academic coach

Establish Habits

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“Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.”

                                                        – Horace Mann

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We all know people with impeccable habits. These enviable folks write each day, exercise each morning and never lose their keys, because they put them in exactly the same place each time they enter their home.

I’m envious, aren’t you?

While we may never be as disciplined as the people who were born to be organized, we can certainly improve our self-discipline and create daily habits of orderliness.

How should we develop new systems and behaviors? With gradual, small efforts and patience.

Here are some guidelines for developing habits:

1) Be Patient – Understand that cultivating a new routine will take time. Research shows that new habits take at least 21 days to form. When trying to implement a new system or behavior, make a chart to keep track of your actions, and wait at least three weeks before you consider your habit established.

2) Start small – Don’t try to change multiple behaviors at once. Pick one positive habit you’d like to develop. Some people launch an enthusiastic make-over plan and decide to begin writing first thing every morning, catch up on a year’s worth of academic journal reading, start a rigorous exercise program and implement a new office filing system. All at once. This is one reason that New Year’s Resolutions tend to unravel a few weeks into January. Instead of trying to change everything simultaneously, pick one area of focus.

3) Be Concrete - Choose something tangible and measurable to change. It is difficult to assess whether you’ve met vague goals. For example, instead of deciding to “stay current in my field of research”, try to “read one new research article a week.” Be as specific as possible. Instead of deciding to “write every day,” try to “write first thing in the morning for 30 minutes.”

These three tips are just the beginning of implementing new habits. Developing desired behaviors is such an important component of becoming a successful academic that I will devote next week’s Monday Motivator to the same topic.

By the way, the habit I’ve established is writing for a half hour first thing each weekday morning. It is surprising how much you can accomplish over time with a daily half hour.

Which habit will you develop?

Giving Thanks

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“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity.... It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.”
                                                                           Melodie Beattie
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For many of us, Thanksgiving is a hectic holiday during which we rush to join family, braving hordes in the airport or on the roads. It is easy to lose the meaning of the holiday: that it is a time to reflect and experience thankfulness.

Did you know that giving thanks reduces feelings of depression?

Martin Seligman, a well-known psychologist who studies the art and science of being happy, has found that daily reflections on gratitude can significantly improve your mood and alleviate depression. In one study, after just two weeks, 94% of subjects reported a decrease in depression after conducting a daily thankfulness exercise Seligman calls “The Three Blessings.”

Here’s how you conduct this happiness-building exercise: each evening, before bed, write down three things that you feel grateful for. The items or events may be large or small. Good weather, talking with a friend or eating a delicious meal are as legitimate as thankfulness for your career, your children or your partner. The exercise is especially useful if you focus on your role in creating the chosen event.

For example, instead of writing “I am grateful that my class went well today,” you might write “I am grateful that I taught a successful class today.”  Instead of “I’m grateful to be an academic because it gives me a great deal of flexibility in my schedule,” write “I’m grateful that I’ve chosen a career that gives me flexibility in my schedule.”

All too often we focus on the challenges and stresses of our daily life instead of the aspects that are positive. Consciously cultivating our thankfulness can increase our happiness.

This holiday week, try counting your blessings. You’ll be thankful you did.

Happy holidays,

Mary

P.S. You can learn more about Martin Seligman, and take questionnaires to measure your levels of happiness, at his Authentic Happiness web site.

If you want to learn more about Seligman and the cultivation of a gratifying life, I highly recommend his books "Authentic Happiness" and  "Learned Optimism."

Finding Editors

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"There are a number of people without whom I could
not have written this book, but I hope you don't
hold that against them. They are all fine people,
and they had no idea how it would turn out."

- Dave Barry

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Last week I lauded the benefits of working with
an editor.

As I acknowledged, the challenging is finding a
talented and simpatico editor to help polish
your prose.

Here are some examples of academic/editor matches
based on the experiences of my coaching clients:

One academic I work with hired another doctoral
student in English to read her dissertation drafts.
Now this client is a professor in her fourth year of
a tenure track position. She still sends articles
and book chapters to the same editor. As you might
expect, this long-term relationship means that my
coaching client's editor knows the subject matter
extremely well.

