3.43 Answering your questions – balancing different commitments, academic role models and surviving publish or perish culture

Today I’m answering listener questions! We hear from people who are feeling pulled in different directions for a variety of reasons, a student who feels she lacks academic role models, and another feeling pressured by a publish or perish culture. I give some words of advice and thoughts to consider to help navigate these challenges. Remember – if you have questions you want answered, join my newsletter and send them over and I’ll answer them in a future episode! 

Links:

You can hear me answer other listener questions here and here. 

****
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

As you know, I've covered about a hundred million topics on the PhD Life Cage podcast. Possibly an exaggeration, but I've covered a lot. And often when you are experiencing particular challenges, you are gonna be able to look back at the podcast and find exactly the episode you need.

In fact, if you sign up for my newsletter, I'll send you a searchable archive where you can find out exactly what I have covered and find the perfect one for you. But sometimes I will concede, there are times where you have questions that I haven't answered yet, and people on my newsletter also have the opportunity then to tell me that, to email me, say, Vikki, I haven't seen you answer this yet.

What advice would you give me in this situation? And then I will answer the questions on the podcast. And that is what today's episode is. I've had three listeners send me questions that I think are applicable to so many people, and which I have so much to say about, and we're gonna answer those questions today.

So settle in, get ready for three completely different topics, and make sure you're on the newsletter so that you can ask me your questions too.

Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. I'm Dr. Vikki Wright, ex- professor and certified life coach, and I wanna try and help you make your PhD and academic experience a whole lot calmer and more fun than it feels at the moment.

And there is no better way to do that than to answer three. Specific questions from some of you lovely listeners. So we are gonna be thinking about task switching, moving between the different bits of your PhD that you need to do. We are gonna be thinking about role models and what happens if you don't have ones around you that you actually wanna emulate and we're gonna be thinking about the publish or parish culture that exists in so many of our academic communities, how we can survive and even thrive within that sort of pressure. So let's get going.

The first question came from Marie and she says, I'm realizing I'm at the point of my PhD where I'm struggling with context switching. I know that doing a PhD means keeping multiple things going all at the same time. As there's more to hold, argument and material, the switch between tasks or large pieces of work feels more difficult.

For context, I'm wrapping up my third chapter, thinking through Ideas, questions, data gathering for my fourth, and also writing grant applications to secure additional funds to get me through until submission. I'm trying to factor in rest days or transition periods where I can create intentional pauses, but it doesn't seem to be very effective.

I think this is a great question and one that a lot of people will struggle with, particularly towards the end of a PhD, where you are working often on multiple projects at once and thinking about what happens afterwards.

So where do we start? I would always start from recognizing that the thing you are finding difficult is quite a complex ask of yourself. Often at these stages, what we do is we go, I'm finding this difficult, but I have to do it, so I just need to get on with it. And that's the kind of feedback that we give ourselves, right?

Sort of acknowledging that it's hard to switch, but not seeing any way around that. And so being almost dismissive of those problems going, oh, well, I've just got to do it. I've just gotta suck it up. Other people seem to be able to. And the problem is as usual, that's not that compassionate. And also it takes away all of our problem solving. It takes away that creativity that will enable us to go, okay, what could we do about this? So the first thing to say here is that you are right when you are doing hard cognitive work in the form of writing a discussion for one chapter to then switch over and write a grant application for something else, or to switch over and do your teaching or whatever constraints you've got, that's a difficult thing to do.

Transitions can be tough for the best of times and transitions between two different cognitively demanding tasks is hard. And so if we start from the place of it's difficult, other people find it difficult too. How can we then think, right, how can I make this easier? Now, I do have a whole episode about why transitions can be difficult, so do go check that one out.

The three things that I really wanna emphasize here are how can we reduce the need for transitions? How can we make transitions feel easier? And how can we beat ourselves up less for finding it difficult? And to be honest, you can apply those three things to most challenges that you have. How can I do it less often? How can I make it easier? How can I make it less painful, essentially?

So how do you make it happen less often if we recognize that we struggle to transition between two different tasks that are sort of cognitively challenging, then when we are doing our weekly planning, especially if you use role-based time blocking, I want you to look at how you can minimize those transitions.

Now, it's not always possible, but often we can decide that I'm going to do this cognitively challenging task on these days, and I'm gonna do this other cognitively challenging task on these other days. And so I'm reducing the amount of times that I'm switching backwards and forwards.

