So many of my Twitter followers told me that they hate the annoying questions they get at Christmas, so I thought I would share some coping strategies! In this episode I give you the A, B, C, D, and E that you need to remember when someone asks you "so, when will you finish your PhD?"
Transcript
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode nine of the PhD Life Coach. I have very vivid memories of telling my grandma that I had got my first major grant. I was interested in how stress and exercise affect immune response to vaccinations, and I just got my first six figure grant. I was super excited and I remember telling her about it, um, over a Christmas celebration, and her exact words were, “why would they give you all that money to do that?”
She didn't mean to be mean. She really didn't mean to be mean, but I was mortified. I was so embarrassed and I found that I couldn't explain to her why they'd given me all that money, even though I knew that this was a really interesting and important piece of research. Another time, my Nanna, so my dad's side, in fact, I say another time - every single holidays, my Nanna on my dad's side would say to me as an academic, oh, it must be lovely to have the long holidays, now the students have gone. Oh, it must be lovely to have three months off, now the students have gone home. And every time I was, no, I work when the students are on there. Oh, do you do ok?
And I look back and I remember these fondly, but at the time, they drove me mad. I started talking about that on Twitter last week and just got inundated with messages from some of you guys about the things that your families say to you over Christmases or indeed some of you said all year round, but I think it's particularly pronounced over the winter break when we're more likely to be spending time with our families of origin and old friends and things like that.
So this episode is going to be about how can we manage that situation? How can we cope with our own emotions? How do we know what to say when we're hearing things like, “so when are you gonna finish your PhD?” “How is writing going?” “What are you gonna do with that after?” “Why can't you just graduate when you plan to?”, “You look really thin/fat/tired, are you okay?”, “You just want to be a student forever,” “It's not really real life, is it?”
Those were all comments that people in my Twitter feed came up with that they experienced from their families and friends over the holidays, and they were already starting to dread hearing. And what you hear will vary. So I come from a very supportive background. My family have always been super proud of me for my academic achievements and stuff. So I didn't really get the, “oh, you're wasting your time and get a proper job” type comments.
But at the same time, I come from a family that isn't steeped in kind of academic world. My parents don't have degrees. My sisters did degrees but don't work in academia and so I got a lot of questions that came from not really understanding working in at university and doing a PhD and those sorts of things.
Others of you, I know there's tons of people who are doing PhDs who work in academia, who parents are academics too, and that can bring you a bunch of advantages for sure, but I guess it can also lead to potentially even more annoying questions because they know the world you're living in and maybe that adds pressure, that adds judgment, it adds critique.
Perhaps your family don't support your choice to do a PhD or to work in academia. Maybe they think you should get a proper job, that you should be getting married by now or all of those sorts of things. I've had those comments in my Twitter feed as well. So, the first thing to say is this will really vary depending on your family background, but regardless, the emotions that these conjure up can be really challenging and can lead to behaviours in ourselves that we don't necessarily like.
So what I want to do today is really go through some concrete strategies that you can take to manage all of this stuff over Christmas, but we’re going to ask the magic question, which is, what are you making this mean? Because usually the problem is not the questions that they're asking. The problem is usually what you are making it mean. So where you are being asked, when are you going to finish? Usually we make that mean we should have finished sooner, or the answer should be less time than it actually is. When we're asked, what are you going to do afterwards, we make that mean “You don't think I've got good prospects afterwards.”
So do you see how that just adds a layer of emotion to it, that might be in the question, that might be what they mean, but it might not be either.
We all know that childhood homes come with baggage and however supportive your upbringing was, there will be elements where all it takes is for your parents to say one word and you fly into defensive mode or you snap at them because it just pushes your buttons. Those of you who have trauma in your background, then that's even more pronounced.
Um, but we all have some element of baggage and that means that when what can sometimes be quite innocent questions come to us our immediate reaction is to take that to mean something about us as a person. And from there, that could induce anger, it could induce snapping, it could make you flippant, it could make you sad or withdraw. Um, it could make you attack back all sorts of different responses from what we make that mean about us.
