Speaker 1: A PhD is so hard. It's hard in so many ways. It makes you question who you are as a person and the really deep questions in life. Loads of people tackle this with a to-do list. They feel like if they just tick off some things that they're going to get a PhD. But importantly, this is not the most impactful thing you can do for your PhD. You should have a to-be list. A to-be list of all of the things you need to become in order to get a PhD and win in academia. I have come up with this framework that I have seen a load of successful PhD students adhere to without even knowing it. It's the RISE framework. In this video, we're going to share what each one of those means and how you can make sure that you become the best PhD student you can. How many times during your PhD do you just feel like giving up? How many times do you sit there and you get feedback when you come across a problem? How many times, and I know that during my PhD, I felt this a lot where I was like, what is the point? The first thing we should really realize is that it's not about the hardships. It's about how we overcome them that really makes us strong PhD students. That can be summed up in one word as resilience. Resilience is the ability to persevere through hardships. During your PhD, you're going to have so many hardships that you're going to just question every day why you're doing it. Trust me, there's moments over PhD where you're like, oh, this again. Being able to push through those is so important. It may be that you're facing a problem, you carry it along and then all of a sudden a blocker comes up. You can't access a bit of your equipment. Things are taking a long time to get approval. You can't move forward. How do we get around that? The second thing is a lot of people face an issue when they come across criticism. Criticism attacks you as a person, and it certainly feels very personal when someone's attacking your research because you become your research even though you shouldn't. Deep down inside, we're like, if they're attacking our research, they're attacking us. How do you get through these things? There's one simple thing that I think every successful PhD student learns, and that is that you got to have systems and structures in place so that it makes sense to continue no matter what. On a Monday, what do you do? On a Tuesday, what do you do? What systems have you got in place that would mean if you did this every single week of your PhD that you would get to the end? It would be unreasonable if you didn't get to the end. The thing is then with resilience, it becomes natural to continue because on a Monday morning, you may turn up and you may be like, oh, I got this horrible email of critique and horribleness, but then you're like, okay, well, what do I do on a Monday morning? I continue. I persevere. I have resilience. Too many PhD students that I speak to don't know what they're doing from day to day. They turn up in the lab in their office and they're like, oh, today, I may try this. You got to have systems and structures in place to make sure that when you reach hardships, you know exactly what you need to do to continue because it's been drilled into you. We'll talk about that a little bit later in this video. Another really important thing is coming up. We are terrible at critiquing ourselves. How many times have you told yourself that you're not good at something? That the internal narrative that you've always learned is I'm not good at numbers or this always happens when I try something because I'm rubbish at something. We are our worst self-critic. We say to ourselves some of the worst things that we would never ever think about saying to someone else in our position. How do we get around this? The I in RISE is for introspection. Let's choose a different color. Introspection is so important because it allows us to identify when we're being our own worst self-critic. We need to cut off those horrible thoughts as they bubble up and either silence them completely or shift their attention to something else. I know that some of the best PhD students I've ever sort of worked alongside have this ability to silence that inner critic and zoom out from their problems so that they really understand what the real issue is. Two things I like to do to tackle this. The first thing is when I feel that inner critic rise up, I stop and I change what I'm doing. For example, if I'm writing, then I have this sort of like message, this little sort of noise in the back of my head which is like, oh, Andy, you're not very good at writing. This is rubbish. It's going to take you ages. Someone else is much better at you than this. I stop. I get away from my computer and I change either the mode in which I'm doing it so I may go and write for a little bit, get some ideas out of my head or I may change location. Those two things have been really good at sort of like just redirecting that self-criticism and changing that mode really helps me get out of that really critical sort of like self-negative talk that I find myself spiraling into and you may be the same. The second thing that I think you should do is zoom out of your problem once you first realize that little self-critic rising is zoom out of that problem and be like, what would I tell someone else in this situation? You'll be amazed how kind, how trusting, how useful your information can be if you're not telling it to yourself and that's how you stop that inner critic from rising up and completely derailing your PhD and that is a skill that you