Another person I work with shared all his work
with two close friends in his department when he
was in grad school. Now he's in his second year
of a tenure track position and still shares
outlines and drafts with those two friends. In
fact, he telephones one of his friend/peer-editor
overseas to talk through sections or paragraphs
when he gets stuck.

Some doctoral students I've coached have been able
to use campus resources as a free provider
of excellent editing services. And other students
have hired editors who advertised their services
at campus writing centers. One faculty member I
work with found an editor via an internet service.

Recently, a faculty member I work with hired a
former student to edit her work. This was tricky
because my client had to make sure that she would
not have the graduate student in a future class. She
wanted to make sure to in avoid any conflict of
interest. Having an editor has halved the amount of
time it takes this assistant professor to revise and
resubmit articles. Now she doesn't get caught up in
perfectionism because she knows that someone talented
and savvy about the field will be checking over her work.

I've recently discovered a talented editor.
She’s a professor - a sociologist by training and an
editor by temperament,-Alex Howson who specifically
edits the work of academics and graduate students and
has decided to teach adjunct courses instead of a
tenure track job because she likes editing. Because
she has written two academic books and numerous journal
articles while juggling the demands of research and
teaching, she understands the pressures academics are
under to produce timely work that is well written and
that meetsthe exacting criteria for scholarly work.
You can reach her at http://www.thistleeditorial.com.

What about me? Do I have an editor? Of course. Two.
Their names are Liz Brown and Alison Fields and they’re
great. (When you see typos or grammatical errors in my
writing it is because I didn't get my material to
either of them to proofread.)

Do you have an editor?

P.S. If you have found an editor via one of the
editing services advertised on the web, I would
really like to hear about your experience. There
are several services that specialize in editing
dissertations or other academic writing and it
would be very useful to me to know whether any of
the services are competent and useful. Please
email me if you have tried one of these services
and let me know whether your experience was positive
or disappointing.
Thanks so much for helping me help more people!

Find an Editor

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Fine writers should split hairs together,
and sit side by side, like friendly apes,
to pick the fleas from each other's prose.

- Logan Pearsall Smith

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Old habits die hard.

Thus we have difficulty moving from an audience of one for our writing to a potential audience that is international.

When we were undergraduates, only our professor saw our written work. When we are graduate students, we typically have an audience of five - our committee members. Then, when we are professors, we are publishing to reach as many scholars as possible.

Ideally, the growth in our reading audience invites new habits. We need to seek out feedback early and often.

When we were undergraduates, it would have been "cheating" to have several friends read, critique and edit our work. When we are graduate students, having peers help us with our writing is allowable - laudable in my opinion - but we must still make sure that our work is independent. Too much help is "cheating."

However, when we are professors, any and all help is a boon. We are no longer trying to prove that we have the right to call ourselves scholars; that was the role of our doctoral program. Now we are out to contribute to an academic body of knowledge and the more comprehensive and clear our writing, the better.

We need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that getting editorial help is somehow "cheating," and we need to become comfortable with the idea of showing drafts at various stages to our peers and mentors.

When I work with doctoral students, I recommend that they show and discuss early outlines of their work with their advisor. Many advisors, understandably, prefer not to read incomplete or rough drafts and it is appropriate to wait to give them a dissertation chapter that is fairly polished. If your advisor prefers to see work in progress, by all means provide it. If not, seek feedback from friends in your program.

Editorial help becomes even more important when you are a junior faculty member and no longer have the experienced eye of an advisor to rely upon. Try to find colleagues willing to look at early drafts of your articles. Hire someone to edit your work before it goes out for review at journals or publishing houses.

One of the benefits of developing a network of editors and informal reviewers is that you will become less of a perfectionist about your drafts. Rather than worry whether a piece of work is good enough to send to a journal, you'll work towards a reasonable draft which friends or your hired editor can tweak and critique.

Finding a good editor is a challenging task, so next week I'll devote a post to ways of finding someone to help you with your writing.

Those of you who already have an editor: How did you find someone to work with?