[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.

[Monday Motivator] Do You REALLY Want to Be a Professor? - July 6, 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 am often contacted by faculty members after a catastrophic professional event has occurred and they realize that their productivity isn’t going to meet their department’s expectations for promotion. The most common scenario is a professor who has received a negative third-year review because she fell into the typical tenure-track trap: spending all her time on teaching and service, promising herself she would write during the breaks, and then making little progress because she’s exhausted from over-functioning in other aspects of her job. As a result, she uses her breaks to physically and mentally recover, doesn’t write, and experiences guilt and stress over her lack of productivity.

These are always difficult conversations, but I typically start with the basic organizational tips and tricks that get faculty members writing and re-connected to their research. To support this intervention, I recommend two weeks of daily writing with structured support and accountability. At the end of that time, we assess their progress. Some people get right down to business, quickly establish a writing plan, and settle into their daily writing routine. But others are so deeply blocked that they just can’t do it, so we start to work our way through the common fears underlying resistance to writing. Working through disempowerment around writing and a hyperactive inner critic helps get the vast majority of faculty moving through their writing funk. However, there’s one qualitatively different type of energy that blocks writing and that can be the most difficult to identify and resolve: unclear goals.

Get Real About Your Goals
At the most basic level, unclear goals can be problematic for academic writers who simply have no overarching research plan. For example, you may be having difficulty establishing your own research agenda independent of your dissertation adviser or post-doctoral mentor. Or it may be the case that you just keep reactively responding to opportunities that come to you instead of evaluating whether or not they make sense for your career. In other words, you react to other people’s agendas instead of proactively crafting an agenda that addresses your own substantive interests and research questions. But at a deeper and far more problematic level, resistance to writing that is driven by unclear goals is often rooted in a lack of clarity about your long-term professional goals. When I have tried everything I know to break through resistance, I typically end by asking: Do you REALLY want to be a professor?

I imagine this as a direct and easy question for a tenure-track faculty member. By that time, an individual has gone through a decade or so of graduate education and training AND survived a horrible job market. But this question is often met with nervous laughter, long pauses, and surprising hesitation. I believe this is grounded in the way that top students get steered into the academy: professors meet bright students and encourage them to consider an academic path. Once committed to a Ph.D. program, the path to the professoriate is fairly narrow and the socialization messages (you are only successful if you get a tenure-track job at a research intensive university) are both restrictive and insular. Then, in well-intentioned efforts to help graduate students become marketable, many are encouraged to apply for programs, awards, and fellowships that further commit them to the academic path without corresponding opportunities to reflect on whether (or not) academe is the right fit.

People often tell me that they became a professor because they took a course that opened their eyes and inspired them to change the world! Their professors (naturally) suggested that they consider graduate school as a way to pursue their passion. Because people often conflate a person (the inspiring professor) with their passion (change the world), it seems reasonable to pursue the same path as their role model. A decade later, when that formerly inspired student is struggling to complete their Ph.D., get a job, secure external funding, publish research, engage ambivalent undergraduates and/or just manage life on the tenure track, the realization sets in that the production of knowledge is an incredibly slow way of making social change!

Wondering whether or not you really want to be a professor is a natural thought when you’re under the stress and strain of the tenure track, when you experience moments of seemingly insurmountable conflict, or when you’re in an intractably toxic environment. The trick is to determine the difference between escape fantasies that result from feeling overwhelmed and the genuine, gut-level resistance that occurs when you REALLY know you’re on the wrong path. Below I’m going to suggest a few things you might try as ways to differentiate between momentary frustration and the need to create an exit strategy.

Write Your Story
Try taking 15 minutes to write about how and why you became a professor. I know this suggestion elicits eye-rolling and dismissal among busy and serious academics; however, the results never cease to amaze. Retelling your story in writing unearths the core elements that drew you to the ivory tower. The writing may reconnect you to your passion or reveal alternative paths.

Reconnect With What You LOVE About Your Work
I’m trained as a sociologist and it’s not uncommon to meet other sociologists who were drawn to the discipline by their passion for social justice and social change. That said, it’s easy in the hustle and bustle of daily work to become disconnected from the very communities that we belong to and/or our work seeks to represent. For individuals in this scenario, reconnecting with project participants, sharing work with the community, meeting with people on the ground to discuss research collaborations, ideas, and connections, can remind you why it’s so important for you to complete your writing projects and publish your work.

Get Some Of What's Missing Into Your Life ASAP
Escape fantasies are frequently fueled by frustration over the seemingly non-stop rejections that are a natural part of academic life. Maybe the grant proposal you poured your heart and soul into was rejected, or the article you were excited about when you wrote it two years ago has been rejected from yet another journal after being under review for nine months. All of these are normal parts of academic life, but they can make you feel like you’re stuck on a very slow-moving ship when the rest of the world’s information and innovation is zipping by at the speed of light. If this is the case, then ask yourself what’s missing and how you can get a piece of it immediately. For example, if you want to share your work more quickly, start a blog, write an article for a mainstream outlet, or join an organization that links researchers to the media as resources (such as the Council on Contemporary Families).

If what’s missing is a sense of comfort and home (because your constant work has left your living space bland and anonymous), then buy a bucket of paint, hang something on the walls, or take an evening to cook a special dinner that will fill your home with comforting smells. Or, if there’s a piece of you that has died as a result of your singular professional focus, resuscitate it by showing some of your paintings in a local gallery, taking a salsa dancing class, writing a Fulbright application to take your family out of the country, or training for a marathon. Each of these examples are drawn from faculty I know who have decided that while they are committed to the academic path, they are going to create some detours along the way.

