4.35 What to do when you don’t stick to your systems

So many people set up new to-do list systems, or decide to time block, or come to one of my workshops about how to review your week, and then don’t stick to the system. We then often beat ourselves up, declare it a fail, and never go back to it. In this episode, I give you a much more productive way to figure out what to do when you don’t stick to your systems. We identify WHY you might be finding it difficult, and WHAT you can do to use your systems more consistently (and recognise what you’re already doing). If you’ve ever ditched a new planner after two weeks, this episode is for you! 

If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on why you don’t need a new planner!

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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

Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach. And if you're listening live, this week is launch week. I'm so excited. Many of you'll know I launched the PhD Life Coach membership once every three months, so that's the only time you can come in and join. And this week is that week. So if you're already on my email list, you will be getting sneaky messages about that all through the week. You'll getting all the information you need. Reach out if you have any questions, things like that. If you're not on my newsletter, why not? You're missing out on my free coaching, all sorts of things. In fact, if you were listen to this lot, if. I have free coaching sessions tomorrow, one first thing in the morning, UK time, one in the afternoon to kind of cover off all my different time zones.

So if you've ever wondered what it's like to be in a group coaching session, in the membership that we do all the time, you get to come. For free. You might be coach yourself, you could watch other people getting coached, get to see what it's like, get some help. We're gonna coach mostly about procrastination and I know you will do that. So if you haven't already got the details of that, drop me a message when you've listened to this. It is on Tuesday, the 28th of April, so if it's past that, you are too late to come to the free sessions, but we are open until the 1st of May.

I am not gonna spend lots of time in the episode today telling you all the features of the website. But we have a new fancy app now, which is exciting. So you get everything there, right there in your phone and you can find all the details on the phd life coach.com. So do make sure you go and check that out. If you're listening to this and it's not the 27th of April and you're like, oh no, I missedit, we'll be opening up again end of July for the quarter that runs August, September, October. So keep an eye out for that as well.

But what we are talking about today is so relevant to what I've been doing in the membership for the last quarter and to what we are doing in the next quarter. In fact, a bunch of this content used to be in a workshop that I run in quarter two, but I decided it was so useful for everybody and I wanted people to have it before the quarter started that I've brought it into this podcast for you today instead. And that is what happens when you don't stick to your systems.

So over the last three months, my gorgeous members in the PhD life coach membership have been working on developing their systems, their task management assistant. Where do they put their to-do list items? How do they get tasks and put them onto that, you know, where do they, these different tasks come from? How do they know they found them all? How do they organize their time, their calendars? How do they decide what they're doing over the next three months and how do they actually track whether they're getting there or not? How do they know what they've actually done? That's what we've been doing in the last three months.

If you're like, oh no, sounds like I should have been in your membership for the last three months. That's okay. I can continue to support that stuff if you come into the membership, you have access to all the back recordings. Not that I'm gonna encourage you to watch 'em all, but I can direct you to the right ones and you can still get coached on all of those things. And to be honest, my members also get a kind of ready made quarterly planning document that includes the planning stuff at the beginning. It includes weekly planning, weekly reviews, all the way through, so you don't have to create any systems for yourself. You can use the existing ones too. So we've been focusing on that, which has been amazing.

I had, one of my members told me yesterday that, I'm not making this up, this was in one of our coaching sessions yesterday. She's doing data analysis at the moment and she says, my Vikki, I have to tell you, my productivity has doubled since I'm in the, been in the PhD life coach membership. I have got through so much more of this because of being more intentional about how I'm spending my days, what my tasks are, and getting on with them. So that was gorgeous to hear. So they've been making huge progress, but because they're a bunch of high achieving perfectionists, like most of you lot, they still come to me and they still say, but I don't always stick to it, Vikki. I dunno what to do because there's these good ideas. I've been intending to do the quarterly planning document, but I don't always fill it in. What do I do about it? So today's session is what do you do when you don't stick to your systems? And I'm even gonna bring in psychologists out there. You will recognize a little bit of this. I'm even gonna bring in a little bit of psych theory just to back up all the things that I'm saying. So let's go.

