[Monday Motivator] Hedge Your Bets

This is an excerpt from the Monday Motivator Program of Center for Faculty Development and Diversity.

Last week's Monday Motivator ("Get Out There and Shake It!") definitely pressed some people’s "personal responsibility" buttons! I heard lots of immediate reactivity, but I also heard from people who decided to take new steps forward by setting up lunch dates, asking someone to read a manuscript, focusing their regular conversation with a colleague on research (instead of departmental gossip, and one person simply decided to approach her cranky colleague in a whole new spirit. Bravo!

The fact of the matter is that most departments aren’t set up to support your success and yet, YOU HAVE TO SUCCEED ANYWAY! So, congratulations to all of you who acknowledged that as your reality and stepped out in a new way last week. And since I'm on the general topic of "Shaking It," let's move on to the next common mistake new faculty members make: Putting All Your Eggs in One Institutional Basket.

I realize that it's incredibly difficult to get a tenure-track job these days, and some of us were in graduate school for so long that we feel extraordinarily grateful to our institutions for simply employing us. In addition, many of us were trained under faculty mentors who spent their entire careers at ONE institution and taught us this was "the way things are" in academic life. Regrettably, the result is that some new faculty members behave as if their very life depends on that tenure decision! They bend over backwards to please everyone at their institution, invest large amounts of time in long term institutional projects, and accept poor treatment from their senior colleagues out of a desperate hope that they will be deemed worthy and allowed to stay. In other words, their identity and self-worth are so wholly dependent on winning tenure at their current institution that failing to do so would be utterly unbearable.

The problem with this approach is two-fold. First and foremost, you don't know whether your current institution is going to make a long-term commitment to you (via tenure and promotion), so why invest 100% of your emotional energy, identity, and self in that outcome? More importantly, this desperate stance puts you in a powerless position because you are, in effect, handing all the power over your future to your employer (instead of assuming some control over it yourself).

How your senior colleagues will vote on your tenure case is out of your control, but there are several important factors that are fully under your control: 1) your research productivity, 2) your emotional investment in your current institution, and 3) promoting your work beyond your institution. Below I outline just a few concrete ways that you can protect yourself from the possibility of future loss, by identifying your power today and using it to invest in yourself first.
Cultivate A Professional Attitude

One of the best ways that you can hedge your bets is to shift your reference group from the faculty at your institution to the broader national arena of your discipline. By understanding yourself as "a scholar who currently works at ______ college/university," you will begin to understand the necessity of not only "shaking it" with your departmental colleagues, but also extending your network to get out there and shake it with the other scholars in your discipline. By proactively extending your network and maximizing your research productivity, you increase the possibility that you will be marketable in your later tenure-track years and then have the ability to decide whether or not you want to stay at your institution (as opposed to whether or not others will allow you to stay).


Make A Top 10 List

The best advice I received as a new faculty member was to make a list of the top 10 people in my research area and then make it my business to connect with them during my five years on the tenure track. Developing your Top 10 list is critical for two reasons: 1) this is the most likely pool of scholars from which your external review letters will be requested when you come up for tenure review; and 2) these are the scholars that your work is in conversation with (a conversation that can't happen if they are unaware of your published work). Even if you are at a college where teaching and research are equally valued, your institution will still solicit external reviews of your scholarship, and they are likely to be drawn from the pool of well-known researchers in your area.


Extend Yourself

Once you have identified your Top 10, figure out how to connect with these individuals. You could invite them to give a talk at your institution, approach them at conferences, send them your recently published article with a personal note, etc. Some will be pleasant and approachable, and others will completely ignore you. What's important is that you begin proactively connecting with people in your discipline who matter to your future success -- as a candidate for tenure and as a scholar. Additionally, feel free to do whatever you think will help introduce other scholars in your field to your work, such as giving talks at your friend's institutions and other local colleges, giving great presentations at conferences, and letting other people know when you have published something they might find useful. The point is to let as many people know about your research as possible while making targeted efforts with those who are likely to be asked to write your external reviews.


If You Are Unhappy, Go On The Market

Nothing puts your current situation in perspective like dipping a toe in the water! If you have published prolifically in the first few years of your current tenure-track job, then you are a far more attractive job candidate than you were ABD, and you are likely to generate more interest than in your previous job search. Sometimes visiting another campus makes you value your current institution in a whole new way, and other times it can make you wonder why on earth you have worked there for so long. Either way, it can be a valuable experience to help you make the mental shift from institutional dependency to independence as a scholar.


Write Every Day

I should have started with this item because everything else I've said is predicated upon your ability to publish your research. Publications are the currency in the academic market so maintaining research productivity will fulfill you as a scholar, increase your marketability, give you some measure of power over your own future, and provide you with the opportunity to make choices. In short, be sure you are writing every day and doing what you need to do to publish your research.

The Weekly Challenge

• Write every day for at least 30 minutes.
• Write your Top 10 list (if you don't have one already).
• Consider ways you could connect with the people on your Top 10 list.
• Consider what it would mean to think of yourself FIRST as a scholar, and SECOND as a "junior" faculty member at your particular institution.
• If you feel reactive to imagining yourself beyond your institutional walls, gently and patiently ask yourself WHY?
• If you find yourself feeling "disloyal” by this type of thinking, remind yourself that your institution will quickly and easily cut you loose if you are denied tenure. Then consider how you could adjust your emotional investment in your institution to MATCH its investment in you.

Life on the tenure track can frequently leave new faculty feeling powerless, vulnerable, and at the mercy of subjective criteria for evaluation. I hope that this week brings you the clarity to claim what power you have in your academic career, the imagination to see beyond your immediate context, and the peace that comes from knowing your future is in your hands.

[Monday Motivator] Saying 'No' At Mid-Career - September 28, 2015

This is an excerpt from the Monday Motivator Program of Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. Please find the original document here. The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity is an independent professional development, training, and mentoring community of over 71,000 graduate students, post-docs, and faculty members.

Sociologists have tested the hypothesis that women do more service than their male counterparts at mid-career and found significant gender gaps in both service work (women do more of it) and advancement to full professor (men are more likely to advance). While working the same number of total hours, men spent seven hours more per week on research than women, who were investing that time in service and mentoring. I often work with mid-career faculty members (mostly women) who are overwhelmed with service requests, over-functioning on departmental service, and feeling exhausted, angry and resentful about the work. And yet, when asked why they keep doing more service, I hear the same thing repeatedly: "I can’t say no."

Given the twin realities that mid-career women (especially the "nice" and "helpful" ones) get more service requests than their male counterparts and that saying yes too often draws time away from the very activities that lead down the path to promotion, it seems to me that one of the most critical skills for success at mid-career is ability to say "no” clearly and confidently and to remove the phrase "I can’t say no” from your professional vocabulary.

What Keeps You From Saying No?
If you’re someone who is over-functioning on service to the detriment of your post-tenure pathway, don’t worry! There’s no shame in acknowledging it and moving toward an exploration of why that is your reality. In other words, if you know you should say "no” and you need to say "no” more often, then the most important question is what’s keeping you from uttering the magic word?

I’ve observed three types of factors that keep mid-career faculty (especially women) from saying "no” more often, more confidently, and more strategically then is necessary to pursue their post-tenure path: 1) Technical Errors, 2) Psychological Blocks and 3) External Constraints.

