2.48 Why we should ask if this will make the summary

Sometimes we can feel like we have to do everything, that everything is urgent, and we don't even know when to start. Sometimes the best approach is to work out how to be efficient, organise ourselves and get stuff done. Other times, it's worth questioning what we're doing and whether it really matters. In this episode we're going to reflect on creating a "summary" of our careers and asking "will this make the summary?" We can use this perspective to decide what we do and how we do it, so that we can achieve our goals and enjoy the process. This is the last episode of season 2 and we will be back in a few weeks for season 3 and the new academic year! In the meantime, check out some of the back catalogue of episodes that you might have missed or revisit some of your favourites. 

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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

I get asked to write short biographies quite regularly, just like little blurbs to put on my website, or if I'm doing a workshop for a university, for example, to get distributed to participants. And that means that a academic career of 20 something years gets reduced down to five or six lines. And doing this recently really made me think about what stuff made it to the summary. When I tell the story of my academic career, what things do I actually talk about?

And it made me think of all the things that I worried about and that felt super important when I was in the midst of experiencing them that don't even come close to making the summary. And even if I was asked to write an extensive piece, for example, when I did my inaugural lecture, so the lecture I do after I became a full professor here in the UK, there were so many things that didn't make that longer story either. And so today I want us to ask ourselves is this thing that I'm doing, that I'm worrying about ever going to make the summary of my life, of my professional career? And if not, how do I want to handle it?

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 48 of season 2 of the PhD Life Coach. We're thinking about why you should ask yourself if this will make the summary of your life. Now, I mentioned writing lots of bios at the minute, but I'm also trying to organize some of the crap I have in my house. I am somebody who keeps a lot of sentimental bits and pieces. I have boxes and boxes of stuff from my childhood, my teen years, universities, various bits of my career. And they're all in boxes. And at the moment, I don't look at them very often, and most of them would make no sense to anybody except me. And for a long time, it felt really important to keep all of these things and to have that kind of record of my life. As I've got older, one of the things I've realized is that boxes and boxes of junk are not a record of my life. They're the detritus of my life. And some of them are amazing. And much of it doesn't actually provide a record at all, because it's something that I was given by a friend in a particular situation that to anybody else makes no sense whatsoever.

At the same time, I've started going through photos and documents and things that I got after I lost my dad a few years ago, and so much of them are unlabeled photos of people. I've got no clue who they are, or if I do, I know their names, but I don't know much about them. And it made me think how much more I would prefer to have less stuff, but that actually told a story and that had some meaning behind it because I understood who they were and what they were like. And so I'm starting to go through some of my sentimental stuff and think about how can I take this huge quantity of stuff and turn it into more of a meaningful story. And again, just like with the bios, that's making me think what would make the summary of my life.

Now what's this got to do with doing a PhD or being in academia? Well, often we get super stressed about everything we're meant to be doing, whether it's on the teaching side, research side, administration, outreach, etc, etc, etc. We're very convinced that every single thing is very important. We have to do all of them and it's a real problem if we either can't do them all or that we don't do them very well. Yet when we have that perspective of a few years looking back, suddenly these things kind of merge together a bit. Suddenly we don't remember all the different bits that were causing us stress. We don't remember what things on different to do lists even meant. I don't know if you guys keep your planners, I've got quite a lot of mine and I don't remember a lot of it. What I do remember are certain key things and we'll talk about what characterizes them in a minute, and I remember how I felt during those periods of time. 

 Other things that seem really important to people that I coach now are things like how long it takes to do your PhD, how many corrections you get, how long it is between finishing your PhD and getting your first grant, getting your first permanent job. And again, looking at it with a perspective of time, you get to see how none of these things are part of your story in the end. No one writes how long their PhD took or how many corrections they got on their CV. And in fact, my CV has changed hugely over time. I've got copies of my application when I went for senior lecturer, when I went for reader, when I went for full professor. And there were so many things that felt so important that didn't even make it into the next iteration of my CV. Now, were they useful to get me to that next step? Yes, absolutely. But did the things that didn't work matter? in three years, five years, ten years? No, almost always not.

So what do we do with this information? Well, the first thing is it gives us a certain amount of freedom that by putting it in the perspective of a much longer time scale, we can see that some of these things are just not going to matter in a few months time. It takes a little bit of the pressure out of the decisions. One of the things that I find holds my clients back from making decisions the most is the notion that they might pick the wrong thing. They might pick the wrong way to make their argument, or they might choose to go to a conference when they shouldn't, or not go to a conference when they should. And in reality, not many of these decisions actually have a right or wrong answer. Either way, you can generate a story of a wonderful career. And so remembering that, keeping that perspective can sometimes just take a little bit of weight out of some of the decisions that you're making, or take a little seriousness out of how you're interpreting things so that it doesn't feel quite so bad in the moment and so that it's easier for us to actually get on and do the things that we want to do.

If you find yourself saying, well actually this, this could be because if I get this grant then that will really send me down this route and that could be a big part of the story of my career. I want you to also ask yourself, is it the only route though? Because we also have to remember that we only ever tell the story of the life we had. It's a little bit like that Sliding Doors movie. I don't know if you've seen it. It's quite old now, where in one version of the narrative, she makes it onto the underground train. And on the other version of the narrative, she doesn't, the door's shut just in front of her and she doesn't make it. And they follow through both versions of her life that she would have had. And we only see the summary of the life that we made. Is the thing you're doing, the thing that feels like actually it could be a really important part of my future, is it the only route to the things that you want? And I would argue almost always not. 

