Be sure to scroll to the bottom of this post for a PDF version and other notes.
If you’re new to Daily Prompts, you may want to start at the beginning of the series here.
Year______ Month_______Day______Consecutive Practice Days_____Missed Days______
Day 26
Gratitude: (the free PDF below features lined entries for your journal practice)
Vision: (the free PDF below features lined entries for your journal practice)
Affirmations: (the free PDF below features lined entries for your journal practice)
You can’t be a good dancer without going out and getting clumsy with it first. To build strength, stamina, grace, agility, balance…even to learn the basic steps, you have to practice the steps.
You can visualize yourself dancing.
You can listen to the music,
read up on how to dance,
take instructions from experts,
and watch your mentors move.
But until you get out on the dance floor and take those first awkward steps, you’ll never improve.
I’ve noticed an interesting contradiction in my past self. I used to get really hung up on the importance of my actions. As if what I did was so important that I dare not fail, or make a fool of myself for doing something stupid. So I would end up doing little if anything.
Funny, my actions were so important on the one hand that I dare not make a mistake. On the other hand, they must not have been that important if I could go on neglecting action altogether.
Procrastination can show up in really weird ways.
One of the greatest tools I’ve discovered for avoiding procrastination is to set the bar so low that it seems silly not to take action.
I’m currently writing my third book and I author a weekly blog, a weekly email called The Lyceum Letter, and some form of daily content on YouTube. I also journal a minimum of three pages every morning.
I decided I wanted to be a writer, so I make sure that writing is what I do. But keep in mind, that this volume of creative time began as a 10-minute daily practice.
Just 10 minutes.
Your entire life can change in 10-minutes per day.
I know that sounds like fluff at the moment, but if you stick with The Lyceum Method, you’ll see what I’m talking about. A consistent daily practice of 10 minutes has an amazing cumulative effect. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The point for today is to avoid procrastination by starting with a commitment that seems so easy you’d feel foolish for not doing it.
For me, 10-minutes per day sounded ridiculously easy to prioritize. For you, it may sound like a lot. That’s O.K.
Consider your Vision for a moment. Come up with a few ideas for taking action on that Vision. What are some things within your grasp today, right now, that you could get up and do? No matter how mundane it seems at the moment. Anything that takes you just one degree closer to your vision is important enough to do.
Now, out of the ideas you came up with. Choose the lowest hanging fruit. What’s the one easiest, simplest, cheapest, fastest action you can take today to move toward your vision?
Write it. Transfer it to your planner if you use one or set a reminder in your phone to get it done.
Action: (the free PDF below features lined entries for your journal practice)
Now go do it.
Daily: (The pdf version below contains three lined pages for your daily journal)
NOTE:
The above is an excerpt from the upcoming The Lyceum Course Journal. We will be releasing it here for free as a Daily Prompt blog post. If you would like a physical copy, we will link to it here once it is released.
Suggested Use:
I realize a daily journal prompt on a blog is a little weird. This is how I would suggest using it: Open your favorite note-taking software such as Evernote, copy and paste this post into it, and write your daily entries there.
OR
Download a PDF version of this post here. Feel free to print it out, or access it through a PDF editor where you can type in your daily entry.
Collaborate With Me!
This post series is a first draft of the future book. If you have suggestions, comments, or see errors, please reach out so that I can make the final product more valuable for you and the rest of the community. Your feedback is greatly appreciated!