First thing is that before we diagnose that you have a problem with sticking to any of your systems, I want us to do a few little checks. The first check is I want you to check how you are defining, sticking to. Because if your definition of sticking to a system is that you always do what you intend to do, exactly when you intend to do it for the amount of time you intend to do it. And you always do your plan at the same time on a Monday, and you always do your plan every Friday, and you always add things to your task list as soon as they come in, and you always tick them off as soon as they're done. And you always finish your whole task list for the week and dah dah, if that's your definition of sticking to, it's no blimin' wonder, you don't stick to your systems, okay? No one does that. Even these crazy, crazy productivity bros on the internet, they don't do that. Or maybe I'm just being super not neurotypical. Maybe some people do. Maybe some people do, but very few people do, and hardly any of you who listen to my podcast are gonna be able to say you do all those things if you define sticking to your systems as being perfect, This is one of the big reasons we are not sticking to our systems. Okay. I'm saying sticking with like speech marks around it 'cause sticking to can mean a whole variety of things. If our definition is perfection, we are almost always gonna fall short. So I want you to think really seriously about what level of adherence? So this is something. So I'm an exercise scientist by training. As many of you all know, we talk about adherence in the exercise literature. When we do an exercise intervention and we give people training programs to do it would be really, really unusual for our kind of desired adherence, our required adherence to be a hundred percent. It would be really unusual if it's an exercise scientist, we're going to exclude anybody who doesn't stick to their exercise plan at a hundred percent adherence.

Be ludicrous. Your studies would fall apart. Okay. Maybe the odd one in very elite athletes, but not many. Whereas usually we'll say, okay, 80% adherence to the intervention, or something like that counts as they've done the intervention. We might explore why people have adhered, why they didn't, We are gonna do that today, but we first have to make sure we're not holding ourselves to a standard we are never going to meet.

So for me, what counts as sticking to my systems, the main thing that counts as sticking to my systems is that the systems are there and broadly up to date. I feel like I'm sticking to them if, when I realize I haven't stuck to them, I can get back onto it reasonably quickly. And essentially, when I am trying to use the system, I consider that sticking to the system. So I use role-based time blocking that I've talked about on the website before. I have a role-based approach to my task management systems. Again, you'll learn about all these things in the membership. And I don't do it perfectly. I don't always designate roles. I don't always stick exactly to what I said I was gonna do in my time blocks, but I mostly do, and the system mostly underpins that. It's the difference between, okay, I get teased for being messy. 'Cause I tend to leave things lying around. But I'm the sort of messy, where everything in my house has a place, it's just not always in it. I'm not somebody that, there's 500,000 things that just don't have somewhere they live. No shade, if that's you. Right. This isn't a like a judgment thing, but my version of being organized at home is that everything has a place that it goes. That mostly makes sense. Then when I'm sticking to those systems is when I broadly put things back at some point to those. But does it mean I'm only being sticking to those household type systems if everything's in its place all the time?

No. Or I would never be sticking to those systems. They exist. They're there. I know what they are. I use them whenever I can. Sometimes it gets slightly more chaotic, but then when I want to sort it out, it goes back into those systems. And the same is true with this. So think about how you're defining adherence.

The second thing I want you to really ponder, and this is gonna be especially true for all of you who love reading Self-Help and love listening to my podcast and other people's podcast and everybody else's podcast, and da, and suddenly. The systems that you've set up are complex and long-winded and would take more time than actually doing the work sometimes, and you're not quite sure whether you want to do them.

You sort of want to be the sort of person who does it, but not all the time, but not right now. But maybe you should be. If you set up stupid complex systems, we are not gonna beat ourselves up for not sticking to them. I say this with love and respect 'cause I have set up many a stupid complex system. I have set up systems where if you don't stay on top of them every single day it falls apart. I've set up systems where if you haven't colored it in properly, it doesn't count. You know, my bullet journal phase, that didn't last long 'cause I spent too much time doing craft and not enough time doing bullet journals. If your system's complicated, if your system is trying to be something you're not, if your system is telling you that you should be, I don't know, doing thought downloads for four hours every day.

Stupid system, don't beat yourself up for not doing stupid systems.

