4.06 I answer listener questions

Today I’m answering listener questions in the same way that I answer questions for students in my memberships. People have submitted questions about all aspects of PhD Life and I’ve selected 7 to talk about today - for each question, I help you unpick what is really the problem, what is making it feel difficult and try to give some tangible ways forward. In the membership I do this all the time and post the answers into our private podcast. Listening to other people’s questions being answered helps you apply the learning to your own life so have a listen and see which of these resonate for you! 

If you found this episode useful, you might like this client Q&A episode, where I discuss getting stuff done when you don’t really feel like it.

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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

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast and I promised you in a previous episode or previous email, can't remember which one or the other that I would answer some listener questions in an upcoming episode. Now, I try and do this from time to time. Anyway, 'cause I like to try and make sure that I'm really addressing the real life challenges that you guys have. But I also wanted to give you a little insight into what it's like being in the PhD life Coach membership program. This last quarter that has run, what would it be, August, September, October, I introduced a private podcast for members and what that means is they can go into our Slack channel.

So we have a Slack channel where we can all talk to each other, share our wins, share our problems, all that sort of stuff. They can go into the Slack channel, go to the questions for Vikki channel and just drop in questions, and what I then do is I record them a little informal podcast, a little voice note that I then post into the private podcast .I post it anonymously with just what the question [00:01:00] was, and so everyone then gets to hear it so the members get. A pretty quick response to their questions, but other people can also learn from those experiences. And this is brilliant for people who either have something pressing or who for some reason can't make some of the live sessions right.

That's one of the most common questions I get. What time zone are the sessions? When are they, what happens if I can't come live? Well, we try and have them at a nice range. I have one early in the morning, one sort of middle of the day and end of the day, so that it's sort of. Works for lots of different time zones and different commitments, but this is one of the things you can do if you can't make one of those live sessions this week, is you can submit a question and then you'll get a response from me in a few days or so. And so I thought I'd show you exactly what that's like. What that means is I haven't actually planned this. 'cause these voice notes are pretty impromptu. I read the question and I give people immediate thoughts. Now, quickly, this isn't necessarily advice. Occasionally it is if you ask [00:02:00] me, you know, good note taking or something like that. I'm probably gonna give you some ideas. Yeah. I'm not a pure coach who only ever says, but what do you think? Um, I will give you some advice, right? I have too many opinions and too much experience not to do that. But I'm also not gonna tell you what to do if you say, should I work on this or that? Should I apply for this job or stick to applying for grants or whatever. I ain't gonna tell you what to do. I don't know you, but what I am gonna do is raise some questions and thoughts for you to ponder on that will help you come to your own decisions. So we're basically gonna do that live on the podcast.

I've got seven questions that you wonderful people have submitted to me. These are all non-members, just listeners and they've submitted them. I'm pulling up the questions in front of me now so I can see them. I'm gonna tell you what they said and give you a quick. Voice note podcast-esque response to each of them.

So I want you to think which of these questions apply to me? And even if they immediately don't seem to 'cause their [00:03:00] circumstance feels quite different to yours, I want you to think what you can take from this. 'cause this is one of the joy of hearing other people getting coached, whether it's asynchronously like this or whether it's live in a coaching session, is you can so often see yourself in at least some of the questions and apply what they're learning to your life too. So let's go.

Question one is I'm working on my literature search after much procrastination, I've planned what to do, how to approach it. I still don't feel like I know where to start. I have my topic categories, which I'll use to search, but I get overwhelmed by diving in. Which podcast episode do you recommend to help? They say, I checked the archive using controlled F and didn't see anything about literature reviews, but I could have missed something.

So first of all, if you guys only listen to the podcast and you're not on my newsletter yet, you'll not know about the archive. Make sure you sign up to my newsletter. Go to the PhD life page.com, and click on the button that's right on the front there. And I have a. Searchable Google Drive, that [00:04:00] will usually help you find the answers to your problems. Now, the problem here was that this listener search for lit review instead of searching for overwhelm or procrastination.

I tend not to have episodes that are, this is how to do something. Occasionally I do. I've got stuff about, you know, shortening your work and writing better notes and things like that. But usually it's more about the stuff that's actually making it difficult. So let's have a think about how we can help this person. Now, the first thing I noticed is you're saying that like, I've planned what to do, but I don't know where to start. And the problem with the, I don't knows, my members will know this 'cause we talk about this quite a lot. When you tell yourself you don't know, you take away all your creative problem solving and it sort of implies there's a right answer. There is a place you should start, and if only you could figure out what that was, everything would be easy. And that's simply just not true. Right? When it comes to writing a lit review or something like that, there's a bunch of [00:05:00] places. If you ask different academics for advice, there's a bunch of different places you could start.

