The PhD Life Coach

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! We all know we should have time away from work yet so many of us don’t. It shocks me that people don’t get more curious about WHY intelligent, capable people don’t do things that we KNOW will help us. In this episode, I share why I think imposter syndrome has a massive impact on our ability to choose a better work life balance. A must if you are exhausted, overwhelmed and fed up of cancelling plans in order to work. If you liked...

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! We all talk about goal setting, and the importance of SMART goals, and yet most of us still set goals that don’t work. Maybe we get there in the end, often in unsustainable ways, or maybe we let the goal drift and then set it again with the promise “it’ll be different this time”. In this episode, I’m going to share 10 ways I think we can design better goals, so that we set ourselves up for success. This approach underpins our quarterly...

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! We often think of resilience as the ability to withstand more and more stress or pressure, which never sounds like a lot of fun or very sustainable. However, as Dr Sherry Hamby explains in this episode, that’s not really what the scientific literature says about resilience. We chat about Dr Hamby’s book, Stronger Than You Think, and go through the four pillars of your resilience portfolio. By the end, you’ll identify ways you can impro...

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! Trying to be “more independent” and “driving your PhD” when your supervisor simultaneously keeps rejecting your ideas can be one of the biggest challenges in academia. In this episode I talk about why I think this situation comes about, what impact it has, and give four tangible ways that you can improve the situation for both you and your supervisor. If you liked this episode, you should check out this one on How to use your exi...

Send Vikki any questions you'd like answered on the show! When did you last get some negative feedback? As PhD students and academics, we get negative feedback quite often, either comments on drafts of papers, rejections from journals, applying for jobs, all sorts of things. We get bits of negative feedback and it can really hurt. So what do we do when we experience negative feedback? What do we do with the fact it hurts and how could we perhaps do something different in the future? That's wh...