What if you suspect you’re avoiding practice by setting up your practice space?

For most people this isn’t a problem.  Even if we think we’re avoiding the work by improving the work conditions, we aren’t.  We’re just used to expecting ourselves to work in un-conducive conditions.

No matter how it feels, usually the time we spend improving the conditions really does move us directly into efficiently practicing.

But ….

If you start getting suspicious that you’re avoiding your practice by setting up your practice space, then …

• Stop
• Take a deep breath
• Get your timer, set it for 20 minutes, and just go through the motions of practice in this imperfect state (no timer? then just sit down and work without a timer)
• Don’t get up and fix anything
• Don’t get mad at yourself
• Keep breathing and keep moving
• Just do whatever you can with what you have – this is a deeply valuable practice itself.

As you’re doing this, just jot down quickly anything you think of that you need to change in order to improve your practice conditions.

The minute you’re done, just fix/change ONE of those things (the easiest one), so that the next time you practice it’s one tiny bit easier.

Keep doing that until you have the workspace you need.  You will also have developed a conscious tolerance for imperfect conditions, and a method for how to improve it one step at a time.

By the way … this process is never over.  Your needs change, your conditions change (whether you change them or not), things break, cool new tools become available (and you have to learn how to use them … and they may have flaws … or their manuals may be written badly). So continue the habit of jotting down what’s not working for you, and then changing it one step at a time.

This is about you making things work for you.