3.01 How the PhD Life Coach can help you this year

We are back for a brand new season and I want to help all of you struggling with procrastination, overwhelm, imposter syndrome, working too much, not working enough, feeling behind, having too much to do or wondering if you want to be doing this at all. In the episode I'm going to give you five FREE ways that I can help you, one nearly free way (ie someone else pays!) and then a couple of options if you're ready to work with me more closely. Check it out! 

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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.

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Transcript

I'm going to guess how I think you're feeling right now. I'm recording this at the beginning of September in 2024. And that means in the Northern Hemisphere, at least, it's back to school time. And when you work in a university or study in a university, even though it's not quite the same as the school year, we still have that sense of starting a new academic year, getting back into something after the summer break. 

I've always found that time to be a bit of a contradiction. On one hand, there's this sense of new beginnings, new starts, new possibilities that this year things will be a little bit more organised, so you'll stay more focused, you'll get stuff done, this belief that maybe things could get a little bit better, that we could be a little bit better.

On the other hand, I often spent this time beating myself up about not having got as much done over the summer as I'd intended to and feeling a bit stressed out about what was coming, especially those of you who are teaching, but even if you're doing your PhD, that sort of thing of, right, I'm into another year now, I'm a second year now, I'm a third year now, I'm all but dissertation now, whatever stage you're at, there's often that sense that you're going into a new phase, and that can be both exciting and a bit scary.

So how I decided to start this season of the podcast is to let you know all the ways I can help you. If you're worried that you procrastinate too much, or you're overwhelmed, or you don't feel like you're good enough, or you feel like you really need to pick it up this year, or something has to be different this year, or that everybody else is finding it easier than you, any of those things, I'm here for you. I've got a whole bunch of free stuff. So don't turn off. If you don't want to spend any money on this, I have got, let me look at my list. I have got five different ways, five, five different ways I can help you for free. And then I'm also going to tell you about a couple of opportunities, new opportunities, which I'm super excited about for us to work together a little more closely. I want you to finish this episode feeling like you're not on your own, feeling like there's somebody who gets it and can help you with this. And with an idea of which one might be a good fit for you. 

So let's start with the free stuff. And to be honest, if after that, if you want to turn off at the end of the free stuff, that's up to you. I think it's worth waiting, but the other things I've got some low cost options too, but. If you want to stop after the free stuff, totally get it. Never going to sell to you without your consent. So let's begin with the free stuff. The first is this podcast. Hopefully many of you are returning people who were here for season one, season two. If you weren't, you're so welcome. So glad you found me for the beginning of season three. Make sure you check back through. All the things that I've covered before, one of the things I will put in the newsletter. So there's a newsletter that I'll tell you about in a second that goes out on a Monday. One of the things I'll put in the newsletter is my little handout, which helps you work out where to start with the podcast.

So if you're brand new and you're a bit like, Oh my goodness, there's 80 something episodes, where do I start? I have a handout for that, so you can have a little look. I suggest some episodes and tell you why I suggest those. If not, just dig in, scroll, see what you can find. There's an absolute wealth of advice, motivation, there's example coaching sessions where I'm coaching real people on the podcast. You can hear them talk about their challenges and think about how it can affect you. I've got interviews with amazing people who help you be a more effective writer or how to network or how to review and plan your year.

All sorts of amazing guests, amazing episodes. Dig back in, see what you can find. So much goodness there. 

There's also, the second thing is the newsletter. As I mentioned, I send a newsletter every week. It's not just me wittering on and it's certainly not me just selling stuff to you. What I do is I give you a summary of this week's podcast and I do that for a reason. Often we listen to podcasts and then we don't enact anything in them. We sort of go, Oh, that's pretty clever, and then don't do anything with it. And I don't want that to be you. If you hear me say something that you're like, Oh, that could be useful. I want you to use that. I want you to try it out. I want you to tell me how it went. Tell me what worked for you and what didn't work for you. So in the newsletter, you get three kind of take home messages from the podcast. You get two reflective exercises and one action that you can take right now to make everything feel a little bit better, whether you're a PhD student or a senior professor, it all applies for you. I also, in that newsletter, let you know about the other free stuff that you have access to. I'll remind you of other ways that you can work with me. But the main thing is that summary of the podcast to really help you embed all of that. 

