4.52 GREATEST HITS - How to be your own best supervisor

There is no voice you hear more often than the voice inside your head, yet we often spend very little time thinking about HOW we speak to ourselves and the effect it has. When did you last call yourself useless? Lazy? Stupid? In this episode we think about how we can notice our negative self-talk and start to be our own best supervisor. 

If you liked this episode, you might also like this episode on how do I stop beating myself up in hindsight?

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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 next episode of the Greatest Hits of the PhD Life Coach Podcast. And this week, we are right back to the very beginning. It was actually quite nostalgic reviewing this one. We are gonna be replaying my very, very first episode of the podcast. And as I reviewed it, I noticed two main things.

The first thing, and you will likely notice this too, is that the sound is not quite as good as it is now. When I first started out, I ... I'm actually really proud of myself for this. I decided that I wasn't gonna overthink it. Often, people who are setting up podcasts get really caught up for months on exactly what technology to use, exactly where to host it, exactly how to record it, exactly how to edit it, and all this stuff.

And I decided, "You know what? The most important thing is that I start getting content out there that is useful for PhD students. And as long as it's audible, as long as they can tell what's going on, then it is good enough for now, and the rest can come later." So I'm actually really pleased that I did that, and I'm really glad that that means that within a month or two of me being full time on the PhD Life Coach as a business, I had my podcast out regularly, and I've had them out regularly ever since. We're coming up four years this autumn, which is amazing 

so that was the first thing that I noticed. And the second thing was how much I'm still talking about the things I talk about in this episode. So I give you seven qualities that I think you need as your own best boss. And whilst I've kinda added to this a little bit over time, added some bits of nuance and stuff, I actually really stand by these seven qualities, and in my membership, people have access to the Be Your Own Best Boss course, which goes into each of these in a lot more detail, but I think this episode gives a brilliant introduction to each of those qualities. And the more people I coach at every level of academia, the more convinced I am that the skill that people need more than anything is how to be a good boss to yourself.

So today is your introduction to that. Even if you've listened to it before, I want you to listen again, and I want you to think which one of these would I benefit from developing most at the moment? And that might be because it's one you find more difficult to implement, or it might be because there's a particular quality that you really need at the moment.

So as you listen to the seven, I want you to pick out the one that you need the most and try to identify how you can nurture that quality in yourself this week. I really hope you enjoy the episode, and I will see you soon

Hello? Hello. Hello. Welcome. So exciting first episode of the PhD Life Coach. Can't wait to get going with you guys today. So I'm Vikki Burns, as you heard, and I started the PhD life because after 26 years in academia, from undergrad to full professor, I saw so many people having the similar sorts of thoughts, the similar sorts of feelings, feeling overwhelmed, feeling like imposters, feeling like everybody else had their stuff together and they didn't, and that they would never have time to do all the things.

And the interesting thing for me, Was that never changed. So it, when I was a undergrad student, PhD student, my peers, my colleagues, my friends would be saying all these things. They'd be saying, I dunno if I'm good enough to get my PhD. I don't know. Um, you know, other people seem to know more than me. I'm never gonna get all this stuff done.

I don't know whether I'm good enough, da, da, da. And then, As I progressed through postdocs were saying the same things and early professors and teaching fellows and all of these people were saying the same things. And most of the professional services staff were saying the same things too. So the admin and professional support that we get around the academic staff, they were saying the same things.

And I started going on leadership courses. I was an emerging leader. Baby. So I went on an emerging leader course and people were talking about having too much to do and not being able to prioritize and not having the work life balance that they wanted. And I was a bit like, Oh, hang on. I thought, you know, I've progressed this far.

I thought things should be getting better by now, and they weren't. And then I went through further and further and I got more senior roles management, senior leadership courses, and everyone was having the same conversations. Everybody felt that the people above them in some way didn't necessarily recognize him or value them or understand how hard it was.

 Everyone kept saying, Just need to get past this bit and it'll be better. I just need to get my PhD done and it'll be better. It'll just need to get past the end of teaching term and it'll be better. I just need to get this grant in and it'll be better. And I rapidly realized that none of those things made a difference.

None of those things were making people less overwhelmed and less stressed and less hurried and busy. I challenge you to ask anybody who works in a British university or any university, I'm sure how they're doing, and have them not answer. Busy. Yeah, busy. Busy. Good or busy. Terrible, but always busy. And that's where this came from and that's why.

The PhD life coach is for anyone working in a university, whether you are a PhD student, just starting out on your research career, whether you are early precarious staff on short contracts, whether the research contracts, teaching contracts, whether you're a. Seasoned academic who is a full professor and going into senior leadership roles, and including all of the really crucial professional services staff that we have in universities too.

