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 46
Gratitude:________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Vision:__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Affirmations:______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Smallest Effective Dose
You’ve probably noticed with the Action prompts that I’m asking you for small simple steps. Why not more?
- The Lyceum Method is a daily practice.
Goal-setting is slogging along a journey for a future destination. The Lyceum Method is dancing the dance. So I encourage a small, easily attainable Daily Action so that you enjoy a sense of accomplishment and progress every day. It’s a way to change how you identify yourself. If you give yourself a monumental to-do list or a single project that is actually weeks’ worth of work, you are likely to feel ineffective, bogged down, or disappointed at the lack of progress in relation to the bigger task. By setting the bar low, so to speak, it’s an easy win. With enough wins stacking up day after day, you begin to identify as someone who is winning. You’re someone who is building their Vision. You’re a person who makes progress.
- Procrastination usually occurs when we build something up in our heads to be worse than it will be.
If you give yourself just one, simple task to do. You’re more likely to do it. Remember- contemplation about a future outcome is what stokes the fires of fear. The longer you have to deliberate about doing something, the more it grows in your head. Better to take a small step daily and take the small win, than try to be a super-productive person and feel like a loser when you fall short. Keeping that one Action as attainable as possible removes much of the resistance to getting started.
- Something is better than nothing.
This statement sounds so patronizing, but don’t take it lightly. Doing something is infinitely better than doing nothing. If fear or overwhelm is causing you to avoid action, you’re just pushing your Vision away into a future that may never come. Taking one small Action every day has an amazing, cumulative, even exponential effect.
- The big MO…
If you’ve ever had to push a stalled car, you’ll know that the hardest part is getting it moving. It feels almost impossible at first, you push as hard as you can and you’re not even sure you feel any movement. But with sustained effort, it slowly begins to roll. Once you get it going…watch out! It can develop so much momentum that pushing is no longer needed, breaks are!
Small Daily Action steps can build this sort of momentum. If your Vision is authentically yours, and not some expectation you have of yourself, you’ll find the small Daily Action steps will be something you look forward to. Then you’ll want to do more. Then you’ll experience the runaway momentum of a Vision whose time has come!
- Focus is priceless.
Social Media platforms make money by selling your focus to other corporations. That’s one of many reasons I’ve completely ditched all Social Media accounts. But my point here is that your ability to focus is worth a lot. Pay attention to, and focus on the very next step that can take you closer to your Vision and you will be helping yourself live with a sense of clarity and purpose.
Action:______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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!
Dori Zabari
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Dori Zabari
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