4.66 GREATEST HITS - Why you deserve a life outside academia

It's so easy to believe that you don't have time for a life outside of academia. The pressure and the never-ending to-do lists mean that even having fun feels like one more thing you need to fit in. In this episode I talk about the benefits of having hobbies outside of academia, including how I found myself hanging by my ankles being rescued by people half my age. I also talk about how you can coach yourself to believe that you deserve that time to yourself. 

If you liked this episode, you might also like this episode on protecting your mental health during your PhD with Dr Marissa Edwards.

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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.

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[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the greatest hits of the PhD Life Coach Podcast. I am settling back into work, having been on holiday last week. Now, you podcast listeners won't know that, because with some sneaky organizational shenanigans behind the scenes, , the podcast has not taken a break during the summer at all for the first time, which is super exciting. But I am still taking that time away, which is very appropriate given this week's topic. So I am currently sort of navigating that transition back into working, thinking about my energy and how I can use it, thinking about managing my thoughts around all the things that I need to do.

So reviewing this week's episodes has been a really timely thing for me, and I think you're gonna love them. So today, we have a very, very early episode. This was only the sixth episode I ever recorded. It feels like a long time ago now. But I think it has really stood the [00:01:00] test of time, and this is about the benefit of having a life outside of academia.

Even now I'm not in academia, and now I'm friends with lots of business owners and things like that, I remember the other day talking with somebody, and she was saying, "No, I would never start a business, 'cause having been involved with one with previous partner, they're just all-consuming. They're 24 hours a day. I just couldn't do it." And I'm like, "Mine is not all-consuming. Mine is not 24 hours a day." Now, don't get me wrong, I love my business, I love my clients, and I work hard, but it is 100% not all-consuming. And so I think even now I've realized that the ability to maintain lots of other things happening in my life alongside what other people would think of as responsibilities is a particular strength of mine. So this is one where you are hearing from a real expert in having hobbies and fun outside of work. So make sure you check it out, especially if you're thinking, "Well, I don't have time [00:02:00] for any of that, Vikki. I have a job, I have kids, I have a PhD to finish," et cetera, et cetera. If your immediate thought is, "I don't even have time to listen to this one," then you really, really need it. And then on Wednesday, we are gonna be thinking about a related topic of managing our energy, and I will tell you more about that one when we get there. 

If you're listening live, I have some sneaky information for you that there are three fun opportunities coming in October. So we always have a free webinar, which you can sign up for. That will be in the middle of October, and we always have a launch in October, so you can join the membership at the end of October, too. But in between the free workshop and the membership launch, we have something else, something that you guys have never had the opportunity to do before, and something that I am super, super excited about.

It is... What clues am I going to give you? It is amazing. [00:03:00] It is cheap, and it might be just exactly what you need right now, so keep a little eye out. Make sure you're on my newsletter so you are amongst the first to know when I announce all the details. I'm so excited. 

But in the meantime, let's think about having some fun outside of academia. I hope you enjoy the episode. 

Hello, and welcome to episode six. Hope things are good. For those of you who listened last week to my podcast about acceptance, I'm taking Marley to the vet today. That will make no sense to you. If you didn't listen last week, say, if you haven't, gotta check in, have a look back. But I'm taking him to the vet and yes, my mom texted this morning to remind me about the appointment, and yes, I was still very polite because I know sometimes I do need reminding. I hope you guys have been working on your acceptance of strengths and weaknesses this week too, and are starting to notice [00:04:00] how just reframing some of that stuff can really make a difference in how you're feeling.

This week I'm gonna change talk a little bit and think about the importance of having a life outside of academia. Sometimes we hear about academics talking about how their job is a vocation, how really it's their hobby too. How in their spare time they read things to do with their subject. And I'm not here to say that's.

But I am here to encourage you to think about that wider life outside of academia. On the other hand, you could be completely convinced about the benefits of that already, but just not see how you could ever fit it in, especially if you're holding down family life. If you're looking after children, you're going for promotion, you've got temporary contracts, you're finishing up your PhD, whatever it might be, you might feel like [00:05:00] you have no time.

For a life outside of academia, and I understand that too. I can see how that makes it really, really hard to find time. I do have to admit my own privilege here, so I might not see it's a privilege, but in this context it's a privilege. So I don't have biological children, so I haven't been bringing out children while trying to do academia and have a life outside of it, and I totally accept that gives me way more spare time than most people who are bringing up families. 