Explore Other Options
I used to teach a leadership course, and one of the most powerful exercises in the class was identifying five role models (people who are doing exactly what you think you want to do) and interviewing them. This has a way of taking dreams from the abstract into reality. Sometimes students would find that the job they thought was ideal wasn’t what they imagined. Others quickly realize that every occupation comes with moments of fulfillment and lots of daily frustration. And sometimes, the interviews confirmed their deepest desire and they ended up making important connections, developing relationships with future mentors, and consciously moving in a different direction.

Create An Exit Strategy
It’s OK if you decide to leave a tenure-track job (if for no other reason than there are thousands of people who would love to take your place). It’s even OK if you decide to leave a tenured position to pursue other work. Everyone will tell you you’re crazy, but a lifetime guarantee of employment doesn’t feel like a privilege when you’re miserable and you really want to do something else.

These exercises are aimed at helping you to discern whether the kind of resistance to writing that you’re experiencing is fueled by unclear goals. And if so, is it a momentary block in response to the stressors of your environment or is it your true self begging you to use your tremendous gifts and talents in another professional capacity? I find that people who leave the academy because they are pushed by toxicity, frustration, institutional politics, or daily aggression quickly discover that such dynamics occur in all workplaces. But those who leave because they are pulled toward something else are often delighted by their choice and wonder why they stayed for so long.

The Weekly Challenge
This week, I challenge you to:

• Write every day for at least 30 minutes.
• If you are unable to write, ask yourself: Why?
• If your resistance is fueled by unclear goals, start by reviewing (or identifying) your research agenda and asking whether the projects you’re currently engaged in are aligned with that agenda. If they’re not, consider gracefully removing yourself from energy-sucking projects that are not moving you in a clear direction of your choosing.
• If the mere question "Do you REALLY want to be an academic?” resonates with you, spend some time reflecting on the answer.
• Depending on why it resonates with you, try writing your academic story, reconnecting with your passion, identifying what’s missing and pulling a piece of it back into your life, interviewing role models, or creating an exit strategy.

I hope that asking whether you really want to be a professor clarifies your own purpose by either helping to confirm your commitment OR redirect your amazing talent and energy. Either way, putting conscious thought towards answering this question will energize you and get you reconnected to your writing.

[Monday Motivator] A Summer Pause - June 29, 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.

As I'm writing this week's Monday Motivator I feel like I can finally take a deep exhale. Aaaahhhhhhhh...... I'm done with all of my professional travel and have completed the first half of our largest Summer Writing Bootcamp ever. This week, I'm settling back in to my non-traveling summer rhythm and reassessing my usual routines, systems, and habits. Personally, I've found myself repeatedly pausing to ask myself: how does that work? Am I missing something? Should I try something new? My summer pause has helped me to rethink my relationships with various types of support, eliminate the things that aren't working, discover support I didn't realize I had access to, and streamline my daily activity.



It occurred to me that this might be a great week to encourage YOU to take a summer pause to reflect on your support systems, accountability structures, daily routine, and also to think about all of the great resources available to you as an NCFDD member. So this week, I want to encourage you to pause and ask:
Do I know how my NCFDD membership works?
Am I maximizing my investment in NCFDD membership?
Am I getting what I need or do I need to go deeper into the available resources?

Our annual membership is designed to operate as a year-long virtual mentorship program. That means we have set up a Core Curriculum to move you through a monthly process intended to increase your writing productivity and work-life balance. Each of the following webinars are available to you, at your convenience:

Core Curriculum Webinars

Month		Topic
January		Every Semester Needs a Plan
February		Align Your Time With Your Priorities
March		How to Develop A Daily Writing Practice
April		Mastering Academic Time Management
May		Every Summer Needs A Plan
June		Moving From Resistance To Writing
July		The Art of Saying "No"
August		Cultivating Your Network of Mentors, Sponsors & Collaborators
September		Overcoming Academic Perfectionism
October		Engaging in Healthy Conflict
November		Strategies for Dealing With Stress and Rejection

To attend the webinars live, simply register online for the webinar link, dial-in number and PIN. If you want to listen at your leisure, you can access audio and video recordings, slides and transcripts after the call is over. To listen to previous core curriculum webinars, click here. In addition to our monthly core curriculum webinars, we offer monthly guest expert webinars that cover a wide range of topics. To view all of our upcoming webinars, click here.

Multi-Week Courses
We also offer a variety of multi-week courses on the skills faculty need to know, but nobody ever tells you: How to Write a Grant, How to Write a Book Proposal, How to Write an Article, How to Plan Your Teaching for a Stress-Free Semester, How to be Successful in the Academic Job Market, How to Develop a Social Media Strategy, and much more. You can register to take the courses live, or you can download recordings on our Multi-Week Course Page after the courses end.

The Buddy System
For members interested in having a writing accountability partner, we offer the opportunity to be matched with a writing buddy. This is designed to support the implementation of strategies covered in our core curriculum webinars, provide you with a peer-mentor, and to expand your network. If you'd like a writing buddy, email Buddies@FacultyDiversity.org and put "I'd like a writing buddy" in the subject line. We randomly match people as requests roll in.

The Monday Motivator
The Monday Motivator is our most popular membership resource. It is a weekly dose of positive energy, electronic support, and a loving nudge forward. The purpose of the weekly e-mail message is to reinforce the core ideas, skills, and strategies presented in our Core Curriculum. If for any reason you're not receiving it on a weekly basis, let us know!

Resources & Referrals
Summer is a great time to do some reading to enhance your professional development and/or try out a new support resource (professional editor, writing retreat, dissertation coach, etc...). Our resources and referrals page contains all our favorite books, articles, and preferred vendors listed in one convenient place for you.

