3.02 How to start the academic year

This week, we’re talking about starting a new academic year! This is NOT about goal setting or new resolutions - instead I'm talking about three ways that you can start the year that are more positive and empowering. These are how to harness your strengths, how to predict the future (and why) and how to modify your environment to support yourself to succeed. These are inspired by my How To Start As You Mean To Go on workshop that I ran for my membership a couple of weeks ago – this will be available as a self-paced course soon, so keep an eye out for that! 

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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 am just back from walking the dog. I am windswept. It is definitely autumn here in the UK. And that means it's the start of a new academic year. Last week I talked about all the ways that I can support you this academic year. So check that out if you haven't listened to it already. But now I want you to think about how you can support yourself this year. 

We are going to be thinking about how we can start this new year in the way we want to go on. And we're not going to talk about goals or target setting. Often we start new years thinking about all the things we're definitely going to achieve this time. But instead today I want us to think about some more positive and empowering ways to start a new year. 

These are based on a workshop that I did last week for my membership students, so the clients that either are at the University of Birmingham or who have signed up as individuals to my membership program, they get access to two workshops a month. And the last one was about how to start as you mean to go on. There was a ton of stuff that we covered in that workshop, but there were some bits that people found really useful that I wanna share with you guys today. 

Hello and welcome to episode two of season three of the PhD Life Coach, and we are gonna be thinking about positive ways to get this year started. The first thing I want you to think about as we start this new year is how can you harness your strengths this year? So often, and I definitely did this in the past, we spend more time thinking about how can we fix all the things we're doing wrong? How can we get up a little bit earlier, work a little bit harder, be more focused, be more disciplined, do things better than we're doing them at the moment. And very rarely do we stop and think, what am I actually really good at? What comes quite naturally to me? What have I been developing strengths in over time? And how can I use that stuff more? 

If anything, before I started learning all this coaching stuff and kind of really embedding it in my life, if anything, I was running away from my strengths. Some of my strengths, things like being enthusiastic, connecting with people and stuff, I thought of, in some ways, as being weaknesses that actually they took away from my focus because I was so enthusiastic about stuff, I tended to take on too much, over commit, then maybe not deliver on everything, or at very least exhaust myself trying. And so these things that were strengths, not only was I not really recognizing them as strengths, particularly, sometimes I was thinking of them as weaknesses that needed to be mitigated for. 

Other times I just didn't even recognize them as strengths. I'm quite creative. I'm quite good at writing in a way that's easy to understand and engaging that sort of stuff. And again, that stuff I didn't even recognize as a strength because I just couldn't see why other people couldn't do that. It felt so easy for me that it that I didn't particularly recognize it as something that I was good at. I want you to have a think about what strengths you have. Things that could help you in your PhD or academic journey that you're not currently using or not currently spending much time thinking about. 

Now don't worry if this feels a little bit uncomfortable. We're kind of taught not to talk about our strengths. You know, no one wants to be the kind of boasting, big headed person who goes around telling everyone how great they are. But that doesn't mean we can't recognize our strengths. Some of you might even feel like you don't really have any strengths. 

One of my clients said in the workshop that the problem is, especially when you're doing your PhD or you're working in academia, is the things that you used to think of as strengths, being clever, learning things quickly, everyone around you has them, so they don't really feel like strengths anymore. 

So if that's you, if you're thinking, you know what, I don't even know what my strengths are anymore, let's just spend a few moments thinking about that. What strengths did you used to think you had? What strengths would your friends and family say you have? Really try and dig into it and identify some things, either that you feel like you're getting lots better at, or that you've always felt that you're quite good at, or you've always found quite easy. 

Now, even if you do nothing else at all, recognizing these strengths is super useful. Because one of the things we know is that what we pay attention to is what we notice. So if you pay attention to your strengths, you remember you've got them, you remind yourself of them, you're much more likely to notice the times when you use it. Whereas when we're constantly trying to fix our faults, we notice the times that we do things wrong. So even if you don't actively try and use your strengths more, just by thinking about what they are, you're more likely to notice them and more likely to recognize the ways in which you're performing well. 

But we can go further than that. We can start thinking about how can these make us more effective in our lives at the moment. And effective you can interpret in any way you want. It could be effective in terms of getting more stuff done, being more focused, having a work life balance you enjoy, pursuing work that feels meaningful, however you define effective is completely up to you. But how does your strength and how could your strengths help you to do that? 

So for example, for me, I know natural enthusiasm is one of my real strengths. It comes across when I'm teaching, comes across when I'm coaching, and it keeps me motivated to do lots of different things. Now I've mentioned it can be a weakness if I let it go kind of unbridled and I just get distracted by lots of things. 

But when focused, what it can do is it can really remind me why what I'm doing is important and really encourage me to take my ideas through to fruitition. I was so enthusiastic about getting this membership site up and running for all of my members and all my potential new members like you guys, and for getting my online self paced courses all up and online, and my enthusiasm for that really drove me through what was a very busy time getting all the content ready for that. 

