3.38 Nine things PhD students need to tell themselves more often

Most PhD students and academics spend a lot of time telling themselves they’re not doing enough, they’re behind or they’re not good enough. Even if you truly believe that’s true, constantly having those comments in your head makes everything feel more difficult. When I talk with clients about intentionally choosing other thoughts, they often struggle to come up with thoughts that might help more AND that still feel true. In this episode, I give you nine examples that you can pick up and play with today!

Links:

What to do when you get contradictory advice

How to coach yourself (and why you should)

Why what you do matters (and when it doesn’t)

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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. 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

I want you to imagine I've got some magical tool where I'm able to look inside your head and see what thoughts you say to yourself most often. What would I see? Think about the last time you were sat at your desk or wondering about your research. What thoughts would I see in your head?

If my members are anything to go by, it's probably things like, I'm not good enough to do this. I dunno what I'm doing. Other people are so much further ahead than me. This is too confusing. Those sorts of things. Do you recognize that in yourself as well? If so, you are in the right place. Don't worry, this is completely normal.

PhDs and academia do something to our brains that mean that we just develop this habit of speaking to ourselves like that. And one of the things that I often work on in coaching is how we can choose other thoughts. Now I wanna reassure you, this is not gonna be toxic positivity. This is not gonna be, everything's great and I can do everything and I'm the best, I can do anything I set my mind to.

We're not doing that, okay? But what we are gonna do is identify some really specific thoughts that might help you more than the ones that you're focusing on at the moment. Now when I say this in coaching in my membership classes and stuff, people are often like, yeah, but what thoughts? I don't even know what would help at this point.

So that's what this episode's about. I'm gonna share with you nine thoughts that I think will help you to enjoy your research more and to get more done than you are at the moment. Let's make your brain a more pleasant place to hang out.

I'm Dr. Vikki Wright, ex professor and certified life coach, and I'm here to help make your PhD and academic journey feel just a little bit more fun. So this week we are gonna be thinking about nine things that you can say to yourself more often.

Now, the first thing I wanna really clarify here is it's really important you only choose thoughts to emphasize your head that you at least cognitively believe. Let me explain what I mean by that. Often people say to me, I know that's true, but like in the inside, in my heart, I don't always believe it. That's fine. If you feel like that about the thoughts, no worries. We will practice thinking them, we will practice believing them. It almost doesn't matter too much if deep down they don't quite feel true yet because that's what the practice is for. However, if I say any where you think, you know, I just don't actually believe that, that's okay.

We don't have to think those ones. This isn't an exercise in making you believe things you don't already believe. This is an exercise in helping you give at least as much space to the useful things you believe as you do to the unhelpful things you believe. We all have a whole variety of thoughts in our head that often contradict each other.

That's why our heads are such complex and joyous places to be. And what we seem to do is somehow think that we should spend lots of time, or that it's inevitable we spend lots of time thinking the thoughts that we believe that make us feel rubbish. And put very little effort into thinking the thoughts that we also already believe, but that we just don't think about so often.

So I'm gonna emphasize nine that I think are really useful, that I have seen help the clients in my membership over the years. But I also want you to identify some of your own.

If you have other thoughts that help you and that make you feel good and make you feel empowered, happy days. In fact, I'd love to hear about them. If you're on my newsletter, you can just hit reply to any of the newsletters. Let me know what thoughts you are going for, or if you follow me on Instagram at the PhD life coach DM me there. Let me know what thoughts work for you. Now, if you are gonna make up your own, at the end of this episode, I'm gonna give you a few tips as to how to make sure there is helpful as you think they'll be. So make sure you listen to all then.

The first one is always so important when we talk about it in our classes, and that is that your thesis needs to be defensible. It does not need to be perfect. There is no absolute definition of correct. It needs to be defensible. Now, those of you who are academics, the same is true about the methods of any paper you write for publication.

It needs to be defensible. Defensible either to the examiners of a Viva or defensible to the reviewers of an article or defensible to your grant body who you're applying to, whoever the kind of assessing body is. There's no right answer. Often we tie ourselves up in knots thinking there's a correct version of this, that if only we can identify the correct argument or the correct analysis, everything will be okay and we'll know, we'll be certain. It's not true.

Put 40 academics in a room and they will very rarely agree with each other. There is no right version. Your work needs to be defensible. Does it mean there's not some other cool way you could have done it? Of course not. There's a hundred different ways you could do any study. You just need to be able to defend why you chose the way you did it, why you made the arguments you made. And show that you understand the implications of those choices. That's what you need to do. It doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to be fit for purpose.