Technical Errors
Sometimes mid-career faculty have a vague sense that they should say "no” more often and that their physical and emotional exhaustion can be traced directly to service overload. They are not however, putting any conscious effort into actually saying "no.” This can be due to a variety of technical errors including:
You literally don't know how to say "no" in a manner appropriate to the context
"Yes” is your default response (and you feel must have an extraordinary reason to say "no”)
You have no idea how much time "yes” takes
You haven’t recognized the connection between the time required to fulfill "yes” commitments and the time you feel you’re missing for truly important activities
You don’t have a clear and consistent filter to help you decide when to say "yes” and when to say "no”

The great thing about technical errors is that they are easy to fix! If you don’t know how to say "no,” then practice (here are 7 Simple Ways to Say No). If "yes” is your unconscious default response, try making "no” your default response for a while and see what happens. If you don’t know how much time a "yes” takes, start tracking how long each and every "yes” costs you. As soon as you start realizing that "yes” is a commitment to a unit of your most precious commodity (time), you’ll get much more selective about how, when and to whom you give it away. If you aren’t clear about the linear connection between the time you’re giving away and the time you don’t have for truly important activities, start holding a Sunday Meeting each week. And if you don’t have a clear filter to decide between "yes” and "no,” either develop one or create a human filter (i.e., a service mentor, a buddy or an accountability group) to help you while you are building this muscle.

Psychological Blocks
Fixing the basic technical errors will be helpful, but more often than not the reason you’re saying "yes” too often is that that there’s a little something deeper going on and it requires a different process than a tip or trick. The goal of identifying psychological blocks is to become aware of why you feel compelled to say "yes” so often and then experiment with different beliefs and behaviors in your decision making. The most common psychological blocks to saying "no" I see among mid-career faculty are:
You’re a pleaser (you're more concerned about people liking you than you are about meeting your own goals)
You’re trying to be super-professor (trying to do a little of everything but not doing any one thing well)
You’re a perfectionist
You feel overly responsible for things that aren’t entirely your responsibility
You believe everything will fall apart unless you do the work
You’re overcompensating and/or trying to prove you belong
You always put other people’s needs before your own

Unlike technical errors, psychological blocks are not immediately fixable with a new skill. Instead, resolving them requires an ongoing process where you first and foremost become aware of how you feel when you receive a request. And until you can gain in-the-moment clarity about what to say "yes” and "no” to, don’t respond on the spot. Once you have some time, ask yourself why your first impulse is to say "yes.” Once you can identify how you’re feeling and if any of the common blocks are occurring, check in with a buddy, mentor or support system to discuss the costs and benefits of saying "yes” or "no” to a particular request. This process will help you to experiment with saying "no” more often, develop a clear and consistent filter for your decision-making, and lead to a more equitable and balanced service load.

External Constraints
You can do all the inner work possible and yet sometimes circumstances outside of your control force you into a situation where your "yes” is a sub-optimal but necessary response. For example, someone died and you’re the only person with substantive expertise who can step in and teach their graduate seminar halfway through the term. This happens to everyone at some point if you have a long academic career, so negotiate the best possible circumstances for your "yes,” get the support you will need to make the "yes” a realistic possibility, and lean into your network. It’s also critically important to adjust your expectations about what’s possible during those times in order to be focused on moving your agenda forward.

The Weekly Challenge
I know this is a delicate topic, but this week I challenge every mid-career reader who is feeling "stuck” to:

• Reflect on your past academic year and gently ask yourself: Do I have a problem with "yes”?
• If you determine that you are over-functioning relative to your colleagues, take 10 minutes to identify what keeps you from saying "no” more often.
• If it’s a combination of factors, pick one step you can take to move forward this week.
• Write every day for at least 30 minutes. It’s the very best insulation you can provide yourself for the unexpected moments of external constraint.

I hope this week brings you the desire to explore your habits around saying "yes” and the willingness to take the first step in a new direction.

[Monday Motivator] Just Say No - September 14, 2015

This is an excerpt from the Monday Motivator Program of Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. Please find the original document here. The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity is an independent professional development, training, and mentoring community of over 71,000 graduate students, post-docs, and faculty members.

One of the most frequent and difficult pieces of advice I received as a pre-tenure faculty member was "just say no." I always felt frustrated by this advice because (while well-intended and correct) it is far easier said than done, especially for under-represented faculty. This difficulty is due to the fact that being the only _____ in your department means you will receive a disproportionately high number of service requests from all across your campus in the name of "diversity." That additional service will neither be rewarded, nor serve as a substitute for published research (at a research-intensive university), nor will it offset lackluster teaching evaluations (at a teaching-intensive institution) when it comes time for your promotion and tenure decision. While "just say no" is important advice for all tenure-track faculty, it is essential for under-represented faculty who are challenged to say "no" more frequently, and to a broader range of campus leaders, in order to have the necessary time to excel in the areas that matter most to promotion: research, publication, and teaching.

I continue to struggle with the "just say no" advice, but I have improved over time. The keys to making it work are: 1) self-awareness about why you feel the need to say "yes" so often and 2) developing a process for evaluating and responding to the never-ending stream of service requests you receive. Here are the six guidelines that Tracey Laszloffy and I suggest in The Black Academic's Guide to Winning Tenure Without Losing Your Soul.

1) Avoid Saying "Yes" On The Spot
Whenever someone asks you to do something, avoid saying "yes" before you’ve had time to consider the request. Try to buy some time by saying something like "Let me check my calendar/workload and I'll get back to you," "I'm currently overwhelmed, so I need to think seriously about taking on any additional service commitments" or just "I'll email you tomorrow." If you’re consistently holding your Sunday Meeting, then one look at your weekly time map will make it clear whether (or not) you have time available to accommodate any additional requests. 

2) Estimate How Long It Will Actually Take You To Complete The Request
I keep track of how much time various routine requests take so that I can be informed when I make decisions. For example, while a search committee always sounds like an exciting and important opportunity to meet new scholars, shape the future of the department, and enjoy a few free dinners, it’s also an enormous time commitment. Specifically, it takes 70-80 hours of my time from the initial meeting to the receipt of a signed offer letter. An independent study = 15 hours, an article review = 6 hours, an "informal talk" to a community group = 5 hours. Your time estimates may be different than mine but what's important is connecting any request you receive with actual hours of labor. And if you don’t know how long something will take, don’t guess – ask your colleagues, peers and/or mentors (then multiply by 2 to correct for academic’s tendency to underestimate the amount of time tasks take to complete). 

3) Consult Your Calendar
Like most of you, my calendar is jam-packed and the further we get into the term, the less time I have available. When someone makes a request, ask yourself: what specific day and time do I have available to complete this task? Not in a general sense, but literally what day, and what period of time are available in your calendar for this activity? Given that you’re not going to compromise your daily writing, research time, or class time, this often makes the decision clear and easy. If you can't schedule it in your calendar, then you don’t have time to do it. 

4) Ask Yourself: Why Would I Say "Yes"?
For a long time, "yes" was my unconscious default response. I automatically responded "yes" and thought I had to have a special reason to say "no." Then each term, I ended up spending too much time on service, got exhausted, and became angry, resentful, and inter-personally unpleasant. Finally I started asking myself: "why do you keep saying yes all the time?" For me, it was some combination of bad gender socialization, wanting to please people who had power over me, trying to avoid the punishment I imagined would occur if I said "no," overcompensating for other aspects of my work where I felt less confident, trying to correct longstanding historical and structural inequalities at my institution, single-handedly making up for all the systemic failures my students had experienced in their academic career, and seeking to nullify all negative stereotypes by being super-minority-faculty-member. With all those intentions operating under the surface, no wonder I kept saying "yes" to every request or alternatively, feeling intense guilt, shame and disappointment on the few occasions I said "no." Thankfully, once I became aware of why I said "yes" so often, I was able to develop a new criteria for evaluating requests and flip my default upside down. Now my automatic response is "no" and I require a special reason to say "yes" (and don't worry, there are still plenty of those!). 

5) Figure Out How To Say "No" And Do It!
There are so many ways to say "no "and I am always shocked by how easily people accept "no" for an answer and move on to find someone else to accommodate their request. You could say "no" in any of the following ways:
"That sounds like a really great opportunity, but I just can't take on any additional commitments at this time."
"I am in the middle of _________, ____________, and ___________ [fill in the blanks with your most status-enhancing and high profile service commitments] and if I hope to get tenure, I'm unable to take on any additional service."
"I'm not the best person for this, why don't you ask ______________."
"If you can find a way to eliminate one of my existing service obligations, I will consider your request."
"No." [look the asker in the eye and sit in silence].