It could have felt like quite a trudge. It was a huge amount of work, but because I was enthusiastic about the topic, I was enthusiastic about how useful it was going to be. I was excited about the idea of you guys using it, then actually it's been really fun. Now I did have support for it and I'm going to talk about that in a future episode. I had somebody helping me with the technical side of pulling it all together. But from my side, I was providing all of the content, the shape of it, the structure, the exercises, everything. And harnessing my enthusiasm has really made this feel like a really positive experience and has got it done in a timeline that I, for a while, didn't think was possible. 

Another strength I try to bring is that I'm creative. I'm quite good at coming up with either analogies or new models that help people understand concepts. And again, I've tried to use that in the materials that I've been designing for you guys, so that the things I talk about are. are memorable, there's a structure for them so you can actually use them, and people seem to really resonate with that. So I've tried to bring my enthusiasm and my creativity to this work that I'm doing at the moment. 

Think ahead to your term. What are you doing between now and December? What are the kind of tasks that are on the agenda? And how could your strengths help you to achieve those? I would love to know what strengths you've got. So if you want to share them with me, you can find me on Instagram or Twitter. I'm the PhD Life Coach on Instagram and Dr. Vikki Burns on Twitter. Find me there. Tell me what your strengths are. We are such a hugely talented community and it's amazing to know what strengths we're bringing to the world. 

The second empowering suggestion I want to make for this year is that we spend some time predicting the future. Now, I went through a whole crystal ball exercise in my workshop. If you're interested to know more about that, it will be available as a self paced course in the next month or two, depending on how my enthusiasm drives me through. We shall see. Um, so it should be available soon, but essentially this is about looking ahead and thinking about what's likely to happen and what we want to happen. And I took my students through a process to identify all of those things so that we can then strategize to maximize the things that we want to happen and to mitigate for or prevent the that we don't want to happen. 

And we do it with good, like, self insight. Now, what do I mean by that? I mean, you are probably going to be very similar this academic year than you have been in other academic years. And I hope that doesn't feel like bad news. I used to start every academic year, and every calendar year, and some terms, and some Mondays, telling myself that I was going to be different. This time, I was going to be new organized Vikki. I was going to do things on time, in a slower methodical way. I was going to carefully work my way through things. 

Yeah, that never really happened. There were things where I improved in those directions, but that never happened because I was trying to be someone that I wasn't. When in reality, if we can look nonjudgmentally at what we're likely to do this term, and then from there, decide what we wanna do about that. 

So I know I'm likely to be enthusiastic, I'm likely to be creative. I'm probably likely to have too many ideas, more ideas than I can implement. I'm probably likely to get behind on some of my routine admin tasks because I do that, you know, it happens. I'm likely to procrastinate a bit. I'm likely to get some work done in a big burst of excitement and creativity. 

 And when I can look at it like that, without judgement, just as a, you know what, I know me. I've lived in this body and brain for a really long time now, and I'm pretty good at knowing how I'm likely to show up. Then we can plan for that version of us. Not changing ourselves into somebody completely different. The world doesn't need you to do that. The world needs you to show up as the best version of you. So then I can start thinking, okay, how can I support myself to use my strengths? Like we just talked about, but also how can I support myself so that the other ways I'm likely to show up, I'm likely to procrastinate. I'm likely to overcommit. I'm likely to get behind on admin tasks, how I can mitigate for those things. I mentioned that I got some support pulling together the membership site. Part of that was me mitigating for those things. It's much harder to procrastinate when you've got somebody who's expecting content from you. It's much easier not to get behind on admin tasks, if you've got somebody doing some of those basic admin tasks for you. So that was me mitigating, for some of the things that I knew I was likely to show up as. And that wasn't straightforward for me. I had to pay for that. And I had to manage my mind about the fact that there was part of my brain that was going, we could just do this. We don't have to spend that money. We were perfectly capable. If we just put our mind to it, we could do this ourselves. And the reason I dissuaded that part of my brain was because I knew that with all my good intentions and all my enthusiasm, technically I could do all those things, but I would probably be battling some of these ways that I was likely to show up. 

I know for a lot of you, delegation is often not an option. There's not somebody that you can just pay to do things for you. So instead we get to think about other ways that you can mitigate ways that you're likely to show up. So for me, I'm likely to get behind on admin tasks. And one of the things I do to support that is I try and make it as simple as possible to do the admin tasks I need to do. So where I have a clear system. So when I take on new clients, I have an invoicing system, for example, although that's going to go in my new fancy membership site soon. But at the moment I have an old fashioned invoicing system. Because it's very clear, because it's very step by step, I don't actually, I'm perfectly on top of all that. 

I haven't set up my expenses system anywhere near as well, and I'm not so on top of that. So one of the things I know I need to do this year is set up my expenses system so that it's much easier for me, someone who doesn't particularly like having, is good at it when I do it, but doesn't particularly like it and puts it off and finds it boring and things, I need to make it easier for myself to do those things. 

Okay, so how can you think about the way that you're likely to show up this year, and think about how you can maximize the ways you're likely to show up that you want, and mitigate for ways that you're likely to show up that you don't want. 

