If you’re new to Daily Prompts, you may want to start at the beginning of the series here.
Be sure to scroll to the bottom of this post for a PDF version and other notes.
Year______ Month_______Day______Consecutive Practice Days_____Missed Days______
Day
Gratitude: (Spend a few moments writing about the things you’re grateful for. Lined pages are on the PDF below)
Vision: (Write out your vision for the future you want to live. Lined pages are on the PDF below)
Affirmations: (Write out 1-5 affirmations of who you want to be. Lined pages are on the PDF below)
Action: (Write out one simple action step you can take today that brings you closer to your vision Lined pages are on the PDF below)
Now that you’ve begun to build your Vision Board, let’s come back to the present.
Future thinking is only as valuable as it is inspiring. Yes, you can plan for things, but we are not nearly as adept at predicting the future as we feel we are. In fact, most of the time we get it wrong. The Vision Board can help us keep that inspiration in front of us, but it’s our Daily Practices that are the most accurate tool for planning.
Like I’ve said, you can’t steer a parked car, but when you’re moving you can make corrections and choose new routes. Since The Lyceum Method tries to avoid specific, time-bound, attachment to outcomes, should we abandon measurements altogether?
No.
But instead of fooling ourselves into thinking that we can predict the future, we’ll use the past to quantify data and help us make better decisions about our actions for today.
Your Daily Practice is the most important aspect of The Lyceum Method. It’s what moves you toward your vision. It moves your Vision toward the present. It changes us. And now that you’ve had a taste of developing your Daily Practice, you can now begin to use it as a guide.
If you’re happy and excited about your results, keep going.
If you’re disappointed, first ask yourself if you’ve fallen into the goal-setting trap again. Are you attaching your happiness to some specific outcome?
If you think your practice is good but could be better…well, that’s a different thing! How wonderful! You’ve discovered an opportunity to improve.
You might assume that since I don’t want you to set specific, measured goals, that I want you to abandon metrics. What I really want to emphasize is that it’s better to use metrics from experience instead of metrics from an abstract future. So yes, track your progress. Track your numbers. If your practice is fitness related, track your weights lifted and reps completed. If your practice is an art form, compare your work from the past week to that of 6-weeks ago (better yet, a year ago).
It’s difficult to improve what you can’t measure. Just realize that your Daily Practice is the tool that will allow you to measure real results, instead of the goal-setting trap of trying to measure up to expectations.
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!