4. How to write the thing when you’re not writing the thing

Twitter accounts I mention in this episode are: 

@writethatphd – for lots of links to writing resources

@drjenncumming – for lots of advice about writing and critiquing strategies

@verymessyjamie – who supports PhD students to find more balance, ease, joy and clarity. 

Transcript 

Hello and welcome to episode four of the PhD Life Coach. This week we're thinking about how to write the thing when you're not writing the thing. So how to get on with whatever writing project it is that you have ongoing at the moment. And I have a massive confession to make, which is that this episode has been a little bit of a learning process for me in that I've had to practice a whole lot of what I preach.

I have been putting this off. I came up with the idea. I knew what I wanted to write about. I knew what I wanted to therefore talk about, and I've kind of drafted it and I recorded a version and then I decided that I didn't like it and it needed redoing. And I put off really thinking about it and I procrastinated on spending the time to think how I was going do it.

And I really became aware of how much I was avoiding re-recording this episode. And one of the things that's so interesting as you develop in this work is not that you don't ever procrastinate and that you don't ever feel overwhelmed, it's that you start to observe your brain. And so I started to observe that I was massively avoiding doing this. And that was a bit weird because I really want to record these. I'm really excited that my podcast is now out there and people are listening to it. So thank you to everyone who's downloading this. It's been really cool.

But there was part of me that was starting to feel a bit nervous about the fact that people were listening to this and a bit judgey about myself and what I was talking about. Things that I'm sure you've experienced too when you are getting on with writing something, whether it's part of your PhD, whether it's writing promotion materials, if you're a member of staff, writing a big grant, an important paper, whatever it might be.

So I had to really like think through, what am I thinking? And what can I do about that to get this done? And ironically, I ended up using tons of the stuff that I was advising in my first draft of it. This is real life in action for you guys. 

What I really want you to think about is often when we are trying to get something written, we think that we need technical guidance. We need somebody to tell us how to write the thing, how to write a paper, how to write promotion materials, how to write a grant. And that stuff is super useful. So the first thing today is I am not gonna say that you don't need that kind of technical guidance. You absolutely do. There's tons of support for it. Two that I would hugely recommend, one I found relatively recently called @writethatPhD on Twitter. They link to millions of how-to guides that are really, really useful. The other person that I would really recommend is one of my very good friends and colleagues, ex-colleague at University of Birmingham, Professor Jennifer Cumming. You can find her on Twitter @Drjenncumming. She regularly tweets guidance about how to go about thinking critically, how to write critically, how to structure your writing, how to make it sound academic and professional.

So I would really recommend both of those for the technical side of things, but that's not the only thing we struggle with often. It's what we think we're struggling with, but we also struggle with the self management side of things. How do we actually get on with writing it? How do we get past all those thoughts that prevent us getting on that make us want to procrastinate and instead get the thing done. 

I'm going to focus on that side of things and it really refers back to my very first podcast episode, which hopefully some of you have listened to called How, To Be Your Own Best Supervisor. One of the tips that we gave in that was to choose your thoughts, not to just accept the thoughts that fly into your head as they come in unconsciously, but instead to decide what you're thinking about something and particularly where it's something challenging like this. So we're talking here really about writing, but you can probably apply this to presentations and teaching and anything else that you're kind of putting off getting ready for.

What we're going to do today is we're going to think of seven thoughts that you are probably having about writing, why they don't help and what you could think instead. So let's go. 

What we're going to do with each of these is come up with a thought and we're gonna ask two questions. We're gonna say: 

1)    Is this thought true?

2)    Does this thought help? 

Because often with our thoughts, we take for granted that they're true. We don't stop and go, actually, is that true? How is that not true? Are there any ways in which it's less true? So we get to really grill those thoughts and figure out if they're true or not.

And then we also get to think, does thinking this help? There's a whole bunch of thoughts out there that they might be true, but it's probably not helpful to spend loads of time thinking. So we're thinking, is it true? Does it help? 

Let's have a look at the seven that I've come up with. You think whether any of these are things that you are thinking at the moment. As we go through this, try and have in your mind a piece of work that you are trying to do at the moment and think, Have I thought this? Is it true for me? It doesn't help me. 

The first one. Which I'm guilty of so often is: 

I should have done this already, or I should be further along. 

That idea that wherever you are at, if past you had just been a bit better, a bit more on it, a bit more organized, a bit more disciplined, then you'd be in a better place.

Now, this really doesn't help because thinking I should have done this already usually leads to feelings like guilt where you feel bad that you haven't done this specific thing. It might even lead to feelings like shame, where it's more about you as a person, that you are somebody who doesn't get stuff done or so who's lazy or those sorts of thoughts.

