3.27 How to “do it all” – a listener Q&A episode!

In this episode I answer three questions from listeners on different topics, but that are all loosely connected to the idea that we want to be able to “do it all”. I give Julia some tips on writing up a PhD with small children, I advise Susan on how prepare for her comprehensive exams, and I give Sajini some ideas about managing overwhelm when balancing writing up with working as an international student.  Interestingly, these are all topics that I don’t have direct experience of, but stay with me as I apply our mindset principles to these very real challenges. 

****
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. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

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.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. Today I'm going to be answering questions from you, the listeners. I have three people who have submitted questions about doing their PhD while parenting, dealing with the anxiety to do with examinations. And balancing work and PhD as a part time student, even if none of those specifically resonate with you, there is stuff in here that is going to be relevant for all of you, I promise. So stick with it. If you have questions that you want me to answer in the future, do make sure that you send them on in. If you're on my newsletter, you can just reply to that each week. And if you're not on my newsletter, why not check out my website, the phdlifecoach. com and you can join the newsletter right there from the front page.

Alternatively, if you're listening to this on podcast, there should be a question, send Vikki a question box. If you do that, make sure you tell me your name because otherwise I won't be able to shout you out when I answer your question. You can send me questions that way. Or if you're watching this on YouTube, use the comments down there and I will answer them in a future episode.

Before I get any further into the episode, while I remember. Are you guys on Instagram? If you're on Instagram, please follow me. I'm starting to build more of a presence over there. I'm sharing advice and tips and general motivation and cheering on. And somehow in a weird world, I have more people on my newsletter or my podcast than I do on my Instagram. So if you're not following me, I am at the PhD life coach. Please follow me. Please. Retweet, that's not Instagram, reshare, you know, post, share my reels, comment, do all that good stuff that means that your fellow PhD students and academics will also find me too. I would really appreciate it if you can help me out with that. And in return, you get that daily dose of motivation, inspiration, tips, and hints.

So, let's go with the questions. My first question comes from Julia, and she asks, Is it possible for you to ,talk about writing up your PhD while also being a parent to small children, without going crazy, in her words. So it's PhD, last month of writing, having two small children, both under five. Now, the first thing I'm going to say, I don't have children. I have stepdaughters, but they didn't come into my life until they were teenagers. I definitely did not have children when I was doing my PhD. And you might say that means that I've got no kind of grounds to give advice from, and I certainly don't have grounds in a do it like me kind of way. However, think that you can still really apply lots of the mindset stuff that we talk about to this specific challenge, even if you haven't experienced it yourself.

And to be honest, I have unbelievable respect for anybody who is trying to do their PhD alongside a family, whatever age your children are, balancing those different really important roles is something that it's, it's inherently difficult. So I want you all first of all, Julia, you particularly, to start by giving yourself a massive congratulations and a massive amount of understanding that this isn't that you're not good enough here. This isn't that you're bad at this. This is an inherently difficult thing to balance. Okay? That's not to say we're not going to try and improve the way we're thinking about it, the way we're managing it, or anything like that. But when we can start from that place of compassion, the kind of problem solving becomes a lot easier.

And the next thing I'd say is it's really important who you're comparing yourself to. And this is going to be true for lots of you, not just parents. Often what happens is we simultaneously compare ourselves to somebody who is doing their PhD full time with no dependents, who's potentially fully funded, somebody who's in a very different situation and we see what they're doing and what they're achieving and we think, Oh my goodness, I'm not doing it like them.

But then we also look at parents who are perhaps not working outside the home or certainly not doing PhDs and think, Oh, I'm not being a parent like them. And this is where you're being really unfair to yourself by comparing yourself to two essentially 24 hour jobs, the PhD student who's doing not other things, there's 24 hours there, this parent who's not doing 24 hours there.

You're trying to tell yourself that you should be able to live up to both of those people when in reality you've only got half the time that they have. So we get to be really careful about who we're comparing ourselves to. What we want to get to is a place where we can say I am doing. a really good job at being a parent who's doing a PhD.

Okay, a PhD student who's parenting. The way we do that, instead of setting ourselves completely unattainable targets of doing all the things they're doing and all the things they're doing, is we get to identify what are meaningful metrics for ourselves. And this is true whatever you're trying to balance. I used to work with a lot of people who were balancing, being elite athletes with academics, for example.

The same is true there. Some of you may be doing part time work. We'll talk about that more in detail later on. But a lot of you will be balancing other things alongside your studies. We get to decide what are the meaningful metrics for us. And we can do that in our PhD, our professional lives, and we can do that in our personal lives.

So I want to ask you, Julia, as a PhD student, what are the most meaningful metrics for you? And a lot of that will depend on why you chose to do a PhD. Did you just need the qualification for the progress that you wanted to make? Is it a passion project about this particular topic? Are there specific skills that you wanted to learn? If we can get back to our why, then we can prioritise what the meaningful metrics are for us.

