2024: a year of good enough

Happy New Year! Despite it being a bit of a cliché, there’s something about a new calendar year and the promise of longer days ahead which makes it feel like a good time to make promises to ourselves about the future. Here’s my suggestion to you for 2024: this is the year you will be good enough.

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The media is full of suggestions on how we can be The Best but this year, how about focussing on being good enough?

It doesn’t matter how long you spend writing, re-working and editing your writing, it won’t survive an encounter with your supervisor (or examiners or peer reviewers) completely unscathed. And quite rightly, too – it will be improved by being seen by fresh eyes or by taking into account a different viewpoint. So don’t waste time on trying to make your writing perfect, just ask yourself, is this good enough for review? If you’re concerned that the lack of polish will affect the feedback you receive, be specific about what you need: is the overall structure about right? do the key arguments make sense? have I included enough criticism and synthesis in this literature review?

This shift in perspective can also help when you experience an overwhelming urge to compare yourself to colleagues. Everyone’s research is unique, so of course your skills and expertise will also be unique to you. You don’t need to be the best at anything, only good enough to carry out your unique research tasks. When planning your development activities, plan what you need to be good enough, rather than spending time over-shooting what’s required. In many cases, this will indeed result in you becoming a local expert in a particular skill or method, but there’s no need to make that your key aim or to worry if it doesn’t.

Often, a desire to do things brilliantly acts as an inhibitor to getting things done at all – as many procrastinators will know to their cost. Reminding yourself that the task you are trying to start only needs to be good enough can remove a powerful barrier. A first draft only has to exist. Good enough work is infinitely better than no work. Let go of your inner perfectionist and find increased productivity.

There are all sorts of areas of your life where trying to be good enough rather than the best can help: browsing job vacancies, parenting, housework, keeping in touch with friends, to name just a few more. Be proud of what you can achieve and stop yearning for perfection.

In 2024, good enough is good enough.

How to be your own best supervisor

This post is from Dr Vikki Burns, an ex-Professor and certified life coach. She runs The PhD Life Coach coaching, workshops, and podcast, as well as the UoB online group coaching programme. Here, she explores the importance of the way we speak to ourselves.

As a PGR, we have supervisors and other people around to support us, but a lot of the time we are managing ourselves. We decide when we start and finish work, what we do each day, and what our expectations of ourselves are. We’re also the voice that we hear most often. What is that voice saying? What type of supervisor do you want to be for yourself?

We’re going to start by thinking about what type of supervisor you are at the moment. I coach PGRs all the time and see patterns in how you speak to yourselves and how you treat yourselves.

How many of these resonate with you?

• You have very high expectations for yourself, and beat yourself up when you don’t achieve them quickly and easily.
• You set unrealistic goals and give yourself unclear instructions.
• You tell yourself that you are not good enough to be here, and someone is to going to figure that out.
• You tell yourself you have to do all the things, they’re all important, and that you don’t have time to get them done.

Do those things feel familiar to you? Are these ways you speak to yourself? I bet they are. It’s true of an awful lot of PGRs (and academics!). But I want you to pause for a second and think: would you accept that from a supervisor?

If you had a supervisor that gave you vague instructions, told you that everything was important and there was no way you could get it done, and you weren’t really good enough anyway, you wouldn’t put up with it. Or if you did put up with it, you would see that that person was making your life more difficult and you would wish they were another way. So, let’s stop doing this to ourselves.

You can start by thinking about your dream supervisor. Get a really clear picture of what qualities they have and how they speak to you. Compare that to how you speak to yourself.

I want you to pick out three qualities that your dream supervisor has, the qualities that you need most right now. Is your dream supervisor more compassionate or reassuring? More ambitious? Has more faith in you? Maybe they’re more structured and help you set goals and work out action plans.

Now let’s think about how we can nurture these qualities in ourselves. How can you try and be that boss for yourself? Can you set aside time where that boss plans a little bit for you? Can you write down thoughts that you want to try and keep at the front of your mind while you are working this week?

Remember, it’s not easy to change the way you speak to yourself. We’ve been talking to ourselves our whole lives, and absorbing loads of messages from our environment and from society that aren’t necessarily helpful. So this week I want you to notice when you speak to yourself in ways that you wouldn’t accept from a boss. Notice with compassion, and then consider swapping in the dream supervisor’s voice, the one who’s going to be the exactly the supervisor you need.

