Love is a Transformational Practice

First published on August 31, 2018

A practice changes you. Something that you do every day, week or month shifts things about you, sometimes the things you want to shift, but also other things, too.

A practice of daily exercise will affect your physical health, but also other things. Perhaps something about your confidence. Perhaps the hormones you feel throughout the day - and through them your very happiness. And, like any habit that you maintain, it affects your story about yourself - you are someone who can get up a bit earlier every day, you are someone who can follow through on their word and commitments. You are someone who recommits when things go wrong.

A writing practice has these multi-leveled effects, too. I set out on the writing practice of which this piece is part as a way to break my resistance and grow my capacity to share with the world. That this is my 100th LinkedIn article, most of them as part of this practice, which now lasts over two years, is a testament that it worked.

But there is more than that, it has changed the way I write, which you might expect. But it has also changed the way I think. And through that, it has changed the way I speak. 

Seth Godin, whose words about his writing practice (daily, going back decades) have been an inspiration to me, speaks about this. 'If you write how you speak,' he says, 'then you can't get writers block, because no one ever gets 'talkers block''. But more than that, if you write how you think, then as your writing improves, so does the way you think. And the way you speak. A writing practice is, in some ways, a practice in thinking. And if you write how you speak, it is also a practice in speaking. Something which changes the way you write, think and speak. I'd call that a transformational practice.

I noticed this as I reflected on the speech I gave at my wedding a few weeks ago. I spoke in the speech about how I have been transformed by the love and appreciation I have received from my wife over the five years of our relationship. I spoke about this in terms of the way I speak publicly: I have moved from an actor, learning lines and delivering them well, to a more present, more confident, more comfortable speaker. Telling stories, from the heart and mind. And this transformation has come partly through a weekly practice of writing, and thinking, played out on LinkedIn. I have practiced telling stories, forming sentences, making points, from the heart and mind, each week over two years. And I saw some of the benefits of that as I spoke in front of one hundred of the most important people to me in the world.

But would I have got here - maintained the practice, stuck with it and all the other things I've done over the last five years - without five years of deep love and appreciation from my wife? I don't know; we can never know for sure. But what I do know is that I am transformed by that love, by that practice of love and appreciation which she has poured into me every day, every week. And I will never be the same, and I would never want to.

Love is a transformational practice, too.

So practice.