Now, you may say that's not possible. 'cause I have meetings, I have commitments on particular days. That means that's not always possible and I accept it is not always possible. But you can, for example, transition. If you decide to focus on one major cognitive task on a Tuesday, say you can then transition into other tasks that need doing, but that aren't as cognitively demanding.

And then on the Wednesday you work on the other big cognitive task and then transition into things that aren't as cognitively demanding. So we're reducing our need to actually come outta one thing that's difficult and move straight into something else that's difficult.

So I want you to look for any opportunity where you can cluster things like that. Often the problem comes from us telling ourselves that we need to be working on all things simultaneously because all things are important, but often working on all things simultaneously is not the most efficient way of doing it.

So really test your assumptions there. Really ask yourself, actually, am I gonna move all of these things this week? Or could I say that this week is discussion week? Plus administrative bits and bobs, and next week is grant application, week plus bits and bobs. Okay, so we're gonna reduce the number of changes we need to make.

Now let's think about how we can make some of those transitions easier when we do have to make them. The first way is allowing yourself a bit of time for that transition, and we can try and mark that in an intentional way. So maybe you do have to switch from one cognitively demanding thing from another one.

Let's not expect ourselves to close one document, open the next document and dive straight in. What can you do in between that kind of marks that transition process? Perhaps it's as simple as going, getting a glass of water, getting a cup of tea, whatever it is, coming back to your desk, sitting for a moment.

Maybe you introduce something that's a little bit more of a ritual where you light a particular candle, if that's your vibe, or you play a particular music as almost like the advert break between two different things.

When you are thinking about what that in-between task is I want you to try and think of something that doesn't use your brain. Now I'm talking to myself here as well. 'Cause this is one of my habits that I don't particularly love. I'm not consciously working on at the moment, but I know it's something I do need to work on. Which is these days, there's a real tendency when we are transitioning from one task to another to go on our phones one way or another, whether you are watching tv, whether you're scrolling, whatever it is, there's a real tendency to stop doing one thing, shove your brain full of a load of other things, and then expect yourself to go into something else.

And that actually really cognitively demanding. It might feel as though you're kind of distracting yourself, turning your brain off, whatever. But actually we are just firing more information into our brains. So when you are thinking about what you are gonna do in that break, I want you to think about what is actually good for your clear mind, for your healthy body.

How can you introduce something that is calming, fun, energizing. There's a real difference to spending that time having a potter around your garden or wandering off to your kitchen while letting your brain just do its little thing than turning your phones on and going off again.

One way of realizing the opinions you have of your own practice is thinking, what would I think if kids were doing this? So as an example, I said, I have a tendency that in between tasks I will scroll on my phone and if the school that my step kids went to policy was that when you finish one lesson, they could scroll on their phones until the next lesson starts. I would not be a happy step mommy. That would not be a school that I would be sending my kids to, but it's what I do to myself. And so asking yourself actually what would I expect kids to do here? I'd expect 'em to get a drink, go to the toilet, go outside, chill out a bit, blow off some steam, whatever it might be, and come back feeling refreshed. How can we instigate that into our lives too?

Maybe you try and work in different places on different projects. So that sort of being in the cafe signifies that you're working on the grant application. Being at home, in your office, being at home, on your kitchen table signifies something, a different project. Okay? So think about using your environment to demarcate them out like that a little bit more.

The other way, and I can't remember whether I've done an episode about this before or not, but I've definitely talked about it, is parking on the downhill. So this is make it as easy for yourself to transition back into whatever task it is as possible.

So this means finishing a task with a clear instructions as to where you're up to and what you need to do next. So almost thinking about future you when you finish one task so that when you pick it back up, you've got almost like shift handover notes. Okay, so if you imagine somebody else was taking over this task, what information would you need to give them? And what we are doing there is we are reducing the cognitive load of starting the new thing by making it super clear where we're gonna start. I said there were three things. Third one, as usual is don't beat yourself up if you're finding it difficult. If you find yourself in a position where you have to transition more than you'd like, where you've tried to make it easier and you're still finding it difficult, that's okay.

It's fine. You're a human being. We can't just switch. Even my computer's not that good at switching straight outta one program into another program all the time. It's okay. We're at capacity. It's all good. Let's just start the next one a little bit slowly. It's all good. Let's have some compassion for ourselves.

Marie, let me know whether that was helpful for everybody else. Let me know how, what you think too and let's move on to the second question.

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.

