There is no voice you hear more often than the voice inside your head, yet we often spend very little time thinking about HOW we speak to ourselves and the effect this has on us. In this episode, we think about how we can notice our negative self-talk and start to be our own best supervisor.
Transcript
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to episode one of the PhD Life Coach. I am so excited to be here. My dog Marley is by my side. I'm hoping he will lie still and quiet, and I am ready to go. I'm Dr. Vikki Burns and I started the PhD life Coach because during my 26 years in academia, from undergrad to full professor, I saw so many people struggle.
I want you to think about the last time you asked a colleague or someone in your PhD program how they were. My bet is that they said some version of, Yeah, busy, good, but busy or, ugh, drowning. Think about the last time you were asked that. What did you say? I bet you said busy. I used to have a PhD student who I adored, and when I asked him how it was going, he'd always reply “It's going…” with a little grin and like a little wiggle with his eyebrow. Whoever I talk to is the same. Whether it's a new PhD student or a member of senior management:
- we don't have time to do all the things that we want to do
- we feel like we're not doing things well enough
- we worry that other people don't think highly enough of our work
- we're tired, overwhelmed, and often just getting by instead of loving this academic career.
I bet you feel like that. Because that's the weird thing, right? We're all living our past self’s dreams. However long you've been in academia, you once dreamt of being where you are now. You worked so hard to get onto your PhD program and now you're struggling to get going on the work.
You push to get a teaching position and now you dread trying to balance lecturing and administration with your research. You exhausted yourself to get the big promotion and take on a management role. And now you worry that everyone hates you and your decisions. Or maybe that was just me. I doubt it.
We're all exactly where we wanted to be, but often it doesn't feel the way we thought it would.
I know this because I saw it all the way through. I kept thinking that when I got to the next level, people would have it together, that I would have it together. But the more I progressed, the more it stayed the same. I went on courses, early career staff, mid-career leadership, senior leadership courses, and we all had to like reflect on our experiences and these are super high achieving people. These were amazing, amazing colleagues. But everyone still felt like they had too much to do, they did worried whether they were good enough, and they still got stressed about whether they'd make the next step at every level.
People kept saying, we just need to get past this bit and it'll be better. I just need to get my PhD done and it'll be better. I just need to get past the end of teaching or finish my marking and it will be better. I just need to get this grant in, this conference done, whatever it is, and it will be better.
And I rapidly realized that none of those things make a difference. The PhD, the promotion, the paper, the grant, they don't make you feel better, because almost as soon as they're done you are onto the next thing and feeling stressed because you haven't done that one yet.
That's why the PhD life coach is for everyone, PhD student through to senior academic, because we all struggle and it doesn't just miraculously feel better when we get to our next goal.
That sounds like terrible news, but actually it's brilliant. Trust me. Honestly. What it means is we don't have to finish our PhDs to feel better. We don't need to get promoted or get that paper published or the grant in to feel better. We can work on feeling better right now, and as a little tangent to the main focus of today.
Just to let you know, this isn't going to be one of those podcasts that's about, Oh, let's just all get more resilient and put up with all the bad things about academia. It's not gonna be that. It's also not gonna be an academia is broken, let's burn it all down podcast. Instead, I want us to learn how to stop making it harder for ourselves than it needs to be and how to make it a little bit easier for those directly around us.
If in the process of it all we can change some of the toxic practices that are going. Happy days. Let's do it. But let's start with just making a little bit of space in our brains before we explode.
So on that note, let's get going. We are going to start today with a topic that really underpins everything else that we'll talk about over the next few weeks and months.
And that is being your own best supervisor, whoever we are, we have people in charge of us, whether you're a PhD student, you've got your supervisor, if you're a postdoc, you've got your principal investigator, perhaps. If you are a lecturer, you've got your head of department, head of school, whatever you call them in your institution. Even if you are a pro-vice chancellor, you've got your vice chancellor above you. I really hope we get some vice chancellors listening to this too. I think they need it too. And if we do, even vice chancellors have people in government across the network that are above them, as it were, and we all have opinions about what those supervisors, those managers, those leaders should be like.
We know what we want from them. In fact, if you Google what are the best qualities of a PhD supervisor or a manager, you'll find loads and loads of articles about what to look for in a leader. But what people never seem to talk about is leading yourself, about the fact that you will hear your own voice inside your head far more than you'll hear the words of anyone else.
The way you treat yourself will have more impact on you than anybody you're currently working with. So it's not to say we're not going to talk at some point about managing your bosses. I got a whole lot of stuff to say about that, about how to manage up, how to make it a lot easier than it is, how to work out what's toxic versus what's something that you can figure out together. We're gonna do all of that stuff.