But I also know loads of single academics who work in their spare time, who still don't have hobbies, still don't do things outside of academia either because their passion for it is all consuming or because they never quite prioritize it over the never ending to-do lists that we all experience. And so what I wanna do this week is really think about some of the [00:06:00] benefits of a life outside academia.

And I'm gonna share with you all about how I ran away to join the circus, kind of, and how I'm bringing that back into my life now. And then we're gonna think about what thoughts might help you to build this life outside of academia, to find time for that life outside of academia. But let's start with why.

And I've come up with six reasons why we all need life outside of academia. And to be honest, the first one is actually all you need. The first one is just because it's fun. I'm gonna go through some more kind of tangible benefits, but we shouldn't need those. You are entirely entitled to do some stuff because it's fun.

We live in a world that really espouses productivity, that talks about side hustles and investments and using your weekends to invest in your future self and rah, all this stuff. [00:07:00] Yeah. You know, you can do some fun stuff with that, some interesting stuff with that. But what about doing pointless things?

Because they're entertaining. You deserve that too. When was the last time you did pointless things? Because they were entertaining. When we hit the pandemic, I was living alone at that stage and I was very aware that I'm a very extroverted person. I'm a very active person who likes doing lots of things, and that I was about to be locked in a house 24 hours a day with no one there.

And I basically planned adventure camp for myself. I had face painting sessions. I bought a recorder to reteach myself, the recorder like I used to play at school. I got art stuff out, all sorts of things. I was bad at all of them. It was solely so that I was consciously building fun things into my life, [00:08:00] even though couldn't go out anymore. I couldn't go and do the fun things that I was doing previously. 

So first reason you deserve fun. It might feel a long way down the priority list, and I'm gonna give you a whole load of other ways to justify it to yourself in terms of other benefits, but you don't need those. You can do it just because it's fun.

Second reasons, mental health, just to get out of the academy just to get out of this world where people are still talking about what papers they've published, what they've achieved this week, how rubbish all the meetings are, how academia shouldn't be this way, blah, blah, blah. All these things to get away from that.

To people that are talking about things that are completely different and to talk to them about things that are completely different can have huge benefits for your mental health. It's [00:09:00] just that reset where you are not regurgitating the same stories, you're not still thinking about work. Cuz as much as you love your friends from work and some of my very, very best friends are people I work.

You still often talk about work and it does you so much good to have other friends outside of that and other things that you do outside of that 

and to just not talk, work for a while. Just talk. About your hobby, about the random thing that you're doing. Super good for just taking a little bit of pressure out, reducing the amount of time those anxious thoughts are running around your head. So excellent for your mental health as well.

Third one, and randomly, I didn't expect this and it's certainly not why I did it, but you can gain some transferable skills from doing it. So I spent time working [00:10:00] for a corporate team building adventure race, which is every bit as amazing as it sounds. We go to incredible places around the UK and across the world to put on huge puzzle and navigation based adventure race.

Awesome. And I worked as a marshal on those. So basically I was bossing around lots of people dressed in jumpsuits, having a great time, and I did it solely to make some friends, which isn't always easy as an adult, meet new people, get out in the outdoors, have a fun holiday.

And what I hadn't expected was the things I learned through doing it. So one of the things I learned, which doesn't sound like it'd be useful in academia, but has been. Is how to move large numbers of people around in an efficient way. So we would need to get like 250 people from their cars to the start line with a mountain bike that was ready to go and wrapped with all the [00:11:00] things they needed on time with the right paperwork, et cetera, et cetera.

And that meant we spent a lot of time thinking about signage, thinking about logistics, thinking about where we needed to position marshals to make this happen. To think about the psychology of how you get people moving, how you create a sense of urgency and I actually took loads of that and transferred it into some campus based ins that now still run at my old university where students are running around campus trying to find answers to challenges as part of their welcome week activities to show them where things are on campus and get them to get to know each other and so on.

And the reason I was able to do it, and I wasn't intimidated for the idea of 401st years running around campus doing different tasks was because of this additional work that I. Now, if you'd asked me when I took it on, will you learn anything useful for work? Absolutely not. That was not why I was doing it.

But sometimes you pick up [00:12:00] things that you never even know that you are gonna pick up, so that's another reason to do things outside of work. 