Somehow thinking about it like that, this just has to be defensible. It needs to be fit for purpose releases just a little bit of that pressure we put on ourselves and enables us to move into, can I justify why we did it this way? Yeah, totally. Let's go. Let's do that convincingly rather than panic about whether we chose the right way.

The second thing I want you to tell yourself more often is that you've done difficult things before and you can figure this out. Often when we're in the midst of like a really hard, difficult thing, we just think there's no way out. This is the one, this is the one I can't do. This is the one I have no way of getting past.

But you felt like that before. And the joy for me working with PhD students is, I know that's true. I know for 100% that's true, or you wouldn't be doing what you're doing. Either you've got an excellent academic track record or you've got a really cool and interesting background in some other industry that's enabled you to come in and do a PhD. There's various routes to PhDs, as we all know, but all of them involve achievement in your past life.

And one of the things I've noticed with my clients is that we're really good at forgetting that achievement. We're really good at writing it off, either not thinking about it or attributing it to luck or attributing it to the support we got back then, or whatever it was. You have done difficult things before and you're gonna figure out a way to do the thing you are doing at the moment.

Now, one thing I will say, this is where my membership comes in useful is. Some of you will have developed unhealthy ways to get difficult things done. Some of you might be looking back and going, yeah, I've done difficult things before, but I did them in unsustainable ways. I did them through beating myself up, working stupid hours, neglecting my health, all of those things.

Now, if that's you, you really need this podcast and you need to jump on my waiting list for the membership next time because that's a fair point. If you are looking back and going, you know what? I did do difficult things, but not in a way that I wanna do them anymore. That's where you need some support to work through that, and that's something I work through with the clients all the time.

But even in that situation, reminding yourself that you are someone who is capable of feeling this feeling of confusion and moving through it to achieve the task can help you in this moment to think about how you wanna address this particular problem.

The third one, and this is one that has been my mantra for probably the last six or seven years since I kind of thought of it and came across it, and this is the notion is anything gets done one step at a time. As many of you who've been listening for a while now, I have a brain that likes to shoot off in 47 directions at once and expect somehow to be able to do all of them at the same time.

Now. I'm getting better at that, but it is still my natural tendency, and so I probably use this phrase. 5, 6, 7 times a day, at least, one thing at a time. In fact, it's the latest piece of advice that my very expensive coach has given me, which is slightly ironic that I'm paying a lot of somebody, a lot of money to tell me things that I do usually tell myself. When it comes to my business, one thing at a time. I can develop different elements of my business one step at a time. You will do your research one step at a time. If you hear your brain going, and then I need to do this, and then I need to do that, and then I need to do that. I want you to pause, breathe for a second, and remind yourself one step at a time. What's now's job? What's the one thing that would be most useful if I moved it on? Now, what's one thing? Everyone does this one step at a time.

In fact, I'm gonna give you a sneaky one bonus bit here just based on something that we discussed in a group coaching session yesterday. So one of my clients was talking about, she was starting some data collection in the laboratory, and then she had a couple of papers that were also on the go. More of a review paper and more of a database paper. And she'd been advised that it might be useful to put one of them to the side, and she felt like that was a failure. She felt like that was sort of her not being able to handle more than one thing and she felt like she might would find it difficult to come back to that later.

Now, we talked about some of the benefits of doing things one thing at a time, or fewer things at a time. And we talked about how actually if you're gonna put something to one side, you can say, you know what? That's not now. So she decided that one of these papers could go to one side. We talked about things like, what do you actually call that? You know, do you call that dropping it? Do you call it abandoning it or do you call it putting it on the side for now until I can give it my full attention, for example, just the way we describe it makes a difference. And if we're putting it to one side, intentionally, we're popping it out there on the shelf.

We can also do that in a structured and useful way. So we talked about what could she do with the data, with the current state of the manuscript to make sure that it's super easy to come back to later. So when we remind ourselves that we can and have to do this one step at a time, we can also think, okay, these other things that I'm deciding are not now things. How can I put them to one side mindfully so I don't feel like they've been abandoned, and so that I know that I've structured them so they're easy to come back to later. That makes this all feel a lot easier.

Thought number four that I want you to cultivate is one that members have asked for. Oh, no. We'll come. We'll say that in the next one. Thought number four that I want you to cultivate is for when you are telling yourself that you don't know something. I don't know how to do this. I don't know what to write. I dunno what order to do this in. I don't know what analysis to use. I want you to remind yourself this isn't a don't know problem. This is a, I haven't decided yet problem. Okay. The difference, and I've talked about this a couple of times on episodes recently, so check those out. But the difference is if you don't know something, it means there is a factual truth out there for you to go and find.

