Five tips to taking your practice the the next level.
Are you feeling a little stagnated in your practice? Do you need a kick in the butt to start taking things to the next level? Do you feel like your heart is in the right place but you’re not motivated to be consistent in your self-care? There are five things that you need to do in order to make sure that you are consistent in your practice which is going to take your practice to the next level.
Tip 1) Have a specific goal.
Find a part of your body that you want to work on or maybe choose a pose that you really want to be able to do. Having a specific purpose to our practice will usually drive us towards success whereas having too many goals can often water down our effectiveness
Tip 2) Keep your daily practice bite sized.
Check in with your teachers to help you map a 15 minute sequence that you can work on your own to start to advancing towards your goal. If it’s too long, you’re less likely to “be able” to make time for it. If it’s more compact we will be more consistent. And remember, you can always add on!
Tip 3) schedule your practices in advance.
If you schedule your practice, then it becomes a specific target to aim for. The moment that target is missed, you reschedule. If we leave our scheduling to, “when I have free time later,“ we often don’t make the time later; before we notice, the practices is missed all together and then it gets too late in the day to even bother.
Tip 4) Create either a spreadsheet or a list to check off successful practices.
Have dates on the calendar that you can cross off when you hit your daily practice goal or simply write it down like a to do list to check off. Checking off a list of accomplishments feeds the soul and increases levels of I feel-good-ness. It also will help us to take inventory and look back at the week to realize whether or not we’re being consistent and then we make adjustments if they need to be made to ensure that the practices happen.
Tip 5) Get an accountability partner.
Have somebody to check in with on your daily practice. You can either share your spreadsheet with them or what I do is I have a small group of people who we send time lapse videos of our practices to each other. If you’re not going to practice that day you need to tell the group. This holds us more accountable since we are seeing ourselves through the eyes of a like-minded friend.
Now you may not need all of this. But if you’re anything like me this can be the key to you really advancing in your practice which of course helps us to advance in our self-care. This formula has worked for me. I hope it does the same for you. Let me know if you have any questions. I can’t wait to hear about your progress.
Namaste,
Chris
