4.39 Nine things I learned about academia from watching reality competition shows

If you think you would do better work if you had more time, or you wonder whether to push back against or accept feedback, or you get envious of the success of others, then this is a great episode for you! Having spent more time than I like to admit watching reality competition shows, I started spotting parallels with the things I was hearing in coaching. So in this episode I ramble my way through nine specific and hopefully useful examples that might help change the way you are seeing academia at the moment!

If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on eight things that PhD students and academics can learn from the Traitors!

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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 Podcast. It's been a little while since I kinda compared academia to something very tangentially related, but I was watching some TV last week. I was watching ... People in the UK, I was watching Interior Design Masters with Alan Carr. And I realized that there were lots of things that me and my husband were discussing to do with the TV show that were also true of academia, also true of PhD, and I literally said to him, I was like, "Oh, I can feel a podcast episode coming on."

So today's episode is called Nine Things I Learned About Academia From Watching Reality Competition Shows. 'Cause why not? They say... By the way, okay, I'm gonna be straight with you guys. I wanna get my podcast to more people. I want you to have a think about how you can help me with that, because my numbers have been going up and up, which is amazing, but this year they've sort of kinda leveled off a little bit, and I would love to get this to more people.

Now, the reason that came to mind was 'cause one of the things I got told that I had to do is have episodes that answer specific questions that people would be searching for, and obviously none of you are searching for how the Great British Pottery Throw Down is related to your PhD. But anyway, I'm just not paying attention to that right now because I know you guys like my random episodes as well.

But if you do have any ideas, if you have any ways that I could get my podcast, like- somewhere at your university in a resource list or anything where people will see it, where people get ... recommended to people or any of those things. If you can share it with the powers that be or people that you think are particularly influential in your institution or anything like that, let me know.

Either just go ahead and do it, copy me into an email where you send it to somebody, or message me. Tell me what you think I should do, 'cause I think all PhD students in your university should know about this podcast and should be able to get whatever benefit from it they want to get. So that's a tangent.

In the meantime, I'm gonna think about some more SEO type stuff, so keep an eye out for that. But today, no. Today we're going on a random tangent about strange TV shows. Anyway, it's gonna be very relevant though, so stick with me. I always make it relevant, you know that.

So first of all, okay, let's get clear what sorts of programs we're talking about here, 'cause some of you will remember I did do a program comparing academia to The Traitors; twice in fact, normal Traitors and Celebrity Traitors.

I'm not so much talking about those sorts of shows as the ones where people make stuff, and then it gets judged, and then someone goes home at the end. So I'm thinking Great British Bake Off, Great British Throw Down, which is a pottery show. These are all Great British, aren't they? But anyway, there are examples internationally. I know, um, I'm thinking Lego Masters. I'm thinking ... Is it Hell's Kitchen, the one with Gordon Ramsay, where he yells at them all? I think that's what it's called. I'm thinking Great British Sewing Bee. Those sorts of shows. Okay? Kinda cozy, kinda craft-based, kind of making stuff, kinda low stakes. So yes, people get eliminated. That's a bit sad, but they're the kinda low stakes competitions. Those are the ones I'm talking about. I might do a Survivor one another day. But anyway, you're learning a lot about my TV viewing history.

So today, cozy competitions, that's what we're at. And you might be like, "Okay, my PhD don't feel like a cozy competition right now." And that's okay, but I promise there's a whole bunch of lessons to learn.

Lesson one is choose your environment. 'Cause whilst I call these all cozy competitions, they do vary. These sorts of competitions vary in their intensity, they vary in the type of feedback you're gonna get, they vary in the whole kind of vibe of it. So I want you to compare Hell's Kitchen, which is an American cooking competition with British chef Gordon Ramsay, who's known for yelling at everybody, where they compete in meals. He yells at everybody as usual. So it's a kinda high-pressure vibe. It's a high-profile show. There's lots of, you know, "You must be the best," kind of narrative, all of that stuff. This is gonna start sounding like some of your universities, okay? You know who I'm talking to.