6) Serve Strategically
Finally, the best advice one of my mentors gave me was to be strategic about my service. That means, you want to determine what percentage of your tenure and promotion evaluation will be based on service. It doesn’t have to be perfectly precise, but whatever the percentage is, use it as a guideline for how much time you can spend on service each week. If service only counts as 10% of your promotion criteria, then spending anything more than 4-6 hours per week on service activities means you’re over-functioning in that area. The percentage will be different according to your institutional type and culture, but once you know approximately how much time you can spend on service each week, then say "yes" only to the things that fit your broader agenda or make substantive sense for you to participate in.

Learning how, when and why to "just say no" isn’t easy. It takes time, practice, and clarity. But doing so is an important part of making time for the things that really matter to your long-term success and keeping you from getting burned out while on the tenure-track.

The Weekly Challenge
This week, I challenge you to do the following:

• If you feel overwhelmed by service commitments (or aren't happy with your research and writing productivity), patiently ask yourself why you say "yes" so frequently.
• Gently acknowledge that the reality of life on the tenure-track is that you will ALWAYS have more service requests than time to fulfill them.
• For one week, say "no" to EVERY new request you receive (just to see what it feels like).
• With each request, let "no" be your default response and wait for a reason to say "yes".
• If that seems too crazy, then at least commit to reviewing your calendar and existing tasks before saying "yes" to any new commitments.
• Re-commit yourself to at least 30 minutes each day for your writing.
• If you haven't created a strategic plan, it's not too late.
• If you want to go deeper into the Art of Saying No, why not download the webinar recording? 

I hope this week brings you insight into the reasons why you say "yes" so frequently and the strength to say "no" often, confidently, and without guilt.

[Monday Motivator] Facing Resistance to Daily Writing - August 31, 2015

This is an excerpt from the Monday Motivator Program of Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. Please find the original document here. The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity is an independent professional development, training, and mentoring community of over 71,000 graduate students, post-docs, and faculty members.

In last week's Monday Motivator, I encouraged you to consider blocking out at least 30 minutes every day for writing and suggested you treat your writing time with the same respect you would a meeting or a class. As always, those two seemingly simple suggestions resulted in my phone ringing off the hook and my inbox overflowing!

The outpouring of response only re-affirmed my belief that daily writing is difficult because what seems like a simple act -- sitting down to write for 30 minutes every day -- brings forth all of our "stuff" (whatever that "stuff" may be). This past week alone, daily writing brought out fears of success, fears of failure, debilitating perfectionism, inner-critics on steroids, rage over institutional inequalities, and painful ambivalence about whether (or not) some of us want to be academics.

Today, I want to acknowledge that daily writing can be incredibly difficult and resistance is to be expected. Anytime we try to make a change in our behavior, we are guaranteed to face resistance which most frequently manifests as procrastination, avoidance and/or denial. That resistance is perfectly normal, practically universal, and you are not alone in your fears, anxieties, and time constraints. If you struggled to write every day last week, that's okay. This is a new week and a new opportunity to enter into open and honest conversation with your resistance.

Some of us experience resistance as a loss of energy that leads us to give up on daily writing. Then later, we feel guilty about breaking yet another promise to ourselves. Let's take a totally different approach to our resistance this week by acknowledging it, being curious about it, figuring it out, naming it, and then sneaking around it. In the process, let's also be gentle with ourselves because guilt, shame and self-criticism aren't useful and they aren't going to help any of us write, publish and/or be productive scholars.

This is a new week, so when you experience resistance, I suggest you try three things. First, acknowledge that you're feeling resistance and name it. Even if it's only identifying the feeling ("I just don't wanna write today!") or the behavior ("I must check Facebook before I start writing!") that's keeping you from writing. That's a great start. Second, find the smallest amount of time you can stand for daily writing and show up. If you can write for 5 minutes every day this week, that's a success. If all you can do in that 5 minutes is physically pick up your manuscript and walk around your office snuggling it, that's progress! Third, in that small amount of time, re-connect with what you love about your project. You may hate 30 different things about it, but for now try remembering what you love about it. Doing just a little something and loving it will help you tiptoe around your resistance, the energy and connection will return, and you will be moving forward on the pathway to establishing a healthy and sustainable writing routine.

The Weekly Challenge
This week, I challenge you to do the following:

• If you haven't created a semester plan yet, do so now. If you need motivation, go ahead and listen to our Every Semester Needs a Plan core curriculum webinar and check out sample semester plans.
• Re-commit to your writing time this week.
• Block your writing time out of your calendar.
• If you don't have a calendar, try google calendar or go buy a simple and cheap one ASAP!
• If you experience resistance, acknowledge and name it.
• If you're struggling, reduce your time to the smallest amount you can actually stand, then set a timer, and get started.
• Remember what you LOVE about your work.
• If you don't love anything about your manuscript, gently and lovingly ask yourself: why am I doing this?

I hope this week brings you the curiosity to engage in conversation with your resistance and a deep reconnection with what you love about your current writing project.

[Monday Motivator] The Sunday Meeting - September 7, 2015

This is an excerpt from the Monday Motivator Program of Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. Please find the original document here. The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity is an independent professional development, training, and mentoring community of over 71,000 graduate students, post-docs, and faculty members.

I've spent a great deal of time in the past helping people to create their strategic plans. While doing this, it's become clear to me that many people are great at making a list of goals, but remain unclear how to connect their goals to time, and how to make their plan work on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis. In other words, a strategic plan is unlikely to be useful if it is only a statement of goals that won’t be touched again until the end of the term. Instead, I encourage you to see the process of creating a strategic plan as one where you identify WHAT your personal and professional goals are, outline HOW they will be accomplished, and WHEN you will do the work. From that point, the real secret to making a strategic plan come to life is to use it on a weekly basis as the foundation for planning out your week. One of the simplest and most transformative strategies that I have seen graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and new faculty put into practice is what I call "the Sunday Meeting." As with all strategies, you may want to try it out for a few weeks, see how it works for YOU, and then adapt it to your particular needs, workload, and lifestyle.


The Sunday Meeting is quite simple: devote 30 minutes of time at the beginning of each week to planning your week. It doesn’t have to take place on Sunday, but many people begin preparations for the week on Sunday night. What’s important is that it’s in place before your week begins. The purpose of this weekly planning time is to make sure that all the things that contribute to your LONG-TERM SUCCESS get done and that you don't get distracted by seemingly urgent (but unimportant) tasks throughout the week. During your weekly meeting time, try the following five steps:


STEP #1: Create Your Skeleton (5 Minutes)
The meeting starts by blocking out all of your commitments for the week: research and writing time, classes, office hours, and meetings, etc… You should also include non-work items that you are committed to a specific time and place, such as child-care pick-up, date night, and/or Zumba class. If you haven't tried it yet, you may want to schedule your writing time first thing in the morning (before checking e-mail or Facebook, prepping for classes, and/or responding to everyone else's needs in your workplace). Your commitments form the skeleton of your week because everything else has to be fleshed out on top of them.


STEP #2: Brain Dump (10 Minutes)
Write out all your to-do items for the week including the short term tasks you need to get done, as well as the strategic tasks associated with your long term research agenda (these should be listed by week in your strategic plan). Many of the new faculty members I work with categorize their to-do items under the headings "teaching," "service," "research," and "personal" to quickly assess the relative length of their to-do tasks and to determine whether their lists are aligned with their priorities and how they will be evaluated for promotion and tenure. The purpose of this step is to: 1) reconnect you with your strategic plan on a weekly basis, 2) get everything out of your head and onto paper, and 3) to put you in a position to control your week (instead of your week controlling you). The brain dump can cause either relief or anxiety, but no matter how you feel about it in the moment, go on to the next step.