So this might be, I don't know how to run structural equation modeling or whatever. Okay. There's gonna be decisions in that too, right? But you might not know the technicalities of even how to start that. That's fine. I accept that's a don't know problem. That's a go and find a book. Go and find an expert.

Look up how to do it problem. But the vast majority of these things when it's, I dunno what auditor to present this in, I don't know which analysis to pick. I don't know which argument to make. These are decisions. 'cause this relates back to that first point, that there's no perfect way to do a PhD or to do your research. There's no right answer here. It's not that you don't know the correct answer, it's that you haven't decided. And if you frame it like that, suddenly the power is back with you. Because if you realize that the only thing standing between you and moving forward is making a decision, then you can start asking yourself, how do I support myself to make a decision?

What options have I got? How can I make it easier for me to make this choice? What advice do I want to seek in order to make this choice? But ultimately, it's your decision. Okay, that can feel scary. I get that. It can feel scary, but ultimately it's empowering 'cause it is not this kind of vague cloud that you don't know. It's something you get to pick and you are capable of picking.

Quick interjection. If you are finding this episode helpful, but you are driving, walking the dog or doing dishes, just remember this. When you're done, head to the PhD life coach.com and sign up for my newsletter. We've all listened to a podcast and thought this is great. I should do something with it, and that didn't.

That's where I created the newsletter to help you actually apply the stuff that you hear. Each week you'll get a short summary, some reflective questions on one simple action that you can take right away. You'll also get access to a searchable archive of all the past episodes so you can find the exact one that you need to help with your current challenges.

Plus all newsletter subscribers get a free webinar every single month on a topic that affects all PhD students and academics, and you'll always be the first to hear for when my membership opens to new members. So once you're done listening, or even right now, go sign up for my newsletter and make sure you don't miss out.

Now this fifth one is gonna feel like a funny one and I'm gonna explain it 'cause it came straight out of a coaching session and that is lazy, useless people get PhDs. Okay. Lazy, useless people get PhDs. Now, I wanna clarify things before you all come at me. I am not saying that PhD students and academics are lazy or useless.

Any of them. I am not saying you have to be lazy or useless to get a PhD or a research career. What I am saying instead is that most people who've done a PhD, are doing a PhD, have at least at some points, if not often, told themselves they're lazy and useless. Okay. When you've had one of those days where you just can't get into it, you're procrastinating wildly, you're beating yourself up about all the stuff you should have done and you're looking at everybody else just carrying on and getting their work done.

Side note, they're probably not, but anyway, do, do, do. They're working away and you are just not all of us have told ourselves we are lazy and useless. The joy of having been in this sort of career as long as I have is that I have seen all those people who call themselves lazy and useless, go on and get their PhDs, go on and have the careers that they wanna have. Lazy, useless people get PhDs.

I will extend that to say people who believe that they are lazy and useless, get PhDs. Now. I am not gonna endorse you continuing to tell yourself that you're lazy and useless, okay? Not gonna allow it. You are banned. But if you have those thoughts, you can still get a PhD.

Number six is about feedback. Now, whatever stage of your academic career you are at getting feedback can be really challenging. Maybe it's from your supervisor on a first draft. Maybe it's from dreaded reviewer two, maybe it's from your grant agency's feedback on your application. Getting feedback can be tough.

So this thought has two components to it. The first is that it is okay to be upset by feedback. There's something in this kind of, I don't know, like positive culture thing that you sometimes see online that we should just go, oh, all feedback is information and this is fine. It will help me grow. And it's like, that is true.

Okay. I stand by that. But we're humans. We are not robots. We are emotionally invested most of the time in the things that we're doing. It is completely normal and completely okay to be upset if the feedback is not where you thought it was gonna be. Okay. It is nothing wrong with you. It doesn't mean you have to fundamentally like change the way your brain works, become a different person. There is nothing inherently wrong. Emotions just give us information. There is nothing wrong with getting upset. In fact, allowing ourselves space to experience those emotions, allowing ourselves a little gap to be like, yeah, I'm just upset about this. I don't need to reframe it yet. I'm just upset. 'cause I thought this was in pretty good shape and now there's a billion tons of work to do on it. That's okay. Not expecting yourself to get the feedback and go, okay, I'll work methodically through each comment at time. No, go and have a sulk about it. That's fine. No big deal. What we are gonna do though is we are not gonna make it mean a million things about us. 'cause that's where we go wrong. We get upset about it and then we extrapolate it out to mean that we don't deserve to be here and all that stuff. We're not doing that. The second part of this though, is that I want you to remember that feedback is information and you get to decide how you are going to use it. So it's okay you have an emotional response to it. All good, no problems, but you also get to decide how you're gonna use it.