Because lots of people will have lots of opinions about what makes a good PhD student, a good academic, whatever stage of your career you're at. But only you get to decide which are the things that are most meaningful to you. Do you just need to get this qualification done? Do you want to have publications? Is widespread networking and connections important to you? Is public outreach and engagement and impact important to you? And you might say all of those things are important, but based on the why behind your career, you get to choose which ones you're going to prioritize at the moment and make those your meaningful metrics.

Does that mean that you will sometimes be disappointed that you need to say no to things that could be an amazing opportunity? Yes, absolutely. But you get to decide what those meaningful metrics are. And remember, I say metrics as though they all have to be super measurable. It could be, and it is often the case for many people, that what is most important to you is that you love your topic, is that you love doing the research and being part of that research community. That can be your meaningful metric. You can decide that, you know what, I am not going to spend time chasing down every single bit of funding, every possible publication, but I do want to engage in departmental seminars and talk about intellectual stuff and make space and time for collaborative discussions. Okay, when you decide your meaningful metrics, you can put those in the diary first. 

The same is true on the parenting side of things. What are your meaningful metrics for parenting? Do you definitely want to be there for bedtime every night? Is that important to you? Do you always want to eat as a family? Do you want to be the mom or dad, who turns up at all the school events? Do you want to be on the, you know, the parents committee and providing cakes for all the cake stalls. Do you want to always be the one that drives them to their activities? Whatever it might be, what are the meaningful metrics for you?

And again, it might be lovely to do all of those things, but some of them will feel more non negotiable than others. Now, with all of these, whether it's your academic side or your parenting side, I want you to also really ask yourself where those choices come from. Do they come genuinely from your true heart and beliefs, or are they influenced by the people around you, the things you see online?

Because what we want to separate when we're choosing these meaningful metrics, we want to separate the kind of shoulds from the I actually want to and I actually think it's important. And then we can narrow it down to a much smaller range of non negotiables, much smaller things that you're committing to.

And then from there, we think about our thoughts. We think about what we tell ourselves when we say, Oh, I, you know, I haven't been to their school play. We say no. I know, but that's not the bit I decided that makes me a good parent. The bit that makes me a good parent is that I'm there for bedtime so they can tell me about their day. That we spend time together on the weekend, whatever it might be. It might be that your meaningful metric is spending time actually with them and engaging with them. Even if that's only a shorter amount of time, rather than being present but not really present because you're worrying about other things or doing your work or whatever. There's no right answer to these meaningful metrics other than you get to choose them for reasons that you like and then you have your own back about it.

The final thing I would add in is remember for all of you, you are not just an academic and a parent, you are not just your roles, you are also first and foremost a human being in your own right. And so when you're working out your meaningful metrics, I would really encourage you to also think about what are your meaningful metrics for you as an individual person that is separate from your PhD or your academic career, that is separate from your parenting.

What is your kind of minimum commitment to yourself? Whether that's something you go and do once a week outside the home, whether it's a period of time that you need to transition from one role into another, or what you do at bedtime, or what it might, whatever it might be. What's the meaningful metric that means that you're looking after you as an individual?

We don't have to be perfect at any one bit of this. We don't even have to be perfect in our attempt to pull it all together. We just have to be doing our best to hit the things that we think are important. The few prioritised things that we think are important. And we have compassion for ourselves and each other when that doesn't go exactly to plan. If we can prioritize like that, we can look at it in the round and go, you know what? All of those things considered, I'm doing a pretty good job

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.

My second question comes from Susan and she has comprehensive exams coming up. So I have a really international audience. Those of you in the US and some other countries will know exactly what I mean. Others will not. Comprehensive exams are usually the culmination of the first few years of a PhD. So in North America, for example, PhDs are typically longer than here in the UK. They start out with more structured courses, with coursework associated with them. The comprehensive exams are usually the bit that are the transition from those taught courses into being able to start your dissertation. They're structured very differently. Most places in the UK don't have them. But even across North America, they're structured differently between different institutions. But even if you don't have those sorts of exams, the advice that I'm going to give Susan today is relevant to any kind of upcoming stressful thing that you've got. So maybe you've got a presentation to do, or maybe it's even your viva , it's relevant across all of those things.

Susan's question was, how do I get over the anxious feeling of comprehensive exams? I have no clue. My professor explained it and the questions he asked as a simple trial, scared the living out of me. They've now been pushed to the full. There goes my summer. Okay. The first thing to say, same as with Julia, I want you to recognize this is stressful. It's okay to be anxious about something that you haven't done before. That is completely normal. Sometimes, you know, you're talking about wanting the anxious feeling to go away. We don't have to make the anxious feeling go away. It's understandable to be anxious. But what we get to do is we get to decide how we're going to look after ourselves through that anxiety.

