PGR Online Group Coaching Sessions Tuesdays

We know that doing a PhD can be challenging at the best of times and at the moment it can be even harder than usual. Lots of you are struggling with managing uncertainty about your projects, adjusting goals, building good habits, managing the inner critic or procrastination, and coping with uncertainty about the future.

The online group coaching programme for PGRs from the PhD Life Coach, Dr Vikki Burns, will run at 10:00 on Tuesdays and 14:00 on Thursdays every week during term time.

A coach is not an expert in your academic field, but an expert in helping you to develop these transferable skills and the ability to coach yourself through these challenging tasks. A coach is also not a counsellor – it is not to deal with deep wellbeing issues but instead to help you develop effective working approaches and coping strategies (if you need help with wellbeing issues please visit our postgraduate support section instead).

In the sessions, you will be taught a “self-coaching model” which provides the framework for the online coaching and which you can use in your own time. A trained coach will then offer you the opportunity to be coached one-to-one while the other PGRs watch. 

It will run in live “panel” mode on Zoom, so the coach and the coachee do not see the other participants but the audience can contribute to the session via the Chat and Q&A functions. In this way, the volunteer gets a highly personalised and valuable coaching experience and the viewers get the opportunity to hear how the coachee reflects on and resolves the issues that they are facing. Sessions should be treated as confidential and should address general issues (as listed above) rather than specific wellbeing issues or problems with supervisors.

Complete this short form to be emailed an invitation to join ThePhDLifeCoach workspace on Slack. Once you have received your invitation, sign-in or register with your Birmingham email address, to become a member of the community. You do not need to register for each session, just return to Slack and drop-in whenever a session is running.