There's no, I don't know where to start. There's just I haven't decided where to start. So what I want you to think about is from a kind of curious and creative point of view, where could you start? What options are there? Why might you choose to start here or there? And then from there, it sounds really basic, but you then get to pick and start and not tell yourself that there was a place that you could have started that would've been better, or that would've, you know, been less painful or whatever. Just start and see how it goes and we figure it out from there. 'cause the fact is, what you are trying to do here is avoid the emotions that come up when it feels difficult and you're uncertain and you're confused. And so what we do is we procrastinate because we think once, I'm not uncertain, once I'm not confused, it won't [00:06:00] feel so bad. But those things don't just miraculously go away. So what we get to do instead is we're like, okay, I'm a bit uncertain. I'm a bit confused. That's all right. I can make a bit of a decision about where to start and I can tolerate those emotions. I can make sure that I'm not making them mean that I'm stupid or that I shouldn't be doing this or whatever.

I'm just a bit uncertain right now, and that's okay. Academics should spend their lives in a place of uncertainty, right? Say, okay, I'm gonna be a bit uncertain. But I'm gonna see what happens if I do a little bit of this and see what happens if I do a little bit of that. And you'll find that by doing that, you start to unpick your own uncertainty.

You start to say, okay, well I could do some of this and that will move that part on, and I could do some of that. And as long as we're super kind to ourselves about the fact that it feels kind of difficult at the moment, and that's okay, you'll start making progress way faster. I hope that helps.

Question two, let's go. [00:07:00] I attended your motivational webinar. That was a cracker. That was, that was a little while ago. That was in July. And I have a question regarding my personal experience. I find science interesting, but I struggle with lab work and find it very stressful. I'm struggling with motivation and I find myself subconsciously avoiding the lab where I can. I have lots of autonomy, but little support and low perceived competence. Uh, now you, if you don't know what I mean by those things, that's 'cause you didn't come to that webinar. I will do it again at some point. I am sure. But essentially they're saying that they don't have many people to help them, and they're not really convinced that they know what they're doing and that they've got the skills that they need and that can really affect our motivation. I want to be competent in the lab so that I can materialize my theory and improve my relationship. I'm now wondering whether it's a personal incompatibility and not necessarily an easy change. And the question went on a little bit longer than that, that about their supervisory support and so on. And it says, do you have any tips about how I can improve my capacity, my competence, or my ability to handle this situation sustainably? [00:08:00] Okay. I thought this notion of a personal incompatibility was really, really interesting. So I think I'm interpreting what you mean there as being that you think you are sort of not cut out for lab work, that it may not be what you want to be doing.

And that's not surprising. If you are in a situation where you don't feel like you're very good at it, you don't feel like you've got lots of support and you've got lots of choice, so you feel sort of a bit fragile, really, it's not surprising that you feel like you are incompatible with it, that it's not for you.

What we wanna try and get to though is this actually a sort of internal gut feeling that, you know what, this is not what you wanna spend your time getting better at, or is this something where actually once you feel more competent at it, you will enjoy it and feel motivated to be there? You know, I started out in a not very lab [00:09:00] end. I was more sort of questionnaire based early on in my PhD and as I progressed in my academic career, I did more and more lab stuff and I felt a bit, not so much the low support, I had a lot of support around me, but the not necessarily being confident and feeling competent in the lab, I had that quite a bit.

And one of the things I did was I decided in the short term, is this something I want to learn to do? . I'm not making big decisions about whether this is my life forever, but in the short term, is this something I want to learn how to do? And I decided, yes, it was. It would enable me to answer some questions and then once I'd decided that I decided that learning how to do this will enable me to answer these questions that I'm interested in, I then really quite consciously decided not to think about whether this was for me or not, whether I was somebody who was good at lab work, whether I was somebody who always wanted to do lab work. It wasn't relevant. What was relevant was that I wanted to learn to do these specific [00:10:00] things in order to answer these specific questions. And the reason that's important is when we're second guessing all the time, that every time something goes wrong we're saying to ourselves, oh, it's probably 'cause I'm not really cut out for lab work.

And then we start, oh, should I even be doing this? These huge spiraling thoughts. That's exhausting and it doesn't help us build our motivation. This is all, if you guys heard me talk about decisions before then you'll have heard me touch on this, if not as a podcast episode about how to make decisions you love. But essentially I recommend and not only to decide for reasons you love, but for decide how long you are deciding. So in this case, I would decide, do I want to learn how to do these tools in order to do this stuff in my PhD? And if so, we then get to really focus in on how can I support myself? How can I gather in the support I need in order to learn these skills given whatever my natural inclinations towards this is. Then over time, once you've done that bit, you get to decide, do you want to do your next [00:11:00] study in the laboratory or something slightly different. Do you want to continue this after your PhD? I did eventually decide that lab work is not my baby. It does not play to my strengths. I'm super glad that I learned the things I learned and it meant I was better able to understand other people's science.

