4.41 What to do if you fail an annual review or milestone

This episode is for anyone who either has failed a key milestone, or is worried about failing a milestone, or who knows someone who has failed a milestone. This can feel like a massive problem and often makes us doubt whether we can even achieve our goals. I’ll take you through a step-by-step process that will take you from upset and confused to clear with a plan to move forwards. Even if you’ve always passed in the end, it’s essential listening for anyone who has ever worried about failing. 

If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on How to manage negative feedback.

****
I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of The PhD Life Coach Podcast. This one is quite specific. It may not apply on the surface to lots of you, but I'm gonna do it anyway for two reasons. One, because if this specific situation doesn't apply to you, I still think that you can get something really useful out of this episode by kind of translating it to other forms of fails or struggles or any of those things. And secondly, because frankly, if it is happening to you, I want you to have the support you need. So even if this isn't as useful to as many of you as my how to stop procrastinating or whatever episodes, if I can reach a bunch of you for whom this has happened, and I can help you when you need that, then I think that is an episode well spent. If you're an academic or if you know somebody who this has happened to, then I think this will also be useful for you in terms of thinking about how you can support that person.

So what am I talking about? I'm talking about failing progress reviews, failing milestones. So everywhere around the world we'll have slightly different versions of this. But in any PhD program, there is some sort of progress checking that goes on, a more or less formal procedure, often annually, where they'll check in where you're up to, what you're planning to do next. You'll often need to submit a piece of work that gets checked, read, et cetera. Often need to submit some plans, some Gantt charts, all that fun stuff. And from there they get to judge whether you're on track and make some recommendations for going forwards.

Some of you may even have this as part of your postdoc programs. And to be honest, academics will have this probably as part of some sort of professional development review kind of vibe. Again, it's gonna differ in its format between different universities. It's gonna differ in terms of the extent to which it's developmental versus judgy. It's going to differ in the extent to which it's taken seriously versus being a kind of notional thing. But lots of you will have some sort of annual performance check-in type thing that notionally at least you need to pass. And for some of you it'll be a big deal, right? It'll be a you have to pass this or you can't continue sort of a deal.

And so we're gonna think today about what we do if you get bad news from one of those. Now, I have done an episode before about coping with negative feedback, and I do think a lot of that is super useful. I'm going to link to it in the show notes online. I'll put a link to it in the newsletter for all of you who are on my newsletter. If you're not, make sure you join. But I'm gonna talk about a bunch of stuff today that kinda goes above and beyond what I talked about in that episode. I'm gonna try not to repeat myself too much, so do go back and check that episode out too

So we are today gonna think through what should you do from the moment you open up that email that says, "Nope, this does not pass as expected," through to you deciding what you're gonna do about it. What are we gonna do in that timeframe? And the first thing we're gonna do, as usual, is we're gonna pause.

Okay? There's something about reading something like that, that your stomach just drops, right? And your heart speeds up, your chest tightens. You get that full sort of panic, even if you thought it might be coming, right? Even if you weren't sure whether it was gonna go okay, when you realize that no, this actually has been rejected, turned down, not approved, whatever, you get that really physical response to it, right?

And that's completely normal. That's not you overreacting. That's you getting bad news about something that you care about. And it's so important in that moment that we just take a big breath and we pause for a second. It's really easy, Some of you will want to act out of that emotion. Some of you will want to smash something or cry or scream or, you know, act from those emotions.

Others of you will want to act to remove those emotions as quickly as possible, so immediately start planning, start replying, sending a stroppy email back or contacting your supervisor in a panic to figure out what to do or whatever. All of those things, they're normal, right? When we have these big emotions, wanting to act from them in one way or another is totally, totally normal.

But it's also really useful just to take that moment to pause and to breathe, not to make yourself calm, I'm not suggesting we have to get to calm, but just to detach that thoughts and feelings that you're having from the need to act from them immediately. We're sort of trying to break that little connection . Just pause. Say, "Okay." That's rubbish. That's not what I wanted.

