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The PhD Life Coach

Vikki Wright

149 episodes

10 hours ago

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! If you’re bored of reading people’s “I’m happy to announce…” posts on LinkedIn, where they only seem to celebrate big wins like “I got a new job” or “my paper’s published”, then this episode is for you. I’ll tell you why big wins aren’t as motivating as they could be, why we should look out for tiny wins, and why sometimes the sillier the win, the better! Join my tiny win revolution and share your silliest wins today! Post on LinkedIn ...

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Self-Improvement

Health & Fitness,

All content for The PhD Life Coach is the property of Vikki Wright and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! If you’re bored of reading people’s “I’m happy to announce…” posts on LinkedIn, where they only seem to celebrate big wins like “I got a new job” or “my paper’s published”, then this episode is for you. I’ll tell you why big wins aren’t as motivating as they could be, why we should look out for tiny wins, and why sometimes the sillier the win, the better! Join my tiny win revolution and share your silliest wins today! Post on LinkedIn ...

Show more...

Self-Improvement

Health & Fitness,

Episodes (20/149)

The PhD Life Coach

4.10 Why we should celebrate tiny silly wins

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! If you’re bored of reading people’s “I’m happy to announce…” posts on LinkedIn, where they only seem to celebrate big wins like “I got a new job” or “my paper’s published”, then this episode is for you. I’ll tell you why big wins aren’t as motivating as they could be, why we should look out for tiny wins, and why sometimes the sillier the win, the better! Join my tiny win revolution and share your silliest wins today! Post on LinkedIn ...

10 hours ago

16 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

4.09 Why you are more than a Gantt chart

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! Sometimes it can feel like the only thing that matters is whether you are “on track” or not. We measure our self-worth in progress, we report to our supervisors about where we are against our plans, and the only answer we can think of to “how’s it going?” is “busy”. In this episode I talk about why you are so much more than a Gantt chart and how believing that can change the way we interact with our supervisors, our friends and familie...

1 week ago

22 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

4.08 How to stay focused when a lot’s going on - a special coaching episode

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! In this episode, I talk with Gabriela, a student in my PhD Life Coach membership. She is taking a few weeks off to get married and is struggling with getting distracted, worried that she’ll feel guilty while she’s away, and that she’ll dread coming back. Listen as we work through ways to address these challenges. Whether you are taking a big break like Gabriela, or you struggle to switch off even for the weekend, this episode will help...

2 weeks ago

52 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

4.07 Why you need an instruction manual

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! When you buy something like a car or a piece of technology, you get a manual - it explains what you need to do routinely to keep the product running well and helps you troubleshoot common issues. Today we consider what would go in YOUR instruction manual - what does it take to keep you as a human being running smoothly during your academic experience and how should we deal with common challenges that come up. I help you identify what s...

3 weeks ago

25 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

4.06 I answer listener questions

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! Today I’m answering listener questions in the same way that I answer questions for students in my memberships. People have submitted questions about all aspects of PhD Life and I’ve selected 7 to talk about today - for each question, I help you unpick what is really the problem, what is making it feel difficult and try to give some tangible ways forward. In the membership I do this all the time and post the answers into our private pod...

4 weeks ago

48 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

4.05 How to send that scary email

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! Today I’m sharing a real life coaching experience we had in the membership this week. One of the members came to an online coaching session because she had a “scary” email to send and she realised she’d been procrastinating for what felt to her like ages. You have likely experienced this too! The trouble is, when it feels scary, we often end up overthinking it, making it more complicated than it needs to be, and/or putting off actually...

1 month ago

24 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

4.04 How to prioritise when you have competing challenges - a coaching session with Predrag

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! In this coaching episode, I’m chatting with a part-time, international student who is juggling full time work, a family, a disability, and a PhD that started many years ago. Predrag contacted me for help with prioritisation and time management. Regardless of your own situation, this discussion will help you think through how to balance your different commitments and how to structure your time when everything feels important. If you fou...

1 month ago

1 hour 1 minute

The PhD Life Coach

4.03 How to mentor anyone in academia with Dr Maria Lamonaca Wisdom

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! Whether you’re a PhD student or an academic, we need to be thinking about how to make mentoring more effective and enjoyable for everyone involved. This week I’m talking with author and university leader Dr Maria Lamonaca Wisdom about her new book, How To Mentor Anyone In Academia. We chat about why mentoring can be so challenging, how we can set ourselves up for success whether we’re the mentor or the mentee, and what we’d change if w...

1 month ago

54 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

4.02 How to take better notes

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! Pretty much all PhD students have a vague (or very strong) sense that they’re not taking “good enough” notes. Yet for most of us, we’re not really clear what good enough notes would actually be like, and often have really unrealistic expectations about what function our notes should serve in the future. In this episode, I don’t give you new systems or softwares to improve your notetaking - instead, I talk about how notetaking is your f...