STEP #3: Introduce Your Tasks To Your Calendar (15 Minutes)
Here's where it gets ugly! Turn back to your calendar for this week and assign each of your to-do items to a specific block of time. This will require you to estimate how long your tasks will take, prioritize what’s most important, and commit to actually doing specific work at specific times this week. Inevitably, you will have the same devastating realization each week: you don't have enough time to complete all the tasks on your to-do list. Breathe deeply. Having more tasks than time is the perfectly normal reality of academic life. No matter how frustrating it is, it's far better to deal with that reality at the beginning of the week then to walk blindly into that realization at the end of the week.


STEP #4: Decide What To Do With Everything That Doesn’t Fit
Knowing that you have more tasks than time, consciously choose how you will spend your time this week. You may need to prioritize the tasks on your list and I suggest using the criteria by which you will be evaluated for your next step. For example, if you're on the tenure-track, use the criteria for tenure and promotion as your guide.

For the tasks that don’t fit, you have many different options! You can:

• delegate
• lower your standards (especially for non-critical tasks)
• compromise
• renegotiate deadlines
• ask for help
• let some things go

Step #5: Commit To Executing The Plan
Of course, the best-laid plans can be thrown into disarray by unexpected circumstances and daily chaos. But having a clear plan and genuinely committing to its execution are essential to moving forward each week, will help you to easily say "no” to additional request during the week, and will assist you in being far more productive than you would be operating on crisis management each day.


The Weekly Challenge
This week, I want to challenge you to do the following:

• Take 30 minutes and try having a Sunday Meeting. If you want to spend a bit more time and walk through this with me, download February's training on this topic by clicking here.
• If you still don't have a calendar, it's time to acquire one (it doesn’t have to be fancy and you can even download and print my free and simple time map as the most basic way to get you started).
• Gently acknowledge that having more tasks than time is perfectly normal for academic life. It is not an individual shortcoming or personal flaw.
• Review your calendar and tasks before saying "yes" to any new commitments this week.
• Re-commit yourself to at least 30 minutes each day for your writing.
• If you haven't created your strategic plan, it's not too late.

I hope this week brings you the willingness to try a Sunday Meeting, comfort in knowing that you are not alone in having more tasks than time, and the creativity to make conscious decisions that are in line with your priorities.

[Monday Motivator] Rethink Your Writing Time - August 24, 2015

This is an excerpt from the Monday Motivator Program of Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. Please find the original document here. The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity is an independent professional development, training, and mentoring community of over 71,000 graduate students, post-docs, and faculty members.

In last week's Monday Motivator I challenged each of you to create a Strategic Plan by identifying your research and writing goals, mapping out how to achieve them, and committing specific weeks in your calendar to particular projects. If you haven't created your strategic plan yet, you can click here and listen to our Every Semester Needs a Plan webinar to get yours started.

This week, I want to focus on how you can move from having a written Strategic Plan to actually executing that plan! Based on the findings of faculty development researchers, the answer is straightforward: write every day for at least 30 minutes.

It sounds so easy, but for most academics, writing for at least 30 minutes every day is anything but simple. It is more difficult than it sounds because even though we KNOW that writing and publication are high priorities, we often BEHAVE as if writing is our lowest priority. In other words, despite knowing that writing is critical to our professional success, we often treat it as an optional activity. We "try to make time for it" at the end of the day, or "hope to get to it" after everything else has been done and everyone else's needs have been met. I want to make a radical suggestion this week: let's re-think our writing time by giving it the same weight in our schedule that it will have in our tenure review, promotion decision, and/or how we are valued on the job market.

To begin re-thinking your writing time, try an experiment this week by blocking out at least 30 minutes of each day for writing (Monday through Friday). In order to send a powerful message to yourself and the universe, go ahead and block that time out of your calendar the same way you would a meeting or a class. Then treat your writing time with the same respect and professionalism that you would extend to your colleagues or your students. That means your writing time is non-negotiable, nothing else can happen during that time, and if anybody asks to schedule something during your writing time, the answer is: "Unfortunately I'm not available at that time, I have a meeting."

The Weekly Challenge
This week, I challenge you to do the following:

• Create a Strategic Plan (if you have not done so already).
• Block out at least 30 minutes of time each day this week for writing. I mean literally write it in your calendar! If you are feeling bold, go ahead and block out your writing time for the entire term.
• Treat your writing time with the same respect you would a meeting with your colleagues or your students.
• Show up at your computer during the writing time this week and see what happens.
• If you need support and accountability in developing your daily writing, join us in the Monthly Writing Challenge on the NDFDD Discussion Forum.
• If you find yourself unable or unwilling to do any of the above, gently and lovingly ask yourself WHY?
• If you want more help in developing a daily writing practice, why not review our Core Curriculum Webinar: How to Develop a Daily Writing Practice.

I hope this week brings you the openness to re-think your writing time and the strength to aggressively, pro-actively, and even ruthlessly make time for writing every day. You deserve it!

[Monday Motivator] New Year, New Habits - August 17, 2015

This is an excerpt from the Monday Motivator Program of Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. Please find the original document here. The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity is an independent professional development, training, and mentoring community of over 71,000 graduate students, post-docs, and faculty members.

Every year it's the same story. Whenever I attend large conferences in late summer, many people -- from graduate students through endowed chairs -- approach me to discuss their writing (or more accurately, the lack thereof). These conversations have a similar awkward quality and painful script that I've only experienced in a confessional booth: no eye contact, hushed voices, palpable guilt, and a touch of desperate hope that another person can say something that will wipe away the past and provide new hope for the future. In these instances, person after person pulls me aside to confess their various writing sins. Unfortunately, I have no power to grant absolution so all I can do is listen.

These conversations cause me to wonder why the perfectly natural and common experience of getting stuck in our writing feels like a dirty little secret? Why do we ALL think that we're the only ones who struggle with writing? And why is our natural response to writing problems self-isolation, self-flagellation and avoidance of the very types of community that would help us to move gracefully through our writing resistance? I hear the same two themes over and over again:
I am hopelessly stuck, I'm not writing and I haven't written for a very long time, and
I feel___________ (angry, guilty, ashamed, frustrated, afraid and/or depressed) about my lack of productivity.

As difficult as these conversations are, there's one remarkable point of contrast. I frequently have the pleasure of meeting with groups of graduate students, post-docs, and new faculty who I've worked with via campus workshops, training webinars, or in our Faculty Success Program. These folks spend their summers engaged in consistent daily writing, participating in writing accountability groups, and staying connected to communities of support that help them through the tough times. As a result they're able to gush about their completed articles, chapters, dissertations, grant proposals, and book manuscripts, as well as the unexpected book contracts, funding, and opportunities that occurred as a result of their productivity. These individuals are energetic, engaged, empowered, and dare I say, happy about their writing progress and excited to start the new academic year.

The difference between my typical frustrated confessional conversations and the celebratory ones I have with productive daily writers is so striking that I am feeling inspired to spend the next 15 weeks walking with each one of you, week-by-week, to help you work towards managing your time in ways that will: 1) allow you to stay closely connected to your intellectual projects, 2) create time each day for academic writing, and 3) exert your personal power in the areas of your professional life where you DO have control. If you've already achieved this, feel free to unsubscribe using the button at the bottom of the page, and/or forward the Monday Motivator to someone who may find it useful.

How About A Fresh Start?
Because the beginning of the academic year is filled with fresh starts, I want to encourage you to make this week a fresh new beginning in your relationship with your writing. The best way to do so is by letting go of all the negative and debilitating feelings associated with what you have NOT done in the past. Guilt, disappointment, and frustration aren't useful energies to draw on as you move forward into a new academic year. Instead, try forgiving yourself and moving on. In other words, instead of beating yourself up, let's try using all that energy to accept that academic writing is a slow and time consuming process, create an achievable semester/quarter plan, pro-actively block out at least 30 minutes each day for your writing, and connect to whatever supportive community will meet your needs.