So what we're trying to do, we're trying to detach our feelings from our actions so we're not going steaming in to something else, whatever that might be. We're also gonna try not to make those feelings drive back into a whole load more thoughts. 'Cause it's really easy to spiral from that moment, to either spiral backwards, "This is because they didn't do this and they should have done this," or, "I didn't do this and I should have done that." So spiraling backwards, or to spiral forwards into the future on what this means for your progress. You know, "If I can't even get past this progress review, how am I ever gonna pass? How am I ever gonna finish? Maybe I should never have signed up." So it's really easy to spiral in both directions. And so by saying the word pause, taking those deep breaths, putting both feet on the floor if you're able to, and just taking that moment and go, "Well, that's rubbish. That is rubbish." We're not trying to say it's okay. We're not trying to go, "It's a learning opportunity." We're not trying to do that. It's rubbish. We don't want this. This is not good. We're allowed to think this is rubbish and not good and very disappointing, but we're detaching from acting out of it immediately, and we're trying where we can to detach it from the spiraling thoughts that lead to all the other thoughts and all the other panics.

We're gonna try our best to stay here in the, "Ugh, that's rubbish. I'm so disappointed." And that's not easy, right? If you find yourself doing bits of the other things, it's okay. None of us do this stuff perfectly. But reminding yourself, "Come back here. This sucks and I can stay here and experience the fact this sucks. Blah. Rubbish. Just until we get through and it only is usually 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds that we're in that full panic, oh my goodness, oh my goodness, oh my goodness moment before everything settles down a little bit and we can say, "Okay, that sucks."

We then get to ask ourselves, what do I need right now? Because sometimes what we actually need is a big cry and a glass of water. Sometimes we need a hug. Sometimes we need to express our frustration about this. Sometimes we need to sleep. Sometimes we need a plan. I'm gonna ask you, I'm gonna encourage you to step slightly back from that one and reassure yourself instead with, "There's gonna be a plan. I don't know what it is right now, but there's gonna be a plan. It's okay." 'Cause sometimes when we plan when we're in the midst of all these heightened emotions, it gets worse, right? So if you're feeling like what you really, really need is a plan, we'll get there. Don't worry, I'm gonna take you through that step. But right now, is there anything immediate that you need? We're gonna try and meet that need of us as a human being before we try and address any of these things.

And you might say, "I don't have time." That's the thing. You know, when our body's panicking like this, we have a tendency to think it's super urgent. Now, not many things in academia happen super urgently. These sorts of things usually don't. You may think, "Oh, no, but I need to get straight on with it 'cause I'm only gonna have a week to respond or two weeks to respond or whatever."

You have 30 minutes to just say, "I don't need to deal with this right now. I'm gonna look after myself as a person." Human being first. So if you hear yourself getting time urgent about it, say, "Okay, we're talking 30 minutes." Take 30 minutes to meet our kind of basic needs for care or love or rest or fuel or water or whatever it might be, and then we will make a plan.

And during that time, in fact, during the whole time, I want you to be reminding yourself this doesn't have to mean anything about you as a person. This doesn't have to mean anything about your PhD or whatever stage you're at. It doesn't have to mean anything about your future prospects. This is a hurdle.

It's a hurdle that we hoped we would just clear and not have to clatter, but it's a hurdle, and it doesn't have to mean anything about where we go in future or how successful things will be in the future. It's a hurdle for us to get over. So we need to reassure ourselves 'cause it's super easy to make this mean something about yourself, about whether you fit, especially if you had worries about that anyway, right?

If you were feeling a little bit of an imposter and things before, or maybe you've seen other people pass their progress reviews and you haven't, and that reinforces this sense that you don't fit or whatever. It's really, really easy, and I'm not saying that reassuring yourself will just make that go away. Obviously, it won't. But we can still remind ourselves, right? We can still from our cognitive conscious side remind ourse- this doesn't have to mean anything about me, doesn't have to mean anything about my prospects in my PhD. This is a hurdle we need to figure out how we get past.

Next up, once we've had that little bit of time ... I mean, by the way, I said 30 minutes. I don't mean that's like a limit and after 30 minutes you have to start acting on this. I mean, I mean that mostly for those of you who are saying, "Oh, I don't have any time at all. I need to get straight on." So if you want to take longer than that, take longer than that. Happy days, right? If you need to take a few days to kinda chill and get this into your mind and process it, let's go. Unless you've got some specific follow-up something, which sometimes you might have, right? You might get the report and then you've got a meeting coming up, where you've got to go through it in person, for example. That can happen. But unless you've got something time urgent like that, I'm not saying you have to move on in 30 minutes. I'm just saying everyone's got 30 minutes.

