2.41 Why we all need to be more encouraging and accepting of ourselves

This is for anyone in academia who struggles with self-criticism and judgement (ie most people!) My series "how to be a better boss to yourself" introduces 10 qualities that we need to nurture in ourselves to support ourselves to achieve our goals and enjoy our lives. In this episode I talk about being more encouraging and accepting of ourselves. We think about why it's important, how to do it, and what impact it would have in our lives! If you like this one, make sure you also catch up with part one where we talk about being more compassionate and more curious.

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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

How have you been speaking to yourself so far today? If you've been critical or judgmental, you are in exactly the right place. This is part two of my little mini series on the 10 qualities we need to be better bosses to ourselves. If you haven't listened to the first episode on this, don't worry at all. They don't come in any particular order, but do go back and check it out at some point. In that episode, we thought about why we needed to be more curious and compassionate. Today, we are thinking about being encouraging and accepting.

Hello and welcome to episode 41 of season two of the PhD Life Coach. The two qualities I'm going to be talking about today sound quite related to each other, encouraging and accepting. They both sound nice, don't they? They both sound like things that we would want from the people around us. Interestingly, though, when I talk to people and I ask them what do they love about their supervisors, who have been the most influential leaders in their lives, who have they most enjoyed working with, encouraging is one that comes up often. People often say they were really encouraging. They made me do more than I ever realized I could. They made me feel like I could get on and actually achieve things. But people rarely mention accepting. They rarely come up with that as a quality that they have found useful in the past, and I think it's because there's a lot of misunderstanding about what we mean by accepting. But I think the two of these go together really well. So we are going to think about how we can nurture our encouraging side, how we speak to ourselves, how we treat ourselves, and how we can nurture this more accepting side as well.

We're going to have the same sort of format as we did in the first episode, where we're going to think about what do we even mean by encouraging and accepting. We're going to think about what circumstances that might be useful to channel, what sorts of thoughts you might have if you're being encouraging and you're being accepting, what emotions you might feel, what actions you might take and what results that you might experience. 

Now, if you're not sure why I'm talking about circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results, do make sure you check out my episode on how to coach yourself as well. This is the basis of the self coaching model, which is the sort of underpinnings of a lot of the work I do. And essentially it suggests that the thoughts we have, the way we speak to ourselves, influences our emotions, which influence our actions, which create our results. And so by thinking about the way we speak to ourselves and the thoughts that we allow to stay in our brain, we can fundamentally change the way we feel, the things we do, and the results that we can generate in our lives.

 We're going to start with encouraging. Now I chose all these qualities really specifically and when I came to encouraging, I was choosing between encouraging and motivating. People often talk about how someone is motivating or that they want to be more motivated. And I always feel slightly uncomfortable around the word motivated. And I was really trying to figure out why that is. What is it about that version that just feels like it could be a bit off? And I threw my mind back to all my time working in a sports science department, listening to my sports psychology friends talk about their research, I realized it's because motivation isn't purely a good thing, in inverted commas. Motivation is simply being able to influence somebody to behave in a particular way. We motivate ourselves to behave in a particular way. And there's ways of doing that that are really good for our psychology and really good for our sort of sustained goal attainment. And there are others that can be really harmful. And I'm going to do a whole episode about motivation in the future. I'm thinking about what types of motivation we might want to generate and how we would do that. 

In contrast, when we look at encouraging, I looked it up in the dictionary to try and understand Why it was a much more kind of purer word, a much more wholesome in its entirety word. And the definition was making you feel more confidence or hope. When you're encouraged, you feel confidence and hope. And I thought, you know what, that is the vibe we're going for here. We want ourselves to feel as though we believe in ourselves, like we can be optimistic for our futures, optimistic for our abilities to both achieve the things we want to achieve, but also to look after ourselves in the process. So being an encouraging boss is reminding ourselves that we can do things. 