The Weekly Challenge
This week, I challenge you to:

• Write for at least 30 minutes each day (Monday through Friday).
• Take a summer pause to ask yourself: how does my NCFDD membership work? Am I maximizing my investment? Should I try to utilize a resource I haven't tried before?
• If you've missed any of our webinars and they sound interesting to you, take a look at our webinar calendar, download the recordings and slides, put your feet up, and enjoy!
• If you're already maximizing the NCFDD membership resources and benefiting from them, why not forward this message to a friend and encourage them to become a member. We love your referrals!

I hope this week brings each of you an opportunity to take a summer pause to make sure you are making the most of your NCFDD membership and to check-in with yourself to see if your needs are being met!

[Monday Motivator] Tame Your Inner Critic - June 22, 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.

Looking at my calendar this morning, I've realized that July is right around the corner. That means I'm heading into the most intense time of summer writing. And whenever I'm pushing hard to move writing out the door, my resistance comes out in full effect. I’ve already written about how unrealistically high expectations and disempowerment fuel resistance to writing, so this week I want to turn to a far more common demon that underlies resistance: a hyperactive inner critic.

When I sit down to write most days, I have to try a variety of tips and tricks to get started:freewriting, mind-mapping, Write or Die, or whatever gets my fingers tapping away on my keyboard. But once I sink into the writing, my inner critic comes out with a vengeance. She articulates a wide range of ugliness including (but not limited to) a litany of my shortcomings, questions about my competence, doubts about the importance of the work I’m doing, speculations about how dumb people will think I am once they read my writing, detailed descriptions of how ill-chosen each word I’m putting on the page is, exhortations to delete and change them right away, or better yet, persistent pleas to stop writing immediately before I embarrass myself further. In short, my inner critic is loquacious, judgmental, and most unpleasant. It’s no wonder that I resist sitting down at my writing desk! Who would want to face this unending torrent of ugliness each day?

Thankfully, one thing I’ve learned from working with academic writers over the years is that I’m not the only one with a hyperactive inner critic. If all of this sounds familiar, then let me suggest some strategies you can try when your inner critic runs amok and threatens to shut down your writing. They are all aimed to help you reflect on your negative internal messages, release yourself from a sense of powerlessness over your inner critic, and respond in a way that enables you to talk back to the critic’s negative messages, minimize the impact on your productivity, and create alternatives that motivate and empower you.

Track Your Inner Critic’s Dialogue
The first step to taming your inner critic is to record his/her negative messages. This doesn’t have to be cumbersome or complicated. Just keep a few post-it notes next to your keyboard and write down the messages your inner critic tosses out so freely. Do this for a week and you will have your critic’s full script. Seeing a week’s worth of data will enable you to identify your critic’s patterns and question the messages by asking: Are these things true? Are they consistent with the reality of my past performance? Are they simply a repetitious and exaggerated statement of my deepest fears? Where are these messages coming from? Also take note if there are places and times that your inner critic comes out more strongly (morning vs. evening, private vs. public writing spaces, or with particular writing content or stages of the process).

Personify Your Inner Critic
Dolores Umbridge is the perfect embodiment of my inner critic (she is the Hogwarts High Inquisitor and temporary headmistress for those of you unfamiliar with Harry Potter). For me, she’s some combination of the meanest nuns I ever had in school and my mother on her very worst day, except that she’s also imbued with magical powers to torture you and capable of delivering the most vilifying narrative in a chillingly calm and sweet voice. Once you can picture your inner critic as a person, you can engage in a relationship with him/her. You can ask her to leave when she’s not welcome, or you can tell her to be quiet, stop lying, and take her fear-mongering somewhere else.

Develop an Alternative
At some point, we have to create a new and positive script to replace the negative one that our inner critic keeps repeating. There are many different ways to do this and, of course, you can create your own based on what you feel comfortable trying. I’ve seen people successfully create an alternative script by visualizing an alternative to their critic in the form of an inner-angel/guide/protector/superhero that can talk back to the critic when she shows up. I’ve also seen people stop their writing when they feel overwhelmed by their inner critic and freewrite a dialogue between themselves and their critic, or their hero and their critic. Others develop a series of positive affirmations to combat the negativity of their critic (you can download Gina Hiatt’s Positive Affirmations for Academic Writers as a starting point).

Invite Your Critic into the Process
The thing about inner critics is that they aren’t completely negative and worthless. While critics can be destructive in some instances, they can also be quite useful when given a job other than tearing you down. For example, some people invite their inner critic into the writing process by weaving the critic’s substantive insights into their manuscripts. Others encourage their inner critic to let loose when it comes to revising their writing. The key is shifting all that intensity away from you and into your work at an appropriate point in the development of the manuscript (not the first draft).

Ultimately, inner critics are at their most destructive when they work on us quietly and without notice. Shining a light on your critic, identifying his silly banter, and strategizing about how to work effectively with (and around) him, won’t make him disappear entirely, but will diminish a significant portion of his power over you.

The Weekly Challenge
This week, I challenge you to:

• Write at least 30 minutes each day.
• Track your inner critic’s dialogue every day this week.
• At the end of the week, take a look at the composite script and ask yourself: Is any of this true? Where are these messages coming from?
• Try to visualize who your inner critic is and begin to have a dialogue with that person whenever he shows up.
• Select and try one strategy to combat the critic’s negative message stream.

If you are regularly haunted by a hyperactive inner critic, I hope this week brings you the commitment to track your critic’s messages, the strength to question those messages, and the creativity to try whatever alternative is meaningful and empowering to you.