need to learn. Some of the best PhDs that I've ever seen and worked with have a really great sense of self-worth. Now, you shouldn't get this confused with self-esteem. Self-esteem is what we build up during our careers as academics when we're doing undergrad. Self-esteem is the ability to sort of prove yourself to yourself and others and then we enter this other world where self-worth is more important. What are your values? How do you make sure that you're not only just ticking off goals and increasing that self-esteem but you're also increasing how you feel about yourself as a person? This is about values. This is about making sure that you are happy in your own skin and the way we do that in a PhD is really simple. First of all, we give ourselves little tiny goals every single day to get over. Once you're exercising that muscle, your ability to increase your self-worth increases little by little and secondly, and this is the most important thing, is that we need to give ourselves permission to fail. We often think that when we fail in a PhD that our self-worth is linked to that but it's not. Failing in a PhD, failing daily, failing weekly, failing big and often is an important part of the PhD process and it's not about always winning, winning, winning. Some of the most important things you can learn about your research field is when you fail and it's a message that isn't sort of drilled into us when we're going up through undergraduate because it's all about getting the best in exams and it's all about doing the best you can and showing off your ability to understand certain things by getting a high exam result. Here, it's about failing, failing often, learning from failures and growing your project out like a phoenix from the ashes of all that failure and that is really hard when you have a really low feeling of self-worth. This is one of the things I struggled with the most during my PhD. I would give myself permission to relax. I would have two, three weeks sometimes where I literally spent most of the day on Facebook. That was the thing back in the day. Facebook, Facebook, Facebook and magazines. I would spend so much time just wasting time that it didn't get me any closer to my PhD goals and that put a lot of stress on me. So the last thing that is so important for PhD students to develop is this ability to have self-discipline and increase their PhD endurance. Endurance is the ability to just get closer to your goals. So the one thing I like to think about this is every decision I make throughout a day, is it getting me closer to a PhD or is it getting me further away? When I was doing my PhD, any Facebook that I did, any hours that I spent just wasted chatting with my friends, that was getting me further away from my PhD and it's a simple equation. If you are doing more things that take you away from a PhD than you are doing things that get you closer to a PhD, that is ultimately going to dictate whether or not you're capable of moving towards it or you're slowly making yourself move further and further away. And sometimes, to be honest with you, we are our own worst enemy because we inadvertently do things to sabotage ourselves. We do things that make ourselves step away from that goal. For example, doing Facebook was really just because I was fearful of failure. I didn't want to try something and fail so it was easier for me to sit on Facebook and pretend that I was going to do something later than actually try something. So that was moving me further and further away from a goal because I was scared of failure. This never ever really comes from a place of negativity. Quite often it's just ourselves protecting ourselves. So along with this kind of ability to have self-discipline, we also need to be brave. And the way we do that is we start understanding the risks involved in a PhD, the failures we need to face and then we step forward little by little and we make sure that the equation of our day, week and month in terms of the amount of things we do towards our PhD versus the amount of things we do away from our PhD adds up to a positive forward direction. I know of someone who spent a lot of time in their first year going scuba diving, not turning up on time, not really spending any time in the lab and this was all moving her away from a PhD. Whereas if she had spent more time coming in on time, having the systems and structures to make sure she was always working towards her PhD, that would have improved the self-discipline, it would have improved her bravery so that she could get over whatever internal sort of like feelings and narratives she's told herself about her ability to get a PhD. And so this whole thing comes down to endurance, self-discipline and being brave with that self-discipline. Those are the important things that are going to get you towards a PhD, not just your to-do list. So there we have it. There are the most important things that you need to be in order to get your PhD. Too often we think about a to-do list and we go, we need to do this to get a PhD. When in fact, we should be thinking, who do I need to be and what do I need to work on to become in order to get a PhD? And those are the most important things. And too many people find out too late that they needed this development side of their own personality. So let me know in the comments what you think and if you would add anything to this list. And also, if you love this video, go check out this one where I talk about the secret formula for a successful PhD in 2024. I think you'll love it.