So when we feel like, okay, phew, this is still stinging, this still hurts, but I'm ready, you know, I've taken my breath, I'm ready to start thinking about what's next, we are going into investigate mode. This is not investigate who to blame, investigate what I did wrong, any of those things. It's investigate what information do I have access to, what does it mean, and what options have I got. We're gonna figure this all out.

First question I want you to ask is what is the process from here? So they've sent you this email or they've told you in a meeting or whatever it is that you failed this milestone. What is the process? What is your opportunity for retrieval? What do you have to do? What's the timeline behind that? What needs to be put forward? All of those things. So we're not getting into the content right now, not the what do I need to change in my plans, but just the process of how do we go from a failed progress review to a retrieved progress review.

Because the vast majority of the time, this is not the end of the line on any level. This is, ah, we're a bit concerned, we're not convinced this is gonna get there on time, we're not convinced this is plausible, we're not convinced this is sufficient, whatever the criticism is. We want to help you pick a new track.

It's not get back on track. We want to help you figure out what the way forward from this is. What is the route from where we are now to the PhD? So there is almost always some sort of retrieval situation going on here. We need to understand the process. You may have access to that in online student handbooks, that sort of thing. If you get on with your supervisor, your supervisor should be able to explain those things to you. I mean, your supervisor should be able to anyway, but you know what I mean. You might not feel comfortable speaking to them. But your supervisor should be able to help. The panel that has reviewed it should be able to help. Ideally, in sensible universities, that information will be in the email, so you can go back to the email. I know you probably had a bit of a disgust response to it and don't want to go back to it, but there should be a bunch of information in the email as well about what happens next. We're gonna go back, we're gonna look at those.

Don't be worried if you need somebody else to go through this with you. Now, hopefully, that might be your supervisor or whatever, but even if it's a friend or colleague, partner, parent, child, any of these things. If you need somebody to be like, "Right, come on, let's figure this out," to just kind of help you keep those emotions in check, that is you scaffolding yourself. That is not you being incapable. That is you setting up a support system so that you can get this done. So we figure that step out.

Next question is what information do I have access to from a kind of content point of view? What are their concerns? Have you been given a copy of a written report, for example? Have you been given a series of recommendations? Have you got a meeting coming up where any of this will get explained to you? What options do you have to better understand their concerns? So notice how this is different. There's the process. We need to make sure we know all the information about the process. We also wanna know as much as possible about the people, their concerns, and their suggested ways forward. That's not because we're necessarily just gonna agree with all of them or we're just gonna do as we're told or all of those things. We might, we might not, who knows? But we wanna get as much information together about that as we can.

From that, we want to then be trying to analyze what's the scale of the issue here. Because sometimes failing a hurdle can be simply you didn't submit sufficient writing or, we're not convinced this is plausible or something, where actually you can demonstrate that it is. Right? Sometimes the issue is just a relatively minor clarification that's needed.

Other times, it's a we don't think this plan gets you to PhD. So as we gather that information, as we get as much information as possible, we wanna be assessing what's the scale of the issue that we're talking about here. Now, there's no scale of issue that's insurmountable at this stage, but we wanna kind of get an impression of that, 'cause it's easy to see that kind of like you've failed your milestone and go and panic about it being a huge, huge, huge deal, and sometimes it can be on relative technicalities. So we're gonna get clear on that as well. So we're gathering, gathering, gathering to get as much information as we can so that we can then use that information to plan a way forward

This is also a moment for you to reflect in a little bit. Your opinion here is super, super important. This is not that they just tell you, "That's not gonna work. You need to do this," and you do what you're told. This is you get to evaluate their concerns, and you come up with a plan that is your plan.

So your opinion here is central. So when we're gathering all this information together, I also want you to gather together information about your own opinion. Now, that might sound a bit strange, but often ... So I've had a client recently talking about failing a progress review, which is part of what stimulated this podcast to actually happen, so thank you to them.

And often people in the progress reviews bring up things that the student was worried about, that maybe they'd been encouraged to do or encouraged to include or expand or to focus on or whatever, that they weren't actually that convinced about. So sometimes the progress review issue can actually reinforce your perspective.