Often we forget the stuff that we've achieved in the past, or we somehow sort of write that off as easy or a fluke now in retrospect, but now this next thing we can't do. Being encouraging, we remind ourselves how important it is to believe in ourselves, to believe that we can do things. We can experience hard times and be okay. We can do tasks that feel difficult until we overcome them. 

Now, if you've listened to my previous episode, you might think that encouraging sounds a lot like compassion, and it really does. It's a similar sort of vibe. But for me, encouraging is a more energized version. So for me, compassion is kind of, it's okay that you find this hard. Those sorts of sentiments. Okay. It's all right that this is challenging. We can look after ourselves and work our way through it. Encouraging is more like, come on, let's go. You can do this. You've done things like this before. We can do this next bit. Let's get on. So it's a much more kind of upbeat, energized version. 

I want you to think about when in your life you've wanted a little bit more encouragement, or when in fact you've received a bit more encouragement from other people, so that you can kind of learn to channel that for yourself. Now the circumstances that I've identified where it could be good to be more encouraging are things like if you've got a difficult task to do. Maybe you've got a deadline that's feeling too close and you really need to kind of smash on and get it. Maybe where you're feeling nervous about a task, you're worried about how it's going to go. Or where you've got a task that's just taking a really long time, and you just have to keep turning up to get it done. Can you think of other situations where it would be useful to be encouraging? Those are ones that I came up with that I think a lot of PhD students and academics at every stage of their career experience.

So what types of thoughts might we have when we're being encouraging to ourselves? Things like, I've done hard things before, or it's going to feel awesome once this is done. I'm going to feel so good to have completed this task. Things like, I reckon I can smash through this task today. So identifying something manageable and encouraging yourself with the belief that you can get through that. 

We can also be encouraging more generally about kind of our sense of self. I am someone who gets stuff done. This one was a really funny one for me because I used to believe that I was someone who procrastinated a lot, that I was somebody who got overwhelmed and didn't finish projects. All of those things are true. There are a whole bunch of projects that I've never finished, usually because I start 47 million projects and then wonder why I don't finish them. But that was the story that was uppermost in my mind, that I was someone who didn't finish tasks. And it wasn't until I was really reflecting on my career and all the things that I have done, that I was like, I am absolutely someone who gets stuff done. I got an awful lot of different things done. And anybody listening to this podcast has also got a lot of things done as well. By virtue of where you are, whether you're a first year PhD student or a senior professor, whatever position you're in, you have got a lot of stuff done. How more encouraging would it feel if you focused on telling yourself that you are someone who gets something done rather than spending more time looking at the things that you haven't done or haven't done yet.

Another encouraging thought we can have is reminding ourselves how far we've come. Often we spend more time looking forwards at the things that we still need to do and haven't yet achieved, rather than looking back at the things that we have done in the past. Encouraging thoughts can be things like, I've come so far with this, let's just do a little bit more. We can do the next step.

Now when you think those thoughts, it's going to feel awesome when it's done. I can smash through this today. I'm someone who gets things done. We've come so far. I've done hard things before. What sorts of emotions do you think you would feel? If you can really think those, and believe them, and remember we're only going to choose thoughts that we actually believe, what emotions do you think you'd feel?

I feel things like strong, and ready, and energized, and supported, and appreciated. Things like that. Are there any others that you experience? If you're feeling things like disbelief, what we want to do is go back and re evaluate some of those thoughts. Because none of this is about telling ourselves to believe thoughts that we don't believe. It's to remind ourselves of thoughts that we sometimes don't spend much time thinking, but that we do believe are true. So if your gut is, I feel surprised because that's not the way I feel, you know. Let's go back. Let's reevaluate those thoughts. Come to something that feels encouraging, but also plausible.

