2.45 Why we should all be more intentional and resourceful (and how!)

You ever feel like you get to the end of the week and you have no idea what you did, you've been busy but you definitely didn't do the things that you wanted to get done and the week just seems to have got away from you, then you are in exactly the right place. Today I'm going to be thinking about how to be more intentional so that you achieve your goals and enjoy your life and more resourceful so that you can get the support you need! 

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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

You ever feel like you get to the end of the week and you have no idea what you did, you've been busy but you definitely didn't do the things that you wanted to get done and the week just seems to have got away from you, then you are in exactly the right place. This is part three of my little mini series about how to be your own best boss and today we are going to be thinking about how to be more intentional and more resourceful. As usual, if you haven't listened to the preceding bits of this series, not a problem at all, they're not in any particular order. But once you've listened to this one, if you find it useful, you might want to go back and check those out. One was looking at how we can be more compassionate and curious, and another was how we can be more encouraging and accepting. And there are going to be two more episodes after this, so make sure you're subscribed and you don't miss either of those.

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 45 of season 2 of the PhD Life Coach, and we are back to thinking about how we can be our own best boss. A lot of this work came out of the program that I just finished running about how to be your own best boss, where I had a bunch of PhD students with me for three months working on building all of these qualities, thinking about how they organize their time, their tasks, and importantly, how they speak to themselves throughout it. If you think that sounds good, It is going to be available as a self paced course for all of you guys to buy. You can either buy it individually or you can buy it as part of my membership program. It's not quite ready yet, but make sure that you are on my email list so that you will be the first to hear when it is ready to get. But in the meantime, I'm going to give you the 10 different qualities, we're doing two today, that I think you should nurture in order to be an effective boss to yourself. 

So the first one we're going to think about today is being intentional. So what do we mean by intentional? I think when you're being an intentional boss, you are really choosing what you focus on, on purpose and for reasons that you like. So often we just end up doing whichever tasks kind of shout loudest at us, the ones that are due now, or the ones that somebody else is waiting for, or the ones that we can see in front of our face, like tidying up the house or whatever. When we're intentional, we spend a little bit more time thinking about exactly what are the most important things for us to do. What are the ones that make us feel good? What are the ones that move our goals forward? And then consciously try and redirect our efforts back to those goals. 

Now, I say redirect on purpose because sometimes people think when they're being intentional, they're being focused, that they will never lose focus. And that's simply not true. Of course, we will end up acting unintentionally. We will do things that weren't what we intended to do. It's not a problem. We're human beings. It happens. But when we're aiming to be intentional, what happens is when we notice we've got distracted, when we notice we're behaving less intentionally. We can just gently nudge ourselves back. And if you want to hear more about that, I did an episode a few weeks ago called what to do when you get distracted. Check that one out because I talk about it in a little bit more detail here. 

When we're thinking about being intentional, we're thinking about how we can choose our behaviors, our thoughts and feelings from a kind of more pre planned place. Now, there's always a caveat around this, as there usually is for the things that I present, and that is that people think if I'm going to be super intentional, that means that everything has to be focused on work, that there's no space for spontaneity and fun and relaxation and all of these things. And I want to reassure you that is just not true. You can apply intentionality to every area of your life. So we're not just going to try and be intentional when we're working so that we spend time on the things that are really important to us. We can also be intentional in our spare time instead of just drinking a cup of coffee at your desk, we can take your cup of coffee outside and sit in the sunshine and have a moment of fresh air and calm and relaxation in our day, if that's what you enjoy doing. We can intentionally choose to spend time with people that we love and that make us feel better rather than just hanging out with whoever's at work, we can intentionally choose what hobbies we plan so that they are things that actually bring us joy rather than things that we feel that we should do.

Intentionality enables us to choose the best version of our life and curate it in the best way. into something we want. And in fact, there's gonna be quite a few other episode recommendations in this. If you lose track of them, don't worry, I'll link them in the show notes. You can always find that on my website, phdlifecoach. com. Um, we have a whole episode with a great coach called Jamie Pei, called How to Curate Your PhD Life. So she talks a little bit about this there as well. 