It can actually be a kind of, "I didn't think that was a good idea, but my supervisor told me to," da, da, da. So I want you to think back. I want you to think about your own opinion coming up to this. Are the things they're saying completely out the blue for you? Which is a different issue. That's fine too, but it's a different issue.

Or are they things that you sort of saw coming? Are they things that your supervisor saw coming and that you overrode, and you said, "No, no, no, it's gonna be fine"? So again, we're gonna try and gather as much information about your perspective as you can.

This is also your opportunity to reflect a little bit on how this has happened, how we've got to a stage where we're failing this milestone. And that's not in a judgmental way. That's not in a who can I blame way, but again, it's in a gathering information way. How's the relationship with your supervisor? Have you actually been checking in with them? Have they been checking in with you? Have you been able to exchange views with each other? Are there things you've disagreed on? Are there things you've been scared to say? Are there ways that they've been out of touch and not connected to what you're doing?

And again, this is not with the interests of blaming particular people, although if you haven't been getting the support that you need, then that's a whole other conversation. I do have podcast episodes about that. But it's about better understanding, how did we get here to then trip at this hurdle?

So in fact, hurdle's a really nice metaphor, right? Uh, those of you who know how many hobbies I have will not be surprised to l- hear that I used to be a sprint hurdler when I ... I mean, those of you who've seen the length of my legs will be surprised to hear that I used to be a sprint hurdler but that's that's a different story.

Um, when I was, like, 13, 14, I was ... I did sprint hurdling, and that was before they got too far. They were short courses, low hurdles, so I was able to jump them. And actually, the pacing between hurdles is much harder than actually jumping the hurdle. If you hit a hurdle in a hurdle race, you have usually messed up your pacing in between rather than actually failing on that hurdle.

So I want you to think, taking that tenuous analogy, I want you to think what has happened between the last hurdle and this hurdle that means that when I tried to jump it, it didn't work. What's happened from your side, from your supervisor's side, from any other side that's useful to know? Have there been things going on in your life that have made this difficult that you haven't talked to the university about, or that the university haven't adequately supported you through?

Are there things that have made the research a lot more complex than you'd anticipated? Access to people, access to archives, working laboratory equipment, all those sorts of things. What has happened in those in between places that meant that you weren't ready to jump this hurdle and that you clattered it instead?

The other thing I want you to check in with, and I toyed with myself about whether I was gonna include this or not, and I'm going to because I think it's important. I think it's important it's on the table, but I also want to remind you that it comes with a big kinda caveat warning attached. And that is I want you to reflect whether you wanna do your PhD or not.

The reason it comes with a big caveat warning signal is because there is no part of me that thinks that if you fail to milestone or progress review you should leave your PhD. Absolutely 100% not. These are hurdles that are designed to check in, designed to give you an early warning system essentially if you're not quite on the track that they think will lead you to a successful completion. But they are almost always completely resolvable and are absolutely not a reason to leave. But one of the reasons that people sometimes get to this position is where they don't actually wanna be doing it anymore, and they haven't taken a moment to actually acknowledge that. And the reason I decided I was gonna include it is because a lot of people think that that's like the worst possible thing to realize or that can happen, and that that would be a massive fail, that would be a massive disappointment, all of these things.

And so I'm including this here, not to panic those of you ... If you wanna do your PhD, there is nothing about failing a milestone that will stop you doing your PhD. Absolutely fine. Not a problem. We're gonna go through all of that. But if you don't wanna do it anymore, you, you don't have to You might feel like you have to.

And if you choose that I don't want to but I do have to, you can choose that, right? It's often best just to acknowledge that to ourselves, that I'm choosing to do something I don't particularly wanna do, but I like my reasons so I'm gonna do it But it can also just be okay to leave your PhD. Okay? So just take a moment, say, "is the reason that this isn't where I wanted it to be because I don't actually wanna be doing it? I've changed, my situation's changed, the reasons that I started doing it have changed." 'Cause if that's it, you don't have to. You don't have to But if you do want to, then we get to make a plan. If you don't want to, we get to make a plan too, but just different plans.

