2.38 Why we should all be more compassionate and curious (One of the "Be Your Own Best Boss" Series)

If you beat yourself up or tell yourself that you don't know what you should do, then I am going to help you be a better boss to yourself! This is the first in a series of episodes identifying qualities that we all need to try and nurture so that we can be give ourselves the support we need to succeed and enjoy our lives. In this episode I talk about compassion and curiousity!

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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. My weekly podcast, The PhD Life Coach covers the most common issues experienced in universities, including procrastination, imposter syndrome, and having too much to do. I give inspiring and actionable advice and often have fun expert guests join me on the show. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you already listen, please find time to rate, review and tell your friends!

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.

#phd #academia #lecturer #professor #university #procrastination #overwhelm #amwriting #writing #impostersyndrome #timemanagement #support #coaching #highereducation #research #teaching #podcast #community

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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. My weekly podcast, The PhD Life Coach covers the most common issues experienced in universities, including procrastination, imposter syndrome, and having too much to do. I give inspiring and actionable advice and often have fun expert guests join me on the show. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you already listen, please find time to rate, review and tell your friends!

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.

#phd #academia #lecturer #professor #university #procrastination #overwhelm #amwriting #writing #impostersyndrome #timemanagement #support #coaching #highereducation #research #teaching #podcast #community

Transcript

My very first episode of this podcast, 78 episodes ago, which I'm very proud of, was about how to be your own best supervisor. And since then, that concept has really underpinned everything that I do in my podcast, in my coaching, and now in my group program, How to be your own Best Boss.

 In that first episode, I introduced you to seven qualities that I think help all of us be better bosses to ourselves, if we can just nurture them in ourselves. Since that episode, I've coached hundreds of clients, from new PhD students through to full professors, and all of what I said still stands. But I've also learned more. I've seen more, I've listened more and clients have taught me more about what's helping them and I've seen them develop over time. So I decided it was time for a more detailed look at how to be your own best boss. We're going to have a series of episodes, not every week, but kind of every other, every three weeks, where I'm going to pick a couple of qualities that I think we should be trying to nurture in ourselves when we're being our own best boss and talk about them in a little bit more detail. We're going to think not only about why these qualities will help us, but importantly, how and when we need to nurture them. What sorts of thoughts and feelings do we want to try and generate in order to take these actions that are in align with these great qualities?

Today's episode is the first in that series, and we're going to be thinking about why it's important to be compassionate and why it's important to be curious. 

So if you've ever beaten yourself up about something that you've done wrong, in inverted commas, or where you just got confused and didn't know what to do, and beat yourself up for that instead, then this is the perfect episode for you. 

Hello and welcome to episode 38 of season 2 of the PhD Life Coach. I am currently coming towards the end of the first iteration of my How To Be Your Own Best Boss program, which is a group coaching program for PhD students and postdocs where we really try and develop the qualities we need to be our own best boss. We've thought about how we're currently bossing ourselves and what challenges that can sometimes create. We've thought about how we can be a boss that can plan our time and our tasks in a way that feels fair and achievable and even exciting. Today we have a workshop where we're thinking about what happens when we don't do what we intended to do and we're going to finish up learning about how to plan for our weeks, our months and our quarters in a bit more detail and in a way that is informed by all of the coaching practice. It's been an amazing experience. We're going to be running it again in autumn. So if you missed out this time, don't miss out next time. But that whole experience has really made us all reflect on what qualities we want to have as our own bosses. 

And today, as I said, we're going to be thinking about compassion and about curiosity. So let's start with compassion. I often find that people think that compassion is the same thing as indulgence. But if we're compassionate to ourselves, we'll say, Oh, don't worry about that. It's okay. You don't need to work today. We can do it tomorrow. It doesn't matter that you missed the deadline. Not a problem. Let's just have a rest and eat some chocolate and do stuff tomorrow.

When in reality, compassion is being compassionate for our whole selves. It's being compassionate for the parts of us that make mistakes and the parts of us that need some love and care and attention, but it's also being compassionate for the us that wants to achieve our goals. It's not compassionate to our ambitious selves or to our determined selves if we always indulge when we want to rest or get distracted or have treats.