Now, if you're feeling strong and energized and supported and appreciated, what types of actions are you likely to take in these situations? You're probably going to identify quick wins and get on with it. You're probably going to spend time reminding yourself of the things you've done before, reminding yourself of what you've got done already, you're probably going to do something like set a timer and get on with it. You're probably going to procrastinate less and actually start these tasks. And when you've done them, or when you've done a portion of them, you're much more likely to recognize it and praise yourself for having done it. And if you take those actions, you become exactly what you said. You become someone who gets stuff done, and you become somebody who recognizes all the stuff that you've got done. I want you to ponder for yourself. 

Are there other consequences you think that would come from you being encouraging? Maybe you worry about imposter syndrome. Maybe you worry about whether you deserve to be here. Maybe if you could nurture encouraging thoughts about your right to be here, for example, your right to be in academia, your right to study what you're studying, perhaps you would feel a little bit more like you belong. Maybe you would be able to encourage yourself to believe that you have a place here and that you can contribute to your area of academia.

Now the people on my mailing list, you will get some further reflective questions to think about to really ponder how you can nurture this more encouraging approach. If you're not already on my email list, you'll hear about that in a second and how to sign up. If this is something you really struggle with, I also have a bunch more episodes. that you might want to go out and listen to after you finish listening to this one. I've mentioned the last one of this series where we were thinking about curiosity and compassion. You might also want to listen to the amazing one with Professor Jenn Cumming, looking at how to review your year, the strength based way. There's things like what to do when you know you're behaving like a toddler. Sounds like a funny one, but when we're in that kind of stroppy mood and we just don't want to do anything, there's some really important tips in there about how we can be more encouraging. There's a really pragmatic one about why we shouldn't cross things off our to do list and what we should do instead. So that's really about recognizing all the things that we actually do get done. And there's another episode called why we should be more proud of ourselves and how to do it. So those can really help you hone your encouragement skills. You can find those. If you just scroll through the podcast, wherever you get your podcast or on YouTube, but I will also link them in the show notes. There's always show notes on my website, the phdlifecoach. com slash podcast. And you can find all the links there and the links to the YouTubes and the podcast episodes.

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.

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Now the next quality I want us to think about is being more accepting and this is one where I've really kind of thrown around what word I wanted to use in my very first episode how to be your own best supervisor where I came up with ten of these qualities. I called it let it go because I couldn't think of think quite what a word would be. I wasn't really fully sure. Sounded a little bit Frozen to me and I wasn't really sure that summed up quite what I meant. And then I went to kind of "free thinking", but that wasn't it either because that kind of overlapped a bit with creativity, which we're going to talk about in a future episode, that wasn't quite what we meant to, but I decided that I was going to settle on "accepting" because really what we're thinking about is accepting our faults. Accepting where we are. Accepting our mistakes and embarrassments. Accepting other people. Accepting other people's judgments and other people's ways of doing things. 

And I'm going to jump in with a bit of a disclaimer before we start. Some people dislike accepting because they think that accepting is the same as, like, settling. It's like just being passive and going, Oh well, if it's like this, it's like this, there's nothing I can do about it. That's not what we mean by accepting. We are going to be a form of accepting that is accepting our own humanity. I talked about this a little bit in the compassion episode where I talked about Kristen Neff's work. It's about accepting our own humanity, our own capacity to make mistakes and still be okay and accepting that other people do things differently. It is not about accepting unacceptable behavior. It is not about just shutting up and putting up. It's about choosing, am I accepting this thing or am I actively resisting this thing? And therefore, how do I want to behave? When we can accept where we are, it's much easier to then make decisions about what do we want to change, either in our actual circumstances or in our own thoughts, feelings and behaviours, in order to help us move forward. When we're more accepting, we spend less time moaning about how terrible things are, and more time either moving on within those constraints if it's something we can't change, or taking the steps to actually address it if it's something that we can change.

So what sort of circumstances can you think of where it'd be useful to be accepting? I thought of circumstances where other people might judge you, where you do something that might be embarrassing or where you made a mistake, where maybe you don't work the same way as other people. I often have clients who either because they are neurodivergent or because they have dyslexia or other disabilities, or simply because it's just the way they like it, that work in different way to others and often they spend a lot of time beating themselves up about that, that they should be able to work in a more focused way, in a more structured way, in a faster way, in a more considered way, whatever it is, rather than accepting the ways that each of us are different and each of us work in different ways.