[Monday Motivator] Writing IS Thinking - June 15, 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’s column (Writing Rocks) generated a whole lot of email! I’m guessing that the outpouring occurred because naming what’s underneath our resistance provides a sense of relief from the idea that we are the only ones who experience debilitating perfectionism. Knowing it is a common problem among academic writers helps to normalize discussion of our unrealistically high expectations and work toward compassionately adjusting them. I was also pleased to hear that many of you experienced important personal insights by trying out the suggested strategies. Given that perfectionism is just one of the demons that underlieresistance to writing, we should keep moving forward. This week, I want to describe a problem that is often experienced but rarely discussed: disempowerment when it comes to writing.

Many of us hold an incredibly limiting set of beliefs about the writing process, the relationship between our thoughts and the physical act of writing, and what it takes to sit down and write. When I ask people to describe their writing process, what often surfaces is the idea that writing is what happens AFTER they have read everything there is to read, clearly and thoroughly worked out an idea in their heads, and have large blocks of time to empty the fully-developed idea onto the page (or into the computer). In other words, "writing” is simply the physical act a scholar engages in after she’s gotten everything figured out internally. Hand-in-hand with this exclusively mechanical understanding of writing is the sense that particular emotional states are a prerequisite for writing. In other words, people frequently tell me they need to FEEL _________ (inspired, excited, energized, confident, clear, etc.) before they can sit down and write. As you can imagine, people who need to feel perfectly inspired and have a fully formed article in their head before sitting down at their desk rarely write.

I’m describing this as problematic for three reasons. First and foremost, it’s a highly inefficient way to write and often provokes anxiety. That’s because you don’t know when inspiration is going to strike and you can’t control it. So if you’re sitting around waiting to feel inspired to write, it’s no surprise that you might experience some anxiety about writing. Secondly, if you’re on the tenure track, the length of time between completing a manuscript and its publication is just too long for you to abstain from writing until you’ve figured everything out AND feel inspired. Finally, and most importantly, when we set a broad array of conditions that are beyond our control for what must occur before we can start generating pages, it reveals a deep sense of disempowerment, distrust, and confusion about what happens when you write. In other words it suggests that writing controls you when in reality, you control your writing.

"Writing IS Thinking!"
I once attended a conference for faculty developers that rocked my world! In part, it was exciting to learn about the newest research on faculty productivity and inspiring to meet the energetic, knowledgeable, and infinitely resourceful set of practitioners who work with faculty on campuses across the U.S. I attended a great workshop led by Joanne Cooper and Dannelle Stevens. I remember Dannelle (a walking ball of energy) getting very animated when some of us described writing as what we do after our thinking is complete. In fact, I remember her exclaiming: "NO! Writing IS thinking!”

I’m a little slow in the presence of new ideas and I couldn’t really get my head around the concept that writing IS thinking during the workshop. But I have come to believe that understanding the fundamental truth of this idea is the key to overcoming disempowerment. If writing is thinking, then you don’t have to wait until you’re done reading, analyzing data, or figuring everything out to get started. You can write before, during, and after the research process. In fact, it’s the best justification for daily writing imaginable: writing every day enables you to think about your project, generate new insights, and move forward every single day! It’s also the case that it eliminates the need to feel any particular way as a prerequisite to writing because you can think about your project if you’re happy, sad, inspired, or flat-out cranky. Finally, it lowers the bar and puts you in the driver’s seat. If writing is thinking, then it feels a lot less scary to sit down for 30-60 minutes every day. I don’t have to produce a perfect first draft, I don’t have to capture a sophisticated argument on the first try, and I don’t have to generate elegant prose -- I only have to get my half-baked ideas onto paper and once they are on the page, I can see them for what they are and proceed to question, massage, and play with them while remaining perpetually open to the surprises that occur when I’m actually engaged in the writing process.

Now that I’ve described the big picture, let me suggest some specific strategies that may allow you to release yourself from any flawed beliefs you have about writing, sneak around your resistance, and slowly but surely ease into daily productivity:

Commit To Daily Writing
I know I say this every week, but it bears repeating. If you’re not writing, block out at least 30 minutes every day, Monday through Friday, for writing. Don’t just say you’ll do it, really try it for two weeks. And don’t forget to build in some accountability because trying to start a new habit alone is a recipe for misery and isolation. Whenever I work with people whose resistance comes from feeling disempowered about writing, I ask them to write every day for at least 30 minutes. When they actually write every day consistently, they are astounded to learn that: 1) they can write no matter how they feel, 2) a lot can be accomplished in a short amount of time, and 3) it’s deeply intellectually satisfying to be touching the work they love on a daily basis.

Expand Your Sense Of What "Counts" As Writing
I get lots of questions about what types of writing are acceptable during your daily writing time. If the pen is moving on the page (or your fingers on the keyboard), then you’re writing. Drafting a manuscript "counts,” but so does freewriting, generating field-notes, editing and revising, outlining, mind-mapping, describing a new idea, preparing a bibliography, consolidating reviewer comments into a list for revision, etc. In other words, anything that helps move a manuscript out the door "counts” as writing. Expanding your notion of what constitutes writing should help you reduce your resistance by making daily writing feel like a regular part of your every day routine.

Freewriting
I think freewriting has a bad rap among academics. I often hear people demean and belittle freewriting as just "writing about nothing” and I have to admit that at first, I rolled my eyes in the workshop when we did a freewriting exercise. But, according to Dannelle Stevens, the reason it works is because the initial writing "clears the dust off the road” and bring our attention to writing. When we shift to focused freewriting, we inevitably experience all manner of surprises. Your job is to get your butt in the chair and the pen moving. Once the writing starts, that’s when the thinking (and the creative magic) happens. If you would like to make a game of it, try Dr. Wicked’s Write or Die. Ten minutes on "kamikaze” mode is how I started writing this column!

