Are you already feeling like you're starting this academic year behind? I know I am. And this is going to be the perfect episode to help you feel so much better and to get yourself onto your new track.
Hello and welcome to season two of the PhD life coach. You will have noticed I have been away for the summer. There haven't been any new episodes since July. That was because I took a decent chunk of time off. Partly because I was getting married, and I wanted a honeymoon, and I wanted a family holiday. Partly because I haven't had a summer off since I was about 15, and frankly, that was pretty exciting.
So, I am back, newly rejuvenated, ready to go for this academic year, and this is your very first episode. However, I did tell you a little lie there. I said that I was ready to go, and today, I'm feeling really ready to go. But I've spent the last couple of weeks really feeling like I was already starting the year behind.
Do you ever get that sensation where it feels like you're not as prepared as you wanted to be? You'd anticipated being really organized by now. It's already September. How is it already the middle of September?
And it's kind of getting away from you. Happens at the beginning of the academic year, happens at the beginning of the calendar year. It can happen in so many different ways and it's a really horrible feeling, that feeling that you are having to run just to stay in the same place. We start to blame ourselves for us not being in a better position than we are at the moment.
We start feeling like we're never going to get “back on top” or to “get back on track” and all of those things that we say to ourselves. And I spent time saying these things to myself over the last couple of weeks. I was all set. I was coming home from my big break away on a Wednesday. Thursday, Friday, I was going to get myself all organized. Monday was going to be a proper work week.
Then I got COVID. On the Thursday that I was planning to get all organized. And my brain has been telling me that I've been on the back foot ever since that I've been behind on the thing. And so I've really seen in real time, the consequences of telling yourself you're behind and I have practiced some of the things that I talk with you guys about to try and get myself back to the mindset, that I feel much more in today, I have to say.
So, what we're going to do is we're going to start thinking about why is there even a problem with telling ourselves we're behind? Because some people think that that will motivate them to work harder, to get on with it. We're going to talk about why it's a problem and, as usual, going to give you some specific tools that you can use when you find yourself in these situations.
To remind you why the thoughts we have are so important, I want to go back to the self coaching model. So if you're new to this podcast, new to coaching, you might not come across this before I will take you through it. If you remember this from last season, fabulous. I'm going to use the example of this thought that we're behind to demonstrate how the self coaching model works.
So the self coaching model really helps us to understand what we're thinking and what the consequences of those thoughts are. It can be used to change. It can be used to help us develop further, but the biggest use for it is understanding. So self coaching model is made up of five parts.
The circumstance, these are the neutral facts. Neutral fact is I'm recording this on the 15th of September. Neutral fact is I arrived home from holiday on like the 27th of August or something like that. Those are my neutral circumstances.
And then the thought that I've been having is “I'm already behind”. Okay. So the second part of the model is our thoughts. It's that cognitive story we tell in our heads. So my circumstance, it's the beginning of the academic year. My circumstances, it's the beginning of the academic year. My thought is I'm already behind.
The third part of the model is the emotion. And this is the emotion that you experience when you think that thought. So when I think the thought “I'm already behind”, I feel overwhelmed. I feel disappointed. I feel some element of shame, like it should be different. I feel a bit of panic, and I feel a bit defeated, like I've already lost. Now, in the self coaching model,
we usually go at it one emotion at a time, explore each bit separately, and I'll explain in another podcast why that's the case. But for now, let's just say that this thought, I'm already behind, is causing me a whole bunch of negative emotions. And what I've really seen this week, and what the self coaching model tells us, is that those emotions lead to particular actions.
Now when we're feeling overwhelmed, panicked, defeated, what do you do? What do you find yourself doing? Not to make yourself better. So this isn't like strategies that you use to get yourself out of those moods, but when you're in those emotions, you're feeling defeated, you're feeling shame, you're feeling disappointed, what actions do you take?
It's almost always going to be actions that don't particularly help us. So what I've seen in myself is massive procrastination. So time spent scrolling on social media, instead of figuring out exactly what I need to do and what I need to get on with. It's actions that happen inside my head, like telling myself I'm never going to get back on track. I'm never going to build the things that I want to build. I'm never going to get done the things I want to do. Why did I even do this? That kind of spiraling.
So the actions we see can be physical actions, like procrastination, they can be spiraling. For me, it comes out sometimes in over-planning. So instead of finding myself doing the tasks I want to do, I get really caught up in, I need to plan out everything I'm going to do for the next year and that often doesn't help either.
And the result is, we stay behind. Because of these actions, the consequence is that we stay behind. So look at that model all the way through. We've got circumstance, it's the beginning of the academic year. We're telling ourselves we're already behind, that's our thought.