The final thing before we get to the plans though, is when you start thinking through how did we get here, you might find there's a bunch of stuff you're unhappy about. Often when people fail milestones, I'm gonna say almost always when people fail milestones, it is ... is this a UK phrase? I'm not sure. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, i.e., it is usually some combination between stuff you've done or not done and stuff your supervisor/university has done or not done. The blame, if we're gonna call it blame, is usually shared Yeah? It's usually a bunch of components coming into it. And that means if you have things where actually you think you haven't received adequate support, where you think that this should have been prevented by people other than you, so better supervision, closer follow-ups, more support, more access to resources, whatever it might be.

If you calmly, not in a knee-jerk way, but calmly go, "You know what? I think I actually have been let down here," the other thing we get to explore as part of this investigation phase is what you want to do with that information. Do you want to just be aware of it yourself so that you don't have to beat yourself up quite as much, so that you can sort of be aware moving forwards that that support is not really there for you, and that that's all you wanna do?

Is it something that you wanna raise with your supervisor? Is it something that you wanna raise with your university more widely? And then within that, is it something you wanna raise now, or is it something you wanna raise in the future? And there's no right answer to this, right? Making complaints about supervisors or universities is not a straightforward thing, and I'm not gonna pretend that it is.

But it's just reminding you you've got a bunch of options here. When you raise it, how you raise it, to what extent you raise it, whether you raise it, there are a whole load of choices here, and if you're feeling, I need to raise it now in order to kind of defend my position, that's totally, totally understandable. And again, there's even choices within that.

So most universities will have an informal complaints procedure of some description, where you can raise it in your progress meeting, for example, have a discussion about it without it ever being kind of officially recorded or officially followed up or any of those things, all the way through to much more formal processes that come into play later on.

So this is just, th- it's outside the scope of this episode for me to be talking in detail about complaints procedures. Maybe I do that in the future. But the short version is remember you have a choice about whether and how you raise something like that. It doesn't necessarily have to be part of this process, but it can be if you think that that will help you move forwards

Now what we get to do, we've done a whole bunch of information gathering, and all the way through this, you wanna be asking yourself, "What do I need?" 'Cause maybe you actually, once you've done all your information gathering, what you actually need is a bit of a break. You need a rest. You need some time away. You need, you know, a distraction, whatever. But once you're ready, we then get to take all that information and we get to plan. Now, you might want to plan on your own. You might want to plan with your supervisor. You might wanna plan with another trusted academic. You might wanna plan with a member of your cohort.

You might wanna plan with family and friends, whatever it might be. But what we get to do is we get to think about it in terms of not, "How do I get my PhD done?" That's too big a plan. We wanna plan, "How do I get from where I am to the next yes?" That's the only bit we need to plan right now. And so we get to look at the feedback that they gave us.

We get to look at our opinions of where we're at, our priorities, why we chose to do this PhD in the first place. We get to look at that process that we uncovered. We get to say, "Okay, the process is I failed my milestone, I get a meeting, and then I have a month to resubmit a new plan," let's say. That would be fairly typical, I would say. Check your university. Do not take my word for it. But that would be fairly typical, something like. We get to say, "How do I go from where I am now to getting through that milestone?" Now, that doesn't mean that we just agree to anything just to get through the milestone. Remember, we're setting ourselves up for the trajectory we wanna shoot off on towards our finished degree. But the main focus at the moment is how do we go from where we are to that next 

My biggest tip for how to do that is in all the feedback that you've been given from the panel or your supervisor or whoever, I want you to separate the problems that they identify from the solutions that they offer. Those are two different things, and they often, in the interest of somebody trying to be helpful, they often get smooshed together.

The problems they identify are weaknesses they see in the research, issues they see with the possibility of completing this within the timescale, so like feasibility, scope, that kind of stuff. Those are the problems that they identify, and we get to analyze those. We get to say, you know, "Do we actually agree? Do we think that really is a problem?" Et cetera. Great.

But I want you to separate that from the solution because often in those attempts to be helpful, they will say, "I don't think your sample size is big enough here. You should run more experiments," or, "I don't think you're going to be a- able to access those people, so you should do it in these people instead." "I don't think that your machine can measure what you think it does, so I think you should do this instead." Those are two separate things. The this is the problem I see, and this is the solution I offer as a reviewer. Two entirely separate things.