And I wanna compare it to something like The Great British Pottery Throw Down, where, as the name suggests, they're competing in terms of pottery, and everyone is super pleasant to each other. The judges are pleasant. The judges cry when they love it, and they give you supportive feedback if they're not happy, and they have something nice to say to everybody, and it's a totally, totally different vibe. Now, both lead to quite exciting things. Both lead to some quite interesting stuff being produced, same as you can do good research in a whole variety of different types of institutions, but the experience of participating in them is gonna be very, very different. And even before you choose what university you're gonna go to, you get to pick, as far as you're able to discern it anyway, you get to pick what type of environment you want to be in. And there's upsides and downsides to all of them, right? Say, Hell's Kitchen, you're gonna get yelled at. You're gonna be put under a lot of pressure. There's gonna be rushing around. There's gonna be stress, all of these things. But at the same time, I've seen several clips online. Hell's Kitchen's not one of my favorites. It's a bit too high-pressure for me. I've seen lots of clips online where, like, Gordon Ramsay suddenly decides he's eliminating them, but he's giving them a job for a year 'cause he's inspired by their story or whatever.

Right? So it's that kinda high-pressure, high-reward sort of environment, and some of you will thrive in that sort of environment. The pottery one is much more kind of- Supportive. You know, it's all about your journey, however far you get is how far you get. You're doing something important anyway, and I've never once seen those judges turn around and say, "Ooh, I'm going to fund your pottery career for the next year." But It is a lot more pleasant if you're somebody who actually likes that more kind of cozy, supportive environment. So really thinking about what sort of environment you wanna work in is super important.

Now, some of you might be saying, "Yeah, Vikki, thanks for that. Great advice, but I'm already in my environment, so what do I do?" Well, within your environment, you still have a bit of autonomy at least to seek out people who behave in the ways that you find more helpful, and you have choices about where you might go next. So maybe some of this advice would have been useful if it had come before you chose where you were getting your PhD or where you were getting a job or whatever, but it's stuff that you now know, and you will now have a better understanding of what sorts of environment, what sorts of working conditions, what sorts of behavioral norms suit you. And I guess, that this then really is a prompt to remember that it's perfectly legitimate to plan your career based on those sorts of things, not just on, like, where would be best in the kind of traditional sense of the word. Okay? So pick your environment.

The second one is actually the one that made me think of this entire episode. The second one is that you are being judged on the best you can do in a specific time period. Because we were watching Interior Design Masters, which as you can probably guess, is an interior design competition. They're given, like, different challenges each week. So I think they were given a hotel room or something like... Oh, beach huts. That was it. That was the one we were talking about. They were given beach huts to decorate. I'm aware that's probably a very British reference as well. Beach huts are these little shed things down by the beach, and people go down there for the day. You're not allowed to live in them, but you have, like, a kettle in them and, some deckchairs, and people hang out in their little beach huts, and they sell for shocking amounts of money. Anyway, they were decorating these little huts, and some of them were running out of time to do the things that they said they were gonna do.

And I'm gonna talk about that more in a sec. But one of the things my husband was saying was that he wished they didn't have a time limit on it so that he could see what their bests would look like with unlimited time. He was getting frustrated with them having to make compromises as the time went on. And that's something I hear from a lot of coaching clients, right? "Oh, if I have more time, this study would be better, I'd be more thorough in this, so this would sound better, I'd do more of that," da, da, da. And whilst I sort of get that temptation, I'm not sure what the quantity of time would be that would be sufficient. Because actually, if you told them that they now, instead of having eight hours or whatever it was to decorate this beach hut, they now had three weeks to decorate this beach hut, I'm pretty sure they'd all be like, "Ooh, but if I've got three weeks, then it has to be really, really good, so I'm going to hand-embroider curtains for it and carve from a tree grown in, like, Transylvania over 100 year." You know, they're gonna go overboard because they've got to prove that they've done three weeks' worth of work. And I don't see what the timescale would be that would prevent this happening. And I think the same is true with your work as well. Usually, people are saying, "Oh, if I only I had another month, I'd do this so much better. If only I had an extra year, I'd do this so much better." And it becomes a moving thing, because in most situations, if you had more time, you would add more stuff. So I think it's actually really useful to remember that both in these TV competitions and in your academic life, you are not getting assessed on the best you can do. You're getting assessed on the best you can do in the time available to you, and that's a very different criteria. Is it good for three years work, or five years work, or wherever you are in the world? 