Switch It Up
I’m not sure how to explain it, but there’s something that shifts in your brain when you move from writing on the computer to good old-fashioned pencil and paper. Many people find it helpful to change the mode of writing when they get stuck. It’s really quite simple, just push your keyboard off to the side, grab a pencil and paper, and start writing longhand through the problem. The changed format and tactile stimulation will help you to think differently. Personally, I keep a can of markers and a giant newsprint pad next to my desk. When I’m stuck, I just lay on the floor with my markers (kindergarten style) and start mind-mapping. This technique never fails to produce remarkable surprises and often generates a breakthrough in my thinking.

Don’t Stare At A Blank Screen
If sitting down to write feels scary because you get locked up when you see a blank file on your computer screen, then don’t look at it. Turn off your monitor or throw something over it (a sweater, a towel, a pillowcase, or whatever is handy). Remember, you control it, not the other way around. Then just start typing. Sometimes, just blocking the debilitating image of the blank screen can help you get started, and once you get started the ideas begin to flow. This technique also will help you to separate drafting from editing (a toxic combination). You can’t see what you’re writing, so you’ll be less tempted to edit it as soon as it hits the page. You can also record your voice talking through the issue and transcribe your chatter as a means of getting words onto the page.

Ultimately, the goal of each of these strategies is to disrupt and undermine the flawed beliefs that writing happens after thinking and that you must be inspired to write. Instead, I’m urging you to understand your writing and thinking as inextricably intertwined so that you can quickly begin moving on your summer writing project.

The Weekly Challenge
This week, I challenge you to:

• Write 30-60 minutes each day.
• If you experience resistance, ask yourself: What is stopping me from writing? As a first step, try some organizational tips and tricks.
• If your resistance continues, ask yourself: What’s going on here?
• If the answer is that you just don’t feel like writing, or that you can’t write because you’re still figuring out your argument in your head, try 10 minutes of freewriting as a way to get yourself started.
• If opening a new document and staring at a blank page intimidates you, turn off your screen or cover it up.
• If you find yourself stuck during your writing time, try turning away from the computer and writing longhand, recording your voice, or mind-mapping for a little while.
• Try joining some community of writers to support you as you establish new writing behaviors and beliefs.
• Get to know the faculty developers on your campus! They are a tremendous resource to help you teach effectively, publish prolifically, and find some balance in your academic career.

I hope that this week brings you a renewed commitment to your daily writing, a sense of clarity about the connection between writing and thinking, and the confidence to know that you have the power to write every single day this week (Monday through Friday). No matter how you feel or where you are in your project, you can choose to sit down and get started today!

[Monday Motivator] Writing Rocks - June 8, 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.

During the summer months, I receive lots of questions about when to write, how to organize an unstructured day, and – once you better understand your resistance -- how to maneuver around it on a daily basis. These are great questions! In this Monday Motivator I'll describe my own personal system in hopes it will give you some ideas to model, adapt, experiment with, and improve upon as you answer these important questions for yourself.

My approach to writing has always been guided by a search for empirically-documented best practices and a spirit of experimentation. This comes from the fact that I’m a social scientist by training anda skeptical person by nature. In other words, I am only willing to try writingskills and strategies that have been empirically tested and repeatedly found to be effective for most people, under most circumstances. But I also constantly find myself taking the strategies that work generally and putting my own spin on them so they work for me. For example, I learned early on in my career that dailywriting, using a timer, and alternating periods of writing and rest are the keys to developing a consistent, sustainable writing practice and increasing research productivity. But no matter what results other people get, I only believe what works for me and I adapt it with my own flavor.

Over the years, I’ve taken those core skills and developed my own personal way of using them that is designed to address my particular forms of resistance. I’m going todescribe it to you to encourage you to experiment with best practices, illustrate how to take your own unique form of resistance into consideration,and validate those of you who like to customize the skills and strategies youlearn here at the NCFDD. I call my system WritingRocks. It's quite simple! There are three types of writing rocks in my system: pebbles, stones, and boulders. Those terms are really just symbolic ways that I think about my writing time. The pebbles are 15-minute blocks of writing time, the stones are larger 30-minute blocks, and a boulder is a whopping 45-minutes of uninterrupted writing time. Let me describe each in a little more detail so you can understand how they relate to my resistance.

PEBBLES
Pebbles are designed to address my primary level of resistance. I don’t know about you, but every morning when my writing time rolls around, I just don’t wanna write! I would rather doanything (check email, fold laundry, etc..) than write. That’s because my biggest problem with writing has always been getting started. Once I get started and get into the writing, I’m just fine. I sometimes even lose track of time! So for me, the challenge is all about getting mybodyguard to relax so I can get my butt in the chair and fingers on the keyboard. What I do is strike a deal with the big guy: I’m only going to write for 15 minutes. For whatever reason, this feels like such a tiny amount of time that it eases any fear and anxiety. What could happen in 15 minutes? To get started, I set my timer, drop down into my writing, and keep going until the timer goes off. And everyday, I’m freshly shocked and delighted by how much work I can get done in 15 minutes (I typically plan easy, concrete, and discrete tasks for my first pebble of the day). When the timer goes off, I stop immediately and give myself a 5-minute break. And here’s the key: I set my timer for the break! I know it sounds crazy, but my resistance can flare up during the breaks in the form of procrastination and avoidance. The timer going off tells me the break is over and it’s time to get back to work.

STONES
Once I’m warmed up, I move into a longer block of writing. I call these stones and for me, they are 30 minutes of concentrated writing, followed by a 10-minute break at the end. On most days, it’s this second block of time where I get into the more intense thinking and writing work. For me, it’s best if I have a SMART goal for that time block (SMART = Specific, Measurable,Attractive, Realistic, and Time-Framed). An example would be: I will draft 3 ugly paragraphs of my introduction by 10:00 am.

