2.44 What to do when you get contradictory advice

PhD students and academics often wonder how to handle contradictory advice and how to decide what to do. In this episode I think about what makes contradictory advice feel so challenging and I give you some questions to ask yourself to help you decide what you're going to do. 

****

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

****
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

One thing that never fails to amaze me in this job is how much I can have the exact same conversation with new PhD students and with senior academics. This became really apparent in the last few weeks, where I had different people tell me about receiving conflicting advice. For some, it was first year PhD students whose supervisors were disagreeing on what the focus of their thesis should be. Others, it was senior academics who were getting contradictory reviews from journal articles and from grant submissions, or even advice about what to do with their careers, what to focus on in order to get promoted. And in all cases, people were asking me, what do I do? If these people say I should do this and those people say I should do that, how do I reconcile that and actually make a decision? It's really hard. What am I meant to do? And so having had some great coaching conversations about these topics, I thought I would bring it all together in a podcast episode for you guys.

Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach where we help you get less overwhelmed, stop beating yourself up and start living the life you want. I'm your host Dr Vicki Burns, ex professor and Certified Life Coach. Whether you're a brand new PhD student or an experienced academic, I'm here to show you that thriving in academia can be a whole lot easier than it feels right now.

Let's go.

Hello and welcome to episode 44 of Season 2 of the PhD Life Coach. And today we're going to be thinking about how to handle conflicting advice. There's tons of different places that this happens. You might be getting advice about your actual research, like what to do, what archives to use, what data to collect, what methods to use. You might be getting advice about what things to emphasise, about how long something should be, about the style of your writing, whether it's too formal or not formal enough. You might be getting advice about the process, how to organise your time, how much time to spend doing different things, how to build your career, what to put your time into. Which jobs you should apply for when you're ready to get promoted. There's a ton of different decisions that need to be made at every stage of an academic career. And there are always people willing to give you their opinion on it. 

So what we're going to do today is think about why is it difficult when you get contradictory advice and some questions you can ask yourself to help you figure it out. If you find this episode useful, I am sure you will, I suggest you also go back to season one and listen to episode 23 where I talked about how to make decisions that you love. Whilst it doesn't directly touch on the stuff we're doing today about contradictory advice, it does take you through my favourite framework for making decisions and I think you'll find it really useful.

So why is it difficult when we receive contradictory advice? The reason I think it's difficult is most of us think that when we receive advice, we should be able to act on that advice. That we should be able to sort of directly take, someone says, Oh, you should do this. And we could go, Oh yes, so we should, and then do it. And when you then receive advice from two different people, often who, both whose opinions you value who say to do different things, it's like, well, what am I meant to do if they think I should do this and they think I should do that? It sort of undermines this belief that other people's opinions are somehow right and valid because they can't both be right. if they're saying different things, or should we be able to find a way in which they are both right and come up with some sort of solution that meets them both? And that sort of cognitive dissonance where our belief that other people's opinions should be right, and now they're in contrast to each other, it forces us to realize that that's not the case. That other people's opinions aren't necessarily right any more than our opinions are right, and it can be really uncomfortable to be confronted with that. 

It can also lead to a position where we tell ourselves that if they say this and they say that, then I just don't know what to do. And those of you who are regular listeners will have heard me talk before about the paralyzing effect of telling yourself that you don't know, telling yourself that you're not sure what to do and ending the conversation there. Because when we're telling ourselves, we don't know, we then don't figure it out. And there's nothing like contradictory advice to make us feel like we just don't know what to do.

I think there's also an emotional element to this as well, whereby we often feel somewhat grateful for advice. So, particularly, let's put to one side kind of reviewers of papers and grants, we'll talk about those in a second. But when we're thinking about more general advice, perhaps more interpersonal advice, it's quite common to feel a sense of gratitude and almost obligation. This person cares enough to have given us their opinion, to tell us what they think we should do. And if we do something different, we're in some way disregarding or rejecting their advice. They might be disappointed. They might be cross with us. If we're then proved to be wrong, that we. that maybe the thing we did didn't work out and maybe the thing that they'd suggested would have done, then we might feel regret, we might feel guilt, they might tell us they told us so. There's all these emotions associated with taking advice and then doing something different than what the advice was. And the truth is none of those things are inevitable. The truth is we can think about how we want to respond in the event that we do this and it doesn't work out. But in the absence of that sort of self regulation, it's really not surprising that conflicting advice can feel so challenging to deal with. 