And I have a sort of broad sense that if I needed to learn how to do a assay in a lab, that I absolutely could do it and I could do it to high quality, but that kind of careful, repetitive. Introverted often in terms of not being super interactive. Really focusing on the details and double checking and all that stuff.

Just not playing to my strengths. Okay. Perfectly capable of doing it. Doesn't use the bits of me that I love the most. It was part of my reason eventually to, um, leave research. I, I moved into a teaching focused career with, before I left academia entirely. It was part of my reasoning for leaving research was that, that [00:12:00] stuff just didn't use my strengths to the extent that I wanted, and it always felt slightly like I was forcing it.

Okay, so I want you to decide is it what you want to do for the next six months? If it's not, this is a great time to have a conversation with your supervisor about are there alternative ways of doing this, different focuses that you could have in your PhD or thesis, or even whether you want to be doing your PhD at all, maybe a different PhD or some other option is a better fit. But if you then decide, actually no, this is it. This is what I wanna do. Even if it's not my bag, even if it's not what I'm naturally good at, then we start thinking, what can we wrap around ourselves to make that feel as good as possible? So we stop telling ourselves, I don't know how to do this. And we start telling ourselves things like, I'm figuring out how to do this. I hope that one helps. Are you guys resonating? Remember that one? I'm talking specifically about laboratories and new arts and humanities People might be going, oh no, not really. Me. That can translate out. That can translate out [00:13:00] into, you know, whether you enjoy archival work, whether you enjoy field work, if you're a social scientist, for example. So you can translate that out into different settings.

Next one. Here we go. Every four to six weeks I seem to crash. Not in a dramatic burnout way, but in a slow, heavy fog that settles in. What's strange is I'm not overworking. I spend work less than six hours a day strictly on campus, and I don't take work home or touch it on weekends. Did I mention that I like my project? I'm also in a very supportive lab and have a strong network. If anything goes wrong, I have people to turn to, but when the crash hits, I can't do anything. I struggle to lift a pen, eat or do basic tasks. Most of all, I lose all motivation to engage with my research. Best case, it lasts a week worse, it stretches into two months. For a long time, I thought it was a motivation issue, but after attending your motivation coaching a couple of months ago, I began doubting whether it was something else just to be on the safe side, I checked with my doctor and they said, I'm as healthy as I should be. So my question is, what do you do? When everything, everything around you is supportive, but your internal systems still shut down. [00:14:00] Is there a way I can reduce its impact on my PhD in research?

So first thing I say, I wanna tweak that last question. It is not just how can I reduce its impact on my PhD research, it's how can I reduce my its impact on my life? 'Cause you are far more than your PhD research. Second thing I'd say, I'm super glad you went to your doctor, but I would also say that doctors are not necessarily always good at discovering underlying things that are more complex than the basic stuff. So I wouldn't necessarily assume that just because doctor says you're fine, that you're definitely, definitely fine. The reason I say that is because we can't mindset our way out of health issues if they're health related issues. Obviously I can't tell you whether it's health related issue or not, but I don't want you to just completely wipe that out of your head.

One thing that flagged for me was the fact that you said every four to six weeks from your name, I'm gonna assume you're a woman. I hope that's [00:15:00] okay. I want you to consider whether there's anything menstrual cycle related to that, because it's that kind of length that sounds about plausible and not necessarily it coinciding with your menstrual period, but potentially with ovulation or anything similar.

Apologies if I'm making any assumptions about your biology or stage of life or whatever. But the four to six weeks really stuck out to me. The reason that's important is because there's a difference between something being wrong and something being kind of not optimal, if you see what I mean. When something's wrong, we might want to look at ways that we can fix it if possible, when something's just not optimal, we might wanna like think of ways that we can support ourselves through these things.

So I want you to notice, start doing some observations. Are there any patterns as to when this happens? Could it be cycle related? Is it related [00:16:00] to the weather, for example, is it related to particular events that if there's a particular type of event, and one way you can do that is a little bit of tracking . It sounds as though you are quite good at some routines in terms of how many times you work a week out, how much time you work a week, uh, where you work, and those sorts of things. So I'm hoping that tracking might be something that. You think you could do? Just very simple. There's a ton of apps for them and things like that, but equally, a piece of paper where you just jot down a few words about how you were feeling that day and what sorts of things happened might help you just collect a little bit of data to better understand when this happens.

The other thing I want you to notice in that kind of tracking is are there places where you could have seen it coming? Because sometimes what we do when we don't pay much attention or when we think we have to soldier on, we breeze past warning signals and kind of keep going until [00:17:00] we're actually forced to stop.

So maybe there are some warning signals that would help you feel this coming and allow you to plan for it. So that's the first thing. Some tracking so that we, you know, it is bring your best researcher plans to this so that we better understand exactly what's going on.