One of the ways you can distinguish between whether you're being compassionate or whether you're being indulgent is asking yourself, is what I'm proposing doing good only for present me, is it good for present me and future me? So, if I'm really tired, and I'm genuinely very, very tired, I perhaps haven't slept well, maybe I'm not well, maybe I've had a really heavy time of work recently.

If I'm genuinely really tired, then resting is good for present me, but it's also good for future me, because future me will actually benefit from me having energy and having taken this rest period. So it's good for me, it's good for future me too. Whereas on the days where I kind of feel a bit tired, but there's no particular reason I should be feeling tired, I'm not ill, I haven't missed out on my sleep, and I suspect that that tiredness is maybe at least in part resistance to the task I'm planning to do, i. e. I just don't really want to do it. The napping in that moment is good for present me, it means that I haven't got to do this task that I don't want to do, but it's not good for future me, because future me doesn't actually need that nap, we've judged, and future me needs this task done because otherwise she's going to have to wedge it in somewhere else that she didn't intend to. So by asking yourself, is it just good for present me or is it good for present me and future me, you can kind of distinguish a bit between compassion and indulgence.

Now, I've started reading the work of Kristen Neff, who specializes in the area of self compassion. And I really liked the way that she broke it down. She broke it down into three components of self kindness, rather than self judgment, common humanity, rather than isolation and mindfulness rather than over identification.

And I think these are really useful to think through in turn. So self kindness, what she really means is being gentle and understanding with ourselves and using, she says the word, soft and supportive tone when we speak to ourselves. I really like that notion of generating a soft and supportive way of speaking to ourselves.

So we're not telling ourselves that we're rubbish. We're not telling ourselves that we're lazy and we just have to pull ourselves together. We're not indulging ourselves. But we're just using a gentle voice to say, I understand that this is difficult. We are still going to do it. But I understand. How could you generate that sort of a tone when you're speaking to yourself? How different would it be if the voice inside your head came from self kindness rather than self judgement? 

By common humanity, what she means is recognising that the things that we beat ourselves up for are universal. Everybody procrastinates to a greater or lesser extent. Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody offends somebody sometimes. All of these things that we often take as massive moral failings when we do them are things that every single human being does and does quite regularly. When we can experience that common humanity, that universal experience, suddenly it reminds us that this isn't just about us being rubbish. This is normal. This is what people experience. This is part of that kind of bigger human experience. Now this element is why I love group coaching. If you haven't ever experienced group coaching, do make sure you're signed up for my newsletter and you'll get access to my free online group coaching once a month.

So the next one is beginning of june. So make sure you are signed up before that to get the invitation. Because in these group coachings, not only can you get one to one coaching yourself, but you get to see other people getting coached.

And so often the people who are watching people getting coached say, it was like I was talking, but it was coming out of her mouth. I couldn't believe that he was saying all the things that I've thought. And I had no idea other people felt. So don't get me wrong. I love my one to one coaching and people get a really long way with that sort of intensive one to one support, but there's something very special and something really helps you develop that sense of common humanity in group coaching.

And then the third element that Neff mentions is mindfulness. And this is here really about staying in the present moment, but not in the sense of that kind of traditional mindfulness that's associated with meditation and those sorts of things, but staying with the specific incidents that we're thinking about.

Often when we're not compassionate to ourselves, we take a single mistake now and make it mean a hundred different things. We make it mean things about us as a person, about us in the future, our prospects, whether we're going to finish our PhDs, whether we're ever going to become a professor, whatever it is.

When with self compassion, if we can stay mindful, what we're doing is we're staying right here in the moment and just dealing with this one thing that isn't going so well, this one thing that is feeling like a struggle. It's avoiding self identification. So a lot of my clients tell me, I'm a perfectionist. I've never been someone who sticks to my plans. And these very, Fixed identities. These, this is just who I am. I am someone who procrastinates. I am someone who's a perfectionist. I am someone who doesn't do what they say make it way harder to change things than if we can stay right here in the moment in a mindful and compassionate way and say, okay, this time I didn't write for my full writing block. But I can do this now, but I can do that differently next time. 

