But I want us to take responsibility for lack of decision making being a decision in itself. Another thing we tell ourselves that doesn't help is that I'm not ready to start yet. I don't know enough to start yet. Again, all lies. I want you to listen to my episode about the Do Know, Don't Know list as a tool that will help you with this if you're feeling like you don't know enough. That will help you get really specific about what you do know and that you don't know. And I just want you to be mindful of the fact that usually when we're telling ourselves we don't know enough to do it yet, it just means we're a little bit scared and we just need to be a bit more supportive to ourselves, not that we're not ready to start. There's probably a whole load of other thoughts. Tell me, let me know. You can either respond, if you get my email newsletter, you can respond by email or if you just listen to my podcast, if you go to the place where you get your podcast, you'll see a send Vikki questions button. Let me know -what other things do you find stop you from getting started on your work? Because what I want to spend the rest of our time on is thinking about what can you actually do aside from coaching yourself on those thoughts, which is a really important element of this, what tangible steps can you take in order to get started on a piece of work that you want to do? My first tip is to separate finishing what you're currently doing with starting on the task. Now, let me tell you what I mean by that. Often what I'll find is it's the morning, I'm having my breakfast, I'm scrolling on my phone, and what I need to do is I need to start work. And I usually know what my task is, because I've usually set that out in advance with my role based time blocking system. Check that out in another episode as well. Um, But I can hear in my brain, as I'm scrolling on my phone, I can hear in my brain, right, you really should be going and doing X now. You know, this is the time you've blocked for that. I can hear myself almost persuading to do it, but I'm still scrolling. And I'm still scrolling. And one of the things that I have found most useful is remembering that we've actually got two different activities here. First activity is stop scrolling. Second activity is start the next thing. This is true whether you're watching TV, whether you're talking to friends, whatever you're doing that you don't want to be doing anymore and you want to be starting work, experiment with stopping that first thing. We don't need to think about starting work yet. We just need to think about stopping scrolling. We need to put our phone down. We need to turn the TV off. We need to stop playing the computer game. Because it's very easy to stay in that kind of parallel world where we're doing the thing and thinking about the work. And that's the worst world because that means we're not doing the work and we're not really enjoying the thing we're in. But if you can separate it out, suddenly it's like, I don't need to think about work. I just need to put my phone down. I can do it. I can put my phone down. Right. Phone down. Let's go. Then suddenly you haven't got all that stuff going into your eyes, whether it's computer games or TV or scrolling, whatever it is. You haven't got all that stimulation coming in. And then it's easier to sit quietly and be like, okay, right. What work is it that we're doing? And again, our task is not start work. Our task is open document. Identify next step, for example. And suddenly when we break it down like that, actually it's much easier to get started. Because we're not thinking about everything at once. You can use this tool. I procrastinate going to bed. I think I've talked about this before. I procrastinate going to bed because I think of it in a whole series of tasks. If you can break it down, put feet on the floor, walk upstairs. Clean teeth, wash face. Then suddenly, actually, if you're only thinking about the next one, it becomes much more manageable. This will be, some of you will be looking at me going, well, surely you just go to bed. Um, any of you , neuro divergent will recognize this. Uh, some of the others of you may as well, but the more you can break it down, the more you can identify stopping one task as one decision, starting the next task as another decision, the easier it is to get started on the next thing. The second tool I want to use, and this is a little mantra that we talk about a lot in my membership, is stay in the room. One of the reasons that starting a task feels complicated, Is because in our brains, we've connected it to 47 other things. I need to do this thing. And then you see that. And then I need to do that. And then I need to send it to my supervisor. And then my supervisor will give me comments. My collaborator will give me comments and I need to respond to those. And then you send them up. But I've also got that other thing and I'm teaching next week. So I need to do that too. And suddenly it's like, well, I can't start on anything because there's 400 things in my brain. We also sometimes spiral into, but if it's not good enough, then they're going to think this. And if, you know, if I can't respond to their comments, then they're definitely going to think I'm an idiot. Maybe I won't even be able to get onto the next thing after all. And we connect it to a load of things about our abilities, our future and so on is the, what we're making it mean. When I can see clients doing this, I can see them taking the one task we want to start and connecting it to all the other tasks and all the things about themselves. I often say, stay in the room with me, just stay here, stay in the room with me. And that's our little shorthand. Let's just stay on this one thing. We need to start this task. That needs to be the one thing. We don't need to think about all those other things. We don't need to think about what's going to happen if your supervisor doesn't like it. We don't need to think what happens if this grant is rejected. We need to stay in the room and focus on this one thing. This is an amazing strategy. If