>> I'll be sending a few emails about this bonus offer this week. If you are certain you don't want to join the Circle right now, CLICK HERE and you won't hear any more about this offer, but I'll still send you my regular DocDates << Hey Reader. I could tell you what the Circle does, but the members say it better. Dawn put it like this: "I have not felt progress like this in months and I really feel as though I can do this!" Notice what shifted for her. Not the workload. The sense that the...
3 days ago • 1 min read
Happy Monday Reader! Something unexpected came up this weekend, and I'm going to be straight with you: I need to bring in some income quickly. Rather than invent a clever reason for a promotion, I'd rather tell you the truth and make you a genuinely good offer. So here it is. Until Thursday at 9pm (UK time), everyone who joins the Doctoral Success Circle gets a bonus 25-minute laser session with me. One to one, just you and your study, to pin down your immediate next steps and get you moving...
4 days ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader. Today's my birthday, so I'm marking it by launching something I've been building quietly: the Golden Thread Review. Here's what it is. You bring your thesis, work within my Golden Thread GPT to generate a written breakdown of where your thread runs, and where it's getting lost, and then you and I spend 25 minutes together talking it through properly. It's £47 for this launch period, and it's built for exactly the moment you're in if you can feel the ideas are there but can't yet...
25 days ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader. How are you doing this week? Really? Pre-S: A quick story for you today, then some links to help you (and me!). 🧭 I once arrived in a city I'd never visited and spent the first two hours going in circles. Not because the city was confusing. Because I hadn't looked at a map before I left the hotel. Something similar happens in thesis writing. You're in the middle of it. You've written chapters, revised sections, and gathered sources. But somewhere along the way, you've stopped...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Ok Reader. It was definitely a dark moment when I saw that price yesterday. We live in a rural area (like, broadband-doesn't-reach-us-here rural!), and I rely on my car. A weekly shop this week was nearly twice the price it was a couple of months ago. The world is on fire, and the cost is heavy for everyone, in our own ways. If you are affected by the nastiness right now, I'm sorry. I hate not being able to influence things - but all of this is definitely out of my circle of influence....
3 months ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader. A little story today. S. came to me six months before her submission deadline. She had written 325,000 words. For context, a doctoral thesis in the UK runs to around 80,000 to 100,000 words. S. had written more than three times that. The problem wasn't that she hadn't worked hard enough. The problem was that buried inside those 325,000 words was a thesis - and neither of us could see it yet. So that's where we started. We took everything she had written and sorted it into...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader. Your supervisor has around an hour. In that time, they read your latest chapter, offer feedback on your argument, flag a few references to follow up, and move on to their next commitment. It's not their fault. The system simply isn't designed for anything more. But if you've been stuck in your doctorate for months - or years -struggling with your writing, losing confidence, unsure what you're actually supposed to be doing, an hour every few weeks isn't enough to understand what's...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader. There's a concept in academic research called collaborative sense-making. It sounds technical, but the idea is beautifully simple: we understand things better when we talk about them with someone else. Not because the other person has all the answers, but because explaining your thinking out loud to a willing, knowledgeable ear helps you hear what's actually there. It turns up in qualitative methodology literature, in studies of how teams solve problems, and in the research on...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader. I've been drafting and redrafting this week's email for days; with lots to tell you, but none of it landed quite right. There is lots going on at Dr Gina HQ: a big house move (we're currently 'camping' in various parts of the new house as we renovate!), decisions about the direction of the business and how I spend my time (ideally not plastering walls: that is fun but not my forte), and some angst over internal politics and colleagues' attitudes recently. And, whilst I'm great...
4 months ago • 1 min read