Don’t worry if you find this difficult – just notice and persist. Even just pondering the idea that you ARE your own supervisor is a useful reflection. This is going to be a lifelong process. We are going to be supervising ourselves every day on this earth. Let’s start making ourselves the very best supervisor that we can be.

Finding my PhD life raft

Laura Cook is a first-year distance-learning PGR in the Department of Philosophy. She has found a podcast helpful as she has navigated the challenges of starting her programme, and here she explains why.

I entered my first year of doctoral study knowing a PhD would require my deep, sustained engagement, even if balanced with a full-time job. Therefore, in an attempt to feel well-prepared ahead of starting my studies, I subscribed to nearly every ‘How to do a PhD’ guide, YouTube channel, blog and podcast out there! Within a couple of weeks I had cast all the self-proclaimed PhD gurus aside: they either confused me or confirmed my looming imposter syndrome. Only one of the initial tools in my PhD toolbox survived the first few months of life as a PGR, the ‘PhD Life Raft Podcast’.

Photo by Floris Mulder on Pexels.com

Many PhD resources focus on the process of reading, researching, and writing the PhD. The Life Raft tackles these areas but also the personal peaks and troughs we have to navigate in order to get a PhD over the finish line. Dr Emma Brodzinski’s PhD Life Raft Podcast is a great resource because it humanises doing a PhD covering a wide variety of topics both professional and personal. What I have found even more helpful than the podcast is the other offerings Emma has developed that are affordable (often free!), accessible and geared towards postgraduates in the UK system.

In January, I joined a ‘PhD Planathon’, five focused days in the company of other PhD scholars from around the world where we made plans, took personal action towards our PhD and were supplied with some great tools for self-management. This didn’t mean five days solid of workshops, rather it was an early morning Zoom call with a focus for the day and then activities you could dip in and out of as you found useful. I think it worked especially well for me as a distance student as it forced me to be accountable to others and to commit things to paper. It almost functioned as a ‘Shut up and Work’ week, but with advice, research planning resources and questions, and a specific focus to get us going. The PhD Life Raft offers other events like this throughout the year with different areas of focus, there is one coming up soon with a emphasis on shaking off perfectionism.

We are all more than our thesis or our research papers and, as a recent distance student residential week in Birmingham reminded me, we are all very different in the way we approach things.  Before beginning my PhD I had assumed my development would quickly move on to building discipline-specific knowledge and that the ‘soft stuff’ of cultivating my work/study/life balance would fall into place. I am quickly learning this simply isn’t true!  The PhD Life Raft certainly hasn’t solved all my problems, but I have found it useful so far as a source of wisdom from folks on the PGR journey, and perhaps others in the UoB PGR community might too.

Productivity and motivation together? Try Kanban.

A couple of weeks into the first lockdown, in 2020, I started keeping a list of the things I had completed each week and e-mailing it to my manager before I shut down my computer on a Friday afternoon. The reasons I started doing this were created by lockdown, but I’ve carried on doing it ever since because it had a rather glorious side effect; it is motivating.

Instead of trying to make progress through a to-do list which never seems to get shorter, I am now measuring my achievements through a “done list” which gets steadily longer over the week. Sometimes it stays stubbornly short for the first few days, if I’m working on a longer task, but then I get to add something substantial to it, and it starts to grow again.

I’m not the only one who thinks a done list is a good way of doing things, but if you can’t quite see how it would work for you in isolation, then you might like to try a technique called Kanban. Kanban comes from the Japanese for signboard, and is a way of visualising progress, including what you have already done.

A simple Kanban board
Photo credit: Kanban Tool

What makes postgraduate mental health fragile and what can we do about it?

Sometimes a topic deserves more than 500 words.  Following Mental Health Awareness Week last week, Bianca Diaconu, a PGR in Psychology, reviews the stressors which make PGRs vulnerable to poor mental health, and looks at ways to address these, in the first of our “in depth” posts.

March 2019 marked the beginning of a strenuous period for the entire world. Everyone was urged to adapt to an extremely disruptive way of working and for the PGR community, this disruption brought even more pressure. Considerable evidence showed that PhD researchers are 3 times more likely to experience mental health problems compared to the general population, with 48% considering leaving and 60% suspending their doctoral studies (Evans et al., 2018). Needless to say, the pandemic has only accentuated this tendency, making it imperative that the matter is no longer overlooked.

