Approaching the Writing

Prepare to Save Your Sanity

Assembling your dossier forms an odd mix of procedural box-checking and high-stakes assessment of your career-to-date. Stress may visit you, but panic need not take hold.

File Hygiene

You can reduce stress by ensuring that you save your files of work-in-process in well-organized ways. Make a practice of incrementing each file’s name with each iteration of improvement, so you always have something recent to fall back to if, literally, lightning strikes while you’re working on your computer. Back up your well-organized directory of dossier materials to the cloud or an external storage device every other day, or weekly.

Can’t Finish If You Haven’t Started

In addition to healthy electronic hygiene, save your sanity by starting on your tasks, working through them methodically, pacing yourself for steady progress. Are you feeling like whaler Captain Ahab staring at the towering white of Moby Dick when you gaze at the open, blank document of your first statement draft? Type the document’s criteria for your review into your open file. You can copy the language defining each criterion and the words specifying the standards you will demonstrate that you meet. Retyping that language will give you power over the words and generate ideas about the evidence you can provide.  Make notes.

Talk Nicely to Yourself

If your internal patter—the mental chatter commenting on anything and everything—is habitually cruel, please notice it. What you are doing is challenging enough, without beating yourself as you do it. If you wouldn’t speak to a friend or colleague the way you are speaking to yourself, please stop.  DO talk to yourself as you would talk to a friend undertaking something hard. Complement what you can, and say thanks for staying with it.

Steady as She Goes…

Your most important asset, you will find, is not your pile of published research, evidence of excellent pedagogy, or tally of service provided. It’s your sanity, your perspective, your recognition of continuity that the person who did all those things is writing about them now, will be the person who calls the dossier complete, submitted, done. Safeguard your sanity, make steady progress, and trust that all will unfold well, or well enough.