The second thing is I want you to think about how you can be kind but not indulgent to yourself during that time. So I want you to really think, in that period where it's coming up and or during that time when you actually crash, what actually helps you. Because sometimes what we think helps, or what we kind of having the drive to do at the time isn't necessarily what helps.

So, as an example, if in the evening or weekend. I am feeling kind of tired and lethargic. My drive is to scroll. It's to sit on the sofa, [00:18:00] scroll Instagram. And if I need physical rest, then that's not a bad she okay? It keeps me entertained while I am physically resting my body. So if I am physically tired, happy days, let's do that.

But usually if I'm tired in the evening or weekend, it is not 'cause I'm physically tired. It is usually because I'm cognitively tired from the work I've been doing, or maybe I'm socially tired because I've been spending lots of time people, I don't get socially tired easily. I'm someone who gets energy from other people usually.

But there are times when it's like, okay, that was a load of people today and I need to just not talk. There are different reasons you are tired and getting really aware of what actually helps during that time can really help. So, what activities help? What food helps? What thoughts help, what social support, help, and just getting much more intentional around that so [00:19:00] that we are not thinking about it in terms of, oh no, I'm crashing. Why is this happening? I'm not doing any work, dah, dah, dah. We are thinking about it in terms of, okay, I'm feeling like this. I've got these symptoms. Here are things that help me in that situation.

I want you then to think during that period of time, what is good for you in terms of your work. And this is a really tricky one, and I'm gonna be really nuanced in my answer. Because if people are in full burnout and you say it's not burnout, but sometimes when we're in burnout, we don't think it's burnout.

Sometimes doing absolutely no work for quite prolonged periods of time is the best way to recover from these sorts of things. Other times though, what we do is we need a bit of time off. We need a bit of time with [00:20:00] either a lighter load or no load, but then actually it then becomes quite hard to get started back up again.

So I want you to think, not during this, but you know, you talk about struggle to lift a pen, eat or do basic tasks. We don't wanna be even thinking about working during that time. If you can't lift a pen, eat or do basic tasks, we are in no position to be thinking about working. But if that then spirals into a period where maybe you could work, but you're telling yourself it's too late, you've wasted all this time, you really don't want to dah, dah, dah.

I want you to start thinking about what are small things that you could do in a way that feels good, that might give you a gentle route back in, because it sounds as though you do come back, you know, this is a cyclical thing where you feel bad and then you come back after a period of time.

And what we wanna think is what is that sort of ramp back into your working again? As the [00:21:00] fog clears, what is your little gentle route back in? And the clue is that it should be gentle, it should progress, and we shouldn't be telling ourselves that we should be doing it faster. I hope that all helps. With the tracking it might help you better understand some of the underlying causes, in which case come back and we can discuss again. That one hopefully is helpful for people who have got any chronic health conditions, anything like that, or whose personal circumstances are cyclical or who struggle with menstrual cycle issues like I mentioned.

Question four. How do you manage two supervisors who are quite different? IE they have quite different disciplines and therefore different ideas about project directions in terms of what to prioritize and what will or won't work? Really good question. So the focus in this quarter in my membership has been networking and academic relationships. So managing your supervisor's been a big one. And we just had a webinar about how to manage when you are very different from your supervisor. [00:22:00] But we also translated that out, thinking about what happens if they're very different.

The first thing I would ask you to reflect on is why is it a problem that they're different? What issues are you experiencing because of your perceptions of them being different? Now, sometimes it can be disciplinary differences, sometimes it can be personality differences, approach differences, and all of those things. But why is it causing you a problem? Usually it's something around because person A says do this, and person B says, do that.

You don't know what to do that you want to please everybody. You feel like everybody's advice should be followed and therefore you don't know which to do. Interesting. This is a really good example of how some of my podcasts are relevant to more than one type of thing. I have a podcast episode called How to Deal with Contradictory Feedback, and whilst [00:23:00] that sounds like a different topic, it's very, very similar to this.

The key here is remembering any advice that your PhD supervisors or anybody else gives you is information. That's all it is. Advice is not direction. Advice is information. And particularly if you've got two different supervisors who are telling you to do different things, you can't do both of them. It would not make sense to do both of them, usually, right?

They're saying, do this, not that. And they're saying, do that, not this. Now that's actually a brilliant position to be in 'cause whilst it's annoying and confusing at first, it means that you get to decide. Now that's true when you have just one supervisor, but with just one supervisor, it's harder to believe that you get to just pick and that it's your decision. 'Cause you're like, but I'm surely I should do what they say. But if you've got contradictory ones, of course you've gotta pick. So then we get to think, well, why does that feel hard? Well, it's [00:24:00] usually because we're telling ourselves that we don't know. We're telling ourselves that there's a right answer, that if we pick the wrong one, it'll be massively problematic.