So we get to ask two separate questions. Do we agree with the premise? Do we agree with the problem that they're identifying? Is there a ... We don't have to get defensive about it. Sometimes it's quite useful to just, to see it and go, "You know what? It's a fair point." Do we agree with the problem that they're identifying? And then separately, do we agree with the solution they're identifying?

Are there alternative solutions that address that problem? Is that problem there because of some other thing that you don't actually care about? Could you just remove the section, for example? Separate problems from solutions. You do not have to just blindly accept their solution. You probably do have to either defend against or explain how you'll address the problem that they come up with. Remember, you can come up with a different solution that addresses the same problems, and it's useful to make sure that you're kind of considering all of those options.

When you're doing this, I want you also to keep your priorities in mind. For some of you, your priority is getting a PhD. For others of you, your priority is something that you specifically care about, a topic that you specifically care about. For some of you, your priority is getting done in a particular timescale. For some of you, your priority is producing a book at the end of it, whatever it might be. Okay? Keep those priorities in mind because the same problem can have a variety of different solutions depending on your priorities.

So sometimes if you're someone who's just like, "You know what? I'm done with this. I just want it finished. I don't want to leave, but I just want it finished. I will do whatever they say as long as it's feasible and as long as it leads to me getting a PhD, happy days. I don't care anymore."

Alternatively, if you're somebody who they're suggesting you might not have time to do an intervention trial, for example, and the whole reason you chose this PhD was because you want to do an intervention trial, then exclude the intervention trial and just do cross-sectional studies, for example, is not the solution necessarily that's going to help for you. Now, it might, because you might be able to tell yourself, "Okay, those things, I thought I'd do them in my PhD, but actually I'll do them in my postdoc and it's fine." Or it might be, "You know what? No, I want to cut other things in order to enable that to happen, or I want to put in this additional resource, or I want to limit the scope. I want to do a short intervention, an intervention with a more easily accessed group," or whatever it might be. Translate out to your discipline. But remembering what your personal priorities are, your reasons for doing a PhD when you started, your reasons for doing a PhD now, those things should be coming into the mix when you're choosing between different solutions here

And finally, again, you shouldn't have to do this alone. This should be something that your supervisor and/or supervisory team, your research group, should be able to help you with. And if that's not happening, that is a conversation to have with the progress panel. Because PhD students have a right to support here. Okay? And for all supervisors listening, I know you're exhausted. I know you're overloaded. I know many of you are fearing for your jobs and things like that. My heart absolutely goes out to you. It's a tough time to be an academic at the moment. But if you don't have capacity or you're not willing to support the PhD students, the university has to provide someone.

And I know that is often easier said than done. But if you feel like you can't make these plans with your supervisor or that your supervisor is not willing to have these conversations or that your supervisor isn't willing to respond to these critiques or they disagree with these critiques and so on, you deserve somebody else to support you.

Okay? And that is something that you can go back. It might be your program director. It might be your head of school. You know, there's different names for it all over the world. But somebody who has responsibility for the postgrad programs in your department, school, unit, whatever you call it, should be able to help you so that you don't have to do this alone.

I really hope that's useful. All the way through, this is gonna be a period of time with a lot of heightened emotions, a lot of spiraling thoughts. So that stuff I said at the beginning about asking yourself what you need, reminding yourself not to spiral backwards, not to spiral forwards, that stuff we do do it at the beginning, but you may well need to be doing it as we go through too. As you're gathering information, you might feel the panic rising again, in which case we pause. We take a moment to deal with that. As you are coming up with potential solutions, you might start to worry there's no solution that's gonna work, and you start spiraling into, "What does that mean? What am I gonna do?"

That's okay. This is not a linear. I've kind of given it as a pause, look after yourself, investigate, plan, like little four-step thing. We are gonna iterate between these, and going back to that pause, look after yourself regularly through the process is completely normal

None of us set out to fail these milestones. It happens. It is overcomeable if you want it to be overcomeable. You deserve support to do it, and none of it has to mean anything about you as a successful academic. I really hope that helps. I really hope even, if you listen to it even though you're not in this position, I really hope you can apply it out to other situations. I think it really applies to lots of different settings. If you are in this situation, drop me a message in response to your newsletter. Let me know how you're getting on. Ask me if you've got any specific questions or anything like that. I would love to help. Thank you all so much for listening, and I will see you next week