It feels as though getting this grant or completing my PhD by this time is the only route to getting where I want to get. But in reality, if that thing doesn't work out, there are other ways, there are other routes that can be taken.

I just want to say I am aware I'm speaking from a position of relative privilege. I came through into academia at a time where, while things were competitive, they were nothing like they are now, and I was lucky enough to get into pretty stable employment pretty quickly. And so I haven't had the huge periods of precarious employment that many of you have experienced or will experience. And so there is a certain extent to which this is the tale of a survivor. But even for people who are experiencing precarity, who are feeling like the things they're doing right now really are the difference between staying in academia or not, of your story going in this direction or in that direction that you don't want, even in those situations, putting this huge weight on it, that this is the only route

makes it more difficult. Telling yourself repeatedly that this thing is super important, it's the only way, it's the only way to prove yourself, it's the only way to get on. It makes it so much harder to do, even in situations where that might be kind of true.

The other thing in any situation is that all the things you're stressing about are definitely not going to make it onto the summary of your career. So maybe you do have one or two things that like, these are the kind of feel like make or break things. Everything else isn't. All the other things that we're telling ourselves we have to do as well are not on that summary. Even just by identifying these are the things that actually have the potential to be in my kind of life summary, my year summary, whatever it is. And these things, eh, probably not. Even that can take a lot of weight out of your to do list and a lot of weight out of the things you're doing.

Now, the contrast of this and it's going to sound like I'm contradicting myself, but let me explain is that today is also the only day that we ever live in. We might have summaries of our careers, but in terms of the life that we experience and the way we feel, today is the only day.

Today is the only day we ever live in and then tomorrow it'll be today and we live in today again. And so what we get to do is we get to also think about if today is the only day I ever experience, how do I balance giving myself the day and the experience that will feel good and feel sustainable, while also serving future me? That sounds complicated. But in reality, there's some quite simple rules of thumb that you can use.

Having a day that feels good and that serves future you normally involves choosing something intentionally that will move you towards your goals, and then engaging in it in a way that feels positive, where you give yourself positive feedback, where you have clear instructions, where you clearly know when you've done enough, and where you leave space to nourish yourself. And if we focus on that, we can create days that feel good, while also working towards a summary of our lives that we actually like. 

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, thephdlifecoach. 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 sorts of things do I think you should actually focus on? These things for me, at least, are usually things that are distinctive. I remember much more clearly the things that I did that were different, you know, when I traveled with a bunch of engineering students to China to experience their integration program that they were going on, for example, things like that were that were really distinctive from my every day life is stuff... they don't make it into my professional bio, but they certainly make it into my like personal summary of highlights of my career.

What doesn't is where I did the same thing many, many, many times. And sometimes we're encouraged to do that, right. We're encouraged to chug out papers, and to keep, you know, to focus on quantity rather than quality. And I did that in chunks of my career and I couldn't even, if you told me to sit down and write down what papers I wrote in my career, I don't think I could actually generate an accurate list off the top of my head because there's so many of them that kind of blur into one. 

So choosing things that are distinctive, choosing things that are interesting or meaningful to you so that you love the process of engaging with them. Choosing things that connect you and help you become the person that you want to be and choosing things that move you forward in the goals that you have, rather than the things that feel the easiest or the most required by others, or the sort of smallest things to move along.

I saw a guy on Instagram talk about how he plans to have one adventure every three months, and he plans to have one big focus of the year in terms of something that he's working towards. So that he can remember 2023 was the year when I did X, and he knows that he did four interesting things during that time. And I touch on this in the monthly and quarterly planning stuff that I do in the Be Your Own Best Boss program, for example, so that you get to pick what are your things for that year, what are your things for that quarter.

 I really like that idea. I like this notion of consciously picking things that will be memorable, that give a focus to your year. And I think we can do that in our academic careers and that will help shape the summaries of our careers in due course. 

When we're mindful that there are only certain things that we'll remember, we get to pick what those things are and give them our time and attention and love. We get to make other decisions more quickly, in a lighter way, get them done and remember that a lot of what feels important right now will be forgotten in a year or so's time.

We focus on creating a day that we want to live, that builds towards a life that we want to have. And I think if we can just try to do that, we're going to be in great shape to having the careers and lives that we want to have. If you're on my email mailing list, let me know what you think of this episode, whether it's made you reflect on anything in your life.

If you're not, why not? Get on the mailing list. You'll get summaries of all these episodes. You'll get exercises to work on, reminders of other free and paid services that you can get hold of through the PhD Life Coach.

I also wanted to let you know that I'm going to be taking a few weeks off the podcast. It is now the middle of August, and I'm going to start back up again in early September. The emails will continue, and instead of providing a summary of the new podcasts that are coming out, I'm going to provide a summary of existing episodes that I think it would be useful for people to go back and listen. Either ones you might not have seen the first time around if you hadn't found me by then, or that I think would be useful for people to revisit. So the emails will continue weekly, the podcasts are going to stop for a little summer break and we'll be back in September. 

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.