Now for each of these qualities that I'm going to talk about over this series, I want us to also think about that self coaching model. If you don't know what I'm talking about at all, I will take you through it a little bit today, but there's a whole episode on how to coach yourself in the archive. So do make sure you go back and check that out. But the self coaching model has five components. Circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results.

And it proposes that our circumstances are broadly neutral. At least they're certainly factual. Our thoughts are the cognitive story we tell about them. Our feelings are the emotions we experience in our body. Our actions are the things that we do, either with our bodies or with our minds, and the results are the consequences of those actions.

And what I want to do is think about what types of circumstances is it useful to be compassionate, what thoughts might you want to think if you're trying to be compassionate to yourself, what feelings those thoughts might generate, and what actions and results you might take and get as a consequence of thinking and feeling those things. And we'll do this for each of the different qualities that we talk about.

So when should we be compassionate? Now, I think all the time is the answer to that, but some of the really specific times that I want you to think about are when you've experienced setbacks, where there are delays that are outside of your control. Maybe there's things you can't do in the laboratory, or access you can't get to something, or your supervisor's taking more time than you would like them to, to get you feedback, for example.

So any of those sorts of setbacks. When you've made a mistake. of some description, so where there's something gone wrong that maybe is your fault, either knowingly or unknowingly. Maybe when you've said something embarrassing, or maybe when you're unhappy with your progress. I want you to have a think about whether there's other times in your life that it might have been useful to be more self compassionate, but those are the ones that I identified.

And then some thoughts that come to me that feel compassionate and kind in this setting are things like everybody makes mistakes. This doesn't mean anything about you as a person or as an academic. This might not have gone well, but I can do the next thing in a way that feels good. Then this final one, and this one sometimes isn't true for my clients, or they don't think it is, but I think it's a useful one to try and nurture. I trust myself to decide whether I actually need a rest or whether I should push on. And if that doesn't feel true to you at the moment, I want you to think about how you can kind of develop that as an ability.

Now, when you think about those thoughts, what sorts of emotions come up for you? For me, I thought of things like calm, understood, and worthy, cared for even. Those sorts of feelings. What comes up for you? And now for me, when I feel calm, understood, and worthy, the actions I'm likely to take, I'm much more likely to think about the things I've done right as the things I've done wrong.

I'm much less likely to kind of spiral and catastrophize and make this all into a massive deal. I'm more likely to correct, in inverted commas, my mistakes. So if we're feeling self compassionate and we're telling ourselves, everybody makes mistakes, it's so much easier to go and apologize to somebody or go and make up for something than it is if we're telling ourselves that the fact we've made a mistake makes us a bad person and that we'll never finish what we're trying to do.

It makes it much easier to take the next step, to get on with the next thing we needed to do, and it makes it much better, and it makes it much easier to take a break that actually helps, to take a break when we need it and that will make us feel rejuvenated rather than as a way of just avoiding our tasks. 

And think about those actions. If you took those actions regularly, what would happen? The next step would get done. You'd make a task feel good. You'd right the mistake, or at least you'd avoid making the same mistake again in the future. You'd build trust in yourself. You'd take breaks that you need, and you'd move your project forward.

So I want you to think about that model, that all is underpinned by self compassion, and how different it would be than if we did a model that was driven by self judgment. When we have self judgmental thoughts in those exact same circumstances, we usually feel guilt, shame, dread, these sorts of emotions, which we know will probably lead to either procrastination or frantic action. And we know that those results are never good. 

So I think this really illustrates why self compassion is so important, both for how we feel and making our experiences more pleasant, but also for our actual achieving goals and getting things done too. I want you to have a ponder. Do you think it's desirable to be self compassionate? Is there anything that worries you about being self compassionate? Let me know. If you're on my newsletter, you can always email me straight back and let me know your different thoughts and feelings and who knows, I may even make you a podcast in the future, answering your questions.

Also, now that there's a lot of podcast episodes out there, nearly 80 like I said, it can sometimes be hard to navigate yourself around them. So if you're feeling like you really want to develop more self compassion, I'm going to put in the show notes some links to some other episodes that might link well to this notion.