Being intentional in your work also means really thinking about why you're doing it and what you want to achieve from it. Some of you will be doing a PhD because that qualification enables you to go on and do some other job. Some of you will be doing it because you were offered the chance and it seemed as good a thing as any. Some of you will be doing it because you're specifically passionate about that subject, or because you want to develop specific skills to go on and work in a particular industry.

When we know those goals, we can then be intentional about designing our experience. We can be intentional about choosing which studies we're going to focus on, which methods we're going to use, what approaches we're going to take, so that we do develop the skills that we want to develop, so that we do address the problems that we want to address. When we're unintentional in our research, we sometimes just end up doing kind of whatever some study our supervisor suggests. 

In these sessions where I'm thinking about how to be a better boss to yourself, what we've usually done is taken the self coaching model and looked at all the components of it. If you're not sure what I mean by the self coaching model, I'll kind of explain it as we go through, but there is a whole episode on why you should self coach and how to do it. So make sure you check that one out.

Self coaching models made up of circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results. And so the sorts of circumstances in which I think it's useful to be really intentional is basically all the time. When you're choosing what to do, when you're planning your tasks, when you're planning your time, when you find yourself with time you didn't expect to have, things like that, when asking for feedback, when networking, when completing a task. Basically everything it's useful to be intentional. 

And the sorts of thoughts that you might want to have when you're being intentional are things like, I can do the thing I intend to do even when I'm tired or even when I don't want to, I chose this so it's the right thing to do, I'm doing this for a reason, I'm so glad I chose this, those sorts of things.

Now I want you to notice that I'm not at the moment talking about how to choose what those areas of focus are. And we're going to cover that in a future episode where I'm going to think about why it's important to be strategic as a boss. Really here, when we're intentional, it's about acting on and intentionally designing our lives so that we achieve those goals so that we move towards the things that we want to do.

We'll think about how we pick those in a future episode, but here it's really about recognizing, I chose this, therefore I'm doing it. There's a reason I've chosen this. And when you think those sorts of thoughts, the sorts of feelings you're likely to get are things like calm, purposeful, focused, and in control. And even in your personal life, if you're intentionally planning relaxation or intentionally planning play, for example, then you should have a similar sort of thing, but you're feeling relaxed and calm, knowing that the time you're spending doing this was chosen intentionally. It's not lazy time, it's not wasted time, it was chosen intentionally.

And when you're feeling these sorts of feelings, calm, purposeful, focused, and in control, you're much more likely to just take the actions you'd planned. There's not any specific actions here that you should be taking. You're just much more likely to do the things that are in your best interest, that you've chosen in advance. And you're much more likely to take that extra step. So you're much more likely to say, you know what, it would be easy just to sit on the sofa and chill out scrolling on my phone, but actually I'm going to go outside. I'm going to have a drink. I'm going to take myself some fruit and a magazine that I want to read. Does anyone still get magazines? I don't know, maybe I'm in the 90s. Who knows? Take outside a book or something that I actually want to do and turn it into a really nice event. It always reminds me, one of my good friends who now is a superstar professor in Sweden, we lived together as students and she was always incredibly good at being intentional about her space. So whereas I would come home tired and just blob on the sofa and put something rubbish on, she would come home, she'd turn on her fairy lights, she'd make herself a hot drink, she'd get her favorite blanket, she'd sort of cozy up, and she always just, it wasn't a huge amount of effort, but she always just took those little steps just to make it really nice for herself, and she then had a lovely relaxed evening, whereas I often just sat in front of the TV and at the end of the night was like, oh, I've wasted the whole night, I feel rubbish.