The Weekly Challenge
This week, I challenge you to do the following:

• Let go of any past writing failures and release yourself from the negative feelings associated with not writing, producing, or finishing your work.
• Go through your calendar for the entire term and mark out at least 30 minutes each day (Monday through Friday) for your daily writing.
• Write down your research and writing goals for the term.
• Stop and do a quick reality check by asking yourself: are these goals realistic for ONE semester or quarter?
• Map out the work that will be required to meet your goals and connect that work to specific weeks in your calendar.
• Commit yourself internally to making changes that will allow you to move your writing projects (whatever they may be) out the door.
• Choose some form of community that will support you through the ups and downs of your writing over the next 15 weeks.

I hope this week brings you a fresh start for the new academic year, clarity about your writing goals, and a new spirit of confidence to move forward!

[Monday Motivator] Dancing With Resistance - August 10, 2015

This is an excerpt from the Monday Motivator Program of Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. Please find the original document here. The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity is an independent professional development, training, and mentoring community of over 71,000 graduate students, post-docs, and faculty members.

Last week I encouraged each of you who are dedicated to daily writing to track your resistance. I am glad that the experience was an eye-opening one for many of you! No matter how much we think we know our resistance generally speaking, there’s nothing quite like collecting a week’s worth of data on the specific ways that our bodyguard works to stop us from writing each day. And as great as it is to become increasingly self aware, this week I want you to use the information you collected to create your very own, completely personalized resistance diagnostic.

What is a Resistance Diagnostic?
It’s very simple. Most daily writers experience some type of resistance to their writing on a regular basis, whether it's avoidance, procrastination, or denial. If you don’t, that’s great. If you do, you’re perfectly normal. Last week we worked towards noticing what’s going on when weshould be writing, but find ourselves actually engaged in behavior that has nothing to do with writing. It’s great to pause and identify what we’re doing. It’s even better to get yourself back to the task of writing. But if you’re like most writers I know, some days it's easier than others to get back to the writing! What I like to do is to keep my Resistance Diagnostic within reach, so that no matter how I’m feeling, no matter what is behind my NOT writing, I can quickly remember a strategy, skill, or technique to get me back on track and implement it.

For example, last week my resistance manifested in the following ways: feeling so overwhelmed I couldn’t get started, various perfectionist spasms, a variety of avoidance behaviors (email, Facebook, reading blogs), denial that anything I’m doing matters, low energy, terror in the presence of a blank page, and that vague feeling that I just don’t wanna write. I’ve faced each one of these before, and I’ve experimented with a variety of skills and strategies to move around each one. Some have worked great, some haven’t worked at all, and I’ve kept track of the difference. So whenever I experience a particular form of resistance, instead of stopping and trying to remember what I did the last time I had this experience (which would very likely take me down a whole new path of distraction), I just whip out my Resistance Diagnostic, locate my resistance-of-the-moment in the left hand column, and look next to it to see the most successful strategy I’ve employed to move around it. Having the solution right at my fingertips reminds me that: 1) I’ve faced this type of resistance before, 2) I’ve successfully moved around it in the past, and 3) I have as many tools to dance with my bodyguard as he has to derail me from writing.

My Resistance Diagnostic

RESISTANCE MANIFESTS AS:	STRATEGY TO MOVE AROUND IT
Feeling overwhelmed by a task	Identify the task you're avoiding and use mind-mapping to break it down into even smaller component parts. Then start to work on the easiest part by promising yourself that it only has to last the smallest possible time you can stand (5 minutes is okay, but 15 minutes is best). Make sure you have a juicy treat for the break immediately thereafter.
Perfectionism	Lower your standards and be specific about what the criteria is for being "done” with the task in front of you for today. Remind yourself: perfect doesn’t happen in a day. Set the timer for 15 minutes and start writing.
Avoiding writing with irrelevant stuff	Try a trigger phrase that will bring your attention back to your writing. For example, when reading blogs during writing time ask yourself: does this matter? or is this moving me towards ________ (my long term goals?) If the answer is "no,” set the timer and return to writing.
Wondering if any of this hard work really matters?	Look at things that remind you of the value of your work, why it matters, or anything that makes you feel good about your work. Set the timer for 5 minutes, open your "thank you” file, and read some of the notes people have sent you about how your work has impacted their life. When the timer goes off, start writing.
Low motivation	Bribe yourself with the promise of a treat when the timer goes off.  Then set the timer and start writing.
I just don’t wanna write today!	Remind yourself about all those who have come before you and/or all the sacrifices others have made to help you get to where are today. Affirm: I come from strength. I come from a line of strong and resourceful people. The energy of all those who came before me is supporting me as I move forward today. Then set the timer for 15 minutes and write.
Low energy	Play a short blast of whatever music will lift your mood, motivate you, or make you feel energized. If all else fails, cue up MC Hammer's U Can't Touch This, get up and dance. Then set the timer for 15 minutes and start writing.
Frozen and terrified of a blank page	Go straight to Dr. Wicked’s Write or Die (set it for Kamikaze Mode).
Can’t write and don’t know why	Pick up the phone and call a trusted peer-mentor. Set the timer for 15 minutes. When it goes off, get off the phone, restart the timer for 15 minutes, and start writing.

What Would A Resistance Diagnostic Look Like For You?
What you’ll notice about my success strategies is that none of them involve stopping to try and unravel the cause of my resistance. Your writing time is not the moment to work towards resolving deep seated perfectionism, disempowerment, hyperactive inner critics, unclear goals, and/or your fear of success. Your writing time is the time you want to spend writing, so the strategies for that moment are the ones that will move you into writing immediately. You can work on the bigger issues later, but remember that your writing time is just for writing.

You’ll also notice that my tried and true maneuvers around resistance are the ones that workfor me. In other words, while an MC Hammer dance party never fails to lift my energy, I'm quite certain that it won't work for most people -- and that's okay. What matters is identifying what works for YOU. Start by pulling up that list of the resistance YOU experienced last week. Use that to fill in the left hand column of your own diagnostic table. Then start filling in the success strategies that have worked for you in the right hand column. This may seem a little silly in the moment, but when you’re trying to squeeze the most out of that precious 30 minutes of writing in a busy teaching day, having your Resistance Diagnostic at hand will QUICKLY and EFFICIENTLY move you into your writing.

The Weekly Challenge
This week, I challenge you to:

• Write every day for at least 30 minutes
• Track your resistance if you were unable to do so last week. It’s simple, just notice what you are doing or thinking whenever you are not writing during your scheduled writing time.
• If you tracked your resistance, spend 10 minutes creating your own Resistance Diagnostic Table.
• Put it where you can quickly and easily get your hands on it during your daily writing (on your physical desk or computer desktop is best).
• When you experience resistance this week, try pulling it out, locating your resistance, and trying the strategy that’s been successful in the past.

I hope this week you experience the familiarity and deepening positive relationship with your bodyguard that a Resistance Diagnostic enables! If you can shift your perspective from one of trying to permanently banish your bodyguard to one where you love, accept, and appreciate your bodyguard, your daily encounter with resistance will slowly change from an agonizing struggle to a sweet little dance.

[Monday Motivator] Track Your Resistance - August 3, 2015

This is an excerpt from the Monday Motivator Program of Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. Please find the original document here. The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity is an independent professional development, training, and mentoring community of over 71,000 graduate students, post-docs, and faculty members.