And that leads on to lesson three, which is you get to pick where to put your efforts and where your efforts are best spent. So one of the women who got criticized in this interior design program had spent ages and ages and ages cladding the inside of the beach hut, which meant that she kind of ran out of time to put all those creative touches in that everybody else had spent most of their time on. And she didn't actually get that much credit for the cladding because whilst it made it look smooth on the inside, instead of being able to see the kind of construction of the hut, it didn't look loads better. So it was a high effort, low reward sort of situation. She did survive the week, but only just. And again, I thought it was a really important lesson that if you've got limited time, choosing to do the things that really move the needle are really important. So rather than getting caught on an idea that's kind of a nice idea, but you've got sort of distracted by it and it's taking ages and ages, and it's not actually central to what you're doing, it is really important to make sure that you're choosing where you put your efforts and making sure that those efforts are going where they will make the most difference. Now, at its most extreme, that's only doing things that you get credit and recognition for, only doing things for yourself, all that kind of stuff, which certainly can be interpreted as selfish, rightly or wrongly, and certainly doesn't necessarily live up to the most kind of collegiate approach that a lot of us like. But you can still be, in my opinion at least, collegiate and helpful and all of those things, whilst also choosing to put your efforts where they are most helpful for other students, where they're most helpful for your research, for whatever else it is that you're trying to do.

The fourth lesson I learned is in all of these types of shows, it's a mixture of trying to meet the criteria of the round that you're in and showing your own style, showing your own interests. So in lots of these shows, each week is themed in some way, right? And so suddenly you have bread week, in Great British Bake Off or whatever, and maybe you're a sponge cake maker, and it's like, "What do I do?" Or in Interior Design Masters, you're sudden- you're asked to make a children's room, and you're more of a kind of elegant, upmarket, expensive vibe or whatever. And in all of these situations, they're having to find a balance between hitting what's important for that brief, whether that's the client's brief, whether it's the competition's kind of theme for the week or whatever it is, and showing their own personalities through that, their own artistic style, and deciding where you sit along that continuum.

Because I've seen people who just completely kind of ignore what they're interested in, ignore their own style and those sorts of things, and do their very best in all of the different episodes. And it can get you quite a long way, right, in quite a few of these to really, really nail the brief every time.

But it does leave you in terms of kind of winning ultimately, it leaves you in a place where you're not really sure who you are as whatever sort of artist it is. You know, I've seen this in Glow Up, for example, which is a makeup version of these. I clearly watch too many of these shows. I haven't even talked about, like, Blown Away, which is a glassblowing version. Anyway, so many, so much fun. Um- You then start getting to the quarterfinals, semifinals, and they're like, "We just don't know who you are as an artist. If we don't see a kind of common thread for your work, how are we ever gonna let you in?" It's like, well, hang on a minute, that wasn't what you were asking me to do before.

I get a bit bitter about that. But it's true in academia too, right? There are these criteria, either written or unwritten, in terms of how you get things published, what needs to go into your thesis, and all of these things, and what the most straightforward routes to that are, meeting the criteria kind of precisely, versus the kind of benefit and pressure to also be independent and have your own voice and to have a perspective that you're putting forward, and all those sorts of things.

And this isn't so much advice as kind of reassurance that it's completely normal to find that a little bit of a tightrope walk, to find yourself in a place where it's like, mm, it probably would be most straightforward if I went down that research route. I could hit the criteria really easily going down that research route. But actually, I feel really strongly about this research route. Or maybe it's not so much about your topic, but about your style. I work with some people who come from more practitioner backgrounds, for example, and they're very, very clear and very, very committed to kind of easy-to-read, applicable writing, so that the writing, even though it's research-led, and evidence-based and all these things, that it can be implemented in real life very easily.

And they often criticized for not sounding academic enough. And again, there becomes this kind of tightrope between on one hand, meeting the criteria means demonstrating sufficient academic-ness, but on the other hand, if part of your kind of style and reason for doing this work is to create accessible research, you want to make sure that you're not going too far towards the criteria and leaving those principles behind.

So it is really, really normal to find that a little bit of a tightrope walk, and to sometimes find yourself having stumbled either away from the criteria and struggling with that, or stumbled away from what feels authentic to you. The reason I think that reassurance is so useful is that when we realize that that's actually quite common, and that there's a decision to be made here, it helps give us a little way forward. Because rather than seeing it as, oh, I'm just not cut out for this, I just don't understand the implicit rules or whatever, and instead starts being a bit more about a decision where you wanna sit on that criteria, and obviously it can change in different situations, right? Um, then suddenly it's a bit easier to go, "You know what? This is just a strategic decision. I get to decide to go closer to the criteria and further away from my approach in this particular situation because I think it's useful, and in this particular situation, actually sticking to my style and my beliefs is what's important."