So thinking I should have done this already leads to those sorts of emotions and we know we try and avoid those sorts of emotions. That can really massively lead to procrastination. So ironically, and I know we've all been there, the thought I should have done this already makes it much less likely that you'll actually get on and do it.

It just because we're trying to avoid those emotions, we don't want to engage with it and so we avoid it even more. A thought I would recommend instead is something along the lines of, I am where I am and I know the next step. The reason that's so important is it really starts to introduce an element of acceptance.

I'm going to do a whole episode of acceptance next week because I think it's so important, but accepting that this is where you. Maybe it's true that you should have done more. Maybe it's true that you'd intended to do this last week. It's definitely true for me that I didn't plan to do this today. I planned to do this early on in the week and I didn't. So it's true. Does thinking it help? No. 

Thinking. I am where I am and I know what the next step. One of the ways I got on with this today was I knew that the next step was reviewing the transcript of the draft I didn't like and twisting it around into something that I did like. I knew the next step, and so that made it something that I could then get on with.

The second thought that can hold people back is: 

I don't know how to do this

That's where looking for guidance can be helpful. But sometimes that becomes a bit frantic. Again, it becomes a bit, I just need someone to show me how to do this. Rather than actually focusing on what you do know.

So if you find yourself thinking, I don't know how to do this, an alternative thought to bring into your head is what I do know is…, and start writing that stuff. So often my individual clients will say things like, I know how to do this at undergrad level, but I don't know how to do it as a PhD student, I know how to write my thesis, but I don't know how to turn it into a publication.

I know how to write papers, but I don't know how to write promotion materials. So people are seeing that they've got some experience, but are allowing themselves to believe that, because they don't how to do this specific new thing, they can't make progress. So if you can start from what I do know is blah, blah, blah, blah, then it suddenly becomes much easier to move forward. And then you start, instead of being at a blank page, you start having down a structure of the things you do know and more specifically the things you don't know. Because if you are telling yourself, I don’t know how to do this, it's very hard to get support for that because how does someone tell you how to do the whole of this? But if you can get to, I do know how to structure this out, and I do know how to do those bits, but I don't know how to make my figures good enough for publication, for example, then suddenly, you know what you need to get advice on, You know what resources you need to look for.

You know what specific questions you need to ask people. The other thought that really helps with this one is I'm capable of learning this. So you don't have to know it.

Whatever stage of our academic careers we're at, there's going to be stuff we don't know how to do. There's going to be new stuff. It's one of the joys of academia is that you are learning stuff all the time, but it can challenge your sense of self when you're used to being good at things and then suddenly you don't know how to do this thing.

If you can reinforce the thought, I'm capable of learning this, then it becomes much less challenging. It's like, Okay, I don't know how to do this, but that's okay. I don't need to know how to do this. I'm gonna figure it out. I will learn. I will find the right people to help me. 

The next one is: 

I don't have time to make it good enough.

And this is another one of those ironic ones where actually the fact that we're telling ourselves we don't have time usually makes ourselves feel overwhelmed, which makes us procrastinate and avoid. And so then we create it so that we don't have time or we have even less time than we did when we first started this.

What I would suggest instead is again, that acceptance. I have the time I have. This is how much time I've got and it's going to be as good as it can be in that time. Another thing that helps with that, especially if you're someone who tends to look at the whole thing and get a bit overwhelmed. That's something I struggle with quite a bit. I have the time I have and I do it one step at a time. So instead of focusing on whether you've got enough time, you figure out what's the journey you need to take within the time you have. Sometimes it means that maybe the scope will be less or the length will be less, or maybe the quality won't be as high as you wanted it to be, but it's complete within the time.

So trying to think, I have the time I have and I do this one step at a time can really help in that situation. 

Another thought that everybody has and is totally human is:

Imagining the voice of the people that are gonna read this. 

So in my case, this was one of the things that really held me back on this one was imagining you lot listening to this and thinking it was rubbish. Oh, maybe this isn't that useful. Now I know that's not true. I know that there are thousands of PhD students and academics who are struggling to write the thing they're intending to write and who would really benefit from this work.

I've benefited from this work. My clients benefit from it. There's no reason you should think this podcast is rubbish, and if you do, maybe this one isn't the right one for you. Maybe some of my other podcasts will be more useful for you and that's okay. But it did paralyze me for a bit, this sort of imaginary conversation with my listeners that I don't even know who you are.