So how are we defining, sticking to it? And are your systems stupid? Anyway? We want something again, advice you today. Uh, your systems aren't stupid if you like them, but are these systems that weren't designed with your current life in place? It's exactly the same as intending to have a house where everything's put away in spic and span and you've got four children under three. Not gonna happen. Is it possible to Yeah, if you had twins, that's a lot of children, but you know what I mean. Okay, so. Check in why you have these systems, why you are even planning to use these particular systems, and are they actually realistic for you as a person in the phase you are in at the moment? So we check what standards we're holding ourselves against, IE, what systems we wanna be using, and what level of adherence we're expecting before we even do anything else at all.

We then start to think, okay, what can I do, and I'm gonna go into a whole bunch of stuff about self-efficacy in a minute. I'm gonna explain to you what that means, from the scientific literature, how we build self-efficacy, and how you can build your self-efficacy about systems.

But before we even get into that, I'm gonna give you one suggestion for free. And this suggestion is based on everybody I've ever coached. It's based on my own experience, and that is you probably need to simplify your systems. When you look at these stupid systems that I mentioned, even if you are like, no, no, this is realistic. I do have time to do this. I spend four hours a day scrolling Instagram. So if I just spent two of those hours doing this, then I went, no, but you are scrolling Instagram for a reason. It's not quite a straightforward saying, oh, I'll just stop scrolling Instagram and I'll do this instead. If I was perfect, I would have time. Simplify your systems. Okay. We want systems that are as straightforward to or used as possible. We wanna streamline them. We want them to be things that are good. I just did a workshop just yesterday and this morning about weekly reviews. Um, by the way, if you weren't at that and you wish you'd signed up for it, just drop me a message and I'll send you the link to the recording. 'Cause it was really good. Um, and so many people were like, oh, but you've told us we can only have four weekly review questions, five weekly review questions, but there's nine that I think are relevant. It's like, yeah, most of them are relevant. Most of them would be great, but if you try and fill in nine questions every week about how your week has gone, you're probably gonna do it for two weeks and then never do it again.

Even if it might be nice to have these fancy bells and whistles, we need to simplify so that it becomes something that actually the amount of effort is proportionate to the benefit we get from it and the likelihood of us doing it. So simplify your systems.

Now let's personalize it a little bit more. 'Cause for all of you, it will be slightly different reasons. And so what we wanna do now is we wanna get curious. This is something I bang on about in the membership all the time, which is that we often get judgmental before we get curious. Oh, I just don't stick to systems. I'm bad at systems. Other people are good at it. I'm bad at it because I'm bad at it. I'm chaotic. I'm useless. Everybody hates me. I'm never gonna be able to PhD. I'm never gonna succeed in academia. All those little thought spirals that we go into, we judge ourselves. If I was just a bit more disciplined, if I was just a bit less lazy, if I was just, just, just, just, just, then I'd stick to my systems, but I'm not, so, I don't, okay.

We wanna channel curiosity instead of judgmentalness, we wanna say, okay, I wonder why. Why am I not sticking to my systems? Is it something about the systems, as we've discussed already, are they too complex? Are they not in keeping with who I actually want to be as a person? Are they not actually very realistic for my stage in life?

Now when we don't have faith that we can do a particular thing when we don't believe we can do a particular thing that's called having low self- Efficacy for that particular task. So many, many of you and most of my members, certainly the ones that are a bit newer and haven't sort of built it up have low self-efficacy for their ability to follow a system.

They believe they're not good at it. They believe they can't do it. And one of the things that's really useful is to explore that a little bit more with curiosity so that we can understand what elements are falling down. Is it our kind of skill level expectation? We're expecting ourselves to be able to run really complex systems that are just not appropriate at the moment.

Or is something else breaking down? And if it's something else breaking down, it's useful to understand what, so that we can work out what skills we want to develop and how we want to build our own self-efficacy around this.

So I'm gonna give you three examples of things that I see kind of break down when it comes to sticking to systems. The first is the kind of things come up. So we start with good intentions. We've probably designed something that is mostly feasible in most weeks anyway, that we quite like, is in keeping with who we are, all of those things. And we sort to do it except when we've got a deadline or when we're feeling ill or when we have problems with our families or when everything just gets a bit chaotic or when the marking comes in, when the students come back, whatever it might be.