And also something about not wanting to offend and upset the people who gave us other advice. So those are the problems. The problems are not that you are getting contradictory advice. The problem and your supervisors different from each other. The problems are that you're telling yourself you don't know.

You are telling yourself that it's a problem that you don't know and that if you get it wrong, it will be massive. And you're telling yourself that people will be upset if you pick the other thing. Okay? What we get to do is deal with those thoughts instead. We get to remind ourselves that there are many ways to do this thesis that end up in a successful PhD many, many ways.

All of you have got infinite roots to a successful PhD. You get to pick one of them, but it doesn't mean that the others wouldn't have worked. It doesn't mean there is this one magic golden thread that takes you to a PhD. There's a whole [00:25:00] variety of different ways. We haven't gotta pick the right one. We've gotta pick one that we can defend and justify and hopefully enjoy doing.

The other thing, and I spend my life telling my members this, your supervisor's emotions are theirs to manage, you have to behave in a way that you think is reasonable and ethical and all of those things, okay? I am not saying just go be a dick. That's not what I'm saying at all. But if one of them is gonna be disappointed 'cause you didn't pick theirs, well that's okay.

They're adults. They're allowed to be disappointed. They can be disappointed. They can manage that themselves. We get to make sure that we explain why we've picked what we've picked. We thank them for their contribution. We consider whether there are ways that we can incorporate some elements if, if only if it improves our thesis.

Not just to placate them, but are their ways. And as long as we've done all of those things, they then get to disagree or be disappointed [00:26:00] or whatever. 'cause the fact that you know, you're in a no-win situation, if they're telling you two different things. We're gonna disappoint somebody. And if we try and wedge it all in, what we're probably gonna do is disappoint ourselves ultimately.

So remembering any advice is information. You get to decide. There's no right answer. Behave like what you consider to be a reasonable human being. And my fifth one, if it's ever really, really tricky, I highly recommend getting them in the same room. I used to have two supervisors as well. They got on with each other very well. They probably agreed 70, 80% of the time, but when they didn't agree, they really, really didn't agree and sometimes I would be spending myself literally going up and down the corridor talking to one of them. Well, what about this? Oh no, no, don't do that. Do this. Go down the corridor to the other one. No, that's stupid. Don't do that. Do this, da da. And I would be like, right, come with me. We need to be in a room and actually having the conversation as a three. So one of the things we learning coach training is about normalized by naming, [00:27:00] by actually pointing out something that's happening. And so a useful conversation can be get them in the room and say. I want us to discuss this. 'cause at the moment you are saying that we should do X and you are saying that we should do Y, and I think it's clear that I can't do both X and Y. So I'd like to discuss as a group collaboratively the possibilities that we have got available to us. Mostly X, little bit of Y, mostly Y, little bit of X or Y, Zed, something completely different.

I want us to discuss them together and actually come to a conclusion and sometimes involving them in that discussion can help as well. Okay, hope that helps.

Question five. I am so scared of starting to write my discussion chapter. I put it off by doing something else. I wrote an article which has no relation to my research to avoid the guilty feeling of not beginning to write the chapter. I'm too scared because this is the most challenging part of my thesis. My supervisor too stated that this is the key part to your thesis. I'm so scared I can't do it. Well, help me sort [00:28:00] this out. My supervisor also said I have to finish the full draft by Christmas, which makes me so scared. I need to write the discussion chapter and revise part of my findings chapter.

This is such a good example of why procrastination is emotion avoidance. You are feeling scared because of the things you're telling yourself about this chapter and the things that people are saying to you. I'll take that. Okay? And we are therefore avoiding those feelings of scared. And in the short term, that's very adaptive, right?

We get to feel less scared 'cause we are doing something else. The problem is, in the long run we are gonna get to that scared place at some point. And what usually happens, I said this, I said this at a training session yesterday, so I did one of my rare live sessions yesterday and everyone was nodding a lot.

Is that what usually happens is that we are avoiding the feeling of scared right up until the point that the feeling of [00:29:00] pressure of an impending deadline feels worse than the scared about doing it. And then we flick over and start doing it. So that's why we often actually do get this stuff done in the end is because yes, we're avoiding the feeling of scared, but actually that becomes the lesser of two evils once the pressure of the deadline gets up.

The trouble is that gets it done, but it doesn't feel very nice, right? So we want to think of a different way of doing it. What we get to do is we get to think about what thoughts are making you feel scared. So, um, what thoughts that you are having. 'Cause it's not having to write it. That's just a circumstance I will be writing my discussion chapter doesn't necessarily have to make you scared. It sounds from what you've said, that you are scared because it's the hardest part that you might not be able to do it. I'm scared I cannot do it. Well. Okay, so is those thoughts that are generating the feeling of scared and it's that scaredness that you're trying to avoid and that's making [00:30:00] you procrastinate.

