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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.
Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Cage podcast. Now, I'm gonna preface this episode with a bit of a disclaimer. And that disclaimer is, I love stationery as much as any of you. You leave me unattended in some fancy stationery store or art supply shop or anything like that, and I'm going to make bad financial choices. I have cupboards full of stationery and craft supplies, beautiful things that are either going to make me organized or are going to be beautiful and I'm going to use them and I love them. I love stationery. However, however, massive however, I am also your academic coach here. I am also here to make sure that you're not wasting your work time doing things that aren't helping you. And that's why this is a pretty short episode. It's nearly Christmas when I record this. Nobody wants to be listening to me whitter about work for 45 minutes. It's going to be pretty short, but I'm here to deliver some bad news. I am hereby banning highlighters. No more highlighters. All of you who are reading and highlighting key passages and telling yourself that you're working. I'm banning them. I'm not usually very dictatorial. People who come to my membership, who come to my coaching sessions, know that I do a kind of non directive form of coaching where we figure out what you're thinking and what you're choosing you want to do. Here, no. I'm just banning them. Ban highlighters. You can use them to decorate around the edges if you want to, but that doesn't count as work. Okay, I'll give you that much. Beyond that, banned. I'm going to give you four reasons why I'm banning highlighters and then you can let me know whether you agree or not, whether you are going to abide by my new ruling. So. First reason is that it is way too easy to highlight way too much of the text. There's something very satisfying about going zzzz, zzzz, across and highlighting things. It's going all in a pretty colour and the pen feels nice and everything. And before you know it, you've highlighted four paragraphs without really fully processing why they're important to you. Okay, there's no barrier to how much you highlight. Whereas if you're taking actual notes, and I'm going to say at the end what I think you should be doing in those actual notes. Whereas if you're taking actual notes, it takes a bit of cognitive effort. It takes a bit of physical effort, especially if you're handwriting it, which I would recommend a lot of the time. And it means you kind of have to be selective, because you can't just write about every single bit of it if you're actually writing it out, or at least there's a kind of time and effort penalty to choosing to do that. When you just highlight, you can highlight way too much, and doesn't force you to be selective, and that is a problem. What we want you to be doing here is prioritizing. We want you to be thinking. We want you to be choosing which elements are most important, not just willy nilly turning all of it purple without really thinking about it. So that's the first reason, it's too easy to highlight too much. The second reason is that when you're highlighting it, you're not processing it in any way. You are merely putting a coloured strip over the top of it. What we want to do with reading is we don't want to just take it in and go, Oh, that's useful. We want to read it. We want to check our understanding. We want to kind of know what it means, summarise it. But we also, really importantly, want to connect it with other things that we already know. Other things that we've read. Other things that we're planning to do, for example. Okay? And highlighting doesn't do any of that stuff. In fact, maybe this is just a me confession. You can tell me whether you do this as well or not. But when I highlight, sometimes I start reading a paragraph and I think oh, this is going to be useful and I highlight the whole paragraph and I don't necessarily read the last few sentences because it's like oh, this whole paragraph is useful and you're almost kind of marking it in some way. It's not helpful. Much, much more helpful to be writing those notes and actually processing it through your brain, connecting it to the other things that you know, and kind of registering it cognitively, rather than almost just marking it for future. The third reason is that when you see highlighting in the future, you have no idea why you highlighted it. Okay, it's orange. Maybe some of you have a fancy colour coding system which perhaps works to some extent, you know, blue for methodological and green for whatever else. But most of the time, you don't really know why you highlighted that thing. So this notion, ooh, I'll be able to find it later. It's just completely misguided. You'll be able to find it, you'll be able to see that it was highlighted, but you won't know why. You know, it's like when you find a random phone number on a piece of paper and you're like, I have no idea who that is or whatever, okay? Just because it's highlighted, it doesn't tell you what you were thinking when you read it. It doesn't tell you why it was important, which bit of your work it was important for, whether it's still important. It doesn't tell you any of those things, just tells you it's green. Green's not helping. That's the third reason. And then the fourth reason is that when you re read that article at some point in the future, you may and probably should be reading it for a different reason. The first time you read something, maybe it's just to get a feel for what the article's about. Maybe it's to get an understanding of the background of the area you're looking at. But maybe the next time you read it, What you really need to do is really understand their methods, because you're going to use methods that are similar to this, and you need to really pick apart exactly what they did, and what controls they used, or what, you know, what ethical considerations there were, or whatever. Now you've got an article that's got loads of orange highlighting all over it, That was from when you were reading it to understand what they found and what the kind of background is. But now you're reading it for methods. Those orange bits aren't relevant anymore. You need to be in a different section and those orange bits, they're going to draw your attention. That's the point of highlighters. And now, they're just a distraction. They're pulling your eye over there when you're reading it for a different function. And, most importantly, even if you're reading it for the same function, you're reading it to fully understand their argument, for example. You are now not the same. Stuff that was important to you when you first read it is not what's important to you now because you know more, you understand more. So those bits that you highlighted because they helped you understand the basics are not going to help you understand the nuances that you're now trying to pull out of it. Highlights become a distraction as soon as you have moved on from the point at which you initially highlighted them. Highlighters are not useful research tools. So what do we do instead? You write. You write stuff. And you don't just summarize what they're saying. That should be a tiny bit of your notes. They did this, they found that, they argued this. That should be a little tiny bit of your notes. I want you to write about what thoughts are you having. What thoughts do you have when you read this? What are you confused about? What doesn't make sense to you? What has it reminded you of? What gaps have you spotted? Where does this connect to something? Where could this influence future work? Where do you wish you'd read this before? You're writing those sorts of things. Almost like a little diary of reading it. Those are the notes that are useful. You're processing it cognitively. You're connecting it together. And when you come back to those notes, you will be able to see what you were thinking then. And so it will be much easier to then interpret it and then to see how different it is from what you're thinking now. That's what we should be doing. It's more effort. Definitely. But it is so much more productive. You won't end the day feeling like, well, I've read a load of stuff. I've highlighted a load of stuff, but I don't feel like I've got anywhere. Cause that's the worst feeling. There is nothing wrong with hard work. All of us came into our PhDs, academia, knowing that we were going to do hard work. The problem with hard work is when you work hard and you can't see an outcome from it. You can't see what good it's and that is what highlighting will do. I am getting very strict. So take your highlighters, do something beautiful with them. That's fine. Create art in your spare time that uses the highlighters that you are no longer using for your research. Let's leave highlighters in 2024 and move on to much more effective ways of reading and note taking. Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. I'm being slightly flippant in all of this. If you like highlighters, figure out a system, but that system needs to have recognition of the fact that you need to process it. It needs to have recognition of the fact that when you come back to it, you want it to make some sense and that you will be a different person coming back for a different purpose. If you can figure out a way to do that with highlighters, Happy days, you go, you do you, but I would suggest ditching them entirely. The one form of highlighting I do allow, and for those of you who are on YouTube, you'll see me holding them up, are these little, tiny, transparent Stickers. So for those of you on the podcast, there may be five centimetres long, something like that, half a centimetre wide, slightly translucent, and mine are blue, yellow, pink and green. These I use not when I'm reading articles, but I do use them to pick out key items in a list. If I've got a list of five things I want to do today, I might put one of these over the top of the one I'm doing right now. And the joy of that, it picks something out specifically, but when it's done, I can take it off and move it somewhere else. So, not as part of the research process as such, but for highlighting specific things, I highly recommend these little stickers. You can find them from all good stationers and the big bad capitalist delivery place that I'm sure most people actually get them from. Thank you so much for listening. If you are listening in real time, I really hope you have a wonderful Christmas and any other festivals that you celebrate. Make sure you have planned some time off, check out my how to rest over the holidays podcast, which was really, really early on in season one, like episode eight or nine in season one, make sure you check it out. Make sure you have decided intentionally when you are working, when you are not working and that you love your reasons for those choices. There are going to be podcasts all the way through the Christmas period. That is not because I'm working. That is because I have planned ahead and got them booked. We have got various guest episodes. We have got a coaching session coming up and then some very important announcements at the beginning of January. So as they pop up, do not fear, I am not working. They are entirely automated at my end. I will be enjoying time with my family and my friends and my good old dog Marley. And I hope you have a wonderful time too. Thank you all so much for listening and I will see you in a scheduled podcast next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.
Links I refer to in this episode Dr Andrew Dewar (LinkedIn) Oxygen Conservation Andrew’s podcast episode – From Hire to High Performance Radical Candor by Cal Newport So good they can’t ignore you by Cal Newport Stephen Covey’s Circle of Influence Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. And we have another guest with us this week. And I'm always excited to have guests, as you know, but this one is particularly fun because we go way back. We came through the same PhD program, although not at the same time. I'm much older, but, it meant that we've been through the same department and things like that. And I even supervised my guest's wife, which is very exciting. So my guest is Dr. Andrew Dewar from Oxygen Conservation. So welcome, Andrew. Andrew: Thanks, Vikki. It's one of the first times I've been described as particularly fun, so this is going to be interesting. Vikki: Don't do yourself down. Amazing. Right. So, now, the reason I found you and the reason that we kind of got back in touch to do this was obviously I saw you on a podcast that you did for your organization where you were talking about creating positive environments for your employees. And it was one of these things I just randomly, I think it was on LinkedIn, I just kind of randomly came across, and decided to have a listen, because I knew you, and it sounded interesting. And so much of it, I thought was applicable to academia. And that was why, as you know, why I decided to get in touch and ask you to come and talk with us today. And for people listening, maybe you can tell them a little bit first about your background and how you got to doing what you're doing now. Andrew: Yeah, of course. Well, thank you for listening to the podcast. It's always good to hear that people enjoyed it. My kind of root or career history has been quite a jumble really. So you mentioned that we met at the University of Birmingham where I was doing my PhD and I back then thought like that was me, I was going to be an academic and I did a year as a research associate, a year as a teaching associate and then I went for a job and didn't get it and that made me think, do I love academia? Do I love it enough to move away from family or to live in a different city from my then girlfriend now wife? And I thought, do you know what I don't. I felt relieved when I published a paper, but it didn't really spark like joy and loads of pride. And so I started looking for other jobs and there was this one job that said something about qualitative and quantitative data analysis. I was like, Oh, I can do that. And we turned up at an interview and they saw something in me and I worked for a social integration charity and I was leading a team of basically sales people trying to offer this National Citizen Service program to young people. And it was really awesome. The people were great, but it was that first step out of academia was just great to see how, gosh, you can take these skills, transfer them into another situation and really do some awesome stuff. And that just led me to sort of move into different places. You know, I think I'm quite an ambitious person, so I'm always looking to learn and improve. And so that took me to the public sector to do a few different bits and bobs, including business improvement, which I was really fascinated in. That then took me into an engineering consultancy firm to work on megaprojects, to do business improvement, and then cultural work with big programs, which was fascinating. And then that took me into being the Head of People at Oxygen Conservation. Vikki: Amazing. I had no idea you worked for NCS. I volunteered with NCS one summer. Andrew: Oh, very cool. Vikki: We have listeners from all over the world, but so National Citizen Service probably sounds a little more military than it actually is. But National Citizen Service is a charity that takes young people and gives them experiences during their summers, doesn't it? That they wouldn't otherwise get. Amazing organization. Um, tell us a little bit about what Oxygen Conservation do just to put us in the picture. Because I think it's always interesting for people to know, you're a sports scientist like me, how far and broad you can go with quite a specific background. Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So if you think of the starting point was basically sports science and for me, you know, sports psychology. What I now do is support an organization who's looking to scale conservation. And by that, what we mean is, acquiring large sections of rural land and then doing environmental restoration. And that's so wide and fascinating as a concept, but it's things like woodland creation, peat restoration, river restoration, there's some regenerative agriculture in there, there's properties on these big rural estates so people live there long term. We offer some cottages to people or opportunities to come and stay in the more short term so people get to experience the rural environment, and anything else that you would imagine is associated with these rural places and sort of bringing them back to what they were in the past and what they maybe should be in the future, but doing it in a way that's really right for the environment. So it's all focused on having a positive environmental and a social impact. Vikki: Amazing. So the reason we got you here was to talk about this kind of positive environment. So what do you mean when you talk about creating a positive environment for the people that work in this organization? What does that look like for you? Andrew: Yeah, so at its best, it's that people wake up and they think about starting their work day and they're excited to do it. They believe they can do something really great. They think they're part of something that's bigger than themselves, but they also have that opportunity to improve and deliver really interesting work that they love. As well as working with colleagues that challenge them, that have a laugh with them, that they really enjoy being around. Um, and we're all moving in the same direction to achieve the same vision and ultimately help, you know, in our case, it's the fact that climate and biodiversity crisis. Vikki: And what, this might sound really obvious because all those things sound great, they sound exactly what you'd want from a job, but what benefits do you see when you do create that sort of environment? Andrew: I think, yeah, it sounds really obvious, but I think it's really tricky. But the, the benefits that we see are like that spark of creativity between people, you know, when you've got colleagues that you really love working with. I think there's lots of support between people. And I think that ultimately you can achieve really amazing things. And I think more than you could achieve if it wasn't such a positive culture. Um, but there is a big part of performance and maybe we'll get onto that because there's a big positive and like, this feels great. This is a genuinely amazing feeling thing to do, but there's also a performance element around delivery and impact. So you get that, that positive piece as well as enjoying the journey that you're on with people. Vikki: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So let's think about how it applies to academia. So obviously, you know, it's been a while since you were in academia, but you did postdoc roles and things after your PhD, as you said. So what do you think academia could learn from all of this stuff? Andrew: I think, so it's really interesting because people ask me like what can you apply from sports psychology into other settings and I think there's actually very little that I found over my probably last decade doing that that you can't take from sports psychology and apply into business and I think it's a similar concept with business and into academia. I think I would start with the relationship between a supervisor and a student, be that a PhD student or maybe it's a postdoctoral researcher. I think that in business that relationship with managers is so important. Like have you seen all of the research and all of these concepts basically that you join a company because of the vision and the brand and the work that you're going to do, but you ultimately leave a bad boss and your line manager has such an impact on the experience that you have day to day because they can be the most amazing, support and source of motivation and inspiration and, you know, they've got a plan for the future and you want to do that with them. Or they can be uncommunicative, they can put their own interests in front of your own and all sorts of other negative behaviours. So I think the heart of that for me starts with the relationship and I think it also starts with... there's a great concept from Radical Candor, the book by Kim Scott, which is about this. There's a high care for the person and there's a high care for performance. And I think once you've got that relationship at the centre of that, you can then start to, you know, show that you care for that person and also that you want to drive performance. And I think that in academia it is a performance environment. I think it's a really demanding and tough environment. And I think by putting those two things together, then hopefully would help how you will feel the day to day experience. It would alleviate stress, it would, you know, more positive emotions, more excitement, and ultimately probably leading to better work performance in the future. Vikki: And for listeners, we've mentioned a couple of things. We've mentioned the podcast that Andrew was in before, we've mentioned Radical Candor, the book, I'll link these in the show notes, so you'll be able to find all those things afterwards. Andrew: And just on Radical Candor, I say this to every line manager, If you've got folks working in universities and you've got students or you've got people reporting to you, you might shy away from like in a more popular literature, you might be more comfortable with journals. But if you read one book of such, make a Radical Candor. It is basically like line management, you know, the root essence of it, the real stuff that you ought to get right in one book. And it is my go to recommendation for people who start that, or if you've been doing it 10 years and you realize actually nobody's ever trained me to do this, to be a line manager. Read Radical Candor. It's got stuff about individuals, it's got stuff about the wider organization, and some of it's corporate America, which may or may not apply to individual situations where people work in academia. But the vast majority of it's so helpful. Vikki: That's so good to hear because often, you know, there's, there's quite a lot of these books that people talk about and stuff. And coming from the sort of background that we come from and that the listeners come from, you always query how evidence based is this? Is it grounded in something? Is it just waffle that some dude made up. So, yeah, that's a reminder for me, because Radical Candor has lived in my Audible library for quite a long time and hasn't got listened to yet. So I'm going to bump that to the top of my list now. That's amazing. So some of my listeners are academics, so we're going to start there. What are a couple of things that they could do to be that sort of boss that you're talking about? Andrew: I think co creating a vision with the people that you're working with, I think that's such an important part of leadership. Over the years I've been sort of exploring this and thinking about it and the way that I like to break it down is like, an organization defines why you're doing something. Essentially by wanting to be part of that, you join up to that. But the leaders in the organization essentially decide what you're going to do. You know, what are the objectives and what does the future look like? And then other people who are working with you deliver the how, and you give them that autonomy over the how. So in that, what's the why of the organization? Why does it exist and what are we ultimately trying to do? And what's your piece in that why? Do you have a compelling vision for the future? I mean, there's like so many things like In academia, the forefront of knowledge, delivering something incredible, like that's an awesome vision, but I wonder how often, again, this maybe you can guide me here is how often are people coming back to that and reminding themselves of, actually, this is the kind of big questions that we're answering and this is the work that we're doing and moving the world forward. Vikki: Yeah, I don't think they do enough. So I have this, I have a course called how to be your own best boss, and it's all about self management and I talk one section of it is talking about 10 different qualities that you need to be a good boss and keeping that big vision, that sort of why is one of the things that we talk about and then I think you're right. I think in terms of how academics support their students, but also how students manage themselves, it's something we don't do enough. I think we get bogged down in the day to day, I need to read this and analyze that and da da da. And we almost start to take for granted, I think, the thing we're doing, of course, that's what I'm studying, it feels mundane to you in many ways. I see lots of students query whether their research is ever actually going to be useful anyway, you know, because you feel like it's such a small piece of the jigsaw and all of those things, that I think reminding yourself that you are still part of a jigsaw, even if it feels like your bit is small and your bit isn't progressing as fast as you'd like it to , I think is super helpful. Andrew: Yeah, it's really funny because I do a lot of