Use meditation and mindfulness in your major project

Use spiritual principles or practices in your important academic project. “What!” you cry, “Academics and religion/spirituality don’t mix, like ice cream and boiled kidney!”

But . . . as you wrestle with your Major Work, do you crave less anxiety, more confidence, better work flow, even real answers to all those knotty quandaries?

Meditation and mindfulness can help. In my academic coaching practice, I’ve found, to my surprise, that many graduate students in their dissertations and professors in their articles use spiritual methods to help them through the Purgatory of academic writing. And I encourage them, primarily in two ways—meditation and mindfulness.

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Talk to me: Using dictation software to write

How often do you talk to your computer?

Last month I discussed the growing sophistication of programs that read your writing aloud from word processing programs such as Word or Pages.

Now, let’s look at the programs that allow you to speak your words into your work without using your fingers. Some might be old school enough to remember the first clunky dictation software. It involved a CD-ROM and lots of instructions and commands. Well thankfully the industry has greatly improved while becoming infinitely easier to implement.

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How to get back on track

You meant business. You gathered all of your research materials and notes. You came up with a plan and set a timeline. You had two solid sessions writing and made some good progress. Things were moving along. Yes, deadlines to disseminate your research and work were looming but the train was moving forward.

Then life started to intervene.

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Are school and spirituality irreconcilable?

Does spirituality go with school, specifically graduate school? School requires your intellect; spirituality requires surrendering your intellect. School lives on logic and realism; spirituality survives on faith.

I used to hold fiercely to these assumptions. Spirituality and school were completely contradictory, I thought, or at least separate.

Privately, I’ve often applied spirituality in my longtime academic practice coaching and advising doctoral candidates as they complete their dissertations. I forgive an ornery client, ask for guidance on a daunting project, let the right assuaging words flow through before a difficult meeting.

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Why weave writing into your teaching?

This is the fourth and final article in a series on finding hidden and unexpected pockets of time to write within your tried-and-true teaching practices. By paying more attention to what we do when we teach, we can spend less time teaching and more time writing without sacrificing quality feedback. I’ve previously written about streamlining your student feedback and grading practices, without sacrificing pedagogical value, to create more time for your writing. In this final article, I will explore several ways to enlist student help in meeting your own writing goals while providing a role model as a scholar.

Impossible you say! “My academic writing has nothing to do with my teaching.” However, when you weave aspects of academic writing into classroom activities, both you and your students benefit.

Let’s look at some powerful classroom activities that will advance thinking and writing for teachers and students alike.

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Tips for anxious writers: Analyze feedback

Dealing with feedback can be difficult. If you’ve had your work rejected, it is particularly difficult to use the feedback you received effectively. Anxiety naturally runs high in such cases, and it’s not that rare for a writer struggling with anxiety to avoid dealing with feedback. But it is crucial to use feedback effectively: the feedback we receive is the best guide to how to improve our work and get it accepted. In this post, I want to suggest a plan for dealing with feedback, along with some perspective that might help reduce some of the related anxiety.

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