By Angelica Ribeiro, PhD
“Should you listen to music more often?” The answer is yes, and here’s why: to create moments of joy. Kelly McGonigal, author of The Joy of Movement, says, “Listening to music that you love is one of the simplest ways to produce joy.” What’s impressive is that the benefits of joy go beyond making you feel good. According to McGonigal, “Joy also affects things like your motivation.
Do you ever find yourself writing in circles, struggling with decision fatigue or a lack of purpose in your scholarly writing? Do you wish you had a structure for your writing process that felt expansive and flexible enough to account for the complexities of scholarship creation?
Join us Wednesday, February 21 from 1-2 p.m. ET for a one-hour webinar, Navigating Your Writing Process as a Purposeful QuEST. Margy Thomas, PhD, of ScholarShape will walk you through the simple yet powerful QuEST framework as a way of structuring your writing projects in any genre.
Hello fellow TAA members, thank you for reading this fourth post of “The Psychology Behind Writing.” With monthly offerings, we’ll get into some of the psychological processes that support our academic writing as well as the ones that derail our writing. And, we will definitely explore strategies for amplifying the positive and mitigating the negative. Read the first post, second post, and the third post in this series.
As many of you might know, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is structured with 4 personality scales, each with two “opposite” preferences that rest on a continuum of intensity for that personality scale.
If you happen to be stuck in your academic writing, the good news is:
(1) You are not alone! This happens to all of us.
(2) There are remedies. Stay with me and read on.
First, ask yourself, “Why am I stuck?”
You might be stuck because you don’t know what to say.
OR
You might be stuck because you have too much to say.
For our writing productivity and fulfillment, of course we need time management, self-discipline, and all the pomodoros (Cirillo, 2018) we can muster. Sometimes, though, as ardently as we apply these, they don’t seem to be enough. I’ve found three additional perspectives very helpful. These are “laws” that are described simply and eloquently by author, speaker, and spiritual and practical teacher Deepak Chopra (1994) in The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.
Are you looking for a greater understanding of the mind-body connection in academic writing? Do you want to know how to get into the optimal writing flow and avoid writing blocks burnout while completing your writing project? In her 2023 TAA Conference session, “Discover the 5 Cs of Your Optimal Writing Flow,” Dr. Michelle Rivera-Clonch, Co-Founder of Writing in Depth: An Academic Writing Retreat, will pull from physiological psychology to help authors understand their brain/body reactions to experiencing adversity in the writing process. It will focus on identifying ways that invite us to work in an optimal writing flow by incorporating the 5Cs in your writing practice: Calm, Cool, Connected and Creative.