The final thing I wanted to talk about today is modifying your environment. Now usually those of you who have been with me for a while will know that I often coach around the self coaching model. And one of the key tenets of the self coaching model is that our circumstances are separate from our thoughts. 

And that it's our thoughts that create our feelings, not our circumstances. So it's not the fact or truth of what's going on around us that influences our emotions, it's the thoughts we have interpreting those circumstances. That might suggest that I don't think modifying your environment can change the way you feel. And in many ways, I don't think it does. I see a lot of PhD students, academics, and I do it myself even now, but certainly in the past a lot, trying to get a sense of feeling calm and in control by tidying their office or coming up with a new filing system or a new task management system. And I know as a coach that the sense of calm or being in control doesn't come from a new tool, it doesn't come from a tidy office, it comes from the thoughts that you're having. 

However, as a human, I also know that sometimes it's a lot easier to have helpful thoughts if your circumstance, if your environment is conducive to it. So whilst I definitely don't suggest that you spend the start of this year starting completely new reference manager systems and learning, you know, new note taking systems and all of these things 

I do want you to think, are there simple and quick ways that you could change your environment that would make it easier for you to behave the way you want to behave? Whether it's having a nice thing of water so that you drink more fluid so it's right there and you can get it. I now have to remember to fill it. Those of you watching on YouTube will see, I just flashed my nice, beautiful blue decantery thing at you. That was part of my mission to drink more water. I'm actually not very good at filling it up, so I need to work on that, how I can modify my environment to make that more easy. But how could you change your environment to make it easier? 

 Is there a way to make it easier to find the documents that you need to write, to always know where you're going to start writing? I'm a big fan of the thing where you write at the end of your piece of writing exactly what you need to write next, so that when you come to it, you know exactly what you're doing. What could you change in the place that you work to make it feel more comfortable? Do you get cold and go off because you're cold? Do you need to keep a blanket in there? Do you need to have better lighting so that you don't get a headache? Do you need to arrange to meet with friends so that you get work done, sort of in some company? What can you modify about your environment that will make it easier for you to use your strengths and harder for you to sort of succumb to the things that you find more challenging. 

I want you to notice my phrasing there. We're not trying to fix anything. We're not trying to stop ourselves doing anything. We're trying to make it easier for us to engage in the behaviours that we want to engage in, and less easy for us to engage in the behaviours that we don't want to engage in. 

Another example, on days that I want to walk on my treadmill more while I'm working, I work with my shoes on. Because if I've got my shoes on, it's a lot easier for me just to pick up my laptop, go over to my walking pad, and walk while I'm working, than if I have to go off and remember where I left my trainers and come back and then get on. It's a small thing, but it's an environmental modification that makes it a little bit easier to engage in that behavior that I want to. 

For some of you it might be choosing to work away from home, choosing to work in the library, choosing to work in a coffee shop, or it's about finding a place that's actually a dedicated little work spot for you at home, even if that's only a small zone in the corner of another room. What would make it easier for this year to feel like a good academic year? 

So we've thought about harnessing your strengths, we've talked about predicting the future and looking for ways to maximise or mitigate the things that we think we're likely to do this year. And finally think about ways that you can modify your environment to make it easier to support yourself, to engage in all these behaviors. 

This is all about being a good boss to yourself. You're thinking forward, you're thinking, how can I make it possible for the version of me that needs to do this work and the wants to have the life they want to have? How can I make it easier for them to do it? How can I make it feel more fun? How can I make it feel less effort and more engaging? We're planning strategically to make this all feel easier. 

Now, this episode is going out on the 16th of September, 2024. So if you are listening live, you still just, and I say , , have time to get into my membership before our quarterly planning session, which is on Thursday this week, Thursday the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, Thursday, the 19th of September. 

So if you join in the next three days, you will be in in time for our two hour workshop on quarterly planning, which is all about deciding what we specifically want out of this quarter. So we'll do a little bit of this, how to make it easier for ourselves, but it's really going to be about decision making and prioritizing around what do we want to exist in three months time that doesn't exist at the moment, and what are going to be the steps to get there. 

Importantly, we're not just going to set goals. We're going to think about what do we need to think and what do we need to feel in order to take the actions that we need to take to achieve those goals. And it's that holistic approach that is what is going to make this session different from any planning session that you've been to before. 

So if you want in on that, or if you're already a member, amazing make sure you're there. If you want in on that go to my website phdlifecoach. com Click on the membership at the top and join. As long as you are in by Wednesday you will get access to that on Thursday. There'll be an online self paced version for members only, if you can't make that session. Not going to sell that as a separate product, but it will be available there in the membership. 

And we're going to do it every quarter. So we're going to do it now planning for the next quarter. And then in three months time, we will do it again, looking back at the last quarter and forward to the next quarter. So if you need that sort of structural support from a live community, then do check out the membership. 

I really hope you found today useful. Let me know if you have any questions. I'm hoping to do episodes in the future where I respond to listeners questions and things like that. So you can either email back to me from the newsletter, or if you go to your podcast provider, there's a send Vikki a question button. Just click on that. Send me some questions. Let me know what you'd like me to speak about in the future. Hope you all have a lovely week. Thank you all for listening and see you next time. 

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.