The second question is anonymous. I know their name, but they've asked me not to share it for reasons that I think will become clear when I'm reading out what they said they said.

What do you think about the importance of role models for becoming your own version of an independent researcher, which aligns with how you want to be and how this relates? To motivation during your PhD? I recently realized I was missing a key role model of what a good researcher is to me.

They then went into some details where they shared that they'd been to another university, experienced working with somebody who was much more aligned with their priorities and are now finding it difficult to go back to their supervisor.

They share that they've lost a bit of confidence in their supervisor and they've definitely realized that they don't want to emulate their supervisor in the future.

I think this is a great, great question and I think often we assume that we will end up with a supervisor that we aspire to be like, and I think supervisors often assume that students will aspire to be like them, and it's often not the case. There are many, many different ways of being an academic. There are many different ways of organizing your career and of prioritizing and looking after yourself during that time. And sometimes we will find that the supervisors that we end up working for actually end up not to be the role models that we thought they were gonna be and not to have lives that we want to have.

So same as with Marie. First thing is don't beat yourself up about this. This is pretty common and certainly doesn't indicate any problem with you pursuing careers in academia or any sort of inherent weakness on either of your part. It is a mismatch in what your supervisor wants from academia and who they want to be in academia and who you want to be and what you want from academia.

So what do we do about it? I think the first thing is not to write off your supervisor. We can learn an awful lot from people who are doing academia in a way that we never want to do it. It can help us better understand our priorities. It can help us better understand what we definitely don't want, but there may also be things that we can learn from the way they're doing it.

Even if you don't want to be like your supervisor, you don't want their lives, they may still, they probably do have elements that you could use and apply in your own way. So really avoid that kind of black and white thinking of, oh, I've realized they're not a role model, therefore I've got nothing to learn from them.

If we can look at it in a slightly more nuanced way and be like, okay. I don't want those bits and I don't appreciate those characteristics, but they are pretty good at getting grants or you know, raising their profile or whatever it might be. I wonder what I can learn. I wonder what I can adjust, twist shape to my own approach that would also be quite effective.

Because when we completely write them off, we to lose that opportunity to learn and twist and adapt the skills that they have to apply in our own way. Now, one of the reasons that's difficult is often if your supervisor doesn't end up to be the role model that you want them to be, that can be super disappointing, right? Super frustrating. And so we've often got all these emotions around it, and often we either respond to that by saying, oh, well, I obviously don't like belong here, I can't do this. Or by like turning it all the way around and casting your supervisor into like super baddie role where we are like, we hate them and we won't have anything to do with them and we'll do the bare minimum and blah, blah, blah.

But there is a place in between where we look after our own emotions. It's okay to be disappointed, it's okay to be frustrated. We get to look after those emotions. And at the same time, deciding how and to what extent we want to engage with and learn from our supervisors. What we then get to do is recognize that our supervisors are only one opportunity to get good role models in academia.

And there is a whole world of academics out there who are doing this in a whole variety of ways. And this is where networking is so important. And now any of you who have just gone, Ugh, networking, I get it. Don't worry. And. I wasn't gonna announce this today. This was not part of the plan, but I'm gonna, if that was your immediate gut reaction was like, oh, I know I should do that, but it's awful.

I hate it. Networking sounds so transactional. It sounds so gross. I'm so bad at it. You need to make sure you're definitely on my newsletter because Hot Off the press quarter three of the PhD Life Coach membership is going to focus on academic relationships, dah dah. It's gonna focus on improving your relationship with your supervisor, improving the community that you have around you, feeling part of a community. Extending your networking reach and doing it in a way that doesn't feel horrible and feels authentic and true to you instead. So if that's something you struggle with, make sure you are at least on my newsletter, if not on my wait list, because this is gonna be the quarter for you anyway. There wasn't gonna be an official announcement today, but turns out it was. So there you go. Surprise. I told my members this week, but I wasn't gonna say it on the podcast. There you go.

So networking though is an opportunity to identify and spend time with people who may be doing academia differently. And this doesn't mean going and schmoozing round conferences in a kind of self-promotional way, but it means recognizing that there's a bunch of people in your departments, in your universities, in your discipline, but at other universities who are doing this differently and who you may well be able to be in contact with and to learn from.

So where do we start and how do you learn? I am a big fan of starting with your peers, so people who have different supervisors to you, whether that's within your immediate vicinity or further afield. Spending time talking to them about what their supervisors are like. Okay, how do they behave? What do they prioritize? Are they good role models? Snoop around with the other PhD students, getting to know them and getting to know more about their supervisors. Often if we've got good supervisors, we take it for granted, right? And it's not until other people are asking that you sometimes realize what you have actually got.