Other circumstances are when other people aren't behaving the way we think they should. Now, this isn't where they're behaving in completely inappropriate ways, I don't mean that. But if you think your supervisor should be kinder in their comments, or they should respond more quickly, or they should give you more encouragement. And it's not that they're being mean, it's not that they're being horrible, they're not just not being exactly how you think they should be. Sometimes there's a big argument there for being more accepting that they are how they are and we get to look after ourselves within that context. 

Another place where it's useful to be accepting is when things are just taking longer than we think they're going to. It can be really easy to allow that to be really frustrating, to allow that to mean something about us and our abilities and all those sorts of things, when in reality, some things just take time, and some things just are difficult, and accepting that can make it a lot easier to keep going with it. 

So, what thoughts might we have if we're being an accepting boss to ourselves? Things like, other people are allowed to have their thoughts. Other people are allowed to do things the way they do things, even if I don't think it's the right way. They're allowed to do things like that. It's okay for me to do things in a way that works for me. That doesn't mean we never learn from other people, that we never look for inspiration from others and try it out to see if it works for us. But it's okay for me to work through something in the way that is working for me. Accepting thoughts can also be things like, everyone makes mistakes. I don't have to be perfect. And those things can really uncover some deep beliefs. I have so many people who believe, I don't know if you can hear. There's a fly in my office while I'm recording this. I've tried to find him. I've stopped talking a number of times. Tried to find him to get him out. Can't see him. Can hear him though. If you can hear him, I'm working on being accepting of the fly. Accepting imperfection. Accepting the fact you might be able to hear a light buzz behind me. I'm hoping my microphone doesn't pick it up. But anyway, I'm channeling some accepting thoughts here too. My thought is this podcast can still be enormously useful for my listeners, even if they can hear a fly in the background. I hope it's not too annoying if you can hear it. 

So as I was saying, for I was rudely interrupted by the fly. We have a lot of ingrained beliefs that other people don't need to be perfect, other people can make mistakes, but when we do it's somehow terrible. And it's okay if those are the first thoughts that come up. They come from a lot of different places in our background, our cultures, the sort of the histories in our families and all these things. But we get to choose the second thought. We get to choose the one that we stay. And as long as you cognitively believe that I don't need to be perfect because I'm a human being just like other people, then we can remind ourselves of that. We can be compassionate, like in the previous episode, and say it's okay that you sort of deep down believe you should be perfect, but you also know that you don't need to be.

Now, if we think these thoughts regularly, What sorts of feelings will we experience? I think sometimes the feelings can be things like relieved, especially if you're somebody who is usually super critical and super judgmental of yourself. It can be quite relieving to go, you know what? It's okay. This doesn't have to be perfect. It can be quite calming and help us be like, it's okay. We are where we are. We move on from here. I think it can also help us be pragmatic. I quite like a sort of slightly flippant vibe of, oh well, it's about as good as it's gonna be, so let's go. That kind of accepting, yeah, it'll do, that's fine, happy days. Let's move on. And if we can channel those sorts of feelings, we're much less likely to dwell on past mistakes. We're less likely to sort of ruminate about what other people are thinking. We're more likely to find a compromise that works, right? If we've got things that aren't exactly as we want them to be, our supervisor, our colleagues aren't behaving exactly how we want them to, but it's still within the realms of being okay. Not being like against regulations or anything. Then by accepting that we can then figure out ways to work with them. If we know that our colleagues are always late to our meetings, we can make plans to always have something to read in that time when we're waiting for them to come on, for example. We can plan for it rather than making it a massive drama. If we can be accepting that we sometimes make mistakes, it's much easier to then make up for those mistakes. Often I see clients who feel really shameful or embarrassed about the fact that they've made a mistake or even that they've just not replied to an email and then they don't address it because they're too embarrassed to talk to the other person and in many ways, we end up making it worse because now we've not replied to their email and we've not replied to tell them we've not replied to their email, and it's become this whole thing rather than being able to go, oh yeah, sorry, my bad, I missed that. Da da da. Crack on. Okay, when we can be accepting, we're much more likely to just be like, oh yeah, I made a mistake and this is what I need to do to fix it.

