Choose Your Own: Lifestyle Practice

Choose Your Own Lifestyle Practice for This Week

Simple Instructions:

1. Look back over the last seven weeks of Lifestyle Practices, choose one, and repeat it this week. It could be one you liked the best, got the most benefit from, or found the most challenging and want another try.
2. You may also choose a Lifestyle Practice from a previous Whole Life Challenge if you have an old favorite.
3. Select one for the week and stay with it for all seven days. No bouncing around.

Watch this video for an explanation of this Lifestyle Practice from Whole Life Challenge co-founders Andy Petranek and Michael Stanwyck.

Why Is This Practice Important?

The Whole Life Challenge Lifestyle Practices are a modern exploration of mindfulness in your daily life. They address things that may pull you away from being present and ask you to engage in your life in simple, practical ways.

You can think of the Lifestyle Practice Habit not as eight separate practices in every Challenge, but as eight expressions of the singular habit of being present and connected. Each week is different, but the aims of each Lifestyle Practice are very much the same.

Because you are an individual, different Lifestyle Practices will appeal to your personality, your sense of yourself, and your ideas of what helps you become present. Look back with that in mind and make a choice. It’s up to you this week — and, really, every day — how you practice mindfulness in your life.

Here is a list of the Lifestyle Practices from this Challenge:

• Create Your Future: Write three short-, medium-, or long-term goals out by hand every day.
• Support Your Teammates: Comment on three posts or reflections from your teammates each day.
• Meditation: Spend ten minutes in silent introspection or inspection of your thoughts.
• No Media Meals: Turn of phones, tablets, computers, and the TV during meals.
• Bedtime Ritual: Create and follow a ten-minute routine to prepare yourself for sleep.
• See the Beauty: Take three photographs each day of things you find or decide are beautiful.
• Journaling: Spend ten minutes journaling in a style of your choice.

For More on This Practice

This week on the podcast, Andy spoke with veteran CrossFit Games athlete Val Voboril about the special way she balances being a mom, wife, and full-time teacher with her physical aspirations. For some quick and useful advice, click through to the podcast and listen at 1:00:30 where Andy asks Val some great reader-submitted questions regarding workouts, nutrition, motivation, and sleep.

Michael Stanwyck

Michael Stanwyck is the co-founder of The Whole Life Challenge, an idea that developed during his seven years as a coach and gym manager at CrossFit Los Angeles.

He graduated from UCLA with a BA in philosophy as well as a degree from the Southern California School of Culinary Arts, and feels food is one of the most important parts of a life - it can nourish, heal, and bring people together.

Michael believes health and well-being are as much a state of mind as they are a state of the body, and when it comes to fitness, food, and life in general, he thinks slow is much better than fast (most of the time). Stopping regularly to examine things is the surest way to put down roots and grow.

He knows he will never be done with his own work, and believes the best thing you can do for your well-being starts with loving and working from what you’ve got right now.