That can be a great way of identifying people who have got more of the sorts of qualities that you are looking to emulate and follow in your own life. And from there, once you identify people, you can kind of find out a little bit more about them. What is it? What do they do with their students that makes their students feel welcomed, feel, you know, to succeed whatever it is that you are, you are wanting from them.

So we get to sort of explore a little bit, get curious about it, and then at some point you also have the opportunity to reach out to these people. Now am I gonna say that any academic you reach out to is absolutely going to answer you? No. Academics are notoriously behind with their emails, through a combination of just generally being overworked, overwhelmed, and avoiding it just like the best of us.

But there are many ways that you can reach out to somebody. Attending departmental seminars and having a chat at the drinks afterwards. Approaching somebody at a conference, just asking them questions about their lives and how they got to where they are can be a really nice way of doing it. We are not trying to get anything out of them.

We're not trying to ask them to be your supervisor or ask them to be your mentor or anything like that. We're trying to get to know people to learn more about them and about their priorities and their paths. And when we see it like that, we see it as a sort of exploratory process where we are interested in people and how they do academia. You'll often find that people are very, very interested in having those conversations. People like to reflect on their own careers. Generally speaking. They like people to be interested in what they believe and how they do things. So if you are feeling like your supervisor isn't the role model that you wish they were, let's go find the people that might be.

My third question came from Anique and she says, I had a question about the publish or perish pressure. I constantly feel this urgency at the back of my mind to do more things and to do them faster. My PhD is by publication, and I basically quantify my progress by how many papers I still have to publish, but it never feels like I'm doing it fast enough.

And she said, is there an existing episode to address this? And I had to think about it, and I think I touch on it a little bit, but I thought it deserved its own answer. And the first thing to say here, I feel like I start all of these by like validating the the comment, but the first thing to say here is you are right.

Academic environments are weird hierarchical places where we try and quantify stuff in ways that may not be helpful to the pursuit of good research and certainly are not helpful to the pursuit of good mental health. So the fact that you feel like this isn't a sign that you don't deserve to be in academia, or that you're not strong enough, or more not resilient enough to be here, academia can just be a bit of a weird place.

And it is a conversation for another day as to whether it has been purposefully and intentionally created that way in order to exclude people or whether it has kind of evolved that way through competition for resources and a sort of inevitable response to more people wanting to do it than there are spaces that is a conversation for another day.

Or they send me your views if you want, but either way. Feeling like you're in a very pressured environment where there are certain criteria you need to hit is completely valid. And for some of you, the criteria might be lots of papers. People who are in arts and humanities, it might be the big monograph at the end of your thesis or whatever it is.

So translate this out to different, whatever the kind of hardcore marker that you see in your field is . However, what you get to do is reassure yourself as usual, that's always one of them. It's normal. This is not a marker of you. Second thing to ask yourself, is it true that you should be moving faster? Because sometimes we are under this pressure and we are not where we want to be, but we shouldn't be there yet anyway. So if you are partway through your PhD and you know, the expectation is for you to produce X number of papers, how many should you have produced by now?

And I'm putting inverted commas around should as usual. Sometimes we actually are on track, but we're sort of stressing that we are not, and often that's because we are anticipating feeling better once we hit that goal. Let me explain more what I mean. If we're in a situation where we are meant to be producing papers and we know that, and we are moving along that path, we are doing the things we need to do, but we haven't yet reached that point where we can say, I have enough papers, but we are not meant to have reached that point yet 'cause we haven't finished our PhD.

I want you to ask yourself, how am I expecting myself to feel once I have enough? Whatever that means. Papers at the end of my PhD. Am I expecting that that will make me confident. Am I expecting that that will make me feel calm? Am I expecting that? That will make me feel secure if you are looking to the achievement of those goals to give yourself emotions Then you are going to feel stressed for the rest of your academic career. I'm really sorry.

Because those things are very unlikely to give you lasting emotions. We don't get lasting emotions from changing in circumstances, and this has been shown in loads of different research. It's been shown in research about academia, but it's also been research in things like lottery winners.

You think that winning the lottery is gonna make you happy forever, but in reality it makes you happy for a little while and then people usually go back to roughly their baseline level of happiness. Their environment may have changed, but their actual emotions stay remarkably consistent. Now what this means is we get to ask ourselves, firstly, if I expect that I will feel confident, calm, and secure, when I reach my target, how can I induce those emotions in myself now.