So the first step before we go into any of the other stuff is to take a breath. When you hear that question, take a breath. Whatever thoughts you are having about it are fine. There's nothing wrong with you for feeling defensive or for feeling sad because of these questions, but we don't necessarily need to act from that emotion.
We don't necessarily need to react to what they're saying. And so just taking a breath before you say anything can really just take the edge out of this.
I know that that's easier said than done, and I know that because I still snap back. People listening to this that know me in my personal life know that I still snap back, but I also know that it works much better when I don't.
It works much better when I take that breath to let the thing go or to decide how I want to respond rather than responding in the way that kind of instinctively happens.
So once you've taken a breath, what happens then? Well, I've got the A, B, C, D, E of what you need to do in this situation. So A = acceptance, and there's two bits to this.
Acceptance of yourself and acceptance of your family members. Now family, I'm meaning anybody who you will be seeing over the winter break who you have some sort of historical link with. So this might be close friends, family. Pick the people that's right for you, but I'm just going to use the word family to encompass that.
So it's acceptance of yourself. It's acceptance of your family members. So starting with yourself. A lot of the pain here comes from the fact, a lot of the pain here comes from the fact that people say things that are our deep fears. So they say, when are you going to finish? And if you ask me when am I going to finish my dinner?
Well, I start eating at like six. I finish my dinner at like quarter past six, something like that. Asking me when I'm going finish it, it doesn't mean anything. If you ask me when am I going to finish the online course that I’m developing for the PhD life Coach, which I am, keep your eyes open, then I might be a bit “Soon! Ok. Ill, I'm working on it”, because part of me wishes I was a little bit further along with it than I am right now. So one thing you can do before the Christmas period is spend a bit of time going, okay, why do these thoughts wind me up? What do I need to accept about my current position before I go home?
I accept that this PhD's going to take me another year of write up that I didn't think I was going to need. Um, I accept that I'm not yet sure what I'm going to do after it, but I'll figure it out.
I accept that I do look kind of tired, but I'm working really hard at the moment, and I'm going to start trying to take care of myself a bit better. So do you see that you can start to work on in yourself accepting the truth behind these questions so that when someone asks them, they feel much less of a personal attack.
So that when somebody asks you, when are you gonna finish? You don't need to go into the details of whether that was longer than you hoped for or how you're gonna fund yourself through that. If you've accepted that that's the position, then it's much easier to give a much more level reply. So it's accepting yourself.
Accepting your family members is the other part of this A of acceptance. And that is, and this is a general life lesson - So much pain comes from expecting people to behave anyway other than the way they always behave.
Now that's not saying you accept their behavior and think it's okay, but it's accepting that they are gonna behave the way they always behave. Because that’s what we all do. We all change a bit, but you know, mostly we behave the way we've always behaved and you can, again, take so much sting out an interaction. Maybe you know that a particular family member thinks that you just need to get a real job because, you know, what's the point in all this high falluting educational stuff, accepting they are going to ask you something like that and that you get to choose how you respond to that, can really take a lot of the passion out of this.
A lot of the toxicity comes from us thinking they shouldn't behave like that. They shouldn't say that, it's not fair. They should understand this. They should see how much I want this. They should understand. What if we just accept that they don't, and then we get to choose what we do with that.
If I could change other people's behavior, I would, trust me, but we can't, and we are, we are fighting something that doesn't change and creating problems for ourselves when we don't accept that. Now I said that you don't have to just blindly accept that this is all okay and put up with everything like a doormat, because that leads us onto B, which is boundaries.
Now, when we accept that people will behave the way that they always behave, we don't tell ourselves we have to put up with that. We just expect them and accept that they will behave like that. So what we can then do is put boundaries in for ourselves, and this is a really key emphasis. Boundaries are for you.
They are what you will do if they do something. We don't have boundaries that are, “they must do this” because again, unfortunately we don't get to control other people's behaviour. But we do get to say, if you do X, then I will leave. This is what again, what you get to decide in advance, and a lot of this will come down to thinking about the motivation behind the comments that your family are making.