Now, once we understand that, once we understand that it's really not surprising that it feels uncomfortable and we don't have to feel bad about the fact that it feels uncomfortable to receive conflicting advice, then we can start moving into a more curious place of figuring out, what can I do about it? How can I look at this as a problem to be solved, as a decision to be made, accepting that it still feels uncomfortable and that's okay, but that doesn't prevent me from actually making a decision about these things.

Because once we're in that place, once we see this as like a little brain puzzle to be solved, a decision to be made, then suddenly there's a bunch of questions we can work through, a bunch of kind of criteria to think about that can frame that decision. 

The first I want you to think about is, was this solicited or unsolicited advice? So, whenever we submit to a journal, we submit our thesis to our examiners, grants, all these things, we are essentially soliciting advice from the reviewers. We might not like it, we might not want to be getting it, but we are indirectly, at least, soliciting advice from those people. When we submit ethics applications, there's another one where we get conflicting things. I've had clients with all sorts of ethics dramas recently, we are soliciting advice from the ethics board about our research processes. When we specifically ask somebody for advice about our careers, about promotions, job applications, all that stuff, or even our research direction, solicited advice. Great. Even presenting at conferences and seminars and things like that, you are essentially putting yourself in a position where you're soliciting at least questions, if not advice.

Other times, you will get unsolicited advice. It may be from people outside of academia, in your personal life or other connections. It may be from people within academia, but in an environment that you weren't asking for advice. So at networking events, socials, outside of you specifically presenting your research, maybe just in the kind of chatting bits of conferences, you may receive unsolicited advice.

I want you also to remember that even within a solicited environment, there may be some advice that you have asked for and other advice that you haven't asked for. So take the example of doing a presentation, for example. You may have people who give you advice about your methodology, for example. And if you're presenting a study, you're presenting methods, that you use, you are in some way soliciting advice or at least comment on the methods of your study. However, what you may also find that you receive advice on from people in the audience is what you should be researching instead of this. So I've seen many situations have had been on the receiving end of it where some people ask lovely questions, point out things that you perhaps haven't thought of about the specific study you're presenting. And then other people ask you questions like, "Well of course that's not the real issue, the real issue is this." And then go off and talk about something that's completely different than what you presented. Bad conference etiquette, we all know it happens. And in that case, even though you were soliciting advice by presenting, you weren't soliciting advice on your research direction, for example. Or if they start giving you career advice in that context. You didn't solicit that. You were soliciting advice and comment on this specific study, not about the general direction or what you should do next or any of those things. So I would classify that as unsolicited advice as well.

The reason it's really important to distinguish between solicited advice and unsolicited advice is you can have that on a continuum of how much you want to even consider taking it into account. I want you to remember that particularly with unsolicited advice, you can just decide to disregard it. You are under zero obligation to anybody who gives you unsolicited advice to enact their advice in any way. Is it still useful to run through some of the other questions that I'm going to ask you so that you don't miss some useful gems that you hadn't, you know, you weren't necessarily thinking through fully? Yeah, absolutely. Of course, you can run it through a quick sense check to see whether actually, I didn't ask for this advice, but that's actually super wise. Of course you can still do that. But when it's unsolicited advice, we sometimes still feel, well, the person, you know, they've advised this, should I listen? Is that true? Da, da, da, unsolicited advice- you can just be like, Oh, okay. Thanks. I guess. and not take it any further.

We're going to think in a minute about what emotions might make doing that difficult. So if that feels uncomfortable, especially if you're somebody who identifies as being a bit of a people pleaser, if that feels uncomfortable, we will think about ways of managing that uncomfortableness. But I think it's a really important first reminder. If it's unsolicited advice. You can just choose to ignore it. You don't even have to tell them you're ignoring it. You can just say thank you and move on.

Now, within the realms of solicited advice, I'm not saying that if you solicit it, you have to follow the advice, but I think when we solicit advice, I would suggest that we're kind of signing up to go through a slightly more in detail review process of what they actually say. Obviously, it's still up to you. You can do what you like, but I would advise that if you are soliciting advice from people, you have in mind in advance that you are going to give it due consideration. And what I hope to give you by the end of this episode is a kind of structure that you can use to do that.

