Practice Makes Permanent

Practice doesn’t always make perfect. As the father of a 9 year old, it doesn’t matter how hard she practices that darn recorder, the noise it makes can never be described as “perfect”

Practice does make permanent though. The things we do repeatedly tend to become hard and fast rules in our lives.

Some people say they can’t fall asleep without checking their email.

Other have a certain colour they feel makes them more confident at work.

In reality, these are habits. They are things that we’ve trained ourselves to need even though we don’t actually need them. We’ve done them enough times to convince ourselves that we can’t manage without them, even when those habits are actually working against us.

Checking email actually stimulates your brain and works against falling asleep.

Shirt colour has no link to performance, but we get flustered and under perform because we have we are wearing light blue rather than typical grey we like that we feel gives us more confidence.

Before too long we have things that have become permanent fixtures in our lives. Some we have chosen to be there, others have just fallen into our lives and have stuck.

We need routine, but we’d better make sure we manage the routine rather than the routine managing us.

Think of all the ways are lives are heavily influenced by things we have practiced into permanence.

We stay late at work because… we always do

We aim for 5-6 hours of sleep because we’re used to functioning on less sleep than we need.

We buy the large size because that’s what we order.

We sit on the couch across from our partner not speaking to each other just watching a screen because that’s how we always unwind at nights.

We’ve practiced these habits and our lives certainly aren’t perfect.

But these habits have become permanent.

It’s not New Year’s but summer is a great time to make a change and take control and start a new practice of something you want to become permanent.

Read instead of watch

Talk instead on not

Spend time with your family or friends that you normally don’t.

A habit takes 21 days to form. 3 weeks of a new habit and you might find you have a new permanent.