So you get to choose.

Lesson five is that the most pleasant environments, in my opinion at least, are those where competitors collaborate with each other. One of the things we see is that academia can be a really, really competitive place, and it can be a place where you're constantly trying to prove that you're as competent as the other people in your cohort or in your department or whatever, where you're sort of jostling for position, and it almost feels like somebody else's success is your loss 'cause it makes you look bad or whatever. Whereas the programs that I think are like, "I'd love to live there," right? And you know, some of these programs, I'm like, "This is such a lovely world. I just want to live in the Pottery Throwdown," are where the people are actually nice to each other, where the achievements of the cohort are worth so much more on a bigger level than the kind of achievements of any one, and where they celebrate each other's successes, and where they help each other out where it's appropriate, and where, yes, they are competing, but the point is what they produce and the relationships that they make.

For those of you who watch these sorts of shows, I think this is really common in, like, Sewing Bee, in Pottery Throwdown, in a lot of ... To some extent in Bake Off, but I think it's gone a little bit more cutthroat in later years. But where they're really supportive. There's a really cute episode, even of Hell's Kitchen, to be honest, where, um and I don't really watch Hell's Kitchen, right? It's not quite my vibe, but I do spend far too much time on social media, and so the videos come up. There's a really cute one where a woman realized she didn't have garlic, and it was an absolute core ingredient for the recipe that she was making.

And she had to go and ask the other competitors whether they would give her garlic or not. And the guy who was her biggest rival gave her the garlic, 'cause he's just like, "I don't wanna beat her 'cause she doesn't have garlic. I wanna beat her 'cause I beat her." And even things like that, that sort of thing of, okay, even if we're competing, we can be reasonable about this. We can be nice to each other. We don't have to see each other's successes as a threat to ourselves. Now, it can go too far. Sometimes in, like, Sewing Bee and things, I've seen people who are off like, teaching other people, explaining ... Where they have, because they have this one where you get a pattern, right, that you haven't seen before, and you have s- you have to make the thing from the pattern.

And sometimes people have just got no idea what they're doing, and other people have made one before. And you'll often see somebody going round sort of going, "Oh, no, no, don't do it like that. Do it like this," to help the other people. Which is lovely and collegiate right up until the point that it starts to massively adversely affect your own performance, okay? And I've seen that happen, where people have spent so much time helping other people who had stuck their sleeves on the wrong way round or whatever, that they didn't actually end up finishing their own piece because they were too busy helping other people. So we get to remember that just because something is a competition, it doesn't have to be unpleasant, and it doesn't have to be mean to each other. But we also get to remember that we are allowed to put our own work first in that sort of context, too.

Six. This is one you know. This is one of those, like, obvious statements, but there's a- another Hell's Kitchen. I think it was Hell's Kitchen. Something like that. American cooking show, anyway, that I just think is super cute. And so it's that it's okay to ask for help. There's a really cute episode where a girl can't open her jar, and she's really, really trying.

She's getting really, really more stressed about it. And they're showing the audience, and they're showing her family getting increasingly concerned about the fact she can't open this jar. And she just runs over and gives it to her dad, who's, like, high up on the side. And he she gives it to her dad, and her dad opens the jar and gives it back. And it's just like, makes everybody cry, and it's gorgeous. It's okay to get help, and it's okay in academia to get help from outside of your academic little bubble if that's what's supportive of you Sometimes we think that we should be either able to do it ourselves or that our supervisors, our departments, our university should be providing everything that you need.

And in some kind of moral stance, they maybe should be, but the reality is they're not, right? And I think, to be honest, all the work I do demonstrates that, that there's a whole load of you out there for whom your supervisors might be lovely and really trying really hard, and some of them aren't, but lots of them are, and your universities try and provide good provision, but it doesn't necessarily cover everything. You know? Sometimes you need your dad to undo the jar for you. Sometimes you need a coach to help you straighten out your brain. It's okay to ask for help.