Now, knowing that, knowing that if you solicit advice, you are going to take it through a more structured consideration can also help you decide whether to solicit it or not. Often we end up just soliciting advice in a really random way. What do you think I should do? Should I do this? I don't know. And sometimes that can lead to really wonderful insights, right? I'm a big fan of asking big overarching questions of people I don't know very well. You know, what advice would you give to somebody who's my age? What's the greatest lesson you've learned in your life? All that kind of thing. But that's very different from what do you think I should focus on in my research? I would be really targeted as to who you ask that question to, because if you're soliciting it, you should be giving it due consideration. And when we solicit things like that from too many different people, without really thinking about specifically what we're asking and why we're asking that person, we end up with kind of, an excess of information, a whole load of noise that makes it difficult. So be cautious who you solicit information from and be really specific about exactly what advice you are actually looking for

So when we're then thinking about solicited advice, I want you to ask yourself, why am I even asking for advice in the first place? Because there's a lot of different thoughts and emotions that induce us to ask advice. Sometimes it's because there's specific information that we don't have. So if there's a particular area of academia that we want to get into, for example, and we feel like there'll be specific qualifications or specific experiences, but we're not sure what they are, maybe we're looking for specific mentoring advice as to, okay, you need to make sure you've got this qualification, that recognition, and you've done this sort of experience, for example. Maybe sometimes we're asking advice because we've got a couple of different options that both have benefits and we haven't yet decided which we want to do. Other times we might be asking advice because we think we know what we want to do, but we're a bit scared, we're worried we're going to get it wrong, we're worried that it'll be a stupid decision and people will think we're silly, and we're looking almost for reassurance. Try and get really clear on why you're asking for advice. Because if you are solely looking for reassurance, you might want to ask in a different way. You might want to even ask yourself whether you need to be asking for this advice or not, or whether this is something where actually you need to be able to give yourself that reassurance.

Once you've thought about why you're asking anyone this, I want you to ask yourself, why am I asking this person? Is it because they've got specific experience? Is it because I just really value them as a influential or impressive person in my life? Do I think they're wise and sensible? Am I asking them because they really know me? Remember, that's very different. Somebody who really knows the thing you want to know about might give you advice. But somebody who really knows you may also give different advice. And remember, there's a difference between people that know you now in a professional capacity, versus that know the you that grew up and was a child and all of those things. So, the people that have known you the longest are not necessarily the people that know you now the best. So, why are you asking this particular person? I am not going to ask my family which journal I should submit my article to because they're not in that world. However, when I was considering leaving academia and changing my life entirely to start this business and become a coach, I absolutely talked to my family because they know me as a person and I was interested in their opinion of how I would respond to that kind of change of professional setting and everything. So really think about who you're asking and why you're asking them this particular thing. Finally, if you're in a position to be actually asking advice specifically, so again, this is slightly separate from submitting things, really think through specifically what do you want advice on? Because sometimes people can get really general and if there are constraints around the decision that you're making, it's really important that you make that clear and ask for their opinion within those constraints. So if you're saying within the constraints that I'm definitely doing a qualitative study, which analytical approach do you think I should take? Is a very different question than, how should I design this study? Because if you then ask somebody who's a quantitative scientist, for example, how to run this study, they're going to come up with something that you're not going to want to follow if you want to take a qualitative approach to this particular question. So trying to be as specific as possible about what you're asking can help ensure you get advice that's useful in the first place, even before we're dealing with contradictory advice.

In the context of submitting things, even then it can be useful to know why you're submitting. Are you submitting because you want to get peer review of this particular article so that you can make this article as strong as possible up to and including the idea that it might get rejected from this journal, you'll enhance it based on those research, those reviewer comments, and submit it somewhere else. Or are you submitting it here because you just want it done and published? Because sometimes that's the case too. And that will affect how we respond to the advice we're given as well. If we're using reviewer advice to improve the paper, that is one thing, if we're using the advice to make it publishable in this particular journal, then that will lead to different decisions. So even in that sort of setting, knowing why you've asked for this advice can really help. 

Once we've then got the contradictory advice, I first of all want you to give yourself some space. It is totally normal and totally fine to have an emotional reaction to that. It would be so much easier if they all gave the same advice and you agreed with the advice and you just do that. Happy days. It is perfectly fine to be upset and frustrated and disappointed that the advice is contradictory and that this is going to be a bit more tricky. That's okay. My old supervisor always used to advise. Read your reviewer's comments, walk away for a couple of days, come back, get on. So, don't worry if you're experiencing these sorts of emotions. However, we don't have to act out of them and we don't have to turn them into a massive drama. And we can still use our curious logical approach to think about how we're going to manage it.