The fourth is, The benefit of being a beginner again, and this is where the circus comes into it. So I used to live in Birmingham and near where I lived, there was this huge mural on the side of what looked like an old kind of community center or something.

Huge purple mural with people doing tricks like on a hoop hanging from the ceiling and from silks hanging from the ceiling and things. And it had the big sign circus mash and it looked amazing. And I'd gone past it a few times and thought that looks really cool. But not done anything about it.

And it was the year I was going to turn 40 and I thought, you know what? I wanna try that. Let's try. And I looked them up and they had some beginner classes [00:13:00] and I managed to con my wonderful friend Helen, into coming with me. She's always up for doing something new and it. Amazing. So much fun. So completely out of the typical academic experience, and I was a total beginner. They're showing you how to like wrap your feet in the silks in a special way so that you can climb up them.

And as someone who could never climb the ropes at school or anything like that, this was just something I'd never done, Something I'd never envisaged being able to do. . And so I was having to get used to the fact that I was rubbish at this cause I was. And they were brilliant at giving you cool things you could do that looked good in photos, but weren't actually that hard.

But I was still watching these other people train and thinking they're amazing and I can't get more than a foot off the [00:14:00] ground without squealing and. That was such an important experience in academia. We kinda rise up and through and we get to a point where we're used to being quite good at things. So I know imposter syndrome and all those things, but generally people who are in academia are pretty high achieving.

So even though we have these bits that we worry about, we are used to doing well. We're used to people telling us we're good at things and it. Really eye opening and really useful to be a complete beginner. Again, partly I think it's just humbling. I think it's good for you. I think we should all put ourselves in situations where we feel a bit uncomfortable, but it also really built my understanding of some of my students.

For example, I have got to the stage a little bit, especially with things like presentations, where when students came to me and said, You know, I'm really nervous. [00:15:00] My presentation, I wouldn't dismiss them as such, but I would reassure them in a way that probably didn't take account of the strength of their feelings. So I would say, ah, don't worry. It won't be that bad. You'll be fine. We're super friendly. You've got nothing to worry about. Things like that. And I realized that these beginner sessions where I was doing things that felt a bit scary or felt like I wouldn't be able to do them, even though the teacher was telling me I could, I was suddenly on the other side of that.

I was suddenly having teachers say to me, Don't worry, just wrap it like this and you can't fall. And I'm like, Yeah, but I'm hanging upside down what is happening here? And it really helped me understand much more and remember much more the anxiety and uncertainty of being a beginner, and I think that is super good for all of us.[00:16:00] 

Also, and it's connected to that, really reminded me of the different skills people have. So again, academia unfortunately can be pretty hierarchical. We sort of assume we're gonna learn from the people above us. You know, when you're a PhD student, you assume that your supervisor's gonna teach you stuff.

When you're a junior academic, you look to maybe professors in your department for advice and. Sometimes I think we forget the skills that people have outside of academia, whether they're academics who have other skills, or people for whom academia's just not their world. And I think it's really easy to forget the whole breadth of talent and knowledge and skills that people out there have and that are student students.

So I'm at Circus and I'm with people who are 20 years younger than me most of the time, [00:17:00] and quite a few of them are students. And on one hand I'm senior to them at work, but here they're totally senior to me here. They're teaching me how to do basic things before they fly up silks and do amazing tricks like six meters in the air and that's really good to remember as well that these people who sometimes we get frustrated if they haven't done their assignments or they are late coming to class, for example, have got these whole other lives and these whole other skills, and we might not be their top priority. And there's so much that we can learn from the things that they're good at.

So we've got intrinsic motivation just doing it because it's fun doing it because it's good for your mental health to have that break doing it because there's a possibility you might get transferable skills. Doing it because it's good [00:18:00] for you to be a beginner. Again, doing it to remind yourself of all the skills that people outside of academia have got.

Two last ones. One's a bit stupid, One's a bit more serious. There's a more stupid one is do it because we deserve to do joyous childish things. So one of the things that I've really seen is that a lot of academics pick hobbies that are quantifiable still. They pick hobbies where they tell us how many books they've read on Twitter, or they pick triathletes.

Why are so many scientists, triathletes? I don't, Well, I do understand it's because you can have spreadsheets and you can weigh stuff and make your kit lighter, and you can play on your nutrition and you can plan on your training and you can monitor your improvement and you can see your gains and all those things.