you hear other people spiralling, you can use it. You can use it on yourself. Just stay in the room. Take a breath. Stay here in the room with me. What do we need to do to start this? I find it super calming. I know my clients do too. It enables you to feel the emotions associated with this specific thing that you're trying to do without having to kind of connect it and fix absolutely everything else. We stay here, we start this one task, one thing at a time. My third one's a semi silly one, but I like it and I think it really, really helps. And that is, I think it's useful to have a theme song. You know how in like boxing or wrestling or whatever, I used to watch WWF. Did you guys used to watch that when I was like 16, 17 or whatever in, what would that have been, nineties. And it was Brett the Hitman Hart and Triple H and all that crowd. Please let me know, comment or something. Let me know whether this is just me being ridiculous. Anyway. WWF. They all had their theme music, right? When they came out, they had their theme music. And it like, got them in the mood and they came out all like, feisty. You know what I mean. They came out ready to fight. And I think we can do this. I think we can identify songs, and it can be your very, very personal choice. I am going to share mine with you in a second. It can be your very, very personal choice, but identifying a song which is, uh, right. Let's go. Fight time. We're doing this piece of work. Music. And for me, I think I've mentioned the, the, the playlist before. I'm not sure I've told you the specific song. So, for me, it comes from the Selling Sunset playlist. It's drivel. I'm aware. Very excited. I think there's a new season out on Netflix. Gonna be checking it out soon. They're all like, Power ladies strutting around in their heels and things. Those of you who know me realize that I am very much a trainers and leggings sort of a girl. So it is not my vibe on any level, but there's something about the music that makes me like, yeah, I can do this. And there is one particular song. And for those of you on, YouTube, you will see me in just a second, share it with you on the screen. It's called Strut by Dita I'm now holding my phone out. Apologies for the terrible audio quality. Okay. And it keeps going like that. And so this is me getting ready to start working. I'm getting ready. I've got my document open. Now we start writing. Okay, so it has like a minutes build up into it and now we're going. Now if any of you are going i can't write with music on nor can i but this gets me going and then what happens is i'm typing, that starts to annoy me and i turn it off and i carry on typing okay so this is not me suggesting that you should write with lyricked music on But, choose your song. Choose a song that kind of gets you in a like, yeah let's go, I can do this sort of a mood. Preferably one that builds to like a little bit of a crescendo like that one did, so you know your moment where you start. And let me know what it is. I have a secret goal that I'd love to make a Spotify playlist with all of your songs on. So, if you think of songs, let me know. Either Instagram, PhDLifeCoach, uh, Twitter, DrVikkiBurns. Or, you can send it, where it says ask Vikki a question in the podcast thing, you can send me your song there too. Or reply to my newsletter, because hopefully you are all, all on my newsletter, because every week you will get summaries of these podcasts and loads of other good stuff that you'll have heard about. Let me know, what song gets you ready to get your writing done? Seems like a small thing, but it can super help you go from, uh, I should start, to yes. Let's start. I really hope that's useful. I really hope YouTube's not going to tell me off for having illegal music. So if that bit didn't work, then, ah, sorry. It's called Strut by Dita. Find it on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Check it out. Laugh at my taste in music. It is all good. I really hope that's useful. Have a think. What are you getting started on today? Which of these techniques are you going to use so that you can move even in maybe a small chunk of time that you have available today? Thank you all so much for listening and I will see you next week.
I am just back from walking the dog. I am windswept. It is definitely autumn here in the UK. And that means it's the start of a new academic year. Last week I talked about all the ways that I can support you this academic year. So check that out if you haven't listened to it already. But now I want you to think about how you can support yourself this year. We are going to be thinking about how we can start this new year in the way we want to go on. And we're not going to talk about goals or target setting. Often we start new years thinking about all the things we're definitely going to achieve this time. But instead today I want us to think about some more positive and empowering ways to start a new year. These are based on a workshop that I did last week for my membership students, so the clients that either are at the University of Birmingham or who have signed up as individuals to my membership program, they get access to two workshops a month. And the last one was about how to start as you mean to go on. There was a ton of stuff that we covered in that workshop, but there were some bits that people found really useful that I wanna share with you guys today. Hello and welcome to episode two of season three of the PhD Life Coach, and we are gonna be thinking about positive ways to get this year started. The first thing I want you to think about as we start this new year is how can you harness your strengths this year? So often, and I definitely did this in the past, we spend more time thinking about how can we fix all the things we're doing wrong? How can we get up a little bit earlier, work a little bit harder, be more focused, be more disciplined, do things better than we're doing them at the moment. And very rarely do we stop and think, what am I actually really good at? What comes quite naturally to me? What have I been developing