So we get to take two approaches. How can we make it feel less scary? How can we tolerate the scariness? So first of all, how can we make it feel less scary? Well, we can start checking whether these thoughts we're telling ourselves are even true. And I'm gonna start by asking you a funny question, which is, are you actually right gonna write this, this discussion?

Are you actually going to? Because if you are, and I suspect you'll be saying yes, I I will. I know I will. Then we know we are going to do the scary thing eventually. And at this point I will refer back to last week's podcast where I was talking about writing the scary email 'cause it's a very similar thing. If you know you are going to write this, you know you are going to do the scary thing at some point, then we start looking at it not as something to be avoided, but something that we can make feel better and actually get on and do. Yeah. So are you gonna write it? [00:31:00] I'm gonna assume you're saying yes right now.

So how can we make it feel less scary? I'm scared. I cannot do it. Well. Well, you probably can't do it. Well straight out the bag, but that's not a problem. You don't need to, we don't need to write a good discussion in the first version of it. If you're saying, I'm not sure I can get it good. I would really encourage you to defer that thought.

So what we usually do is we try and reassure that thought. We try and say, oh, no, no. Of course you are capable, but your brain is still going. Yeah, but what if I'm not? I like to use, it's not my business. It's not my business to know whether I can get this to a good standard or not. It's not my business to know whether this will be good enough or not.

My job at the moment is to move towards that and get it as good as I can get it. Is it good enough? Who knows? That's for my [00:32:00] supervisors, that's my examiners to decide, not for me to second guess. So instead of telling ourselves that we're scared we can't do it, and we should know that we can do it in order to do it, we can go, okay, I don't know if I can do it.

What would be the first steps? Let's do those bits and see how we go. Okay? Don't need to know that you can do it. Just need to do the next bit. We can stop telling ourselves that we are worse than other people. That everyone finds. It's easy. Everyone says this is the scary bit. That's okay. We do the scary bit. Everyone who's ever written a thesis thought their discussion was the scary bit. Somehow they wrote a discussion. Somehow they got a thesis. So we get to say it's okay. I know this feels scary. But we are not gonna make up a load of drama to make it sound more scary. It's okay that it's scary, but we're not gonna feed that.

And we're gonna ask ourselves, what if I was gonna do it, what would be the next bit? What would be the next few steps towards that? And we try and [00:33:00] keep our brain in that room. So what would be the first steps to roughly working out how to write your discussion chapter. If you were giving an instruction to an assistant or you're giving instruction to chat GPT to write your discussion, what would be the first step?

Do not ask chat GPT to do it, but think through what would be the prompt that you would write if you were gonna do that? What would be the first steps? And then we get to say, my only job is to do those steps. Because you'll never write a discussion. You will make an approximate plan. You will review your plan, modify your plan. You will identify a few more papers that you need to read and slot in. You will draft the first paragraph. You will draft the second P, no right point. Do you write the discussion? It's just a series of small other tasks. Okay? Do you get to pick one? Say, okay, can I do that bit? I can do that [00:34:00] bit. Right. Next one. Can I do that bit? Yeah. I can figure that bit out. You can do this. It's normal to feel scared. It doesn't have to be a reason to avoid it.

Question six. I know you are a PhD life coach, but I thought this might fit well as a PhD is not a separate individual than their life as a person. So I believe, um, life coaching as a whole would also help. First thing before I go into actually the question, that's literally why I call everything the PhD life coach, and it's not the PhD. Life coach. It's the PhD life coach. I coach on PhD life and in my membership we talk about stuff outside of PhD as much as anything else. So this, I do not separate. This is not about getting your thesis done and nothing else. You are not your PhD. You are a human being who is going through the PhD experience at the moment, and we want that whole life and experience to feel great.

So this person says, sometimes I can question [00:35:00] prioritization at all levels, not just PhD tasks or work tasks, like spending time with loved ones, especially elderly family members, and how important that is given that time passes so quickly. And I don't want to reach a time where I feel sorry for not spending much time with them, but then I have to work and earn money and also develop my career and advance my PhD, let alone my personal needs and my leisure. I feel exhausted and sometimes depleted in cognitive, emotional, and physical energy. Sometimes I feel like I need a hundred hour day rather than a 24 hour one. It might look silly, but really am I asking for tips and tricks? How to prioritize all aspects of life based on what? Do you have any life management tips, not just time management? Most importantly, is there a system or scale that you recommend to rate important things in life at an individual level sort of scoring?

