Tips from the NCFDD Monday Motivator: October 2022 edition

Monday, August 15, 2022
What's Holding You Back

by Kerry Ann Rockquemore, PhD
Founder, NCFDD

Anthony Ocampo, PhD
Academic Director, NCFDD

Ultimately, our hope is that there is a piece of writing and research that is keeping you tethered to the reason you are here in the Academy. We know it's hard to hold on to that, and we hope you are staying measured with your ambitions because gentleness is a matter of survival. Like we say every week, try to find just a half hour each day to touch the writing. You can draft sentences, you can edit, you can storyboard, you can record a voice memo of your ideas-whatever you can do to shepherd the project forward counts.

You may be discovering that even a modest goal of 30-minutes a day is a challenge, especially if daily writing is a new habit. Right now, 200 to 400 words are all we can manage these days, and we're celebrating that. So, whether you are managing to sneak in that half-hour a day or whether daily writing feels like a lost cause, we want to do a little bit of mid-term self-assessment. Ask yourself a few questions (gently): How is the writing progressing? Have I attempted to develop a daily writing routine? How am I progressing toward some of the goals on my strategic plan? How does it feel to even ask myself these questions?

Let us be clear: this is NOT an invitation to beat yourself up. This is simply an opportunity to assess what's been working and what hasn't been working and then experiment with some adjustments that could help the writing move forward.

Certainly, there are folks out there who are merrily moving along on their writing projects. We know that for some, writing functions as your coping mechanism of choice. But if you're like us, we know that there are more than a few moments of feeling stuck. The question is, how do we get unstuck?

In our many conversations with faculty, both past, and present, we realized that the obstacles faculty face fall into what Julie Morgenstern describes as technical errors, external realities, and psychological obstacles. Of course, this is just a typology, as there are certainly overlaps between these buckets. We've simply adapted this framework for you as academic writers to help you identify possible adjustments you can make to help you get unstuck and help the writing flow more smoothly.

Technical Errors

The following technical errors occur when you are missing some relevant skill or technique, and they are the easiest to fix.

• You haven't set aside a specific time for your research and writing
• You've set aside the wrong time to write
• You have underestimated how much time particular research or writing task takes
• You're the wrong person for the job (but you think you have to do it all and that asking for help is a sign of weakness or incompetence)
• The tasks you have set out are too complex (i.e., items like "finish my book" are on your to-do list)
• You can't remember what you have to do because you don't believe in lists or calendars
• Your space is disorganized, so you can never find what you need when you need it and/or
• You don't have a support and accountability mechanism for your writing

Psychological Obstacles

These are the deeper issues that underlie our resistance to writing. For now, let's just try to become aware of which (if any) of the following may be keeping us from writing every day:

• Unrealistically high expectations
• Feeling disempowered around research, writing, and/or your intellectual abilities
• Fear of downtime (during which you may have to deal with difficult issues like what you really want to do with your life and/or relational problems)
• Needing to be a caretaker at the expense of your own needs (i.e., your helping others is out of balance, so you feel resentful, unappreciated, and overwhelmed)
• Fear of failure
• Fear of success
• Fear of disrupting the status quo and/or speaking the truth to power
• Fear of completion
• A hyper-active inner-critic
• Unclear goals and priorities, and/or
• Extreme conflict avoidance (i.e., you spend a lot of time angry, worrying about unresolved conflicts, and feeling too emotionally drained to engage in your intellectual work)

External Realities

These are situations or environmental factors that are beyond your control. As a result, the following obstacles aren't necessarily things you need to overcome (in fact, they may not be able to be overcome at all). Instead, we ask that you exercise patience, self-understanding, and compassion around these external realities:

• Health challenges (including both physical and mental health)
• The physical materials you rely on to work and/or live are in transition (you don't have access to the office or the library. Your office is also a space for your child/ren to do distance learning)
• You are in a life transition (i.e., new baby, divorce, unexpected elder care, a loved one has passed)

We realize this is a long list, but we hope it helps you to identify the challenges you're facing in your writing. Learning to observe and name your resistance to writing is an important step forward in using your creativity to move through and around it. This type of continual self-evaluation coupled with small behavioral adjustments can make a big difference between hoping to write and actually writing each and every day. The number one thing we need you to do is to be gentle with yourself.

The Weekly Challenge

This week, we encourage you to do the following:

• Take 30 minutes to observe, evaluate, and reflect on your writing and project goals this term. Refer to your Strategic Plan to gauge your progress.
• Name and celebrate the successes that you have experienced.
• Consider the list of technical errors, external realities, and psychological obstacles, and ask yourself: Where am I getting stuck? How can I get unstuck?
• Pick one area that is under your control, and generate potential solutions. For example, if you haven't set aside a specific time for writing, block out time in your calendar every day this week and show up.
• Re-commit yourself to at least 30 minutes each day for your writing.

If you haven't written your strategic plan, it's never too late. We believe that going through this process will help you to get a sense of what you can (and cannot) do before the end of the term. We hope this week brings you the courage to patiently assess your progress, the joy of celebrating your successes, and the creativity to experiment with solutions that can help you make progress on the work that is meaningful to you.