The third thing you can get for free is online group coaching for free once a month. And this is all in the newsletter. So if you want that, you need to be on the newsletter. You need to go to phdlifecoach. com and the very first big orange button that you see will show it will say, sign up for the newsletter and get access to free online monthly group coaching. You dial in, it's a webinar, you can only see my face, you're just lurking in the background, and people take in turns to get coached. You stick your little Zoom hand on, one of you will get promoted, you'll appear next to me as if by magic, and we'll have a conversation about something that's causing you problems at the moment. You'll get the benefit of some one to one coaching completely free from me and everybody else will get to see you being coached. Now we don't watch it like Netflix. We watch it with the intention of learning from it, from ourselves, because seeing somebody else have a challenge that feels a bit like one of our challenges is an amazing way to not feel alone and to come up with ideas that you want to try out in your own life.

So make sure you come along. The timings change. They're all in the newsletter. You'll find all the dates so you can put them in your diary. I release the zoom details just before the session and we'll see you there completely free. And just to reassure you, it's not a sales pitch. I mention the ways we could work together in other ways, but you ain't gotta listen to like 10 minutes of coaching and 50 minutes of me telling you why you should give me money, that's not what it's there for. This is my contribution to the world for anybody who is never going to pay me for anything. It's also a wonderful opportunity for any of you who are considering paying me, but want to kind of check it all out a little bit first. So either way, come along, get your free coaching every month.

The fourth thing, I have a new thing on my podcast where my podcast provider has this like, ask me questions option. So if you check the place that you got this podcast, you have a look, whether you're on Spotify or Apple or wherever, have a little check in the blurb, there should be a button that says something about ask questions. If you ask questions on there, I will answer them on a future podcast. It's something I haven't done in seasons one and two. It's something I want to start now because there's this new facility on the podcast. And you'll ask questions, I'll answer them. So you'll get bespoke advice on the podcast to answer your questions. You'll be able to hear from other people's as well. So press that button. No one's doing it at the moment. It's been there for a while. So if you do it, you will probably get your question answered. You can tell me when you ask whether you want me to say your name or anything like that. So you're welcome to do it as a named person. You're also welcome to do it anonymously. If you don't say, I'll assume you want to be anonymous. So drop in your questions, anything you're struggling with, anything you think I haven't answered in the podcast, or at least you haven't found it, just ask a question and I will answer it for you.

The fifth way I can help you for free is kind of an extreme version of that, which is, I mentioned that I sometimes coach on the podcast for a podcast episode. So these were real students who wanted support, and they got a free coaching session in exchange for me being able to use it in my podcast. So if you think that that's something you'd be willing to do, that in exchange for getting that help about your specific problem, you'd be okay with me sharing that on the podcast, just let me know. I want to line up a bunch of people for this year. I'm looking to do at least six or seven of these over the next year. I want every level of academia. So brand new PhD students through to senior, senior professors, everything in between. Just let me know if you fancy it and let me know what's challenging for you at the moment and we will try to make it work.

So that's five different ways that I can help you completely for free to get over all the things that feel difficult at the moment. Let's get this PhD, let's get academia feeling a little bit easier without beating ourselves up, in ways that feel sustainable and fun so that we can get stuff done. 

