What’s the only way to get things done?
Learn to harness the awesome power of daily practice.
If we are forced to do a hard thing, like get out of bed, get into the commute, and get on with our taxing day job, we grudgingly do it, maybe getting demoralized in the process, because we need to pay the bills and because we have little choice in the matter.
But if we aren’t forced to do a hard thing, if doing it is optional or at our discretion, and even if know that we ought to do and even if part of us would love to do it, we are quite likely to skip it, and not just for today but for weeks, months, years, and decades at a time. In this way, our online business doesn’t get built, our novel doesn’t get written, the cause we care about doesn’t get our support, new relationships don’t get formed, and our physical and mental health get ignored—again.
This is the nature of our species. We can be very dogged in our attention to obligatory things, like all those emails that pile up at work, and toil deep into the night getting them answered, but not find ten minutes to pay attention to the music we say we’d like to play, the skill we say we’d like to learn, or the meditation practice we say we’d like to begin. In the end, we burn out at work and never write our songs, learn those new skills, or champion that meditation practice.
In my experience as a therapist and coach, working primarily with creative and performing artists for thirty years, the best way to change this picture is to learn about and buy into the idea of daily practice: the idea that those things that you find important but that are discretionary will only find a place in your life if you pay attention to them every day. If you try to get to them now and then, you likely will never get to them. That’s our truth. Because that’s our truth, the answer—often the only answer—is to pencil them in every single day.
This means changing how you live. In the upcoming series of thirty posts, I’ll explain the reasons for doing this, how exactly to do this, and how to meet the challenges that are bound to arise as you try to do this.
This series accompanies the appearance of my latest book, The Power of Daily Practice, and I invite you to learn more about daily practice either via the series or via the book. If you want to make just one change that will make a huge positive difference in your life, getting behind the idea of daily practice is that change.
The important things in your life really do matter—here’s how to start getting to them!
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