strengths in over time? And how can I use that stuff more? If anything, before I started learning all this coaching stuff and kind of really embedding it in my life, if anything, I was running away from my strengths. Some of my strengths, things like being enthusiastic, connecting with people and stuff, I thought of, in some ways, as being weaknesses that actually they took away from my focus because I was so enthusiastic about stuff, I tended to take on too much, over commit, then maybe not deliver on everything, or at very least exhaust myself trying. And so these things that were strengths, not only was I not really recognizing them as strengths, particularly, sometimes I was thinking of them as weaknesses that needed to be mitigated for. Other times I just didn't even recognize them as strengths. I'm quite creative. I'm quite good at writing in a way that's easy to understand and engaging that sort of stuff. And again, that stuff I didn't even recognize as a strength because I just couldn't see why other people couldn't do that. It felt so easy for me that it that I didn't particularly recognize it as something that I was good at. I want you to have a think about what strengths you have. Things that could help you in your PhD or academic journey that you're not currently using or not currently spending much time thinking about. Now don't worry if this feels a little bit uncomfortable. We're kind of taught not to talk about our strengths. You know, no one wants to be the kind of boasting, big headed person who goes around telling everyone how great they are. But that doesn't mean we can't recognize our strengths. Some of you might even feel like you don't really have any strengths. One of my clients said in the workshop that the problem is, especially when you're doing your PhD or you're working in academia, is the things that you used to think of as strengths, being clever, learning things quickly, everyone around you has them, so they don't really feel like strengths anymore. So if that's you, if you're thinking, you know what, I don't even know what my strengths are anymore, let's just spend a few moments thinking about that. What strengths did you used to think you had? What strengths would your friends and family say you have? Really try and dig into it and identify some things, either that you feel like you're getting lots better at, or that you've always felt that you're quite good at, or you've always found quite easy. Now, even if you do nothing else at all, recognizing these strengths is super useful. Because one of the things we know is that what we pay attention to is what we notice. So if you pay attention to your strengths, you remember you've got them, you remind yourself of them, you're much more likely to notice the times when you use it. Whereas when we're constantly trying to fix our faults, we notice the times that we do things wrong. So even if you don't actively try and use your strengths more, just by thinking about what they are, you're more likely to notice them and more likely to recognize the ways in which you're performing well. But we can go further than that. We can start thinking about how can these make us more effective in our lives at the moment. And effective you can interpret in any way you want. It could be effective in terms of getting more stuff done, being more focused, having a work life balance you enjoy, pursuing work that feels meaningful, however you define effective is completely up to you. But how does your strength and how could your strengths help you to do that? So for example, for me, I know natural enthusiasm is one of my real strengths. It comes across when I'm teaching, comes across when I'm coaching, and it keeps me motivated to do lots of different things. Now I've mentioned it can be a weakness if I let it go kind of unbridled and I just get distracted by lots of things. But when focused, what it can do is it can really remind me why what I'm doing is important and really encourage me to take my ideas through to fruitition. I was so enthusiastic about getting this membership site up and running for all of my members and all my potential new members like you guys, and for getting my online self paced courses all up and online, and my enthusiasm for that really drove me through what was a very busy time getting all the content ready for that. It could have felt like quite a trudge. It was a huge amount of work, but because I was enthusiastic about the topic, I was enthusiastic about how useful it was going to be. I was excited about the idea of you guys using it, then actually it's been really fun. Now I did have support for it and I'm going to talk about that in a future episode. I had somebody helping me with the technical side of pulling it all together. But from my side, I was providing all of the content, the shape of it, the structure, the exercises, everything. And harnessing my enthusiasm has really made this feel like a really positive experience and has got it done in a timeline that I, for a while, didn't think was possible. Another strength I try to bring is that I'm creative. I'm quite good at coming up with either analogies or new models that help people understand concepts. And again, I've tried to use that in the materials that I've been designing for you guys, so that the things I talk about are. are memorable, there's a structure for them so you can actually use them, and people seem to really resonate with that. So I've tried to bring my enthusiasm and my creativity to this work that I'm doing at the moment. Think ahead to your term. What are you doing between now and December? What are the kind of tasks that are on the agenda? And how could your strengths help you to achieve those? I would love to know what strengths you've got. So if you want to share them with me, you can find me on Instagram or Twitter. I'm the PhD Life Coach on Instagram and Dr. Vikki Burns on Twitter. Find me there. Tell me what your strengths are. We are such a hugely talented community and it's amazing to know what strengths we're bringing to the world. The second empowering