Same as why so many go and do CrossFit and all that stuff. And again, I'm not saying those hobbies are bad. Those hobbies definitely better than no hobbies, but [00:19:00] it's not quite the same. I was crashing out of some move that you've done on silks, falling on the ground with your ankles still tied up your on the ground and having fits of laughter while people half your age are trying to untangle your feet so that you can get down.

That's much more silly and that might not be your version of silly. Your version of silly might be doing fun crafts where you don't worry at all about whether they're good or not. You don't try to make things that you can sell in your side hustle on Etsy, but you paint old cardboard boxes just because it's fun.

So really thinking about are there hobbies that I can do that are just ridiculous, that just stop me taking myself too seriously? That that remind me what it's like to be a child. And that's a great place to go. If you are not sure how to find these things, think back to what you enjoy doing as a child. Are there any [00:20:00] fun things that you haven't done in years that you could go, You know what, I haven't done that for ages. Let's do it. Let's go. 

The final one about why you need a life outside of academia is a little bit more serious, and I've only really recently realized that I did this inadvertently, which I'm really proud of myself for, but I didn't realize I was doing it at the time, and that is my sole identity has. never been academia. So I've been in academia my whole life.

Those of you don't know my background. I came to Birmingham University as an undergraduate student and never left. I got offered a PhD straight out of my undergrad. So I did that and then I got offered a postdoc outta that. I got offered a lectureship out of that and I progressed through to full professor over about 25 years, and I left in August this year.

And, People were [00:21:00] surprised. I think it's fair to say because I think for a lot of people, they don't know what they are outside of their job. They're an academic. Their status comes from being an academic it's what they do, it's what they're good at. Outside of that, they might be a mother or father, parent but often that's it.

They're an academic and they don't have or make time for anything else, and that's not necessarily terrible, but it leaves you in this position where if you realize that academia's not what you wanna do forever, that's a huge challenge to your sense of identity. That makes it very difficult to figure out how to walk. And I realized in retrospect, really, that everything that I had been doing outside of my PhD when I was doing that and outside of every stage of my [00:22:00] academic career, actually made walking away really easy. . I've done all these different things and I've got all these groups of friends who are completely different to me.

 And that's been huge because that means I know I can have a life outside of academia. I know how to be friends and relate with people from all different backgrounds, and that means I can do anything I want. I don't need to get my status from the fact that I can have professor in front of my name.

I don't have to get my sense of worth from how many papers I've published this year or what my impact factor is. I have things I'm working for outside of my job. I have things I do just for stupidity outside of my job, and I have friends. You don't actually even know what I do for my job, I think, and that made it super easy to walk [00:23:00] away.

So whether you want to ever leave academia or whether you just want to know that you are staying because of an active choice rather than because it's all you've ever been, I really recommend you think about how you can build an identity outside of that. Now we've really focused in, in what I call the action line.

This week we've really focused on things you could do and why you could do them. So if you've listened to this and gone right, okay, yes, you've sold me this sounds good. I've been stuck in academia for too long. I need to have a life. I'm bored of not having a life outside of academia. What sorts of thoughts.

Do you need to have, Well, let's think about the thoughts that you might be having that are getting in the way of that. I haven't got time. I'm sure that's one. For the vast majority of you. I don't know what I would do. I'm [00:24:00] not good at anything. Those might be thoughts. I don't know if my partner or family would support in doing something else, you might be having all of those thoughts, and what I want you to notice is the emotions that those thoughts generate, they probably generate feelings of maybe being a bit hopeless or feeling disappointed that you're not gonna be able to do things maybe even trapped, that you've created this world where you've got so much to do, you can't make this space for.

And the irony is when we create those sorts of emotions, the actions we take make it even less likely. We're gonna fit these things into our lives. So what I would encourage you to do is really ask yourself, in what ways isn't that true? In what ways do I have time to do something fun? In what ways [00:25:00] might my family support me to do this?

In what ways do I know things I might enjoy. Just turning it around in your head, gets your brain curious and gets you to start thinking. Well, I mean, actually to be fair, I don't do a lot on a Saturday night. Maybe there's something I could do then, or actually there is that two hours on a Saturday morning where the kids are in swimming and I could probably go somewhere as long as it was close by.

It starts getting you into that kind of problem solving mode. If you haven't listened to my first podcast about how to be your best supervisor, Do go back and listen to that cuz we look at the importance of generating a kind of curious mindset where you look at these issues not as barriers, but as curious little issues to solve, and you kind of try and puzzle them out.

