This was a question from a very good friend of mine.    My initial reaction was, “Noooo???!” “It’s your life. The whole idea is that you get to invent what your practice looks like.”

I didn’t in fact say this, it was what was going on in my head, and in my head I played out the most likely scenario of his response, which would have been something like, “So what the hell good are you then? What value do you provide to people?”

While I would have had a good answer to this hypothetical response, I knew that this thought process was an indication of my resistance to something important. Once people understand the concept of living their life as a practice, the next place for them to go is, ” … and how do I start?”

The obvious place to look is at the guy who’s talking about the practice of your life. Duuuuhhh!? And I saw from my thought process that I was resisting being that person.

So I accepted my friend’s request, for several reasons, not the least of which was being of service to a friend, but also as a means for me to refine my thinking of how to give structure to people who see value in living their lives as a practice.

I’m already putting my thoughts down for my book “The Practice of Your Life”, and this caused me to revisit the outline. The first thing that occurred for me was that this is HARD. Living your life as a practice is a lot of work.

From what sells in the market, this is not a good sign.   People are all for the quick fix, even if they have to spend a lot of money to get it. They’ll do whatever it takes, or even spend whatever it takes as long as it will be over and they can go back to an easy life, watching TV, playing sports etc. The only difference being that they would then be happy, rich, good-looking, in a relationship and/or getting laid all of the time by gorgeous model types that did everything they wanted in bed and agreed with everything they said.  (Just my fantasy.;-))
But the fact is this: living your life as a practice will seem like a lot of … well, … work.

In future posts I’ll take you through what this “work” looks like.