The Write Mindset: A Three-Part Blog Series

Thursday, April 12, 2018 Expert Advice , mindfulness , Writing Process 1 comment

On our blog, we’ve written about breaking writer’s block by finding a suitable writing environment, turning off your internal editor, and carving out writing time despite a busy schedule. However, as writers and humans, sometimes what blocks us—writing or otherwise—is a lack of mindfulness and self-care. While none of us in the Writing Center are self-professed experts on the subject, some of us would like to share with readers some mindfulness and self-care tips we have for getting into the “write” mindset to ensure we aren’t our worst enemies when it comes to creating and sticking with writing goals and our busy schedules. We’ll be sharing these tips over the next few weeks here on the blog.

For the purpose of this blog series, mindfulness can be understood as the mental space between our rational mind and our emotional mind—like a happy union between our logical thinking selves and our feeling selves that helps us make wiser decisions which, for instance, can help us reach our goals.

For many of us, mindfulness is a skill and not something we are automatically born with. For instance, your rational mind might remind you Saturday morning that you need to begin working on drafting that paper that is due next week, whereas your emotional mind might convince you that you can put it off another day for x, y, or z reasons. This is not to say that the emotional mind is wrong; rather, if our emotional mind greatly conflicts with our rational mind, or if it takes center stage in our actions and decisions, we might tend to find ourselves in situations that may eventually lead us farther away from our goals—education, career, or otherwise.

You can read all of our posts in this series as they're published.
Finding Your Drishti: A look at how the mind and body work together, as well as tips for how a yoga practice can enhance your writing practice

Creating Mindful Workspaces: A glimpse inside of the workspace of one Walden Writing Center Instructor and how mindfulness can influence physical spaces

Managing Time Mindfully: A Writing Instructor's strategies for balancing work, writing, and family using simple time-management techniques

With this in mind, we hope you enjoy our Instructor posts on tips for getting into The Write Mindset and we hope you share with us your own tips for harnessing this mindset as well!

The Walden University Writing Center strives to support student writers in all of their academic writing pursuits. The Instructors, Editors, and Leadership of the Writing Center recognize that learners and writers have different needs. As such, we produce a variety of resources intended to support writers where they are, when they need them.