When stuff happens, then we don't have self-efficacy that we will do it. And we sometimes call this coping self-efficacy. So it's not just our ability to do the task itself, it's our ability to do the task, If stuff is happening around us, so like in exercise, if you ask me what is your self-efficacy, that you could go on a mile run, fine. High self-efficacy, I am very capable of going. I'm mean, it'd be slow. Don't get me wrong. I'm gonna be trudging it out guys, but absolutely fine. Go and do a CrossFit class, absolutely fine. High self-efficacy, if you ask me my self-efficacy that can you still do those things regularly when you're in a busy period at work or when you've got stuff happening with your family or whatever.

It's better than it used to be, but it's lower. Okay, and this particular example is problem focus coping. We are lower in problem focus coping skills, that we are less able to do these things when there's these other pressures around us. If that resonates with you, We wanna be really specifically trying to build our problem focus coping skills, and I'm gonna talk in a minute about how we do these things.

The second one emotion focus coping. So, and these are highly related, right? But emotion focus coping is to what extent do you believe that when you are bored or when you are sad or when you are tired or when you are frustrated, you'll be able to use your systems. This is one that breaks down a lot. So for example, in my end of week review sessions, a lot of people recognized that the one thing that will put them off doing a end of week review is the frustration and embarrassment, that kind of sense of shame that they haven't done all the things they said they'd do, and therefore they're gonna avoid the review because they're avoiding those emotions. That's low self-efficacy in emotion focused coping.

So it's not so much about whether these people have time to do it. They're not saying, oh, I just don't have time. There's too many things happening. They're just avoiding the emotions associated with doing it, and that's more emotion-focused coping that we want to be working on in that case. Have a think which of these is resonating most for you? You might be saying all of the above, which is absolutely fine too.

And then the third sort of coping self-efficacy that we're gonna talk about today is support seeking. So to what extent do you feel able or willing to ask for support when you are not sticking to your systems? To what extent do you have somewhere you can go that will help you to stick to those systems? So as an example, I think I've mentioned this in the past, but anyway, one of the support focus coping that my mom used to do when I didn't tidy my bedroom was that she would get my friend over. So my friend Anna would come over and she'd sit on my bed and we would gossip and I would tidy my room while we gossiped and I would get so much done.

And it was 'cause my mom had these skills in support focus, coping, where she knew that she could bring in this support and it would help me to get it done. . And I still do that a bit Now. I make my husband talk to me. If I've got boring house jobs that I need to do, he has to come with me.

So think about to what extent are you willing to pull in support when you need it for these sorts of things. Lots of you won't be, because lots of you will be embarrassed that you are not currently doing this. You'll be under the false impression that everybody else has this sorted and that you should have this sorted and that therefore there isn't really anyone.

You can ask. It's hard to talk to your supervisor and say, yeah, I just don't really plan my week. It's hard to admit that sometimes, Right? And if other people are like, I remember talking to people about it and them just go, oh, you see on a Monday, I just write down my tasks I need to do, and then I do them and I tick them off on a Friday. I'm like, marvelous. But I don't work like that. That's not how. This goes. So if you don't have that, then we want to work on your support focus coping, and that is about both having access to and willingness to access appropriate support.

So have a think which of these are resonating with you. And as I say, it may well be that all of them are resonating, which is absolutely fine. What we ask ourselves then is, okay, so I'm recognizing I've got low self-efficacy when it comes to sticking to my systems. Let's just pause before we get into what we do about that and think what impact that has on you. When you have low self-efficacy, low belief that you are able to stick to systems, what impact does it have?

The impacts that I see in my members are an unwillingness to try new systems. So some of my members are like, yeah, I don't even wanna talk about it, Vic, 'cause I know I'm not gonna do it. So it feels like a waste of time. Others almost go the opposite way, that they immediately blame the system. So if they think they don't stick to systems and then they start a system and they don't stick to it, they immediately go, oh yeah, this is another one that hasn't worked, but this next one might work.