suggestion I want to make for this year is that we spend some time predicting the future. Now, I went through a whole crystal ball exercise in my workshop. If you're interested to know more about that, it will be available as a self paced course in the next month or two, depending on how my enthusiasm drives me through. We shall see. Um, so it should be available soon, but essentially this is about looking ahead and thinking about what's likely to happen and what we want to happen. And I took my students through a process to identify all of those things so that we can then strategize to maximize the things that we want to happen and to mitigate for or prevent the that we don't want to happen. And we do it with good, like, self insight. Now, what do I mean by that? I mean, you are probably going to be very similar this academic year than you have been in other academic years. And I hope that doesn't feel like bad news. I used to start every academic year, and every calendar year, and some terms, and some Mondays, telling myself that I was going to be different. This time, I was going to be new organized Vikki. I was going to do things on time, in a slower methodical way. I was going to carefully work my way through things. Yeah, that never really happened. There were things where I improved in those directions, but that never happened because I was trying to be someone that I wasn't. When in reality, if we can look nonjudgmentally at what we're likely to do this term, and then from there, decide what we wanna do about that. So I know I'm likely to be enthusiastic, I'm likely to be creative. I'm probably likely to have too many ideas, more ideas than I can implement. I'm probably likely to get behind on some of my routine admin tasks because I do that, you know, it happens. I'm likely to procrastinate a bit. I'm likely to get some work done in a big burst of excitement and creativity. And when I can look at it like that, without judgement, just as a, you know what, I know me. I've lived in this body and brain for a really long time now, and I'm pretty good at knowing how I'm likely to show up. Then we can plan for that version of us. Not changing ourselves into somebody completely different. The world doesn't need you to do that. The world needs you to show up as the best version of you. So then I can start thinking, okay, how can I support myself to use my strengths? Like we just talked about, but also how can I support myself so that the other ways I'm likely to show up, I'm likely to procrastinate. I'm likely to overcommit. I'm likely to get behind on admin tasks, how I can mitigate for those things. I mentioned that I got some support pulling together the membership site. Part of that was me mitigating for those things. It's much harder to procrastinate when you've got somebody who's expecting content from you. It's much easier not to get behind on admin tasks, if you've got somebody doing some of those basic admin tasks for you. So that was me mitigating, for some of the things that I knew I was likely to show up as. And that wasn't straightforward for me. I had to pay for that. And I had to manage my mind about the fact that there was part of my brain that was going, we could just do this. We don't have to spend that money. We were perfectly capable. If we just put our mind to it, we could do this ourselves. And the reason I dissuaded that part of my brain was because I knew that with all my good intentions and all my enthusiasm, technically I could do all those things, but I would probably be battling some of these ways that I was likely to show up. I know for a lot of you, delegation is often not an option. There's not somebody that you can just pay to do things for you. So instead we get to think about other ways that you can mitigate ways that you're likely to show up. So for me, I'm likely to get behind on admin tasks. And one of the things I do to support that is I try and make it as simple as possible to do the admin tasks I need to do. So where I have a clear system. So when I take on new clients, I have an invoicing system, for example, although that's going to go in my new fancy membership site soon. But at the moment I have an old fashioned invoicing system. Because it's very clear, because it's very step by step, I don't actually, I'm perfectly on top of all that. I haven't set up my expenses system anywhere near as well, and I'm not so on top of that. So one of the things I know I need to do this year is set up my expenses system so that it's much easier for me, someone who doesn't particularly like having, is good at it when I do it, but doesn't particularly like it and puts it off and finds it boring and things, I need to make it easier for myself to do those things. Okay, so how can you think about the way that you're likely to show up this year, and think about how you can maximize the ways you're likely to show up that you want, and mitigate for ways that you're likely to show up that you don't want. The final thing I wanted to talk about today is modifying your environment. Now usually those of you who have been with me for a while will know that I often coach around the self coaching model. And one of the key tenets of the self coaching model is that our circumstances are separate from our thoughts. And that it's our thoughts that create our feelings, not our circumstances. So it's not the fact or truth of what's going on around us that influences our emotions, it's the thoughts we have interpreting those circumstances. That might suggest that I don't think modifying your environment can change the way you feel. And in many ways, I don't think it does. I see a lot of PhD students, academics, and I do it myself even now, but certainly in the past a lot, trying to get a sense of feeling calm and in control by tidying their office or coming up with a new filing system or a new task management system. And I know as a coach that the sense of calm or being in control doesn't come from a new tool, it doesn't come from a tidy office, it comes from the thoughts that you're having. However, as a human, I also know that