So things like what to do when you feel a bit bleurgh, how to stop beating yourself up and learn from past mistakes, and so on. So the show notes are always on my website, the phdlifecoach. com under podcast. If you go there, you'll find the show notes and I'll put a few links of some suggestions in there for you, if you want to follow this one up further.

Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful.

I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately.

To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with.

So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. 

The second quality I want to think about today is curiosity. And I think this is one that I rarely hear people think about. We're often curious about our research, about, you know, our teaching, maybe. But we're rarely curious about the process by which we do things, don't do things, and how we can change them.

Now, curious is very different from judgmental. Same as self compassion is different to judgmental. When we're being judgmental, we really shut down the problem solving part of our brain. We tell ourselves these are fixed things. They're shortcomings. They're not something that we can do anything about. Or if we do do something about them, it's through kind of discipline of forcing ourselves and all this stuff that just doesn't sound fun or interesting at all. 

Curiosity is a much more open approach. Rather than saying, Oh, you never do your writing blocks, we've missed another one. You're going to get really behind. We're saying, Oh, it's interesting that whenever we put a writing block in the morning, we really struggle to get going and don't often start until a bit later on. I don't know why that is. What is it that gets in the way? And what this does is it engages that creative problem solving part of our brain. It engages the part of our brain that wants to solve little puzzles.

We can also be curious about our thoughts and feelings. Sometimes we just get mad about something. You know, we're cross that our supervisor hasn't sent us something. We're cross that our boss has allocated us a new admin role without telling us about it, whatever it is. And we don't really get curious about why it bothers us so much.

What is it about the fact your supervisor hasn't sent you feedback that's upsetting you? Because sometimes, it's because deep down we're worried that this is going to hold us up, it's going to mean that we're not going to be able to finish on time.

Other times, it's because we feel like it's a sign that they don't care, they're not interested, we're not a priority. If we can sort of be curious and dig into it a little bit, it's so much easier to fix because I don't know about you, I can't make your supervisor get feedback to you more quickly.

Supervisors who are listening to this, I get it. I was often late with feedback. You guys are so overloaded. I understand. But if we can't change the other person's behaviour, then what we can do is think about how can we protect ourselves from the kind of negative impact. And it's a very different problem if we're worried that the feedback is going to mean that we can't get done on time, versus whether we mean that the lack of feedback means that they're not interested, they don't care, or we're not a priority. We can look after ourselves in very different ways if we understand what the underlying emotions are here.

Curiosity for me is lighthearted, it's solution focused, it's creative, and it's open. So not only does it actually helps us to change things. It actually feels really good. It's really nice to be curious. It's why a lot of us have ended up in academia in the first place, because we're really curious about different things.

If we can turn that curiosity in on ourselves to think, Ooh, how can I make this easier for me to do? Ooh, I wonder in what ways I could make this more fun to do. I wonder if there's any different ways of writing this that I haven't thought of. Then suddenly we're opening up this really enjoyable part of our lives.

So let's apply it into the self coaching model like we did with self compassion and think about what circumstances it would be useful to be curious. The things that came up for me are when you're not sure what's gone wrong, where things just aren't working and you don't know why. When you're struggling with something and you don't know why it feels so difficult. When you're not sticking to things and you don't know why. When you're choosing between different options, so curiosity can be really useful in decision making. 

Now, often, just as an aside, often people don't even register they've got a problem with decision making. So, if any of you are out there thinking, I don't know what the right way to do this is, whether it's writing, whether it's teaching, whether it's your promotion materials. If you're thinking, I don't know the right way, the problem is not that you don't know the right way. The problem is that you're not recognizing this as a decision that you need to make. There is no right way to structure a paper. There is no right way to frame your promotions materials. What there is, though, is a series of decisions that you need to make based on your own best judgment at the moment and be able to justify those decisions. 