So that's the first step. Always try and see in what ways are these barrier thoughts not [00:26:00] as true as you're telling yourself. They. The other thing to ask yourself is, what else could I think? So often one of the biggest challenges my clients have is they think they need to stop thinking the other thought.

So you might think that you need to stop thinking, I don't have time for hobbies in order to go and have a hobby. And I don't believe that you can still think you don't have time for a hobby. I pretty much thought I didn't have time to dor and I didn't have time to take a week off to go and work for my adventurous company, .

I pretty much thought I didn't have time to do those things my entire career. I probably didn't have time to do those things, but I did them because I told myself. They were fun and I wanted to do fun things. I told myself work could go on forever if I allowed it. I think that's a big one. So [00:27:00] I don't have time to do these things.

It's one thought work will go on forever if I allow it. And that brought out my slightly stubborn side where I was like, This job is not gonna own me. I love this job and there's times when I will work super crazy hard for it to move something along, but it's not gonna own me. There's bits of me that are mine and that I am gonna protect and one slightly flippant thought that really helped me is I'm never gonna have time, so I'm doing it. Because if you wait for the time, when you have enough gap in your schedule for this, it'll never come. You just need to pick a time and put it in your diary. Make the arrangements you need to make and tell yourself, I do circus on a Monday.

It's important to me. This is what I want to do. And I didn't do it consistently. So also, don't [00:28:00] beat yourself up. If there's times where you fall off it and you go, You know what, I can't make it. I for sure did that, but those would be. The smaller bits of time, because that would be for a little while, I'd start to notice my mental health suffering.

I'd start to notice my physical health suffering. I'd start to miss my friends. I'd want to see my circus buddies, and so I've made the time again. I also noticed, and it's a little additional benefit for you, it may be more efficient at work. If I knew I had a class at six, I got finished before. I just did cuz I knew I wanted to be in my class.

Whereas the days I didn't have a class booked, I would find myself just kind of carrying on, working not as fast as I could, maybe faffing about on some things that maybe weren't urgent right now, you know, jobs expand to fill the time we give them, so that's an extra bonus fee. It made me work more [00:29:00] efficiently.

The important thing is you don't have to stop thinking that you don't have time. You don't have to stop thinking that other people will think you're ridiculous for wanting to do this. You just need to find something else that's true as well. So once I will offer you are I deserve to have fun.

This is only x hours a week. I can find time for that one. If you do have children, my kids should see me doing fun. I think often we think we have to be there for our children. We have to look after them at all times, and sometimes I think it's really good for them to see their parents go, I'm gonna go and do this thing.

I'm bad at it. It's funny. I fall off, I look ridiculous, but it's fun and I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna enjoy. I'm gonna go and do artwork, and I'm gonna come home with terrible pieces of art every week, and I'm gonna be super proud of myself [00:30:00] anyway. I think that's great for kids to see. So find a truth that's true for you.

And whenever you find yourself thinking the negative thought, we're not gonna tell ourselves off. We're not gonna criticize ourselves. We're thinking, I don't have time. We're just gonna notice that and say, Yeah, but I want. Or, Yeah, but it's good for my kids to see me doing this or, Yeah. But I deserve this time.

So we're just gonna nudge ourselves back to the thought that leads to us taking these behaviors. Because as someone who's left academia, I cannot tell you how important it was to have a life outside of academia. It enabled me to succeed within universities by keeping me happy, keeping me relaxed, keeping me healthy, and it enabled me to leave when [00:31:00] the time is right.

So pick your life. Start with small things. Remind yourself while they're important, and remember, there is always more to you than just your academic career.

Thank you so much for listening. As usual, make sure this isn't something that you just, listen to and go, "Oh, yeah, that's a good idea," and then don't do it. Plan something fun for this week. Let me know. Find me on Instagram. I'm trying to post more regularly on Instagram. I'm @thephdlifecoach, like I am everywhere. Let me know what do you do for fun? Send me pictures. Tag me in them. That would be exciting. I should post more of my things. I tell you what, we'll do that. I'm gonna post more things on Instagram of the rubbish I do outside work 'cause it's all sorts of different things. Don't forget that we have our bonus episode on Wednesday where I'm gonna be thinking about how to manage your energy, so make sure you tune in for that one. In the meantime, thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next week