The Myth of the Muse by Reeves Douglas;Reeves Brooks;

Author:Reeves, Douglas;Reeves, Brooks;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Solution Tree
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Approaches for Maintaining Discipline

When we speak of the daily discipline of creativity, we understand that life does not always cooperate with our aspiration to keep a daily schedule. Unfortunately, when people work on any worthwhile activity, from creative endeavors to spending time with family, it is easy to become discouraged when reality falls short of goals. The great danger when this happens is what psychologists call the what-the-hell effect (Selig, 2010). For example, if you’re supposed to be laying off ice cream in an effort to lose ten pounds, but it is just too tempting to resist and you take a couple of bites, you are faced with two choices. The first is to say, “I’ve busted my diet. What the heck? I might as well eat the whole carton.” The second is to say, “I’ve really missed that and don’t mind savoring a couple of bites. But now I’ll return the ice cream to the freezer, and I’ll do an extra thirty minutes of walking in the park, not as a punishment, but to replace one pleasurable thing (eating ice cream) with another pleasurable thing (walking in the park).”

The same is true with other daily disciplines. While ideally exercising, practicing yoga, writing, singing, painting, and hundreds of other creative pursuits should receive daily attention, the truth is that they won’t. Having missed a day of practice, you must choose whether to abandon all hope—what the heck?—or give yourself a break and return to practice later that day or the next day. CBT, noted previously, also challenges all-or-nothing thinking. Taking a puff on a cigarette doesn’t doom one to return to chain smoking; missing a day of running does not lead to eternity as a couch potato.

Another way to help maintain discipline is to ensure you have some time—even a small amount—to yourself each day without interruptions from the outside world. It’s also possible to simply turn off the wireless function on your computer, log off email, or otherwise unplug. But for most people this appears to be astonishingly difficult. Watch teenagers (or many a parent) sneak a peek at their electronic devices during a family dinner (or, for that matter, during a wedding or funeral) and you get an idea of the difficulty that people face in disconnecting.

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