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

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

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

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

Do you ever wonder why you’re even doing this? Whether your research actually matters and whether the world actually cares? In this episode I’m telling you exactly why I believe your work matters, no matter what you’re researching. I’ll also tell you what bits (that we often worry about) don’t matter! This episode is designed to listen to whenever you need it, so make sure you save it somewhere for those days when you’re struggling! Links I refer to in this episode What to do when you want more reassurance Transcript Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. I am here today to tell you one thing, just one thing, and that is that what you do matters. So often we sit here in our academic careers, doing our PhD, whatever level we're at, feeling like no one even cares about anything we're doing. Hardly anybody's going to read it anyway. What impact will this ever actually have in the world? And why did I sign up in the first place? If you're feeling like that, it's totally normal. We all go through those stages. And that's why I want to remind you that those things are not objective truths. Those things are stories we tell ourselves when things are feeling difficult and when we've forgotten why we're doing what we're doing. The work you do is important, regardless of what you're researching. Sometimes I have clients who say, oh, but you know, if I was researching for a cure for cancer, or I was researching about establishing peace in the Middle East or whatever. If I was researching those things, it would matter, but who cares about my little bit of literature? Who cares about my little bit of history, but I want you to know that these doubts happen no matter what you're researching. I have clients who are researching those exact things, those things that seem so obviously valuable and they still feel often like a tiny piece in a huge jigsaw that they have no idea whether it will work anyway. The discipline that you are studying within and the topic you are studying does not inherently make you sure that your research is valuable. We have those doubts across all disciplines, all research areas. But what you do is valuable because you're a small piece in a massive jigsaw. Because you are creating and producing one small piece of a jigsaw that nobody else would have produced in the way that you're producing them. But we don't know how it's going to fit together in the future. It's not like there's an actual jigsaw where all the pieces are kind of preconceived. You're creating a you shaped jigsaw piece, a piece of this giant puzzle that we don't know where it's gonna go. And that means we can't be sure how much impact it will have in the future, but equally we can't be sure that it won't. And sometimes it's the most unusual obscure bits that capture people's imagination the most. Certainly when I ask clients in my workshops to share what they're researching on, sometimes it's the stuff that I would never have thought about. I still remember a student from, its gotta be 15, 20 years ago, who was researching the history of pantomime, and I just thought that was the most fascinating thing. Those of you who aren't in the UK, that may not be so relevant for you, but for me, pantomime is such a huge part of being a child in the UK. And the fact that most of us don't know anything about where it came from and how it developed, I just think it's fascinating. These are the things that will be in museums in the future. These are the things that will be in a book on somebody's bookshelf that they picked up just because it looked cool when they were wandering around a bookshop when they're not meant to be spending any money. The things you do are important. The approach that you take is important. The fact that we have hundreds of thousands of people out there doing PhDs, who are learning how to take huge amounts of disparate information, often contradictory information that's arguing with each other, and to turn it into a meaningful argument. The world needs that. The world needs to be able to understand the nuances between different arguments, to understand that there isn't right and wrong, that there's a whole load of grey in between, and that we can make evidence based arguments for where we sit on that nuanced continuum. The world needs those skills. The world needs the skills that you are developing. The world needs people that can manage this enormous unmanageable amount of information and turn it into something coherent so that other people can learn from it who haven't got your skills. The world needs what you do. The world needs people that can define a huge project, decide what it is, and make it happen. The world needs those people. The world needs people who have creativity and insight and who can stretch our knowledge beyond where it is at the moment. If you feel like you don't know enough, it's because you are literally at the edges of human knowledge. That is what you're doing when you do a PhD. When you work in academia, you are meant to not know enough. Because that is what makes you read the next bit and to write the next bit and to understand the next bit. We need people who can operate in that sort of uncertainty and still make it happen. The world needs your research and the world needs you. Now I said in this episode I was going to tell you one thing and that that's what you do matters, but I'm going to tell you one more thing too. And that's that the stuff you do sometimes doesn't matter. Now, that might sound like a massive contradiction, but so many of my clients flip from everything I do is completely pointless and no one cares to, I have to get this exactly right in exactly the ways it needs to be done or else I'm a failure. And that's why the second half of this is to remind you that so much of what you do doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you tell the story in this order or that order, as long as it tells a coherent story. It doesn't matter whether you include this article or that article or this quote or that quote, as long as you can justify why you've included it or why you've left it out. It doesn't matter whether you take a quantitative approach or a qualitative approach or what exact measure you use, as long as you can justify why you did and you only interpret within the realms of what you did. A lot of the decisions that you're getting het up about don't matter that much. You have to have a good reason to choose it. You have to be able to defend it. You have to understand the weaknesses of the choice that you made. And other than that, it doesn't matter. What is important is that you move this research forward, that you develop the skills that you need to push this piece of research forward. That's all that matters. And that means learning to sit in that uncertainty and move forward anyway. Learning either to be comfortable with the fact that you're not quite sure where you're going next, or to be okay with being uncomfortable. The tiny things that you are stressing about probably don't matter. But the research that you do, the fact that you're doing a PhD, the fact that you're having an academic career, those things matter. Go do them. And this episode is specifically designed to be short and for you to come back to it whenever you need it. So save it, send it to your friends who need to hear it right now. You matter. Your research matters. The little things you're worrying about probably don't. Let's just crack on and get this research out into the world where it can have the impact and bring the joy and the interest and the intrigue that it deserves. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

Do you ever feel like you’re only succeeding because you’re working more than is healthy? That you are subsidizing your work at the expense of your wellbeing? Then today’s episode is a must listen! I welcome Andy Brown, author of The Emotional Overdraft and we chat about what we mean by an Emotional Overdraft, how to know if you have one, and what to do about it. Links I refer to in this episode You can find out more about Andy Brown and The Emotional Overdraft here Find out the extent of your emotional overdraft by completing this assessment Transcript Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. And today's episode is one that's come about through a kind of spontaneous moment of "Oh sod it, I might as well try" on a train. So I was on my way to Stirling and I took with me a book, The Emotional Overdraft, those of you on YouTube, you can see Emotional Overdraft by Andy Brown. And I found myself loving it and I thought, you know what? I wonder if there's any chance this person who's written this amazing book would come on the podcast. Vikki: And so I messaged Andy, and as those of you who are on YouTube can already see, here he is, Andy actually agreed to come on the show. So welcome, thank you so much, I really appreciate it. Andy: Uh, delighted to be here and thank you for asking me. And to be on the podcast where, from the person that runs the How You Can Be Your Own Boss course is great. And I was listening to chunks of it and you were talking about being driven by our thoughts which drives our emotions or feelings, which drives our behaviors and outcomes. And I thought this is these are my people. This is, this is what I talk about as well. So it's great to be here and I'm very excited about the conversation. Vikki: Perfect. Thank you so much. And yes, that was the thing as I was reading it, it's always one of those wonderful moments where you read some bits where you're like, Oh, that's what I say to people. And then you read other bits where you're like, Oh, and I hadn't thought about it like that. And that's where, you know, you're in exactly the right place. Cause you're kind of, you know, you're on the same page. There's things you agree on, but equally. You're kind of bringing slightly different things to the table, which is, which is perfect. So let's start with. Let everybody know who you are and how you came to write this book. Andy: So I'm a non executive director these days because I'm old, but my career, I started out in market research. So all you PhDs going, yeah, that's not real research. But I started out in market research, uh, which took me into advertising and I spent 35 years working in and running advertising agencies. Andy: And for the last 10 or so. I've been a non exec and an advisor to creative and research businesses to helping them build more valuable businesses. And that's really where the idea of the book came from. So looking at the challenges these, these founders and these, these leaders have in their businesses that just seem to be whatever the question, the answer seemed to be "I'll do it." You know, they were going to do it. They were the answer to everything and I spend a lot of time talking to people about how you can resolve that. But the researcher in me just kept coming back to it and going, I wonder if there's something seems to be consistent here. So so let's let's ask people. Andy: So I did a little bit of research and what I discovered was that, what I subsequently called an emotional overdraft, this idea of subsidizing your, your enterprise's success at your own mental or physical cost is pretty universal. In fact, spoiler alert, it is universal. Um, and it doesn't just exist within business, although my publisher said, you need an audience, Andy, so you've got to write it right, right for the audience, you know, right for a business audience. Andy: But I do believe emotional overdraft is absolutely universal state. So I did the research and I discovered that almost everyone at some point or another is subsidizing the success of their venture or whatever they're doing at their own mental or physical cost. Andy: One where another and some people that feels like an overdraft to me. It's that sense of you dip in and you dip out when you need it And some people dip in and stay there and and that's very damaging and dangerous, Yeah. Other people can dip in and then come out again Just like financial control, you know, there are people that use their overdraft when they need to buy something expensive, they pay it straight off, they don't incur all those terrible costs, and it's gone again, but it's a useful facility. Andy: Other people don't manage their costs very well. They've permanently maxed out their credit card, they're permanently in their overdraft, and they're paying a hell of a price for it. And it felt to me that that emotional cost of running a business, or I've got a good friend of mine working on his PhD, and he's probably been doing it for 10 years, and I know that that stresses him out. Andy: I know that that pressure, it's the same thing. And his behaviour is basically contributing to that. Broadly, I'm not saying he's to blame, but I am saying it's broadly a behavioral issue. Uh, and those behaviors tend to come out of habits. And that's what the research threw up was there are a number of habits, which tend to underpin these behaviors, which we can do something about. Because if it's habitual or if it's behavioral, it's not easy, but we can change that. Vikki: Yeah. Andy: As long as we can spot it, we can change it. So that, that's what the research showed. The book took two more years to come out, but was published in January 2024. So, yeah, it was quite a relief and quite exciting. Vikki: And you mentioned that it was written for a business audience. I think I came across it first, I think you talked on another podcast and it was on the back of that, that I bought the book and thought that it would be really, really relevant. And I love this idea that when you're thinking in one setting, you know, a book that's focused. very much for people that are running their own businesses and there's bits in it that are not specifically applicable in academia. Vikki: But there was so much of it that resonated, whether that's with PhD students who make up probably the majority of the people that listen to this, but also all the way through, and maybe even more so as you go further through an academic career, and now you're not just responsible for your own research but you're responsible for grant income. You're responsible for teaching and personal tutorials and supervision and all that stuff as well. And it just, there was so much that resonated with me at every level. Andy: You talk about being your own boss. And I thought that is the boss you or the implementer you. And that's, that's the same situation. That's, you're a boss of one, you know, you're a company of one, you're the CEO. So you're still leading, even though you are the only person leading, and the only person you're leading is you. Andy: But you're still leading, and the principles all hold true, which is there are ways of behaving which will make things easier, more sustainable, more effective, and more impactful. And there are ways of doing it that will make it inadvertently harder and more costly to you. And that's, so the exact principles apply through. Andy: I get. I mean, it's this strange thing when you launch your book baby into the world, you get, it takes on its own little life. I, I get emails from mothers and that is not my audience for the book, but I had one who sent me a voicemail. And it, she just said, I bought your book on someone else's recommendation. I, and I'm not flogging the book, I'm just sharing the story, but I bought your book. I read the first chapter. And it was like you were talking to me. So I phoned my friend up, and on the phone I read her the first chapter, and I said, who's he talking about? And my friend said, he's talking about you. Now, that's not the person I wrote the book for, but she's effectively this mother with kids, and a partner, maybe, and a family, and a wider network of friends, and societal pressure, and all those things. Andy: Effectively is the leader of that community, of her micro community, and it was speaking to her. So it has taken on a bit of a life of its own, which I love. I think the reason I wanted to come and talk to you is because of the idea. The concept of an emotional overdraft, I think, is a helpful label that we can use in the right at the right time to spot what's going on and to do something differently. Andy: And if that's when you're a mum, or a working mum, or a PhD student, or you're running a team in a university, or you're running a business, great. If it works for you, then take it and do things with it. Vikki: Absolutely. All the way up to the very top. Andy: So just to pursue that a little bit, when you find yourself in an emotional overdraft, it's okay to dip in. We've all done that. It's, you know, when I get people talking to me and they're saying, yeah, but I'm running a new, I'm running a business, I've got a startup or of course I'm working long hours. Yes, of course you are. But if it's persistent, if you don't stop and pay yourself back, if you stop doing exercise, if you don't find time for your family, if you stop seeing your friends, if you withdraw from your community, you stop volunteering or doing the things that feed you emotionally, that cost eventually catches up. Andy: So it's important to realize maybe I'm in my emotional overdraft. Maybe I've been here too long. Maybe something's going on. And in that moment, recognize that you can genuinely help yourself if you're able to change some behavior. Vikki: I think that having the name for it really helps. That really resonated with me. So you've touched on this a little bit in terms of what people might see themselves stopping doing. But how would somebody recognize that they're going into an emotional overdraft? Andy: Yeah, it's a good question, and it is different for everybody. I think what you're looking out for is physical or mental change. So, putting on weight, maybe. I mean, it is so, so different for everybody else, so I'll try not to make it all about me. But, it might be putting on weight, it might be losing weight, it might be physical change, it might be withdrawing From certain situations, your family. It might be, you know, stopping doing sports. Andy: It might be that you find you're more easily distracted, you are less able to concentrate or work for longer periods of time. That's another good clue. You can't stick to a task. Your to do list is being carried forward and rolled forward and rolled forward and stuff isn't getting done. Andy: You maybe stop looking at your to do list. You stop engaging with it because it's feeling overwhelming and a sense of overwhelm is a very good signal. And these can be tiny, tiny things and these can roll up into quite major things. So there's lots of little signals. If people call it stress, I'm feeling a bit stressed. You're already there. Andy: I'd be looking for those things that are leading up to, before the point where you might admit that you're stressed, or feeling overwhelmed, and that you've definitely got there then, but you'll recognise that. It's those small changes in behaviour. Andy: And one of the things I do encourage people to do is to, if you think that you are subsidising your PhD at your own personal cost, then get other people involved in that. Share that thought with somebody. It doesn't have to be a professional. I mean, share it with a friend, share it with someone else who's doing the same thing, who can empathize. But, but talk about it and externalize it. Andy: Because that then gives you a forum to start understanding. If you hold the thing, if you hold on to it and look at it and explore it and get inquisitive, then you've got way more chance of starting to understand what might be happening. I'm not saying it'll fix it, but it's definitely, it makes it more tangible. Andy: That's why the labels are helpful. If you can label it, it makes it a bit more tangible, then you can explore it. Vikki: And I love, I think this notion of subsidizing is so important because obviously, you know, people talked about stress, they talk about burnout and all of these things, but I think this notion that this can be what's propping up success., That sometimes there are people who are outwardly doing really well, their PhDs are progressing well, their academic careers are looking good, but it's only working because they're propping it up with their health and wellbeing, as you say, I think is such an interesting way to distinguish it from just solely a stress issue. That this is