The seventh lesson is that early wins don't necessarily predict long-term results. And this is sometimes, I think, a bit of a mistake that people see in PhD programs and in sort of the early academic careers. You start seeing that some people in your cohort have early wins, right? They get a paper accepted. And there can be a real tendency to start interpreting that those people are the success story. Those are the ones that are good at this. Those are the ones that fit in well here and things, and that maybe that's not you. And this can happen at different stages of your academic career, right?

This is not a PhD specific thing. It can happen when you start seeing people getting promoted to professor early, and you're like, "Oh, okay. Wow, I'm not even anywhere close to that." Early wins don't necessarily mean long-term success. The people that finish their PhD the fastest are not necessarily the ones who have the biggest academic careers. The ones who get early grants are not necessarily the ones that go on and get tons of funding for the rest of their career. Sometimes it just happens that particular things come together in a particular way that make it more straightforward for some people than others.

Sometimes that's situational. You know, they're full-time, haven't got any other stresses in their lives, that sort of thing. Sometimes, though, it's more to do with the actual research they're doing, right? We all know that some research just sort of works out. Your experiment did exactly what you thought it would do. The archive contained something cool and exciting that you wouldn't have necessarily known was there, but it was there, and isn't that amazing? And sometimes it just works out, and when it does, it's so much easier because you feel more motivated to write it. It's a more straightforward write-up. Anybody who tells you it isn't is lying. You know, null findings, super important, And we have to write them up, but they're not as easy to write up as when something does exactly what you thought it was gonna do. And sometimes these sorts of serendipitous early wins put people ahead in a way that can then make you feel, if that's not you, can make you feel really quite behind and not good enough. It doesn't necessarily mean it lasts. Now, that's not saying that we should be like, "Oh, ha-ha, look at you being successful now," because you won't be successful later. I don't mean that. You know I don't mean that. But we don't have to make it mean a whole bunch of stuff about our entire prospects for the next 20 years because these things come and go.

And to some extent, obviously, they compound and build on themselves, but to a large extent, it swings and roundabouts, right? They'll get luck in one and less luck in something else. Quite often in these programs you see people that do really well early on and then something crash and burns later, or people who are kind of invisible in the edit early on, um are the ones that actually come through and win. So remember, you're never actually out of the race until you choose to be.

Lesson eight is one I've stretched the rules here. Does RuPaul's Drag Race count as a- Cozy reality competition? I'm not sure, but I watch that, too, so I included it here. The episodes that made me think of this particular lesson are around Snatch Game.

So, in Snatch Game, the queens dress up as a famous character of some description and participate in this, like, TV quiz show style game, and they have to be funny and they have to be in character and it's a lot of improvisation and all those sorts of things. And it's one of the most high-profile episodes of each season. It's one of the most popular bits of Drag Race. I love it. Everyone wants to stay in long enough to get to Snatch Game and all of that. Anyway, at the beginning of the Snatch Game episode, uh, RuPaul is wandering around the workroom where they're all getting prepared, and asks them who they're gonna be for Snatch Game.

And quite often RuPaul will then say, you know, "Ooh, yeah, that sounds amazing." I'm laughing. I'm not gonna do an impression of RuPaul. They're laughing, they're enjoying the conversation, all these sorts of things. But other times they look super skeptical. They're going around and they're sort of either suggesting that that person's been done before, or that they can't see how it will necessarily work well in Snatch Game and things like that.

And you then see the little aftermath of that, where the queens then have to decide whether they're gonna change who they're going to be. Now, usually they come with a couple of options, right? And so sometimes you see people say, "You know what? I was gonna be Tina Turner in Snatch Game, but three people have been Tina Turner before over the years, and Ru didn't seem to like it, so I'm gonna do what Mama Ru said, and I'll switch to plan B or whatever."

Others are like, "No, no, I'm gonna prove it. Right?" And they stick with the one that they, um, were given. Now, where I think this is really useful is sometimes the sticking with it really works. They really demonstrate why they were picking it, and other times it's like, "Mate, you should've listened to Ru. You did not take feedback." And how do they know which, okay? That's the tricky part. And the same is true for you guys. So the lesson I have here is listen to early feedback- listen carefully. Don't listen defensively. Don't listen in a kind of, "Oh, no, everything's gonna be terrible," kind of way, but really listen.