 And so just being intentional to make things nice for yourself can just lead to a completely different mindset and a completely different type of activities that you do. And the results you get if you keep doing things that are in your best interest, you keep taking that extra step to do the intentional thing and to really enjoy it, then the result is that you, you can achieve anything you want. If you can be intentional and do the things you plan, you can become the person you want to be doing the things that you want to do. And that's huge. So I want you to have a think, and if you're on my email list, you'll get an email about this that will give you all these prompts and things, but I want you to think about whether you think it's desirable to be an intentional boss. And in what ways are you already doing it? What might get in the way of you doing that? And how could you make that a little bit easier? And these are the questions we're going to ask ourselves after all of these qualities. I'll also link in the transcript. I know all of you don't go and check the transcript, but really the show notes online also have links to all these additional podcasts.

There's a few other episodes that I think you might find useful if you want to really develop your intentionality. So do make sure you go to the website, phdlifecoach. com, click on the podcast section, you'll find this episode and all the others. There's like 86 now, so make sure you have a good snoop and I'll give you two or three more episodes that will be worth having a listen to if you haven't already.

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 next quality we're going to be thinking about today is resourceful, and this I think is one that's always come quite naturally to me, but that really can be developed much further in other people. Now in the dictionary, I looked it up because I was like how am I going to define resourceful? I actually looked up resourceful this time and in the dictionary it's defined as the ability to find quick and clever ways to overcome difficulties. Now I'm actually going to expand that a bit. I don't want to argue with the dictionary but you know, go with it. Um, because I don't think resourceful necessarily has to be particularly quick and I don't think it necessarily has to be particularly clever. I think it just means finding ways to overcome difficulties. And I think in your PhD, there's a bunch of situations in which this is a really useful quality and I think this then goes on throughout academia. So for those of you who are post PhD, long into your academic careers, being resourceful at every stage of your academic career can take you a really long way.

Now, what sorts of circumstances do I think this is? Well, I think it's times when the people you traditionally work with, whether that's your supervisor, your regular collaborators or whatever, have maybe got less time to give you the support that you'd like. Maybe they don't have the specific expertise. Sometimes we see that collaborative relationships at any stage, whether it's supervisory or just as an academic, you sort of grow apart from each other slightly, one of you develops an interest in something that maybe is getting a little more biochemical than before, or a little more into a different era, or into a different method, or whatever it might be. And suddenly that person can't provide everything you need anymore. Maybe they were your go to, you expected your supervisor to teach you everything you need, but now you're going to use this new statistical technique, or this new qualitative analysis and they don't know how to do it anymore. That's okay, but that's a situation where being resourceful is really useful. It can also be useful when you've got technical problems with your project, whether that's access to things, whether that's ethics problems, whether it's actual, like, machinery breaking down in your laboratory, for example, many of us work in laboratories where perhaps there isn't as much tech support as you would like, and the PhD students and postdocs become responsible for fixing problems, troubleshooting issues in the laboratory.

Maybe you're aware of training needs you have, that there are things that you're good at but things that you're less good at. When we're feeling resourceful we're able to look at those things and see them as a problem to be solved rather than as a kind of inherent flaw that we can't do anything about.

So being resourceful is useful at any time you have any problem that you want to solve and the sorts of thoughts that I want you to nurture as a resourceful boss to yourself are things like There must be a way to figure this out. I don't know how I'm gonna do it, but I can work it out. Or someone must know how to do this and I bet they'd be willing to share with me. I bet they'd be willing to help. Or I bet there's a training resource for this somewhere. It's sort of going beyond the problem you have and just assuming and being aware that there's almost certainly people that know how to help with this.

And when we have those sorts of thoughts, we're much more likely to feel optimistic. I want you to compare and contrast. If we're in, "I don't know how to do this and that's a problem" mode, we feel frustrated and shut down and confused and maybe even guilty that we don't know. Yeah. And we know that when we feel those sorts of emotions, we're probably going to end up overworking or procrastinating something that's a kind of frantic action or procrastination. Whereas if we can think thoughts like someone must know how to do this, there must be a resource out there that would help with this, then we start feeling optimistic. We start feeling pragmatic, like looking for solutions and we start feeling calm again.