But first I want you to think about the voice inside your head, the things you say to yourself, because when I think about the meetings I have with my individual clients, they tell me, they say things to themselves that you would never tolerate anybody else saying to you.
I want you to think about the person directly in charge of you. OK, PhD supervisor, Head of Department, Vice Chancellor, or whatever it is. Okay? And I want them you to imagine them saying to you, Yeah, you're probably just not good enough. I mean, I don't know if you know why you're here. You should probably give up. Everyone thinks you're an idiot. You're never gonna get this all. I mean, the world will fall apart if you don't get it done, but you're never going to.
If they said those things, you wouldn't tolerate it. Or if you did tolerate it, you would at least moan about it. You would say, they shouldn't speak to me like that. It's not fair. It's not right. It's not nice. Doesn't make me work harder, doesn't make me get more stuff done, and it definitely doesn't make me enjoy living and working here.
But we say these things to ourselves all the time. I know I did. My habit, and I'm a lot better at it now than I was because I've worked on it through this coaching process, is two voices. One that said you have to do all the things. And the other one that said, there's no way you can get all of these things. So they will be simultaneously like fighting it out in my head. You have to do all of these things. There's no way you can get them all done. And then a sneaky third one would come in saying, and you should have done it already.
Okay? There's no way you can drop it. There's no one else that can do it. All of it has to be done now, but it's impossible to get it all. Imagine having a boss who says that to you. You've gotta do all the things. They're all important. Gotta do them all right now, and there's not enough time. You'll never do it, and you should have done them before.
It's ludicrous. But it was what I was saying to myself all the time until I started doing more of this coaching work and really thinking about the thoughts that I focus on and the things that I say to myself. So that's why I decided that this first session is gonna focus on being your own best supervisor.
And to keep it simple, I've got seven qualities for you, Seven things that I want you to nurture in yourself that I think will make you the best supervisor that you can be. Some of them are things that you might have seen when you search for like what to look for in a good supervisor, good manager. Some of them might be a little more unusual, so let's go.
The first one, and this is one of the more unusual ones, is that you want to be curious. Not curious about the research or the teaching, but curious about yourself. Why you do the things that you do, why you find things difficult, why you find other things easier, why you get stuff done, and why you don't.
One thing I really want to point out here is when we are being curious, we're not being judgmental. We're not going, Oh my God, you didn't finish that again. You're going. Okay, hang on. I lined up six things to do today and I only did two of them. Okay, that's interesting. I wonder why that is. Not, oh my word, tomorrow you're gonna have to work harder. You're so useless, you're so lazy. Or how does everyone else get this done? I can't do it, but I wonder why I didn't get those things done. Because when you come at it from a point of curiosity, you start to engage your problem solving brain. You start to think. Hmm.
Actually, maybe my list wasn't that realistic in the first place. So maybe the problem started there. That was often my problem. I'd list like 20 things that I needed to do that day, get 10 of them done, but beat myself up about the 10 I didn't do. And when I'd show the list of people, people were like, Yeah, you were never gonna do all those things Vikki were you.
But I was still beating myself up for not doing. So maybe when we are being curious with ourselves, we think maybe I do need to spend longer thinking how long things will take. Maybe I need to spend a little bit longer working out what are the crucial must-do-today things and less time just listing everything. Maybe I could put times next to them. Maybe I could just focus on a few of them.
Maybe you'd start to reflect, Eh, actually people interrupt me during those times, so perhaps it was unrealistic to plan something for them. Or actually, how could I stop people interrupting me during that time? I wonder what I could do about that. I wonder how I could carve out some time where I won't get interrupted. Do you see how when you come at it from this curious perspective, instead of judging yourself, instead of being mean to yourself, you're seeing it just as a little problem, little challenge to be solved, and you are much more likely to just experiment the next day and go, Okay, well maybe if it went like that yesterday, maybe I'll try it like this today. Let's see how that goes. So number one, quality, curious.
2. Be encouraging
Number two, and this is one that you are more likely to see if you search for some of the best qualities of a leader or a manager or being a supervisor. And that's being encouraging, having faith in you. So often people, you know, they find something difficult, they don't know something, and they make that mean that they've really failed, that they shouldn't be here, that this isn't right for them, they're not good enough.
All of those sorts of things. And again, those things don't motivate you to work hard, or if it does, it doesn't motivate you from a good place. It kind of motivates you from a sort of a desperate place of, Okay, I'll just work a bit harder. I'll, you know, I'll give up sleeping. I'll give up weekends. I'll, I'll just go a bit more.
Where what we really want is somebody to say, It's okay. You're doing really well. This is good. I think you can do this next thing, let's crack on. Come on, you can do it. Or You've done really well today, let's have a break and then we can come back to it. We want people around us who are encouraging. We want people to spot us when we're at our lowest and have faith in the fact that we can keep going, that we can get where we want to be.