So I'll do that one. So it's this weird sort of, I don't have the efficacy. I could stick to that one, but I do have this kind of vague blind hope that there is a version somewhere of a system that I will stick to perfectly. I also see so much self-judgment, like so much telling themselves if I can't just stick to tasks. If I can't even fill in my task list, I'm never gonna be able to finish a PhD. I mean, I'm living proof this isn't true, I finished my PhD, I went all the way to full professor and I don't think I ever finished a task list in my, okay. But we tell ourselves these stories and that's a consequence of this low self-efficacy to do with organization. And then extrapolating that out to beat low self-efficacy in other things as well. If I can't this, then I definitely can't that. Take a second just to think what impact it has on you believing that you can't stick to systems.

So what do we do? How do we increase our self-efficacy? Well, There's a bunch of ways to do this, and the psychological literature has spent quite a lot of time exploring how we can increase self-efficacy in a whole variety of different sorts of behavior changes. I'm most familiar with the exercise literature, but it's been explored in all sorts of different areas.

But if we think about it in terms of our self-efficacy that we can stick to systems, i've got four different ways from the literature that you can increase your self-efficacy.

The first is what's called increasing your mastery experiences, and this is gathering evidence that you are capable of sticking to an element of your system. Not sticking perfectly, none of that, but looking for evidence. Oh, I did do this bit. I did stick to that part. I did say to it for this long. I did do it that many times. Reminding yourself how much you do use your systems Often, especially when we're holding ourselves to these a hundred percent adherence standards and everything, we completely overlook the evidence that we do stick to things. Mastery experience, building your mastery is building this sense that you do sometimes at least stick to these things.

The further on from that is also recognizing when your systems have worked for you. So it's about when you've used them and what benefit you've got from that. So actually I don't always stick to my systems, but on Wednesday I did update my task list and it actually made me feel much clearer about what needed to do, and I actually got on and got two priority tasks done that would help. Build your mastery experience and if your brain goes and I never stick to my systems, it's okay. Say a thank you brain for your less than helpful contribution. I appreciate you, but I don't believe you. I don't believe you. You guys have all completed excessive amounts of academic experience. You have all been highly successful in your own different ways. You definitely sometimes stick to your systems. Now you might have a whole load of practice that doesn't help. I totally accept that. That's why you're here. But you definitely do sometimes, and if you have this sort of all or nothing thinking that I never do, it's even more important that you go I probably have once. When have I once stuck to a system for at least a little bit. Build our mastery experiences. If you struggle to identify those, that is actually a symptom of not having systems. It is really hard sometimes to recall what we've done when we don't have good systems, and that's one of the things we've been building in the membership.

The second thing is building your vicarious experience. This is where we see other people doing things that work and importantly other people like us. Just like, you know, everybody thinks that kids watch the Olympics and are now inspired to take part in sport and it's sort of true for a little bit. But when those people are very, very different from you, it doesn't last as well as when you see people like you doing something. Middle-aged people are much more likely to get involved in sport if they see other middle-aged people getting involved in sport than if they watch the Premier League or whatever. And the same is true here. If you are always looking at people who go, oh, I just fill in my Bullet journal at the exact same time, well, I have my matcha tea and. Whatever. If you only look at those people, that's not a vicarious experience 'cause it doesn't feel like it could be you. They're just like this little alien over there that it all comes easily to. I want you to look for people who are similar to you, who struggle with systems, but want them, need them, crave them, but find them difficult. People who feel a little bit chaotic but are trying to improve it. I want you to find those people. And see them starting to develop systems, starting to see them use it.

And if you're going, where do I find these people? You need to join the membership because the membership is just such a safe place for this. 'cause everybody is there to develop the same things. Everybody has admitted by being there they haven't got all the answers and that it's not all going perfectly for them, but they are also committed to trying. And so we have a community where you can kind of chat with each other and things like that. And we have member led coworking sessions so often you're actually just chitchatting in Zoom too. We have people coming, going, you know, I filled in a hundred lines on my to-do list that they, over the last however long, and I'm so proud I've kept using it.

