PURPOSE: TO DEVELOP A PERSPECTIVE AND EXPERIMENT WITH AN APPROACH FOR A REFLECTIVE PRACTICE THAT INCREASES YOUR SELF-AWARENESS AND ABILITY TO SELF-ASSESS.
To be more intentional about how you go through your day, start it with the following questions:
…what do I want to think?
…what do I want to feel?
…what do I want to do?
Most successful people have a morning routine. Some meditate. Others go to the gym. Some do morning pages—a few pages to capture the “overnight mail” from the previous day, thoughts, fears, hopes still to be processed. For any of these activities, the practice is not the activity so much as it is the ritual of deeper thinking and reflection—that is the muscle being developed, and what trains us to “show up” for ourselves.
Along with athletes and artists, master craftsmen are one of the greatest illustrations of “showing up” because of how they embrace the daily grind. They do so day in and day out because their livelihoods depend on it. Each day, they are seeking permission to remain in the market. Each day they are asking: did I go far enough, or too far? Is my work understood?
To contend with the anxiety that inevitably comes up with questions like this, they have rituals to get them started. Some organize their tools. Others stage their workspace for the day. Some just plain procrastinate.
But this kind of mental preparation is necessary because of how much mental work is expressed through their respective mediums—and something else we can all relate to, the effectiveness of their performance. As master stone carver Heather Lawson puts it,
“A lot of times I make things and I’m not sure why I’m making it. I’m working something out and not sure what it is. There’s just a huge amount of self-searching in the stone. It has nothing to do with the piece, but everything to do with where I [am] mentally at the time. … I will have realizations about why I’m making certain kinds of pieces. It’s a way to figure things out for me. They’re like [emotional] markers of time period.”
Sometimes we can be very literal when translating our learning from one context to another. For instance, many leaders feel they are “unemotional” when it comes to their work.
You are anything but.
Decision making comes down to feelings. The quality of our memory and the amount of information we can access helps, but we tend to make choices and decisions based on feelings. Then we start to rationalize—to ourselves and others. It speaks to our vulnerability as human beings that for all the preparation, thought, intensity, and data we put toward choice, a real decision is delivered from the soul.
So when Heather speaks of working through her emotions as she carves a piece of stone, we can take lessons from that.
The stone cutter sees a face in the natural angles of a stone’s edges and structures the rest of her sketch around that emerging relationship. Similarly, the CEO takes the pulse of employees and customers while also assessing external competitive and market pressures, then makes a strategic decision about which products to release. As they operate at their craft, neither limits his or her judgment strictly to subjective or objective knowledge or deductive reasoning.
To work at something with craftsmanship, committed practitioners must rely on both control and openness in their work—at the same time. They must manage their feelings in order to gain an appropriate feel for their work.
Image credit: Breakwater Studios
Whether you can relate to a stone carver or a CEO, we can all relate to encountering roadblocks in our work. Ask yourself: Would you rather be pleasantly surprised during the course of the day or unexpectedly disappointed? You can bet that you will encounter someone who is difficult (like a burl in the wood or an unexpected crack in the stone) that takes the ease out of your work. Are you going to be ready for it?
Each morning, wouldn’t it be better to know up front that people, including ourselves sometimes, behave in ignorant or selfish ways rather than be surprised by that fact several times throughout the day as if we are experiencing it for the first time?
The point preparing your mind for the snags you are likely to encounter for the day is not to write everyone off in advance. It’s that preparation will likely increase your patience, empathy, forgiveness and understanding.
The larger lesson to take mental preparation is to realize that Craftsmanship is a practice, not simply an amber lit studio filled with wood shavings and people in leather aprons. This is something one does, not knows. Every morning.
Every day. Let reflection and hard work guide you to better answers, one morning at a time—over the course of a life.
DEVELOPING A PRACTICE: to prepare your mind for the day, start broadly.
…what do I want to think?
…what do I want to feel?
…what do I want to do?
Alongside technical skills, people who can master a range of subjective skills are better able to influence, deal with ambiguity, bounce back from setbacks, think creatively, and manage themselves successfully in their pursuit of mastery. Learn more about skills of modern craftsmanship.