So this boundaries part is really for where you think that it comes from a toxic place, where it genuinely upsets you, where they are genuinely trying to hurt you. Unfortunately people do have family members that they will see over the holiday period who are like that and that's where your boundaries might be – “I don't really want to talk about my PhD during Christmas.”
And if somebody then continues to talk about it saying, “oh, sorry, I don’t know if you heard me before. I don't want to talk about my PhD over Christmas. Let's just enjoy the holidays.” And if they continue to ask about it, you can explain that you'll go in another room or you'll leave. Or you can offer a different topic for conversation. You can set boundaries around what you will or won't talk about.
If you want to be able to talk about it, but you don't want particular things to discuss, being able to say, “I'm happy to talk about my PhD with you, but let's focus on the cool stuff I'm finding out. I don't really want to think about when it's finishing”. And then if they continue, you can just not have that conversation.
You can choose. If somebody keeps asking me when I've said that I'm not going to answer those, you can just look at them and start a conversation with somebody else. You can decide what those boundaries are for yourselves, how you will behave if certain situations come up.
The third one is really for people who are in much more my situation, which is where you have a loving family who care about what you do, but aren't necessarily in that world. So they ask questions out of interest, out of concern, out of genuine support, but accidentally press buttons that they didn't know were there.
And this is C. So we've had acceptance, boundaries, we're now going to C, which is comedy. See how you can make a joke out of it. So one thing that I'm going to do on Twitter, and I'd encourage all of you to do, is to come up with a bingo list. Make yourself a Bingo card even, of all the things that family members could say over Christmas.
I'm going to put one on Twitter for you all. You can let me know how you get on, yell bingo when you hit a full row. Try and make a joke of it. Try and make it okay. Somebody's going to ask me how long it takes. Somebody's going to ask me what I'm going to do afterwards. Someone's gonna use the words real world.
Whatever it is, see how you can make jokes out of it just to take that pressure off a little bit. As I've said, this is only where you believe that it comes from a really good place from your family. I wouldn't recommend doing this if you have an actually toxic relationship with that person or an actually fraught relationship with that person.
But it can really help you take it that little bit less seriously. As I say, tweet me the best ones. See if you can go for a quantity over a time period. How many of these will you get asked in an hour over Christmas dinner? For example, you could start betting with your friends. Who's going to be the first person that asks me when I'm finishing and you can start to bet which of your extended family members it's going to be. Turning it into comedy rather than something that genuinely bothers you can be super helpful.
D is for diplomacy - and this you could use across the spectrum really from supportive but hitting buttons accidentally through to a bit more toxic - is plans and phrases in advance.
Now, I've mentioned a couple of them before about not wanting to, um, to speak about it, but you could also have some more subtle diplomatic answers. And this can be really useful in a whole range of situations. So things like, oh, that's so interesting. Full stop. That's often useful where someone's expressing an opinion about whether your work is useful or interesting or not. Oh, that's a really interesting perspective. And leave it there. Wouldn't that be nice is another one. So if somebody's saying, are you going to get an amazing job after this?
Oh, wouldn't that be nice? Will you be finished by September? Oh, wouldn't that be nice? Leave it there. You can plan these things. I guess we'll see. What are you going to do after this? I guess we'll see. When are you gonna finish? I guess we'll see. how's it going? It's going. It's progressing. Yeah, good, thank you sometimes is sufficient. People usually don't want to know the details. Yeah. Good. Yeah. Great. Thank you.
Another option is to say, oh, thanks for your interest in this, anyway, what have you been up to? How's work going and twist it around. So planning these kind of stock phrases in advance so that when somebody says the thing that you know is going to wind you. You take a breath, like I said at the beginning and you say, I guess we'll find out, won't we? Anyway, are those mince pies, I haven't had one yet.