But why can't we be that voice for ourselves? Why can't we have that faith in ourself that encourages us when we find it difficult, just reassures us and pootles us on a little bit, or encourages us to have a rest? So number two is encouraging.
3. Be compassionate
Number three, and it connects to that massively, is being compassionate. Now, just to point out, this isn't being a complete pushover. This doesn't mean just going, Oh, well, I'll lay in bed all day and scroll on social media. It's not about being a total softie yourself. It's about having compassion for yourself saying, Actually this is hard. Getting your PhDs hard, getting your professorship’s hard, all of these things, they take a lot of work.
They're tough going. That's where everyone doesn't do them. And some days I'm going to work better than others and some days it's going to be a struggle and that's okay because I've got a human brain and a human body and that means I can't do everything. And that's okay. And it's true of everyone. No one can do everything.
That's a compassionate voice. That's a voice that supports you to get done what you want to do, and not even forgive yourself, but accept the things that you don't get done. Sometimes I think the thing that stops us being compassionate with ourselves is we feel like if we are too compassionate with ourselves, that we'll just give up. We just won't do anything. That's not true. And it's not only two options. People seem to think we've got this option of being compassionate where we just go, Oh, well I'm gonna eat chocolate in front of the telly, or we are mean to ourselves and kick ourselves to get stuff done. Actually, there's a middle ground. There's a middle ground where we can say, Okay, yeah, it's difficult. Yep. It's been a tough day. Let, let's just get this little thing done. Or let's just take a little bit of time. Okay? Cause I've got faith in you and I think you can do. So that's the third one. I want you to think about how you can create a more compassionate voice in your head.
4. Let it go
And the fourth one, and I haven't come up with a single word for this, so if you think of one, let me know in the comments. Let me know on social media. You want to let things go. So again, imagine you've got a boss you've been working with for a few years and you make a mistake, you're late for a deadline.
I once forgot to turn up for a lecture, whole lecture theatre full of students and I wasn't there. Email started coming in. Yeah, very awkward. So imagine you do something like that, you lose something, you turn off the freezer, if you're a science student, whatever, you break the bit of equipment, you lose the archive, whatever it is, okay?
And you tell your boss. If your boss says, Yeah, typical, you do that. You did this two years ago too. You were useless then. That deadline. You miss that deadline too. You're late for that one. You always do this. You just do. It's you. It's a pattern. We wouldn't like that supervisor, but we do that to ourselves all the time. We do one thing that we perceive as wrong and we extrapolate it to everything we've ever done. We think back to all the times that we've been late, all the times we've forgotten to do something. We make it this big pattern. So when you are being your best supervisor, we need to learn to let things go.
If we make a mistake today, that's all it is, it's a mistake today. We don't have to remind ourselves of all the things we perceive we've done wrong in the past, all the things we’ve done before. We can just focus on today and let that past stuff go. Now I'm gonna take a moment before the next one just to go on what might be a tangent. Let's go. We'll see.
I can imagine some of you listening to this feeling a little bit skeptical, going well, yeah, that's all very well. But how do I just change my thoughts? I've been thinking these things. I've been beating myself up since I was 12 years old. That's one of the problems, it’s one of the reasons I work with people in academia.
High achieving people who have generally been mean to themselves since they were at school one way or another. So you might be thinking, Okay, yeah, I can see this would be really nice. But I can't imagine what it would be like to speak to myself like that, and I don’t know how I will remember to do it. I've got you. If you're feeling like that, you are right.
This is the first thing I'm gonna say. It's not easy. Changing thought patterns, changing these habits that we've had our whole lives is really hard. So just trust me that the first step is just to notice as we go through more and more sessions talking about this stuff, we are going to go into more detail about exactly how you spot a thought, work out what effect it's going to have, and think of different thoughts and so on.
We're going think about all those things, but at the moment, just try and get in the habit of noticing when you do these things, noticing when you're not being compassionate, when you don't let it go. All of these things, just notice and be kind to yourself. That's part of the compassion too. Don't start beating yourself up for beating yourself up, because that's a whole other spiral that we can do without. Okay. Just notice and go, Oh yeah, probably better I don't speak to myself like that. I'm going to be kinder to myself than that. Okay, so. Let's move on.
5. Choose your thoughts carefully
Fifth one. Kind of connected to that, kind of connected to the tangent, so maybe it wasn't as much of a tangent after all, but that is, choose your thoughts carefully.
All sorts of thoughts fly into our heads all the time. We don't have to listen to them. Again, that's gonna be a massive focus. This, this podcast is thinking about how, just because our brain has offered us a thought, we don't have to spend loads of time. Okay. I want you to think about what names you call yourself. I had a habit. I'm a lot better at it now through this coaching, but I had a habit of calling myself useless. I still do it to some extent. It's something my partner calls me up on. He notices when I do it. I know I'm not useless. I'm objectively not useless. I've been really successful if I do say so myself.
