From Blocked to Breakthrough Creativity: Learning the Art of Stress-Free Writing
Session Abstract
Feeling blocked in your writing? Putting the “pro” in procrastination? Ready for a creative breakthrough? In this session, you’ll learn inspirational, stress-free methods designed to help you generate ideas (the ideas everyone wants to have!), get unstuck (and stay unstuck!), and share your work (brilliantly and fearlessly!) with the world.
Target Audience
This session targets individuals within the field of adult education who are feeling blocked in their writing. As a former adult literacy instructor, turned professor of adult education, and now a creativity and academic writing coach, I know firsthand the writing requirements of the profession. Audience members may include graduate students struggling to overcome procrastination and finish their theses or dissertations, professors wanting inspiration to help them complete their academic journal articles, administrators seeking ideas to help them complete their reports, or adult educators who want motivation to get through the writing assignments related to their jobs.
Session Description
I am proposing a concurrent session for professors of adult education, graduate students, adult education teachers, administrators, and really any individuals in adult education who are feeling creatively blocked when it comes to their writing and are looking for strategies for cultivating creativity. Many professionals struggle with feeling creatively blocked and stuck in their writing (Maisel, 1995; Bane, 2012; Badonsky, 2013). As professor of adult education know turned professional creativity and academic writing coach, I know the reality of losing touch with one’s writing and feeling creatively unfulfilled. I will provide participants with inspirational, stress-free writing methods so they can understand their own creative block practices, recognize at which point they block in the six stages of the creative process, and understand how and why they procrastinate. Participants will learn five key strategies they can use again and again to help them move past procrastination and onto generating ideas, getting unstuck, and feeling confident sharing their writing with the world. This session will use innovative techniques from the fields of creativity, writing, and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) (Hoobyar, Dotz, & Sanders, 2013). Writing is an important aspect in so many adult educators lives. This session will help to make writing stress-free.