recruitment, screening a lot of CVs and somebody came across, they had a PhD and I don't know why, but I was like, well, I'll look at like the impact factor of their journals to see, you know, was this a kind of a big deal? And they had a number and I was like, well, I've got nothing to bench that against, that's their number. So I looked at my number, it was significantly lower. I was like, okay, so this person's, their research is well read. That's fantastic. That's really good to know. But like that's the only time I've ever thought about what my research did. However, almost every coaching engagement I have with somebody, I can take the central concept of my research, which is about, which was about defining success as improvement and mastering your craft, as opposed to how you perform relative to other people. And that, that the former definition of success has a positive impact on your emotions and how you think you're performing. I can use that with everyone because you can always get better by improving and I always see people comparing themselves to others. And so. In an academic world, like, I didn't think it was particularly groundbreaking myself, but over the last decade, like so many times I've been like, oh yeah, and like I was a part of that. So that's the other thing to think about is like that perspective over the longer term. Vikki: Yeah, 100%. Just a shout out on impact factors, though. Remember, impact factors are massively disciplinarily influenced. So, sports psychology impact factors are always low, even for incredibly eminent academics, because sports psychology is a relatively small field, whereas I was publishing in biology journals or something like that, they automatically have much higher, so don't use it as a marker, maybe as the size of the kind of reach, but not as the quality of the work, just a little shout out for everybody listening. Um, so one thing I think is different about academia compared to other organizations, and I'd love to hear what you think about this, is you're talking about kind of organizations having an overarching mission, as it were. And universities do, for sure. But I always think that academia is almost like a whole bunch of self employed people who have been forced to work in an organisation. Because they've all usually got their own little visions for success, their own areas that they want to work in, and some people's research will fall very clearly within the university's priorities, and it'll get lots of attention and promotions and all of those things. Other people will find that they're studying something that's, you know, maybe not fashionable or not big at the moment. And then you've got that dynamic between the supervisor and the student as well, where the supervisor kind of wants to set the direction of the PhD, but they also want the student to take real ownership and make decisions and it to be their independent piece of work. So how does all this stuff work, do you think, or have you got any tips for where it's a much less kind of single vision hierarchical setup, as you might see in a company, where we're almost all individuals who are in this big messy place. Andrew: Yeah, really interesting. question and really interesting thing to think about. Let's start with the supervisor and the student and let's come back to the wider piece. But with that, I think that's, for me, that's my language about what and how. And so from the supervisor perspective, I think it's their role to sell the vision, to, you know, to explain the impact, to explain the future, what it would like to get the person excited about that. Particularly if they have a strong vision. I think the other thing that's really good for supervisors is around expectations and clarifying while you're building a really strong relationship, what do you expect and how's that going to work? And part of that is going to be, well, what's the expectation on the student to set the direction, or where are they getting their choice in decision making? And that was something that my supervisor did a great job of, was giving me choice about certain things. Like she recognized the importance of autonomy and, you know, she would hold the line and like really clear about, no, we really ought to do it this way. And these are the reasons, but there was a lot of choice involved. So where is the supervisor? Are you saying, I think this is the direction for us to go. And when are you giving that person the choice about the route that you take, you know, if it's an analogy of an actual journey and if you're not giving any choice, like how are you sparking their motivation? Do you understand motivation? You know, you really ought to because you're going to be working with this person for at least three years and they need to be motivated in that time. And yes, they have an individual role to play, but I think choice about what they do, is really, really useful for how they do it. That would be the other place. So you might decide that, you know, our project is going to be on this topic. You might give them choice about the methods that they go about or some of the individual decision making pieces because that then creates that sense of ownership. The other more complex thing is what happens when you're part of a research group and when that project is part of a larger piece, then how do you then communicate what everybody's doing, because if you're making that relationship as a payer, if actually that supervisor is supervising five people, how do those pieces fit together and how do you ensure collaboration? I think that's where you've got to get more of a team emphasis. So does everybody understand everybody else's role? Does everybody understand what they're trying to achieve and how those pieces link together while balancing the competition between people and trying as much as you can to avoid that and make it an environment where people are celebrating other people's success and lifting them up without feeling a sense of jealousy because people have the ability to deliver good work themselves. So I think that, the kind of individual or kind of smaller group level, I think those things would help. When it gets to the wider university level that becomes a lot more complicated, I think. Vikki: Yeah, for sure. And I think even within PhDs, because you and I have a similar, you know, background in terms that we're in slightly different disciplines, but similar background in terms of what we're used to. When I work with my clients across different disciplines, it varies so hugely. So I have everything from clients whose supervisors have got a grant. These are the projects. This is what you need to do. And there is, you know, a little bit of wiggle room in terms of exactly how you analyze it or exactly how you write up the data or whatever. But mostly, here you go, funded position, off you go, all the way through. So I have a lot of clients who usually in the arts and humanities, social sciences, that sort of end of the world, who they're self funding, they've come up with a project, they've proposed it to an academic, and the academic has gone, yeah, I can probably supervise that. Yeah. All right. You tell me what you want to do. I'll put in some effort from time to time and everything in between, right? And I think thinking through what that kind of vision for the future looks like and how you create that environment where you both feel like you're moving in the same direction and you're supporting each other and you've got the kind of, I don't know if it's the right amount of autonomy, but like a good amount of autonomy. I think across that continuum is such an interesting challenge. Andrew: I think so. And I think the advice that I would give would be probably completely different either end of that spectrum. Vikki: Yeah. Andrew: So on the end of the spectrum when it's set, you're right, you've got a lot less autonomy, but that's not the only driver of intrinsic motivation, which is really what I'm talking about. The kind of competence or mastery is another key piece. And then I guess relatedness would be my third key concept. So relatedness, we think we've covered with the relationship we talked about. Can we give them choices? Can you encourage them to be on the path of mastery? So if you've got a very set idea of what it looks like, then I would be reinforcing this idea that the person is gaining skills, learning, improving, moving forward, because you want to be building that as a source of confidence. And if you're meeting them once a week or once a fortnight, which if you're not doing at the very least, Do it. Pull your socks up, because it gives you that opportunity to build confidence, you know, know what they're doing and even just say, Oh, that's good. Well done. You know, thank you for doing that. There's tiny little nudges that help somebody build up that through positive feedback. I think that's so useful. And then on the other side, when you've got no structure, very little structure, I think that is on the student to be engaging and selling the vision to the academic and saying, okay, we need to be bought into this because this is what you're doing. And it starts as a relationship of the supervisor helping the student. You need to get them drawn in and it become at least a partnership. If not, then realizing that you're helping them as well so that they can invest the right amount of time and support that you need to be flourishing. And I think also like having the open conversation when you feel comfortable to do it. But I would think probably within the first three months of What level of support do you think you need at what stages? What do you do when you have disagreements? You know, those kind of conversations to really understand how you're going to work together and how do you know when it's going to go well and what happens when something doesn't go well, because you're going to work together for quite a long time. You're not always going to agree, but to be able to talk it out is just so helpful. Vikki: Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, thephdlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. Vikki: Now I know an awful lot of my listeners are PhD students who are on the kind of receiving end, as it were, of a lot of the things we've talked about, and you've started to touch on it there, but if people are listening and they're thinking, I don't think the environment is exactly how you say it is, what can they do? What can they do from their side, assuming they can't change their supervisors, what can they do to change their experience of it? Andrew: So I'm going to give you one concept which I'm going to just going to put my cards on the table. I've never looked into the research behind it so you can like contact me via LinkedIn and fact check me and tell me I'm wrong, I would love that, that would just be the best. But I take people towards this concept of circle of influence, have you come across that before? Vikki: Yeah, Stephen Covey, yes. Andrew: There we go, yeah, which, you know, um, Cal Newport is doing a pretty good job of unpicking all of Stephen Covey's work, but that's, but the concept is good, which is that at the centre, if you imagine a diagram at the centre, you've got the things that you can control, your thoughts, your actions, your effort, for example. There's another slightly bigger circle outside that where it's things that you can influence. You know, other people's perceptions of you, some things that have, you know, um, things that can happen in your life. And then you've got things you can't control, such as the weather or, you know, big geopolitical events. Vikki: For the people listening, this is coming out probably January time, something like that. We're recording this on the day of the U. S. presidential election results, so Geopolitical events are out of our control, especially as people who aren't American and can't vote. Andrew: Exactly. Very much right outside of that. Um, bring it back and focus on what you can control. This is an old sports psychology trick because you are going to feel... like it's anxiety in sports settings, isn't it? If you're a part of a team, you don't know if you're going to win the league, and actually your level of ability to control that is pretty limited unless you're a star player who can somehow win the game, all the games by yourself, but I was never that person, I was very much a small cog. But what you can do is focus on your piece, so am I putting in the effort, am I focused, am I doing the right things? So I think that's the first thing for people. The second thing I would say is just some really simple interventions. Like, okay, are you starting your day with a clear picture of like, one thing that you want to get done today? Or at the very least, even if it's a couple of things, it's not like 20 things that you're never going to get done. If you were honest with yourself and looked at, And then are you ending your day by looking back at the things that you have done? Like, how simple is that to do? I think if everybody paused at the moment and said, Are you actually doing it? Like, the vast majority would be like, No, no, what I like to do is set a massive to do list that I think I can get done, but I know deep down I never will. And then at the end of the day I take all of the things I haven't done and I put them into tomorrow on top of another massive list of things to do. And I don't look at any of the good things that I've done, because why would I do that? Vikki: While beating myself up about the fact that I didn't finish this unreasonable list. Andrew: Exactly. It's not, to make you feel better, if you're doing that, you're not alone. People do it in business. I'm coaching a lot of people with the same thing. So I'm really trying to flip that dynamic of saying, actually, What's the most important thing to do and do that once you've done that big tick well done Recognizing you did that and then you get to a few more things great and then at the end of the day actually looking back and thinking I did some good stuff today. Like it's not gonna be perfect It's not gonna have changed the world in a day But every day that you look back and think Yeah, I did some good things. That's building the confidence when, you know, great things happen and not so great things happen. So that's another thing. And then the other one is, I just mentioned Cal Newport in passing, and he's jumped back into my head. He's doing some really interesting things. Started with a book, Deep Work. Now, Cal Newport is an academic. He's a computer scientist. So he probably is pretty well researched, but he writes books on productivity. He's also got a podcast. Something around his work would be really helpful. He talks about lots of ways of planning time, so multi scale planning, how to be productive, and he is a professor in an American university, so he knows the demands during term time, he knows the demands out of term time when it comes to writing. So if people, like, this is something that I don't think people tell you is, you can be more productive, you can stop berating yourself for not achieving things, and you can learn ways of doing more. And actually, when you learn those tools and techniques, your life becomes a lot better. Vikki: Yeah, for sure. There's another book that he wrote, and I'm looking over there because it's my books, but I don't think Andrew: There's Slow Productivity, that's his recent one. Vikki: There was one earlier than that that was, So Good They Can't Ignore You, I think it was called? Yeah. Was that called? Andrew: He also wrote books on like, how to be a grade A student. That's how he got started. Yes. He came up doing his degree. Vikki: That one I haven't read. The So Good They Can't Ignore You, I love. It's all about, I'm 90, I will double check and make sure it's in the show notes. I'm 90 percent sure it was Cal Newport. If it wasn't, it's a good book anyway. It was all about, rather than necessarily following, like, your passion, you know, when people don't know what they want to do. It's like, oh, follow your passion. I was like, what's that? Um, his argument is get really, really good at something. And I think, I mean, you're a really good example of that, right? You went and you did your sports psychology PhD. You got really good at understanding what motivates people to do things and what motivates them in a healthy, sustainable way. And now you're off, you know, you might have thought that your passion was applying that to sport originally, I assume, as you came to the sports science department, but now you're off applying that in so many different settings across your career. Um, that's a really good one. I love those really tangible tips for what people can do. And I want to, I mentioned the course that I run, Be Your Own Best Boss, which is like an online self paced thing that people can work their way through. And one other thing, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. One of the things I love to, recommend to my clients and that that whole course is about is the notion of if you think about what you would want from your very perfect boss, how they would treat you, how they would organize your time, how they would keep you motivated, how they would help you feel engaged, all of those things. You kind of invent that boss. And usually when you ask somebody to do that, they don't come up with a boss who's yelling at them and berating them and reminding them of all their failures and those things, but they equally don't come up with a boss who's like, Oh, it doesn't matter. You can do it tomorrow. It's fine. It's no big deal. They can usually come up with, it varies a bit with different people, but something in the middle where that person kind of believes in you is ambitious for you, but is also compassionate and understanding that everything's not perfect, like you say. And what I try and encourage people to do is channel that boss for themselves. Because often we have some control over who our bosses are. You know, we can move, we can change supervisors and things. But especially if you've started a PhD, you're often wedged into a relationship for a few years. You can't necessarily control, maybe influence, you can't necessarily control what they do, but what you can control, what is very firmly in that circle of control, is how you treat yourself. And I think that giving yourself clear guidance of what's an appropriate amount of work for today, recognizing when you've done it, all of those things, for me comes into that being a really good boss to yourself so that you can succeed and you speak to yourself in a way that you would want a boss to speak to you. Andrew: Yeah, I think that's a really useful concept. I think that, you know, would you speak to your friend the way you speak to yourself? Sometimes it's a good prompt. And I think, I think you're right. I think that what would be those expectations because you're ultimately trying to do something and achieve something really big and being held to that is really important sometimes, but also being like knowing it's okay to make mistakes or it's okay to get things wrong is absolutely critical as well. That's the other thing about, I guess, cultures that's important is you can have a really high expectation of performance, but you can't drive a perfectionistic culture, because you think you should, like, and we see things. If you watch Simone Biles at the Olympics or some, like, other elite performer, you think they're perfect. But if they're, if you are trying to constantly be perfect, it actually moves you further away from being any good. So like recognizing that you can make mistakes and giving yourself a break. And then the other thing is what you spoke there for me, Vikki, was it's sometimes difficult to know how much to work because that's quite an endless, you know, challenge and there's always things that you can do. Sometimes I find it better to think about, well, how much time do you need to recover? And almost this sports psychologist coming at me again, like if you just played a game of tennis or you just on a big weights workout? You've just done whatever your sport of choice is. How much time do you give yourself to recover until you do it again? And what are the things that you do when you're recovering? So do you sleep and eat? And maybe sit and watch Netflix? Or sit and do a puzzle, like whatever that thing is? Well, what's your recovery at the end of your work day? Yeah. You know, what do you, what do you do? What brings you, what fills your tank and gives you energy? And I, I went through a period of burnout at the end of 2023, was it? Yeah, 2023. And I really had to do a lot of thought about like, is this what I want to be doing with my life? Is this giving me that positive environment and sustaining me and giving me energy at work? And it was like, no, this is pre Oxygen Conservation, just to make that very clear. But then I had to get really good at, well, what am I doing? What, what gives me energy? And what are the things I do that I think I do for fun, but actually take an energy in a weird way, in that either mental, emotional, or physical sense. So that'd be another thing for people to think about is like, how are you recovering? And like, If you can't stand reading at the end of the day because you've spent your entire day reading and writing, don't do it. Just like put on Netflix or go for a walk or whatever it is. Vikki: Yeah, I love that. That is such a good way of framing it. And now I feel like this discussion is going on forever, but I wanna share with you one other thing. So I took part in like an online retreat thing for solo business owners that was run by Karin Nordin, who is a coach that we've talking about before we came on recording. Wonderful coach, people listening, follow her on Instagram. She's amazing. I love her. She has a PhD in behavior change as well and in this teamless retreat, one of the things she said is that the time that we allocate to tasks is the parameter that determines how we do them. And I loved that because so often people ask me, I don't know if I can get this done in the time. I don't know how long this is going to take. All of these sort of slightly vague questions that imply there's an amount of time, that is the right amount of time, to get this task done. And her argument was that you decide in advance how much time you have to give this task, and on the basis of that, you decide how you do it. So if you only have a short amount of time to give it, it's going to be limited scope, so it's going to be focused on something quite small, it's going to be quite short, it's going to be a bit rougher than perhaps you would intend, it's going to not have as beautiful slides or whatever it might be, you decide what bits you prioritise. But by deciding how long you have to do it, you then decide exactly what end product you're expecting to get during that time. And it works so much better than having a kind of endless, I'll see how long this thing takes, and then realizing that you can't get it done. I love that. I thought that was so useful. Andrew: Yeah, that's a brilliant concept. I think I've used something similar in my working life, which is when somebody asks something of you, I generally want to say yes, because I want to perform and you want to be, you know, seen as being doing good work. But the trick is be like, if you want that tomorrow, I can get you this, maybe an outline. If you give me to the end of the week, I can give you like a full PowerPoint presentation with beautiful photos and the whole thing's done. Which would you prefer? Oh, I'll take it at the end of next week. Thank you. And like, so that's much better. So it's that piece of it. Establish the time and then when you've got the time, then you can work as, you can work really hard in that time and get it to the level of quality you get it to. But there's also an element of realism in that, isn't there? Because, you know, you ain't writing a paper in a day, like a fully formed, completely high quality paper, unless you're amazing at it. I mean, I certainly wasn't. Vikki: Oh, well, um, yeah, absolutely. But that's when you then decide, if I've only got a day to give myself, then I'm not writing a paper. Andrew: Exactly. And that's where you might get an outline or you might get a paragraph. Vikki: Yeah. Thinking of it like that, the realism then forces you to actually make a decision because that's what I think all of us do. And I do think this connects with the kind of positive environment because it's a problem when supervisors don't make decisions either. I think what lots of us do is we sort of vaguely look at our tasks, vaguely think they don't all fit, tell ourselves they kind of have to all fit, And so just start work. And we avoid the uncomfortableness of having to decide that something definitely doesn't fit, and we're going to have to either tell someone it doesn't fit, or we're going to have to deal with our emotions about the fact that we'd love to do it but we're not going to be able to. And so yeah, it's absolutely not about just going, oh I've got four hours I can write a lit review, happy days, let's go. It's, if I literally only have four hours, I can't do a lit review. I could do a blog post about this and talk about one or