Whoever you are, if you're working in higher education, then the PhD life Coach is for you. And we're gonna start today with a topic that really underpins everything else that we'll talk about over the weeks and months that this podcast's going to go. And that is about being your own best supervisor.

Whoever we are, we have people in charge for some your PhD shooting, you've got your supervisor, you've put your pi perhaps if you are working on a grant, you've got your head of department, head of school. Even if you are a vice chancellor, you've got your vice chancellor above. 

I hope I get some vice chancellors listening to this too. Kids, lord knows they need it too. Then even as vice chancellor, you have people in government, people, across the network that are above you as it. And we all have opinions about what those supervisors, what those managers, those leaders should be like.

We know what we want from them. In fact, if you Google what are the best qualities of a PhD supervisor, you'll find loads and loads and loads of articles about what to look for in a leader. In your PhD supervisor yet, what people never seem to talk about is that you will hear your own voice inside your head far more than you will ever hear from a supervisor, from your manager, from your head of school, whoever it is, the things that you say to yourself.

And the way that you treat yourself will have far more impact on you than anybody that you currently work with. So that's not to say we're not gonna talk at some point about managing your bosses, how to like manage up and all of that, and how to work out what's actually toxic versus what's something that you can figure out together.

And all of these things, we'll do sessions about them later. We'll talk about all that stuff. That's super important. But I want you to think back, the voice inside your head, the things you said to. Because in most of my coaching, when I talk to people about this, the things that you say to yourselves, things you would often never tolerate somebody else saying to you.

If you had a PhD supervisor or a head of department or a vice chancellor saying to you, Yeah, you're probably just not good enough to be here, are you? Should probably give up. You're never gonna get all this. I mean, you have to get it all done, but you're never gonna get it all done. If you had somebody saying those things to you and particularly saying those things to you day in, day out, you wouldn't tolerate it or you would at least moan about it.

You'd at least say They shouldn't speak to me like that. It's not fair. It's not right. They shouldn't talk to me. You will also know that it probably doesn't make you work harder. It probably doesn't make you get stuff more stuff done. Certainly won't make you enjoy the place you're living and working.

But so often when I listen to my clients, these are the things we say to ourselves. I know I did. Mine was always you have to get all these things done, but there's no way you can get all these things done. Those were the two voices that simultaneously went out in the air my head. You have to do all of this.

There's no way you can drop any of it. There's no way anyone else can pick up any of this for you. All of it has to be done now, but it can't be done now. And if you imagine having a boss who says that to you, you've gotta do all the things. By the way, all of them right now cause. They've all gotta be done now.

They're all really important. They've all gotta be done now. Oh, but you can't, I don't actually believe you can get them done, but you have to. If you had a boss that said that to you, it would be ludicrous. But that was what I was saying to myself all the time until I started doing more of this coaching work and more of really thinking about the thoughts that I focus on and the things that I say to myself.

So that's why I decided that this first session is going to focus on being your own best supervisor. And I have seven qualities for you. Seven things that I want you to nurture in yourself that I think will make you the best supervisor for yourself that you can be. And some of them are things that you will have seen when search for what to look for in a good supervisor and a good manager. Some of them might be a little bit more unusual for you. Let's go. So the first one, and this is one you don't see come up very often, is you want to be curious and not just curious about the research or the teaching that you're doing, but curious about yourself, about why you do the things that you do, why you find things difficult, why you find other things easier, why you get stuff done, why you don't get stuff done. And notice when you think about this from the point of view of being curious, we're not being judge. We're not going, Oh my God, you didn't finish again. We're say, Why didn't get time? You got so and now you're behind tomorrow. You're not going like that. You're going, Interesting. I'd lined up six things to do today, and I've only done two of them. I wonder why that is. Not, Oh my God, tomorrow you're gonna have to work harder. You're so useless, you're so lazy. Or how does everyone else get this done? I can't do it. But I wonder why it was. Cause when you come at it from a point of curiosity, you start to engage your problem solver brain, you start to think, Well, actually, to be honest, my list wasn't very realistic in the first. So maybe the problem started there.

Maybe I need to really think about how long do these things take. Perhaps I could put times next to them when I plan out my to list so that I can be a little bit more, sort of realistic about what I can get done

So I wonder why I didn't get it. Actually, people do always knock on my door and just ask me questions that really, you know, all I don't wanna say they should know the answer to, but they probably should know the answer to, Hmm, that's interesting. I wonder what I could do about that. I wonder how I could carve out some time where I won't get interrupted.