Our feelings are overwhelmed, panicked, defeated, stressed, all of those things. Our actions are we procrastinate, we worry, we catastrophize, we sometimes plan too far ahead or take frantic action. And the result is we get further behind.
This is why these thoughts are so dangerous. Even if they feel like they're true, even if it feels like we're behind, if you compared what I've done now compared to what I had planned to do by now, I am “behind”. That's a fact, but it's this thought that that's a problem and that this is a negative thing is causing a ton of emotions, which is not making it easy to get on.
So, what do we do? As usual, we ask ourselves a series of questions. And you can ask yourself whether it's true that you're behind and all those sorts of things. But I'm going to ask you, behind what? Because this is really important and it varies between different people. What exactly are you behind?
Are you behind the plan you'd made three months ago? Are you behind other people? Is that the problem? Is that who you're feeling behind? By what metric are you behind? Objective tasks not done? A general sense of not being on top of things? What do we even mean by behind?
I'm behind a vague plan that I had to be on top of things at the beginning of this academic year. But actually, when you pin down what I haven't done that I thought I would have done by now, it's kind of hard to pin down.
Sometimes it's easier. I remember starting academic years as a lecturer, believing that I'd have my Canvas all sorted and my lectures all planned out and everything scheduled and sort of organized, ready to go. I never did. And in that case, I was behind a plan that was never realistic anyway, but I would still beat myself up for that.
So ask yourself what exactly are you behind. Sometimes we're comparing ourselves to something that isn't even a fair comparison.
The second thing I want you to do is to remind yourself there is no track to get back on. So we often tell ourselves, I just need to get back on track. I have this with the students I coach all the time. PhD students who've planned out a six month plan and for whatever reason haven't been able to follow it.
Sometimes that's because they haven't stuck to the things that they genuinely thought they'd be able to do. Sometimes the plan was unrealistic. Sometimes unexpected things happened during the year. So like me getting COVID, for example, my students get COVID. They have things happen, their families, experiments don't work, whatever it is.
Stuff happens, and then they put a lot of cognitive effort into thinking, how do I get back on track? They look at that old plan and spend loads of time thinking, how can I get back to where I thought I'd be by now? My second tip here, that track doesn't exist anymore. This isn't Back to the Future. I asked my students if they've watched Back to the Future, and I was positively surprised by how many of them have. If you haven't, make sure you've watched Back to the Future.
But in that, they sort of have key events where time splits off in a different way, and part of the kind of storyline is trying to get back to the normal timeline. And it's not possible to get back to a normal timeline. If you had planned out a series of tasks that you wanted to get done by certain times, and then you had three weeks where you were ill, you're not getting back to that plan.
At some stage you might be able to submit at the same timeline, but it's not the same plan. And time spent feeling like you are somehow off another plan, that in an alternate universe you would have been on, just makes us feel guilty. It just makes us feel disappointed, all of these things.
You are on your track. This is the only timeline that exists, as far as our human consciousness knows. Who knows? All you quantum physicists might tell me something different. But as far as we can tell, this is our only track. The one we're on now is our track. Today is the track.
If we can start from here, forget the imaginary old plans, start from here, what can I do today to move myself forward? What are the specific things that would help me right now, not to get back on track, but to move forward from where I am? Suddenly, we're in a much more compassionate, much more growth focused place. We're not trying to catch up. We're trying to move forward from right here.
When we're trying to do that, there's a few things that I want you to bear in mind. The first is acceptance. It's okay to be disappointed that you're not where you thought you'd be by now. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with negative emotions. We don't have to avoid them. We can just be disappointed for a while. That's okay.
But part of this process is also accepting we're disappointed, but this is where we are and we can move forward from here. So it's that acceptance that this is our place. We can have negative emotions about that, but we move forward together from here.
Another tip is to avoid that planning procrastination. And I fell in this hole. Okay. And this is something I really want to emphasize because it came up in some of my coaching sessions this week. A lot of people think that once they start doing this sort of thoughtwork, they start getting coaching, that they are going to be good at this all the time.
They're going to manage their minds all the time. They're going to be able to do whatever they want to do. They're going to be able to always have positive thoughts, always regulate their emotions and all this good stuff.
It's not true. We're all human beings. I'm a coach. I do this stuff all the time. I coach people on all this stuff, year in, year out. Yet I have spent a chunk of time this week, I have to say, in what I call planning procrastination. This is where you're so freaked out by all the things you have to do and the fact you haven't done them and you're behind and all those stories that what you tell yourself you need is a clear plan.