two articles. I could, you know, happy days. Let's do that. You know, it can be a little bit research informed, a little bit informal, go up on the internet, happy days, but I can't do a lit review because I've only got four hours. And yeah, I think it sort of encourages you to make decisions that can feel uncomfortable, but it will need to be made at some point when you realize that you can't do it. Andrew: And it's, it's such an important life skill, the ability to make those decisions. Because ultimately what we're talking about is most often not the things at the really top of your to do list, the most important things, it's the things at the bottom. And what are the multiple things at the bottom that I can either stop doing or delay in order to allow me to do the really important things. Learning that skill early in a career is brilliant because it sets you up for success in the future. But a question for, for you and the students out there, if you've got a supervisor who's setting a task and the timeline doesn't be realistic, Do you think that they know, the supervisor, knows how long it will take you, the student, to do that work? Like, do you think they've gone through the cognitive processing of, Okay, this needs to be done, but, you know, my student will probably take, hmm, eight hours to do that. So what I'll ask them to do is do it in four. Like, I just don't, I don't think people know. Vikki: I don't think they do. And this is, this goes back to the whole thing about universities being a performance environment. One of the problems I see is that because universities are so pressured, um, time pressured, money pressured, all of those things at the moment, um, supervisors are often, and I say this with love and respect having been one, um, because it was definitely true for me, supervisors are not showing up as their best selves all the time because they're under pressure for 47 other things other than your projects. And so sometimes we simply don't have either the time or the cognitive capacity to go through and go actually, I don't think they can write a lit review because they've also got that teaching they've also got this da da da and that's where I'd say to students One way to push back on things like that is to say, can we just take a minute to go through what the steps involved in doing what you're asking me to do is just so that we can clarify, how long it's likely to actually take and whether it is that much of a priority. I remember doing this and I won't name anyone. I think they were around your time. I'll tell you when we stopped recording. I was second supervising with a member of staff who was quite enthusiastic, shall we say, on what he wanted done and had lots of ideas and things. And he'd be like, yeah, yeah, just run that analysis again doing this. And he was doing like lab work stuff. Um, and I remember sitting there as a second supervisor with relatively terrified looking students and I'd be like, that's probably four days full time work. Do you care about it four days worth? Oh, no, no, definitely not. Don't, ignore that. Forget I said it. And I think sometimes it was easy for me. I was the same level as this person. It was easy for me to say that. It's harder if you're the student in that situation. But being able to go let's break that down and work out what the steps involved are because partly supervisors, when it comes to the practical side of things, it's a long time since most of them have done it. Whether that's accessing archives, whether it's collecting data in the laboratory, running biochemical tests, whatever. It's a long time since they've done it themselves and often they forget how fiddly and how long these things take and when things go wrong and all that stuff. But also I think they forget that, you know, you and I could knock up an introduction to a paper, if it was on a topic we'd written about before, we could knock up an introduction to a paper relatively straightforwardly. It'd take a bit of thought, but it wouldn't be that big a deal. Because even if we weren't up to date with the literature, we'd know roughly what people we needed to be looking for, we'd know what keywords to search for, we'd be able to understand them quickly and put them in context when we read them. And I think the other part of it is the supervisors often forget that what they could do in that period of time is not necessarily how long it will take somebody who's got less context, less skills, less experience, less confidence often. You know, when you're experienced, it's easy to say, you know, Oh yeah, I think that covers pretty much. The key points. I think we're good to go. Let's go. And so I think remembering that when they're setting goals is really, really important. Andrew: Yeah, I totally agree. I think them not knowing the time associated. I think also if you could approach that with the genuine, as the student with a genuine curious mindset and you can go to somebody and say, they asked you to do something and you can say, right, well actually I've probably got about, let's say 12 hours this week because I've got these other things on my to do list. I think what I should do is prioritize X and Y and drop this. What do you think? That's such a good discussion because it shows, you know you're on top of your time, it shows you know what you're supposed to be doing. And it also then you offer some element of prioritization. And then the supervisor can then be like, Oh, why are you doing that? And you're like, I would hope it's in a very gentle way. Talk to me about this. Why is that important? And then you can realign on priorities because if you haven't done this, like you will be drifting. You won't know about it, but you might be drifting on what's important. So taking things and maybe presenting them in that kind of way, I think really allows for a positive discussion, you kind of lead the supervisor to what you're seeking. Vikki: That is brilliant advice because I think so often students think that the way to impress their supervisors is by being able to do everything and being able to be on top of it and not worrying and not being anxious and all of those things. And I think it's a huge sign, like you say, of confidence and maturity and all those things to be able to go, okay, I have this many hours this week. Does this fit? Is there anything I should be doing? And there are times, you know, I've had people in the past when I was supervising them that would have that sort of conversation and they'd say, you know, and I spend eight hours, I don't know, updating my reference manager or something and I'll be like, Oh, okay. Let's have a conversation about that because if that's what's filling up your time, we can, there's ways I can help you. There's ways we can make this more streamlined for it. And we definitely don't want to be spending that much time on that. Or you go, Oh yeah, if you're spending eight hours doing this really important thing, whatever it is, then I understand why it might take a month to get this piece of writing done because you've only got this much time to give to it. That, that makes sense. I hadn't thought about that. Andrew: Yeah. I will have a say. My supervisor gave me one of the best pieces of feedback that I think I've ever got, which was probably in second year. She sat me down and she was like, do you want to finish on time? And I was like, yeah, of course. Like I have no money, like there's no option. So she was like, you need to work more. And I went back and I said to Jo, my then girlfriend, now wife, I was like, how could she say that? I'm working nine to five. I'm doing all this kind of stuff. I had a bit of a rage. And I was like. Oh, she's, she's right. This takes more and it did towards the end. Now, if I was doing it again, the more sustainable version would be to work on productivity to really like really prioritize and to put in a lot of work and recover really well over the time. But there are times you just have to put in the work, like you have to do that a little bit more. But again, those skills that you've learned about recovering and prioritizing are going to help in that regard because that's what's going to get you through that. So, we're saying this, and yes it has to be realistic, but don't be concerned if your supervisor pushes back and says there's a time to push. Before a conference, for example, and you haven't written your presentation, that's a time to push. You might have to do a bit more. Vikki: But I think even within that, I agree completely. And it's something I coach a lot of write up students. And it's something we talk about that yet you're not necessarily aiming for a work pattern that is sustainable year in, year out, you're looking for a work pattern that's sustainable for the period of time you've got left. Um, and one of the things we talk about then is, okay, if you're going to work more hours, A, how are you making sure that those hours are useful? So the productivity piece that you're talking about, but B, how are you going to speak to and look after yourself during that? So if we go back to your sports analogies that you've talked about before, if it's a period of heavy competition, then those athletes, yeah, they're training really hard. They're competing really hard. They're very physically, you know, Busy, for want of a better phrase. But their team are going to wrap around them, things that help quicker recovery, support, you know, psychological support, all of those sorts of things, so that if you are putting in tons of hours, let's at least sort of cushion that around with sleep and very easy to grab healthy food. So like not just having pizza, but equally not deciding that you're going to start some new regime where you're cooking from scratch and blah, blah, blah. Easy stuff that you can grab. Um, what things can you drop from your life for a little while? Take the pressure off you and say, you know what? There's just not space for those right now. I'll come back to it. Um, and how can you, you know, going back to your thing about how you start and finish each day, how after those long days, can you be congratulating yourself about how hard you're working and how I'm not sure how proud you are of how much you're doing and how you, you know, you're really pushing on rather than ending your days going, oh my god, I'm working so hard and I still don't think I'm going to get there. I still don't know this is possible. I'm not. It's probably not good enough. They're probably going to tell me I'm rubbish and all these other things. Because I think often we add a whole load of baggage on top of the hard work. that just make it really, really unpleasant. Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so recognising the positives is really key in that. The other thing that I did as well, I played a lot of music growing up and music really changes my moods and I can use it to manipulate how I feel. So I had certain albums that I would put on at the start of a day to get me into writing. And I knew that , literally to get you in that right mindset. So that's another sports psychology trick. It's almost a pre performance routine. It might not be music for everybody, it could be me like brewing a cup of tea and just taking a mindful moment to enjoy that or having a lovely coffee or whatever. But something that gets you into that mindset and then just getting moving can be really useful too. Vikki: Love that. So, for me, one thing that's been really useful in this is, obviously there's all the advice that people can use to create their own positive environments and to create positive environments for other people. But I think there's a bigger piece here about using research to optimise environments and performance. in universities or, or any other organizations. And I think we're often quite bad at doing that. We sort of talk about research led in terms of the teaching that we do and perhaps our impact on the outside world. But I don't see lots of evidence of universities using research, like you're talking about sports psychology research, to guide how we actually work. And I just wonder what views you've got about that, whether we should be doing that more, and if you've got any ideas why people don't at the moment. Andrew: I think, I think there certainly should be. I think if you move outside of academia, There's some more barriers to getting that research, like, you know, paywalls and such, but not massively, so there's more and more that's freely available, and there's loads of other things online. But I think universities and other big organisations are difficult to change, you know, notoriously so, and if you think about big change projects in terms of reorganizing, like 20 percent of them are really ultimately successful. However, what we can be looking to do is like, what are the incremental improvements that we can make? And so that starts with understanding really what you're trying to achieve, I would think, and then trying to look at ways of doing that more effectively, most likely through making small incremental steps that people are going to be more likely to be comfortable with. And I think that's the other thing is that I guess humans are ultimately pretty self serving in an extent. Like we can be, there's amazing capacity to do things for other people, but if you want to get somebody to change the way that they're working, you have to make it better for them. So I think that's something I, I honestly don't know how you do it at the big, Institutional level because partly because it's a big organization to change, but partly because I don't understand like what is most important. What are you optimizing for as a university? Is it student experience? Is it academic record? Is it something else? Is it profit and loss? Like, what is the driver? And it's probably all of them. And how do you make and square that circle of it? How do you do the research and the student experience incredibly well, and then drive the positive outcomes that you want? Like, that's essentially what we're trying to do at Oxygen Conservation, which is why we're leading with quality environmental improvements done in the right way to deliver social impact. We think by doing those things really well, we will generate profit as a result down the line. Whereas if we flip that situation and say actually we want profit and we want to be an environmental company, you wouldn't do it right. You'd end up sacrificing your quality and your decisions, and then ultimately you wouldn't make any money anyway. So I guess that, from a very naive perspective from the universities is, what are you trying to optimise for and how can you do it in a way That gives you positive outcomes. Vikki: Yeah, I love that. And the reason, if people who are watching this on YouTube will have seen that I was smirking while you were saying that. That wasn't me smirking at your naivety. Because I think what you've put your finger on is the absolute essence of the problem. And it's not that you don't know that. It's that the vast majority of universities haven't decided that. The vast majority of universities still think that they can be sector leading in research, sector leading in teaching, sector leading in student experience, da da da. And those things do and should relate to each other. Um, but any change project is usually run by Pro Vice Chancellor for research, for research, Pro Vice Chancellor education, for the teaching ones or whatever. And so they're very siloed within one of the aims of the university. And often they don't take into account, not in any meaningful way anyway, the kind of trade offs between well actually if we're putting all this effort into performing well in the research measures, how are we gonna relieve pressure a little bit on what we're doing on the teaching side or the student side or vice versa, right? And some universities do it better than others but I think that is one of the massive things is that when you refuse to make a decision, going back to the things we talked about at an individual level, when organizations refuse to make decisions or don't see the need to make decisions about if we prioritize this, that means something else steps back, then you end up in that position that we've all found ourselves, where you're trying to do everything and everything has to be great. And that's just a recipe for burnout, as you say. Andrew: Well, absolutely. Because, you know, academics by nature, just have like, far too much to do. And across, are they still working with those three main elements of research, teaching and administration? Vikki: Uh, yes, but then people have then thrown in, obviously there's much more on impact and influence now. So that knowledge transfer, that side of things is a much bigger thing now. So certainly in the UK where we have the research excellence framework, something like 10 percent of the score is to do with, with your impact. So there's all that side of things. There's a much bigger, understandable, I agree with it on principle, emphasis on outreach and trying to inspire people to come to university who wouldn't otherwise necessarily consider themselves a university person and all that stuff, so schools outreach and all that good work, and then obviously all the kind of, there's the administration of the doing of the jobs but also the kind of broader leadership and strategic leadership, and um, Yeah, there is a huge issue with universities and academics, feeling like they should be able to excel at all of those, all the time as well. Andrew: Whereas, if you take it into an organisation, let's say you take it into a random business doing whatever, what you'd be talking about is a senior person in a business, a manager, a head of, maybe a director, depending on if we're talking about lecturer, senior lecturer, professor, reader, whatever. And what we're saying is we want you to do all these things is really important for the business. You don't really have anyone to support you or to delegate to you. Like, yeah, you've got some people supporting you with research, but who's supporting on teaching and on outreach and all these other things. And let's be honest, like the admin probably isn't very fun. So you don't want to do it. I mean, have you ever been taught how to do outreach? So there's all sorts of challenges there, but I guess that's an opportunity for the students is to offer to support in those elements, because if that's your career path and you want to be doing that in the future, that's what we do in organization. We pair them up with somebody and say, right, well, you supervisor teach the person how to do it and then they'll take some work off your plate and then they can not do some stuff that they didn't think that they, like at the bottom of their to do list and everybody gets freed up a little as a result. Vikki: Yeah for sure and that opens up whole other conversations about how then the academics have to make time to support the students so that it becomes a learning experience and not just a dumping experience and all of those things. Andrew: We should do a part two where we have an actual academic and we can put these ideas in and they can tell us that it's terrible and it'll never work. Vikki: They'll tell us why it will not work. But I think my take home from that is not so much, it could be a really depressing take home that higher education is fundamentally broken, which I do think to some extent it is. But. What I think is really important for our listeners to take from that is that means if you can't do it all, if you are finding that you're having to do some things to the best of your ability, some things a bit shoddily and other things you just forget entirely, it's not about you. That is not a personal failing. That is an inevitable consequence of the way academia runs at the moment. And yes, we can try and change academia, but as you say, that's a really slow moving ship, but what you can change is how you manage yourself within that. Stopping expecting yourself to have to do all these things, even if the university is telling you that you have to do all these things, in reality, no one is doing everything brilliantly. And so what we can do is sort of, try to make some decisions for ourselves about at the moment, I'm putting my foot down on this thing and trying to push that forward. These things, I'm just going to take over and maintain. So a colleague, ex colleague of both of ours, Jennifer Cumming, who's a professor still in Sports Science at Birmingham. She had a brilliant rotation of how often she would update her courses, for example. So some people would never update their modules. Other people think they have to update every lecture every year. And she would have a brilliant, she had kind of brilliant structured rotation of which ones she would redevelop in which years. So that it all got refreshed at an appropriate rate, but she didn't try and do everything every time. And that freed her up just enough that she had a bit more capacity for her research work or for other commitments, which is just, you know, it's those sorts of things is thinking, okay, what's on maintenance mode? What's on really pushing forwards on this mode so that you accept that you can't be a hundred percent on everything all the time. Andrew: But you just, you just can't. And if you try and live at that absolute, you'll just become nihilistic and you'll get really sad because you won't be successful on all those fronts, but that's a great example of being practical about what can I do and what am I focusing on? And the other things can be done quicker or a little later in some way, make it manageable, because then you get to focus your essentials on what you're trying to do, not berating yourself for the things you don't do. Vikki: Perfect. Love it. That has been absolutely amazing, even better than I'd hoped for, so thank you so much. Whenever I have somebody on who has a PhD but who's working outside of academia, I ask them to tell us a little bit about their route. You've obviously told us a little bit about how you got to where you are now. Maybe just take a moment to tell us what you love about what you're doing at the moment and how it's different to academia. Just in case there are people that fancy that sort of thing. Andrew: Yeah, very cool. So I, I really love the teamwork. I think we've got this amazing group of people. I'm fortunate to lead on recruitment. So I get to meet everybody as they come in and offer a bit of a perspective. So I love that. I love that we're working together towards something. And I think I've got this great ability to build things in terms of processes and ways of working, get some good challenge and feedback on those, and then make them a reality and then run them. That to me just is, is really exciting because and you don't always get that in bigger businesses. Sometimes you're given things. And I think that's one of us being, I would call us a scale up. So we're 32 people now. So we're not quite scrappy startup. We've matured beyond that, but we're still at this position of how do you want to measure performance, Andrew? Oh gosh, I don't know. Okay. Go away, have a think, do some research, put something together, get some ideas. And then we do, and we do it. And When it gets positively received, it's a, it's a great feeling because you know that well, I got to take my knowledge and apply it to something and it is having this positive impact on people that I work with. So yeah, I just think that's awesome. Vikki: Amazing. And I just love how you're using your academic knowledge completely out of its academic context, but in such an effective way. And I think, I think that can really hopefully give hope to lots of people listening that the skills they're developing, even the specific knowledge they're developing in a very niche area could well be applicable across lots of different places in the future. Andrew: It so is. Every time I see a CV and I've seen over a thousand if not more now if I see somebody with a PhD I know it's not going to be in our like if somebody if they did have a PhD in environmental restoration fantastic but we've just hired somebody who had a PhD in like Butterfly behavior, and they work in Wales doing a really practical role. The PhD's great, they did loads of good work on it, but the transferable skills are the thing that's really important from an employer perspective. So yeah, loads of hope in that regard. Vikki: Fantastic. Now, if people want to find out more about Oxygen or even get in contact with you, what's the best places for them to look? Andrew: So. If you want information about the company, the website's fantastic. There's a LinkedIn page as well, and we've got newsletter, we've got the Shoot Room Sessions podcast. To start with the website, it'll direct you towards all of that awesome content, which our marketing team and others do a great job with. If you want to get to me, probably LinkedIn's the best place. I'm going to be honest, I'm not a massive fan of the feed of LinkedIn. So I don't see that all the time, but I do respond to messages and requests for connections. And if you just want to ask questions, then reach out to me there. Vikki: Amazing. Thank you so much. And thank you everyone for listening. I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.