actually a structural thing that means that as it stands in its current form, your workload is not viable because you're having to sell this really important stuff essentially. Andy: And it's invisible. It's not easy to measure and so in business and I won't talk about profits and loss and all those things, but that's the analogy I use in business. But in business, it's easy to measure financial measures. What do we, you know, what do we sell? What did it cost to do it? What staff costs do we have? Those things are easy to measure and so we measure them. Emotional overdraft, that invisible subsidy that's coming from my cost to my health, me not going to the gym, me not looking after myself, me disengaging from my family and my support network, that is not easily measured. And if you can't measure it, it's far easier to ignore and kind of pretend it's not there and pretend that it's normal. Andy: It's just It just, it just is. Lots of business people, lots of leaders I talk to go, well, that's the job. It's meant to be difficult. It's meant to be hard. I'm meant to have a consistent level of low level stress. I'm meant to feel like that. No, you're not. I know loads of people who do this. Andy: I know people who run businesses and I'm sure you know people who, who, who work through a PhD who don't, it isn't fueled by stress. It's not subsidized by a constant sense of discomfort and, pain. It doesn't have to be that way. Vikki: I am going to be really cheeky. I've realised I've forgotten to feed the dog and he's crying. He's literally crying. It's going to be 30 seconds. Andy: So now we can talk about the real stuff, can't we? What do we think about Vicki's podcast? Are you enjoying it? I was just chatting to your listeners. Vikki: Oh yes, I'll leave that bit in, they all know about Marley. He was literally nose butting me. Cool, right, let's get back in the zone. You mentioned that, like, profit and loss isn't so relevant as measures in academia, and you're right, but I do think there are kind of similar things, you know, we equate publications or impact factors or grant income and things like that are some very measurable things of success. Vikki: Or even how, you know, how long to a submission. Many of my PhD students that I work with are obsessed with how long it's taking them, you know, are they going to submit within their funded period? Are they going to submit when they thought they were going to, et cetera, so I do think there's kind of comparable quantitative. Andy: Yeah, and that's, and that's, there's comfort in quantification. There's comfort in numbers. There's comfort in you know, you're making progress. You're hitting the milestones. That's great. I keep coming back to that Chinese proverb. You can't measure a pig fat. And I think it's right here in the sense that what they mean is simply measuring the pig is not the thing that's making it fatter. It's feeding the pig is what's making it fatter. Andy: Sometimes you can console yourself with the measurement and the measuring. And what you're ignoring is what are you actually having to pay to make that pig fat? What's it really costing you? Let's, let's torture this analogy to death. If you're, if you're taking food from your own table to fatten the pig, something's gone wrong there. Andy: And so that's really the point I think about this is that it, it's really hard to quantify. I think it's possible to, to identify even if you can't quantify it exactly. So we can identify it, uh, which is an important thing to do, but because we don't quant, can't quantify it exactly, It's easy to disregard it, but the impact or the halo effect of emotional overdraft can become all too visible. Vikki: Yeah, for sure. And I think, especially for my PhD listeners, I want you to also think about your supervisors and the impact that their emotional overdraft, because I'm pretty confident most of them have one, has on you potentially. And then the impact that your emotional overdraft has on other people, because when you're feeling like this, right, it changes how you're interacting with everybody else, you know, you've got much less patience, you're much less likely to be able to sort of reach out and be collaborative and all those sorts of things. Andy: You're more sensitive to criticism. You're less open to, to people helping you. Potentially, it depends on your nature, how it manifests itself. The other thing is emotional overdraft is incredibly greedy. So even if you think if you're sitting here thinking well, this isn't me I'm not dealing with this firstly you're lying to yourself because everyone has to some extent deals with this But what it can do is it can it can go and steal other people's it can create emotional overdraft in someone else and then take it. Andy: So this is the, you know, the person that's working really long hours that they're not going home until late, that they're not engaging with their partner. One day they come home, there's a note on the table that says, you know, I've left you. That, that, that is a classic case of, that person has probably been subsidizing you with their emotional overdraft for a very long period of time and you didn't realize it. So it's, it's pretty insidious. And it doesn't care where it goes to get sustenance and emotional overdraft. It will, it will go and find it where it can. Vikki: Okay. I think we have thoroughly convinced everyone that this is really important. And that lots of people are probably experiencing it. So let's get to what can we do? Vikki: If people really, if they're listening to us today and going, Oh my goodness, they're talking about me. Where do they even start? Other than reading your book, obviously. If you're not going to push your book, I will push your book. Andy: Well, interestingly, when I first submitted the book to the publisher, they said, this is great. We really liked this, Andy, but where's the rest of the book? And I said, well, what do you mean? And I'd got so excited about the concept of emotional overdraft and digging into emotions and this idea of which you talk about, which is you're thinking, driving your emotions, which drive your behaviors, which drive your outcomes. Andy: I'd not written the second half of the book, which is what the heck do you do about it? So they sent me back away. It's part of the reason it took so long, which actually just quite straightforward. So, yeah, you definitely can do something about it. Um, I think there's a couple of steps, though, here that are quite important. Andy: One is to try and measure it. We've talked about measurement a lot here, so I mean, if there's people listening who can come up with a better solution than this, then please do, but there's, you know, some brains listening, so please do think about it. My solution for measuring emotional overdraft was to think about it as a relative, as a relative thing. Andy: So if you think this might be you, set up your spreadsheet, get a piece of paper, whatever, whatever floats your boat, and track every day whether you think your emotional overdraft has gone up or stayed the same or gone down. And you need to do it on the day. It's not really journaling, but it's a simple form of that, because you won't remember, you won't remember in a few days time how you felt. Andy: So on the day, at the end of the day, find a moment to reflect and think, do I feel like my emotional overdraft has got bigger? Has it gone up today? And why might that be? Is it about the same as it was? Or have I done something, did I do something today that made me feel better? That makes me feel a little less stressed. Andy: Start with an index, so typically 100, I guess, if you want to be conventional. Add one if your emotional overdraft has gone up. Don't add anything if it's the same, and take off one if it's gone down. And what you might find across a month is that you've had, I don't know, let's say 15 days where it's gone up, 5 days where it stayed the same, and 10 days where it's gone down. Andy: So you're net 5 days up, so your index would have gone from 100 to 105 across the month. And what that tells you, broadly, your emotional overdraft has got worse in that month. Now, 100 to 105, I don't know, that might be good, it might be bad, it depends on where you are at the moment, where you started. But if that carries on, and it went up by 10 the following month, then you're suddenly at 115 and 5 the next month and 20 the next month. Andy: You really have got to be thinking, way before four months, by the way, what can I be doing differently? And that's where the notes really help. If you're making little notes every day, it doesn't need to be long, it's just a few bullet point keywords, even is going to give you the opportunity to go, is there a pattern in this? Andy: Is it the end of the week where I'm getting physically tired or is it that I'm not recharging at the weekends? I'm withdrawing and I'm just sitting on the couch and watching TV or what's happening and try and see the patterns and try and see what's going on because even just doing that will give you the chance to , to bring some data to this, really. 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. 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Vikki: I'd just add one thing on the, the measurement which I think is in line with the stuff that you talk about but sort of reminded me of some of the stuff we talk about too, which is, if you're making a note about why it went up or down, I'd really encourage people to think about circumstance stuff, but also about their own thoughts, because I could imagine a world in which somebody would say that their emotional overdraft has gone up because they got negative comments from their supervisor, and they'd write that down as their reason. And I'd really, really encourage people to write negative comments from my supervisor. I made this mean I'm not good enough to be here, or I'm worried that I'm now not going to finish the paper, or whatever, because I think, and I know we'll talk about thoughts and things in a minute, but I think noticing where there's circumstantial stuff that might be shifting this, but also noticing where it's coming from the things you're telling yourself is really powerful to separate. Andy: You're right. Not just look at the circumstances, but look at the thinking and what's behind that thinking, how you created it. Uh, the second thing I'd say is in the research, what what I discovered was that there are approximately 10 broad areas of behavior or drivers as I call it, which every response I got was a combination of some of these 10 and whatever feedback I got from from the research I could drop it into these 10 areas. So there's 10 drivers. I won't talk about them all but It's different for everybody And I'm no psychologist. So I can't tell you why you've ended up like this Why you are a J. F. D. I. Which is just flipping do it as my publisher insisted I call it or why you have a challenge with trust or why you feel the need to be loved by people. That's not really the point for me. I mean, go ahead and explore that if you wish, but that is what's manifesting in your behavior and online at the emotional overdraft dot com I've created a kind of a very simple. Online, it's sort of a quiz. We called it the Cosmo quiz the whole time I was writing this. I don't know if Cosmo magazine still does these 50 quizzes. Vikki: I don't know, but I remember them from being Andy: Do you know what I mean? I have a younger sister and we used to read them. Vikki: I think we are of a certain age. Other people might not get this. Andy: But there was 50 questions that will tell you whether you'll still be with your boyfriend at the end of the summer. It was ridiculous stuff like that. Has he bought you flowers? Yes, no. And this is 50 yes, no questions, and the output of which is a spider chart, which identifies where your behaviors are contributing to your emotional overdraft most. Andy: And your shape will be different to everybody else's. Everyone's different but it's a really useful exercise. Mainly it's pretty accurate given that it's a 50 question quiz and it's, you know, it's invented by a marketeer, not, not a scientist, um, but it seems to be fairly accurate and people tend to, I see people nodding when they get it. Andy: And even if it's not do some honest reflection and go, well, why do I think that's wrong? And why do I think that isn't me? And is that really, am I really as good at that bit or is it wrong? And why is it wrong? So it's just a vehicle for reflection. But it definitely creates some, for me and for most people I know who've completed it, it creates some thinking around what are the things that are happening typically for you that are almost triggers for you? Andy: What's the sort of thing that's going on? And if you do that, then you get what that does is that sensitizes you to the particular drivers that, that might be causing you the most problem. Andy: So, JFDI is a good one actually. It's quite a good one which is the, just flipping do, I'm a doer. These are people who identify as doers. They get stuff done. Um, I've learned to say, get stuff done as well. I'm a doer. I make stuff happen. Andy: That's great. It's a bit like a SWOT analysis, this, you know, when you did these at universities, every strength is a weakness, every opportunity is a threat. And being a doer and getting stuff done and not hesitating and making stuff happen is brilliant on one hand but the flip side of it is that it can be, it can lead you to do the things that aren't necessarily the priorities. Andy: It can lead you to do things that are giving you the hit and the buzz. But that aren't really getting the important things done. You're leaving things back on your to do list that actually would move the dial. The things that would have the most impact. But as we all know, every tick on a to do list is created equal. Andy: You get the same amount of endorphins from, I don't know, rewrite my list tick. I mean, I've been known to add things to my list which I've done which weren't on the list just to tick them off. I'm sure lots of people have done that. Vikki: I stand by that technique. Andy: It's legit because if you reflect on your list. Vikki: Yes. Andy: I think that's okay. I also, by the way, don't call it a to do list at all. I called it a don't forget list and that changes my relationship. I was a slave to my to do list. It was to do. You've got to do this. This is, you fail if you don't complete, whereas a don't forget list is great for me because I'm a little bit forgetful and actually it's the same thing, but it's just saying this is stuff you mustn't forget to do and then each morning I prioritize a few things off that list. Andy: So it really, that helps me as a technique. But, uh, so what I'm saying is, is JFDI can be very helpful to you, but it can also lead you to behaviors, which particularly start to get an emotional overdraft and you start to develop signs of stress or burnout, it then becomes worse. You can feel like you're getting stuff done, but you're getting the wrong things done and you're smart people and then you know it. And then you feel bad about it. You feel you haven't achieved things, and that piles on into your emotional overdraft. So again, you're starting to feel worse. This, this thing feeds on itself. All of these behaviors in and of themselves can be a good thing. Empathy is one I talk about. Andy: People say, how on earth can empathy be a bad thing? Everything in business certainly is talking about empathy is the great, everyone needs to have empathy. And that's totally true. But the other side of this empathetic feeling is the need to be liked, the need to feel belonging, the need to feel that you are one of the gang or that you're accepted and that's driving the wrong behavior. Or can be driving the wrong behavior, and it might not be behavior that's serving you. It might be behavior that's not serving your PhD. In the end, it's not serving anybody. Andy: So being aware of of where your behavior is coming from, I think is extremely helpful. Vikki: And I will link to the site that you mentioned in the show notes. Andy: And it's so easy because it's the same name as the book. So emotional overdraft. Go there. Um, and then you really can do something about it because you can go, okay, let's get, let's get organized about it. And I, I don't mean to add things here to do this. I don't, I'm, someone said to me, Andy, you've written this book and I feel like I need it, but I haven't got time to read it. I said, well, that's okay. Don't read it if you haven't got time to read it. And that's gonna make you feel worse. Vikki: Also, I found it sneakily on Spotify this week as well. So, if people have Spotify Premium, you can find the audio version too. So, um, Andy: Tuck in everybody. Vikki: There's that option too. Andy: So, yeah, and I think there's a sense of, I'm listening to this Andy, I get it, I see what you're trying to say, but I'm so busy, I'm so stressed, I'm so stretched. Andy: How do I make this time to reflect? How do I make this time to stop? How do I even start to change this stuff? I feel like I'm on a hamster wheel. Or worse, I'm sort of careering downhill on a, it's been snowing in Dorset today. I'm on a sledge just hammering down the hill. I'm not stopping until I get to the bottom. Andy: And I know that's how it feels. And I know that's what your brain is telling you. But there is a finite amount of time in every day. And your job, as being a better boss of yourself is to make the time to be the boss you, I'm not going to just steal your idea here, Vikki, be the boss you, and what's the difference between the boss you and the implementer you? The implementer you is hammering away, getting things done, piling along, taking the to do lists, maybe doing the wrong things, that's all the stuff we've been talking about. The boss you's job, and I talk in analogies as you've spotted already, um, is to stand on the bridge of the ship and look at what's coming. What risks? Is there a storm coming? Are there pirates? Is there land? Is there a shoal of fish? Is there opportunity? Your job is to be up on the bridge of that ship looking forwards, looking out, planning, having some kind of vision for what you want to happen, some direction. It is not simply to be down in the boat, rowing like crazy. And if you stop for half a beat and think about that, you know it's right. Andy: And that's the time, that's the moment that you go, Okay, now I'll stop for a second. I'll just take a moment and recognize that working on me is just as important as working for me. And, and work on yourself a little bit. Andy: And if you're finding that really difficult, I'd encourage you to talk to someone else about it. Andy: Because it's so much easier to find time to talk to someone about this. Just put the words out. That's why we have coaches. That's why we have mentors. That's why we have tutors. That's why we have people whose job it is to listen to us. Find, find that person or find those people and in the book I talk about a board, a personal board and this, everyone has this. So in a board in a company is a group of experts who come together and their collective skills are what drive the business forwards. Andy: But you can have a personal board and that might be someone who just listens to you, someone who's just what I call a cheerleader. Just someone who is there who goes you're great I don't care what you do. You're great. Sometimes you just need that. Vikki: Yeah, Andy: you just need the cheerleader You might need a mentor. You can maybe find a mentor. You may already have someone in your network of contacts who could be your mentor. A coach. So a coach is different. I mean, a coach and mentor, there's a slight distinction there. Um, someone who's going to help coach you through the specifics of what you need to get done. Andy: Someone who you can lean on in that moment. So that's three people on your board already. You might have someone who's a physical coach or a trainer, and I have a personal trainer because I know I would not go to the gym unless Luke was down there tapping his watch going, you're late again, Andy, let's do it. Andy: But I do go, I go twice a week, and I run twice a week, and Luke, when I, if I don't run, Luke whatsapps me, because he can see on Strava that I haven't run. So, I'm all for personal accountability, but sometimes it helps to have a little external accountability to so you can build a group of people around you and I would encourage you to let them know they're your personal board and those people then