And in that situation, curiosity really helps, because suddenly we go from, I don't know how to do this, to, I wonder how I could do this. I wonder what options there are. If I did it like this, what would it be like? If I did it like that, what would it be like? I often think with writing, people would be way better off, when they're saying I don't know how to write it, they'd be way better off just writing it four times, in four different ways and seeing which one they like. And most people would say, well, that doesn't sound very efficient, but I can assure you it takes a lot less time to write something four different ways than it does to sort of battle to get yourself to the desk, procrastinate for weeks on end, tell yourself you're terrible, tell yourself you're useless, and all of these things. Way easier to go, I'm going to spend an hour writing it this way, an hour writing it that way, and see what works out best. So bringing curiosity to decision making can be really useful.

So what sorts of thoughts help us to feel curious? Things like, I wonder why it's like this? This is an interesting problem to explore. So reminding ourselves this isn't some massive crisis we've got to fix here, it's just quite an interesting problem. Am I better off writing in the mornings or the afternoon? I wonder. Am I better off talking about this thing first or that? Am I better off focusing this entire paper on this one thing or including all three? I wonder. How interesting to explore it. Thoughts like there could be a different way of doing this. Sometimes when we're feeling stuck it's because we're really fixating on it has to be like this, whereas actually if we can tell ourselves No, could there be a different way of doing this? I think there could be, we often identify more. When we're thinking about how we respond, so you get an email from somebody that's upset you, for example, you're having thoughts that make you upset, think about, I wonder how I could respond to this. What options are there? 

The other one, and this kind of relates across to self compassion, is, it's okay that you don't know, I can figure this out. So something about curiosity that has a certain optimism, about it that I don't know, but I can figure it out. It reminds me a lot of one of my old coaching clients who used to say, I don't know how to do that, but I'm a researcher, so I will research it. I just thought that was an amazing mindset to have. 

Now when we're generating curiosity through these sorts of thoughts, what types of feelings do we generate? I identified things like interested, inquisitive, open, hopeful, those sorts of very open and optimistic sort of vibes. I wonder how it feels for you?

And now I want you to think, if you were feeling hopeful and optimistic and open and creative, what things might you do? Well, you might braindump all the reasons that this might be bothering you at the moment. You might ask different people what approaches they take and think about whether they're relevant for you or not. You could speculate wildly about different approaches without judging them.

There's an old story, I don't know how much it's based in truth, but there's an old story that post it notes came about because people were talking about qualities of glue, and what things it could be useful for, and what types of qualities they would want it to have, and they were kind of trying to be as open and, optimistic and kind of curious as possible. And one of the things that somebody identified was not very sticky glue. And they said it as a joke, because in most circumstances, it's not very sticky glue would be incredibly unuseful, but from that open curious place, they identified that actually, Post it notes and unsticky glue is incredibly useful and has made them billions of pounds. So the other action we take is that we believe other ways of doing this. We believe that other ways of reacting are possible. 

And now when we do those actions, what results do we get? We come up with creative solutions. We get better insights into ourselves. We create links with other people because when we discuss these things with other people, not only are we likely to find solutions that we want to try out, we also get better understanding of them as people. We start to feel a bit more connected to them and we give ourselves a bunch of options. So those are the reasons that I think generating curiosity can be so powerful. And I have to say, I started with these two for a reason. If you're going to pick any two qualities, self compassion and curiosity will take you a really, really long way.

I would love to hear your views on it. Make sure you're on my email list. Jump on, let me know what your thoughts about this. Have a think about what barriers are there to being self compassionate, to being curious. How could you overcome those barriers? How could you make it a little bit easier to be self compassionate and to be curious?

Again, I'll put some links to some podcasts that if you want to build your curiosity might be really useful for you. So for example, how accepting where you are is the first step to getting where you want to be. That was one of my very early episodes that kind of relates to this topic. I also have ones about how to make decisions and I have a great one about how to curate your life with Jamie Pei, with one of my guests that came on. So, make sure if you want to see those, either dig through the archive yourself, or I'll put links in the show notes for those too. This is the beginning of our series. There's going to be five episodes like this where I talk about two different qualities. I'll intersperse them with some of my more traditional episodes and some of the guests that I've got lined up for you all and I'd love to know what you think. Can you guess what qualities are coming up? Jump on my social media. Let me know what qualities you think I should talk about. At the moment, I've got 10 identified, but who knows? Maybe you'll come up with some that I haven't thought of. Let me know. Anyway, 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.