Calm is a really recurring thought with this When I feel resourceful, I always feel excited to be honest, like, Ooh, yes, I could speak to them and I could speak to them and then we could do this. And it becomes this sort of like, Ooh, I can see how this problem gets fixed kind of vibe. And when we feel optimistic, pragmatic, calm, even excited. The actions we take are we approach people, we ask questions, we look for stuff. We assume there must be a solution to this and we go and find it. And the results we get from those actions are that we solve the problems that we have. And probably even more importantly, often we'll make meaningful connections and learn new stuff.

Because in being resourceful, we go and talk to people that we wouldn't otherwise talk to, and we learn how to do things that we wouldn't otherwise learn how to do. I want you to think about what barriers get in the way of you being more resourceful. Sometimes it's about confidence. So one of the things that would really get in the way of being resourceful is if you're telling yourself you should know how to do this. It's really hard to be resourceful and have thoughts like, Oh, there must be people who can help with this. There must be a training resource that would let me solve this, if you're also telling yourself that you should already know. So keep an eye out for thoughts like that because thoughts like that Uh, they might be true. I was going to say they're almost certainly not true. Sometimes, maybe you should know. Maybe you have been shown this stuff before. Maybe you should, in inverted commas, know. But you don't. And so telling yourself that you should know just doesn't help on any level. Maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't. Who knows? But you don't. That's the fact. You don't. So you can either sit around feeling grumpy about the fact you don't know, feeling guilty about the fact you don't know, and stress about all the things that are going to go wrong because you don't know. Or you can put your best resourceful pants on, say, okay, maybe I should know, maybe I shouldn't, I don't. So who does? How can I figure this out? 

Now, one thing I want you to be cautious of with resourceful is that occasionally when people are very resourceful, they can assume that all answers exist outside themselves. So when we are trying to fix a piece of kit, for example, there may well be somebody who knows how to do that. If we are trying to decide what analysis to use, there's almost certainly training programs, books, whatever it is, other people who would be able to give you guidance about the different options and which you might choose. So being resourceful up until a point is really, really useful. Remember though, that resourcefulness is key.

doesn't take away from the need to also make a decision. And I've talked about this in some of my recent episodes where we're talking about contradictory advice and things like that, ultimately, if there's a problem, you need to make a decision about what you're going to do and being resourceful is a great way to get information, to get options, to get suggestions, but then you get to decide which ones you're going to implement and how you're going to implement them. You're going to decide which training is useful, which reading is useful, which people to speak to, or which people's advice to actually take and act on. So when you're sort of trying to channel your best resourceful self, I want you to remember that that's never going to be an alternative to actually having to pick at some point.

Some people think that as long as they keep looking, they will at some point find the perfect thing, the perfect piece of advice, the perfect piece of reading that will tell them exactly what to focus their research on, or exactly what to argue in this particular paper. And you're never going to find that. At some point you've got to decide. The resourcefulness gets you all the information you might need to make that decision. And then you get to make that decision. So there's only two suggestions for you today that you channel your intentionality. You try and be more intentional and you try and be more resourceful as a boss to yourself. Let me know which of those do you feel like you're already doing well? Are these things that you think would be really useful for you to develop more? What gets in the way of that? Get on my email list. Drop me a message and I will try and respond to it in future episodes.

Next week I have a guest episode from an amazing academic coach. I am super excited about it. We've already recorded it. We talked for hours. So my job now is to go and process it and turn it into something that is manageable for you guys. So make sure you tune in next week and listen out for that. I am super excited about it.

Make sure you're on the email list. I'm starting to soft launch my individual membership. What I mean by that is I'm not shouting about it publicly. I'm just telling you guys. So if you're on my email list, you will get some information about how to join the individual membership. This is a cheaper way to get coaching than doing one to one and it means you're part of a community of PhD students and early career researchers. It's completely amazing. So make sure you're on my email list to hear more about that. Thank you all so much for listening and I will see you next week.