are the ones you can lean on without feeling guilt without feeling like you're putting on them without feeling embarrassed or awkward. Andy: Ask them if they're prepared to do that. And it doesn't mean you'll call on them, even. It's just that they, they know they're there. And in my experience, most people, if you say, I'd like you to be my mentor, I'd like you to be my, my supporter and my cheerleader, they're flattered. And they're up for it. Andy: So that, I think that's a really good idea to, well, I would think it's a good idea. It's my idea, isn't it? But it's not, conceptually, it's not my idea. The idea of a personal board is not my concept, but I did jam it in the book. So, yeah, I think that's a really good way to start and the other thing is about yourself. And the way we talk to ourselves, I think, is very important and very helpful. Vikki: Yeah, and there was a part when you were talking about the impact of thoughts in the book. One thing that I really liked was you were talking about how positive emotions can feed your resilience and how you can sort of reduce or make yourself less susceptible to the overdraft by making sure that you create space for joy and interest and things like that. Vikki: And I, I think that's fascinating because I think we often focus on reducing negative emotions, and we often think that the way to move ourselves out of emotional overdrafts and things like that is that we inevitably have to do less, we have to reduce our workload, we have to sort of take things off our plate, and maybe it's the bit of me that likes to be able to do everything, but I think it's really interesting this idea that actually you can do the same things sometimes, but if you can do them with joy and interest and fun, then they don't deplete overdraft as much as if you're doing them in a, Oh, and I've got to do this and I should have done it before and I still haven't done it, so we should probably do it, but I don't want to kind of vibes. I wonder if you could. Speak to that a little bit, because I love that part. Andy: I don't know, you kind of nailed it, but we create the world we live in. Our brains are amazing at controlling how we think about everything and you genuinely can re reset your thinking about any given circumstance. So if you get up in the morning, you think, Oh God, it's just I couldn't do enough work yesterday and I've got piles to do and I've got to send this off by five and it's going to be long day. I had a day today that was going to be many, many, many meetings. Monday this week was awful on Sunday night. Andy: And I was thinking, I literally, even my lunchtime had been taken with a meeting. I was thinking it's ridiculous. Why does no one care about my, my physical wellbeing? And no one's who's scheduling this stuff. And it was me, of course. So what an idiot. Uh, but I had a little word with myself because I said, well, firstly you're busy because, you're in demand and your clients want to talk to you and those people really value what you have to say. You're having an impact on their businesses and you're having an impact on them and I get amazing texts. At the end of Monday I got a beautiful whatsapp from one of my clients who said after our conversation I felt completely different and she was in a not great place. She said I felt completely different. I cannot wait to get into work tomorrow. So this is why you do it and I reminded myself on Sunday night before I went to bed. That there'll be a lot of meetings. That's a fact, but I can go into those meetings thinking, and this is nine opportunities to make a real impact on people. Andy: Or I can spend the rest of the evening feeling like a grumpy old codger going, you know, who is it that does all these things? It's ridiculous. I've got a horrible day coming up tomorrow. I went into that day. I had an impact. As it turns out, I got feedback that I had some impact on some people, which is the buzz I get from my job. And at the end of the day, I felt fantastic. That, that, that idea, you can translate again and again and again. You genuinely can, and it's a question of practice, really. I use the "I wonder" exercise, which I know you may have spoken about before, Vikki, but Andy: no, Vikki: I haven't, but I Andy: it's really useful. And you can use it on yourself. But traditionally you use it in front of somebody else. So if there's someone with a with a challenge that are dealing with, You can get two people sit in front of them and they do an I wonder exercise. So they talk out loud. The person they're talking about isn't allowed to say anything. They just have to listen. And the two people exchange, they start the sentence, every sentence with, I wonder. So it's not judgmental. It's not factual. It's just, I wonder if the reason that Andy got so cross was because he hadn't realized that there might be another reason why that person did what they did. And you can have that conversation backwards and forwards and you can have it with yourself. So if you can catch it and stop and go, well, I wonder why that, that busy day is making me feel so cross. I wonder why my 5pm deadline is stressing me out. Andy: Well, you could go, well, I know why it's stressing me out. I have, I've got too much to do and I can't do it by 5pm. But it's not the 5pm deadline. It's your thinking that's stressing you out. So what, what, what's going on in your thinking? I'm not going to complete everything by five o'clock. Is that true or isn't it? Because sometimes that's not true. But if it is true, then if you can take that moment and go, well, okay, what would be the best thing to do at this point? Would it be best for me to let someone know that? Because they'd much rather know before five o'clock, I'm going to let them down. And it's nine o'clock now. I can phone them now. At least they know I'm not going to deliver, then they may be able to, you know, if they're depending on me for it, or if it's a deadline, they might be prepared to extend that deadline, or they might be prepared to help or do something differently. Andy: So, just by stopping, you can go, wondering what, what you're thinking is doing for you. If you're feeling something, just look at it briefly and go, is that serving me? Is that telling me that maybe my thinking is not of the quality it might be? So you're stressing and panicking about five o'clock. I'm in panic mode. What can I do about it? How can I think differently? It's such a good exercise. So I wonder why I'm thinking that way. I wonder why that's where I'm getting to. It's not easy. It takes practice, but again, talk to other people about it and see if you practice with other people. Vikki: The other one where you were talking about things you can do about it that really struck me as relevant for this audience was the one around self worth that a lot of the problems here come from people attaching their self worth to their productivity or their work and that's something I see with my clients a lot. Vikki: What can people who are running up this emotional overdraft because they're convinced that they have to be good at what they do, they have to do lots of it, they have to be the best in order to be worthwhile. What can they do about it, do you think? Andy: So I think if your self worth is tied up in, in your work, you are setting yourself up. You're putting yourself in quite a risky position, because if your self worth is purely about the quality of the output of the work that you're doing, of the writing that you're producing, or the thinking that you're producing, or the time in which you're producing it, other people's opinion of the work that you produce, you're giving your power to other people and other things all the time. So you're giving that away. Andy: And I think that's, if you're striving for that there's almost no upside to it. You could be proud of the work you produce. That's the only upside. But the downside potentially is that you, you really are putting yourself at risk of of judging yourself purely in one dimension or in one direction. Andy: So that the answer to it is really to understand where your self worth comes from and to look, look for other ways of justifying yourself or understanding your worth within your society, your community and so on. So I think it's it's almost limitless number of options you have open to you. Working with the working with the scouts keeps coming to my mind on this Vikki: I'm a Guide Leader. Andy: Maybe there you go. And that's what I mean. It's sort of finding something that's beyond you is particularly valuable. Andy: If you find that your self worth is wrapped up in the production of that paper or simply achieving the, the grant, you know, the funding you were talking about, and then you don't, where does that leave you? Vikki: Yeah. Andy: Whereas what you might realize is that I might get another chance that might open up a different opportunity. That's, that's a shame. It's unfortunate. I, but I tried my best and now I can do other things I can focus on other stuff. So it's, it's a really bad place to be from an emotional overdraft point of view because it's, it doesn't really have any upside. Andy: And even if you do really well and you get the grant or, you know, the paper's published or you get the peer recognition or whatever happens, what happens next? Vikki: Oh, those goalposts move quickly. Andy: Yeah, yeah. Vikki: For sure. Andy: And we never stop. You know, we are still being chased by the saber toothed tigers in our brains, our monkey brains. So, we are not geared up to stop and dwell on the good. We don't spend time reflecting on how marvellous we were and how fantastic it was. We immediately start thinking, how could I have done this better? What am I doing next? What's happening? We're thinking about, we still don't want to get killed by the thing. Andy: Back in the day when we lived in caves, if we stopped and congratulated ourselves every time we killed a deer or something, we'd get eaten. So we don't think that way. We're not wired like that. So, even if you succeed and your self worth is boosted in that moment, it will not last long. Vikki: And some people, one of the things I often try and remind people is that even if you're somebody who thinks that your work is your main purpose, I mean, I'm saying, I encourage people to have lives outside of academia, to have their hobbies and their fun and all that stuff. Andy: And I see, I see emotional overdraft as my mission. I actually, my mission is to talk about this to everyone I can because I think it helps people. So it is my mission. I'm driven by it, but not to the point where other things are excluded. Vikki: I agree. And the thing I try and remind people, is that if you're going to attach your worth to your work, at least attach it to your life's work, not to this one paper, you know, I think this is why we see it so often with people who are at the beginnings of their academic careers is they've had this whole time through school and university where they're usually the brightest people. They're usually scoring amazing marks and everything like that. Suddenly they become PhD students. Vikki: It's not quite as straightforward anymore for them and Their worth is tied up in this one chapter they're writing and so getting critiques from their supervisors or submitting to a journal and getting rejected is suddenly an indictment on their entire kind of ability and thoughts and the stuff they're trying to put out in the world. Vikki: I try and remind people, at least see your worth in terms of the body of work you're going to do over your 40 years in academia, for example, because then this one little thing isn't like a massive mark on your self worth, it's just going to be one little part of the story of all the great things you contribute through, through your academic work. And I think sometimes that can help separate it out a little bit. Andy: Definitely right. And this is, again, an opportunity for reframing, isn't it? Because you could look at that rejection and go, well, that's it. I'm, I'm not good enough. I'm, I failed. It was, it reflects on me. I'm poor at this stuff. I'm not cut out for this or, or they are stupid. They can't see my brilliance or whatever. You can react that way to it or you can go, this is an opportunity to learn. This is an opportunity to maybe, maybe the time is right for me to stop. Maybe actually I could be doing something way more practical, that that would be contributory in some way, because I do think everyone should have a sense of where they're trying to go, not just not the end of the paper, but a north star something further on. Andy: Because if you don't have that, you're basically jumping, you know, like a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad. You're just, the success is not getting to the lily pad, the success is getting across the pond. That's, that's that goal. So, um, another tortured analogy for you. Andy: So I, I think you're absolutely right. And, and it's such an opportunity to see the world in a different way. How could I have done that differently? What could I have done? How can I change this? How good am I at taking criticism? Is this an opportunity for me to hear criticism and become a total criticism ninja, take this on and do amazing things with it? Well, that's the opportunity it presents. Vikki: Now, one thing I wanted to ask you about. I really enjoyed the final bit of your book, because often people talk about, you know, "and here are all the things you can do to get over this problem" and you had, you had that big chunk. Vikki: But then you had the sort of, and then other things you can do after that. You know, if you want to take this further, you want to think about it in more depth. And I really, really enjoyed that chapter. And one of the things that really stood out to me as a really clever idea was this notion of a relapse kit. And I wonder if you could tell the listeners a little bit about the relapse kit. Cause I thought, I thought that was really clever and it was something that I hadn't heard about in other places. Andy: Yeah, so, it sort of came from, um, as an amalgam of other people's ideas. So it's not, there's no new ideas in the world, of course there aren't. But I struggle with my weight and my weight's gone up and down over the years. I'm 59 now and it's probably never going to change, but I, I keep hoping and I'm pretty harsh on myself, and my self speak is pretty, pretty horrible, and I'm very judgmental, and, and it's, it's, yeah, it's not, it's not great when I fall off the wagon, and particularly with me at snacks, and a coach I was working with said, it was chocolate biscuits at the time, he said, if you find yourself going to the cup and having a chocolate biscuit, he said, That's a relapse. You know, we're trying to go through 28 days without having one and you find 14 days in, you, you, you have, you haven't failed, really, you've had a chocolate biscuit, but you're not going to eat the whole packet. And if you do eat the whole packet, say you've just eaten a packet of biscuits. Failure would be doing that every day and going back to that sort of behavior. So that's just a relapse. Andy: And that happens in all sorts of walks of life in all sorts of ways. All the behaviors, particularly in trying to change habit. So he said, put a little note in that cupboard with the biscuits. He said, I just want you to write a little note where you tell yourself what, what you think about yourself in that, what you really think about yourself in that moment. And what I really think about with myself when I, when I'm being rational about it is that's normal. It's human nature. You've just had a damn biscuit. It, it doesn't really matter. Don't have another one, Andy. Don't, don't just carry on because my, my brain goes, you failed now. So it doesn't matter. Andy: You might as well. And by the way, go to the shop and get another packet. So that's what the note said. And he said, and just tuck it by the biscuits. And when you have a biscuit, if you relapse, get the notes out and have a little read. And I just thought this was such a good idea, such a strong idea. So, a relapse kit could be if you find that you're struggling to get down to some deep work and you're distracting yourself again with YouTube or social media. That's a typical sort of thing that might happen, I guess, your relapse kit could be a note to yourself, which just to remind yourself. What that does to you and why you, why you're probably doing it and, and to be kind to yourself and give yourself some helpful advice, it could be, someone's phone number. Andy: So maybe in that moment, the best thing actually you could do is phone. You've agreed that you're going to phone one of your personal board and you can phone one of them up and say, I've just spent 2 hours watching YouTube videos about cats on skateboards. And I'm really not getting down to my work. I'm starting to spiral a bit and it's now kind of getting down on myself, which means I still can't work and it's getting worse, so I'm going to watch some more and you can chat about it. And maybe that's your relapse kit. Andy: Maybe it's it's what's your motivation. It might be something that reminds you your motivation, but have it available and have it, not out and on your table or on your wall. I think you have to, with a relapse kit, you have to go and think of it like a first aid kit with the white cross on the top. You're going to open this box, open this thing, and it's going to help you in that moment. It's going to be like a emotional bandage. It works every time, particularly if when you, when you plan it, when you structure that relapse kit, you do it with absolute kindness and generosity towards yourself. You have to be thinking. I love this person. I want this person to succeed. They're just human. I know they do great stuff when they can really get down to it. So I'm, I'm going to forgive them. They need to forgive themselves and have another go. If you do that, it works incredibly well. Don't have a sign there that says. You weak individual. That's not what we're talking about here. That's like putting rusty razor blades in your first aid kit. That's not helpful. Yeah. It's got to be something helpful. But it, yeah, I get lots of feedback on that and it really does work. Vikki: No, and I really like that you emphasize the kindness and the reassurance and then I think not making it too big a deal that you've realized because I think often when we wrap that up in a load of shame and a load of self criticism, we end up avoiding our goal for much longer because suddenly you hate yourself because, you know, you said you were going to write this much every day and you haven't today and then you start avoiding it. Andy: Day one, a thousand words a day. Day one, I haven't written a thousand words. Vikki: Yeah, and so you then avoid it for a month. I've failed. Yeah. Instead of being like, oh, okay. I was going to do a thousand words today. I haven't still got an hour left. Maybe I could do 200. Let's crack that bit out. We'll get on tomorrow. Andy: You know that expression if you've only got 40 percent to give that day and you've given 40%, you've given a hundred percent that day. I love that idea. If that's what's available to you and you've given it all. So this sense of kindness is really important. That's not, I'm not a new age woo woo thinker, but genuinely self kindness is one of the rarest commodities and it's something to cultivate in yourself if you're listening to this. It's really important. Vikki: And you can even bring that into the goal setting. So as an example, I would never recommend somebody sets a no biscuits for 28 days goal, because you screw that up one day, you've missed your goal. If you set yourself as few biscuits as possible in 28 days, for example, or even better 28 apples in 28 days or whatever it is, giving yourself something alternative to do, then it becomes something that you can work towards throughout. If you have one day where you have a biscuit, then okay, crack on. I can still have 27 days where I don't eat a biscuit and that's pretty awesome. Andy: Exactly that. So designing the goals are really important. And talk to someone like you who, who understands the precise nature of what you're dealing with and can give you some practical hands on help. That's, that's really important here. So that. You know, that's the point. You don't have to do this alone and doing it alone is not heroic. Vikki: I love this. You're telling people to come to me for caching. I'm telling them to buy your book. It's like a mutual promotion. Andy: Sorry, everybody that wasn't set up. Vikki: We're just that good. Anyway, thank you so much, Andy. I really, really appreciate you coming on. We've already mentioned your website a little bit, and obviously the book, but if people want to know more, where can they find you? Andy: I'd say go to emotionaloverdraft. com. I produce a podcast myself, and there's lots of interesting case studies on there. I write about it a lot. Just knowing more about it is a helpful thing to people, and yeah, everyone knows where they can buy a book. Go independent if you can. Vikki: Yes. Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on. 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 You can find links to Dr Lilia Mantai’s research here How to build your own academic community If you sometimes feel lonely or like you haven't got the support that you need around you, unfortunately it's not that unusual. Often when people feel like this, they feel like they're the only one, right? That everybody else is part of this like fun and vibrant academic community and has got friends around them supporting them and cheering them on, when in reality I speak to PhD students all the time who feel really disconnected from their studies. Maybe you don't get on with your research group as well as you thought you might, and outside of that you're not sure where to find an academic community, or perhaps you've had to move away from family and friends and you're really missing that. Maybe you're a part time student, a distance learning student, whatever it is, there's tons of reasons why you might currently be feeling lonely, and you might feel like you haven't got the community you need. As usual though, I'm here to tell you that although it's normal, it doesn't have to be like this. And in today's episode, I'm going to tell you about six different types of social support. Five of them grounded in some quite interesting literature that I found and one of them, which I haven't found in the literature and I think is really important. We're going to use this framework to kind of audit where you're at and to think through what's what types of support you might want to actively try and build over the next few months. Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach and this week we are talking about social support. Now many of you will know I stayed in the same university all the way from undergraduate through to full professor so I was there 25ish years in the end and you'd think that would mean that I had. a pretty stable community. Now the fact is that actually in academia, at every kind of milestone you hit, you have a big change of people. So when I finished undergrad, they left. Then when I finished my PhD, lots of the people I did my PhD with left. And then over the years, I kind of made friends with different groups of people, many of whom then got jobs in other places, moved on and so on. So there were several times during that academic career where I really felt like I was having to rebuild the support around me. And at that stage, I was kind of winging it, I guess. I was feeling like I didn't necessarily have people at some stages to, like, go do fun stuff with, at other stages, who were kind of at the same place as me in their careers, where we could share ideas and things. And so when I noticed that, I made efforts to build those connections. I'm quite a social person. I'm quite extroverted. And so once I noticed what I needed, I didn't find it too challenging to go out and at least start creating those bonds. To tell you the truth, I'm having to do it a little bit now because, um, many of you will know I left my university job back in 2022. I'm living in a much smaller place than I used to, and I'm still finding my friendship group. I've got an amazing family network around me. I've got a few old friends near here , but in terms of those sort of fun, hobby connections, and I used to have a lot of them in Birmingham. I'm still figuring that out, right? But often it can feel either like not a priority, or it can feel a bit like you don't know where to start. Or it can all feel a little bit like luck that you either meet people you get on with or you don't. Now, I did make an episode quite a long time ago called How to Build an Academic Community. And if you haven't listened to that one, I will link it in the show notes for you. I highly recommend you go back to listen to that because there's some really important stuff about the kind of how to connect with people, where to connect to people, um, in that I'm not going to touch on in today's episode. What I want to do today instead is to give you a framework to assess where your support is at, to better identify what type of support you might need more of. And some of this builds on, as you know, I always try and be a kind of evidence based practitioner. I'm trying to stay up to speed with the literature, bring that into my practice. You guys want to be connected to an academic for a reason. You don't want me just making stuff up. So I was looking for some stuff to do with social support and PhD students and academia, and I found some really interesting work by somebody called Dr. Lilia Mantai. Now I am hoping, I'm going to contact Dr. Lilia to see whether she'd like to come on the podcast at some point in the future. But one of the things that I pulled out of her work were these different types of social support that she identified and the different roles that they play in academia. And so what I'm going to do today is I'm going to introduce you to the four that she outlined in her first pieces of work. A very important fifth one that she then uncovered when she did some more detailed research. And I'm going to finish up with one that I think everybody overlooks and I'm going to explain to you why I think it's overlooked, why it's so important, and what you can do about it. The first four that she identified is built out of the social support literature. These were moral support, emotional support, guidance and mentoring, and companionship. So let's think about those. The first one is moral and I was a little bit like what do we even mean by moral support. How it's usually framed is around inspiration and encouragement. This is having people around you who support you and cheer you on in what you're doing and give you a kind of image of what it could be like. So for some of you, those of you who are in positive supervisory experiences, you might find that your supervisors are an amazing source of moral support. That you look at them and you're like, oh my goodness, one day I could be like them. If I work hard, if I do all the things, I could be like them. You see the change they're making in the world, see the impact they're having, the publications they're getting, and you're kind of inspired to make that kind of change. For others, maybe it's senior people in your research group, so the PhD students or academics who are a few years ahead of you, whatever stage you're at, right, there's people that are kind of ahead of you, and those people may be encouraging you, they may be sort of showing you what's possible. Now this is really important because whether you're doing a PhD or working in academia more generally. We often don't spend too much time in the big picture. We often spend time in the day to day of, I need to do this. I've got that on my to do list, that needs writing, that needs researching, whatever it is. And we don't always take that time to kind of take that step back and remind ourselves why we're doing it. Having somebody who is inspiring or encouraging or both can help you recall that big picture. When, in the best circumstances here, when you see that person it reminds you of why you're doing this stuff. For others of you, maybe you're thinking that you don't get that from your supervisors, from your research group. And that's okay too. You can look further afield in academia for people who are perhaps more in line with your priorities or doing things more the way that you would like them to be and maybe think about how you can remind yourself of those people more regularly. Do you want to follow them on social media? Do you want to try and meet them at conferences? How can you make those people a more tangible presence in your life? For others of you, that moral support might come from other parts of your life. It might be your friends or your family. Maybe you've got a reason you did your PhD. Maybe you know somebody who has a condition and you're now researching that condition. Maybe you've grown up with somebody who always inspired your interest in archaeology and now that's what you're studying too. I'd really encourage you to think about who in your life inspires you, who in your life encourages you, and to think about not only how can you have them in your life more often, but also how can you have those conversations and those reflections more often. Because there's something very energy giving about being encouraged and inspired. So try to identify who that is for you and how you can get more of them in your life. The second type of support that she identified is emotional support. This is somebody who really provides a listening ear. So they don't necessarily have to inspire you to great things, they have to be there for you when you're struggling. They need to be somebody who you're willing to be vulnerable with, at least to some extent. You're able to share your worries and concerns with, and who will give you that safe space for you to be able to talk about the things that are bothering you. Now, I think this kind of divides down into different sorts of support in that sometimes you want somebody who totally gets it and who'll perhaps moan along with you, right, so that you don't feel like you're crazy. So that you feel like other people experience this and they will say, yeah, tis is rubbish, I hate it when that happens, that happened to me too. Other times, the listening ear you need is somebody who's completely detached, who can help you sort of retain some perspective and who can help you see that perhaps outside of academia the things that we're stressing about aren't as big as we're making them out to be. Who in your life provides that listening ear? How do you feel about sharing with them? Do you feel comfortable? Do you feel like you burden them? Do you feel like you talk too much or not enough? Do you feel better after you speak to them? Ideally, that person doesn't necessarily fix the problems that you've got, but helps you to feel heard and helps you feel like these problems are both legitimate and manageable one way or another. Again, for me, I kind of have my insiders and my outsiders, right? I had really, and I still do have really close, lovely colleagues who would be my emotional support who knew exactly what I was going through, knew the people that I was moaning about, knew the types of situations that I was talking about, and so could really empathize and understand without me having to explain it. And that has been absolutely crucial at so many stages of my career and that builds over time, right? Some of those people who I feel like are my closest people now started out as people I didn't know that well. They started out as people that I invited for a coffee every now and again and we had a little chat and slowly you get to know and trust each other. So you can build these things over time. Then on the other hand, there were people that are outside my academic circle who are a listening ear, but in that slightly more detached way. So I have friends that work in the corporate world, and they don't get it at all. They don't, you know, they don't understand what I do, and why the things that feel like a big deal to me are important. But they love me so they listen to me talk about it and sometimes they give an angle that maybe I hadn't even thought of a different way of looking at it based on their experiences in their different world that they live in. So this emotional support can come from inside the academy, it can come from outside the academy. Some of you may also have professional support in the sense of counsellors, therapists, that sort of thing. And again, you can never underestimate the impact of having that really neutral space that is solely about you, unlike with friends where it goes both ways, where it's solely about you to be able to talk through the kind of the deeper aspects of the emotions that you're experiencing. The third type of support I want you to think about is guiding and mentoring. Now the obvious person who should be providing this is your supervisor, your supervisory team, your dissertation committee, if that's how your structure's set up. The people that are actually, it's their jobs to provide this stuff. And I want you to think about how that's going for you right now. What sorts of support is your supervisor good at providing? What support do they automatically provide that you find useful and that's working well? What elements are working less well? Either they don't provide it unless asked, or that you don't like the sort of support they provide, or that you just don't feel like they're there for you. This is one of the reasons why it's important to separate out these forms of social support. Because when we think about our supervisors, there can be a tendency to expect our supervisors to provide all of this support. They're going to be a listening ear, they're going to inspire, they're going to enthuse, they're going to guide and mentor us. Maybe we even expect to have social time with them as well. I want to encourage you, your supervisor doesn't have to provide all of these. Hopefully your supervisor is providing at least some of these, at least some of the time. They don't have to provide all of them. So think, in terms of guiding and mentoring, where is your supervisor really useful? Where are they expert? Where are they willing to help? Where does it fall within their comfort zone? You can then think though, where are the gaps in that? Where's the sort of guiding and mentoring that I'm not getting? So for example, one I've seen is people where the supervisor is amazing at teaching research skills. They'll be in the lab with them, they'll be hands on, they'll be helping them develop whatever technique it is they're doing. Super, super helpful at training in the laboratory, testing the equipment, you know, learning new techniques, all of that stuff. But if you want guidance and mentoring about organizing your time, or you want guidance and mentoring about how to write effectively, this person might not be your person. Maybe they're really bad at it too. Maybe they're naturally amazing at it and so have never really thought about it before. And I want you to think if there's gaps in that guiding and mentoring. Where can you fill those gaps? Think about where are there gaps and where can you fill those either within your university or beyond. So it might be bringing in collaborators. It might be accessing support for things like writing, for example. Most of your universities will have how to write effectively courses and all that kind of thing. How can you fill the gaps instead of spending time sort of bemoaning the fact that your supervisor doesn't provide everything? How can you find the bits that you're not getting from your supervisor and fill them from elsewhere. Or how can you identify the bits you're currently not getting from your supervisor and consider whether it's something that you could legitimately ask your supervisor for. Sometimes they don't do it automatically but it doesn't mean that they're not willing to help with those things. The fourth type of social support is companionship. This is often not anything to do with academia. This is having people that you can just have fun with. Now this might, if you have your own families or you live close to your family, it might be your family. It might be friends, it might be people, like I was saying at the very beginning, from hobbies that you're involved with. One of the things I adored about where I was before was I had sort of little pockets of random people. I had my paddle boarding club and my circus club and my people I knew from kids camp and my people I knew from the adventure races I worked on and things. I had my little random pockets of people, whose company I loved, who I always had a giggle when I saw. And where I felt like a part of a little group. Now one of the problems in academia, whether you're a new PhD student all the way through to a senior professor, is we often convince ourselves we don't have time for that stuff. That by the time we've done our work and dealt with our responsibilities, particularly those of you who have children that you're looking after, we think we haven't got time for that stuff. I should be working. You know, academics work all the time. And I'm here to wipe away that. I guarantee that you will be more productive if you have some times of companionship every week, if not every day. There is something about having playtime, having time where you can relax and just enjoy somebody's company and not have to think about work and not have to think about performing well or any of those things that is so good for the mental health, so good, I believe, for your physical health that it will infuse everything else you do. I think we're going so far as to say. I think it's super important, even if it doesn't make you better at your job. Even if it does take a bit of time away, and you don't make up for that time by being more effective, I think it's still super important. I think you need it to be a functioning human being. The people that I saw being most miserable in their PhDs and academia more generally, are the people who didn't have any of that stuff, are the people who only worked. If you feel like you've let that slip, if you're listening to this going, I just don't have that, I'm in a country where I don't know anyone, or a city where I don't know anyone, I haven't had time, don't worry, it's okay, this isn't some like big failing of you that you haven't, we're, you're under a lot of pressure, and that's okay, it's fine that you're under, and that's okay, it's understandable that with all the pressures on you, you've prioritised other things. But this is my little call to you to do one or two things to just try and build some of that companionship. That might be taking people for coffee at work, just suggesting catching up for a little zoom chat with people you don't know that well, maybe, or preferably please do some stuff outside of academia, even if it's one off stuff, even if it's going to be, you know, I'm not saying you have to join a club and go every week or whatever. Find something that's fun to do once in a while where you might see the same people. If you go back at the same time, you might see the same people and where there's little opportunities for interactions. So I've just joined a netball club. I can't remember if I've told you guys that before. It's like slow basketball. Um, And this is perfect. I don't go all the time. I've only been going a few weeks. So I haven't made any good friends yet, but we chatter before it starts. We have a giggle while we play. We chatter afterwards. At some point, I am sure that we will suggest, you know, probably when the weather improves a bit and things, we'll suggest going for a drink afterwards or meeting up for a coffee during the week or whatever it is, there's opportunities there for it to progress into more friendship type things. I want you to look for things like that, whether it's going to the gym, whether it's going exercise classes, art classes, whether it's just regularly going to the same coffee shop. So you might see the same people working in the same coffee shop and you can sort of strike up a bit of a conversation with them. Introverts, I know this may sound completely painful, but we don't have to do it with lots of people. We don't have to do it hundreds of times, but just putting yourself in a position where you might have that kind of regular contact can be an amazing way to build that sort of companionship. So those were the first four moral, emotional, guidance and mentoring companionship. And then Lilia Manti identified a further one. She did research with PhD students and their supervisors and really identified how social support can also help you in your developing identity as a PhD student, as an academic. And like I say, I don't want to go into this in tons of detail because I do hope that I'll be able to get her to come on the podcast at some point in the future to talk