Links I refer to in this episode Why you shouldn’t read when you’re writing How to plan your academic writing (with special guest Dr Jo Van Every) How to break your work down into chunks Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. Do you have a word count goal at the moment? Whether you're a PhD student or academic, do you have a notional idea? You want to have 5, 000 words written by the end of the year or a chapter finished by the end of January? I'm here, not to tell you you're wrong, because we all have those goals, right? But to help you shape goals that are going to help you way more than simply using word counts. Now this actually came from a question from one of my members. She was talking about having a word count goal, but how some days she's doing stuff that feels important, but that doesn't progress her towards her goal. And she asked me, Vikki, should I be using word count goals? Is that the best way to do this? Cause it doesn't seem to be working for me at the moment. And as you know, I have episodes where I go through client questions, but this one was such a cracker and so important for so many of you that I decided to make a whole episode about it. So let's start with what's wrong with word count goals. Now, before I tell you why you're wrong, it's completely understandable that you have word count goals. And actually, I think they do have a really important place. But there are a number of problems with them. The first one is it doesn't tell you anything about the quality of those words.So do you mean 6000 words of polished, virtually finished, ready to submit chapter. Or do you mean 6, 000 words of a rough first draft just so that the whole thing exists? Or do you mean something in between? We rarely specify what we actually mean. And actually at times like this, so I'm recording this the end of November, it's going out early December, often we start to kind of change what we mean. Maybe when we first set the goal, we meant 6, 000 words of polished, finished chapter, and now we mean probably 6, 000 words of rough draft, if we're lucky. So rarely do we actually specify the quality and the number of words doesn't tell us that anyway. The other thing is my client recognized is that word count goals don't recognize all the different elements of writing that there are. Now I teach these in my workshop about how to write when you're struggling to write in lots of detail, but essentially we all know that there's the kind of planning phase. There's the fleshing out your plan phase. There's the turning it into a rough draft element. There's the checking structure, reorganizing things. There's the checking for flow, checking for accuracy, all of those sorts of large scale editing stuff. There's the, does it all sound nice and academic- y stage. There's the proofreading stage. And often, we don't follow that as a linear process, right? We're kind of going backwards and forwards between these chunks. And there's some of those tasks that will contribute to a word count goal. And there's some that don't. And so you can finish a day feeling like, well, my word count didn't change at all. Okay. Or, on some days my word count got lower, right? And unless you're really kind of conscious of what you're doing, it's hard to tell the difference between days where you were doing things that were absolutely what you should have been doing, that were appropriate to moving this piece of work forwards, It just didn't change the word count. Or days where actually you got distracted faffing about with your references or diving into articles that you were panicking that maybe you should have read but maybe you didn't need to. If we only have word count goals it's really hard to differentiate between those things. To think what we should do instead, we need to really understand what the purpose of these goals are. Now, goals, in my view, should help you recognize progress. They should inspire action. And they should tell you when you have done what you said you were going to do. Now, I think a word count goal at a kind of macro level is a really good way of knowing whether you've done what you said you were going to do. So when we're looking at planning for a month or planning for a quarter, which is something I teach in my Be Your Own Best Boss course, then having a word count goal for those kind of large scale goals can be really, really useful. In fact, I always argue that goals should be something you are producing, not just something that you're doing. So a goal isn't to read for your thesis, a goal is to screen these 10 papers to see whether they are worth reading in lots of detail for the chapter I'm on at the moment, for example, and to produce a list of which ones need to be scrutinized further. Okay, so having a goal that is actually something you're producing, and a word count is absolutely something you might be producing is really, really useful at that kind of monthly and quarterly level. However, this is where it's simply not enough, and where it will rarely be the only goal you should have when we're thinking about it in a daily and weekly level. So what I want you to think about is taking that macro goal of writing 6, 000 words in the next month or whatever. That may sound like loads or not and much depending on what stage you're at and how that process is going for you, but insert your own numbers there. What we now want to do is think about what interim goals, what micro goals we need that will actually reflect the different steps that are taken. And I don't suggest that for a monthly goal or a quarterly goal, you work out every single micro goal you're going to need to get from where you are now to there. That's simply not necessary. But what you can do is think about some sort of midterm goals. So ones that, you know, where you need to be, this week, next week, in order to stay on track. So if you've got a goal in the next month of having 6, 000 words of polished draft, when do you need to have 6, 000 words of rough draft, if that doesn't exist already, for example? So you can start breaking down that, and then you can start thinking, okay, so this week, what does that mean? And this is where we get to think about the whole myriad of goals that we could set that would actually reflect the tasks we need to do. So instead of saying, right, if I'm going to get 6, 000 words by the end of this month, then I need to be doing, what's that, do the maths quickly, 200 words a day in order to do that. Well, that doesn't allow for planning. That doesn't allow for redrafting, restructuring, shortening, polishing, editing, all that stuff. But instead we can say, okay, if I want to get to 6, 000 words polished draft by the end of this month, I want to get to 6, 000 words of rough draft by two weeks time, what do I need to do to get to that rough draft? Well, one goal might be to produce an approximate outline of what the major sections need to be. One goal might be to turn one of those sections into a more detailed paragraph plan. One. My goal might be to put bullet points into each of my paragraph plans to show what roughly needs to be covered in that paragraph. A goal might be to produce 200 words around that paragraph plan to flesh it out into a rough draft. Okay? And there's so many good things that happen when you break down the work like this and you have goals that are much more specific to what you have to do. Firstly, it recognizes all these different sorts of work that you need to do. You might, for example, decide that in order to produce 6, 000 words of polished draft, you need to produce 8, 000 words of rough draft. I always recommend overwriting at the rough draft stage. It's a little bit like, I always used to tell my students, it's like if you're trying to produce a good pasta sauce, right? You don't start with the volume that you want your sauce to end up being. You start by making something that's bigger than that, yeah, that's got more juice in it than that. And then you slowly simmer it and the rubbish bits steam off so the water disappears and you end up with a really lovely concentrated pasta sauce by the end of it. And the same is true with writing, so you may decide actually I need to produce 8, 000 words of rough draft and then actually part of my goal for that later period is to take this section of two pages and bring it down to one page, or bring it down to a page and a half by taking out repetition, by taking out unnecessary sentences, by changing my sentence structure to make it more elegant and efficient. And then actually on those days, your goal is to go from having 800 words to having 600 words, for example. Okay? So, giving yourself a much wider range of types of goals, especially these micro goals, can enable you to recognise the different things there are to do when you're writing, get much more specific about what your tasks are, and to also then recognise progress. Because progress is doing what you intended. Progress doesn't have to be generating new words. Progress can be completing the tasks you said you were going to do on that day. I talk about this a little bit. I have an episode about how to break your work down into chunks. And it goes through why you might find that challenging, and why it can be super beneficial. But this is an example of how you can do it when you're writing. Setting these interim goals, these micro goals that are more specific than just producing wordcount can also help you to finish a day and know exactly what you did. There's nothing worse than that feeling that you did a load of work and you're not really sure what you did and your work counts no bigger than it was. So it enables you to finish a day going, yeah, I plan to take that from 600 or I plan to write three bullet points under each section, or whatever it was, and look. there it is, check me out doing exactly what I intended. So it can allow you to reinforce when you did do what you planned. It also makes it way easier to decide what you're going to do tomorrow to actually go, okay, that's my job. Let's crack on because you're not having to kind of go, well, 200 words Goal, because that's what I said I'd need to do every day to generate my 6, 000 words, but really I feel like I probably should edit what I've done already, but then I won't generate that. It enables you to go, Okay, that's my goal. Do my goal. Boom. Did my goal. Check me out. And then it becomes this kind of self fulfilling thing where you become someone who plans what you're doing, does what you planned, and then rewards yourself for it. So that's why word count goals are crucial. We've got to produce work, but they are not sufficient. They are necessary, but not sufficient. And hopefully in this pretty short episode, you can see the benefits of having a far wider variety of goals than that. Let me know what you think. What sorts of goals do you set yourself when it comes to your writing? How do you know that you're making progress? And how do you know that you've done the things that you intended. Today is quite short because it's the 9th of December that this is going out. Americans, you'll be coming off the wave of your Thanksgiving. Anyone who celebrates Christmas will be building towards that, and most universities will be having a winter break for all the different festivals that are happening at the moment. You're busy, you've got lots going. I want you to just Pause listening now. Go double check your to do lists. Have you got word count goals? Have you got other sorts of goals? How can you make sure that your goals are realistic, the things you want to get done before that winter break, and so that they're actually recognizing the tasks that you're doing to move yourself in that direction? Use this extra time to go check your goals and tweak them so that we can really recognise all the work that we do between now and the winter holidays. If you didn't sign up for my membership, by the way, it's okay. I want you to love on that decision. But if you were telling yourself that, you know, maybe in the new year, don't need it right now, but maybe in the new year, I want you to go to my website and jump yourself onto my waiting list. It doesn't commit you to anything at all, but it does mean you get all the information about when the doors will open, what's coming up in that month, and give you the opportunity to answer any questions. So by putting yourself on the waiting list, it doesn't mean that you're definitely in, but it does mean that you'll get the information that you need if you're telling yourself that you might join in January or February. So make sure you are on that list. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. Let me know how you set your goals, whether you use word counts or some other mission, and maybe I'll share some of your expertise in future episodes. Thank you for listening, and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.
Links I refer to in this episode How to go from idea overload to clarity Hello and welcome to the PhD life coach podcast. We are doing more client questions this week, where anyone who is a listener, who's on my newsletter, who's one of my members, for example, can submit questions about things they're finding challenging at the moment and I will try and answer them for you. This week I've got three questions that I think are going to resonate loads with all of you. And make sure you stay for the third one because the third one is 100 percent relevant to all of us. So, first up, have you ever had that sense that your PhD is just not working out quite the way you thought it was going to? Maybe you're in your second, third, more years along and you had all these high hopes at the beginning of your PhD as to what you were going to achieve and what you were going to do, and things are just not quite working out the way you thought they would. And you're kind of ready to write up, or you're in the process of writing up, and it just all feels a bit disappointing. Well that was the situation of a student that I met at a workshop I ran in London for the Wellcome Trust, which was amazing, really, really able, motivated students, we were talking about career decisions and things like that. And she asked me afterwards, how do you stay motivated to write your thesis when you're a bit disappointed that you didn't do all the things that you intended to do? And she explained that this was just making it really hard for her to sit down and do the difficult work of writing when she was managing all these frustrations and disappointments with it not looking the way that she had dreamed it would look when she first started. And I just thought this was such an interesting question and you can hit this kind of disappointment at any stage in your PhD. So don't worry if you're not as far along as she is at the moment, you might still be experiencing this. Now, I answered it for her there in the workshop, but I thought it would be useful for all of you to hear this answer because she found it really, really beneficial. And that is that you have to remember that the reason things are disappointing or frustrating now is not because your PhD is bad and it's not because you've let yourself down or any of these things that we often tell ourselves it means. What it means is that you know more now than you did when you started. When we start our PhDs, we are necessarily optimistic and excited and hopeful. If we weren't, we wouldn't take on a 3, 4,5,6, year project. If we weren't experiencing those sorts of emotions and having those sorts of thoughts, we wouldn't even begin this thing. That period running up to the PhD and in the first bits of it, we need to be really hopeful and excited about what we might achieve. We need to be dreaming big about the impact that we'll have and the discoveries that we'll make and all of that stuff, because that's what gets us through the application process, that really uncertain period at the beginning where you don't really know what you're doing. You kind of need to believe that it's going to go somewhere afterwards. So, that past you that was hopeful and optimistic was super necessary to get you going on the PhD journey. However, you are now much more informed, you're much more knowledgeable, and you're much more immersed in what you've done. And that's a wonderful thing, but it has some negative effects as well. One of the negative effects is that we have, by necessity, had to reduce the scope of what we'd hoped to do. We've realized how over hopeful, over optimistic we were at the beginning. We've learned more about the details of the research process and how complicated some things can be. And we've necessarily had to change our project to accommodate that. Those are all exactly right. Those are exactly the things that you should be doing as you develop into becoming an independent researcher. Taking big dreams and turning them into something that you can actually achieve and managing the disappointment that that might not be everything you thought, this is a sign that you know so much more, that you have learned so much more during this period, which is a wonderful thing. It just makes you super attuned to any of the flaws and the kind of reduced scope of your work. The other thing is that you are more immersed in and kind of focused on this piece of research than you ever will be with anything you do in your life again. Because if you go into universities, carry on as a researcher, go into lecturing and all that stuff. You'll have multiple research projects. You'll have your own students. You'll have your teaching. You'll have your leadership, your admin. But while you're doing your PhD, you are fully immersed in this thing. And the downside of that is it also comes super mundane to you. Anything that we do every day, we can take for granted and not realize the wonderful things that we're doing because it's just normal. It's just what we do. I remember being at a conference once and some students from an American university were like, Oh my God, it's Doug Carroll, your supervisor. Oh my God, you'd introduce us? Because he was quite a big dog in his field at the time. And, I was like What? Him? Doug? Yeah. Fine. Whatever. Come on. I don't understand why this is exciting, but sure, we can talk to him. Because for me, it was completely normal. I mean, don't get me wrong. He was a great mentor and I really enjoyed working with him and all those things. It's not to criticise him, but it's like, you don't get excited about your own parents, right? You know, your own supervisor. Pretty dull. See him all the time. But! For them, he was this big academic and they were really excited to meet him. Familiarity had made it mundane. And the same is true when you talk about research. In the workshops that I run from universities, I always get people at the beginning to tell me about their research. And it all sounds so amazing. It's one of the reasons I love to work with PhD students and academics. You're all doing such cool stuff that brings so much interest to the world or solves big problems. Yet to you it can feel really mundane because you've been doing it for the last three years. Now, how does this help? Well, the first thing is to recognize it, because often we think that because we're disappointed and frustrated, it means our PhD is bad. It means that we haven't fulfilled our promise. And I want you to see that it doesn't mean any of that at all. What it means is that you have hugely progressed since that hopeful, optimistic first year that started off. You know loads more, you've done it so much that it's become mundane, and all of this is exactly how it should be. Final year PhD students are a little bit like older teenagers, where like, they're ready to leave the house, okay? They're at that stage where their parents are annoying, everything they're doing is annoying, they're ready to move on to the next thing. And that's what final year, whatever age you are, that's what final year PhD students are like. You are ready to move on. So this does feel a bit mundane and a bit just boring and long. Okay, nothing broken here. The other perspective that I want to bring to this is the perspective of future you. Because future you is going to know more than you know now. And future you is going to have a perspective on your PhD that you don't have right now. They are going to realize what a big deal it was. They are going to be so proud of you for completing it. And so all we have to do is look after ourselves in this moment, this moment between the kind of hopes and optimism and dreams of past us and the future perspective where we will look back on this and realize what an achievement it is. We need to look after ourselves here and that means saying things to ourselves that reminds us why it's important, reminds us why we're capable of it, reminds us why we wanted to do this in the first place and really recognize the progress that we're making. Let's not make these worries or concerns into anything they don't need to be. They are just a sign that you are ready to finish your PhD. Let me know if you're, if that resonates with you. So let's move on. Question two. We often think that when we finish our PhDs, it's going to be like this wonderful moment of clarity and confidence and suddenly sure that we can take on the world because we've actually done this huge thing that we've been working for all this time. And the reality is the other side of thesis submission, the other side of your viva, you're still the same person. You might be pleased. You might be happy that you've done this. You might be proud of yourself to some extent, but we then start to worry about other things. We start to worry about what we're doing next, whether we're well set to get a job either within academia or beyond. And I see this in my members. So some of my members have actually stayed on post PhD for me to support them in that kind of postdoctoral period. And so I got a question from one of my members who is post PhD. She is now a doctor, and she was asking how does she apply all this stuff when she's trying to write up papers so that she can apply for jobs. She wants to be an academic. She doesn't think her CV is quite ready for that yet. And so instead of getting a job at the moment, she's using this time to try and improve her publications. And what she's finding is that without that kind of external accountability, without deadlines set by other people, she's really struggling to get on and complete that piece of work. She's finding herself setting targets and then when the day comes to work on it, talking herself back out of it again. And we've all been there, right? I want you to think about the last time that happened for you. I think it's really, really common, especially in anything where you're trying to work independently. I have a few tips for this. The first is to really think about what sort of boss you want to be to yourself. So some of you may be familiar with my Be Your Own Best Boss course. There we really talk about how to provide yourself with the support and structure that you need to succeed. So in this sort of a situation where you're trying to work even more independently than you were during your PhD, I would really take some time to sit down and say, Okay. What do I want this to look like and how can I try and set it up for myself in a way that feels good, makes me want to do this, makes me want to live these days rather than filling it full of I should be doing this but I don't want to. So spending a little bit of time in boss mode, just kind of planning how to make this work, is really useful. Sometimes this is around time blocking and deciding in advance exactly when you're going to work, but a lot of it is about self talk. If you're spending your time telling yourself that you should have done this before, you should be further along by now, it just becomes this painful thing that nobody actually wants to do. So we get to decide when we work, what we work on, and how we speak to ourselves about that work. Now, whenever we're trying to motivate ourselves, you know, people tell me they want more