” What ya doin”, I said to my housemate, ( the one that just graduated with honors in biochemistry and genetics). ” Practicing making your special dinner” she replied! It had occurred to me to ask her to make a special Chinese dinner before she goes home to China. ” Hmm” I said and thought! I guess practice is how you get honors in a double science major.”
I started to think about the idea of Practice. I think it is a little old-fashioned and a bit quaint. For me, it conjures up tortuous hours of “practicing” the piano against my will or “practicing” sewing when I just wanted to get to the “real” thing.
I started thinking about babies when they learn to walk, I don’t think they are ‘practicing” what they are doing! And when they fall they don’t quit and label themselves ” not good at walking”!
I don’t think I am the only one who feels this way about ” practice”! Am I? I have clients who want to make changes in their lives. often one of their first thoughts is ” I can’t’ Or “It will be hard”, meaning too hard. We live in a world of photoshop and seemingly instant perfection in others and so we say to ourselves, things like ” I can’t” or I am too something or other to do that.
What if we changed our thinking? What if we became more baby-like in our approach? What if we looked at practice as something other than tortuous hard work?
Take yoga for example. We practice yoga. We go to our mats each day (well I do) in order to go through the postures and breathe. Not to practice making a mythical perfect downward-facing dog ( Ruffus does that), but we go to our mats to practice yoga.
After more consideration of this practice thing, I realized two important points, important at least for me and maybe for you as well. The two points are desire and judgment.
Desire means, do you even want to do the thing that may require practice? So my housemate wants to make a lovely and tasty dinner leading her to want to practice making it! Babies want to learn to walk and so even though they don’t call it practice they in fact do it over and over again until they can walk! When I was a kid trying for the Gold President’s Physical Fitness Award, I practiced throwing a softball which was my weak link for hours and I loved it. Oh, how I wanted that award ( I got it)!
The second point is judgment! I think babies observe what doesn’t work when they are learning to walk, so they evaluate things like balance and slippery rugs but they don’t judge themselves or their ability to learn to walk. When I am skiing, I evaluate my turns and learn from them but I don’t judge my skiing or myself.
Quite a different experience than feeling forced to do something that you don’t even want to do. Like me and my piano lessons. I was never going to want to be or be a concert pianist and so practicing the way I was told to do, felt like torture!
I don’t know that I have a conclusion to these musings. I do know that for me I am changing my thoughts about “practice” to something more gentle, something more in the moment, something less result-oriented even knowing that results occur from “practice” like babies start walking and clients stop smoking and we grow and change. Maybe we choose to do things that we want to do, rather than trying to be perfect at everything!
I am hoping that these thoughts find their way to those who need them.
Susy is a Life Coach. She talks the talk and walks the walk of Coaching!
