When I am working with a client who is trying to establish (or reestablish) a creative habit, our initial plan always involves two things 1) teeny tiny practices 2) disproportionate rewards.
The teeny tiny practices are usually very small creativity sessions – 2 minutes of writing, a single doodle on the edge of a notebook, 1 minute of dancing.*
The disproportionate rewards? They can be anything at all but they have to be WAY more of a reward than the (apparent!) effort of the work.
That might look like a person deciding to do a 2 minute writing practice every Friday for the next month and rewarding themselves by going out to dinner, or watching a movie, or hanging out with a friend for the evening or anything else that feels particularly rewarding for the person who is trying to establish the habit.
At first glance, that might seem like an awfully big reward for a 2 minute practice. BUT we have to remember that doing that practice is not just about the 2 minutes you spend doing it. It’s about overcoming your mixed emotions about starting, it’s about all the thinking and overthinking you do beforehand, it’s about fighting resistance, it’s about quieting the voice in your head that tells you that there’s no point in starting if you can’t commit hours and hours to the practice or the other voice that tells you that doing this practice is a waste of time.
Making the switch from not doing the thing to doing the thing takes way more effort than you realize.
The two minutes with pen in hand (or in our case, on the meditation cushion/lifting a weight/walking in place) is the smallest part of a new practice.
It’s practically a symbol of all of the effort the person has had to put in to get started.
Writing, exercising, or meditating practices become their own rewards over time. However, when you are in the early stages of a new practice, when the practice is just as much about establishing the habit as it is about the activity at hand, it’s hard to see those kinds of rewards.
And that’s when external, disproportionate rewards come in.
Choosing really, really appealing rewards – whatever those might look like for you at the moment – can make all the difference.
Knowing that an hour of reading lies on the other side of 2 minutes of meditation really makes those 2 minutes seem pretty short.
Knowing that you are heading to your friend’s place after you do those 20 squats won’t make the exercise easier but it will help you look at them differently.
As you move forward in the habit-building process, you mostly won’t need those disproportionate rewards any more but you can keep them in mind for days when your brain gets uncooperative and a big reward will make all the difference.
So, Team, here are your gold stars for your efforts today.
There are a lot of them on there so you have plenty of rewards if you need them.
PS – Please be kind to yourself, you are doing the best you can with the resources you have today.
*For the record, this is just step 1 and it is about managing resistance to the new practice. Most people feel free to do longer practices relatively quickly because their 2 minute practice has helped them past their initial resistance. I don’t force people to stick with the 2 minutes for a long time but starting with 2 minutes is way better than not starting at all.
