Reading Time: 2 minutesPractice a Skill Each Day This Week
Simple Instructions:
- Every day this week practice something that is important to you.
- You can choose something brand new, something you used to practice, or even something you’ve been doing and feel you need a little more commitment to.
- Stick with the same thing all week. Improvement in or even growing to like a skill takes practice. Decide before Saturday what your activity is going to be and practice it all seven days.
Watch this video for an explanation of this Well-Being Practice from Whole Life Challenge co-founders Andy Petranek and Michael Stanwyck.
Why Is This Practice Important?
Few of us are born with the innate talent to do exactly what we want to do. Even the gifted among us have to hone our skills if we want to excel in our natural abilities. Without practice, our gifts gather dust and our plans remain fantasies. Who of us doesn’t have something in the back of our mind that we wish we were better at or could return to doing — like playing the piano or guitar, or learning gymnastics, or painting, or learning a new language?
It doesn’t matter if the skill you choose to practice this week is physical, mental, or even spiritual. Becoming proficient at anything requires regular, diligent effort. There is no way around this. And if you want to be good at something, you have to be willing to get through being bad first. So be patient with yourself and remember it’s about the journey, not the end point.
But the great thing about practice is that it means anything you want to be good at is within your reach. Are we saying that with enough practice you’ll end up in Carnegie Hall? We are not. But perfection and “world class” are not the same as mastery and pure enjoyment. You don’t have to be the best to love what you do. But you’ll need the skill to do it, and that takes a little work every day.
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.
