26. How to be kind to yourself

In this episode I talk about how I'm being kind to myself this week and how you can too! It's short but includes some important reflections on what we need to believe in order to take decisions that are right for us in the moment. Hope that you're kind to yourself this holiday period!  

**Please note - for reasons that will become clear, this was recorded in a field so you can hear the wind! It's still audible but not quite as crystal clear as usual :) Thanks for understanding!

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to episode 26 of the PhD Life Coach. And you might have noticed it sounds different. If you're watching me on YouTube, you'll see it definitely looks different. I am currently up the field with Marley. Where's Marley gone? There he is, with Marley, trying to get my head together to record this podcast.

So if you're listening to this live, it will be Easter Monday. I'm talking to you from Thursday, the day before Good Friday. And I haven't recorded this yet, and I've tried a couple of times this week on a couple of different topics, and it just hasn't flowed. It just hasn't worked out the way I wanted it to, and I decided that I would walk Marley and really kind of - from my non-coaching perspective, really beat myself into how I was going to get this done before breaking up for the holiday so that I didn't have to work over the bank holiday weekend. 

And just five minutes walking up here with Marley made me have the thought, “Why aren't you being more kind to yourself?”

I've been running this podcast since the 18th of October. We've done 25 episodes. We didn't even miss Christmas because I pre-booked all of those and I was determined to do that. I was determined to stay consistent and to carry on through. 

And I have to say this week it's been a slog and I didn't want to have to work during my holiday, and so I decided to ask myself a question that I often ask my clients, which is, “what do you need right now?” 

And to be honest, what I need right now is to not be beating myself up, to not be telling myself that I'm not ready for my holiday, that I haven't done enough to have my holiday. What I need right now is to just be on my holiday and feel okay with that. 

And so I've decided that the kind thing to do for myself today is just to record a super quick podcast that can go up for Monday, all set, and to be able to get on and enjoy my break.

At first my brain resisted that a bit because I felt like I owe you guys a full episode and that it would mean something about me and about the podcast if I let that slip. But then I decided, you know what, I think PhD students and academics need to see this too. They need to hear this side of how things go and to think about ways that you can be kind to yourself as well.

So I don't want you just to listen to this podcast and go, “oh, it's only five minutes this week. That's disappointing. But okay.” I want you to listen to this podcast and go, “okay, how can I be kind to myself?” What could I decide that I'm just not going to do during this break? And how can I be okay with that? 

Because you know what? I feel okay with this. Last week you had an amazing episode with Jamie Pei. You haven't listened to that one. We were talking about how to curate your best PhD life, and ironically, we were talking about how to create more ease and those sorts of feeling. And next week we have a super exciting collaboration. Both of those episodes are long. Both of those episodes are far longer than my standard podcasts. 

And, you know what, I've decided I'm okay with this. I have decided that I'm okay with spending my time up the field here with my beautiful boy who's wondering why I'm not throwing the ball for him right now. And, not recording more of a podcast. 

So what do you need to believe in order for you to be kind to yourself this week? What do you need to believe in order for you to decide that actually there are things that you are not going to do. I need to believe that I've added a whole ton of value in the podcast so far, and I do believe that, I think it's true. 

I need to believe that most of you won't have listened to all the episodes yet, and so there's plenty for you to be listening to over Easter, if you want to. I need to believe that rest and recuperation is just as important as productivity. 

I need to believe it doesn't mean anything about me, if there's a week where I only publish a short podcast. I need to believe that this doesn't mean I'm not consistent. I need to believe that this doesn't mean that this is the beginning of a slippery slope. That did cross my mind. “Oh gosh, if you let yourself off now and don't do an episode this week, will you start missing weeks in the future?”

And no. I believe that I won't do that. And the reason I believe is because I think this podcast is super useful and I think it's really useful for all of you. And so I believe in that bigger picture, and I don't think that I'm going to get to a stage where I just keep skipping it, because this is too important.

You guys need this. I enjoy it. And it's part of the bigger picture of the PhD Life Coach. So those are the things that I think I need to believe. One more just popped into my head. I need to believe that you guys need to see me living the life that I'm professing to you guys. Sometimes I think people think that once they get involved in self-help stuff and they start getting coaching, that they're never going to struggle again.

They're going to be able to coach themselves out of any situation. They're going to be able to get everything done. And that's just not what it's about. It's about sometimes being able to self coach yourself and make the changes that you need to make in order to achieve the things you want to achieve. But sometimes it's about accepting, you know what I'm tired. 

I'm tired. I've done tons of work on this business and, and that's okay. I started this business so that I could spend more time with the boy and my family and living a life that I wanted to live. And I think part of being authentic is sharing with you guys when I'm finding it difficult and when I choose being kind.

So this weekend I am not going to be stressing about needing to record a full length podcast ready for you guys to listen to or not listen to over your Easter breaks. I'm going to be helping Andy dig up a patio. I'm going to be hanging out with my stepdaughters. I'm going to be eating the Easter nests that my stepmom made for me, and I'm going to be telling myself I made the right decision.

Because that's the other thing, and we've talked about this on previous episodes, that a big part of decision making is then loving the decision you've made. So one thing I'm going to commit to you guys today is that I am going to believe, and I do believe, that doing this short episode is absolutely the best decision for me, right now.

And is the best decision for you guys too. And if my brain starts to offer, Ooh, maybe you should have done it. Maybe if you'd organized yourself more, you'd have had it up earlier, I'm going to tell myself, no, you made a decision. You made a decision with compassion and love for yourself and understanding of your business and the importance of the longevity of your business, and we're doing it from kindness today and also from kindness, if you guys are on YouTube with me, I'm going to leave the field before these clouds get any closer. 

So for all of you listening to this, what are you going to do for yourself this week to just lift the pressure off, make something slightly easier and tell yourself that it is the best decision that you could have made.

Whatever time of year you end up listening to this, I hope that resonates. Go cancel something, don't do it. And enjoy. You are more than your productivity and you deserve to be able to make decisions that are the best thing for you at that time. Take care, and I am going to attempt get Marley back from all the way down there.

Take care and tune in next week because we have a collaboration episode next week with the Struggling Scientists. Super excited. It's about science communication and how you can get over the things that might be preventing you getting involved in the public communication of science. It's going to be on my podcast, it's going to go on their podcast as well. It's the first full collaboration PhD Life Coach ever done. So we're super, super excited. Make sure you tune in. I will see you next week.