Do you really have imposter syndrome?

Imposter syndrome, or imposter phenomenon as it was called when it was first identified, is described as an experience of feeling incompetent and of having deceived others about one’s abilities. It seems like everyone is talking about it in academia these days, and perhaps because of this, the term is becoming diluted and in many ways, no longer meaningful.

Photo credit: wolfgangfoto

I have heard imposter syndrome used to describe emotions from perfectly normal nerves before an important presentation, to recurring panic attacks and sleeplessness, and everything in between. Every PGR experiences nerves, uncertainty and doubt. This is completely normal, and in many ways, to be encouraged – postgraduate research is all about getting out of your comfort zone, trying new things, and exploring new ideas. It’s not easy, and if you’re sailing through without feeling challenged, you’re probably doing it wrong. We should absolutely be talking about the difficulties and doubts associated with a postgraduate research programme, but we should stop calling it “imposter syndrome”. It’s normal.

The only way out is through (part 2)

Sara Corpino is a distance learning PGR in the Department of Modern Languages and, following on from the first part of this post, she gives her tips on how to overcome difficulties and get through a distance learning PhD.

Residential event

Broad Street tunnel, Birmingham
Photo credit: Parrot of Doom

Many distance PhD students in the College of Arts and Law start their experience with the residential event. During the residential you meet the other distance PhD students and have the chance to share your thoughts, impressions, and opinions with them. The UoB campus is amazingly huge, and you can notice students from all over the world attending the event. I loved spending time in a multicultural environment. During your first residential, you also normally meet your supervisor(s) for the very first time and make a planning for the upcoming months. After my first residential, I came home full of enthusiasm and looking forward to starting to work on my research.

The only way out is through (part 1)

Sara Corpino is a distance learning PGR in the Department of Modern Languages and in this first part of a two-part post, she gives her tips on how to overcome difficulties and get through the PhD.

If I only had listened…

I have thought about applying for a PhD in Modern Languages for years before being brave enough to send my first proposal. I remember my academic colleagues telling me how difficult it would have been doing a PhD, but I was really motivated. Plus, I was not scared, as I thought that obtaining the PGCE in Modern Languages – which I had just finished – would have been the toughest experience in my life, until…I started my PhD first year. If I only had listened to those people preparing me, would I have changed my mind? Not at all! And would I have been more psychologically prepared? Possibly yes, but I could have been even too scared to take my first step into what has been the most rewarding – and of course challenging – experience of my life so far.

Resilience during a pandemic

In this post, Simona Scanni, a distance learning PGR from the Department of Modern Languages, shares her challenges and the ways in which she has built her resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic.

You will feel alone. Nobody will understand your research work, nobody will ask you about it. So be prepared to feel alone as a part of the journey.

This was, more or less, the advice we were given by some PGR fellows during the very first residential week in September, on my first year as a PhD student. At the time, I opted for the distance learning programme, so I was already prepared about the idea of being far away from the campus and university services, and somehow isolated from the campus life. My research is about online learning which, ironically, was something existing but still “remote” for many people. The pro was that I could actually conduct my research from home or from any part of the world.

ReproducibiliTea at the University of Birmingham: Embracing Open Science in Lockdown!

In this post, Catherine Laverty, a PGR from the School of Psychology, tells us about her experiences of open research and the ReproducibliTea initiative.

Back in early 2020 I was approaching the midpoint of my PhD (and as it turned out the start of a global pandemic!) and found myself in a place where I was questioning how to make sure my research was as rigorous and open as possible. I had heard of the open science movement and seen various bits of advice on twitter about how to be a better scientist but in all honesty had no idea where to start. I knew the replication crisis was on the horizon and wanted to make sure I was doing my upmost to make positive steps towards good scientific practices but was admittedly a little lost.

Around the same time, I began to speak to two other early career researchers (ECRs) that were in exactly the same position – Mahmoud Elsherif & Sonia Rishi. Together, we decided to navigate the landscape of open science and establish the University of Birmingham’s ReproducibiliTea Journal Club as a place where others could join and learn alongside us.