Or I put all my time blocks in for three weeks in a row. I haven't started to the ball, but I did it. And they, people get to share their little experiences and you get to see. Oh, okay. Well, I've seen that person being coached and they definitely don't have it all together. And they definitely say a lot of things that sound a lot like me. And now they're actually using that system a little bit and they're sticking to it a little bit. I wonder if I could too. And it's suddenly much more motivating. It builds your belief that if somebody like me can do it, then maybe I could do a bit of it too. And that's building your vicarious experiences. 

A third way to build self-efficacy is social persuasion. Is other people convincing you that you are able to do this. This is receiving positive feedback from people and not poo-pooing it, actually allowing it to seep in allowing us to believe that it's true. The problem is that most people don't see you fill in your to-do list or to do your time blocking or to plan your week or plan your quarter. Most people don't see you do it like in real life, right? Maybe in your supervision meetings, your supervisor might say, oh, I'm really impressed that you've blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay? We grab those. We believe, don't go, oh no, I've pulled wool over your eyes. We're gonna grab those and use them as social persuasion evidence. Okay? But often when it comes to the systems side of things, we don't really talk about it. So we don't get a lot of social persuasion.

Again, this happens massively in the membership because in coaching sessions, one of the things, one things that happens all the time, okay, I think my members are probably getting bored of it now, but it's good for them, is that somebody will come on and go, oh yeah, yeah. That article that I, well, you coached me on a couple of weeks. Yeah, tell I've, I've submitted that and that's been accepted, so that's all good. But now the problem is, and I'm like. Uh, can we pause just for a second? The paper that you were coached about last time has now been accepted. It's now been whatever. You know, my supervisor said it's fine for my thesis, whatever it might be. Let's just pause here for a second. Let's just recognize how you made that happen, what systems you use that made that actually happen. How you managed your own emotions, how you faced the problems that came up, how you sought support.

Let's actually pull all that, and this is part of social persuasion, is people saying, no, no, hang on a second. Look what you've done here. Look how well you've done and helping you see that other people can see you using this.

And then the fourth way we can build self-efficacy is around managing our emotions. And that's not about, people often think that managing our emotions is like getting to a stage where we don't have emotions. That's not the point. The point is being able to experience our emotions, our sort of true and sincere emotions. Be able to experience them without panicking, but also without making them into some huge deal and like, uh, extrapolating from them wildly. So one of the things I see most in this context is that when people feel shame or embarrassment that they haven't used their systems, they avoid their systems to avoid the shame and embarrassment. They're so scared of those emotions of sharing an embarrassment that they would rather never go back to their systems than face them.

So one of the big things I teach with systems is don't over-dramatize falling off. Everybody is gonna, at some stage not use their systems perfectly. And if when we do, we make it me. Oh, look at me. I've never stuck to my systems again.

I say uses, this is more evidence. I can't use systems. Stupid system anyway. Stupid me anyway. Blah, blah, blah. Okay? The more we do all of that, the harder it is just to get back on? The little kid that falls over and doesn't wanna get back on the football pitch 'cause they fallen over. Whereas if we can fall over and then jump back up and go, okay, I'm gonna carry on playing football, okay, yeah. Fell over. Oops. I'm all right. Brush myself off, crack back on. The more we can do that with our systems, the less time we're actually away from our systems.

One of the things I've noticed massively over the last couple of years for me is I do still fall off my systems regularly. I do still forget to put things in my task list or not quite stick to my time blocks as intended or whatever. But I get back on them much faster. And when you get back on them much faster, you waste so much less time reinventing them. I don't do that at all anymore. Much less time reinventing them. Much less time beating yourself up and more go, oh, I've paid to stop using my task list for a couple of days. Okay, I'll start using my task list again.

Let's go. And that's about managing those emotions. It's about not feeding the emotions that this means I'm rubbish and that I now feel shame and frustration and all these things and going okay. Yeah. I mean, I'm a bit embarrassed I haven't been using it. Not that embarrassed, but I can start again and that would be okay.

So we're thinking about mastery experience, evidence that you can do this at least some of the time, and that it does help when you do. Vicarious experience surrounding yourself by people who are like you and who are starting to work on these things and starting to see success. So you believe if it's possible for them, could be possible for you too. Social persuasions surrounding yourself by people who give you feedback on how good it is that you are doing the things that you're doing and how much this shows you sticking to your systems and managing your emotions so that we don't have to make it a massive drama every time something goes wrong.