The first step of that, so when we've actually got contradictory advice, I think, is to really consider the humanity of the people that have given you that advice. What do I mean by consider their humanity? What I mean is that these people have perspectives on the world that will overlap to a greater or lesser extent with yours, but they won't be a perfect match for. They will have their own interests, and, and this one we often forget, especially with more senior people, they are also imperfect. We are all imperfect. We all show up imperfectly, at least some of the time, and we sometimes forget that about the people that are giving us advice. Now, why is all this important? Because sometimes they may be giving advice that is, to them, really true and really important for you to know. But if they have a different perspective that is in contradiction to your beliefs or values or perspectives, then it doesn't have to be advice that you follow. So, to give you an example, I stayed my entire academic career at the University of Birmingham. I went as an undergraduate student, I left as a full professor, and I never worked or studied at another university. Now, many, many, many people told me that that was a terrible decision. They told me that my career would progress much faster if I went and post doc'd overseas, I moved around. I would get promoted more quickly if I was changing institution, all of these things. And they were probably right. Yeah, they probably were. Those things were true. But they were coming at it from a perspective of somebody who wanted to maximize their academic progression and maximize their career development. And if that had been my perspective, then I probably should have gone and done those things. 

But it wasn't. I had people I loved in Birmingham, I had my family not too far away, and my life as a whole was more important to me than my career progression. The lucky flip side of that for me was that the other thing that I really valued was autonomy and I had a huge amount of autonomy because of the weird particular setup of my experience at Birmingham, which if you want to hear more about, there is an episode about, can't remember which number, but it's called how I got my PhD in two and a half years and why I don't recommend that you do. I tell you the whole story there. Um, I really valued autonomy and I knew I had it at Birmingham in a way that I don't think I would have done at most places, certainly not in that early stage of my career. And so knowing that I valued my personal life and I valued my autonomy, I decided to stay in Birmingham. Did I doubt myself? Yes, absolutely, because I hadn't done all this work and I was thinking, Oh my God, what if I've made a mistake? What if I should do that? Maybe I should. But I stuck to my guns and I remembered that other people prioritize different things. So remember, people have different perspectives, they have different priorities, that doesn't mean you have to take it into account.

Other people also have conflicts. So one of the things I see happen quite a lot is supervisors advising their students about what they should do in situations where there is a conflict of interest. Now in the nicest people in the world, the best supervisors ever, there's always a bit of a conflict of interests. They want you to succeed, but it's way easier if you succeed in things that they're also trying to succeed in, where your research interests really overlap, where the work you're doing really builds towards their next grant income. But I have clients and experiences with people where the conflict of interest leads to supervisors making suggestions that are not necessarily in the student's best interest. Why don't you just stay on in the lab for a year afterwards and write everything up when that's not necessarily where they want their careers to go and what they want to be focusing on. But it's good for the supervisor to have that kind of cheap experienced hands around to finish stuff off where people have got commercial interests coming out of their academic research. And so they're pushing their students to do the work that helps their commercial interests. For example, there's a lot of places where there might be conflicts of interest. in what people are suggesting. Your family might want you to take a job closer to where they are, rather than further away. That's another conflict of interest. A conflict of interest doesn't have to be nasty. It doesn't have to be someone trying to screw you over. It can simply be that there's a difference between what they want for you, than what you want for you. And remembering that when we're screening advice is really useful.

So I want you to think about their perspective, their conflicts, and I also mentioned their imperfections. And this is where often when we get advice, we think, Oh God, they could have said that nicer. They could have been more clear on that. Oh, that's a bit vague. You know, we get reviewers comments. Everyone has all the jokes about reviewer two being horrible and everything. Remembering people's imperfections is really important. Remember this isn't to justify terrible reviewer behavior, be nice when you do your reviews, but sometimes we do our reviews late at night when we're exhausted because we've realized we've delayed it 10 times and we still haven't done it. Sometimes we are just really frustrated with the paper that we've read, and we're grumpier than we intend to be. And remembering that because the advice was a bit snippy or a bit vague or any of these things, doesn't mean they're horrible or it doesn't have to mean they're horrible and it doesn't mean that you are stupid or unworthy or any of those things. It could just mean that it wasn't a great day for them. We don't know, but I think there's a lot of benefit to just remembering that the story we are putting around that advice may well not be true. That there's a whole bunch of reasons why they responded the way they did, and that we don't necessarily know that.