about it in more detail. But essentially, when you go from the beginning of a PhD to the end of a PhD, or starting an academic position to becoming a more senior member of staff, you're not only learning new skills and doing new things, you're changing who you are as a person. You are becoming an academic. You are starting to identify as somebody who has academic skills and who has academic opinions and belongs to an academic network. And your social support is hugely important to this. So, I've seen over the years, particularly at undergraduate, but to some extent at PhD as well, people who do their PhD without ever really engaging outside of that direct supervisory relationship. They've got their friends at home, they've potentially got family at home, they turn up, they do the things they need to do, they leave. And that can be, if your goal is simply to get a PhD, happy days, do it, let's go. But if your goal is to become somebody who is an academic, whether that means you want it for a career or not, but if your goal is to identify as belonging to an academic group, then we need to have the connections in place in order to do that. Now I'm going to refer to the how part of this. I want you to listen to that podcast I mentioned called how to build your academic community. I also want you to listen to an episode that I recorded with Jen Polk a few months back where we looked at networking. So if you're just like, Oh my God, no networking, definitely not. That's awful. Check out that episode. We kind of debunk a whole load of thoughts around networking. But when we surround ourselves by people who care about the research that we're doing and where we care about their research and who think about things the way a historian or a biochemist or whoever you are think about things, that starts to change who you are too. It starts to change the way you see yourself. Suddenly it's normal to be somebody who can experience a critique of their work and not internalize it too horrendously and respond to it in a constructive way. Suddenly you become somebody who is part of that broader academic community. And again, for some of you, your supervisor will be a real kind of gatekeeper, facilitator to this, introducing you into different networks. They'll really see that as part of their role. Others won't. Others will take a more functional approach to supervision. They won't necessarily, they'll see getting you through the PhD as their prime concern, not so much sort of enculturing you into these sorts of academic communities. But that's okay. You can do this in your own ways. You can build that sort of network for yourselves. This doesn't necessarily need to be within your direct group if your supervisor is not providing it. But it does need to be within your kind of academic setting or discipline more broadly. We are trying to develop ourselves as somebody who is capable within this setting and who feels they belong to the setting. Again, if that doesn't feel like you right now, that's okay. This is a kind of, this is an audit, right? We're checking in. There are some of these that you'll be like, I do not feel like that at all. And that's okay. What I want you to do is just start thinking about where you can build tiny bridges towards these things. Now, I promised at the beginning that I was going to share with you the five that Lilia Mantai talks about, and then I was going to share with you the one that she doesn't talk about, and I, to be honest, I haven't seen people talking about. And I think the reason we haven't is because most of these data collections are kind of bottom up. They ask PhD students, what sort of support they get, what sort of support they want. They ask supervisors, what kind of support do they provide? What kind of support did they have? And you can do that super thoroughly, but the problem is, if there's a type of support that people don't even recognise as a type of support, don't even realise that it could be helpful, then it's not going to come up in that sort of bottom up exploration. And the type of support that I think is missing is self developmental support. What I mean by that is support that helps you develop your processes, that helps you organize yourself more effectively, but also helps you with thoughts and emotions. That helps you to manage yourself more effectively. To self regulate. To make decisions. To show up as the person that you want to be. Now, many of us seek this out in the form of podcasts or in the form of self help books, right? But often it doesn't progress far enough to become an interpersonal relationship. Now I found when I started reflecting on this, I found that I actually did have this in some elements of my life before I got into coaching and things because I made friends with people who were interested in that sort of stuff too. So you guys have heard me talk about Professor Jen Cumming a number of times. She and I are very close friends and we were both into kind of that self-help vibe and working out ways to be more effective without having to work harder and all of that stuff. And so we used to swap tips. You know, we used to learn about bullet journals and both try out our bullet journals. Hers are beautiful. Mine did not last. Didn't always work. We'd look at different project management software or different ways of managing the stresses that we were under. And so we sort of made this kind of very informal, very kind of unintentional in many ways, support network for that kind of more human side of self development. And lots of people don't, right? Lots of people don't find people who are interested in that stuff. I was lucky that the person I found who was really interested in that stuff, was also a psychologist, was also an expert in self regulation, was actually trained in all of this stuff. And so in a good friend, I found somebody who had professional expertise too. So I was super spoiled. Most of you don't have access to that. Most of your supervisors can't support this stuff. They might talk to you about Gantt charts, they might talk to you about to do lists. All those things, but they don't have, most of them won't have the expertise to support you if you said, I tried it but I couldn't make it work. You know, I had good intentions but I didn't follow through because they don't have expertise in behavior change. They don't have expertise in habit management. They don't have expertise in emotional regulation. Most people don't have access to that sort of support. And it's such a shame because that support underpins everything else. Because I guarantee that every one of those other sorts of support I talked about, you probably have thoughts about. You probably have thoughts about being too nervous to turn up at a club where you don't know anybody. You probably have thoughts about whether you're burdening somebody by sharing your emotions with them. You probably have thoughts about how much help you're allowed to ask for from your supervisors. Seeking out all the other types of support is affected by our thoughts and emotions and our ability to self regulate those things. Even the practical stuff I was talking about, whether you have time for it or not, whether you have time to seek out those things, and more importantly, you believe you have time to seek out those things, is dependent on your ability to manage your tasks, to prioritize, to make decisions, to manage your own overwhelm, to manage your general life organization. This sort of support underpins everything else. Some of you who know me well will know where this is going, but I promise it's not the only place it's going. So one place this is going is I can provide that support. The PhD Life Coach membership specifically does that. It creates a community of people who are all trying to figure out what their best realistic selves looks like and how they can make this whole thing feel more fun, more engaging, more purposeful, and more intentional. So, in the membership, not only do you get access to me and my expertise, more importantly, in many ways, you get access to each other. My members are cheering each other on, they're offering each other bits of advice in the background, they're connecting each other to tools and techniques and books and opportunities that they might not have seen. They're doing co- working sessions where they give accountability to each other and show up just to help the other person to work. So they're kind of mutually assisting each other. So it connects you with a community that actually can provide quite a bit of this. It can provide some inspiration. You see people in the membership go on and finish their PhDs when you remember them being coached about how they didn't think that would be possible. That is hugely inspiring. It can provide emotional support and emotional support that isn't. Indulgent, that doesn't just go, Yes, it's terrible to be you, isn't it? Which, sometimes we need to hear that, but often we actually need something a little more neutral to help us think about what we're struggling with and to potentially reframe it or handle it in a different way. It can provide that. We don't provide guidance or mentoring in a technical sense, but there are times where we provide guidance and mentoring in things like reading effectively, and organizing your studies, and organizing your time, and all of those sorts of things. So there's elements of guiding and mentoring there. There's definitely elements of companionship. I have people who jump on Zooms with each other all around the world, just to catch up and just to be cheering each other on and helping each other out. I think it also hugely helps with developing identity because one of the biggest limits to developing identity is a sense that if I was an academic, if I was a good PhD student, I wouldn't worry about this, I'd be able just to do that. It wouldn't be this hard. And being in a community where you see other people experiencing those things and being effective and succeeding makes you realise that I can feel like an academic, even though I often am finding things difficult. That I doubt myself sometimes, that I don't know how I'm going to do something. None of those things stop you identifying as an academic, as a PhD student. And finally, I think it is one of the unique places to support you to develop yourself. To develop the way you want to speak to yourself. Develop the way you want to treat and organise yourself. You're not going to be perfect. I didn't get out of bed this morning at the time I intended to. I'm still working on that. But I am on track to get done today everything I said I was going to get done, including recording this podcast. And that's because of the skills that I've learned in this sort of setting and because of the skills I teach in this membership. Now, if you're not interested in that, hold fire for two seconds and I'm going to tell you some alternatives. If you are potentially interested in the membership, this episode comes out on Monday the 27th of January. If you are listening to it live or anywhere close to live, you can literally join the membership now. We are open from Monday, the 27th of January, 2025 until Sunday, the 2nd of February, 2025. Okay. A full seven day week. If you go to my website, the phdlifecoach. com, click on the membership, you will find all the stuff you need to know. It is £149 for three months You'll get all the details on there, but there's workshops, there's themed coaching sessions, there's open coaching sessions, there's online courses, there's co working sessions, there's access to me through Slack if you can't make it to the live sessions. So there's a ton of stuff. Check it out. Join now. We start on the 3rd of February. You do not want to miss out. Now, if you're sitting there going, there's no way Vic, I'm really sorry, this sounds great, but definitely don't have any money for this. Um, you know, PhD student can't do it. It's okay. I gotcha. First thing, make sure you're on my newsletter. I mention it every week. Make sure you're on my newsletter. You'll get structured support every time. You will sometimes get hear me talking about the membership and encouraging you to join. Feel free to ignore it. If you're not in a position to pay for it, you don't want to pay for it, just skim past those bits. It's all good. I'm not offended. Happy days. And keep an eye out. I'm going to do a monthly webinar on a specific topic this year. You can sign up to as many of those as you want. Get the free support that's there. So you've got my podcast, you've got the newsletter, you've got those workshops. But if you want that little bit more, and you think you can prioritise £149 for three months, not per month by the way, total, £149 total, if you think you want that little bit more, if you've tried to implement stuff on your own before and it just hasn't worked out, Let's go. Quarter one is going to focus task management, time management, how we can build a kind of structure to a life that feels fun and doable and that helps us achieve our goals. I mean, three months to do that. Amazing. I'm so excited. I've already got a ton of you on the waiting list. I'd love to have even more on too. So jump in, go do it now. If you're listening to this and it's past February 2nd, don't worry. We're going to open up again at the end of April, go to the same place. Make sure you're on the waiting list and you will be the first to hear about it. Thank you so much for listening, everyone. I want you to think back, take a moment after you finish listening, especially if you're currently driving or walking or whatever, and you can't make notes. Think about those six areas. And even if you're not going to join the membership, I want you to identify one other area where you want to make a concrete step. Where you want to do something to improve your support in that area. Have a think, let me know what it is. You can always email me vikki at wembury coaching. com. Let me know what the one thing that you might do to improve your social support is. I promise it will make everything else feel easier. 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 Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People How to do role-based time blocking Total Workday Control by Michael Lindenberger If I have a deadline, I have always been able to hit that deadline. I'm not going to tell you that I hit it in some kind of calm, organized, working methodically all the way up to it kind of way, but through pulling some late nights, a bit of overenthusiastic working, whatever it might be, I will hit that deadline. The tasks that I've always had problems with, and I know a lot of you have problems with too, are the tasks that don't have an externally imposed deadline. Maybe we try and put our own little fake deadline on it, but we know it's fake so we're able to push it back. Or maybe the task is really vague and there's not even a point at which we know it's complete, read more or whatever. It's those tasks that I always struggled with. Now, as usual, I'm not going to lie and tell you I'm perfect at this now, but I have found a tool that massively helps me schedule and get done some of those important but non urgent tasks that often fall by the wayside. The other thing that this tool has helped with is smoothing out that runup to a big, actual formal external deadline. So rather than kind of skidding in at the last minute, I am now getting better, not perfect, but better at starting work on it earlier and working towards it in a more consistent way, and that's the tool that I'm going to teach you in this episode. So keep listening. Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. The first thing I'm going to say before we get started properly is you might notice my voice is a little croakey. This is actually the improved version. I had flu all over the Christmas and New Year period. I'm now feeling fine, but my voice has not yet recovered. So it's not too bad, but if I squeak a little bit in this episode, please bear with me. It's all good. But, voice or not, I've got a really important tool that I know is going to help you guys loads and loads, so I want to get this podcast done, and even more excitingly, I want to tell you about the membership program, which if you're listening to this live, is opening in one week's time. So at the end of this podcast, I'm going to tell you a little bit about what that involves and some of the new structures. So even those of you who are current members need to listen to this because it's going to be super cool. I'll tell you a little bit more about what you're going to get out of it, what it's going to look like and how you can join if you want to be a part of this very special community. So Before I tell you what the tool I'm talking about is, I want us to think about the problem with deadlines. And for me, the big problem with deadlines is that they tell you when something needs to finish. But that doesn't tell you much about the process of getting it done. And some things have very hard deadlines. So usually a grant deadline, for example, is very fixed. You can't just write to the grant offering body and say, can I have longer, please? So there are some deadlines that are like. super clear, super hard, it's got to be done by then. If you're booked in to do a talk, your talk needs to be done at least at some level by the time it's time to do your talk. Then there are kind of externally set but somewhat fluffy deadlines. So these might be submitting a chapter for a book to the editor, submitting a draft to your supervisor, any of those sorts of things. So notionally, there's a deadline. Somebody else will know if you don't hit that deadline, but there may be some flexibility. Often you can message your supervisor and say, this came up, that's taking longer than I thought. I've had this issue, can I have an extra week? And it usually works. And to be honest, same with submitting to books and things like that. I used to feel really bad about asking for extensions to those deadlines. And then when I spoke to the editor, they're like, yeah, everyone's taken the extension. Don't worry. And then there are things where there's no real deadlines. I have a bunch of tasks around CPD, for example, I'm really keen to make sure that I'm an evidence based practitioner, that what I'm teaching you guys is based in the literature and the research. And so those CPD tasks, unless I specifically decide that I'm going to talk about that thing in that podcast, in which case I have more of a deadline, they don't have real deadlines. I can set myself deadlines, but no one else knows what they are, and they're not real. There's no consequence for missing them. And what that means is, whilst deadlines can be a useful motivator for certain tasks, it means we often end up prioritizing tasks that have deadlines over tasks that don't. And that's not necessarily a criteria of what's most important. Just because it has a deadline, it does not mean it's more important. If you have to fill in some boring form, which you have to do in academia, and there's a deadline it has to be done by, that task is not more important than reading a research article to stay up to date in your field, for example. But the fact that it has a deadline associated with it will usually mean that we will prioritize it over tasks that don't have specific deadlines. Now, many of you may be familiar with Stephen Covey's work. He wrote Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I highly recommend reading at least a summary, maybe not the entire book, but if you Google, you'll find loads of summaries. And one of the things he talked about was the four quadrants of tasks. Some of you all heard this before. This is not the new thing I'm teaching you. I'm just making sure everyone's up to speed. And in this he maintains that you can classify tasks as important and not important, and urgent and not urgent. And if you use those two scales, you end up with a quadrant where you've got one quadrant which is important and urgent, one quadrant which is important but not urgent. And those are the ones that we're talking about that we often neglect. Then there's urgent but not important. See little forms, that kind of jazz, and then there's the not urgent not important stuff And he maintains that you start with the important and urgent stuff Then you move to the important but not urgent stuff, the stuff we usually neglect. Then you do anything that's urgent but not important. And you try and either ignore or delegate stuff in the other box. Now, I find that quite a useful