Now, I know my resistance quite well and once I have the nerve to start a longer block of writing, my bodyguard ramps up into high gear. He will throw anything and everything at me in rapid succession, each of which is designed to take me away (physically or mentally) from the writing task at hand. For example:

• I’m hungry
• I’m thirsty
• I have to pee
• I’m cold/hot
• I have to track down that citation right now!
• This isn’t the right music for the mood, let’sgo to iTunes and look for something more appropriate
• Maybe I should email ________ to get some additional clarity on this issue.
• Here’s a great idea for a completely different paper, maybe I should write on that nowinstead of this boring piece in front of me
• Maybe I should stop and go read the latest news/research on _______ before I waste time writing.

Sound familiar? I keep a pad of paper next to my keyboard and simply write down each diversionary thought as it occurs. If it’s truly important, I can act on it after the 30-minute block is complete. As you can imagine, once I’m done with my writing and it’s time for a break most of those seemingly urgent needs no longer feel pressing. Again, I reset the timer for my break and I can do whatever I want until it goes off again.

BOULDERS
Every once in a while, I drop a 45-minute boulder (followed by a 15 minute break) into my writing routine. It’s rare for several reasons: 1) big blocks of writing time activate the greatest resistance for me, 2) long writing times make me cranky, and 3) my busy schedule rarely allows for big chunks of time to write. That said, I do occasionally have either a lot to accomplish in the face of an immediate deadline, a task that could be complete in one slightly longer writing period, or extra time in my week that can accommodate a big block of writing time.

One thing I know for sure, boulders have a way of bringingout my inner-critic. For me, longer periods of time activate a qualitatively different kind of resistance than I experience in shorter periods. It’s uglier, it’s more below-the-belt and it’s typically aimed at undermining my confidence and self-worth. In other words when my inner-critic sees a boulder in myschedule, she slams a red bull and comes out swinging fast and furious: Who do you think you are? Nobody is going to publish this crap, so why bother? And even if you can fool someone into publishing it, do you really want everyone who reads it to realize how stupid and silly you are?

Ugh! Because of my inner critic’s drama, I know that the only way I’ll get through a boulder is to have another human being waiting on the other side. Whether it’s a call from my writing buddy, reporting in to the nag, or a mid-day group chat with my Faculty Success Programcrew, I won’t make it through a concentrated 45 minutes unless I can run screaming into the presence of someone else at the end of that writing time. For me, it’s both an accountability mechanism and a lifeline. Whoever I’m talking to knows to ask me how my writing went and I’m motivated to give a positive report (when I finish a boulder, I call myself a "rock star”!). With all of these requirements, you can understand why I often prefer to shoot for a pebble and a stone rather than head straight into a giant boulder that will trigger greater and uglier forms of resistance as well as require more organized external accountability.

Needless to say, the whole reason I enjoy the image of various sizes of writing rocks is because I understand writing as a slow, long, and gradual process. I’m currently working on a book manuscript and it takes lots of time and sustained effort to complete a draft. But I want to feel good about completing each step of the process, not just the end product. Imagining my daily time as writing rocks provides me with a visual image that each day matters, each day I take an important step forward, and each 15, 30 or 45 minute writing rock contributes in a concrete way to the cumulative end product.

The thing I love most about my Writing Rocks is that they help me understand my time differently. Getting accustomed to writing in small blocks means that I feel empowered to block 60 minutes out of each day knowing that I can get a lot done. I also enjoy the flexibility it gives me to choose how I will spend my 60 minutes based on how I'm feeling on any given day. Maybe it will be a pebble and a stone or maybe I'll go straight in for a boulder. And finally, having varying sizes of writing blocks means I can write anytime I have even as little as 15 minutes. In fact, I finished drafting this Monday Motivator while I was sitting in a waiting room. How? My esthetician was running 10 minutes late and I arrived 5 minutes early: 10 + 5 = 15 unexpected minutes in my life. That was just enough time to bang out a little pebble instead of staring out the window, eating or drinking something just to keep myself busy, or mindlessly checking Facebook with my phone. Isn’t that great! With writing rocks, an annoyance turns into an opportunity!

I frequently hear that the specificity and detail that we provide in our NCFDD materials are helpful to imagining what might work forYOU! I’ve described my Writing Rocks as a way to stimulate your thinking and ask yourself: what is my current writing process? Is it working for me? Do I have realistic expectations? Have I tried short bursts of writing or do I assume that writing requires long and agonizing hours at a time in front of the computer?

The Weekly Challenge
This week, I challenge you to:

• Write every day for 30 – 60 minutes (in whatever configuration of pebbles, stones or boulders suit your fancy).
• Ask yourself: what is the relationship between the length of my writing time and my resistance?
• If you don't know the answer, try tracking your resistance and your writing time this week.
• Once you observe your own patterns of resistance, try experimenting with different blocks of writing time and accountability mechanisms to see what works for you.

I hope this week brings each of you a spirit of experimentation and compassionate curiosity 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 planning a new semester.

[Monday Motivator] Why Aren't You Writing? - June 1, 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 met a faculty member several years ago at a conference (I’ll call her Claire) who wanted advice about writing. Our conversation began like many I’ve had recently, with tears in response to a negative and critical annual review. Claire is a brilliant social scientist, incredibly hard-working, and passionately committed to her scholarship, her institution, and her students. While Claire is an award-winning teacher, and far exceeded her college’s service expectations, her publication record was significantly below her department’s standards. Her chair was clear that her lack of publications was problematic and she left the meeting feeling an almost desperate sense of urgency to move several manuscripts forward this summer.