So now what do you do when you've got conflicting advice? We're thinking about the humanity of the people that have given it. We're remembering that they've got a whole bunch of perspectives that might not overlap, lay with us and might not line up. What do we get to do? Well, what we get to do is. We get to decide. And that's one of my favorite phrases. If you follow me on Instagram, you'll see I went to a collage workshop like this week, which was lovely. And I decided to put a little motto on it based on things that had been really important in coaching recently. And the one I went for was I get to choose. Because often we think, well if they tell us A and they tell me B, then what do I do? And we try and come up with some version that covers A and B. When in reality, all that has happened is you now have more information. You have information that one person thinks this, and that one person thinks that. And you can add that to the information you already had about your opinions or advice you've had from other people, and you can make a decision from there. It doesn't have to appease both of them. You could decide to go with one or the other. You could decide that you're going to do some third thing that somewhat meets both needs. You could decide you're going to do a version of one person's advice, but you get to choose.

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. 

So what you can do is you can kind of triangulate this information together. I'll just say if some people think this and some people think that, what do I want to do with this information? Now remember, a compromise is not the only solution here. Sometimes the fact that two different people get very different perspectives and very different advice on what you should do tells you that actually the problem is a lack of clarity, perhaps, in what you're trying to say.

The other reason it's important to triangulate and kind of bring it all together to see what it's telling you as a whole is because often our tendency is to try and please everyone. Our tendency is to try and compromise and come to something that both sides will be happy with. And the problem is then, sometimes we end up with something that is not satisfying to anybody. So think of an analogy of planning a meal, you might have somebody say they want a chicken curry and somebody else say they want roast chicken and you're like, right, I can please everybody here. Let's compromise between those. And we'll do curried roast chicken and roast potatoes. Might be a bit strange. Nobody wants that combination. But if you can look at them both and be like, okay, they want quite different things here, but both of them want chicken. And actually I can take that basic information and come up with something that, you know what I think will work for both. You get to sort of pick out the principles of what they've said and decide can you come up with something that works for both, or do you actually have to pick a team here? Because sometimes in a lot of our work it is better to do one thing well than it is to try and combine everything.

When you think about career planning, this is particularly an issue. We all receive advice about what to do for our careers. You need to focus on your research. I remember that was one of the things that drove me to a teaching focus contract was people saying, Vikki, if you want to get promoted on research, you need to do the bare minimum in all your teaching, bare minimum in all your admin roles really get on with, you know, we want grants, we want papers, you need to really push on that stuff.

And I was like, I don't want to do that. And then other people were saying, what you really want to do is be a really well rounded academic. Make sure you do all this external stuff, do all this, you know, community work, this leadership, all these things. And what I see a lot of academics do, and what I did for a while was try and follow all of the advice. So not picking, not finding a compromise, but instead trying to do all of it. And then we just end up completely overloaded.

If you're an academic, you're in a permanent position where you're thinking about applying for promotion, you're feeling a bit like that at the moment, do give me a shout. I have one or two spots available for my promotions package where I will help you figure out how to streamline what you're doing at the moment and come up with a coherent case for promotion, whether it's a senior lecturer associate prof level, or whether it's a full prof. So whatever level you're looking at, give me a shout if that sounds like you.

The other thing that example brings up is my final point in this kind of you get to choose section and that is that your response to somebody's advice can be as useful as the advice itself. And it's worth spending a little bit of time just thinking about what is your response and why is that your response. So in that example, I was being advised that I should cut back on all my teaching and leadership and just focus on research so that I could get promoted on the research route. And I realized I didn't like that advice. It was probably correct. I did get promoted on research. So obviously it wasn't completely correct, but it probably would have been a faster way to get promoted on research so they weren't wrong, but I noticed that when they were telling me that I had some real resistance to it.

And thankfully it was one of the moments in my career where I was quite reflective and I stopped and thought about it and was like, why am I not going, Oh, brilliant? Because actually a lot of academics, if you say to them, you know, if your people senior to you say, what I want you to do, I want you to do less on your sheets and less on your admin and focus on this, they'd be like, Oh my God, that's the dream. Thank you so much for giving me permission. Amazing. Yes, I'll do that. And I didn't. And I knew it was interesting that I didn't. And that was what made me realize that I didn't really want to be doing my research anymore. So even getting advice that you disagree with can really tell you something about your opinion as well.