framework to kind of think about my tasks. But I have to say, it never worked for me. Certainly not when I was an academic. Because by the time I'd finished all the important and urgent tasks, I had run out of time. If you don't pre schedule the other stuff, if you don't block time for the important and not urgent tasks, the important and urgent tasks expand to fill the time you've got, in my experience. I was also never very good at defining what I mean by important. You know, I would I was the person that said, you need to make a priority list. My priority list would be like 40 things. So that's not a priority list. That's just a list. So for me, it kind of gave some insight into the types of tasks that I was neglecting. Those important but not urgent tasks. But it certainly didn't solve the problem. Now I mentioned there time blocking. If you want to know more about time blocking and specifically about my version of time blocking, I want you to check out my podcast episode about how to use role based time blocking. I'm not going to go into lots of detail now, but essentially this is where you're putting time in your diary for particular categories of work. So for me, I block time in my diary for CPD. I don't decide weeks in advance exactly what I'm going to read or watch or learn during that period, but I'll block in time that is specifically for the role of continuing professional development. Do go check out that podcast. I will link it in the show notes. If you can't find it. The other thing that I think deadlines don't help with is the sense of having an overwhelming to do list. So, deadlines. You guys might have deadlines all the way for like the next three years, right? You know roughly when your PhD is going to finish if you're doing that. You know roughly when you might apply for promotion and what the deadlines are. You might have a conference booked in October. You might have a module that needs delivering by December, whatever it is. You've got deadlines often that are not just these imminent deadlines. You've got all the way through to six months, a year, three years. What that means is without careful management, your to do list could be huge because you've got write talk for conference, which actually should be around 12 different actual tasks within that, but let's just call it one for now. And it's on your to do list because you know you need to do it and you know what the deadline is. So there it is. So every time you look at your to do list, thinking, what do I need to do? There's too many things. There's all these things that some of which you don't need to think about yet. Because it's not till October. It's not till December, whenever. But you look at it and it takes up cognitive space because your brain goes Oh yeah, I need to do that too. Yeah. And I've got that coming as well. And then next month I need to do that. And da da da. It fills up our kind of cognitive capacity. Now, how some of you get around this is having a kind of master to do list of all the things you need to do. And then more kind of daily and weekly to do lists where you pick things off this, which is brilliant. Love that system. We want to be getting it right down so that we can see these are the things. You, me and these two tasks. That's all we're doing. Okay. Makes it much, much more manageable. But the tool I want to talk about today is a way of semi automating that and strategically deciding what you're doing when. Because I don't know about you, but when I just have a master list and then I pick things off it for what am I going to do today or what am I going to do this week, I pick off stuff that I want to do and I abandon stuff that I don't fancy or that feels difficult or feels boring or long winded or whatever. I never pick it off. So the tool that I want to teach you today is about using start dates as well as deadlines. And in many cases, instead of deadlines. I actually got this from a pretty old school now book. I read it at the time. This has been in my shelves for a long time. Called Total Workday Control, by this guy Michael Lindenberger. Okay, and I want you to see, it proudly announces, covers Outlook 2007, 2003, 2002. So the actual kind of technical stuff, people on YouTube will be able to see me flicking through. The technical elements of this are pretty out of date because it is a system that is designed to work through using Microsoft Outlook. However, there are some principles in it that are enormously useful. I actually want to re, I was going to say reread, I want to reread, I want to re flick through this to see if there are other things that I can pick out of it too. But the one I want to teach you today is his notion of throwing things over the horizon. So he talks about this idea of having too many things on your to do list so that they're all sort of there in your mind when you need to just get on and focus. And what he suggests is that you go through your tasks and you decide which of these do I need to work on now or do I choose to work on now? Now, some of that decision making may be to do with deadlines that are coming up. Some of it may be choosing which are going to have the biggest impact, which are the most important for you, those sorts of things. And what you then do is you decide which things you don't need to be thinking about yet. So, for example, if you're doing a presentation in November, make slides for November's presentation should not be on your to do list right now. You should not be seeing that. Now, you might want to think back and think, Okay, what data am I going to be presenting? Is there any data collection or analysis I need to be doing now that's going to feed that? You know, do I need to be doing ethics applications? Do I need to be doing project planning? What is it? What am I actually going to be talking about? You don't need to be making your slides. And so what he suggests is that we throw making those slides over the horizon. i. e. we take it out of our kind of current to do list and make it pop up in the future. So I might think, right, I need to make sure that I know what data I'm going to be presenting so that I can backtrack and work out if there's anything I need to do now. But let's assume I'm presenting data I already have. So if my presentation is in November, I probably want to be making my slides mid October, depending on when in November it is. Some of you might want to take longer than that. I'm now pretty fast at making slides. It's not something I have much drama about. So I'd probably put it in for mid October. Okay, that's your start date. The deadline is maybe two days before the conference so that you can send off your handouts or whatever it is. But the start date is mid October. And you can do this with a bunch of things. If you have, here's 10 articles that you need to read to stay up to date with your field. They're not for a specific piece of writing you're doing right now, but they're new. You could, instead of looking at that list and going, Oh God, I need to read all of those. You could throw nine of them over the horizon and set one of them as a start date for this week. Okay. So at some point this week, you want to read that. Now you could give it a deadline. You could say, I want it gone by the end of the week so that next week I do the next one. But even just having it as a start date means it appears on your to do list and puts in your consciousness that that's actually one you're intending to work on this week. And the joy is if you use either my role based task management sheet, which you can email me to ask for, so you can email info at wenburycoaching. com, email me, you can find it. It's a kind of interactive Google sheet where you put your tasks in, it uses the system that I use. If you use something like that, or if you use Click Up or Notion or any of these kind of automated task management systems, you usually have to add a column that start date is not usually one of the default columns. Most people don't use it, but you can set up a column that start date as well as deadline. And then what you can do is you can set filters. So in my Excel sheet that you can all get, I have filters already on the columns, so you can filter by start date. And in ClickUp and things like that, so I now use ClickUp, the version that I share with you guys, teaches you the basic system to see if you like it. I've now transferred it into ClickUp. I've made filters, so that I have a filter that is started tasks, so tasks where I have passed the start date, i. e. I should be making progress on them. . What that means is there's a whole bunch of things on my task list that I don't see pop up until I need to start working on them. And that's amazing. Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one-to-one coaching or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. Now, you might ask, yeah, but I don't know when I'm going to start working on it, because it depends how long the other things take. Perfect. I have a system for that, too. What I do there is I have a specific date that I throw them to. So what I will do, for example, is I will book some time in my diary on, let's say, February 2nd. I'm recording this on the 16th of January. I'll book some time on the February 2nd and I will throw all my tasks that I don't know when I'm going to do them to a start date of February 2nd. That doesn't mean I'm going to start them on February 2nd. What it means is I'm going to review them on February 2nd. So on February 2nd, I'd block an hour into my diary to look through my tasks and decide, Do I actually want them on my start list now? I. e. I'm intending to do them in the next week or so. Or do I want to throw them over the horizon again? Some of them you might just throw over the horizon again until March 2nd or April 2nd or whatever your next one is. Or you throw it, say I'm not doing it this week, but I am going to do it next week. So you set a more specific task, set a start date for it. Now, what this does is many things. It simplifies your to do list so that you only see the things you actively want to be working on now. So it really reduces overwhelm, makes it much more straightforward. It gives you a structure by which to review your to do list every month so that you can make decisions about what you are and aren't doing. And this one's very important for me, is the act of having to throw it over the horizon every month. And I do this, I have tasks that just go and go and go. Next month, next month, next month. And then at some point I will say to myself, Vik, are we actually doing this thing? Because at the moment we've put it off month after month after month after month. Are we ever doing it? Or are you just accepting that this one's not going to happen? It kind of encourages you to review whether you're going to do the thing you said you were going to do anyway. So it kind of clears up those historic to do lists. Now that actually reminds me. Those of you who've stayed this long on the podcast , I'm going to give you a sneaky extra tip. And I planned to do this, then I got sick, so it didn't happen, but I'm going to replan it into my diary. Little tip for you. If you've got a bunch of little bits on your to do list whether they're, for me they're usually crappy little admin tasks. Things I just, I need to talk to my website host about something. I need to, I need to talk to Microsoft. That's a whole other story. We're not going there. Anyway, I've been not doing those things. You might have those sorts of things. You might have reading. You might, there might be a bunch of things that you've kind of pushed backwards. I would really encourage you now, go and grab your diary. And, Look a few weeks ahead and block in something, time where a week doesn't look too bad. Block in a couple of hours and mark it as historic to dos. Okay, so this isn't a specific role. This isn't I'm going to be doing marketing things. I'm going to be doing operational things, whatever. This is historic to dos and your job in that two hours is to do as many things that you've been putting off as possible. This works perfectly at home as well. So if you found that there's jobs around the house, or maybe things like booking dentists, that kind of stuff that you haven't done, book in a time to do historic to dos. And the joy is A. It blocks time where that is your job. Other things aren't more important. But B. It removes a little bit of the shame. Because one of the things that stops you doing these things isn't that they're particularly difficult. It's that you've got a bunch of emotions about the fact you haven't done them yet. Whereas if your task is literally to get done things you haven't got done. Much less shame about it. So it's like, that's literally the job. That's literally what this time slot's for. I don't need to feel bad about the fact I haven't done this so far because I've literally blocked in time where doing things I haven't done for ages is my job. So there's a sneaky bonus for you. The other thing that you can use start dates for, let's take that example of a conference in November, is you can use it to support your project planning. So a deadline in November tells you nothing about what you need to be doing during the year. But what you could do is break that task down. Let's imagine now you do have to collect data for it. You could break that task of the conference in November down into all of its constituent parts. And so you've got to, let's go backwards, you've got to make this. Slides, you've got to, well, you've got to make the slides content wise. You've got to make the slides beautiful before that. You need to know what you're going to say. You need to have planned it, before that you need to understand your findings before that. You need to have findings before that. You need to have collected data or whatever your. Before that, you need to have designed the project, recruited participants, found your resources, whatever it is. Before that, you need to have a big picture idea of what it is you're intending to do. Before that, you might have to apply for funding, you might have to get ethical approval, you might have to get access to an archive, whatever it is. There's a whole bunch of different tasks. What start dates allow you to do is you can spend time identifying what those different tasks are, and then you can give each of them a start date. Now, if you use something fancy like ClickUp, like I do, you can set the map as dependencies where the next thing doesn't appear until you've done the one before it. I actually quite like it appearing because if you're are still in the habit, as I am still a bit, of not doing the things on your to do list when you said you would, the next one pops up anyway, so it stops it kind of getting you a bit like, Oh, blimey, I need to have done that and that. So it kind of gives you that little sense of urgency. You can set in all the start dates, so you know that even though you don't have to do the conference until November, realistically, You need to be project planning now so that you can collect data in March so that you can analyze data in June so that you can whatever, you know, you put your time scale in depending on how, how much pressure you're under and how much time you have. So you can then put start dates in for all of those subcomponents. So this start date idea is brilliant for your tasks that have no deadline, that are really important but don't feel urgent. It puts them on your agenda in a specific week, but it also helps you avoid that crazy run in to a deadline where you've only just realised that actually there's a billion things you need to do in the deadlines then. It helps you to pace that out over the year. And of course, when you're looking at start dates, you can put into your diary your other constraints. So if you have children, you might want to be more gentle about what you put start dates during the school holidays for. If you have a period where you're going to be on holiday, you don't put any start dates during that period. So you can structure it around your life. If you know you've got a heavy teaching period, let's not put lots of research start dates during that time. Okay? So you get to, by using start dates, which you're in control of entirely, rather than deadlines that are either fake or set by somebody else, then you can also schedule the work around your key things. Now, if you're telling yourself, yeah, yeah, but I don't always follow through, or that sounds great, but it sounds a bit complicated, and I don't know where to start, that's something I can help with. And that's my final announcement for you all, which is the PhD Life Coach membership is opening to new members at the end of January. And how it's going to run is instead of joining monthly and kind of coming in and out whenever you want. We're going to be a quarter. If you join at the end of January, you are in until the end of April. You are going to have three months specialist support, and it is focused on structures. It is going to be focused on time management, task management, designing a day and a life that you love, so that you can do the things you want to do in a way that feels good. You're going to leave the quarter feeling clearer, feeling more capable with a personalized time and task management system that you know how to practice, you know how to iterate, and that you can work on with minimal self judgment. Because I ain't going to teach you a tool that you do this perfectly. I ain't found a tool that I do this perfectly. But I have found tools that enable me to do this with minimal self judgment and still achieve my goals, even though I don't do any of it perfectly. And that's what I want for you guys. If you're interested, I want you to go to my website. I want you to click on the membership and I want you to put your name on the waitlist. If you're listening to this live, so in the week, beginning the 20th of January, put yourself on the waitlist. If you're listening to it in the week, beginning the 27th. You could just join. So just go to the same place on my website. You'll find a button. If you're listening to this afterwards, we are going to reopen again at the end of April for the second quarter. So keep an eye out for that. Put yourself on the waiting list. You'll be amongst the first to know when what's happening and when it's open and when I announce the new theme for the second quarter. All important question, cost. I hate people when they don't tell me what the costs are, make you go and search through pages. I've reduced the prices. It's cheaper than it used to be. It, the quarter is going to be 1 49 Great British Pounds, which for people more familiar with US dollars is 180, 185, something like that. That's for the entire quarter, not per month. For that, you get access to six two hour workshops about things like how to write when you're struggling to write. You get access to 12 themed coaching sessions where I teach you all the specifics of the various time management task management systems and support you to adapt them to meet your needs. You get access to 24 coaching sessions. The sessions are going to change in time over the day to try and make each week to try and make them as accessible as possible for as many people as possible. And you also have access to all my self paced courses. So if you can't make the live versions, there are self paced versions of all of these courses that you can access. You get access to my Be Your Own Best Boss program, which is like my flagship big course . Access to that. You can also ask me questions in Slack. So if you're ever in a position where you're like, Oh, I can't come to the live session. I really want some advice. You can ask me questions in Slack and I will give you personal responses. It is so good. The members love it so much. Make sure you check it out. Go to www. thephdlifecoach. com Click on the membership you'll find all the information and I would love to have as many of you in there as possible. Current members. How exciting is it that we're going to have this more structure to it? You're going to get, uh, sort of your own worksheets that you can work through if you're not able to attend sessions. It's going to be amazing. I'm so excited to continue working with you. Thank you all so much for listening. Go away, look at your task list, see whether you can allocate start dates to just a few things, and see how it works for you. Let me know. You can always message me if you have questions, anything you're unsure about. 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.