Throughout this summer, I’ve dedicated the Monday Motivator to helping readers better understand and develop a relationship with their resistance to writing. This week, I want to go a little deeper into that evolving relationship by encouraging each of you to engage in an exercise I call "Resistance Tracking.” It’s a deceptively simple exercise, but one that I've seen have such a powerful impact on those who commit to actually doing it that I thought I would share it with you.

Why Track Our Resistance?
We’ve talked a lot about resistance this summer, but I think we need to move from just talking about it towards getting smarter about moving around it. You know you’re experiencing resistance when you want to do something and you should do something, but you just aren’t doing it. For academic writers, it means that you want to finish your ____________ (dissertation/book/article/grant proposal) so that you can ______________ (finish your degree/move on with your life/get a job/get tenure/move your ideas into the world). And yet, you’re just not doing it! It may be that you keep procrastinating the act of sitting down to write.

If you’re reading this, it’s more likely that you’ve committed to daily writing, but when you sit down each day something happens. Maybe you get a strong urge to check email, Facebook, or the news. Maybe you suddenly feel a bodily need that you must fulfill before you get started writing (hunger, thirst, too cold, too hot, etc...). Maybe you become suddenly distracted by your immediate environment that must be cleaned or organized before you can concentrate on writing. Maybe some unresolved conflict (that has nothing to do with your writing) must be resolved before you can get focused on your intellectual work. Or maybe you find yourself gazing out the nearest window, thinking about the meaning of life and wondering whether you are wasting yours cranking out work that very few people will read. Each of these examples illustrate the most common forms of academic resistance: procrastination, avoidance, and denial. And, of course, if you should happen to be experienced and nimble in moving beyond these basic forms of resistance and actually start writing, a new and deeper well of resistance often arises in the form of your inner-critic(s).

If you experience any of this resistance, CONGRATULATIONS! You’re a perfectly normal academic writer. While I’ve encouraged you throughout the summer to better understand yourresistance and explore the fears that lie underneath it, this week I want to encourage you to get even more intimately acquainted with how your resistance works to keep you from doing the one thing that will have the greatest long term impact on your success in the Academy:writing for publication. The purpose of this (slightly painful) exercise is to get clear about your unique individual patterns, to both see and feel your resistance as it manifests, and to begin laying the ground work for your own personal diagnostic tool.

How To Track Your Resistance
Every day, during your writing time, keep a small notepad and writing utensil next to your desk. Throughout your writing time, you simply make a quick note of whatever comes up to keep you from writing. Some of your resistance will take the form of behaviors (clicking on Facebook, checking email, etc...) and some will take the form of thoughts ("this is awful,” "who do you think you are?," "you need to read more before writing anything else," etc...). The goal is to capture in one place everything that emerges to keep you from writing during your scheduled writing time each day this week. Please note, this will be most effective if you can resist the urge to judge your resistance. All you want to do is to view these thoughts and behaviors with compassionate curiosity, record them, and then get back to your writing.

For example, my recent resistance tracking looked like this:

• Let me find the right Pandora station.
• I’m thirsty.
• I wonder how dehydration impacts cognitive performance?
• Uh-oh, I drank too much water, now I have to pee.
• I wonder if I’ve eaten enough protein today?
• I should post "I’m writing” as my Facebook status so that people can send me positive writing energy.
• I hate writing, I don't feel like doing this.

[then once I actually started writing]

• Why didn't I start this ever earlier?
• Why is this taking 10 times longer than expected?
• I'm so lazy and disorganized, why can’t I get your shit together?
• I should stop writing this before I embarrass myself!

This is pretty standard fare for me during a 30-minute writing block. I don’t need to feel embarrassed or frustrated by this list because I can see my wiggles and negative self-talk for exactly what they are: manifestations of my resistance. They are each designed by mybodyguard to keep me from writing so that I can stay safe from sharing my writing, putting my ideas into public space (for criticism and debate), and from the possibility of failure. Once I see them in writing, it becomes perfectly clear that they are simple distractions that I can maneuver around by simply acknowledging the thoughts and impulses and writing each one on my notepad. At the end of my writing time, I can assess if they are truly worth acting on. And, after a week’s worth of data, I can see the patterns in my resistance: behavioral urges at the beginning of my writing time and inner-critic outbursts towards the middle and end. I don’t know what your patterns are, but I encourage you to become interested in identifying them this week.

The Weekly Challenge
This week, I challenge you to:

• Use your timer each day for your writing time. Trust me, this will heighten your awareness about starting and stopping your writing time, as well as what’s going on during that time.
• Each day, notice when you feel resistance and record it.
• Ask yourself: What’s going on here? And How do I feel?
• If your resistance manifests as a behavior (or urge to engage in a particular behavior), record it.
• If your resistance manifests as a strong inner-critic(s), record the dialogue and messages.
• At the end of the week, take 5 minutes to look back over your resistance log to see if you can identify any patterns.
• Don't throw that log away,we’ll use it next week to create a resistance diagnostic tool that’s unique to YOU. 

I hope this week brings you the energy to track your resistance, the desire to deepen your relationship with this ever-present piece of your humanity, and the confidence to know that you can move around your resistance each day no matter how it manifests.

[Monday Motivator] Lower Your Standards - July 27, 2015

This is an excerpt from the Monday Motivator Program of Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. Please find the original document here. The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity is an independent professional development, training, and mentoring community of over 71,000 graduate students, post-docs, and faculty members.

The summertime has a way of throwing many writers into a panic. Even the most diligent academic writers who have formulated a summer plan, created support and accountability mechanisms, developed a relationship with their bodyguard, and are dedicated to daily writing, can feel the summer slipping away. This time of the summer is when many of us begin to realize that: 1) academic writing is a very slow process, 2) the brilliant ideas we started the summer with may not be quite as groundbreaking as we imagined, 3) we have grossly underestimated the amount of time our summer projects will take to complete and 4) our summer plans may need some downward revision.

The combination of these various realizations can leave dedicated summer writers feeling frustrated and the procrastinators (who haven’t yet started their writing) hesitant to begin. I have worked with thousands of academic writers, and the most common demons that underlie resistance to writing are: 1) disempowerment, 2) a hyper-active inner-critic, 3) unclear goalsand/or 4) fear of success (or failure). We've exorcised each of these demons one by one this summer in a way that encourages conscious reflection on each one and some concrete strategies to use to release the anxiety-producing elements so you can move forward in your writing. This week we are going to turn our attention to another issue underlying writing resistance: unrealistically high expectations.

Examining Your Expectations
High expectations are tricky. On the one hand, if you're reading this, you've already experienced tremendous educational success and that is likely tied to having high expectations for yourself. On the other hand, when our expectations about who we should be, how we should feel, what we should achieve, and the impact our work should have in the world are too high, unexamined, inappropriate for our current career stage, or generated from a desperate need to prove ourselves, they become a straitjacket. I’ve seen high expectations manifest in a variety of ways among academics, including:

• Super-Professor: There are so many roles that I must perform perfectly NOW! I want to be a cutting-edge researcher, institutional change agent, transformative teacher, inspiring role model, community activist, and public intellectual all at the same time. Regrettably, I’m so busy running around trying to do all of these things simultaneously that I’m not accomplishing much of anything.
• Instantaneous Superstar: My first book must be a discipline-shifting magnum opus! Unfortunately, I can’t actually get any words on paper because my initial attempts at a first draft feel feeble, small, and incompetent when compared to the brilliant, flawless, and award winning book I imagine producing. 
• Super-Parent: My standard of parenting is so high that I’m perpetually exhausted (particularly in the summer months). As a result of my perfect parenting standards, I have difficulty carving out time to write during the summer and experience debilitating guilt when taking time for my writing (or myself).

Maybe these sound familiar, and I’m sure you could come up with more examples of high expectations running amok. Let’s be clear, I’m not writing this to judge anyone. Instead, I’m describing these common examples because if you suffer from the kind of high expectations that induce writing blocks, guilt, shame, or feeling not good enough, smart enough, or dedicated enough, then I want you to consider trying one of the strategies described below. At a minimum, they will provide you with ideas about how to identify immobilizing expectations, release the unhealthy components and respond in a way that gets you back to daily writing.