motivation so they'll get on with things. And, like to say two things. One is, one of the best things you can do in the world is learn to work when you're not motivated. And that is that you choose to work because that's what you said you'd do and no other reason. You don't need to want to, you don't need to feel like it. You don't need to have deadlines. You're just doing it because you said you would. And trying to cultivate a sense that I'm doing this because I wrote it in my diary and I want to be someone who does what she said in her diary can really, really help. We don't want to be kind of pressuring ourselves and kicking ourselves to do it. But just reminding yourself I'm someone who does what they said they'd do can really, really help in this situation. The other thing is we can try and increase the motivation, right? And what people often do is they either remind themselves of the big picture, you know, I'm doing this because I want to get a job or whatever, or they promise themselves some sort of reward immediately after it. Now I've talked about this in a past episode, but what I would encourage instead is aiming for proximal, intrinsic motivation. So what do I mean by that? Intrinsic motivation is to do with the enjoyment and motivation by the task itself. So rather than I'm going to complete this piece of work because then I get to spend the evening with my friends, or I'm going to complete this piece of work because it will get me a job, we try and channel a sense that I'm completing this piece of work because I value this piece of work and because I enjoy the process of writing it. And this is especially true if you want to be an academic, writing these papers is going to be a part of your life for the rest of your career. So we need to channel a sense that we actually like doing this. Because if we don't like doing this, we might want to reconsider that whole academic career thing. Okay. Now for most of you, I think you do actually like doing it. You just don't like the negative self talk and the judgment and the pressure that comes along with it. So we get to remind ourselves of all that intrinsic motivation. How lucky we are to be able to write this stuff that's about something we care about. That's about something we chose, for reasons we want to, for the benefits of our own career. And we get to delve in and be an academic and sit at our desk and do our thing. That can be hugely, hugely motivating. So remind yourself of those intrinsic reasons why the actual process of doing this thing is so nice. And the reason I'm saying proximal rather than distal, distal would be things that are important to you in the future. Proximal are the benefits you get right now. So an equivalent here in exercise is a distal motivator to exercise will be so that you're healthier in old age. Now, I'm getting to an age where that's starting to feel proximal, right? So for me, that's starting to become a key motivator. But for many of you, it won't be. It's something that's too far in the future to make you want to do something that feels a bit uncomfortable now. A proximal motivator for exercise would be something like, I always feel better when I move my body. It's such a nice sensation to have been outside running and to come back in and be all warm and cozy. The mental health benefits of exercise are another one. I always feel much clearer in my mind after I've exercised, for example. So this is where, again, you're reminding yourself of the benefits you're going to get from this immediate piece you're going to do. Oh, I'm going to feel so good when this bit's written. It's going to be so fun to really straighten out what I'm doing in this part of the task. So try and make your motivations proximal and intrinsic. Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. The final thing to say is, if you are repeatedly telling yourself that you want to do something, and you are not doing it. There is another decision. You can just decide you're not going to do it. If you actually just don't want to write this paper, don't. Apply for jobs without the paper. Will it make it more difficult to get the job? Maybe. But you're not writing it anyway, so you may as well just decide you're not going to. And you're going to put your efforts into applying for jobs and making yourself marketable in other ways. Same for exercise, to be fair. If you're repeatedly telling yourself you should be exercising and you're not exercising, you might as well just not decide to exercise. Now often we respond to that with horror. It's like, no, but I really want to. It's like, okay, why? Why do we really want to? Then how do we make it happen? But it's when we're in this murky middle where we're definitely not ready to say we're not going to do this thing, but equally we're not doing it either, then it's just unpleasant. You're not getting any of the benefits of doing it. And you're getting all this extra self judgment. Because you're not. So you can just decide not to do it. If you decide to do it, be your own best boss. Structure it. Speak to yourself well. Be proud of yourself when you complete things. Recognise the stuff you are getting done. And chip away and get this done. And then question three is the one that I promised was relevant to absolutely everyone. And that's because it's about listening to podcasts. I got contacted by one of my regular clients who's finished her PhD and she sent me a message saying, this is going to be a bit meta Vikki, but how would you recommend that people listen to your podcast? Because she likes to listen while she's doing craft or something like that, because she finds that if she's just listening, then she ends up picking up her phone, looking at other things at the same time. Not offended, Sophie. I get it. I get a bit like that with podcasts too. I'm not very good at just sitting listening either. But then she finds that she doesn't make notes and she feels like she's not necessarily getting maximum use out of the podcast. And so she asked whether I had any tips about how to listen to a podcast. Now, there's many, many different ways you can do this, but I'm going to give you some tips that I have found useful for me. I have a bunch of podcasts that I listen to regularly. And I think there's a few things that are useful here. The first is don't overthink this. Don't make it more complicated than it needs to be. I have some podcasts that I listen to because I find them broadly interesting, broadly motivational, and I always end up feeling like I want to get on with things afterwards. Does that mean I implement the exact things they talk about? Often no. Often it's just like, Oh, that's an interesting idea, but I don't actually do it. But there's something about hearing them talk it through that just puts me in a frame of mind that I like. And for many of you listening to this podcast, that might be it. Maybe you just like listening to me, wittering away, sounding vaguely motivational, making you feel like you can actually do your PhD. Perfect. If that works for you, that's enough. Do your crafts, walk your dog, listen to me while you're driving, whatever it is. And don't worry too much that you're not implementing everything that I say, if you're still getting benefit from just listening to me witter, okay? Don't overthink it. However, if on occasions you're like, you know what, there are some of these things that I actually want to try out. I don't want to just be consuming these ideas anymore. I want to actually make sure that I'm trying them and practicing them in my life. And, to be honest, if you want to change your behavior, that's a really, really sensible thing. Then the first thing to say is let's get specific with that. Let's not try and implement everything I talk about in every single episode. I don't implement everything I talk about. I try to, but all at the same time, it's too much for my little brain. I can't implement everything all at once. You definitely can't. So if you're kind of going, you know, I find Vikki's podcast really useful, but I feel like I want to move to the stage where I implement things. Let's just pick one. One episode. What is the biggest pain point in your life at the moment? What's the one thing that if you could make some progress on that, it would really, really help? Then, go to my website, thephdlifecoach. com, and go to podcast, and you'll find all of my episodes there. I am soon going to have some better kind of tagging system, but at the moment you can just scroll on through, okay? Find an episode that answers that pinch point, and side note, if you notice that there's no episode that answers your problem, let me know. I want to record that episode. I want it to feel like when you go there, there is everything you need to succeed in your PhDs in academia. So, have a look, find one, and then you've got three different choices of how you consume it. There's video, if that helps on YouTube, there's the podcast version, and there's a full transcript on my website. So if you are somebody who is better when you're wanting to implement things, better off just reading it, it's right there for you. Word for word transcript of everything I say in the podcast. So just pick one episode, go to the website, consume it in the way that you find best, and then do it. Pick one thing from it that you want to do. If this is something you want more support with, make sure you're on my newsletter. I know my client already is on my newsletter, but if any of you aren't, if you're on my newsletter, you get a little summary of the podcast. So you get three take home messages. You get two reflective questions to try out that are connected to that topic. And you get one specific action to take. So if you're a bit like I want to implement from this episode, but even looking at the transcript feels a bit overwhelming, make sure in your newsletter, you will get those week by week. Now, secret for you. I am currently looking at a way to create a repository of all those newsletters and to go back and create them for old episodes so that we end up with like a summary bank of all of those things. It hasn't happened yet. It's the middle of November right now. Who knows whether it will exist by the time you listen to this. If you listen to it live, it does not. But it is on my agenda. So keep an eye out for that because I think it would be super useful. My final thing connects back to an episode from a few weeks ago where I talked about using voice notes to kind of capture your ideas. And I tried this one out the other day and it was amazing. A little bit disjointed, but amazing. So I like to listen to podcasts while I walk, because I'm similar to Sophie. I'm not very good at just sitting still and reading these things. But there are sometimes, not necessarily even things that they say that I want to implement, but that while I'm listening to them, it made me think of something. And so what I did the other day, I was listening to a book because I have an author coming up on a future podcast. Uh, he's going to come out in January. I think it is. I recorded it last night. He's amazing. You're going to love it. But I was finishing up listening to his book. And it was making me think of loads of things that I wanted to ask him and talk about. And so what I was doing was I was walking around my village with my headphones in, listening to my book, March, March, March. And whenever I had something that I wanted to remember, I paused my podcast, I opened my Otter. ai, I whittled into my phone for a minute. Stop, go back to the podcast, do, do, do. It's actually quite similar to how my husband and I listen to podcasts in the car. We'll listen for like three minutes and then one of us will pause it and we'll talk about something. And then we'll go again and then somebody else will get another idea and we'll press pause. And for anybody else quite annoying. We love it. Um, so that's another way that you can do it, is either having a notebook with you, or using voice notes on your phone, so that as you're listening, even if you're doing crafts or you're walking or whatever, you can just pause and add notes into that. Obviously it doesn't work so well while you're driving, but hopefully having the transcript and the notes in the newsletter will enable you to return to the things that you want to return to. On that, if you find this podcast useful, I have one request. One teeny tiny request for you. Send it to somebody, find an episode that you think is particularly useful to something that one of your friends has told you they're stressed about and send it to them. Send them and say, I love this podcast. This will really help you listen to it. Now, call me when you've done it. We'll have a chat about it. Make sure you listen. Or, suggest it for one of your university, like, journal clubs or something like that. Suggest, everyone listen to this episode and then we'll talk about how we can implement it and how it could change the way we do things. Please, please, please share this. When people listen to the podcast, they tell me so many nice things about it and I just want to make sure it's getting to all the people that could benefit. I really hope today's been useful. I feel like those were three really, really insightful questions. So thank you to the people who sent them in. If you have questions, there's a bunch of ways you can get them to me. You can send them on Instagram through messaging. I am at the PhD life coach. You can reply to my newsletter, if you are on my newsletter. If you're listening on podcasts, then there's a send Vicki, a question button on all the places you get your podcasts. So you can press that, just send them through. If you do that one, make sure you tell me your name. Cause otherwise I don't get your name. Just let me know. I want to answer any specific challenges that you have at the moment. Let me know what you think of the episode, what things you might be implementing and thank you all so much for listening. I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.
Links I refer to in this episode How to use role-based time-blocking How to plan when you hate planning Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. I often notice patterns when I'm coaching when many of my clients are coming up with similar issues at the same time and what I'm seeing a lot in my membership at the moment is this feeling that they're really bad at planning. They're bad at planning because they don't always make a plan, they are worried that they're not very good at judging how long anything's going to take, so their plan kind of goes wrong, and then they don't follow their plan, and then they beat themselves up for not following their plan, and so they then avoid making plans for a while. Or when they do, they end up making unrealistic plans and the cycle starts over again. And if that feels like you, don't worry, you're in exactly the right place. I was like this for a really, really long time. And when I tell people that things are different now, they usually think that that means that now I make perfectly realistic plans and implement them exactly as I intended. And anyone who knows me knows that's a really long way from the truth, okay? And what I want to say in this episode today is I don't think that's even the goal. Some of the most important coaches in my life who have really brought me to where I am today do emphasize that that's how you do it, right? That you only put things in your diary when you're sure you'll do them, and then you absolutely robotically do everything in your diary, and that as long as you do that, you'll be fine. And whilst I've learned a lot from these people in other areas, this is one that never landed with me, because I'm like, well, I don't see that's ever going to happen for me. And that made me feel like I didn't really have any options for to feel better than they did. What I've realized instead, and what I work with the clients in my membership on much more, is how we can accept imperfect implementation of our plans, how we can not only accept it, but expect it, plan for it, and not make a massive drama out of it when it happens. And you might think that that will make you really bad at planning. But actually, in this episode, I want to really convince you that planning for and accepting imperfect implementation will make you a way better planner than expecting perfect implementation and getting upset when that doesn't happen. Now, before I get into that, I do want to say I'm recording this in November. It will be coming out to you on the 25th of November 2024. If you're listening to this live, you have got one week, one week till Saturday night to get into the membership if you want in before the end of this calendar year. The membership is going to be open until midnight UK time. GMT, American listeners, please notice. Midnight GMT, November the 30th. The membership is going to close until the end of january. It will reopen again and then next year it's only going to open in the final week of each month. I'm introducing some new sessions which will take place at the beginning of the month, welcoming new members, teaching you the self coaching model, getting you up to speed with how all the membership stuff works, and because of that you're only going to be able to get in at certain times of the month. So if you've been umming and erring about whether the membership is right for you or not, now's the time to join if you don't want to have that whole fear of missing out thing. If you're not sure what the membership's about, you can check out on my website, thephdlifecoach. com. If you click on the membership at the top, it will tell you all about it, but essentially, it gives you access to three sessions a week of online group coaching. Some of those are open coaching sessions where you can bring any topics. Others are around specific topics that are really relevant for PhD students. You get access to two workshops a month, on all sorts of things. Like this afternoon when I'm recording this, I'm doing one on what to do when you've got too much to do. Next month we've got one on how to manage your time and energy. We've got one on imposter syndrome. All sorts of really important topics. It's a lovely community. Everybody really looks after each other. Get the support you need from me and from the other people around you. So definitely make sure you check that out if you're not a member already. You also actually get access to some online courses, one of which, Be Your Own Best Boss, covers a load of stuff about planning. Gives you some really specific tools that allow you to practice some of the stuff that we're talking about today. So check it out for the end of November. Perfect. Now back to the topic, imperfect implementation. Well, let's start with what's the problem with expecting yourself to implement things perfectly. Now, the first thing that's a problem with that is that if we expect perfect implementation, then it makes us much more likely to make unrealistic plans. Because we're looking at going, well, okay, as long as I do all the things I said I'd do at exactly the times I said I'd do them in exactly the amount of time I said I'd do them, then all of this fits. So having this kind of belief that you're going to be able to implement them perfectly and that you should be able to implement perfectly can tempt you not to leave any wiggle room in your planning. And I see this all the time. And the reason people don't want to put wiggle room into their diaries is because they think it means they have to accept that they're not good enough, you know, they should be implementing perfectly. So why would they plan to be less than perfect? It also means you have to make some difficult decisions, right? Because if you've realized that not everything fits into the time you've got, then you have to choose what things you're not going to do, who you're going to have to disappoint, whether you're going to have to disappoint yourself, what you're going to miss out on, because you can't do everything. And so instead of making those difficult decisions, instead of accepting that we're not going to implement this perfectly and we can't fit it all in, what we do instead is kind of avoid those decisions, jam it all in anyway, expect perfect implementation and then don't implement perfectly. The reasons we don't implement perfectly are partly stupid plans that don't allow for breaks, that don't allow for transitions, that don't allow for unexpected things to come up, that don't allow for us just not being on top form that day. But I think it's also driven in large part by the fact that although we told ourselves we should be able to implement this perfectly, we also told ourselves it probably wasn't reasonable to implement this perfectly. So it's almost like there's two different voices in our heads. I have to plan it like this because I should be able to do it, and this is the only way it all fits. And a voice that says, yeah, but you're probably not going to stick to it, are you? Because this looks exhausting, and you never know how long things take anyway. And then we're almost starting it with an expectation that we're not going to do it like that anyway. So we don't go at it a hundred percent because we think, you know what, this probably was never going to work, which makes it really hard to go at a hundred percent. And then when we do miss something, then I don't know about you, but me and my clients then often end up really beating ourselves up about it. We failed again. This plan was pointless. This plan didn't get implemented. It was useless. I'm useless. We're never going to finish. And then we have end up avoiding the entire plan, avoiding our tasks and then until we get so frustrated that we start saying, we'll try again, we're just off plan. And I think this will sound really, really familiar to lots of you. And that's okay. This is really, really common. One thing that doesn't happen when we assume we're going to implement something perfectly is any strategizing about how to make this plan robust to non perfect implementation. Now what do I mean by that? When I used to do my GCSE revision back in the days when I was at school. I would make super perfectionist plans and they would be really unrealistic about what I would fit but they'd also be super specific so in this hour I would cover this topic and this topic and in that hour I'd cover this topic and that topic. And it meant that if I ever missed an hour, I had to reshuffle the rest of the plan. The plan didn't work anymore. Suddenly I was trying to jam in extra hours, or I was having to move things down, and then I was spending more time reorganizing my plan than actually doing the work. And I hadn't thought anything about what would happen if I didn't do these things in those hours. Whereas if we know we're going to implement something imperfectly, then we're much more likely to say, I'm going to try my best to implement this as close to what I planned as possible, but on the basis it's probably not going to be bang on, how can I make this more robust to imperfect implementation? Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. And that might be things like making sure you have a system for knowing what you have done and what you haven't done. Maybe it's things like prioritizing more clearly so that you know which things you would drop if you are then running out of time. It might be using a more role based approach rather than a task based approach. And if you want to know more about that, I talk about it in my episode about role based time blocking. But essentially, instead of blocking in, in this time I am going to do this specific task. You instead say, I'll be in operations mode and you then look at the operations part of your to do list and choose the thing that's most urgent, or you'll be in writing mode and you'll then decide which bit of writing is most urgent or the highest priority and you do that rather than specifying the exact thing that you will write weeks in advance. I usually recommend picking maybe the day before or that morning so that you're not having to decide in the moment, but not deciding so far in advance that if you then miss a session, it messes everything up. Everyone's built a Gantt chart, right? That you then get off track with, and then instead of adapting it, you just delete it or shove it in a drawer somewhere and never look at it. Again, that's what happens when we make plans that only work if we turn up as perfect humans, which we never do because we're humans. So, what do we do instead? How do we make plans if we accept that we're going to implement them imperfectly? Well, the first thing we do is we think about the quantity of work that we're trying to do and we ask ourselves, does it still fit if I implement this imperfectly. If I only did 80 percent of the time that I said I was going to do, would this still work? And if the answer's no, then we get to make some decisions about which bits of it we are going to do, which bits of it we need to do first, which bits are the highest priority, so that if it does slip, we know exactly what we need to change. And it makes it much more likely that we're going to start with a realistic plan in the first place. What we're also going to do when we plan that we're going to be imperfect, or that we're likely to be imperfect, we also start to let go of the idea that anything less than perfect implementation is a fail. Plan is useful if it inspires action, not just if we follow it perfectly. If you make a plan and it gets you going on something that you really want to do, it was an effective plan, even if you didn't carry out every single thing that you intended to do within the time that you had available to you. Planning is at best guesswork. Even when we're really good at it, we're never quite sure exactly how long things will take. Obviously, we can adjust the quality to fit in the time we get it, but even within that, we don't always know or decide in a way that we're happy with. So, sometimes, we do underestimate how long things take. I still do, even though I try to get it done in the time I said. Sometimes, that's just not possible. To be honest, I planned to record this this morning. I didn't record it this morning because it took me longer than anticipated to edit the last podcast that I was doing. You know, we all get it wrong sometimes. It doesn't have to mean that there was a fundamental flaw. The joy is that by making a plan, It means that you've sat down and thought about what your intentions are for the week. What are the things that are most important to you this week? What's top of the agenda? What's got deadlines coming up? And even if you don't follow that through to perfection, you're still aware of those things in a way that you wouldn't have been if you hadn't made the plan. So, I very rarely stick to my week plan perfectly, but if I don't stick to the plan but I have planned, then I'm at least aware of what things were important that I haven't done, and I'm aware of what I was doing that wasn't what I'd planned. And that gives me a whole bunch of information that you simply don't get if you don't plan. My weeks that get away from me are the ones where I decide that I'm too busy to make a plan, I've just got to get on and do some of the things, and then I usually end up three quarters of the way through the week going, I don't even know what I've done this week and where I'm at. When we plan, we identify that framework and then how we deviate from the framework can be really, really informative. It might start telling you that you're not allowing enough time for routine tasks, for example. It might tell you that there are things you're avoiding. If you notice that there are tasks you keep putting on your list each week and then not doing, we get to look at those and go, I wonder I wonder why I'm not doing that? It gives you a load of information that if you just do what comes top of mind all the time without planning, you never ever get to find out. Making a plan and knowing that we'll stick to it imperfectly also helps us appreciate the things we do do. So I want you to think of the last time you made a plan and then didn't stick to it, especially if it was a time that you were beating yourself up a lot about that. What usually happens is as soon as we fall off that wagon, we now hate the plan. We now hate ourselves. And therefore we just go back to doing whatever comes into our inboxes, whatever people shout for loudest, right? When in reality, if we have a plan and we know we're going to fall off it occasionally, we're not going to do it perfectly, as soon as we realize we have, we can nudge ourselves back to doing the plan, without judgment, without making a massive drama about the fact that we missed some stuff, and then we can recognize how much of the plan we did do. Because if you sometimes fall off it, don't do exactly what you thought you were going to, but then you nudge yourself back onto it. By the end of the week, you might find you followed 40 percent of your plan or 60 percent of your plan. Now, if you hadn't got a plan, or if you'd got a plan that was only acceptable if you do all of it, you would never have recognized all that stuff that you got done. Whereas if you can look at it and be like, look at me. I got 60 percent of my plan done this week, that's awesome. Check me out. Okay, we need to look at the bits I didn't do, why I didn't do them, how I can make them easier, all that stuff. We're going to strategize for that. But part of strategizing for that, for anything, is recognizing what we are already doing well. And having a plan, knowing you're going to implement it imperfectly, and then recognizing the extent to which you implemented it, can really help recognize what you did do, as well as notice what you didn't do. Now, none of this means that we're going to just let ourselves off the hook, make unrealistic plans, know we're not going to stick to them anyway, dick about, and then moan about it later. That's not what we're doing. Our goal. is to still stick to a plan. Our goal is to still design a plan that makes it as likely as possible that we can do it. A plan that feels like it might be fun to try and do, that's kind of challenging but achievable. A plan that's designed to kind of structure our day in a way that feels nice and feels like we'd want to live it. And then during the week we want to look at that plan in a kind of slightly eager teacher's pet sort of way and be like, oh, I wonder if I can do this bit. Oh, I think I can do that bit too. Oh, I missed a bit this afternoon but I reckon I could catch up and do this bit this afternoon and then I'd have done most of it. We want to channel that kind of eagerness to do our best to hit the plan by making it much less important if any of that goes wrong. Okay, so this isn't about just going, oh, I'm a little bit tired today. I don't think I'll do it. It's about going, okay, I'm a bit tired today. Might not do all of this, but I said I was going to spend an hour and a half working on this piece of writing. How about we do 45 minutes and see how we go. And then at least I've stuck to 50 percent of my plan. If after that I'm feeling really rough and I'm not getting anywhere, we'll call it quits. But you know what? Better than nothing. Rather than if we have this kind of black and white, yes or no, did or didn't approach to whether we completed our task or not, as soon as we know we're not doing 90 minutes that we'd planned, might as well not do it, right. Might as well just not bother. So by cultivating your kind of, eager to please, trying to do the bits that you set yourself, then we sort of scurry to catch all the bits we could do and just accept the bits we didn't get done, and we learned from those. I think this episode actually even fits really nicely with last week, so if you haven't listened to last week's, do go back and listen to that after this. I was talking about using voice notes to capture ideas, because one of the things that my members have been talking about that derails their plans is when they suddenly think of or remember something else that they needed to do other than the thing they'd planned. So they'd put aside 90 minutes for writing perhaps, and then they remembered that they needed to look something up, they remembered they needed to do something for their supervisor, and they're so worried that that thing's more urgent or that they'll forget that thing. The, they sort of go, Oh, I'll just do that now. Now, sometimes that's true. Sometimes they're worried they're going to forget it. Sometimes we have to concede it's because that other thing is a lot easier than this difficult cognitive task that you're meant to be doing right now. But I think if you use this in combination with that voice notes episode from last week, that can really help. So that if you're, you know, you're in your 90 minutes, you're working away. Do, do, do, I'm doing my writing. You think of something. You can grab your voice notes. Whatever system you're using and just say, need to remember to talk to my supervisor later, record it into, your voice notes, jot it down in the notebook, if that's the approach that you prefer, but do it more as a kind of memo, knowing that you're going to go back to that tomorrow. You know, if you look at the system I talked about last week, knowing you are going to look at that tomorrow is much easier to kind of, okay, I'll dump it over here, back to this thing I planned. So that's another kind of approach when we know we're going to get distracted, we plan for us being imperfect, we then start to put structures in place. It's like, it's okay, my brain is going to come up with some random stuff that either I'd rather do, or that feels more important, or that I'm worried I'll forget, that's okay, I can plan for that. I can have a system for that because I know it's going to happen because I'm not perfect. I'm planning for imperfect implementation. I would love to hear from you what you think about this episode. How could it change things for you to plan for someone that you know is going to be imperfect? It kind of refers back to this whole notion of being your own best boss, right? If as a boss you give your employees a plan that only works if they're perfect, it's not a very good plan. It's not a very motivating plan. Whereas when we remember, when we're being good bosses to ourselves, we're planning for the real and authentic version of ourselves. Not the version of ourselves that turns up at its very best, but the kind of normal day to day version of us. We're planning for that version. We're making it as easy as possible for them. We're trying to make it as clear for them as possible. We're trying to make it so they want to try and implement this plan because it looks achievable and great fun. And like, it will take them all the places they want to go. Then we get to create this kind of motivating work environment, even when we're working on our own. Let me know what you think. Let me know what things have helped you to implement imperfectly but better than you ever imagined. I have certainly found that since I've accepted that I am never going to implement this perfectly, I get way more done than I did when I was making unrealistic plans. I get more done. I feel better about it. And I make the difficult decisions about what I'm not going to do. And to be honest, I always feel really good about them. So let me know what you think. I really hope you found this useful. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.
Links I refer to in this episode Moxie Moxie's Research Dr Jessica Parker’s LinkedIn Profile Ethan Mollick's Substack "One Useful Thing" The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI Dr Sarah Eaton – Six tenets of post plagiarism Vikki: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD life coach. And this week I have another guest with me and I think this one is going to be super fun because it's quite controversial and interesting and very, very topical. So welcome. We have Jessica Parker here from the AI company. Moxie. Welcome, Jessica. Jessica: Thank you, Vikki. I'm excited to be here. You know, I listened to your podcast several months ago when you met with Alison Miller, who was the owner of The Dissertation Coach and now runs The Academic Writers' Space. She's a really close friend and colleague of mine, and I really enjoyed that episode, so I'm honored to be here. Thanks for having me. Vikki: Fantastic to have you. So we're going to be talking today guys about AI and AI's use in academia and the controversies and the misconceptions and essentially all the things that academics need to know, but before we get into that, maybe tell people a little bit more about you. Obviously you've got this connection with dissertation coach and the Moxie company as well, so tell people a bit more about that. Jessica: Yeah, so I will just put this out there as a disclaimer. I am not a computer scientist. I am not an AI expert. I think of myself as an advocate and a skeptic. So my goal is to really try to understand AI, in terms of its capabilities and limitations and helping guide my students and my clients on how to use it ethically and responsibly. Uh, but I started doing generative AI research about a year ago, and before that, I was a health care researcher. I worked in Boston for two large universities managing some large scale inter-professional health care grants. I got pretty burnout on academia. My dad got sick and I came home to take care of him. And I thought, you know, what can I do to try to bridge this gap in my career? And I started a consulting company, Dissertation By Design. And that was in 2017 and originally it was just me working with all the clients and I primarily specialized in working with health care disciplines and really just giving them guidance on research design and data interpretation. And then my team grew and that's how I ultimately met Allison Miller, the owner of The Dissertation Coach. And we really bonded so when she decided she wanted to retire from The Dissertation Coach and focus on The Academic Writers' Space, it just seemed like a natural fit for me to take over. So that happened in January of this year, and that was big. So I still manage both of those companies, but from an AI perspective, like most of the world, I started using chat GPT three, in like March, 2023. And I will never forget the moment I first started using it. I was just in shock. I could not believe how well it approximated like human like conversation. And I had both awe and then just, I felt like I had an existential crisis. I immediately thought about like, well, what does this mean for research and my industry and learning and society and just all the things. And so I'm very curious. So I set about learning. I just immediately dove in to YouTube videos and LinkedIn. I started trying to find thought leaders and just teaching myself as much as I could to understand it. I also supervise doctoral students at a university in Boston still and so I wanted to think about how they might be using it and how to guide them. So one of the first things I did, uh, last summer was I started trying to create my own generative AI tools. And that's kind of what sparks this whole journey. Like I never set out to found a tech company. Um, I'm a very non technical person up until recently. And so I think this has been as much a surprise to me as anyone else who knows me. Vikki: I love that. I love that. So then I just decided to build one. Jessica: You know, naivete is a good thing. I think if you had told me then all the challenges I would run into, I might've thought twice, but here I am navigating it. Vikki: One of my recent episodes, I was thinking about the 10 different qualities that I think we need to be good bosses to ourselves and ambitious was one of them. And I love that just getting immersed in something and seeing an opportunity and going for it, regardless of kind of what your original background was, building on the expertise that you've got now. I think that's amazing. Jessica: Yeah, I think it can be like a curse and a superpower. It's like, I'm really good at focusing and solving problems. And then sometimes I can get like completely immersed in something and lose myself in it. And you know, so like my family checks in on me and they're like, we haven't heard from you. And it's usually because I've just discovered some new capability and I'm like building some new application or something like that. Yeah. Vikki: I mean, so tell us about what you've been building. Jessica: Yeah, so Moxie, we started out really focusing on using generative AI for formative feedback, and I wanted to solve a problem. I'm a very pragmatic person, but the first problem I wanted to solve was a problem I have with my doc students and my clients, and it's this need that they have where they want feedback on really long academic texts. You know, we think about 40 page lit reviews or 100 page research proposals. And typically they haven't planned ahead and they need it last minute. And so I'm limited in my time and resources. And I thought, you know, can generative AI provide some sort of formative feedback on aspects of their ideas or their writing? And it can. And that was the first research study I did with an applied linguist. We evaluated chat GPT's capabilities and limitations for automated writing evaluation and we looked at complexity, accuracy, [00:06:00] and fluency of the writing. And we came to a conclusion then, and it's evolved, but we've kind of stuck to it, which has been interesting given how much we've learned, which is that we already have these tools available before generative AI that are really good at looking at accuracy. So you think about rule based systems like Grammarly or the spell checker in Microsoft Word. So those are rule based systems that are good at looking at accuracy. Whereas generative AI, what we found, if you use it appropriately, so it's not going to immediately do this well, it can really help with complexity and fluency of the writing. And I believe, and what I've seen, and I know to be true, is when you give it enough context and you're using your critical thinking skills when you're engaging with an AI chatbot, you can increase depth and complexity in your writing. And so that's really what we set out to do. And so the first suite of AI tools we created were tools I was using with my doc students. So I did a study alongside of them, a participatory research study to understand, like, their experiences with it, and it was wonderful. I made it clear that the generative AI was not grading them. It was not a summative assessment. It was just meant to help them get some preliminary feedback from something that I created using the same criteria I would be using to evaluate their work and try to close the gap on their own before submitting their work to me. And so they loved that. They felt like it gave them a bit more autonomy in the learning process and I noticed that it was reinforcing learning because it was using that criteria I provided it, that I was teaching the students. So Moxie is really mostly about formative feedback. So we don't create tools to write for the user. Like people don't come to Moxie or if they do, they quickly realize we're not for them to like generate their lit review or something like that. It's more like you have to bring something to the table. And then Moxie acts as like a collaborator or a thought partner with you to develop your work further. Vikki: Amazing. And you said that the students liked that and they found it useful. Tell me a bit more about what they kind of got out of that. Jessica: Yeah, so, some of the things I heard early on, and I'm now on my 4th semester with this. So every time I'm sort of tweaking and experimenting, but what I started noticing in the discussion boards and the students weren't aware of it. I became aware of it. And then we did a focus group. So then they became more aware of it is, I noticed more, metacognition. So they were thinking more about their process and I had intentionally built the chatbot to do that to force them to think about the process, not the product and to recall concepts like these students, and this was an academic writing course. I was exposing them to new concepts, such as anthropomorphism or precision or coherence and writing. And these were concepts that they were not familiar with. And so getting that feedback, maybe 10 times from an AI tool before submitting it to me gave them ample opportunity to like, see those concepts reinforced. And then I would develop the tools to encourage reflection. And then I required reflection in their papers to understand how they used it. So I started seeing these signs of metacognition and cognition where they're recalling and using the concepts that they're learning in the discussion boards, and normally I would see that much later in the semester, so that was a good sign. And what the students liked about it is, it was available any time of day, never gets tired, uh, and they, and they're not afraid to ask them questions. So sometimes I don't know a student is struggling until I see their 1st assignment or until they reach out to me, but the students through interaction with the chat bot, and they don't have to admit what they don't know or come to me right away. Because maybe, you know, there's that power dynamic. So they appreciated that they sort of had the opportunity to ask the dumb questions that maybe they're too afraid to ask me. That was something that they liked and, but the biggest thing that they appreciated was feeling like they could try to improve their work well before they submitted it to me. So it gave them like a bit more control over that process. Vikki: Hmm. I love that. So one of the things I've noticed with AI, so I've only used the kind of the bog standard commercial free chat GPT, and I've used it for a few worky bits, and liked some bits of it, not others. We talked a little bit before we started recording that I've used it to develop some examples to use in a workshop, for example, but then I haven't liked it when I've, I've tried to do like summaries of summaries of my podcasts into short articles and things, and I didn't like the way that worked. But one of the things that I noticed is that I learned a lot about my own thinking by thinking about how to give it enough instructions to do something well, if you see what I mean. Because we all hopefully know by now that if you say in chat GPT, you know, write a paragraph on photosynthesis, it'll chug something out. But if you say, write a paragraph on photosynthesis that's at the level of a graduate student, including, I don't know what recent research there is on photosynthesis, bad example, but you know what I mean, you know, giving it more and more context and more and more instruction, the better quality output you get, and for me, I think a lot of the benefit is in actually learning what you're exactly asking for in the first place. And I wonder whether that's something you see with the writing and the feedback. Jessica: Yes, you have to have an order to, so there's this age old computer science principle that I learned, which is garbage in garbage out. And that still holds true for generative AI. [00:12:00] So the more you give it, the more likely you're going to get what you're looking for out of it. And I was actually reading something recently that I think captures this really well. So. All the frontier models like ChatGPT by OpenAI, Clod by Anthropic, Gemini by Google, Llama by Meta. They're trained on everything in the internet. And the internet is a decontextualized and frictionless environment and these are general purpose tools. And so they're good at doing just a little bit of everything kind of okay. But when you give it all of that instruction, so like my prompts are sometimes a page long. Like I was just working on one of my prompts for synthesis and it requires me to have a lot of clarity about exactly what I want to evaluate. And so it's interesting through writing the prompts actually have improved my rubrics and my evaluation criteria, 