We're much more likely to move on quickly to what actually needs to happen now. We're more likely to focus on the current moment and enjoy it. If we accept that we're in the midst of a busy teaching period, for example, we might spend less time beating ourselves up about the fact that we're not writing and more time figuring out a short burst where we could write And maybe even enjoying the phase of the year for what it is, enjoying that teaching and that student interaction.

We're also much more likely to decide to do things that are a little bit risky. If we know we're very critical of ourselves, we know we're very self judgmental, and we know that we're someone who beats ourselves up if we make mistakes, we're much less likely to want to submit that paper for comment. We're much less likely to put ourselves forward to do a presentation or to get an award or any of these things, because we know that if we're not successful, we're going to be horrible to ourselves, whereas if we know, well, if I'm not successful, then I accept that too and I'll look after myself and we'll move on, then it's so much easier. Yeah, I might make a mistake. Okay, happy days. The reviewer will tell me I've made a mistake and then I'll fix it. Great, we like that. That gives us more information. If we're accepting that sometimes reviewers are not as constructive as we might like them to be, it's a lot easier to then just decide how we want to respond to it, rather than getting really angry about the fact that it shouldn't be like that. If we're accepting that we might do things in different ways to other people, we're much more likely to come up with some novel and interesting ways to do the things that we want to do. We're much more likely to actually get on and do them in the ways that work for us, rather than telling ourselves we should be able to do this task like a, inverted commas, normal person.

And what results do we get from those actions? Much less wasted emotion. There's nothing wrong with negative emotions. If they are the consequence of thoughts that you're like, you know what? I stand by those. In my current situation, these are entirely appropriate and I think it's okay to feel disappointed or to feel frustrated or whatever. But when we're accepting, we're much less likely to kind of whip up drama and have unnecessary emotions about things that aren't even true or aren't even realistic. We're more likely to come up with quicker solutions. We're more likely to find new approaches. We're more likely to try new things with much less drama. And imagine the outcomes that you would get if you were able to submit to journals without any big drama. Volunteer to do talks, to do something new without all the drama. Because you accept that, yeah, it might go well, it might go badly. That's okay. I'll be fine.

So again, people on my newsletter, you'll get a series of reflective questions that will help you really think through how you feel about being a more accepting boss to yourself. And that can really help you sort of take stuff you listen to in a podcast from being something you listen to once and go, "Oh, that's interesting" to something that you can really start to embed in your own self talk and behavior. If you found this part of the episode useful, there's a bunch of other episodes that are related to this topic of being more accepting. Things like how to get back to work after a break, how to stop comparing yourself, what to do if you already feel behind, how to seek the help you need, how to stop beating yourself up and learn from past mistakes instead, how to be kind to yourself, and one of my very early episodes, how accepting where you are is the first step to getting to where you want to be. Make sure you check some of those out, find them in the podcast app or on YouTube, or they're all linked on my website too. I really hope you found today useful. We've now covered four of our 10 qualities. So we've looked at compassion. We've looked at curiosity. Now we've looked at encouraging and accepting. Keep an eye out for a few weeks time when we do the next two, which are resourceful and intentional. Super, super useful qualities that often we don't think too much about. So make sure you don't miss those. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please share it with your friends and colleagues and students. I really want to get this out to as many people as possible. 

I also have some exciting news about my membership program. So definitely make sure you're on my email list because they are going to be the ones that find out about this opportunity first. Thank you all for listening and 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.