Strategy 1: Rethink Your Career As A Book With Many Chapters
Take 15-30 minutes of time to journal about your career from a long-term perspective. In other words, instead of feeling that you have to do everything all at once, imagine that your career is literally a book with many chapters. Each chapter represents a five-year span of time in which one type of activity is front and center. Imagine that there’s one big goal for each chapter (the title) that serves as the guiding force for your professional activities. If you’re on the tenure track, chapter one is going to be entitled Research and Writing. But the later chapters can focus on becoming a master teacher, working as a public intellectual, engaging in activism for social change, creating organizational change at your particular institution, or whatever is important to you. This type of reflection about your career over the long run often frees early-career academics from a sense of having to do everything now, and instead allows you to imagine your goals as unfolding over the length of your career.

Strategy 2: Develop A Metaphor To Understand Your Writing Process
Unrealistic expectations for the production of writing often emerge from a lack of awareness of the length, depth, and oscillations of our own writing process. I used to be in a writing group with a political scientist named Michelle Boyd who described writing as birthing. She developed an elaborate metaphor in which each stage of pregnancy (from conception to birth) had a parallel to her writing process. Fully developing this metaphor required an awareness of her own process, the time frames in which her writing occurred, and the desire to understand how her writing unfolds over time. The benefit to developing your own metaphor is that it enables you to release yourself from the idea of producing a perfect first draft (because that’s just not how anyone’s process really works). Instead you learn to understand how you move from a new idea to a complete manuscript so that you can appreciate your ideas when they are in the fragile and unformed early stages, nurture them along through revision, share them regularly with others, and watch them grow into mature and polished manuscripts.

Strategy #3: Create a 0–100 Percent Reviewer List
One of the best ways to keep unrealistically high expectations from paralyzing your writing is to share your work throughout the writing process. At any given time, I understand my own manuscripts as somewhere between 0-25 percent, 25–50 percent, 50-75 percent, or 75-100 percent complete. I keep a corresponding list of reviewers for each stage. For example, when a manuscript is 0-25% complete, I ask a particular group of people (my husband, my writing group, and my long-standing graduate school friends) to read it and provide quick feedback about the central idea. If a manuscript is 75-100 percent complete, then I send it to a different group of readers (people who are experts in my subfield) for more comprehensive feedback.

While norms for sharing manuscripts differ by discipline, the key is to avoid holding onto manuscripts until they are almost complete before you request feedback. Waiting until something is "perfect” only heightens anxiety and encourages over-investment, over-attachment and holding onto manuscripts too long. Instead, you want to continually share your work with trusted readers and ask for feedback that is appropriate to the stage it is in. Get comfortable saying things like: "Can you read this in the next week? It's at 25 percent so there's no need to line edit. I just want to know what you think about the idea." Doing so will help you to hold expectations that accurately correspond to your manuscript’s stage of development.

Strategy #4: Experiment With Lowering Your Expectations
One of the homework assignments I give my Faculty Success Program participants is to lower one of their standards every day for a week. The only rule is that they can’t lower their standards in the areas of research, writing, or personal care. But everything else is fair game: summer course preparation, household cleanliness, e-mail responsiveness, etc…, It’s amazing what happens when high achievers try lowering their standards each day. If you regularly operate with uniformly high standards across every area of your life, then lowering your standards and learning how to make conscious decisions about when and where to invest your best time and energy can feel positively liberating! Most of the time nobody even notices and you will increase the time you have available for the things that really matter.

The Weekly Challenge
This week, I challenge you to:

• Write every day for at least 30 minutes.
• If you find yourself procrastinating or avoiding your writing, patiently ask yourself: What’s going on? What are my expectations? And what am I afraid of?
• If your resistance to writing is driven by unrealistically high standards, try journaling about your career as a book with many chapters, or developing a metaphor for your writing.
• Expand your sense of the writing process to include ongoing feedback and conversation with others by creating a 0-100% reviewer list.
• Try adjusting how you approach your first drafts from perfectionist judgment to compassion by treating your initial writing with the same loving gentleness you would give to a baby, a puppy, a seedling, or whatever is small and fragile but will grow into something big and strong.
• Lower one standard each day this week (other than writing, research and self care) and see what happens.
• Try reading Peg Boyle’s excellent series on Procrastination and Perfectionism in order to better understand these issues.
• If you’re completely lost and have no idea what you’re doing, read Wendy Belcher’sWriting Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success – it will provide you with a framework, process, and timeline for moving from idea to complete draft.

I hope this week brings you a spirit of curiosity about your writing habits, a willingness to try new techniques, and the increased engagement that comes with spending time each day with your summer writing project.

[Monday Motivator] Assess & Adjust - July 20, 2015

This is an excerpt from the Monday Motivator Program of Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. Please find the original document here. The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity is an independent professional development, training, and mentoring community of over 71,000 graduate students, post-docs, and faculty members.

Doesn't it seem like yesterday that we were drafting our summer plans and trying to decide what type of support systems to put in place? If you've been following the Monday Motivator Series this summer, you have many weeks of daily writing under your belt and you've survived a multitude of resistance to writing including disempowerment, hyperactive inner critics, unclear goals, and the fear of success. As we head into the back end of summer, it's time for us to practice one of my favorite strategies: assess and adjust.

Assess Your Summer Progress Thus Far
At this point of the summer, it's incredibly important to pause and assess your progress. This is not an invitation for you to beat yourself up over what didn’t get done. Instead it's an opportunity for you to honestly evaluate the effectiveness of your new writing habits, the scope of work that can realistically be accomplished before the fall term begins, and the patterns of your resistance to writing that have emerged this summer. I typically begin my assessment by pulling up my summer plan and then answering the following five questions:

1. What goals have (and have not) been accomplished so far this summer?
2. How consistent have I been in my daily writing routine?
3. When, where and how has my resistance flared up?
4. Is my current support system effective and if not, what am I willing to try?
5. How do I feel about my answers to the previous questions?

If you have been consistent throughout the summer in updating your progress each week in your plan, you will very likely feel that an enormous amount of work HAS been done, even if it's not quite everything that you imagined back in May. So let's appreciate all the work that you have accomplished and reflect on the moments that your resistance flared up (and what it looked like when it did). This will help you to identify some important patterns. For example, this summer I realized that my resistance is strongest when I am just about to send something out. I get scared of what my readers, reviewers and/or co-authors might think of my work, so the final stage of completion is when things have turned ugly around my house. That’s great! Every piece of insight we gain about our resistance patterns makes it easier for us to manage our bodyguard in the upcoming weeks. And finally, if your support system fell apart, that’s also perfectly fine -- it’s all data for your decision making moving forward.

What Worked And What Didn't Work?
Now that you have data about your summer productivity so far, you can begin to analyze it and use it to make decisions about how you will spend the rest of your summer. It’s important to start off by identifying what HAS worked well for you. That list will help you to clarify what practices to build into your schedule for the next few weeks. For example, if morning writing works better than evening (or vice versa), then build your schedule around your optimal writing time. Next, identify what is NOT working. For example, if your voluntary support system fell apart, then consider experimenting with a different type of support system (and it may be time to experiment with paying for the support, services, and accountability you need).

Make Necessary Adjustments
You’ve assessed and analyzed, and now it’s time to revise the last part of your summer plan! When you’re ready, just follow the same steps you took for creating a summer plan the first time around: 1) list your writing goals, 2) outline the tasks necessary to achieve each of your goals, 3) map the tasks onto each week, 4) commit to executing your plan on a daily basis, and 5) set up whatever support and accountability system will help you move forward day-by-day and week-by-week. Thankfully, planning gets easier every time that you do it.