So when you're getting conflicting advice, I want you to stop and think, how am I reacting to each of these pieces of advice? If I look at them in turn, and if I look at them as conflicting advice, and why am I feeling that way? Now, be careful about knee jerk reactions to advice as well. I remember another time, and I can't remember whether I've talked about this before or not, I had a lovely colleague who was just hilarious, very opinionated, and he saw a pile of papers on my shelf and told me I should throw them away because I was never going to read them. And I got super defensive. I said, I am. I know they're not central to what I do, but they would be really useful. I'm definitely going to read them. Yeah, I didn't. I think I've told you about it before. About two years later, when I came back from a sabbatical, I just binned the lot of them sheepishly. But at the time I was really pissed off about his advice. I had interpreted it and internalized it as a criticism on my commitment to reading on my discipline, my organization and all of these things when in reality he was just right. And so had I been more reflective in that situation, I might have noticed that actually it was probably a bit of a defensive response to his advice. It was a little bit me taking it personally, meaning something about me, which prevented me from listening to it and going, yeah, probably is good advice. Cause for like two years, I looked at that pile and felt guilty. I'd have been much better off just getting rid of it and accepting earlier that I wasn't going to read it. 

So when you're getting this sort of conflicting advice, I want you to think of it as extra information to support your decision making. Think about your response to the advice and how it's made you feel and what thoughts you've had about it. What you can glean from that. Think about whether, are there ways you can take glimmers from both of them and create something that works for both? Are you going to pick a side and why, how are you going to justify that? Remember when you justify things, you usually only have to justify it to yourself. If it's a review or a grant agency, you might need to justify it to them, but you can always say. I've done this but not that for these reasons.

The final thing that can hold us back from managing constrictory advice is our beliefs about how people respond if we don't follow their advice perfectly. Because sometimes we worry that we will make people sad or disappointed or frustrated if they've given us advice and we don't follow it. And the first thing to say is, I can't even reassure you that that won't happen. People may well be frustrated or disappointed that you didn't follow their advice. What I would suggest is that that's okay. They've given you advice. And they get to feel whatever they feel if you choose to do something different. When you start to make decisions based on how other people will feel about your decisions, rather than on the basis of what's right for you and your situation, that's when we just get in a pickle. And that's where this conflicting advice feels so challenging because suddenly you're forced that you can't please everyone. Often if somebody gives us advice, even if it doesn't necessarily feel right for us, we follow it because, well, maybe they know, and we put our own needs to one side. But suddenly, if you've got contradictory advice, you can't do that. You do have to pick. And from that perspective, getting contradictory advice is actually really freeing because you physically can't please both of these people. You actually can't follow their advice. And therefore you have to accept that at least one person may choose to be disappointed or frustrated and that that's going to be okay. And what we get to do is we get to look after ourselves through that instead of avoiding it by making decisions that they told us to do.

So what we get to do is we get to say, right, I get to decide if I'm following that advice or that advice or some combination or some completely other option, I get to pick that based on reasons that I like, based on my needs and what I want. And they get to manage any emotions they have because of that and I get to manage any emotions that I have about the fact that they're disappointed or that they're sad or that they're frustrated. Okay, we don't have to manage those emotions by avoiding them, by doing what we're told, by following the advice. We get to manage those emotions by being kind to ourselves and looking after ourselves and allowing ourselves to experience it, while making a decision that feels the best one that we can make at the time.

So that's my advice. That's whatever stage of the academic journey you are at, you will be getting all of this contradictory advice. And the more we can be reflective and intentional and all these words that we keep using in these podcasts about how we think about what they've said, evaluate what they've said and choose mindfully what we're going to take from it, the more we can use advice as something that sort of informs our decision making rather than as a pure map that we must follow because it's been given to us. 

I really hope you find that useful. I'd love to hear what you think. Make sure that you are on my newsletter so that you get the emails each week about this. And if you are a PhD student that's interested in longer term support, but you've thought that one to one coaching is a bit too expensive for you, make sure you're on my newsletter because I'm going to be giving more information about my PhD Life Coach membership, which will be a more affordable way for you to get access to online group coaching, all of my self paced materials and a really supportive PhD community. That membership is also open to early career researchers, so if you're a postdoc or at the beginnings of your academic career, it's absolutely for you too. If you have any questions, just drop me an email. Academics who are thinking about starting leadership positions or who are going into promotions applications, applying for fellowships or any of those sorts of things, get in touch. I have one or two slots for one to one clients at the moment, and I would love to work with you. 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.