Now, my next way I can help you is sort of free, especially if you're a student or a member of staff, which is that universities can pay me to put workshops on. So I have a whole series of PhD workshops on things like how to be your own best supervisor, how to write when you're struggling to write, how to start as you mean to go on, what to do if you feel behind, uh, how to overcome imposter syndrome. I'm trying to think of them all. There's so many. What to do if you've got too much to do. That's a classic. Everyone loves that one. There's a whole series of them, and your university can book them. If you think your university should book them, send them my website, phdlifecoach. com, tell them how amazing the podcast is, tell them how much you think it would be an amazing thing for your university to offer, and tell them to get in contact with me. Often universities like student led stuff, and members of staff, often you have access to people who make these decisions. So between you, I reckon we can make this happen at a load of universities. And the good thing with that is it means I get paid by the university and you get it completely for free. So it is a win win situation. They're two hours, they're online and they're good. They're really good. Get some really great feedback on them. So check that out. Make sure you encourage your universities to sign up. 

I also run workshops for staff. So if you're an academic member of staff and you're feeling like, hang on, I need that stuff too. Any of them can be converted to staff courses. For example, I have a specific staff version of how to write when you're struggling to write, and particularly how to write when you're too busy to write that I ran for a couple of universities last year was super well received. Really, really good. And I also have a couple of courses about supervision. So I have a shorter course about how to have difficult conversations as a supervisor and I have a more extensive, how to be an effective supervisor course as well. So if those sound interesting, nudge your university, get them in touch. I can share with them all of the details.

Now for the last few minutes of the podcast, I want to tell you about the two paid ways that you can work with me at the moment. So if you're convinced, you'll definitely never give me any money or certainly not at the moment, you can stop listening now. It's been lovely having you here. And I really, really hope that you engage with all the free stuff. I don't mind. So I love the fact that I can support people all over the world who will never ever pay me.

However, if you think that maybe you'd like a little bit more hands on support and a little bit more in detailed stuff, and if you feel like something needs to change, that it can't really carry on the way it's been. And that actually putting a little bit of money into it might just help you get where you need to be, then listen up, I've got two options for you. 

The first is my lower cost, more self paced option. I have an online course called how to be your own best boss. And this is based on a three month program that I ran earlier in the year with a cohort of students, but now you can do it on your own. If you're in the wrong time zones to work with me, or maybe you work full time and you can only do things in evenings or weekends, and you want a bit of flexibility of doing it yourself, then this is a perfect option for you. It's got about 60 lessons, so we go through, in fact, Those of you who are on YouTube, I'm going to show you. So I'm just going to share my screen here for a second. If you're listening on the podcast, check out YouTube because it's got all the details here. So you can see my website. This is where you sign up for my newsletter. If you go to self paced courses right here, it's going to take you through to this. And you'll see there's two here at the moment, be your own best boss and too much to do, too little time. That is coming soon. Keep an eye out. I'll shout out for that, but be your own best boss here. I will take you through. It's not just about time management. It's not just around bossing yourself to achieve everything. It takes you through exactly what you need from yourself as a boss. How you can organize your time. How you can talk to yourself. How you can manage your tasks. But all in a way that takes into account all the stress and thoughts and feelings that we have about this stuff that are why these techniques have never worked in the past. We have reflective activities. 

It's all designed by me. So not only am I a coach, I was a senior professor in the UK, before I did this, I've supervised PhD students to completion. I've supported even more. I know what stuff helps. And this is not just for PhD students, whatever level you're at, you will get what you need out of this course. So we have, module one is how to be the boss you need. This is really about how we talk to ourselves. If you're super critical, self judging, then that one is going to be amazing for you.

Module two is a bit more pragmatic. It's thinking about how you organize your time and your projects, but all the time thinking about how can we do that from compassion and curiosity, not just by learning a fancy new tool. Module three is for those of you who don't follow your plans. Okay. So if you think, yeah, I plan all that stuff, that sounds great, Vikki. I just don't do what I plan. And then I beat myself up for it, module three is the one we pinpoint here why are you not following your plans? And we have strategies to help you figure out in a bespoke way, how you can do what you intended, make plans that you can follow and then follow them effectively to the best of your abilities. Not perfectly, never perfectly, but to the best of your reasonable abilities and be satisfied with that. Module 4 is my planning and review process so we go through how you can review your months and plan the next one and how you can review your quarters and plan the next one. Okay, so we've got 4 big modules and there is a fifth module coming soon, and anyone who buys it now will get that one for free when it comes out. But at the moment, four big modules, about 60 lessons in all of it, and it's amazing. It's £47, it's a one off payment, and it's going to be really good for anybody who loves self paced stuff, likes being able to take themselves through it, like in their own time, who wants specific techniques, who wants reflective activities, and wants everything to feel a bit better than it does at the moment.