Do you see how it goes by coming at it from this curious perspective instead of judging yourself instead of being mean to yourself? You're seeing it as just a little problem, little challenge to be solved, and then you're much more likely to experiment the next day and go, Okay, well maybe if it went like that yesterday, maybe I'll try it like this today.

Let's see how that goes. So number one, curious. 

Number two, and this is one you will see when you search for best qualities in a leader or a manager or a supervisor is being encouraging, having faith in you. So often people take the fact that they found something difficult or they didn't know something, or maybe they failed at something to mean that they shouldn't be here that this isn't right for them, that they're not good enough to be here. All of those sorts of things and that doesn't motivate you to work harder, or if it does, it doesn't motivate you to work harder. From a position of like encouragement and positivity and those sorts of things, it kind of leads to a kind of, Okay, head down. I'll just work harder and harder. I can do that. I can work harder and harder. You know it, it doesn't help you. Whereas we want other people to be encouraging. We want other people to spot us when we're at our lowest and have faith in the fact that we can do more than this, that we can get there, we can do better.

Why can't we be that voice for ourselves? Why can't we be that person that has faith in ourselves that's encouraging that when we find it difficult, just reassures us and poodles us along a little bit further. So number two is encouraging. 

Number three, and it connects to that, is being compassionate. And this isn't just being a complete pushover. This doesn't mean waiting and going, Oh, well I think I'll just lay in bed all day and scroll on social media. It's not about being. Total softy on yourself. It's about having compassion for, actually, here I am, doing the hard thing, right? PhD's hard, getting your professorships hard. All of these things, you know, they take a lot of work and it's tough.

And some days I'm gonna work better than others and some days it's just all gonna be a struggle and that's okay cuz I've got a human brain and a human body and they can't do everything and that's okay too. Because no one can do everything. And sometimes I think we worry that if we're too compassionate with ourselves, that we'll in some way kind of what's the word? Like give up. It will just be, you know, we won't get anything done. We believe that to get stuff done, we have to boot ourselves into it, but it's so rarely the case. Imagine having a boss or a supervisor that's behind you when you say, know, Oh, I didn't do the thing today. It's okay. Yeah, I get it. You know, it's difficult. It can be a bit confusing, but let's move forward. How can we move forward from this? What are we gonna do next? Cause I've got faith in. So the third one, compassionate. So we got curious, encouraging, and compassionate. 

The fourth one is you want your supervisor, your inner supervisor, to let things go. So imagine you had a boss that you've been working with for a few years and you make mistake. You do something wrong, you forget to do something, you're late for a deadline, you lose something. You switch off the freezer, whatever it is, depending on whether you're in science or arts and humanities, whatever subject you're in.

 And that boss says, Yeah, typical. You did this just like when two years ago you were late. That deadline too, weren't you? You're late for that one. Yeah. You always do this. You do. It's just a pattern you always do this. Again, we wouldn't like that supervisor. We wouldn't wanna work with that manager. But so often when we do something that we perceive as wrong, we then extrapolate it to everything we've ever done.

We think back to all the other times we've been late or all the other times that we've forgotten to do something and make this a big pattern. So when you are being your best supervisor, We need to learn to let things go. If we make a mistake today, that's all it is. It's a mistake today. We don't have to remind ourselves of all the things we perceive we've done wrong in the past or the times we relate before.

Let's just focus on today and let that past stuff go.

The fifth one I've got here is kinda connected to all the others, but it's about choosing your words. So I'd like you to spend some time listening to the thoughts you have in your head. I want, after you finish listening to this, spend some time just going about your day is normal, but listening to the things you say to yourself, I'd be really interested to know what names you call yourself.

I had say, Somewhat have, but had at least a habit of calling myself useless a lot. I know I'm objectively not useless. I've been very successful. Things generally go pretty well, but the words, Oh my God, you'll say useless, would run through my head multiple times an hour. You know, I have a tendency to leave things lying around to not remember where my keys are, things like that.

And the immediate thing I would think is, Oh my gosh, you're so useless. And those words stick in our heads. We start to identify with them. You wouldn't put out with name calling from somebody else. So we have to be really careful what names we call ourselves. And you will think of ones that are your triggers.

Some people it's being stupid. some people it could be being lazy, for example. Notice how many times you call yourself these things, and at this stage, just notice. I'm not even asking you to stop. When we do this work, we call it thought work. A lot of my clients say to me, you know, , now I realize what problems I'm causing myself.