And the first thing we're going to look out for is where we're making it more anxiety inducing than we need to. Now, one of the things I noticed in the question is a lot of drama around this, which is understandable. We all do this, right? I want you to think in your own examples where you add drama to stuff.

But you talked about having no clue and it scared the living out of you that your summer is over now because of this. There's a lot of what we call all or nothing thinking there, where you know absolutely nothing, you definitely can't do it, your summer is definitely over. And the problem with all or nothing thinking is it feels terrible and it's almost always not true.

I don't believe you when you tell me you have no clue about your exams. You may feel like you have no clue, you may be telling yourself you have no clue, but I think you know some stuff about it. Okay, and when we keep this all or nothing thinking, we don't give ourselves the opportunity to find that grey area where, okay, I know some stuff. Okay, maybe my summer's not ruined, but there is going to be these challenges. We don't allow ourselves to find that kind of nuanced area that is actually probably much more accurate. If you know you experience all or nothing thinking a lot, I have a whole episode about how to recognize all or nothing thinking and what to do about it.

In this case, let's look at them in turn. So first of all, I highlighted this idea that you have no clue. Is that true? Is it really true? One of the tools that you can use to help yourself with that, again I have a whole episode on, is called a Do No Don't No list. I want you to grab a piece of paper, divide it in half, write on one side I do know, one side I don't know, and I want you to really brainstorm about these exams.

What do you know about them already? What do you know about how you prepare, and what they expect, or what topics might come up? What do you know factually? What actually are you able to answer questions on? And then at the same time, I want you to be writing on the other side the things you don't know. What are you not sure of? What areas of your research are you less confident on? Because when we give ourselves that I've got no clue, there's nowhere really to go for that. Where do we even start? But if we can get ourselves to, okay, you know what, I do know these things. There's these factual things I don't know about how they work or how to prepare for them or whatever.

There's these topics I'm okay, confident on, need a bit of a refresh, but they're not too bad. There's these topics I really struggle with. Suddenly we get to a place where we can actually move forward, we can action plan from here. Suddenly it becomes me, you, and this small thing, rather than just, I have no clue what's going on. Again, I'll link the episode, uh, for the do know, don't know list in the show notes for you as well.

What that then allows us to get from is going from, I've got no idea. This is all gonna be terrible not to, this will be fine. Okay, most people think we need to get to this will be fine. I don't feel anxious, but that's not plausible for most people and it feels so far away that we don't even try and get partway where I want you to get to is I can figure this out and I can look after myself if this is hard.

Okay? Those are two really important places. Let's take them one at a time. So, I can figure this out. We're not telling ourselves we know everything. We're not telling ourselves we're ready for these exams. If these exams aren't until fall and autumn, then you're probably not ready. But that's okay, because they're not till autumn.

Okay? So, telling yourself you'll be fine, we don't know you'll be fine, and we don't know you know everything, so let's not bother telling ourselves that bit. But I do know you can figure this out. I do trust that you are somebody who can identify the things you need to know, and you can get a long way to knowing a lot of them. So we get to tell ourselves, I can figure this out. 

We also get to tell ourselves, I can look after myself when this is hard. Because again, if we tell ourselves that we're going to somehow become so amazing, it's not going to be hard, and that if it's hard, it's a problem. Then It's just not really true, is it? You're doing something difficult. Doing a PhD is difficult. Having an academic career is difficult, whatever context you're applying this to. These things are difficult, but that doesn't mean they have to be unpleasant. So, if you know that you're going to have a period of time where you're going to be studying for these exams, how do we make that okay for you?

This is where we go into boss mode. Those of you who have done my Be Your Own Best Boss course will know about this. If you haven't, check it out on my website. It's a self paced course that you can just buy for yourself. If you can go into boss mode and make sure that you're doing a appropriate amount of work, that it's clearly defined tasks, that you are supporting yourself logistically through that.

And you can decide how you want to speak to yourself through this process, then you can make something that is going to be difficult much less unpleasant. You can do challenging things by virtue of the fact you're in an academic career, you've done challenging things before. If you can be careful and caring to yourself while you do these difficult things, suddenly they're enormously less intimidating and you can feel supported while you get them done.

Remember also, if you struggle to apply that stuff to yourself all the time, that you kind of know that you want to structure your time a bit more, you kind of know that you shouldn't criticize yourself so much, but you find yourself falling back into old habits, that's completely normal. That's why most people need ongoing support with this stuff.

My membership program is going to open back up at the end of april 2025. So if you're listening to this before that, you can get yourself on the waiting list. Doesn't commit you to anything, but it means that you will find out all the information as we go along. So where you've got something where you're like, you know what? I want to learn how to support myself to do hard things, but I'm struggling doing it on my own. Come on into the membership. Let us support you because we have a whole community of people who are all trying to learn the same things alongside you.

