Today’s Tuesday Reading is from Jim Dezeick, Leadership Coach at MOR Associates. Jim may be reached at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.
Practices: The 28-day daily practice to firmly root a new behavior, the weekly balcony practice to reflect and strategize, and new habits. These are the DNA of MOR. While I am erstwhile a mild-mannered coach on our team, I have earned the reputation of being the drill sergeant of practices. That said, I don’t push anything your way that I don’t do myself, and I’ve traveled 28-day practice paths over a thousand times over the decades. In fact, long before you could put it on a Scrabble board, I’d gamified practices as a vehicle, for professional and personal growth. In this season of post-holiday adjustment, a cold mid-winter stretch here in the northeast, I am offering up some favorite practices and tips to encourage you to embrace the joy of practice.
First, my oldest go-to: the 3-line journal, 28 days.
You find a quiet space and stop what you are doing. Three easy breaths. Then you enter a phrase or two, in turn, to these three questions: One, what am I up to? Two, how am I feeling? Three, what am I going to do next? The 3-line is a presence practice, a good way to set an intention for the day, refresh at mid-day, or nourish the work-to-home transition. In trying times I will commit to a second or third go daily. It calms me, makes me smarter, and cuts the current crisis down to size. You can apply the 3-line generally as I just described or you could focus it upon a specific goal or project. When I do my end-of-week balcony reflection, I re-read the week’s 3-lines to get a better look and feel for what went on and what I learned.
Number 2 is Bingo.
Say you’ve got a goal in mind and you’re looking for practice, but there are so many possibilities you don’t know where to start. Well, pull up a new Excel doc and create a 5×5 grid. Then next to it, brainstorm any activity that might fit the bill. Want to become a savvy AI consumer? Read an article about AI personal productivity, create a Dall-E image, find an online course, brainstorm what you want from AI, or talk to somebody whose organization is into it. Then, once you’ve brainstormed, take the best of your brainstorm, adjust each so they are 1 – 30 minutes long, and then populate the bingo board with them. Finally, determine how many you will go for each week. Then start knocking them off, filling the bingo board as you do, with the objective of completely filling it. You will find that with each activity, you will learn more about your goal and likely discover an ongoing 28-day practice that will give you the traction and impact you’re looking for. This winter, I bingo-boarded a bunch of local places I’ve always wanted to visit that I’ll get to during the season on a once weekly cadence. And, as with the 3-line, my weekly balcony check gives me a vantage point for reviewing and planning.
Lastly, consider systemizing your practices for sustainability.
I always recommend success with just a single practice on your first 28-day run: you practice, reflect, and score. Personally, I’ve considered 20 days of success an overall win, and 24+ extraordinary. Over time I’ve built up to four practices a week. I rarely go with more than two new ones at a time. The other two of the four will be ‘remedial,’ like detoxing from the sugary holiday. Right now, here’s my mix: a 15-minute eve tai chi practice on a new move from class that week (new), 30 minutes on a new writing project (new), and 20 minutes of aerobic exercise to tide me through the Boston winter (remedial), and no in-between meal eating (remedial). The new ones grow me forward while the remedials rebalance.
There are so many possibilities, and surprises – like the time I was refreshing my planning skills and, for fun, mocked up a hiking vacation to Yosemite National Park, aware, at the time, that there were no reservations available [but whoa, when I looked, there were] [and I went] [and it was fabulous], 28 days of conversational Chinese phrases before visiting my grandchildren in Taipei [fortunately their English was good], 20 minutes daily on an audiobook to help give audiobooks a chance [greatly enriched time in the car]. Bottom line: The right practice – modest, daily, a pinch of challenge – at the right time can move the world or, maybe, change your life.
Parting Thoughts
Practices can be amazing fun, like dopamine fun! But you already know that, so please send me some of your favorite practices – fun, productive, nourishing, unexpected – and if I get a bunch, we’ll post them back your way. From the practice drill sergeant to you: may you surprise yourself in a wonderful way in 2025!
Where are you with the 28-day practice habit?
Last week, we considered a word of the year, and asked about where you want your intentionality to be in 2025:
- 39% said way more intentional
- 45% said somewhat more intentional
- 10% said similar intentionality as last year
- 6% said less intentional
Wow! It’s not often that we have such a varied distribution in these surveys. 84% of us want to be more intentional. One of our goals is that these Tuesday Readings provide a dose of inspiration each week as you consider your own intentionality. Jim is a guru at practices, and he provides us with actionable and effective steps to increase our intentionality.