And I'm sure you have the same thinking about what your supervisor's going to say, what the reviewers are going to say, what your head of school's going to say. So what really helped me here and might be useful for you is thinking, yeah, they might, but it still needs to exist. So notice I'm not going, Oh, they're going to love it. I'm gonna get billions of listeners. My supervisor's gonna think this is the best paper ever. I'm not going down this kind of imaginary “Oh yeah. But they might. They will love it” route, because we don't have any control over what other people think about our work.

We don't. I don't get to pick what you guys think about my podcast. You can think whatever you like. Some of you will love it and some of you will think it's really obvious and some of you will think it's too difficult and some will think it's too formal.

Some will think I talk too fast and some will think I talk too slow. Fine. You get to pick. But what I can tell myself is, you guys might think it's rubbish, but I've decided I'm doing this and I've decided I'm keeping it up. So episode four needs to. And it is on the way. So I'm very pleased. 

The other thing you might want to think at this stage, and it comes from another person on Twitter who does lots of support for PhD students and academics. Jamie Pei the messy PhD coach, and that is that this is the messy stage. Often what we are doing when we're writing is we are beating ourselves up, that we are not producing perfect text first time, when actually that's not the stage you are at. So reminding yourself that you are in the messy stage can really help.

Then you can get that first bit going, get yourself moving, get on with it, which leads me beautifully to thought five, which is:

I just can't get on. 

Sometimes we allow ourselves to get almost stuck in this sense that I'm procrastinating on this thing, I just can't get going on it. And the problem is, again, it might be true, it probably is true, but thinking to yourself, I just can't get on with this thing is really difficult to then get on with a thing because we like to be right. We've talked about this before. Our brains love to be right. We tell ourselves we can't get on with this thing, we probably won't.

So again, have a think. What could we think instead? One I love is I can make this fun. So usually when we're thinking, I just can't get on with this thing, our sort of our gut reaction is to then think I just need to force myself to get on with this. I just need to stop being ridiculous and get on with it. But bullying yourself into getting things done is a really short term way to achieve things.

You might get some stuff done right in the midst of bullying yourself, but you are going to stop. It's not comfortable. It's not going to make you want to write regularly if you have to bully yourself into doing it. Whereas if you can think I can make this fun, then suddenly it becomes a whole lot easier.

So for me, I thought I can make this fun by basically picking seven thoughts and deciding that I was just going to just chat around them rather than trying to script this. And it is so much more fun just talking with you guys than it is trying to plot out a formal script of what I'm going to. 

Another way I've done in the past, I had a PhD student who was struggling to get the structure of his paper right. It was really good, but he had some bits of repetition and we kept sort of saying, it just doesn't seem to flow. And all of us were getting a bit frustrated with it because we were struggling to explain exactly what was wrong and he was struggling to therefore fix it. And what we ended up doing was, I thought, Right, we just need to make this fun.

We're all getting scratchy here. Let's make this fun. And we actually ended up printing out on pieces of paper, single sided and chopping it up into paragraphs, so we were able to kind of go, Ooh, in this bit, in this bit, you talk about the same thing. Let's put those together. Actually, hang on, you talk about that over here as well.

Hold on, let's put that there too. And we moved all these pieces of paper around, we had highlighters and post-it notes, and we moved it all around and reorganized what his introduction could look like, in that kind of really physical, fun way We ended up laughing. We were moving around the table. It was so much more enjoyable than just sitting in front of a computer, getting frustrated with the fact that it didn't flow and we couldn't figure out why.

So thinking I can make this fun really brings a kind of creative approach that makes it much more likely that you'll get on with it and enjoy it than even if you kind of just force yourself into doing it. 

Another one that I want you to be aware of is what you make it mean if something's difficult. So one I often hear clients talk about is:

If I'm finding this hard, it means I'm not good enough.

Or it means I'm not good at writing. It means I don't deserve to be in my position, whether that's PhD, student, academic, whatever. So if I'm finding this hard, it must mean I'm not meant to be here. And it's such a common thought. Honestly, all the PhD coaching I do, virtually everyone feels like this at some stage but again, that leads to feelings of disappointment, shame, maybe hopelessness, and all these emotions that don't lead to actions that are going to move you along. So instead, when you find yourself thinking, if I'm finding it hard, it means I'm not good enough, I want you to think about the thought. I'm willing to find this difficult.

Notice how that changes. We're all doing really hard work. Whatever part of academia you are in, you're doing stuff that most people don't ever do. Most people don't ever engage in research and teaching at the level that people in academia do. Whether you are a newbie PhD student all the way through to a senior professor, we do hard things.