1 month ago

24 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

4.01 How to use your existing expertise when you feel like an imposter

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! Feeling like you know absolutely nothing is perhaps the worst part of doing a PhD. You know you need to become an expert but often you feel like a complete imposter. One great strategy is to identify areas of your life where you DO feel more competent or confident and consider how to transfer that learning to your PhD. This could be a past or current career or even hobbies and life experiences that you often overlook. In this episode, ...

2 months ago

22 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

3.48 What to do when you don’t make time for yourself (special coaching episode with Gillian)

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! Today I’m coaching Gillian who is a member of The PhD Life Coach membership! She has been making great progress on her procrastination during Q2 of the membership, but asked for coaching around making time for herself. She lives with her parents and young son, and finds that she spends all her time in daughter mode, mum mode, and PhD student mode, and hasn’t been “just Gillian” for a while. She also finds the different roles blend toge...

3 months ago

1 hour 2 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

3.47 What to do if you’re lonely in academia

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! Loneliness in academia is so common yet so rarely talked about. In this episode I’m going to get honest about some of my experiences of loneliness, share why I think academia can be a particularly lonely place, and give some tangible tips that you can use to make it all feel a bit better. If you enjoyed this episode, you might like this episode on the six types of social support you need and this one on how to build your academic com...

3 months ago

26 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

3.46 How to prepare for a difficult meeting

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! If you put off having difficult conversations or get frazzled just thinking about it, then you need to bookmark this episode! I am going to give you my three step process for preparing for a difficult meeting. You’ll learn how to manage your own worries, strategize for success, and leave feeling proud of yourself. If you are preparing for a viva or oral defence, check out this episode for more specific advice. **** I'm Dr...

3 months ago

29 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

3.45 How to write your discussion when you don’t know how (special coaching episode with Becci)

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! Today I’m coaching Becci who is writing her final thesis discussion chapter. She told me “I feel like I don't really know what I'm doing and I'm just flailing around in the dark spewing out thousands of words and wondering what my point even is. Up to now, I've found it quite easy to understand what I need to do and what chapters need to look like but this part just feels like a huge and important amorphous blob.” Hear how we worked th...

3 months ago

57 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

3.44 Understanding how power affects student-supervisor relationships

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! Today we’re thinking about the relationships we have with our supervisors/advisors. These are one of the most complex and important elements of your PhD experience yet we rarely consider the nature of the relationships. In this episode, we think about how power is distributed in these relationships and how this affects how we each behave. This episode is relevant for PhD students AND supervisors, even if you think you have a great rela...

3 months ago

27 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

3.43 Answering your questions – balancing different commitments, academic role models and surviving publish or perish culture

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! Today I’m answering listener questions! We hear from people who are feeling pulled in different directions for a variety of reasons, a student who feels she lacks academic role models, and another feeling pressured by a publish or perish culture. I give some words of advice and thoughts to consider to help navigate these challenges. Remember – if you have questions you want answered, join my newsletter and send them over and I’ll answe...

4 months ago

31 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

3.42 What to do if you are considering leaving your PhD – a special coaching episode

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! Today you get to hear a real coaching session with a listener, Ruth, who is considering not finishing her PhD. We talk through the reasons and I take her through a process to help her make a decision that works for her. This is a great episode for you if you ever doubt your own abilities to finish your PhD or if you have any big decisions to make. **** I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyo...

4 months ago

46 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

3.41 Thriving with autism in academia: Advice for students and universities

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! In this episode, I’m joined by Jess Dineen, who is both a PhD student and a neurodivergent consultant, speaker, coach, and founder of NeuroNatives. We discuss the strengths and challenges of being in academia with autism, how autistic people can support and advocate for themselves, and how individuals and universities can better support neurodivergent people. Whether you are autistic yourself, or you want to be more inclusive and suppo...

4 months ago

52 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

3.40 How to read academic papers more quickly

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! One of the most common comments I hear from PhD students is that reading always takes longer than they expect. In this episode, I share four elements that you need to take into account when deciding how much time you are going to give an article, book or other piece of writing. By being more intentional in considering these elements, you can be much more accurate in how long each piece will take to read and often read it in less time. ...

4 months ago

39 minutes

The PhD Life Coach

3.39 How to get ahead when you’re feeling behind

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! In this episode, best selling author Sophie Hannah shares her “Book Ahead” method for managing multiple projects when you already feel behind. Born in the midst of a particularly busy year of writing, the first iteration of the Book Ahead method not only got the job done, it also changed how Sophie felt about herself, her other projects, and one of her long-standing “bad habits”. If you feel like you’ll be behind forever and want a tec...

5 months ago

40 minutes