I realize how I'm criticizing myself from things, but even now I know I'm still doing it. I can't stop. And it's like, well, yes, of course you're, it's a long habit. We've been doing this in our human brains for a really, really, really long time. So don't worry if you can't stop calling yourself names. Just notice it.

Just notice how often it's cause even just noticing can start to sort of tone it down a bit. Help you realize that these are just thoughts we have and we don't have to, doesn't have to be okay to call ourselves useless or to call ourselves stupid or lazy, or whatever your words are. So when you are being your best supervisor, Call yourself names that you wouldn't let other people call you.

The sixth one is about being resourceful. So people often talk when they want a new position, they want a new supervisor or a new manager that they want someone who's connected, someone that can help them get stuff done, move on in their research career, their teaching career, whatever it is, and really that's about having somebody who spots what development needs you might have and connects you to the things that might help.

And that was amazing quality in a supervisor or a manager. But it can be an amazing quality in yourself too. So when you've been being curious and you've been being compassionate, the next step is, Okay, how can I be resourceful? So I'm struggling with this. Okay, that's cool you can do about it. Who is there out there that can help me?

Who is there out there that I could ask for advice or where can I get some more training? Who could give me support on this? Who might have gone through this before? What can I read? What can I listen to on the PhD Life Coach podcast because who else can I speak to that might be able to help me with?

So being resourceful, one of the things I so spotted at the university that I spent my whole career was there were millions of resources available for students. So many welfare services, training services, online resources, all sorts of things. And often people just didn't know that they existed, and this was at every level.

This was at undergrad all the way up to senior professors who had access to amazing leadership training and all of these things. They often didn't know it was there, or they often didn't think they had time to go and access it, or they didn't prioritize going through it. Be resourceful and find the things that will help you to succeed.

And then the seventh and final one is about direction. We all want supervisors, managers, bosses that are clear about where we're going, clear about what the next steps might be, that give us some flexibility, but who've also got that big picture in mind. What's your big picture? Are you clear with yourself about where you are going, about where you're going today or this week, or this term or this year or over the next five years?

Because if you are not, it's really hard to keep working hard. It's really hard to keep doing the stuff you need to do if you're not really. On the direction that you are going.

So that's the seventh one is having direction. So we had curious, we had encouraging, we had compassionate, You have to let it go. You can think of a word that is like a sum of, Let it go, let me know. that you choose your words carefully. You are resourceful and you have direction. Those are the seven things that I think we all need from our supervisors and managers, and more importantly, that we all need when we are supervising ourselves.

The voice in your head, you will hear more than any other, so make sure it's the best one it can be. If this all seems like interesting, but massive habits to break, don't worry. We are gonna go into each of these in turn over the next few weeks. we are gonna think about how you can spot habitual thoughts you're having, what impact they have on your feelings and your behavior and therefore the results that you are getting. And most importantly, we are gonna think about how you can change these things. We're gonna think about how you can learn to speak to yourself in a better way. How you can have more direction, how you can get the support that you need. This is all about us enjoying this academic life that we've created, that we've dreamt of but making it what we want it to be. Making the rest of our lives what we want it to be, and having some fun along the. I really hope you've enjoyed this first episode. I have loved talking with you, and I look forward to speaking with you next time.

And that was the very first episode of the PhD Life Coach podcast. I hope you enjoyed as much as I did. It was a real trip down memory lane. It is one of my most listened to episodes. Which quality did you choose? Which do you feel most in need of at the moment?

If you've identified one, I want you to just spend a couple of moments now thinking, how can I make sure that I implement that this week? How would that show up? If I was being compassionate, what would that look like? If I was being curious, what would that look like? In fact, listening to it, curious is the one that I want to get most into.

So those of you listening will know by the time you're listening to this, I have just finished a launch, and I will be trying to channel my curiosity about why the people who joined, joined, and perhaps why those of you who didn't join, chose to join.

By the way, if that's you, you can message me and tell me what, what it was that meant that you didn't join the membership last week. So I'm gonna try and channel my curiosity so that I can make sure that next launch, the PhD Life Coach membership gets to as many people as would benefit from it and I've got some ideas about how I'm gonna create space for that curiosity, how I'm going to kind of implement that in my life.

How are you gonna implement the quality that you think you need the most? Try and come up with a tangible plan that you can practice this week. If you're not already on my newsletter, then go to thephdlifecoach.com, and right there on the front page you will see the sign-up for my newsletter. You'll get reminded of all of these episodes, get show note summaries, all that kind of stuff, and you'll be the first to hear when we open for new members again in autumn time.

Thank you all so much for listening, and the next episode comes out on Wednesday, so see you then