For some of you, this is gonna be about prioritizing. I have members who are right in the last few stages, you know, last month or two of their PhDs, and they're having to decide which things they have time to change, which things they have time to action. Which are things that are just gonna have to ride and we'll see how it goes.

That is completely normal to have to prioritize that, that other times this is about getting contradictory advice. You know, most of us who've been in academia for a while will have received reviews from journals where reviewer one says, oh, you should include much more about x. And reviewer too says, oh, you should include much less about X.

And you're like. And if you see that as annoying and contradictory, it gets incredibly frustrating. Whereas if you see that as, oh, that is information. That could tell me different things, right? So that could give me the information that, you know what I'm probably hitting this about, right? If some people want a bit more, some people want about a bit less, that's probably about right. Or it could be telling you that you know what, you're not hitting either. That people either want much more or they want less, and we need to make a decision as to which is better for the paper. And only we get to decide that, right? We get to take that feedback, we get to combine it with the information we have in our heads. Go back to the intentions that we had for this article and make a decision from there. So feedback is information. You are allowed to get upset about it, but you get to decide what you do with that information. I actually have a podcast episode about handling contradictory feedback if that's something that you struggle with. So do go check that out.

Thought seven is that what you do matters. And in fact, this is so true I did a whole episode about it recently. What you do matters no matter how. Esoteric and random your topic feels what you do matters. Pur, pursuing information for the good of the world or for the just joy of knowing new things is important.

What you do matters. You are making a contribution, and it is okay if it doesn't always feel like that. Every stage of your academic career. There'll be times when you feel like what you're doing isn't making a difference, but I want you to remind yourself. Especially in the current climate, in academic world where everything can feel like a struggle sometimes, the work you are doing is important.

Intellectual curiosity and exploration is important for the world, the population, the future, the past, everything. You are doing something that matters. You are making your contribution to it, and it matters. You matter.

Number eight is one that often comes about later on in the PhD journey. And again, I've talked with clients about this this week, and that is that moment where you are returning to chapters you wrote early on in your PhD with the intention of sort of finessing them, improving them, ready to be actually submitted with the rest of your work.

And what often happens is you read them and you're like. Oh my goodness. I thought these were in a better state than that. I thought these were nearly finished and actually they're a bit rough. And that can be really disheartening because what is common is for people to focus on the fact that, A, they've got lots of work to do, and B, that if their work's not as good as they thought, then they must not be very good.

Those are the things that are most common that I see come up all the time, and they miss something really important. What they miss is the fact that you can identify flaws in your previous work means one thing. It means that you are now better than you were back then. It means you are more expert with more nuanced understanding and better skills than you were when you wrote that.

Looking back at old work and thinking, oh, I could do that better now is nothing but a celebration. That is a beautiful thing. That is you visibly seeing your learning and development in front of you on a page. I want you, instead of going, oh, I got so much work to do on this now to go, I know how to make this better.

I'm now better than when I wrote this. Let's go. Let's bring this up to my current standards of knowledge. This is an exciting thing. It is not a sign you wasted time writing it. Writing it was how you got as good as you are now, but the fact you can see that it's not perfect, that's a wonderful thing. Let's make it better.

And then the ninth one, I'm gonna get feisty. The ninth one is one that, to be honest, is the area of coaching that I struggle with most because one of the things with coaching is you are supposed to stay at least semi neutral about the circumstances that somebody's telling you about.

You're not meant to like jump in the pool and get involved and sort of be like, oh my goodness, this is terrible, or whatever. Number nine is it is okay to expect feedback from your supervisor even if they're busy.

I was a supervisor. For a really long time. I get it. I trained other supervisors. I worked with hundreds of collaborators, and I get it. Supervisors are crazy busy. They have so much on, they are so overwhelmed, they're so overburdened. If you are listening, I see you. I get it. I was there for a really, really long time, and if any of you supervisors listening are starting to feel guilty, I wanna contextualize what I mean by delays here, because I saw collaborators all the time. My colleagues feeling really bad 'cause it had been a couple of weeks, three weeks that they hadn't given feedback on an article and feeling really, really guilty about it. That's not what I'm talking about here. Students, if you expect to get it back within a few days routinely, you are probably underestimating the workload of your supervisors.

However the number of times I work with clients where they say, and obviously I've only got the client side of it, who knows what the other side is, but where they say that they submitted something four months ago, six months ago, last summer, whatever it is, and they haven't heard back. And when they chase, the supervisor says they'll get to it.