My third question comes from Sajini, who says that she's working part time, she's doing her PhD at the same time, and she's feeling really overwhelmed with her material, she's feeling really overwhelmed with balancing both of those things, and she's very worried about the future.

And to add on top of this, she's an international student, which is bringing her a whole bunch of complications that she feels are kind of heightening this experience of feeling overwhelmed.

As with the others! Let's just recognize that doing a PhD or working in academia overseas, away from the place that you grew up, is a challenging thing to do. It can be super exciting, don't get me wrong, super fun, loads of amazing opportunities, but it is inherently challenging and it's challenging in ways that we often don't think about.

We often think about the big things to do with visas and funding and language and all those complications, but sometimes it can just be as simple as not understanding the difference between certain brands of food. I remember a good friend of mine, I don't know whether I've told this story on the podcast before, a good friend of mine is Dutch and when she was first over here she was just so frustrated because she didn't know which was a good brand of ketchup, for example, and she'd find herself in the supermarket just wanting to make some simple decisions and just not knowing which brands she liked and it was just one more thing to think about. For other people, it will be things like cultural norms, like understanding what time to turn up for things, what's considered too early, what's considered too late, things like that.

How close do you stand to somebody? How direct can you be in your communication? Some of you will find that you're expected to be a lot more direct than you're culturally comfortable with. So you're having to choose between doing something that you feel is rude and doing something that gets misunderstood. Others will find the other way around that your way of communicating is considered too direct and is considered rude by the people around you. And so you're having to kind of hedge what you say in ways that feel ridiculous so as not to be judged by others. There's a whole bunch of cultural considerations that happen when you're working away from where you grew up. Okay. So let's give ourselves some credit here. You're balancing a lot of things. Being a part time student is a big enough balance. And then when you throw being an international student on top of it, it's not surprising that this feels difficult.

So where I want to go first is to give yourself a load more credit. And again, I have a whole episode on being more proud of yourself, but I want you to recognize all the things that you're doing here. Often the overwhelm comes from focusing on all the things we haven't done and all the things we're not good at. We can work on not telling ourselves those things. But another way is to squeeze it out with the positives. Is to squeeze it out by recognizing how amazing it is that you're doing the things you're doing. And you can get really specific here, really specific about exactly what you are proud of. You're proud of the friends you've made where you are, you're proud of the fact that you've got through your first year, whatever it may be. You're proud of the fact that you have now got a favourite ketchup in the country that you're working in, and that is one decision you will always be able to make. You can be proud of all the big things and the small things, and the more we spend time telling ourselves those things, the more we believe that we can get past the next set of obstacles.

The next thing that I would say is that when you feel overwhelmed, a key thing is to have tasks that you can grab and move forward. So often when we're overwhelmed, we think we need whole new systems. We need a whole new approach. We need to do things differently. Usually it means we need to pick a thing that we need to do and get it done.

Okay, preferably an important thing, not just like little admin tasks. We need to have something that we can say, you know what? If I'm overwhelmed, I work on this document. I work on this manuscript. Let's go. Okay, and we try and break those things down into achievable chunks. Again, if you find that hard, I'm referring you to lots of other podcasts today, but there's a wealth of info for you. I also have an episode about breaking things down into chunks. If we can say, okay, I haven't got to think about all of that job, all of this academics, all of my, you know, missing people from home, all that stuff. Here's one thing I can do this thing. That can really help us to manage overwhelm. One thing, do that one thing. And when your brain's telling you you should be doing the other things, this is the thing.

The other tool that can really help with that is role based time blocking, which again, I've talked about in another episode, but especially when you are managing part time, so you're doing your PhD and doing something else.

And to be honest, Julia, this one's for you too, because this is really useful for parenting as well, is get really clear which role you are in at any one time. So in this hour, I am in writing mode. I am not thinking about things to do with my job. I'm not thinking about stuff I need to do for my family back home. I'm in writing mode. In this hour, I'm in parenting mode. In that hour, I'm working for my job, whatever it might be. 

If we can get really clear of which role we're in, then we can use that to nudge our brains. When our brains say, Oh, yeah, yeah, but you actually also need to do X. Or, Oh, yeah, yeah, you actually need to do Y. You go, I do. But not right now, because I'm in writing mode right now. I'm in parenting mode right now. Or I'm in part time work mode right now. Okay? So you get to decide when you're in which roles, how much time you're willing to give to each of those different roles. And use that as a way of managing the thoughts that are constantly telling you you should be doing something else.

I really hope that that was useful for you all. If you have questions, either about anything I talked about today, or if you have new questions that you think I haven't done an episode on yet, then do let me know in the ways I said at the beginning. Maybe I will answer yours next time. Thank you to Julia, to Susan, to Sajini for sending their questions in. 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.