Those are always that you can build your self-efficacy around anything, but in this case, specifically around your ability to stick to systems. All the way through, we need to be paying attention to what we are doing, where we are using our systems and gaining benefit from them. We need to give weight to that. So many of you discredit the evidence that you have to Oh, yes, but it was only because the kids were in school, so it wasn't so bad. It was only for one week. It was only because my supervisor helped me load. Whatever it might be. Let's not discredit it. We're gonna pay attention to all the times we do use our systems.

We're gonna give weight to all the times we use our systems. We're gonna make it mean something, and we're gonna integrate it into our stories about ourselves. Because the more your story about yourself is that you can't stick to systems, Whatever stick means, the harder it is to do any of this stuff. If our stories can be, I sometimes find it challenging to stick to complex systems, so I'm building smaller systems, simpler systems, and doing my best to stick to them whenever I can.

That's so much better than I never stick to systems and I'm a hot mess. Notice in these stories we tell about ourselves, we are not saying, I'm the most organized person in the world. You are not. None of us are. But we're telling a story that is true. This is something I find difficult and that is positive, but I'm selecting things that are useful for me and that I'm capable of doing, and I have evidence that I can.

Now, if when you're listening to this, you're like, okay, this sounds all really good, Vikki, and I'm feeling super motivated after your little pep talk, but this sounds like a lot to do on your own. It kind of is. To retain this kind of remembering, to look for your mastery experiences, to have access to vicarious experiences, have access to social persuasion, to learn how to manage your emotions in the moment is not straightforward. I hope that today has given you lots of food for thought and lots of things you can start to build on.

And if you take nothing else, simplify your systems. Stop beating yourself up. That's the take home. The sort of too long didn't read bit. Um. If you are like to do more than that, actually feels really hard and I don't know how I'm gonna support myself through it. That's where I want you to think about the membership.

The membership is the structure that makes it much easier for you to do all of these things, and quarter two is designed to help with this. So for the people who've been in, who are coming in, like at the beginning of Q1 and going through first quarter, we build their systems second quarter. We support them to stick to their systems more effectively.

So we're talking procrastination, we're talking motivation, we're talking managing distractions, increasing focus. All that stuff that we really struggle with. If you're like, yeah, but I missed Q1 Vic, so is it really worth it? Yes, a hundred percent. The whole point with the membership is you can start at any point and it totally makes sense.

So we'll get you to a basic level of systems. We won't have gone through all the depth of it that we did in Q1, but we'll get you to a basic level of, here's some systems to try, and then we'll really focus on helping you understand why you procrastinate, understand how your motivation affects how much you stick to these things, and how we can kind of grasp control of that and move on, and you'll do it all, not only with my expert support, but also with this amazing community all around you. You'll hear them getting coached. You'll hear their successes, you'll hear their little crises. You'll support each other through it. You'll get access to all the online materials that I have for all the different things that you might be struggling with.

And access of course, to my gorgeous co-working community where they organize their own co-working sessions. They run pretty much, not entirely around the clock, but mostly. So if you are on the other side of the world to me, please do not assume there won't be co-working in your hours. There usually are, and if there aren't, I have a lot of members down that way now and who would be very, very happy to co-work with you too. So if you wanna have any more information, please do come along to those free coaching sessions on Tuesday, the 28th of April. If you hear this in time, check out my website, the PhD life coach.com, and you'll click on the membership button at the top and it will give you all the details there.

You can sign up through the 1st of May if you are going, this sounds amazing Vik, but for very specific reasons, There's no way I could afford it. Please get in contact with me urgently and I mean urgently like today, tomorrow, because I am gonna give out a few scholarships this year, but I need to hear from you soon so that I can let people know who I have chosen.

So let me know by the end of the 28th. If you need a scholarship. You just need to send me a short explanation. Unfortunately, just I'm a non-funded PhD student's. Not enough because there's a lot of you, , so if there's other reasons that make it particularly complex for you, then please do fill that in.

Otherwise, I try and make it as affordable as I possibly can. So check it out, and I hope to see several of you in the membership soon. Take care. Thank you all for listening, and I will see you next week.