'cause it's helped me see what's unclear. And that's one of the ways I use generative AI a lot. Just as an educator. So this is just not even with Moxie, but I will take an assessment criteria or rubric or template, I'll feed it into say Claude, and I'll say What's unclear? Imagine you're a first year PhD student who has no knowledge of these concepts. Which of these instructions might be a bit vague? How do I need to elaborate? Should I give some examples and sentence starters? And so it just helps me really improve a lot of those instructions and templates and rubrics for my students. I also use it as a thought partner, and this is what I encourage my students and my clients to do. You know, we as humans have a lot of assumptions and biases. I mean, writing a positionality statement is a common assignment for a first year Ph. D. student because they're learning about positionality. Well, you can brainstorm and thought partner with a chat bot and have it like point out what some of your assumptions and your biases may be by having it role play. It doesn't mean that you take everything for truth and at face value. It gives so many more opportunities to do those things where maybe before you had to have a human available and not everyone has that human available to thought partner with. Vikki: Yeah, for sure. My brain is now pinging in about 50 different directions, but I feel like for the purposes of me fully understanding and everyone else fully understanding. Can you just tell us a bit more about how it even works and therefore, you know, what it's good at and what it's less good at? Jessica: Yeah, no, that's a good question, especially cause I think with the news hype and the media, I feel like expectations are not aligned with reality. And so a lot of people do not understand. They just think it's magic. I think the easiest way to explain what a large language model does. So I'm not talking about an image generator. In particular, I'm talking about text content. It's like a mathematical model of communication. So we have artificial intelligence is like an umbrella term that encompasses machine learning, deep learning, which includes neural networks and large language models and generative AI are grouped together. Ultimately, these models have been trained on vast amounts of data, so much data, it's hard numbers that you've never heard of, crazy amounts of data, everything on the intranet. Through learning and seeing all of that data and seeing how words are paired together, it creates a database and we call that a vector database. And so a word like apple could be the fruit or it could be the company. And the way it knows the difference is based on the words that are surrounding it. So when you ask a question to chat GPT, if you say, tell me about Apple's products, it's going to know that the word Apple by product means that it's a company. So it just puts words together in a vector database and it uses numbers. So it's just a mathematical model of communication. Vikki: So what implications does that have? What people should be using it for in academia? Jessica: Well, the first is that it's not rule based. So up until now, we've all thought of technology in terms of software. Software is programmed and it's rule based, so it's predictable. We can identify where something went wrong. We just go find that code and we fixed it because it's not following the rule we gave it. Generative AI is not rule based. It produces something new and original, even if it's slightly different every time. So it's not pulling complete sentences from somewhere, so it's not paraphrasing or plagiarizing. It's generating something new each time. And it's not following rules, so it's less predictable. That's why you and I might ask ChatGPT or Claude the exact same question, and it might give us a slightly different response, which is why context is so important. I use the example of, if you were to go into ChatGPT and say, What color is the sky? Just leave it at that. likely to predict that the word is blue. It's just a prediction model. But if you give it context and say the color of the sky is blank, it's raining today. It's going to predict a different word, like grey. And so that's where the context is important, but it's still not predictable. Like the more you add on, the more complex the task is. So that's why they call it a black box. It's really difficult to trace any issues or like, I was recently reading a study where they looked at, um, I think they use chat GPT. They use it to evaluate different essays by students who were white, black, Asian American, and it scored them all very differently and it was stricter in its grading for Asian Americans compared to black and white students. And you [00:18:00] can't go into the system and figure out like exactly why and how that happened. That's very different from a software. And so everything we know about the software paradigm, which we're all used to, does not apply with generative AI. And that's really hard, I think, for people to understand. That means it's not a hundred percent accurate. It's not a fact checker. So I. I hear a lot of people using it like they would Google where they go to Google and ask a question that you expect to link to a source and get a fact from. That's not what ChatGPT is made for. It might get it right, but it's not a fact checker. It's just predicting the next word. It doesn't have Truth. So I think that is important for people to understand. And I think that's really challenging to wrap your head around because it's so good. It's so confident in its responses. It uses a lot of, when you look at the language, boosters, which makes it sound even more confident. So for someone who's not an expert, it comes across as the truth. And unless you question it, even then it's still predicting the next word. It's not thinking about your response or your question if that makes sense. So people using it like Google for fact checking is, I don't like to say right or wrong, but that's not the best use of a large language model. What's also challenging is what we're starting to see is this idea of summarizing. For instance, now you've probably noticed in Google, when you ask a question, it does use Gemini and it'll summarize and attempt to answer a question for you at the top, and it will link to its sources. But large language models are not the best at summarizing. Like, if you just tell a person to summarize, that person is going to choose what they're going to focus on in that summary. You think about summarizing a whole research article, I might really value the methods and put more emphasis on the methods. So unless you're telling it exactly what to focus on in that summary. And so what we start to see is this simplification bias, which is really problematic in research. And I've been cautioning people about that quite a bit. An example of simplification bias would be if you, especially these AI research assistants, if you ask it a question, like you put in your research question, it'll summarize maybe the top 10 papers and attempt to answer that question. If you really go through each of those sources, a lot of times it will get it wrong. And that's because it's not great at knowing what to focus on. It's not a human. It's not looking at that research through the same lens that you would. based on your experience and your perspective and maybe the theory that you're using. So I, I feel like people are going to get in trouble with this simplification bias and that's something that concerns me quite a bit. Vikki: Definitely. And Yeah, and you see people on Twitter and things talking about tools that, you know, this will take the 50 articles you need to read and put it into tabulated form. So you don't, you know, they don't usually say the words, so you don't need to read the original, but it's kind of inferred sometimes that that's why this will save you so much time and That it is really concerning that it doesn't have that element of having gone through your brain and been filtered against the things that you think are important or the things you're focusing on this time. Jessica: Well, I want to touch on that because I think you're hitting on something important and It bothers me that the marketing language that we're seeing is all about speed and efficiency. I don't know if Microsoft still uses this language, but when they released its 1st, like generative educational product, they use the phrase teaching speed, which is really interesting. To me, it seems obvious, but I do find myself having to say this, like, as a researcher, when you get, when you're an expert in something, or you're becoming an expert, you don't go get your Ph. D. for speed and efficiency. There's friction in learning, doesn't mean it has to be more painful than it needs to be, but I do worry about this focus on speed and efficiency because it does send the wrong message. I don't think that I'm conducting research any faster than I was, but that's wasn't my goal. And I think that surprises people when I talk about it, like the goal, the way I see it, isn't. To do your research faster to your lit review faster. I think you can do it. Maybe more a bit more efficiently manually, I used to build out literature matrices and word. So now I can speed that up. I can, you know, use it in a way I could just make that table, but I'm still having to read every article. So it's not saving time. It's just shifting my time. It's like, I'm just spending my time on different things. And I think if people can think about it that way, then that would be, I think, a healthier way to approach it. I see what you mean and I hear it all the time. And I think that's where sometimes expectations are not aligned with reality. Vikki: Yeah. But there's two different versions of reality as well, isn't there, in the sense that there's the reality of what it's actually good at and what it should, in inverted commas, be used for. But there is also the reality, and maybe this is worse in undergrads, one would hope, but I'm sure it filters through, there is also the reality of what people will actually just use it for. And sort of believing the truth of both of those I think is actually really challenging because we can say, you know, it's the same as we'd say to undergrads, you know, things a lot easier if you turn up to lectures and you talk to your tutors and da da da, and then they try and do it from the video recordings and blah blah. Um, we can say it [00:24:00] works a lot better and this is what it's intended for. But if it roughly does that, then there's going to be chunk of people for whom that's very attractive and that kind of tempt them over, even if they know it's not perfect, it's, it's done. Jessica: I mean, we're seeing that. I have mixed feelings on this. So on one hand, like I've been in rooms where there's conversations about how all the admissions essay now is our essays now are AI generated. One part of me, it's like, I want to give humans the benefit of the doubt and say that I think that's a sign of low AI literacy. I also believe that as long as the focus is on the grade and there's deadlines, there's always going to be cheating. What I think is great about this moment for educators. And I try to talk to faculty about shifting our focus from A. I detection because they're very unreliable to instead rethinking, which is a hard discussion because it requires a lot of effort and work rethinking, like, how are we evaluating learning? And personally, you know, for me, it's been a big shift to process over product has helped me address some of these issues. Now, I would not want to be an English comp professor at a university. Like, that's a whole other thing to tackle that I think is really challenging, but I do like to remind folks that, writing technologies have been around for a long time. There's been concerns like with the printing press and with the development of phones and text that we would lose our ability to write. And we've navigated that before. And I think we will again. We're just still very early in the process, and there's a lot of education that needs to happen in terms of just AI literacy. Vikki: Yeah, I think one of the things that it, one of the positives is I think it is going to teach, it's going to force us to teach things that were perhaps kind of expected to just implicitly pick up. Because when I think about novice academics, I'm thinking about sort of, you know, the end of undergraduate, beginning of postgraduate, that sort of level where they're doing, you know, they're doing their lit reviews and things, but they're still at the kind of beginnings of knowing how. When they're doing that in a beginnery way, it's not that different than what AI does, in my opinion. You know, they're reading stuff, and they're kind of trying to say what they say in slightly different words, and like, summarize what was in that more or less accurately and combine it up with summaries of other articles and try and smush that into something vaguely coherent. You know, this is with all respect. We've all been through that stage. And I think we've sort of, I don't know, maybe we've been lazy with just how things have been taught, but getting people to understand the difference between that and filtering literature through the particular lens that you're trying to look at it through and bringing your perspectives and comparing things that aren't usually brought together and whatever, and all those interesting things you can do to produce a good piece of work are the bits that, AI at the moment, at least, are less good at. But in order for students to see, or academics to see, what it can't do, they have to understand that actually the way they're doing it, isn't the kind of advanced version either. Does that, does that make any sense? Because I think like with reading too, you know, I spend my life trying to share with people that if when you read an article, you start at the beginning and you read to the end and your goal is to read it. You've missed a trick here, you know, you need to be going into it with why am I reading this? What is the purpose? Am I looking at the methods? Am I trying to understand the take home message of it? Am I trying to see what argument they're making? Which bits of it are going to give me that? And yeah, you'll read the whole thing at some point, but I'm a big fan of getting people to jump around in an article, reading all those things. And so I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether you think there's a role in when we're understanding the limitations of what AI does in better understanding the limitations of what we as humans do in, in the sort of beginnings of our academic careers. Jessica: Yeah, I think you're exactly right. And you're on to something. For example, I think back to when I was the first research study I ever did was as a graduate student. It was my senior year and it was like abstracts. I was reading abstracts because it was like so overwhelming. I started with too broad of a search. Like, how am I supposed to get through all these articles? I wasn't searching appropriately. And then it was just like reading abstracts. And that's what I see now when I look at simplification bias with AI systems is a lot of the information it's pulling is from the abstract of the article, which is what we know that a lot of students do. And so I, I see the point that you're making and this is where I have a hard time answering because my answer kind of depends on the context with the student. So some of it is like the level of expertise. I'm going to go back to a discussion about writing and try to, like, connect my ideas. I do this webinar that students really like, and I talk about a top down versus a bottom up approach to writing. Jessica: And experts typically have this, like, top down approach because we already know the field. We come to the table with a thesis, an idea, an argument, and we go find what we need to build that argument. And therefore, our voice tends to come through more in our writing. Whereas a student who doesn't yet know the field, they kind of have to [00:30:00] go from the bottom up and look at all this evidence and then the pressure to like figure out what is the gap and what is the question and they don't have their voice. And then there's levels like, you don't just go from like novice to experts. Like we think of Bloom's taxonomy and you gradually improve your expertise over time. When I think about a first year PhD student, first semester coming in, like, I don't know that I want them using AI for any of these things, but if I have my student who's gone through their coursework, they've demonstrated their ability to synthesize literature, critique literature, choose an appropriate research design, then I think that's a really good point to introduce them to these tools. Now, does it mean that the 1st year 1st semester PhD student isn't using? I feel like those are things that we just to some extent we can't control other than just trying to educate them and helping them understand how that might be hampering their ability and their skills later on. If they're using AI shortcuts. I think a really interesting conversation that I'm starting to hear that I don't have any answers for. I mostly just have questions at this point. Which is around, like, what are the skills that are going to be needed? Because Anthropic's Claude, they just released a video, if you haven't seen it, it's called Computer Use Capability. It's a full AI agent system that can run on your computer where you give it a goal. You could tell it to conduct an entire lit review for you, and it'll go find all of the literature, it'll execute all the tasks by going online, locating it, storing it where you want it stored, Putting the information in Excel spreadsheet, so it is able to work across software platforms on your device, and it can execute all of these tasks in a row. And that's already here. So we have agents already and then how advanced are those going to be? And the questions I'm starting to hear and with faculty and higher at, or some of them are big questions about, like, how are we going to keep up with the workforce and stay relevant to make sure that we're producing students who have skills that are valued by the workforce when this technology is evolving so quickly, what does research even look like in 5 years? If A. I. Is able to really accurately conduct a thorough lit review and come to the same conclusions as humans what is the role of the researcher then? Are we going to have fewer experts? Will it free up our time for more creative problem solving? Will writing even be the medium for expressing these ideas. I mean, notebook LM already has the ability to turn an article into a conversational podcast. So those are such interesting questions that I do not know the answer to, that I feel like everyone is just speculating on. And I think anyone who claims to have all the answers is not being honest because the reality is, is even the top AI experts who are building these models still have a lot of these questions and we don't know. Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. Vikki: Yeah. So with the formative feedback, because I think that's fascinating. How do you balance up the added kind of benefits that brings. And I don't think anyone listening will underestimate how useful that is. One of the biggest issues I deal with with my clients is their frustrations over not getting feedback. And when I coach academics, their frustrations with the requirements to be giving feedback for everything and one of the things that I coach on quite a bit is how can, particularly when I'm working with students, how can students generate their own ability to evaluate things and their own ability to reassure themselves without seeking approval from their supervisor. Now, I'm never discouraging them from getting feedback. Obviously, feedback's the fastest way to learn, and we'll talk about that more in a minute. I do see this sort of dependence on if my supervisor tells me it's good, I'll believe it, rather than being able to, like, reassure themselves or to troubleshoot their own work in a meaningful way. And I'd be interested to hear your perspective on whether the AI stuff helps them to develop that skill to do it themselves, or whether it just makes them dependent on a bot to reassure them instead of a tutor to reassure them. Jessica: Yeah, that's a good question that I get a lot. And I think we're still figuring out the implications of over reliance, using it as a crutch. This is where I think AI literacy becomes so important. Part of AI literacy is functional, just understanding capabilities and limitations. Critical AI literacy requires the user, in this case a student, to not just take all of the feedback. Sometimes it gets it wrong. It's maybe 95% on point. Sometimes [00:36:00] it leaves things out, it focuses on the wrong things. Again, it's not a rule based system. The way I train my students to use it. And when I talk to educators about having their students use AI for formative feedback, I talk about teaching the students right away to not believe it all to be true. So they have to critically think about what that feedback is. So it's not the same as getting feedback from me where they take it all to be a hundred percent truth. Like they know exactly. Vikki: I mean, not if I coach them, they don't. I teach them to read supervisor comments critically as well! Jessica: Yeah, my doc students is more what I'm referring to, like they really value. So that's like an interesting question that I was wondering in the beginning is like, are they even going to value this feedback because it's not me? And I found that because I had designed the tools and they know that I added the criteria that I was using, they trusted it more than just, trying to go to chat gpt and say, give me feedback based on this rubric. But that's more of a trust issue. Not so much how they're using it. With critical literacy. It involves. Not just uploading your paper, getting the feedback, and then walking away with that initial feedback and trying to implement it. The real value, and I just published an article I could share with you to link, with my students, is meaning negotiation. So meeting negotiation happens with second language learners, and I have had this theory about academic writing is that it's a non native language for everyone, and so there's elements of second language learning that we can see in those who are learning academic writing for the first time. And that's something that we noticed when we studied my students chat conversations, because they shared them with us, that the students who are getting the most benefit out of it, follow up. There's lots of turn taking, asking for clarification. Can you pull another excerpt for me? Can you explain that for me? Can you create an analogy to help me understand that a bit more. Just like you would if you were learning a language where you're asking lots of follow up questions and for explanations? Having that meaning negotiation with the AI is a part of critical AI literacy. I don't think all students are going to do that, but I think that's part of our job of teaching them how to use it responsibly, is helping them understand what it means to like, have a conversation and negotiate with it, not just take it all to be true and then do it. You also have to use your brain, I mean, that's why I think there's this expectation because of the media and how it's reporting on AI that it's some quick fix and that it's going to require less effort, but. I mean, we're dealing with PhD students, and these are really complex problems that are being solved. And so there's no shortcut around using those critical thinking skills. And so if a student is going into it thinking, I'm going to write this paper faster, you know, I say, it's actually probably going to take you longer because I'm going to make you reflect on how you use this tool. But hopefully you're learning more and you have a higher quality product at the end where you thought through all of the ethical