If you can just tell yourself that you are willing to do hard things. You're willing to stay in that slightly confused state, to stay in that slightly uncomfortable state. When you are wrestling with a paper and you don't know how to make it feel like it makes sense, or you don't know if this bit's clear or not, or whatever, then if you can tell yourself, I'm willing to find this hard and stick with it, then suddenly it's not about whether you are good enough to be here or not.

You're willing to stay with it and you will figure it out. 

The final one, and I see this all the time, particularly with students, but with my academic colleagues as well, is:

I don't know enough yet. So often there's this thing that I just need to read a few more papers. I just need to know a little bit more.

I sometimes fall into this one, but probably less so. Occasionally I'll sort of dig around on the internet, like I need to know a little bit more. Usually I'm willing to go with it, willing to wing it as my colleague Jenn Cumming, that I mentioned to you before, might say, but a lot of people feel that they just need to know a bit more before they start writing.

I don't know enough. And again, that can really limit you because the issue is you will only know enough when you think you know enough. There's no right answer to how much is enough before you should start writing. And so until you've decided, you know enough, then you will never start, and it's a moving goal post.

The more you read, the more you'll think you don't know enough, so it can really hold you back and tie you up in knots. It's totally normal, so don't beat yourself up for thinking it. But if you can try and move that thought along into some thoughts, that can help with a little bit more progress, you'll find it enormously helpful.

And one I would love to offer is writing is thinking. I want you to try and have the thought that writing is thinking. If you are thinking, I don't know enough yet, that's a cue to start writing. And what you start writing is what you do know, what you don't know, what you're confused by, what you still need to figure out, what you need more of, where you need extra references.

Whatever it is, you start writing all this stuff. If you think, I don't know which side of the argument I sit on, let's write it both ways. There's no such thing as wasted writing. Writing is thinking. Every time you write something, your thoughts will develop further. Some things will get clearer, some things will get less clear, but it's all thinking and moves you towards where you want to be.

So if you're thinking, I don't know enough yet, start writing the thing you want to write and write down in it “and in here I need to put in some stuff about the method that we are going to use, except I haven't decided what that is yet”.

“So I really need to talk to my supervisor. It'll probably be this or it'll be that”. So you are writing down this thought process, then you'll go onto the next bit. Where you describe your participants if you're writing a method section, for example. You're like, Oh, I do actually know this bit. I can write this bit.

So by getting on and writing it, you really figure out what bits you do know and where you need further development. Sometimes it's when you start to explain something that you realize that you didn't understand it after. So sometimes you've thought, Oh yes, yes, I know this. And then you try and write a paragraph about it and that make that much sense and you're like, Oh, maybe I don't know this as well as I thought I did.

And that's when you go back and you figure out the bits that you didn't know. So anytime you find yourself thinking, I don't know enough yet, remind yourself that writing is thinking and it would benefit you to write at every stage of your career. 

So those are my seven thoughts that you should try and notice when you have and try and shift.

So if you find yourself thinking:

-        I should have done this. Try and switch to I am where I am and I know the next step. 

-        If you're thinking, I dunno how to do this, focus on what you do know and tell yourself that you are capable of learning this. 

-        If you think you don't have enough time to make it good enough. Again, acceptance, I have this time and I can do this one step at a time. 

-        They are gonna think it's rubbish. Whoever there you might be. You can tell yourself, yeah, they might, but it still needs to exist. 

-        If you're thinking you can't get it on, think I can just make this fun. 

-        If you're thinking, I'm finding it hard, and that means you're not good enough, remind yourself that you are willing to find this hard. 

-        And if you are thinking, I don't know enough yet, writing is thinking, remind yourself of that all the way through.

Now when we are thinking about this sort of thought work, what often happens is people go, Oh, but I still think the stupid thought. I know it's not helpful, but I keep thinking it. Oh my God, I'm rubbish at this. 

And then you start beating yourself up for that as well. There's not helpful, we don't need to do that. You will keep thinking the unhelpful thoughts. I thought all the unhelpful thoughts when I was procrastinating recording this episode.

The point is not to stop thinking those thoughts. The point is to stop taking them so seriously. Stop believing them to be true. And just notice when you do so that you can offer yourself a different one. “Oh look at me. I'm thinking that again. I'm thinking I should have done this before again. That's okay. I know that doesn't help.”

So I am where I am. Let’s crack on. That's how I got this episode recorded, and I know it's how you can move on with the piece of work that you've been struggling with too. Let me know how it goes. If there are any thoughts that come up for you regularly that I haven't covered today, please do drop them into Twitter for me.

Send me a message, come along to my free group coaching and we can talk them all through. Maybe I'll use them in future episodes. Thank you so much for listening and see you all soon.