Listen to understand early feedback about the scope of your work, the direction of your work, and things like that. And then make intentional decisions about are you fully taking the feedback on board? You know, so if it's negative feedback, are you gonna change your direction? Are you gonna partially take it on board? 'Cause where I've seen this work in the past is where that they've been, you know, Ru's given feedback like, "Okay, this could be interesting, but no one's really familiar with this famous person that you've picked, so you're gonna have to make their character, like, really apparent." And in those situations people can take on that feedback and they say, "Okay, right, I am gonna stick with my original plan, but I'm gonna make sure that I address these sorts of concerns."

Or if you go for it, you've got to accept the risk, and you've got to prepare your defense. And it's the same in PhD, same in academia, whether it's preparing for the viva and the reports that come after that, or whether it's preparing for reviewers' comments and things like that, is if you decide to do the thing that you got early feedback might not be feasible or might not be the greatest plan or whatever, you better be able to defend that decision at the end.

You better be able to accept that maybe you're making more work for yourself than you could do, and be able to explain why that was the right decision even if it works out the way that the person who gave you negative feedback thought it would. So this is not about just crumbling and you know, taking on board everyone's feedback at the beginning.

It's listen carefully, really understand what their concern is, and then make intentional decisions. So instead of, "Oh, no, but I don't know what else I'd do," as a reason, or, "Oh, no, it would take too much time to change now," or, "No, I just love this idea and it's the best idea and I don't want to do anything else. I don't want to even think about doing anything else," rather than those being reasons, I want you to make your decisions about whether to stick or twist, essentially, based really intentionally on your own principles, where you wanna be, what you wanna do, and have a plan for how you're gonna defend that decision later.

Number nine, final one, is inspired a bit, to be honest, by Bake Off, and this is beware drift in expectations. Because one of the things that I've realized, and I've actually stopped watching Bake Off now, I have to confess, is every season the requirements get more complicated. The, like, mystery recipe that they have to make with no recipe, they're just bonkers now. It's like, "I need you to make this rare Bolivian specialty that's made out of pineapple dust and four cubic feet of guinea pig bedding or whatever. I, uh, no ingredients, I'm sure you're familiar. Off you go." What? But I think this happens in academia, right? I think the expectations on PhD students these days are way more than they used to be back in the day.

I think the expectations to get promotion are worse than they used to be back in the day. There's this kind of shift in expectations that whatever comes next, you think needs to be more. And whilst there's not a massive amount we can do about that from an institutional perspective, what I would say, particularly for those of you who are supervising others, is just be really cautious of it in yourself because, especially if you're getting PhD students who are continuing to work on a similar topic to the others, so this will probably be those of you in more kind of lab-based PhDs and that sort of thing, where you're working on the same topic and you're kind of building incrementally on the last person.

Be really cautious that you're not shifting your expectations of the newbies because you're steps ahead because of the last people you supervised, and shifting the expectations of how good they should be and where they should be at by when based on your experiences with the previous PhD student.

Because sometimes when we get much clearer on something, it becomes obvious as to what they should be doing next and things, and we sometimes forget that this new PhD student is fresh to this. We might be really familiar with it, we might understand all the basics and everything, but the new PhD student is fresh to it, and that can really...

That's really important to remember when we're setting expectations for how fast things should happen. I think a lot of the problems that happen between students and supervisors is that supervisors forget what it's like to try and do things that they don't know how to do, 'cause most of the time supervisors know what...

You know, they have too many things, don't get me wrong, but they know how to do the things they need to do, and they forget how long it takes because it's been a really long time since they didn't know how to write a lit review or whatever. So be really cautious of those shifting expectations, and I think even be cautious of it in yourself.

Sometimes once you've done something once, you sort of then have really unrealistic expectations about how quickly you should be able to do it next time. Oh, I've already written something, so this should be easy, da, da, da. But no, it's often a more complex task you're asking yourself to do next, and be careful that you are recognizing your progress, recognizing that you are asking something more challenging of yourself, And giving yourself the kind of grace and compassion around that.

So that's my nine lessons. A little bit random assortment in a little bit of a random order, but I hope some of them made you think. Do let me know which ones do you think are most relevant, made you kind of ponder the way you're approaching your PhD or academia generally at the moment.

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by going to my website, thephdlifecoach.com. Sign up for my newsletter, and you can reply to any of those newsletters and tell me how you think I can get my podcast out to more people, 'cause I would absolutely love to. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week