Now, some of you might be thinking, that be your own best boss program sounds amazing, but I keep buying things and then not doing them. So I'm really worried that I'll buy it and then I won't work my way through it. First thing, it's designed to be done in chunks. It's got tons of interaction in it, tons of activities to do. So you should hopefully feel more engaged and able to drop in and out of it as much as you can anyway. But, if you're somebody who responds better to having times in your diary where you're actually doing things, people to speak to, community to go through things with, and actual live interaction, then my membership is the best option for you.

I'm going to share my screen again for people who are on YouTube, there it is. Look, doing your PhD can feel so much better than this. That's like a little strap line on the video. The membership is a monthly membership where you get access to online group coaching sessions. If you're watching, there's my big face talking about how amazing it is. You get access to online group coaching, where you'll see people getting coached, like the free monthly one, but twice a week. You'll get access to workshops, those ones that I offer for universities. I do for you all the way through the membership. So you get all of those live throughout the year. We do two a month, they're two hours online, and you get self paced versions of them as well. You also get access to that whole, be your own best boss program too. So if you're thinking that sounded really good, but maybe a bit more support would be great, then you get it for free as part of this program.

We also have a Slack community. So you will meet with the other people who are in the membership already. You'll be able to set up co working sessions with them. You'll be able to exchange ideas, support each other, share your wins, commiserate on the things that go wrong, and generally feel a little bit less alone than you are right now.

If you're interested in that, again, go to myphdlifecoach. com website. You'll be able to click on the membership, find out all about it. I'm really up front with prices. Some people on these things just don't tell you the price until you dig around. I don't want to do that. The membership costs £97 per month if you pay it on a rolling basis. If you can pay up front for six months, then it is £475. That's in pounds. If you're from the US, £97 is about $130, something like that. £475 is about $630, that sort of ballpark. But I want you to think how much support this is. And I want you to think about the difference it could make to how long your PhD takes. It only needs to cut a month or two off the time it takes you to do your PhD for it to start paying for itself already.

Sneaky one, too. If you've ever worked with me before, so you did my Be Your Own Best Boss program, or you've paid for one to one coaching in the past, get in contact. I have a sneaky alumni rate for the membership just for you guys. So get in contact if that's of interest to you. 

So there are a ton of ways you can work with me for free, for smaller amounts of money, for bigger amounts of money. The one way you currently, only some of you could work for me with me is on one to one coaching. So at the moment I am not taking any new PhD clients. I have a pretty full set of clients at the moment you. And I'm encouraging all new PhD people who are interested in getting my support to come into the membership. I truly believe it's the best way for you guys to work with me. You will get all the support you need through that membership program. If you're an academic member of staff, get in contact. I do have a short waiting list, but I would hope to have availability for academic staff in kind of late October, something like that.

I'm so excited to be starting a new season. I've got so many amazing topics coming up. Thank you for indulging me telling you about all my services for an episode. I truly do it from the point of view, I want you to know that the support you need is out there at whatever level you need it to be.

I am planning and recording a ton of new podcasts for you. We are going to run throughout this academic year. If you've got ideas for topics, if I haven't done them before, if you think there's things I could go into in more detail, let me know. I'm always open to new suggestions, people I should interview, or if you want to come on and be coached yourself.

It is amazing to be back. I'm super excited about this year. I hope you are too. I am here for you however you are feeling. Thank you for listening and I will see you next week.