How can I induce those emotions in myself on the way? And you might said, well, I don't need to. I just need to get there. And then I will. But once you get there, I promise, other goals are gonna come up. Then you're gonna want your secure academic job, then you're gonna want your first grant, then you're gonna want your first PhD student to have finished. Then you're gonna want your first promotion, B blah, blah, blah, blah. And all the time you'll be telling yourself you'll feel better once you reach that next milestone. We need to identify what those emotions are gonna be that we think we're gonna get when we achieve that goal, when we've published enough and we need to think about how we can induce them now. And the way we induce them now is the thoughts we tell ourselves, is the beliefs that we instill in ourselves is the way that we speak to ourselves, okay? Publishing papers is not gonna make the pressure go away, I promise.

The second thing you can do is set your own markers of success. If you dislike the markers of success that are routinely used in the environment around you, yes, you absolutely need to jump through their hoops potentially in order to finish PhD, secure jobs, all those things, but you get to decide what your markers of success are and that can be a whole variety of things. That can be around enjoying your work. That can be around what time you finish on a Friday, that can be around doing meaningful work that's changing people's lives, you, that can be around doing work that other people think is interesting and that you can share more widely.

You get to pick your own markers of success and focus on those. So you're in an environment that only in your mind respects, publishing as the marker of success. But you can pick other ones too, and we can focus on and celebrate our ability to hit those.

The third thing is you also get to put your own boundaries around this too. You get to decide, okay, I'm in an environment that values this. I value these other things. I'm interested in that, but really these are the things I value. This is how hard I am willing to work. This is the hours I'm willing to put in to reach the things that I believe are success markers, jump through their hoops to whatever extent I can, and this is how much I'm willing to put in.

If it takes more than that, I'm not willing to do it, and the consequences will be what the consequences are. You get to decide what those boundaries are because if you burn yourself out as a PhD student, hating the publish or parish culture, but forcing yourself to try and adhere to it. Your reward is going to be going into an academic environment where exactly the same is true, and then you get to do it again, and that's not fun.

Now, this is not in any way saying therefore you're not cut out for a career in academia. No, a hundred percent no. What you get to do instead is you get to decide. I at the moment, would like a career in academia as long as I can try and focus on these things as well as jumping through your hoops, and I can do it within this amount of effort.

And then you get to succeed as far as you can. I have seen people succeed all the way up to professor with that mindset, with the, this is how much I'm willing to give. If it's enough, it's enough. If it's not, I'll do other things or I will choose to walk away, whatever that might be. But you get to decide those markers of success, decide those boundaries.

It can feel really hard. It gets easier as you become more senior. It's really hard as a PhD student to put that to one side. I absolutely get that. And it's completely normal for you to feel pressured. But let's talk to ourselves in a way that already helps us feel more confident, already helps us feel calm, already helps us feel more secure. And then we work at the pace we're working to the within the boundaries that we set for ourselves, and we do the best we can.

If you don't know how to do that, if you are struggling with how to even speak to yourself to induce those emotions, to take the pressure off, then do make sure you're on my newsletter. Over the next month, I am gonna be starting to tell people more about the membership 'cause we open at the end of July. I'll be telling you more about how I support clients and the transformations that I'm already seeing in the students that are going through that process. So if you're listening to this going, sounds nice, but dunno how I'd ever do that. Make sure you're listening so that you can hear more about the membership in due course.

Thank you all so much for listening. I really hope that you found that useful. People on my newsletter, and if you're not on my newsletter, why not? People on my newsletter send me more questions, I'm gonna do another one of these in five, six weeks time. I'd love to be accumulating more questions for it, so drop 'em to me and I'll answer 'em for you. In the meantime, if you have other ones, you're not sure whether I've done a podcast on it before, make sure you check the PhD Life coach archive. Make sure that you search generically. So I've had some questions from people saying, oh, I don't think you've talked about how to do a lit review. I find it really overwhelming. If that's you, I want you to look for overwhelming. Rather than for lit review. I'll occasionally do episodes where I talk about a specific activity like writing or reading, but usually I will be talking about the kind of thoughts and feelings that underpin that.

So search for too much to do, search for overwhelm, search for procrastinating, all those sorts of things, and you'll find a ton of episodes. Thank you all so much for listening, and I'll 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.