Of course, I suggested she make a summer plan and join a writing group that would motivate and support her throughout the summer. Last week, when I was writing about resistance to writing I couldn’t help but think of Claire, so I reached out to see how she was progressing. Unfortunately, she had done very little writing. When I asked Claire what was holding her back, she had difficulty identifying anything specific. She readily acknowledged having more free time and fewer responsibilities than she did during the academic year. But despite knowing that this was an important summer for her to be productive and having a general sense that she should try to write every day, somehow her days kept flying by without any progress on her manuscripts.

I think there are lots of Claires out there. For me, she typifies both the most common and the most basic type of resistance: when you have a vague sense that you SHOULD be writing and you NEED to write (in order to finish your dissertation, get a job, win tenure, be promoted to Full Professor, etc.) but you’re not putting conscious, direct, and intense energy into the actual act of writing. As a result, lots of other work gets completed and other people’s needs get met, but at the end of the day your manuscript is left untouched. This type of resistance is grounded in relatively simple technical errors that academic writers frequently make. The good news is that this type of resistance is the easiest to resolve because a few simple tips and tricks will get your fingers to your keyboard (or pen to page).

What’s Holding You Back?

If Claire’s story sounds familiar, then I want to encourage you to reflect on your writing habits and gently ask yourself: What’s holding me back from developing a daily writing routine? I like to start with people’s writing habits first, and then move down into the psychological blocks (I’ll be tackling those one by one for the rest of the summer). For this week, I want you to focus on your writing behaviors. Maybe you haven’t set aside a specific time for your research and writing, or you’ve set aside the wrong time to write, or maybe you just have no clue how much time particular writing tasks take so you consistently underestimate the amount of time that writing requires. Maybe you imagine you have to do everything yourself and therefore very little gets done. Maybe the tasks you’ve set out for your writing time are too complex, so when you sit down to write you’re spending all your energy trying to figure out what exactly you’re supposed to be doing (instead of actually doing it). Maybe you don’t know what you need to do, or you knew but you forgot because you think planning and list-making are for anal retentive people and you’re more of a creative type. Or maybe your space is just so disorganized that you keep spending your writing time looking for things you need on your hard drive, in your files, or in your office.

Claire was committing all of these technical errors! Like Claire, many early-career academic writers remain steeped in writing habits that were formed when they were undergraduates. Because student writing is largely driven by external deadlines, few of us developed consistent writing practices, and instead, we end up waiting until shortly before a deadline, engaging in multi-day writing binges, and then avoiding writing again until we face another external deadline. This week, I want to encourage you to observe your current writing behaviors for these common technical errors. If you identify one of them, consider trying one of the following strategies:

Error 1: You haven’t set aside a specific time for your research.

Block out at least 30 minutes in your calendar each day, Monday through Friday, and show up at the appointed time. Treat it with the same level of respect you would a meeting with someone else (start on time, end on time, turn your phone off, and only reschedule for an emergency).

Error 2: You’ve set aside the wrong time for writing.

Too many people treat their writing as an activity they "hope" to have time for at the end of the day, after everyone else's needs have been met. If writing is the most important factor to your long-term success as a scholar, it should be given your best time of your day. If you’re just starting to develop a daily writing routine, try writing first thing in the morning (even if you’re not a morning person).

Error 3: You have no idea how long writing tasks take.

The most common complaint I hear from academic writers is that everything takes far longer than expected. Keep track of your time, particularly for repetitive tasks. This will not only give you an accurate assessment of how long writing a proposal, constructing a table, or reviewing the literature actually takes, but it will also help you to set realistic expectations for the future.

Error 4: You think you have to do everything yourself.

Ask yourself what tasks must be done by you and what tasks can be delegated to other people. Often there are many writing and research related tasks that can be delegated or outsourced to others (checking citations, proof-reading, editing, etc.). Don’t use "I don’t have a research fund or research assistants" as a reason for doing everything yourself. Sites likeUpWork.com and Elance.com can provide quick and incredibly inexpensive assistance on a wide variety of tasks.

Error 5: The tasks you have set out are too complex.

Take a piece of paper and pencil and map out whatever it is you need to do. When I feel overwhelmed by a big task, I write the big-overwhelming-thing on the right side of the paper and a stick figure (me) on the left side. Then I work my way backwards from the overwhelming thing to myself by asking: What are the steps that need to be accomplished to complete this?I keep breaking it down into smaller and smaller steps until I’ve reached the tasks I can do today. It will also help you to uncover if there are aspects of a project that you don’t know how to do, so you can pinpoint areas where you will need to seek assistance.

Error 6: You can’t remember what you have to do.

Make a list. Get all of the things you need to do out of your head and onto a piece of paper in one place. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, electronic, or synced with some gadget or gizmo. A note card, post-it note, or your paper planner will do fine to capture all of your to-do tasks. Start the week with a 30 minute planning meeting where you determine what needs to be done for the week and place each of those items in a specific time block in your calendar. If they don’t all fit (and they won’t), then figure it out how to delegate, delete, or renegotiate the deadlines on the least important items.

Error 7: Your space is disorganized.

Set aside time to organize your writing space in a simple and easily maintainable manner. I recommend Julie Morgenstern’s Organizing from the Inside Out. It’s a quick read and will help you to develop a simple and sustainable way to organize your office. If you find yourself working on multiple computers and can’t keep your electronic files straight, consider ways that you can either access your other computers when you’re away from them (GoToMyPC) or keep all your computers automatically synced (www.dropbox.com).

Each of the strategies will be super-charged by attaching support and accountability. For example, daily writing is easier when you have a writing buddy or accountability partner. Organizing your office doesn’t have to be drudgery or a solitary task: partner up with another disorganized colleague and help each other. Or better yet, find a highly organized person (they often love to organize others) and offer to exchange their organizing skills with some skill that you have in abundance. And as always, there are tons of professionals who are happy to nag,coach, edit and/or organize you if you have more money than time. Once you learn and implement a few new writing strategies, you will either be off to the races with your writing, or your resistance will resurface in new and more frightening ways (more on that next week).