Reconnect With Your Mentors
Now is a great time to set up meetings with your mentors in the coming weeks. You can share with them all of your progress and achievements (mentors love to hear good news) and you can discuss your fall semester plan to get their feedback. I find these meetings can serve as a motivator for finishing up the last of your summer goals so that you can have a strong report of the tangible tasks you've completed during the summer months. And for whatever items didn't get accomplished, you can ask your mentors for concrete advice and support. Having structured exchanges with your mentors will not only elicit their valuable wisdom, advice, and feedback, but it also communicates the message that you are a serious, organized, and productive scholar who has clear goals and makes concrete progress towards achieving them.

The Weekly Challenge
This week, I challenge you to:

• Write every day for 30 – 60 minutes (why stop now?).
• Pull out your summer plan.
• Answer the reflective questions provided above and congratulate yourself for all of the work that DID get accomplished.
• Analyze your answers and figure out what IS and is NOT working for you.
• Adjust the remaining time in your summer plan in a way that responds to your needs and builds in some new experimentation.
• Set up a meeting with at least one of your mentors to discuss your summer progress and your fall research and writing plans.

I hope this week brings each of you a spirit of gratitude towards yourself for all the things you have accomplished this summer, a sense of curiosity about your own patterns, and the renewed energy that comes from assessing your reality and adjusting to make things better.

[Monday Motivator] Are You Afraid to Succeed? - July 13, 2015

This is an excerpt from the Monday Motivator Program of Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. Please find the original document here. The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity is an independent professional development, training, and mentoring community of over 71,000 graduate students, post-docs, and faculty members.

I recently ran into a former colleague whom I’ll call Dick. He was always one of my favorites because I love scholars with big and intense personalities. Dick completed his doctorate at a top program in his discipline, struts around huffing and puffing like an ever-agitated intellectual, and aggressively attacks any professor who dares to present work-in-progress (as opposed to polished work) at his department’s brown bag. Interestingly, Dick has neither written nor published a single thing during the five years he has been on the tenure track. His bluster and verbal acuity have kept people from asking him about his self-sabotaging behavior and record-breaking procrastination. His lengthy rationalizations about how his project’s scope and depth are far too complex for daily writing are so exhausting that they have a numbing effect on the very people who might press him for details. Inexplicably, Dick has somehow managed to get through one review after another without having made any tangible progress.

Staying Stuck
I’ve met a lot of Dicks in my academic career! By that, I mean people who have all the right credentials, have received multiple fellowships to focus on writing, who perform the role of an intellectual with perfect precision, and yet their publication record is minimal. Instead they engage in various types of self-sabotaging behavior because they fear that the publication of their work will expose them, make them vulnerable to other people’s criticism, or reveal that they’re not really as smart as others believed. These scholars are often stuck in their productivity due to uncertainty about their current skills and the possibility that they won’t be able to sustain any future success they may achieve. Instead, they feel that no matter what they do it will never be enough to earn tenure, get promoted, and/or win the respect of their senior colleagues, so they don’t bother putting themselves through the work and exposure, and instead focus on the things that they can easily and readily engage in (such as the verbal exchange of ideas).

Not all Dicks have the blustery air of intellectual arrogance that my former colleague exudes. In fact, the female version more frequently involves avoiding face-to-face contact lest the individual be asked if she has written anything lately. That said, it’s not difficult to identify resistance that is driven by a fear of success. Ask yourself:

• Are you writing for at least 30 minutes every day or have you created a story that you can’t possibly write in short periods of time?
• Do you fail to prepare for presentations until the last minute, stay up late the night before, and/or go out drinking prior to presenting your work?
• Do you talk a big game about your project but never actually engage in the work to make that project become a reality?
• Do you luxuriate in negative talk about the state of academic journals, the abysmal job market, and/or the shrinking proportion of tenured faculty positions at American universities to the point that you convince yourself there’s really no reason to bother writing because your manuscript will never get published, and if it does it will only be read by five people, or that you’ll never get a job, tenure, promotion, respect, etc.?

In short, procrastination, destructive behavior, and excessively pessimistic thinking all provide the same outcome: a safe and justifiable reason to blame a lack of performance on so that you will always have an explanation about why you didn’t do well.

Looking Below The Surface
To be perfectly honest, of all the various types of resistance to writing I have described this summer, I have the greatest compassion for those suffering from a fear of success. My compassion stems from the fact that this type of fear often drives scholars into such deep isolation and avoidance that they are the least likely to reach out for help. I also know that such fear is grounded in profound insecurity, not feeling good enough, and a lack of confidence in one’s own skills. I’ve seen some tragic breakdowns among faculty who are immobilized by the fear of success. Unfortunately, they only occur after their situation has deteriorated so far that their career is in serious jeopardy (Dick's empty-handed tenure case may invoke just such a crisis). If any of this sounds familiar, I want to suggest a few ways that you can begin to move through the fear of success before a crisis arises.

Imagine Your Future
I’m a big fan of planning. Not because it’s fun (it’s not), but because the process of writing down what you want and mapping out the steps to achieve your goal is transformative. It requires you to: a) ask yourself what you really want, b) acknowledge that the road to getting it is filled with lots of small steps, and c) get honest about the fact that taking no action guarantees failure.

Create Accountability
While it is the last thing that any paralyzed writer wants to do, what you need more than anything else to overcome your resistance is weekly accountability for your writing. Because you are capable of generating sophisticated levels of denial and complex rationalizations for not writing, you need a group of people who won’t allow you to babble on endlessly about how you have a "slow process,” but instead will hold your feet to the fire in a spirit of firm and loving support. If you don’t have people in your life to do this, it may be time to plug into an existing program.

Start Writing And Preparing
Work with your accountability group to set deadlines for presentations and drafts that occur far in advance of the actual deadlines. This will help you to break the habit of last-minute sabotage and focus any evaluation of your performance on the actual substance of your work. The trick is that these deadlines will have to feel consequential, so set up other people who are expecting to review, edit, or collaborate with you on your work so that you can’t just slide through the advanced deadline without any consequences.

Reach Out To Your Mentors
It’s time to start having serious conversations with your mentors and role models about the reality of academic life. The difficulties you are experiencing are common, and asking your mentors to share how they got to where they are today and what types of failures they have experienced will give you a clearer picture of their path to success. I’ve never had a conversation with a successful person that didn’t involve devastating failures that were critically important to their eventual success.

Consider Starting The Inner Work
If you are unable to unravel why you keep sabotaging yourself by not writing and you just can’t imagine reaching out to your departmental mentors for help, it may be time to find a good therapist and start doing the inner-work that’s necessary to determine what’s standing between you and getting what you really want.

Each of these suggestions is aimed at a single outcome: breaking you out of your paralysis to take one concrete step forward. Taking any one of these steps will help you to explore what’s holding you back, connect to the support of a community of people who want to help you, and get you back to your writing. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been since you touched your manuscript, it’s never to late to re-engage.

The Weekly Challenge

This week, I challenge you to:

• Write every day for at least 30 minutes.
• If you’re unable to do so, ask yourself, why?
• If your response goes beyond organizational errors, consider the list of self-sabotaging behaviors described above and determine if your resistance is driven by a fear of success.
• Spend 30 minutes imagining your goals and mapping out the steps that would be required to achieve them.
• Call one of your mentors and set up time to discuss your blocked writing.
• Join a writing accountability group to support your re-engagement with your writing project.
• If you feel like I’ve described your situation but you can’t begin to imagine trying any of the suggested ideas, consider contacting a therapist who specializes in working with academics.
• Resolve to take one step forward this week.

While fear of success is an incredibly difficult type of resistance to face, I hope this week brings you the clarity to identify the cause of your paralysis, the wisdom to know what first step makes the most sense for your situation, and the strength to reach out for whatever help will get you back to your writing.