Actually, we are gonna be doing something about this in the new quarter of the PhD life coach. It's funny that you ask. There are things called wheels of life that you can use to kind of think about your current satisfaction levels with different areas of your life, and I have some [00:36:00] tweaks on that, that I will take the membership through to think about not just how important they are, but also how much effort you're currently putting in, how much effort you want to be putting in, and how you can divide that when you've got limited effort to go around. Okay? So that's something we are gonna go into. I won't have capacity to talk about that now.

So I would really encourage you, if this is something you struggle with, I'd really encourage you to be in the membership next quarter, and we'll do that in more detail. Short answer is I really like the idea of dialing things up and down. So deciding which bits of your life are in maintenance mode, you know, doesn't mean they're perfect, but they're fine at the moment, and improving them is not a priority and which things are dialed up at the moment.

And what we then get to do is decide what that looks like. What does maintenance mode look like? So as an example, if you've got somebody elderly in your life who is not [00:37:00] imminently sick, is not imminently a sort of big, big priority to be spending lots and lots of time with, but you want to maintain a relationship, you want to feel like you're there for them. What is that minimum level of engagement? What does that maintenance look like? How often do you want to visit them? How often do you want to call them? What do you want? Importantly, what do you want that time to be spent doing? Because sometimes it's not about more and more time, it's about more presence and intention when you're actually with them.

So what would maintenance level look like, and you can do that for different aspects of your life. What is maintenance level for your personal needs? What is maintenance level for leisure? Enough that these things don't deteriorate. Your health stays about where it is now.

Your relationships with people stay about where they are now. Your PhD progresses at about the state. It's progressing at the moment. What does maintenance look like? [00:38:00] And then we get to identify which one or two areas of our life are we kind of turning it up at the moment ? Because we can't turn all, we can't be trying to progress all areas of our life at a time.

It's just not possible. So which parts of our life are we trying to dial up at the moment? Where are we trying to put in a bit more? And what does that look like? What does a bit more look like? Now, you might be telling yourself everything needs to improve. I'm not even maintaining in any area of your life. And it can really feel like that. And that's an exhausting feeling. And when that usually happens is because you're comparing yourself to somebody who is doing that thing with a lot fewer other things. Okay? We all have a tendency to compare ourselves to parents who are parenting full time and to compare ourselves to people who are working full time and compare our leisure to people who have lots of leisure time and compare our beauty to people who are beauty influencers or whatever, right? We compare ourselves to people who are putting lots and lots of effort [00:39:00] into that one thing. So if you're telling yourself that it needs to be everything, that's where part of the problem is coming from. We could tell ourselves that we should be doing all the things, and the problem is we actually end up doing worse in all the things because when we're with people, we're thinking we should be working. And when we're working, we're telling ourselves we should be with other people. So what we get to do is we get to decide, okay, given that I'm a human being with 24 hours, not a hundred hours, and that I need to be sleeping for eight of those and that I have these other basic needs that need to be happening, how do I actually want to distribute my time?

And then given the amount of time, what do you want to spend that time doing? What would be, if you have one hour a week to give elderly relatives, what do you want that one hour to be doing? What's a good use of that one hour? If you have 15 hours a week to give your PhD, what do you want those 15 hours to look like? What would be [00:40:00] useful use of that time? And that way we get to be intentional so that instead of during that time telling ourselves we should be doing something else, we tell ourselves, this is part of my phD time. This is part of my leisure time. This is part of my personal needs time, whatever, and this is the most important thing I can be doing. It is normal to feel dragged in lots of different directions, but we don't have to perpetuate that. We don't have to tell ourselves it's true. I hope that helps. Like I say, we are gonna be working work-life balance, feeling like an imposter and trying to figure out what actually works for us is gonna be a real focus next quarter.

And then question seven, so this person talking about, they needed to make a plan. They've made a plan, and they're struggling to follow their plans, so they say, I am trying to read a hundred pages a day and write coherent essays for my comps exams as practice. I'm struggling with all the words and ideas to write these essays. I've considered doing audio into Google Docs. I'm trying to recall what I'm reading, so I would have it accessible when I take the exam in November. I'm trying to get it all done. [00:41:00] Now in a previous answer, this person's contacted me a couple of times. In a previous email you mentioned that you are aiming to read a hundred pages a day. You actually end up reading 20 pages a day and still feeling overwhelmed. And so how do you stick to your plan? Well, one of the things I encourage, so, my members have access to be your own best boss, which is a sort of online self-paced course.

And one of the elements of that is, getting your boss self, the boss who makes the plans, and your implementer self, the person who actually does the work to have a conversation with each other. And so if you are in a position where boss you is saying you should be reading a hundred pages a day and writing coherent essays and implementer you is saying, I can't. I'm struggling to do this. I don't get through that much, and they don't feel coherent, then we need to have a little sit down and decide is the problem happening with the boss and the plans that are being set, or is the problem happening that we are not implementing in a way that's reasonable?