The Weekly Challenge

This week, I challenge you to:

• Write every day for at least 30 minutes
• Identify what (if any) technical errors are holding you back from writing each day
• Experiment by trying one new strategy this week
• If you feel reactive to trying new strategies to increase your writing time, ask yourself: what beliefs are keeping you from experimentation?
• If additional resistance emerges, welcome it with curiosity, engage it in conversation, and identify the behaviors and the feelings associated with it (you may even want to keep a resistance log).

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] Meet Your Bodyguard - May 25, 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.

Greetings,

This summer, I'm dedicated to walking alongside all of you who are tackling big writing projects, trying to establish new writing routines, and needing to experience explosive productivity. If you’ve been following this column so far, you have a clear summer plan that you’ve discussed with your mentors and you have created some form of writing support and accountability. By now, you’re very likely facing a new challenge: the intense difficulty of actually writing every day. Unlike the academic year, when we can attribute any lack of daily progress to teaching and service, summer lays bare the reality that daily writing brings up all of our stuff. This week, I want to describe what happens to many people when they engage in daily writing and give that "stuff" a name and a face.

Identify Your Resistance

It's an odd situation, isn’t it? You’ve been waiting all year for the summer so you can have the time, space and energy for your writing. You've been fantasizing and yearning for three months of quiet and solitude so you can finally finish your Big Unfinished Project. You planned to write every day and maybe even imagined losing track of time while immersed in your writing projects. And yet, when you actually sit down to write, all of a sudden you experience an unquenchable desire to ____________ (fold your laundry, check your e-mail, organize your pens), or you suddenly realize you need to read one more ______ (book, article, report) before you can start writing, or _________ (insert seemingly urgent crisis) appears and distracts you, or maybe you find yourself gazing out the window and realize that life is too __________ (short, painful, unpredictable) to spend a sunny day inside writing. In short, procrastination, avoidance, and denial arise to distract and derail you.

Why is it that we so often find ourselves wanting to write, but then end up not writing at all?Most academic writers I know genuinely want to share their ideas and findings, and also need to complete writing projects in order to finish their degree, get a job, and/or obtain tenure. And yet, whenever we put our butt in a chair to write, along comes our resistance! Barbara Sher describes resistance (when you want to do something, but you just can’t seem to do it) as an innately human defense mechanism that is uniquely designed to protect us from doing anything dangerous. In other words, our resistance is like an internal bodyguard that rises up to keep us from any risky situation.

Having an internal bodyguard is mostly a good thing! On one hand, it keeps us from engaging in potentially harmful activities. On the other hand, our inner-bodyguard can't tell the difference between physical danger and emotional danger so he gets activated whether we are standing at the edge of a cliff or sitting down to write a book. Both feel dangerous and raise anxiety. In response, our bodyguard leaps into action to stop us from engaging in this activity in the form of procrastination, avoidance, and/or denial. He will do whatever it takes to stop us from jumping off that cliff, or engaging in what feels (for many of us) like an equally dangerous act: the production of knowledge.

Fear Drives Resistance

Wherever there's resistance, there's fear underneath it. So it might be helpful to ask yourself:When I sit in front of the computer to write, what fears emerge? It may be fear of success, fear of failure, fear of being publicly judged, fear of not being good enough, fear of being revealed as an impostor, fear of speaking truth to power, or fear that writing about other people’s pain will trigger your own. There’s no need to analyze or judge these fears, just to identify them, because knowing what you’re afraid of will help you to design strategies to maneuver around them.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to go into greater depth about the different types of resistance that are common among academic writers for the purpose of suggesting a broad array of tips, tricks, and strategies you can use whenever your bodyguard shows up for duty. If you keep in mind that he can't quite tell the difference between real and perceived danger and that he genuinely wants to do his job of protecting you, then you will quickly realize that the trick to sneaking around your resistance is to keep your inner bodyguard in a nice, comfortable, and relaxed state. For this week, it’s enough to imagine your resistance as a big bodyguard that's always ready to protect you, identify when he’s present and what he’s up to, and then look him in the eye, shake hands, and get acquainted.

Personally, I love the idea that my resistance is really my very own built-in bodyguard at work! First of all, it brings me a sense of compassion and understanding towards the procrastination, avoidance, and denial I experience when I sit down to write every morning. Each time I feel an irresistible urge to check Facebook, a sense I can’t write until I color-code my sock drawer, or suddenly imagine my current writing would be better if I read someone else’s book first, I can recognize that resistance as my bodyguard at work. Secondly, it frees me from the debilitating idea that if I could just fix one of my many personal flaws, then I would be free of any resistance to writing. There’s no sense in believing that if only I were more disciplined, more motivated, and more focused, writing would be quick, easy and enjoyable. That’s just not how it works. And finally, it's helpful to me to understand that my resistance is ALWAYS going to be with me, because it's part of my human packaging.

The Weekly Challenge

This week, I challenge you to:

• Write every day (Monday through Friday) for 30-60 minutes.
• Notice what happens when you sit down to write.
• Consider what it would be like to understand your procrastination, avoidance and denial as protective impulses.
• If you can’t seem to start writing, gently ask yourself: What am I afraid of?
• Identify all the ways your resistance manifests this week without judgment, shame or self-recrimination.

I hope this week brings you the willingness to identify your resistance as it occurs, a spirit of openness toward new ways of understanding your procrastination and avoidance behaviors, and a sense of compassion toward yourself in the process.