An excerpt from The Power of Daily Practice by Eric Maisel, PhD
Are you trying to finish your novel? Do you want to build your own business? The impact of having a consistent practice focused on your life goals cannot be underestimated. Prolific author and creativity coach Dr. Eric Maisel has been working with artists and creative people for more than thirty years. His new book, The Power of Daily Practice: How Creative and Performing Artists (and Everyone Else) Can Finally Meet Their Goals (New World Library, September 8, 2020) is a thorough and holistic approach to meeting the goals and challenges of creating an authentic and effective daily practice.
We hope you enjoy this excerpt from the book.
In my experience, the simpler the practice, the more powerful it is and the more likely you are to maintain it over time. One reason that it ought to be kept simple is that if there is even a whiff of difficulty or complexity attached, it becomes really hard to crack through everyday resistance and get to your practice.
You wake up in the morning. Maybe you’re going to write, and maybe you’re not going to write. On one side of the ledger is your desire to write. On the other side are all of your bad feelings about your current book manuscript. Those bad feelings produce a heaviness that as likely as not will prevent you from writing. If, however, you have a simple daily practice in place that begins with a super-simple mantra, like “I write every day,” you’ve increased your chances of writing on that day, even as heavy as you feel.
If you feel heavy and you also have to face a complicated practice with lots of demands (A thousand words every day, damn it!) and lots of moving parts (Is the temperature sixty-eight degrees? Is the light coming in from the east? Has the rooster next door crowed three times?), that emotional heaviness combined with practice heaviness is a recipe for a writing day skipped.
Simplicity is both a cognitive sort of thing and a felt sort of thing. As a cognition, it might be a thought such as “I’m off to my practice” or “Time to practice” or “Here I go!” As a felt sort of thing, it is the same body lightness that comes when you anticipate something being easy. It’s like a sigh and a smile rather than a groan and a frown. It’s like a pillow rather than a rock. Picture something being really easy. Feel the ease in your body?
You might combine these two ideas, of simplicity and of ease, into the following ceremonial mantra: “I’m light, and I’m off to practice.” Imagine how lovely it would be if every day you were able to say, “I’m light, and I’m off to practice.” Can you remember the childlike simplicity of running out the door to play? There was nothing in the world easier. Be as easy as you can be and keep your daily practice as simple as is humanly possible.
Remember that we’re talking about your practice itself and not the content of your practice. The content of your practice may be very complicated. Maybe you’re working on a hard problem in physics or in the app you’re creating. Your practice can still be blissfully simple. Even if the song you’re writing is challenging, your practice can still be simple. Even if the mathematical problem you’re trying to solve is knotty, your practice can still be simple. Keep this important distinction in mind.
Robert, a workshop participant, shared his experience:
I got very excited about the idea of a life purpose practice where every day I would look at my list of life purpose choices and decide which one or two I was absolutely going to get to on that day. If I’d kept it that simple, it would have been a beautiful thing! But for some reason I had to overlay it with all sorts of demands: that I prioritize my life purpose choices, that I tackle at least one from my top three choices every day, that I spend an equal amount of time on each life purpose choice so as not to shortchange any, and fifteen other demands.
It started to feel like the worst kind of job imaginable! I had to chuck that whole way of looking at my practice out the window and return to the beautifully simple starting place: looking at my list each morning and making a choice or two. Period. That made all the difference! It turned a chore into a light thing.
Sandy explained how it worked for her:
I had a hard time defining my practice. I wanted to write, I wanted to paint, I had health issues I knew needed addressing, I was craving a spiritual practice or maybe something like a meaning-making practice...I couldn’t make up my mind what my practice was “really about.” So, of course, I never started it, and I never engaged with it.
It wasn’t working trying to decide what was most important. Each thing was important in its own way. I was about to throw in the towel, and then I had an inspiration. I decided that I would take “simple” to mean just showing up. I would just go to my designated daily practice space in the spare bedroom and do whatever needed doing on that day. I would just go there and stay put for an hour.
That kind of made for a magical change. One day I would work on my nonfiction book. Another day I would research alternative health treatments. Another day I would sketch. I realized that it didn’t matter what I did — each thing had its own importance and its own resonance. My practice simplified itself to “I show up for an hour.” And during the next two months I got a lot written, I created a new health regimen, and I made a lot of meaning, one hour at a time.
Food for Thought
What does a simple practice look like to you?
Is it your nature to make things more complicated than they need to be? If so, what might you do to rein in that impulse when it comes to creating your daily practice?
Explain in your own words how a practice might be kept simple even if the content of the practice is difficult or complicated.
Eric Maisel, PhD, is the author of more than fifty books on creativity and personal growth, including The Power of Daily Practice. Widely regarded as America’s foremost creativity coach, he writes the Rethinking Mental Health blog for Psychology Today and facilitates creativity and deep writing workshops around the world. He lives in Walnut Creek, California. Find out more about his work at EricMaisel.com.
Excerpted from the book The Power of Daily Practice. Copyright ©2020 by Bridgit Dengel Gaspard. Printed with permission from New World Library.