considerations that maybe you would have missed in that first draft or, um, done a more thorough critical appraisal of the evidence than maybe you would have done in that first draft for me. Vikki: Have you seen any differences in the emotional responses to feedback from the, um, bot rather than from people? Because one of the things. I see a lot is clients who procrastinate submitting something to their supervisor because they're worried their supervisor is going to tell them it's rubbish and all those things. Is it just as bad? Do your students worry about the bot criticizing them or do they care less because it's not you. Jessica: Yeah, that was one of our findings was that they, and this is a small sample, but we have seen validation of these findings and the literature elsewhere. But that was one of our findings is that the students described, they didn't realize they were describing it, but that was part of my role as the researcher is teasing that out, is bypassing that, like, affective state where you can shut down because the feedback is personal. On the other flip side of that. Sometimes the AI would validate their ideas and so that would stop them from ruminating and second guessing. Like if enough times they've gotten the feedback that this is coherent, they've achieved paragraph unity or whatever it may be, then they stop ruminating on it and their confidence increases and they move on. Yeah, my students viewed it, and we hear this all the time, is like, it's this neutral, Thing machine that's giving me something valuable. It's not all 100 percent true, but it's there's something I can take away from this to improve my work. And sometimes it's validating your ideas. And sometimes it's giving critical feedback, but you don't have that emotional shutdown that you have when you get it from your advisor because you feel embarrassed or ashamed that you produced work that got that type of criticism. Vikki: I want to take you back to something you said earlier about the biases that there can be in anything that's based on stuff from the internet, right? How do you, how do you manage that in the context of giving formative feedback, Jessica: Yeah, we as humans have a lot of biases, so of course, these models are also going to have biases. Um, but yeah, when you're not aware of them, there's a lot of dangers there. There is. There's more like medium and small language models that are coming out for specific use cases to try to address some of these issues. It's complicated, but I'm encouraged by the growing field of research. That's. happening to try to understand the biases and teach others how to mitigate them. But the first step is understanding that the biases are present and reflecting on your own biases and how that might be reflected in the output. Vikki: Yeah. Cause I mean, it's not like, you know, when a human does feedback on a work, that it's not biased by many of the same things. We may tell ourselves we're trying not to be and everything. So it's not like [00:42:00] there's a kind of gold standard. I think sometimes when people are talking about all of this, there's this sort of inferred gold standard of human marking where it's, you know, it's accurate and replicable and all of those things. Which we all know isn't true, but I think sometimes when it's, maybe it is the lack of AI literacy, but when it's coming from a machine, you almost, if you don't know these things, you can sort of assume that it's being more objective than it is being. Jessica: For sure. And I think that like what you just asked is that I see a lot of different sort of debates taking place and I sort of sit in the middle where, no, I do not believe we should be using AI for summative assessment and grading students and having that final say on a student's grade. And some people will use that argument to say we shouldn't be using it at all. And then I come back and say, well, as humans, like, are you sitting down and grading the student and thinking about cultural differences in writing styles, or are you just grading according to the rubric? So it's not a binary response. It really depends on the learning outcomes, the level of the learner. I mean, I think what's amazing is we're starting to see AI products come out that help neurodivergent learners with dyslexia, ADHD, and so there's so much potential there and it's not like a, should we do it or should we not? It's more of like a how, how, and first we have to understand the capabilities and limitations before we make that decision. Vikki: Yeah, I think I've mentioned on one of these before, but there's several tools now for people with ADHD where it'll break tasks down into its constituent parts and things. And, that's a model of it that I think can be really, really useful because it's not actually doing any of the work, but it's helping you to take what feels like an insurmountable task and break it down into chunks, which I know is something that even people who are neurotypical can, can find really challenging too. And I think, I think that's one of my take homes with AI, is I actually think that the skills we'll need to develop to use AI well are skills that would make us better academics if we never used AI. So, when hearing you talk about feedback, one of the things my clients and I often discuss and I do this inside, I do supervisor training as well as coaching people, and I think this is done badly on both sides, is that students say, can you give me feedback on this 40 page lit review, and the supervisor tries to give feedback, whatever feedback is, on a 40 page lit review. I get so many students who tell me that their supervisors will only read a polished final draft. They won't read anything before that and things, which I think is ludicrous. Sorry, supervisors, but it is. Um, and well, when I say, what feedback are you looking for? They're saying, I want them to tell me whether it's good enough or not. And. we often talk about all the different levels of feedback you can ask for in terms of, you know, am I making a argument that broadly sounds like it makes sense with some evidence to back it up? Um, does it feel like it's in the right sort of order so that it follows one from the next and all these sorts of things. And so the stuff that you've had to put into designing and that your students are now having to use in order to ask it the right questions, feel like things that would be really useful for students to ask their supervisors that specifically and for supervisors to be as focused because presumably when you ask Moxie, do the paragraphs flow coherently from one to the next, it doesn't start correcting typos and things the way that a supervisor often gets distracted. Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. Every student is different. So I don't want to generalize, but I did find that instead of those vague requests, give me feedback or can you pregrade this? Can you just take a look at this really quick before I submit it, you know, in six hours for grading. A lot of times they were coming to me and they actually already had an idea of what they were struggling with. I kind of expected that, but I wasn't sure. Um, and, and so when you're using, and this isn't just Moxie, like if you were to create your own tool using a rubric and you were to consistently have that criteria, you start to notice patterns like I consistently struggle with passive voice in my writing. My hope is that if students are starting to see that feedback again and again from the AI, it'll help them ask more targeted questions to their supervisor, versus just this generic, but I understand what you're saying. I do that all the time too. I don't consult with individual clients anymore, but that was one of my approaches is I'd say, you know, you can't just ask me to read this whole thing. I need you to tell me what were you struggling with? What's top of mind for you? and I do think AI can come in handy that way. Vikki: I'm going to also take you back. So you started to talk about it, but I think it'd be useful to go in more depth in terms of when it's useful for people to start using AI, because one of the times where I've tried to use AI and found it quite limited is where I really wanted it to sound like me. So I have my podcast transcripts. Everyone listening, there will be one of this. I have all my podcast transcripts and I'd love to turn them into. Short articles. And I started doing it myself, but I'm coming up to my hundredth episode and a podcast ends up being about 8, 000 words. So it's, it's a substantial body of work. And so I messed around with quite a few different versions of AI. And I even try, you know, you see these guidelines online where you're like, here's five [00:48:00] pieces of my writing. Try and edit this one into a short thing in the same style as that. And maybe I'm not giving good prompts, or maybe I'm not finding the right AI models, but In my experience, it made me sound very, I call it kind of generic internet y. Very sort of, this is a game changing fact, kind of thing. Um, and so I've sort of, at the moment, at least divided my life into things that I can ask AI to do. You know, I've got these four things in my fridge. Are there any recipes that build from that or whatever? Happy days. Fine. I can do that. Versus things that at the moment I won't, and writing my emails, writing my podcasts, writing anything that I want to sound like my voice, I won't. And one of the things that made me reflect on is that that entirely depends on the fact that at the moment I am capable of writing in a voice that feels like my voice. And that's true, whether I'm doing this more kind of chatty stuff or, you know, I've got tons of academic publications and stuff in my academic life, I know what I sound like too. Um, and I just wondered what that's like for people who are at the beginnings of their career and whether, will this stop them learning what their voice is if they've only ever had a AI voice, if you see what I mean. Jessica: Yeah, I've heard there's this debate going about, it's like, am I starting to sound more like the AI or is it starting to sound more like me, like, which is it, uh, from a, from the perspective of, let's talk about low stakes tasks. So, and in your example, you know, you're summarizing transcripts, one of my most common low stakes tasks is maybe I'm creating notes for a LinkedIn post where I'm bringing together, you know, a lot of different ideas and I'll make like a long bulleted list. So that's low stakes. There's a lot more editing involved. So I find that instead of spending all that time on the writing, I'm now doing the editing. So I don't expect it to produce something that I'm just going to copy and paste into the YouTube description or my LinkedIn posts. So for those low stakes tasks, it's like shifting my time from where I was doing a lot of the writing to now I'm doing a lot of the just quick and dirty drafting. And then a lot of my time is spent editing. So I let the AI put together all of that, like connective tissue. And sometimes I edit a lot of it out. Um, then I think about high stakes tasks in terms of what are the boundaries of when we should use it and when we can't. And I'm just going to use some examples because I, I don't have any sort of rules of thumb, if you will, other than if you don't know how to do it yourself, like analyze data using a statistical test, then please don't use AI for it. Cause you have no way of evaluating whether it's accurate or not. So that's kind of a rule of thumb I have, especially if it's high stakes. But from the perspective of you have a novice, let's say researcher who maybe doesn't have their voice. I think about different scenarios. So fear of the blank page. Now you can just put in your ideas into AI and, and, and brainstorm with it. You know, I think about lit review outlines. Um, what are potential outlines of this is the argument I have- problem, cause solution, you know, thematic, whatever it may be. And then you can sort of take those suggestions and instead of starting on a blank page, you have some headings to start with. Like, I don't think that that is problematic or cheating. It requires you to have some clarity about your problem, going into it, to ask the right questions, to get what you want out of it. I think it is problematic to rely on it to like identify literature gaps for you or choose your research design or develop your IRB application and then you don't have to think about informed consent. Like, these are really important decisions that we make in the research process. And if we want to protect the integrity of research, I think the human has to be steering, we have to be in control and the AI is just sometimes our copilot. When it's appropriate, but I tend to, to just tell my students, like, do not use it if you don't know how to do it yourself. if you have no clue how to select a research design, please do not ask chat GBT to select a research design for you. On the other hand, if you've selected your, you feel confident you've selected it, but maybe you don't know if you've justified it well, and you know how to ask that question, I think that's perfectly appropriate because you've still made those decisions. Those are still your ideas. Now, that is very different than saying, here's my entire lit review, edit it for grammar, spelling, punctuation. Because what's likely going to happen is, well, it's unpredictable, but usually what happens when you ask that is you don't get just your lit review edited for grammar. There's going to be changes, there's going to be shifts in language that you might not notice unless you're reading every word. Vikki: Hmm. Yeah, and I think it's really, you know, you were talking about affect before, I think just remembering the role of emotions in all of this is super important because I think for us at the kind of career stage we're at, what you just said makes absolute total sense. There's things I know how to do, it's fine, I can tell whether it's done it well or not, I can tweak it, da da da. Other things, more of a copilot, totally get that. My concern, I guess, is that all of that makes absolute sense, but when a student is panicking and doesn't think they know how to do any of it, and it has to be done because there's deadlines coming and all of those things, I worry that it becomes self reinforcing, right, that because they ask too much of AI, but they [00:54:00] kind of get through, right, they're not going to get amazing anything, but it's, it's all right, it gets done. They go to the next milestone in their PhD or whatever, but now they're even more sure they can't do it for themselves. Um, And I'm just, I just think it's going to be really important, and it sounds like you are doing this, it sounds, I think it's going to be really important to remember the, and I say this with due respect to the students because it's true of all of us, the kind of lack of rationality sometimes in the choices that we make when we're feeling pressured or when we're feeling unconfident in our own abilities to analyze these things. It's not just a kind of really cognitive cost benefit analysis that people are making decisions from with these things. Yeah. Jessica: Yeah. Ethan Mullock calls it like the temptation of the button. And I think it's so true. If you haven't read it, whoever's listening, he, Ethan Mullock is a professor at Wharton Business School here in the U S and he's like a thought leader on generative AI and innovation and higher ed. And he has a sub stack that I love. Comes out every week. I read it. One of his subsects that resonated most with me was called the, like setting time on fire with the temptation of the button. Like, are we going to have a crisis of meaning? And right in the beginning has a screenshot of Google docs They were in beta at the time where there was a little button that just said, like, help me, right? And I was like, what are we going to value now? Are we even going to value writing anymore? And that's when I felt like I was having an existential crisis. Cause I'm like, I don't know. I mean, it is tempting to push the button if you haven't done any work and it's due at midnight. And it's either that or an automatic zero. We're already seeing it. We're already seeing evidence of that. And I don't know that there is a way to prevent it because AI detectors don't work. They're not reliable at all. If you haven't used one, just try putting in some of the work that you wrote well before AI existed and you'll see that they're not reliable. So AI detectors are not the way. I think it's going to cause a real shift in how we think about how we're evaluating learning and it's not going to happen overnight and it's going to be really rocky. There's going to be implications that we can't wrap our head around. Just like we had no idea what the implications of like social media would be on, you know, mental health and isolation. I think there's a lot of implications. We don't, we have no idea. I think what's scary is that it's out there. Students are using it. More students are using it than faculty are using it. And then how do we navigate that? And I don't have the answer. I'm like, I don't know. Yeah, I still have deadlines. I still expect my students to write their own work. I still know that they're going to be tempted to press the button because it's there. It's very tempting. Um, but again, and maybe this is like, overly optimistic or naive, but I do feel that as we learn more about this technology, then it'll become a lot more clear how to manage those concerns. I mean, I do believe knowledge is power. I mean, that was why I said about learning about AI is I felt honestly, my first thought was I felt very threatened by it. Like, am I going to have a company? Are my doc students are, are they even going to be writing dissertations in 5 years? what does this even mean for my entire professional life? And I've come a long way since then. Um, but I think there's a lot of faculty and a lot of folks who feel very threatened and it's leading to just a shutting down mentality sort of ostrich head in the sand. And, um, and we know that that is not going to work. But I think just to kind of try to answer your question, we need to talk to students. Like, I think a student's voice is really important in all of this, um, and helping us understand how to address these concerns that we're having. Vikki: Yeah. One thing it made me think of, and this is, you mentioned interdisciplinarity before, and I come from a, very interdisciplinary background. So I love pinging off into different disciplines. Um, one thing it made me think of a lot is all the research around, um, illegal drugs in sports. So I was a sports scientist in my, my academic background and, um, there were Couple of people there, um, Professor Maria Kavussanu, Professor Ian Boardley at my old university, who do a lot of research around the decision making process that athletes go through at the point where they decide whether they are or aren't going to take illegal drugs. So these performance enhancing drugs we're talking about here. And there's some really, really interesting stuff around the sort of moral disengagement that's involved in believing that other people do it, too, believing that your reasons for doing it are sufficient to justify the breaking of the rules. And I know AI isn't always breaking the rules, so I'm not, like, doing direct comparisons, but I think there's some really interesting stuff there around how people go from being sure that they wouldn't do these things to kind of maybe sometimes to now actually being regular users and relying on it for performance enhancement. And I'm sure I'm less familiar with the kind of criminology literature and stuff, but I'm sure there'll be parallel literature around how people make and justify those sorts of decisions. And. I wonder whether it would be interesting to look at parallels between, because we make decisions around where boundaries sit as to what's acceptable and what's not, and in what circumstances, because what they're doing with the performance enhancing drugs work is seeing [01:00:00] if they can identify young athletes that they need to intervene with earlier, try and figure out which are the ones that are heading that way early enough that you can intervene and sort of, scoop them up and bring them back to safety sort of thing. Jessica: Yeah, I mean, I would imagine I went down this rabbit hole a while ago. It's not fresh in my head, but I did start looking at the literature on plagiarism. Dr Sarah Eaton is a scholar in Calgary in Canada. She's done a lot of work on academic integrity and plagiarism, and she has this post plagiarism framework that I find to be really fascinating, and she asserts that, at some point soon human AI hybrid writing will be the norm and that our standard rules of plagiarism will no longer apply and that just got me interested in plagiarism. So I went down this rabbit hole into trying to understand plagiarism and some of the things that I learned were around. I mentioned earlier around cultural differences, so there's like inadvertent plagiarism. There's mosaic plagiarism, and then cheating overall, a lot of it does come down to circumstance. It's very situational. And then, yes, you like get away with it and then you sort of push the limits the next time, but ultimately it comes down to our incentives and our rewards. Like if the focus is on meeting the deadline and getting the good grade, and that's what we're rewarding, then that is more likely to create that situation where you're tempted to cheat or plagiarize. And so it causes you to question the systems that are in place that are reinforcing this behavior. And that makes me just think about like institutions and ethical guidelines. So what does our community, our academic community accept or reject? And I don't think we know right now. Like we've saw, I think the NSF or maybe it was the NIH originally said absolutely no generative AI can be used to develop a grant proposal, and then they shifted it to acknowledgement. I would imagine that given some time, we'll have more institutional guidance on what the standards are, the ethical standards for the academic community. Um, but I think you're right. I think there are parallels, but in some ways, like, I feel that higher education is due for a closer look at how we are incentivizing students to get the grade or actually learn. I mean, in the US our standard grades are abysmal. Like reading comprehension is at the lowest ever. And um, so in that way I think it's good. It's forcing us to really rethink some of these systems that are in place. Vikki: Yeah. Raising some really important, big issues. . Thank you so much. This has ended up being a monster sized episode, and I love it, and I could have carried on talking to you for so much longer. But thank you so much. You've mentioned a couple of things already that I will link in the show notes, so listeners, look out for those. but if people want to know more specifically about you and Moxie, where can they look? Jessica: Yeah, so Moxie, our website is moxielearn. ai. I'm on LinkedIn as Jessica L. Parker. I do most of my thought leadership on LinkedIn, but we publish our research on Moxie's website. And I also have a ResearchGate profile for Moxie in our lab, because we are actively studying generative AI in research contexts, so. Vikki: Amazing. And spell Moxie for people? Jessica: M O X I E. Vikki: Moxie. Perfect. Thank you so much for coming. It's going to be so much food for thought. People listening, let me know your thoughts. You can reply to my newsletter. If you're not signed up for my newsletter, make sure you are. You can just go to my website, thephdlifecoach. com, or you can find me on Instagram at the PHD Life Coach. Tell me what you're thinking. Are you using AI? What scares you? What do you want to know more? And who knows? We might talk about it in a future episode. Thank you so much for coming, Jessica. Thank you everyone for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.
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.
