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 47
Gratitude:________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Vision:__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Affirmations:______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Action:______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Practice makes progress.
Practice won’t make you perfect. Perfect is boring anyway.
Practice will make progress. Progress feels great!
I can’t emphasize enough the value of Daily Practice in service of your Vision. There are 1440 minutes in every day. Surely you can spare 10 of them to Practice living your Vision.
Remember the momentum analogy? Well, that only works if the effort is consistent. That’s why, if I had to choose, I would rather write for 30 minutes every day than have one whole day a week set aside for writing. A Daily Practice builds the big MO.
Setting a timer for your Daily Practice helps you focus, helps you avoid procrastination, and helps you to avoid results-oriented thinking in favor of progress-oriented thinking. I don’t strive for a word-count in my writing every day, I strive to improve for 30 minutes.
“Good” days, “bad” days, all the same. I’m victorious every day I practice whether I’ve had a revelation wrapped in eloquence or a sloggy bout of stalled out nonsense. The product is secondary to the person. My personal development takes precedent over the results.
By gamifying the Practice, you can build a sense of interest in your consistency. Playing the game of high-score with your consecutive practice days trains your brain to be interested in returning to your Practice. Distractions abound. But your focus can be trained like any other skill. Playing it as a game is a great training tool for your skill of focus. See how many days in a row you can get with your timed, Daily Practices.
Hindsight is 20/20. Setting a goal to achieve is a bit like trying to predict the future. A Daily Practice, on the other hand, allows you to see your progress and analyze better potential actions based on what’s already happened. Even though you are not setting results-based goals, that doesn’t mean we don’t care about results at all. Journal about your results. Video your Daily Practice sessions. Take before and after measurements every month. It doesn’t matter how you do it as long as you do it. Take some objective measurements of your Practice sessions so that you can not only see your improvement, but you can adjust your approach if something isn’t working.
I don’t list my Daily Practices every day, because it’s too redundant. If you would like to journal about them, use the provided “Daily” section. Personally, recommend getting a habit-tracking app for your phone. There are many options that help you track your consecutive days and high scores. Set a reminder alert on your phone if needed. You can use a wall calendar for this as well. If you have three Practices, use a different symbol or color for each, and make the mark on the calendar after each completed session. Make sure your Keystone Practice is the priority. See how many days in a row you can fill up! Whatever method, find a way to track your consecutive Practice sessions.
The more present you are for your Practice, the closer your future Vision becomes.
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!