I'm sorry. It's just not okay. I'm gonna go right out there and say it controversial. I don't care. That's not okay. You are not doing your job as a supervisor. Your supervisor is not serving your needs if they are taking months and months and months to get you feedback. Okay, now. Don't get me wrong, you need to be in careful communication with your supervisors so that you can try and time the feedback that you need for appropriate moments so that you know it doesn't coincide with them prepping for a big conference or right in the middle of their marking period or whatever.

So giving some warning as to when it's coming. Great. Agreeing some boundaries around how long you're gonna take over getting feedback back. Great. In fact, I think I might do a future episode about feedback because there's, I think a lot we could all do better to make the whole feedback process a lot more efficient.

But if you are just not getting feedback, that's not okay, and it's okay to be cross about that. We'll talk in a second what you can do about it, but I think a lot of supervisors think that students are often a bit entitled as to what they want. In my experience, it's the opposite. I hear clients all the time justifying why their supervisors are just far too busy to give them feedback and it's okay. 'Cause they are, you know, they're really important in their field and they've got a real lot on, and I knew that when I agreed to work with them. And, you know, it's, it's okay. And I'm like, it's not okay. It's not. That isn't good enough. You need feedback. Even if it's quick and dirty feedback, even if it's, this is roughly on the right lines, that's not, try this next, let's go feedback.

If that's your situation, I want you to talk to an academic, some other academic in your unit to figure out what is normal in your discipline and what is okay and what's not.

The trouble is universities don't always have good systems for dealing with supervisors who don't do this stuff. Often it's a known thing that particular academics are rubbish at giving feedback, and somehow no one can do anything about it. But you don't have to think it's okay.

 If you're a supervisor listening, my biggest tip for you is be honest with your students. If you've missed the boat and you are feeling really guilty about the fact that you haven't given feedback for a while, just speak to them. I'm really sorry. I should have got this back to you sooner. I haven't, which is the most useful part for me to move forward now.

And stop asking for polished drafts before you give feedback. I was ranting about this on Instagram this week. If you saw it, I apologize, repeating myself, but stop asking for polished drafts. I'm gonna talk more in the feedback episode about why it's a terrible idea, but it's essentially like decorating a house before you've actually checked whether somebody likes the layout of the house.

Don't do it. It's a waste of everybody's time. Give quick and dirty feedback. Allow somebody to move on with a bit more information. And students if you are getting neglected by your supervisor, you deserve better and it's okay to say so.

Now, if you are one of the unusual students that's sending a manuscript for comments on a Friday and getting pissy that you're not getting it back on Monday morning, take a little look in the mirror. Let's not do that. We have to accept that everybody's working in a really pressurized environment at the moment, and there will be times when your supervisor drops the ball.

They're not the people I'm talking to. I'm talking about the people who just routinely don't reply. Who routinely say, I'll get to it. I'll get to it, I'll get to it, and never get to it. Those are the people I'm talking to.

So there is nine things that I want you to keep telling yourself much more often than all the other unhelpful things that you are telling yourselves. Let me know which one's your favorite. If you're on my newsletter, just reply to that. If you're not, why not get signed up?

One things that people on my newsletter are going to get, and this is brand new at time of recording, is a gorgeous Google Sheet summary of every podcast I've ever done. The key points from it and the links to where you can find it so that you can use Control F and search, find whatever topics you're interested and find me wittering on about it. So it's like your ultimate archive of all things PhD life coach. So make sure you're on the newsletter so you don't miss out on that.

Now, I promised at the beginning that if you were gonna come up with thoughts of your own, that I would give you a few pointers. First one, I'm gonna ban the word just from it. So if the thing that you are saying to yourself is, I just need to get on with it, I want you to take a second look and see if there's a different way of saying it. The reason for that is that saying just makes it feel like something's easy and it's not true. Okay. When we are saying, I just need to stop procrastinating, there's no just about it. Stopping procrastinating is a tough thing to do. So, be cautious around that. I want you to make sure that you are not secretly insulting yourself in your attempt to motivate yourself. So if you are sort of saying, get off your bums, stop being so lazy and get it done. Let's not speak to ourselves like that, not routinely, not if we're trying to change the way we speak to ourselves.

You know, every now and again as a kind of, if you're doing it from a lighthearted, affectionate place, not so bad. But if you are trying to break a habit of beating yourself up all the time, let's not do it by insulting you.

I want the things do you choose to be around, how capable you are, how achievable this is, why this matters, why you are the person to do it, and that it's okay to have emotions, but we don't have to make it mean a whole load of stuff about us and our futures. Your research is really important. Let's tell ourselves these things more often and actually enjoy getting it done. 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 like 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 the PhD life coach com.

You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics time.