Okay, so diplomacy, and then E is for empathy. And again, this is where you are getting comments from misguided relatives more than people who are actively hostile. But why are they asking you? Are they just interested and don't realize what a hot topic it is?. I would say that a lot of the time that's the case.
They're genuinely just wondering when you're going to finish. They're not saying you should be finishing sooner. They just don't really know anything about a PhD or anything about academia and they don't really know, um, when you'll be finished. So is it just that they don't know?
Is it coming? Because they're worried when they're asking you, what are you going to do afterwards? They're not saying, what are you going do afterwards, you big weirdo who went and spent three years studying something that I don't understand and feels a bit pointless to me. They're saying, what are you going to do afterwards?
I really want you to be happy and to have a career that is successful and nice. You know? Are they worried about you? Are they confused? Do they not know? Sometimes, um, there's things that we take for granted. The fact that a PhD takes a certain amount of time in different countries. So in the UK it's usually three to four years, but often there'll be a write up period on top of that.
And people don't necessarily know that. Maybe in their heads, the PhD's three years and they don't understand why you haven't finished. When in your head you're like, of course I haven't finished. No one writes up in that time. I've got this right. I've got the write up period. So are they confused? Could that be where it's coming from?
Are they intimidated? Sometimes people ask you passive aggressive questions about the real world and things because they think that you think they're stupid. So sometimes people create whole stories in their heads about what you think about them, and if you come, in their view, swanning in with your PhD and your fancy academic job, in their heads, they could be interpreting that as you having judgment over them.
And so they almost get the jibes in first about you not being in the real world and all those things because actually they're making it mean something about them.
Is it just they're proud? Actually are they asking all these questions because they're super proud of you and they don't really understand what you're doing and so they want to know more.
So E is for empathy, thinking about why they might be asking the questions they're asking, and trying to use that as a basis from which to respond. Why is it totally understandable that they're a bit worried or confused or perhaps feel threatened by what you're doing? It's then much easier to do all the other things that I said.
It's much easier to make it comedy. It's much easier to be diplomatic, and part of that empathy could just be actually responding directly to what you think their real feelings are. So if you think that them asking you about when you are finishing is them being worried about you and whether you're doing okay, you can actually address that directly.
“Oh, thank you for your concern. No, honestly, it is fine. It is taking a long time and it's tough, but I'm doing okay. I know it feels like a really long time to you, but honestly, genuinely this is normal.” So you are sort of almost responding to that. So understanding what that person might be thinking and kind of really trying to read behind the question can often help.
So those are my recommendations. A, B, C, D, E, acceptance, boundaries, comedy, diplomacy, and empathy. Start planning it now. I can see on Twitter people are already starting to dread the things that they're going to hear at Christmas. Get this stuff in place now.
Building it up before it happens will make it worse. If you are dreading it now, when it happens, you are going to be fuelled and ready to explode. So instead, working on some of these thoughts, people are going to say these things. I'm okay with where I'm at. I've got boundaries. It's actually quite funny. I've got my diplomatic responses planned. I have empathy for where they're coming from.
This is fine. This is just people saying some things to me. This is fine.
So get your plan in place now so that you can relax and enjoy your Christmas break. Now coming up on the podcast for the rest of the time between now and the break, we are gonna be talking about reviewing your year. Super excited about this one.
I have a guest visitor and I will tell you more about that soon. And we are also going to be talking about planning your rest and relaxation over Christmas. I know that it's a real challenge for lots of PhD students and academics to properly take holiday. And so the last one of these before Christmas is going to be really thinking about how can you make it so that you feel comfortable with the amount that you will work and the amount that you will rest so that you enjoy both parts of it and don't spend your Christmas thinking you should be doing one when actually you're doing the other. So keep an eye out for both of those.
In the meantime, I am going to be working on that course that I mentioned. So if you are interested in hearing more about that, make sure you get to my website, get on my newsletter on the Work with Me button, and you'll be one of the first to hear about it. See you next week.
The PhD Life Coach is part of Wembury Coaching Ltd.
Company number: 13866726
Copyright © All Rights Reserved.