I need a new plan. I need to work out, okay, if I'm not getting on that plan, how am I getting on this? What is my new plan? And then you end up getting all ahead of yourself, all kind of working out, I'm going to do this today, that tomorrow. And all of a sudden, four hours have gone past. You haven't done any of the things. You've just planned.
It's like back in the day, when we were at school making revision timetables, not sticking to them and then having to make them all over again. Planning can be a form of procrastination. I love planning. It's really important, but don't do planning when you're in the midst of overwhelm, when you're in the midst of telling yourself you're behind.
We do planning when we're feeling organized and on it and we're ready to go. Don't use planning as a way to make yourself feel organized. Instead, pick a task, do the task. Because when we're feeling like we're overwhelmed, we're telling ourselves we're behind, what we really need to see is progress. And in many ways it doesn't matter which of the many tasks you've got to do, you do. You just need to make some progress.
I even, I'm going to tell you a secret, I even fell into some planning procrastination this morning. I spent more time than I intended trying to plan out a social media strategy. You're going to see a lot more of me on Instagram and things like that soon, hopefully, and I was planning it all out and I was only going to spend an hour and a half on it and I got sucked into YouTube and all these How To guides from all these influencers and I spent way more time on it than I thought I should have done and I had planned to do because it felt like I was getting organized, but then I noticed, and that's the key.
We don't stop doing all these things, but we do notice when we're doing them and we understand what we're doing. And I noticed what I was doing and it was like. Vikki, come on. This isn't moving you forward right now. You can plan this stuff. This feels good. This is exciting. But what you actually need to do is get something done.
And the thing you need to get done is record your podcast. And that is exactly what I'm doing now. So you guys are now listening to this as a product of me having coached myself out of getting distracted by planning procrastination and moving myself into actually achieving one of the things I need to do.
So, notice when you do that. Do you start making lists of all the papers you need to read, instead of reading a paper? Do you start making notes of all the things you need to write, instead of writing? Just pick a thing. At this point, momentum is more important than strategy. Getting something done is more important than planning out everything.
One cautionary note. Don't fall into the trap of doing all the unimportant things because they feel easy. Don't fall into the trap of deciding now is the perfect time to do that health and safety training and to colour code your whatevers. You don't need to do that. Pick one chunky thing that you're worried about and just start it. Because we are where we are and that's how we move forwards.
My final point, and it's going to sound like a weird one, is work slower. One of the things we know is that when we're telling ourselves we're behind and we feel panicky, we start rushing. We start feeling like we have to plan everything, we have to do everything, we need to do this, we need to do that, and when our brain's in that kind of frantic mode, it's really hard to settle down and actually just get one thing done.
In fact, what you often end up doing is pinging between, “Oh, I need to do this, but actually I need to do that.” And you sort of boing around between the lots of different things you need doing. And for many of us, that causes a freeze response. I spent more time than I care to tell you on just staring at social media this week, not doing it, not planning, not actually interacting. Just staring at reels, because I'd allowed my brain to ping around into too many different places. I was telling myself I needed to work fast and because of that I got overwhelmed and didn't do any of it.
What has worked for me this week is telling myself I need to work slower. I just need to pick one thing. I just need to pick this podcast, plan what I'm going to say, turn on my camera and record it. I can work slow. I can take my time over that. I'm just going to do some small things. I used this technique earlier in the week as well. I'd had one morning where I'd really annoyed myself because I hadn't got focused on anything. I felt like I was wasting time. I was feeling guilty about it. And I thought, you know what? I can work through my expenses a little bit. And so I got myself onto a very basic task, but one that is getting quite urgent now, and I gave myself permission to work through it slowly. To just gradually go through one receipt at a time and figure it out.
And I actually got a surprising amount done and it actually brought my brain into a place where I was saying things like, “Oh yeah, I can, I can work through this. This is achievable.” So give yourself permission to work slowly if you're telling yourself you need to catch up.
So those are my thoughts for you this week. If you are feeling behind, it's a really common feeling. You are not alone. Many of the students and staff in my community are feeling like that at the moment. There's something about the beginning of the new year that makes you believe you're going to be this, like, incredible version of yourself this year.
You are going to be incredible. But we are going to do it one step at a time, starting from exactly where we are now.
I hope that's useful. It's lovely to be back. Let me know what you think of the episode. Tell me ways that you feel behind. And tell me things that you want podcasts on in the future.We've got one coming up about responding to negative feedback, which was a request from one of my coachees. So let me know what things you want to hear about, and I will try and help you out. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful week.