Resilience is something that most of us keep fighting to develop through our lives and careers. Personally, my journey has been challenging, with many steep learning curves. But these learning curves, good and bad, have helped me to develop and strengthen my own resilience. I share eight (8) lessons from my own journey to help you think through the challenges you are facing!

Resilience is key. As emerging research professionals, we must develop resilience throughout our journey, not only for the PhD, but beyond as well. While it is commonly argued that there are five (5) essential skills to develop in order to be a more resilient researcher, I believe that a sixth skill adds the 'icing on the cake' so to speak. Developing our competency in these five plus one (5 + 1) skills will strengthen your resilience as a researcher.

There's a lot of opinion and advice out there on how to become a good researcher, and of course the attributes that are essential to this. I put my own spin on to this discussion by exploring what I consider essential facets of being a good researcher, not only as a PhD candidate or Early Career Researcher, but as a research professional that wants to hold their own against others.

It should be a friendship for life! Building a strong supervisory relationship contributes to your personal and career growth, and help ensure your PhD journey is a productive and rewarding one. This episode touches on a few issues to consider as you start to build that rapport with your Doctoral supervisor.

In this episode, we discuss a vital aspect of our PhD journey: managing feedback and how to handle it in a mentally healthy way - including when we don't concur with the feedback offered!

Collaborating with other researchers can be extremely rewarding. This episode explores some of the important considerations PhD candidates and early career researchers need to think about when developing and progressing with collaborative research initiatives.

The very nature of research implies that failures and setbacks may be part of the journey. In this episode we look at ways to lean from and overcome setbacks, and use this to positively influence our research progress.

We are told it's important to be 'ourselves' in our research, but at the same time, ensure we conform to convention. This episode explores a few ideas on how we can balance this tightrope; keeping our voice and letting our worldview guide us, but at the same time adhering to the values of academic rigour.