I have been. But the words, Oh my God, you're so useless run through my head, in the past, multiple times an hour, literally probably every three or four minutes that would run through my head. Now, a couple of times a day maybe. So I have a tendency to leave things lying around and then not remember where my keys are and stuff like that.
And my immediate thought is, Oh my gosh, you're so useless. You’ve lost your keys again. I call myself useless far more than I want to. We need to start identifying those names. And then not letting us do it. I've made so much progress on this. I still hear it pop into my head, but I don't believe it anymore. I don't take it seriously and I don't spend time dwelling on it. I sort of find myself going, Okay, but I can find my keys. It's fine. It's all good. It's so much less painful. You think about what the word is for you. Some people it's, they call themselves stupid. Other people they call themselves lazy.
Notice how many times you call yourself these things, notice which is the one for you, which is the one that you want to work on. And at this point, I'm not even asking you to stop. I'm just, it's asking you to notice. Sometimes, one of my old coaches used to say, If you are banging your head against a brick wall, the first thing you have to do is just notice that you're banging. Then you can start to stop regardless, just by noticing. We're just going to tone it down a bit.
6. Be resourceful
Sixth one is about being resourceful. So people often talk about what they want from a new boss, a new supervisor, a new manager. They want someone who's connected, someone who's influential, who can help them get stuff done, who can notice what development needs they have, connect you to people and things that might help, all of that stuff.
I was recently talking to a client about wanting this from her supervisor. Those are amazing qualities in a supervisor, but it can be an amazing quality in yourself too. So when you've been curious and you've been compassionate, the next step is, Okay, how can I be resourceful? Okay, so I'm finding this thing difficult. That's fine. What can I do about it? Who is there out there that can help me? Who could I ask for advice? Or where can I get more training? Or who could give me support with this? Who might have done this before? What can I read? Are there any episodes on the PhD life coach podcast about this? Are there other people I can speak to that could help?
So being resourceful, for example, one of the things I spotted, so I was at an amazing university where there were so many resources for students and staff, wellbeing services, training services, online resources. All sorts and people just didn't know they existed. It was all the way through my PhD up to senior professors who had access to this incredible leadership training, and often people didn't know it was there or they didn't think they had time to go and access it or they didn't prioritize going through it.
So when you are being your own best supervisor, be that resourceful person, stop and think. What advice would I give someone if this was them? Often we're better at giving advice to other people than we are to ourselves. If a student or client came to us, a colleague came to us and said, Oh, I'm struggling with this. Where would you figure out to send them? See if you can do that to yourself. You can be resourceful for yourself.
7. Have direction
The seventh quality I want you to have is about direction, having direction. We all want supervisors, managers, bosses that are clear about where we're going, what the big picture is, what the next steps might be. Both of those things are important. The big picture, where are we trying to get to, but also the specifics of what specifically do I need to do next?
What's your big picture? Are you clear about where you're going? Often people are good at one but not the other. They're good at what the next four steps are, but not what the big picture is of where we're heading to. Others have got that big picture there, but no idea how they're getting there. And if you are not clear, on those specific next steps, on the big picture, it's really hard to keep working hard. It's hard to keep doing stuff if you're not sure of the direction that you're going. So the seventh quality I want you to nurture in yourself is having direction.
And again, we're going to have some sessions about how to work out all these things out, how to work out what your big picture is, how to establish the next steps. So we had curious, we had encouraging. Compassionate, letting it go. Still need to think of a better word for that, but go with it. Choosing your words, being resourceful and setting the direction.
Conclusion
Those are the seven things that I think we all need from our supervisors and managers, but much more importantly that we all need when we're supervising ourselves. The voice in your head, you'll hear more than any other, so make sure it's the best one. It can. If this all seems interesting, but massive habits to break, don't worry.
Like I said, we are going to go into each of these in turn over the next few weeks. We're going to think about how to spot those habitual thoughts, what impact they have on your feelings, your behavior, how they impact the results that you are getting, why you are where you are. And most importantly, we're going to figure out how you can change it. We're going to figure out how you can speak to yourself better, how you can give yourself more direction, get the support that you.
This is all about us enjoying this academic life that we've created, that we've dreamt of, but making it exactly what we want it to be. Making the rest of our lives what we want them to be and having some fun along the way.
I really hope you've enjoyed this first episode. I have loved talking with you, and I look forward to speaking with you next time.
The PhD Life Coach is part of Wembury Coaching Ltd.
Company number: 13866726
Copyright © All Rights Reserved.