sometimes it's a lot easier to have helpful thoughts if your circumstance, if your environment is conducive to it. So whilst I definitely don't suggest that you spend the start of this year starting completely new reference manager systems and learning, you know, new note taking systems and all of these things I do want you to think, are there simple and quick ways that you could change your environment that would make it easier for you to behave the way you want to behave? Whether it's having a nice thing of water so that you drink more fluid so it's right there and you can get it. I now have to remember to fill it. Those of you watching on YouTube will see, I just flashed my nice, beautiful blue decantery thing at you. That was part of my mission to drink more water. I'm actually not very good at filling it up, so I need to work on that, how I can modify my environment to make that more easy. But how could you change your environment to make it easier? Is there a way to make it easier to find the documents that you need to write, to always know where you're going to start writing? I'm a big fan of the thing where you write at the end of your piece of writing exactly what you need to write next, so that when you come to it, you know exactly what you're doing. What could you change in the place that you work to make it feel more comfortable? Do you get cold and go off because you're cold? Do you need to keep a blanket in there? Do you need to have better lighting so that you don't get a headache? Do you need to arrange to meet with friends so that you get work done, sort of in some company? What can you modify about your environment that will make it easier for you to use your strengths and harder for you to sort of succumb to the things that you find more challenging. I want you to notice my phrasing there. We're not trying to fix anything. We're not trying to stop ourselves doing anything. We're trying to make it easier for us to engage in the behaviours that we want to engage in, and less easy for us to engage in the behaviours that we don't want to engage in. Another example, on days that I want to walk on my treadmill more while I'm working, I work with my shoes on. Because if I've got my shoes on, it's a lot easier for me just to pick up my laptop, go over to my walking pad, and walk while I'm working, than if I have to go off and remember where I left my trainers and come back and then get on. It's a small thing, but it's an environmental modification that makes it a little bit easier to engage in that behavior that I want to. For some of you it might be choosing to work away from home, choosing to work in the library, choosing to work in a coffee shop, or it's about finding a place that's actually a dedicated little work spot for you at home, even if that's only a small zone in the corner of another room. What would make it easier for this year to feel like a good academic year? So we've thought about harnessing your strengths, we've talked about predicting the future and looking for ways to maximise or mitigate the things that we think we're likely to do this year. And finally think about ways that you can modify your environment to make it easier to support yourself, to engage in all these behaviors. This is all about being a good boss to yourself. You're thinking forward, you're thinking, how can I make it possible for the version of me that needs to do this work and the wants to have the life they want to have? How can I make it easier for them to do it? How can I make it feel more fun? How can I make it feel less effort and more engaging? We're planning strategically to make this all feel easier. Now, this episode is going out on the 16th of September, 2024. So if you are listening live, you still just, and I say , , have time to get into my membership before our quarterly planning session, which is on Thursday this week, Thursday the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, Thursday, the 19th of September. So if you join in the next three days, you will be in in time for our two hour workshop on quarterly planning, which is all about deciding what we specifically want out of this quarter. So we'll do a little bit of this, how to make it easier for ourselves, but it's really going to be about decision making and prioritizing around what do we want to exist in three months time that doesn't exist at the moment, and what are going to be the steps to get there. Importantly, we're not just going to set goals. We're going to think about what do we need to think and what do we need to feel in order to take the actions that we need to take to achieve those goals. And it's that holistic approach that is what is going to make this session different from any planning session that you've been to before. So if you want in on that, or if you're already a member, amazing make sure you're there. If you want in on that go to my website phdlifecoach. com Click on the membership at the top and join. As long as you are in by Wednesday you will get access to that on Thursday. There'll be an online self paced version for members only, if you can't make that session. Not going to sell that as a separate product, but it will be available there in the membership. And we're going to do it every quarter. So we're going to do it now planning for the next quarter. And then in three months time, we will do it again, looking back at the last quarter and forward to the next quarter. So if you need that sort of structural support from a live community, then do check out the membership. I really hope you found today useful. Let me know if you have any questions. I'm hoping to do episodes in the future where I respond to listeners questions and things like that. So you can either email back to me from the newsletter, or if you go to your podcast provider, there's a send Vikki a question button. Just click on that. Send me some questions. Let me know what you'd like me to speak about in the future. Hope you all have a lovely week. Thank you all for listening and see you next time. 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.