Links I refer to in this episode Dr Gertrude Nonterah on LinkedIn The Bold PhD 55 academics reveal PhD student secrets you won’t learn in school! Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach and I have another guest with me this week. Um, so welcome. This is Dr. Gertrude Nonterah from the Bold PhD and I am super excited to have you with us today. Gertrude: I am so excited to be here, Vikki. Thank you for inviting me. Vikki: No problem. Well, I came across you, as you know, on YouTube, so those of you listening, I will link all of this in the show notes, but if you haven't found the BOLD PhD on YouTube already, I highly recommend that you go check it out after this. And when I was looking, I was like, oh my god. There's so many things that we could talk about that you talk about on YouTube. But we picked one where you had talked up to 55 academics about secrets that PhD students don't know. And that was just so intriguing that I was like, that one, let's talk about that one. But before we get into it, Tell people a little bit about yourself, what you're doing now and how you got there. Gertrude: Yes. So, so thank you for the questions. Thank you for the introduction. I'm Gertrude Nonterah, like you said, and I got into this space of talking about career design for academics and PhDs about four years ago. So prior to that, I PhD as a postdoc for almost three years at a big institution here in the US, a research intensive institution. And somewhere around the three year mark, one day, uh, PI calls all of us in after a lab meeting, he calls all of us into a room and says, Hey, guys, we run out of funding for research. And so in 90 days, you all are going to lose your jobs. And so this is really, um, What happened? This is how this whole thing began. And this was back in 2018. And when the postdoc ended, I thought that getting a job, and at that time, I wasn't really sure, like I had an inkling that I didn't necessarily want to stay in academia and become a tenured professor. But I didn't know where else I would go. Right? Because when you have a PhD, the idea is that you're going to stay in academia to become some kind of lecturer or professor or researcher, right? This is a path that has been well trodden for most academics and PhDs. Well, I began to learn about the different paths that were out there beyond academia. And the trouble was I didn't know how to communicate my value to companies outside of academia. So I kept on submitting my academic CV, thinking that people would be impressed with my credentials and my degrees and nobody was. I had to just learn through the school of hard knocks, how to present my work and how to talk about my work so that people outside of academia would say, Oh, she's not just an academic. Um, you know, because there is that, there is that bias where people just think, Oh, she's an academic. She probably doesn't know how to do anything. Um, I'm sure, I'm sure Vikki, uh, you're familiar with that sentiment. And so like really showing people my value. And I began to document some of that on YouTube. And essentially, that's how the Bold PhD was born, and I didn't realize that in documenting that I would gain sort of an audience around this subject. I thought this, everybody knew this stuff. I thought everybody had figured this stuff out, but the more I wrote about it on LinkedIn and the more I posted YouTube videos, the more I learned that, oh my word, that a lot of us go through the whole academic system and nobody ever teaches us the basics of career development, the basis of career success. You know, it's just assumed that, Oh, they're smart people. They'll figure it out. But I cannot tell you how many, the hundreds of people, if not thousands at this point, to be honest, hundreds of people who have sent me emails or instant direct messages and said, thank you so much for sharing that. If you didn't share that, I would never know how to communicate my value. So really that's how it got started. I hope that I hope that helps answer the question. That's the short part of the story. Vikki: Yeah, so, so helpful and so true. I really, really recognize that because apart from anything else, these students are getting, I saw it where I was. Um, the students are getting supported by people who mostly haven't done that. Right? So, you know, when you're going through your PhD, you've got your supervisors who are in a pretty good place to help you explain your value in terms of getting an academic career, because that's what they did. And so they can kind of guide you through that. But the vast majority of academics who are supervising PhD students will never have done what you've done. They'll never have actually gone and had to sort of, you know, get jobs outside of academia and figure out different ways of telling that story. So it's probably no surprise that PhD students aren't getting taught it directly. But I agree completely that it's a, it's a big gap for sure. Gertrude: It's such a big gap. I feel like ever since I started talking about this, there were a few blogs here and there that talked about it, but it was just so few and far between. I think now there are more voices that are speaking up about this because More and more academics are choosing careers outside of academia or sometimes not necessarily choosing, but there's just not an option for them in academia, right? I think I read a paper a few years ago that said only about 20 percent of PhDs will ever get tenured faculty positions. And that was in the US. I don't know about other places. I spoke to a friend of mine who, um, worked in the UK and she kind of confirmed that statistic, it was even lower for the UK. So, you know, there are more and more people choosing careers or working outside of academia. So I feel like that's no longer such a black box, but still I find that there are people that are like, how do I How do I present my personal brand? How do I write a resume for industry versus academia? You know, so it's, you know, hopefully I've, I've helped enough people. Vikki: And you're going to help more. I know that for sure. And those two things you mentioned there, I know you've got videos about. So if people want to know more specifically about those things too, they can, they can go dig that stuff out as well. So tell me about how this talking to 55 academics came about. Gertrude: That's right. So I made a LinkedIn post and this is about three months ago. We're recording this in November of 2024. So this was, I think somewhere in August or September. So August and September usually marks the beginning of the school year across most countries, right? And usually it's when the new batch of graduate students, PhD students are getting started. So I said, well, semesters are starting all across the world. Okay. PhDs who are in my LinkedIn connections, give your best advice, give the advice you wish somebody had given you when you were starting graduate school. And I think that post ended up getting about a hundred comments of different academics. And I counted about 55 individuals who had responded. I'm sure it's a little more now, but the last time I checked there were about 100 comments and it was just an education in career advice in surviving graduate school and so they had given all these these pieces of advice that to be honest, if somebody had given me that list of advice when I started graduate school I think I would have been in a much better place than I was when I was looking for jobs outside of academia and was unemployed for almost a year and a half, right? And so that's how that post came about. And I, once I made that, that post and I saw how much traction it got and how, how many times it got reshared and commented on, I decided to make a YouTube video about it. And I think that's what you discovered, right? Yes. And so do you want me to go into some of what that people said? Vikki: Well, I am. Yes. But I want to ask you one thing first, because, you mentioned that you were unemployed for a year and a half, and I just think it's amazing that you went through this period where it must have felt super uncertain and things and you found it in yourself to not only get through that and carry on and do different things, but to put your journey out there, to develop these skills and stuff. I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about that. What that was like and how you, how you got yourself to do those things. Cause it would be so easy in that situation to kind of feel sorry for yourself or feel bitter about the experience that you'd had or how people should value your skills. And I'd love to just know a little more about that. Gertrude: Yeah, so I was bitter and sad that I won't lie. I cried because I think for most I'm a millennial. I in my early 40s and all my life I was always told, do your best, go to school, get good grades and everything else will work out. And that's exactly what I did. I went to school. I got good grades. I went and got a PhD. I did everything society said would set me up for success. So why wasn't I successful? Why was I unemployed and barely scraping by? That made me incredibly upset, right? Because I felt like a big failure. I felt like I'd failed myself. I felt like I'd been lied to so many things, right? There were people, I would look at people who maybe didn't have all the credentials or education I had, and they seem to be doing well. Now I have since learned to be careful about comparing myself with people because sometimes you may see somebody and you may judge them to be successful, but you know, what does that mean? It's really important to define success for yourself and not. Get caught up in other people's lives. That's a that's a losing battle. So I've since learned to be careful about doing that but I was still really disappointed in myself for doing everything I was told to do and still not be successful or as successful as I thought I would be at that point. And so I'm the kind of person that if I go through something, I begin to think, is somebody else going through this? Like, our human experiences, it doesn't matter where you're from, it doesn't matter what your experience or your upbringing, most of us have very similar life experiences, maybe just in different settings, right? Just a few things change. And that's when I told myself, well, maybe I'll put this out there and it will help somebody, because I don't want somebody to fall in the same, I'm a teacher at heart, maybe that's why I pursued a PhD, and so I want to teach people all the time, sometimes, you know, even unsolicited, right? And so, and so, um, I really wanted to just show, tell people that if you're going through this, you're not alone. You're not a failure. I just really wanted to say that. And ever since I started doing that, the number, again, the number of people that have sent me an email or something to say, thank you. I was on the job market for a year. I was in the job market for six months and I watch your videos to keep me going. And I'm like, Oh, thank you so much. I'm glad that that helped. So I didn't want people to feel despondent and helpless, as helpless as I did. And so that's why I began to do that. And if I can just reach out to somebody and give them some hope that, you know, just because you are unemployed and you have a PhD or unemployed and you have a master's degree, doesn't make you a failure. You know, hopefully I would have done part of my job. Vikki: Yeah. And it's so important. Thank you for sharing that you, obviously you went through the sadness and the disappointment and the bitterness and stuff as well because I think sometimes people think that handling things well in inverted commas means that you don't experience any of those emotions. And I think it's really important that people recognize that you can feel all of those things and it's probably completely fair and completely understandable to feel all of those things. But you can also decide to do things that will help too. I think that's super powerful to hear. So thank you. How, just on the timelines of it though. So were you, and then, okay, I'll tell you where this is coming from. So I'm trying to get fitter at the moment, right? Cause I want to learn to do like fun fitness stuff, like the kind of calisthenics where it's like handstands and things like that. And part of me is like, this would be quite fun to share my journey, right? but then part of me is like, I only want to share my journey if I actually get to my journey. Yeah. So, were you like, Were you sharing in like real time with you being, you know, you applying for things and sharing all the way through? Or was it that you kind of got some way along this journey and were starting to see things improving and so you then tried to help people that were behind you? Gertrude: Yeah, I think both of them are good approaches. I think I was a, a little further along the journey. Vikki: Okay. Gertrude: So, when I started sharing on LinkedIn, at this point, I was an adjunct professor at a college. So in the U. S., we have community colleges, and those are two year colleges. You can do community college for two years and then transfer to a four year university, and it's still considered that you did two years of university. So, usually people Get into community college after high school. And for a lot of people, it's a cheaper option. It's a more accessible option, right , to help them bridge their way into university. So I was an instructor at a community college. And so I began to share a little bit of my experiences there. And then when I finally landed my first role in medical communications, which is where I work now in the arena I work in now, I was like, Oh my goodness. Like the, the light bulb started coming on. So I started to share, you know, so I had been unemployed, for the 18 months, almost two years prior and, um, in between me, while I was unemployed, I started a writing business. So I started writing, and one of the ways I would get clients was really share my work or share the tools I was using on LinkedIn. So that's how I. I got started. I never meant to like start sharing about my career or anything. I was just trying to find a way to find clients for my business so that I can actually have money to survive. So, as I did that, I began to see it as a platform where people shared ideas. And so I just, I'm telling you, all of this was really like, I stumbled into it. I never planned for it to become anything. I just shared my journey and all of a sudden it sort of blew up , and people began to reach out. So I had gotten a little bit along the down the road with my journey. Um, I never really talked about being unemployed online, but I was talking about my freelance business and getting people so people have been following me since 2018. They know how it started and then somewhere 2020 ish. I started sharing around that transition out of academia, and then that it kind of just Vikki: Yeah, so interesting. So let's get into the secrets. What do you think the most important things that PhD students that would make such a difference if they if they understood during their PhD? Gertrude: Yes, so there's so many, the first one is faculty jobs are not prizes, they are jobs. I loved this one so much because, again, if you, if you're only tuned into the academic narrative, then usually the sentiment within academia in general is academia is sacred and pure and is not tainted by capitalism. And if you get a career there, then it's the most respectable thing you can do with a PhD. And the reality is that it's just a job. And they are not, you know, academia is not really untainted by capitalism. If you think about it, right. Now, this is not me knocking capitalism. I mean, you know, this is not me doing that. But the reality is that there are universities within this country. I live in the US. So there's so many universities now that are basically hedge funds. They have billions of dollars in the tuition that people pay that they have put in funds, you know, to, to enrich who we do not know, but it's real and it's there and these, these things are happening and yet you have academics who sometimes work at some of these institutions and are barely scraping by. So if you think that, you know, it's a sacred calling to be in a faculty member, you know, I really understood the sentiment behind the person that made that comment. It's, it's not real. It's, it's, that's, you've been brainwashed to think that, right? And so, regardless of what you choose, whether you choose to be in academia or you choose to work outside of academia, there's no real evil side. There's no real dark side. It's all just a job, right? So whether you get a job in academia or not, you're probably doing just fine and, and that's okay because people would be really disappointed. I've had people say, I feel like a failure because I didn't get this job in academia. And there's no reason why you should feel that way. Or I remember when I had one of the first posts of mine on LinkedIn that kind of went viral and I ended up making a video about that. And that video also did well, was when I talked about why I left academia. Right, and people have even, I've had, I've gotten a lot of flack for that video too. But anyway, um, I talked about the fact that I enjoy teaching my students. I really did. But ultimately, it wasn't a sustainable income and the way healthcare works here in the U. S. usually, we don't have a nationalized healthcare system, not saying that that's only the kind of healthcare system that you can have, but because of that, you have to pay if you're not working for a company that covers that, you have to pay out of pocket, and to get really good health insurance is very expensive, and even when you get good health insurance and you go to the hospital, you may, you know, if it's a thousand dollars, You know, your health insurance may cover 800 you still have to pay 200, you know, so there's just a lot that goes into not having a good job or health insurance, for instance. And so for me, because I had to think about that and have to think about my family and the needs at that time. I have a child who really needed medical care and that medical care was too expensive coming just from our pockets. And so it was imperative that I get a job that could support me in that way so that I could cover those costs. If it was just me alone, okay, whatever, I can eat ramen noodles and, and just go to bed. But now you have people who begin to depend on you. It's okay to say, I'm making this move for the people I love. I'm making this move so that I can have a better financial future and not feel guilty about making moves like that, right? Because that's what's wrapped up in that comment. Faculty jobs are not prizes, they're just jobs, is if you are in a faculty job and it's not paying you well, it's not helping you meet your financial goals. You're not able to cover your children's health care. You're not able to cover things. It's not like, and I always say this, I wasn't trying to live frivolously. I was just trying to even just survive, you know. If that's you, then, you know, that's your permission to say, hey, I can look for something outside of academia that maybe pays well, it helps me take care of my family, helps me meet those financial goals and obligations. Vikki: No, for sure. And it's so reinforced, I think, you know, I, and I'm going to keep this anonymous for the purposes of the podcast, but I've known people in my past where as a supervisor, they were like really disappointed if their students didn't follow into academia and somehow treated it as though they'd wasted this time training them and things. And even though I, I did, I spent like 25 years in academia before I did what I did, what I'm doing now. I never really got that because I, I feel like we're training PhD students to do a million different useful things. And I never really understood that, but there, there was, I saw it all the time, this kind of, that that's the legitimate route and anything else is disappointing in some way. So yeah, I loved that one. 