And often it's a bit of both, right? But [00:42:00] usually we blame the implementer. I just need to be more disciplined. I just need to work harder. I just need to get on with it. But sometimes we're asking ourselves unrealistic things, and I said at the beginning, I wasn't gonna give advice, but I'm gonna give a little bit of advice.

Okay. I wanna know what you mean by read. And I want you to think about how long you are giving yourself for each of these a hundred pages. Because if your definition of read is, read all the words, digest all the words, and fully understand each page, I think a hundred pages of a day of what I assume is academic text is a lot.

I'm not gonna sit here and tell you it's too much, you know, what you're capable of. Um, but I think that's a lot. Now, could I read a hundred pages a day? 100%. I could read a hundred pages a day as long as I decided that I'm skimming them for key information, that I know what that key information is, that I'm choosing to ignore elements that are not relevant to what I'm doing [00:43:00] right now.

And you put your own numbers in, right? You could be like, oh, I usually do that. That's fine. This question's not for you, if that's fine. Okay. I'd then think about what you are meaning by writing coherent essays. Because again, if you are trying to prep for exams and usually, so this is somebody, I believe you're in the us certainly in the UK and many other places, we don't have these sorts of exams. So this is not something that I've helped PhD students prep for, but I did used to work a lot with undergraduates who had to write essays in exams as well. The other thing is, do you need to write them in order to practice them or do you need to plan out what it would look like and what the key points would be?

Often it's much more useful to if the question was this, here are the five key things that I would need to get in here. Here are the eight pieces of evidence that I would use. This is the conclusion that I would take is often much better to practice generating that bit than actually writing the [00:44:00] whole thing.

Because you know, students would always tell me, I get marked down 'cause my essays don't sound academic enough. Almost always, that wasn't why they were marked down. Almost always they were marked down because the key arguments were not clearly presented. And that's not the same thing as not writing academically that means that it wasn't clear what you were saying. So if you can get much clearer on, in this type of essay, I'm gonna say these things in this sort of essay, I'm gonna say those things that works much better for an exam and can be much faster to produce.

I am also a really big fan of what I call blank page revision, which is where you don't start with all your notes. You don't start with all your reading. You just take an exam question and say, okay, if I was gonna write this, you know, I would have an hour to write it. I'm gonna give myself 10 minutes to plan it. What would that look like? What would my plan be that I would do at the beginning of it? And [00:45:00] then once you've done that, then you use your reading to go back and go, okay, that was what I planned, but if I had access to my texts, how would I improve it?

And so now, instead of reading in a kind of, I'm just reading linearly, beginning to end kind of way. We are looking to go, oh, that argument would've been better if I'd mentioned this. Oh, actually I missed one of the elements out. We should put that in. Oh, actually, I don't think that section's relevant. I'll cross that out. And so then we're sort of going, okay, how can I make this better now that I have access to my notes? That can be a really, really useful way of doing it. Those of you who aren't doing comps aren't preparing for those sorts of exams. The key thing here is if you are routinely planning to do one thing and you are routinely not doing it, we need a sit down conversation with ourselves about is it unrealistic plans or is it that we are not implementing in a way that's reasonable, reasonable, not optimal, not perfect. We don't expect perfection of ourselves, and therefore do we need to be working on [00:46:00] boss self to make clearer plans, more guided plans, more reasonable plans, or do we need to work on implementer self to work in a way that is more efficient or more effective or more focused or whatever?

We need to sit those down. The answer is very rarely I just need to get on with it. 'cause we tell ourselves that all the time and it doesn't work.

So that is my seven questions. That is an example. I don't usually, so in the membership, I record them out as little individual. So they're usually like five to eight minutes for each question, and they go in as a separate little question into the private podcast.

So you can log out, oh, that's a question that I have, and click on it and hear my answer to it, as well as getting them for yourself if you're the one who submits. The question, but there's seven examples of the sorts of voice notes that I do in the membership all the time. If you wanna find out more about the membership, please just go to my website, phd life coach.com.

Click on the membership. You'll find all the information there. If you join the wait list, [00:47:00] there are some special bonuses that only people on the wait list will get. I'll tell you more about them soon. We open on the 20th of October. If you're listening to this live, that's two weeks time. We are open Monday through Friday, so we are taking new members between the 20th of October and the 24th of October. If you don't come in now, we don't open again till the end of January. So you come in now for that winter period. So for the, November, December, January. Period. And if you don't come now, you'll have to wait till then. So if you want support through this winter period, if you wanna make sure that you get a restful and intentional winter holiday, you wanna make sure that you start next year strong. You need to be thinking about the PhD Life Coach membership. New Year's resolutions do not start in January. They start right now so that we make sure that we take this year in exactly the directions we want it to go. Hope to see lots of you there. You can sign up for the wait list [00:48:00] now. Let me know if you have any questions, and thanks for listening. 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. See you next time.