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: So what's next? Gertrude: Well, yes. ,Your cohort is not your competition. They are your village. So I loved that too, because, one of the things I talk about sometimes is networking. And sometimes we're like, I hate networking because we all think of networking as going to those events with a business card and maybe exchanging it and then you leave the networking events and just toss that business card in the trash. We think that that's what networking is. And, you know, I've been trying to like show people that networking is more than that. Right. And then there are people that tell me, oh, I'm an introvert. I hate talking to people. And I'm an ambivert. I can be both that depending on the environment, but I definitely have strong introvert tendencies. And so I get that, right. But one of the things we forget, one of the big networking opportunities we all miss is realizing that the cohort, the PhD cohort we're part of, whether that's your year or even the people that are before you and after you are a network, right? They are a village. They're not your competition. So like just having silly, you know how academics can be sometimes a competition, right? And so, Just falling to that silly competitive behavior like you stop it right and and really see these people as people that can help you get your career ahead. A lot of us would like to think that everything is a meritocracy. Right? Nothing is a pure meritocracy. Nothing. A lot of us love to think this and no society is a pure meritocracy. That apart from you having to do well, having to publish papers, having to do excellent work, you have to learn how to build relationships, how to navigate politics, how to talk to people, how to find mentors. And so this part of it, this part of your cohort or your, the PhD, the people in your PhD program, being a part of your village is one of the things that you're going to have to learn to do so that you're not just depending on your brilliance to get ahead in your career. And I find that this is so true. Now, recently I was interviewing a PhD who had been an academic. She had been a professor for about 10 years at a university. And then the pandemic happened and she decided to transition away from that career path. And you know, the first thing she told me was I immediately got in touch with a professor. With my alumni network, I immediately got in touch with them and just began to ask those people who were not working in academia or those people who I'd known before. Hey, how did you career switch? How do I talk about myself? You know, she just began to talk to these people. She didn't go outside of herself. She just went to the people that she had gone to school with. Right. And so really seeing these people as your cohort and developing those relationships is going to be great. Maybe you're listening to this or watching this, and you didn't develop those relationships. It's not too late, right? When you go on LinkedIn, for instance, and you click on a specific company, sometimes those companies will tell you if there's somebody from your school or somebody from your network that works there. You can tap into that and say, Hey, we went to the same product, right? You know, university, we went to the same high school, even sometimes, um, I just saw that you work at ABC company and I just wanted to, to connect. And that could be your, you know, because we, as human beings, we all love it when we find commonalities with each other. And so if I say my son swims and somebody is a swim mom. She's also going, Oh, my son swims too. And immediately we have a connection. You already have connections with people based on your PhD cohort, based on the broader alumni network. Leverage that and don't shun people or make them your competition. Make them a part of your village. Vikki: Definitely. And I, I see people not necessarily making it competition. Bear in mind, I came from a sports science department. We were as competitive as it gets. But for me, there's also a difference between the kind of competitive where you're like both cheering each other on and trying to slightly outdo each other, but it's all quite exciting and fun. Versus what I see a lot more of with my clients and people in my membership membership is people sort of being like, oh, Gertrude's already published two papers and I haven't, and I must be rubbish, and that whole kind of making it mean something. When, I don't know about your cohort, but like looking back through all the PhD students I've known going through my school, how long people took to finish their PhD or how long they were writing up for or whatever doesn't seem to relate to anything to do with where they are in academia now. It's just a really pointless metric. And how many changes you got after your viva and things like that seems so important. And then I say to people like, you know, how many changes did your supervisor get? And they're like, I don't know, it's like, because no one cares, it's fine. And so, yeah, it's just, it's almost, it's even like really stupid things that we get competitive about. The other thing I wanted to add was, it also doesn't have to just be within your own, like, department or university. One of my, so I have my kind of cohort that I went through my PhD with and things who've been amazing, bunch of them were at my wedding and things like that. Um, but then there was also the people who, I used to go to quite small conferences and it would be the same people each year and so like through the early stages of my career. And I consider a bunch, you know, they're all over, most of them are all over the U. S. And I consider them my cohort too, and that's been wonderful maintaining those relationships and just, and they're all super high flying in their field now and stuff. And so it's, it can be useful too, but more importantly, it's just been really nice. You know, sort of being part of that kind of little network of people that came up at the same time, just in the discipline, even though we were in completely different PhD programs. Gertrude: Yeah. Yeah. I know that's an amazing addition for sure. Vikki: And I know it doesn't always, you know, if you go to massive conferences and where you don't see the same people and stuff, it doesn't necessarily, or you don't get the opportunity to, to go to as many conferences, it doesn't quite work out, but I think there's lots of different places you can find your cohort too. Gertrude: Sure, for sure. Absolutely. Vikki: Well, so give us another one. Wow. So I'm loving these. Gertrude: Yes, absolutely. I like this one where it says, your dissertation topic does not need to define your identity as a researcher. Vikki: Yes. Yes. Gertrude: Like I don't know why somehow the people, I don't know whether it's everybody, but at least a lot of people I've come into contact with who have PhDs think we're locked into this one thing, right? Just because we became an expert in that for five years or six years. You're not, you're not limited. Your identity is not a genetics researcher. Your identity is not the specific, you know, niche subject that you studied. You can apply your skills to a plethora of things. And so one of the things I encourage a lot of PhDs to do is come out from the little pit, right? You've been in that pit for too long. You've got a bit of tunnel vision. Yeah, it's too dark. Come out of it a little bit and realize that your skills that you acquired on getting on the way to getting the PhD are not limited to that one subject, right. If you build the skill of literature review, it's not just for that one subject. If you build the skill of writing about a subject, it's not just for that subject. If you build the skill of designing experiments to test your specific hypothesis, that's not just what your skills are for. Your skill of asking questions and your skill of hypothesis building can be applied to various areas, not just the specific subject you studied or your specific discipline. And so helping people see that has also been one of the, the wildest things I've observed. Like when I, when I say that and the light bulb comes off in PhDs eyes, I'm like, how did we not know this, you know? And so, um, just letting people really realize that. You don't have to allow your dissertation topic to define your identity. You can, you can switch. Vikki: Yeah. Gertrude: And it can be fun. Vikki: And I think that's even useful during your PhD too, because one of the things that I see a lot is that people find negative feedback, for example, really hard to take because they've wrapped up their identity in their topic so much. So then anyone saying, Oh, I'm not sure I quite believe this bit of the experiment, or, you know, have you thought about changing your argument like this becomes essentially someone saying, I think you're stupid and your ideas are bad. And so I think that kind of just. separating yourself just enough from your work, not that it's not important to you or whatever, but that it is just your work, can really help in kind of how you receive feedback, how you develop your ideas, even aside from, from what you do afterwards. Gertrude: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Vikki: Such an important point. Gertrude: Yeah, and then I'll jump on. So the next one is ask for help when you feel lost because we all feel lost at various points. And I think this is a really important one that builds off the points you just made, that you're looking at other people and you're thinking, Oh, this person is doing so well, or she made that presentation and it was so good. Or, you know, and I remember doing my postdoc at some point I was lost. I didn't know where I was going with my question. And I told my PI, I said, I feel lost and I feel like an imposter. Um, and so it's okay to, to express those feelings. Um, because actually, very, very high achieving people tend to all have those thoughts running in their heads. Right? You're high achieving, your whole life you've gotten maybe straight A's or, you know, a few A's and B's. You've always had a high GPA. And so you tend to think that. If I don't have that, then I lose my identity. Talking about identity. If I'm not brilliant, then who am I? And so, because if I'm not, if I'm not brilliant, then who am I? I'm not going to ask the question because it's going to make me look stupid. Forget that everybody else in the room has those questions. Everybody else is feeling just like you feel. They just haven't said it. They just haven't voiced it out. And so I find, I wish I had done this more. Um, and so in hindsight, I'm, I'm giving this advice that if you find yourself in a PhD program or maybe early career and you have questions, ask the stupid question before you make a stupid mistake. Right? Because if you ask the stupid question, then everything is clarified and you know how to move on. If you don't ask the stupid question and then you go and make a stupid mistake, well, people are going to remember that way longer. So you might as well just ask and voice that you feel lost and voice that, you know, maybe you feel like a fish out of water and let somebody help you. And if somebody, if the person you're asking makes you feel less than, that's on them. That's unfortunate. That's a shame for them because we're all learning and we all don't know everything. And so if if they do that, that's not on you. That's that's again. I said stupid not to say it's a stupid question, but I put it. I'm putting it in context. So just to say that, ask the question so that you don't make a mistake that is way, way more costly than the actual question. So ask the question and have somebody who can get you back on the right path rather than feeling like everybody has figured it out. Trust me. I've been in the room. I've been in rooms with people with PhDs, they don't have it together. Vikki: They really don't. Sometimes when I'm, sometimes when I'm coaching, the clients are like, um, you know, especially like, because I have a program at my old university where I have a lot of people and they'll be like, you know, Oh, my supervisor is so brilliant. And they're always on top of this. And I'm just like, I've worked with your supervisor, are you really sure? I'm not really sure. Gertrude: Yes. Sometimes you're like, mm, I, I met these people you are talking about. They're not that impressive when it's, it's not that. It's not that. And you see, I I, I, Vikki: They're human. They're human too. Right? Gertrude: Exactly. I have to be careful with my words. They, yes, in, in some regard. They're definitely impressive, but they question themselves just like you are questioning yourself. Vikki: Of course. Gertrude: They have to carry an air of, I carry an air of confidence because I'm like, why not? But I have questions, I get insecure, I experience imposter syndrome. We're all going through that and it's okay to, to ask the questions. Vikki: And it doesn't mean you're not independent. Because that's the pushback I always get is students saying, but they say I'm meant to be independent. They say this is meant to be my project. I'm meant to be making the decisions. And I'm like, yeah, that doesn't mean you never ask for help though. Being independent doesn't mean you're just like an island that never can... in fact, the best independent researchers that I know are the ones that make the connections that you were talking about earlier and know how to like build on other people's knowledge and expertise is but while adding their own by, by like bringing it all together, so. Gertrude: Yeah, yeah. Vikki: I could talk to you all day, but I know we are slightly tight for time. So if people want to hear the rest of these, and the rest of all this good stuff that you have for them, where should they find you? Gertrude: Yes, so if you go on YouTube, you can type in Dr. Gertrude Nonterah. You'll find my YouTube channel and this video is one of my most recent videos. I posted like maybe two months ago. So you can find that there. You can also go to theboldphd. com. That's my website. Um, it has all the links. I have a, I have a newsletter I send out bi weekly to about 2, 800 academics and I just write whatever comes to mind every every other week around life and around career, because I think they're intertwined right. I think if you want to build a good life you have to have a good career and I really believe in designing the kind of life you want and then fitting your career into that versus the other way around so that you can actually have a life that you enjoy. So I write about that in my newsletter, uh, every other week. So people can join that as well. Vikki: And I'll put a link to this specific episode, as well as your website and stuff in all of the show notes. So thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. I know this will have been super useful for all the listeners. Gertrude: Absolutely. I appreciate you too, Vikki. Thank you so much. Vikki: And thank you everyone for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach.com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.