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How to focus on dealing with today, according to Jesus

01 November 2024

How to craft a day that is lived well is the focus of a new course. Laurie Vere investigates

A recent daycrafting retreat

A recent daycrafting retreat

OVERWORKED? Struggling to keep a collection of unrelated plates spinning? Having trouble sleeping? Feeling trapped in a downward spiral of decreasing energy and creativity? Are you in full-time ministry or the NHS?

I was able to tick all those boxes, but it was with trepidation that I enrolled on a daycrafting course, since it added a weekly 90-minute Zoom meeting to my list of things to do — not to mention the pre-course preparation and workbooks. How could this help?

Actually, from the moment the workbooks arrived, the basic concept of the course — “crafting a beautiful day” — changed my thinking about work entirely. Instead of getting up each morning braced to get through 18 hours of work until I could fall into bed again, I was reminded of what I ought to have known: that each day is a gift, full of raw materials for beauty. My problem-solving challenge was to make something lovely from it.

Having completed the course, I now begin each day with that intention, and end each day using a very simple evaluation tool to assess kindly what went wrong, and what might shape tomorrow better.

 

THE course, a teaching and mentoring programme, has been devised by Bruce Stanley, a former professional leadership coach and one of the pioneers of the Forest Church movement. It combines personal development resources, distilled from a wide range of human-research fields, with his own spiritual and creative professional development.

The problems that beset people in parish ministry and other caring professions are widely acknowledged, but not so easily addressed. And the net could be wider: there are many people in public service, or teaching, say, who need an approach to life and work that acknowledges that their aspirations and achievements cannot be measured by professional goals or targets.

The beauty of Mr Stanley’s approach to mentoring people in the art of living well also makes it difficult to describe. The goal is simple: participants are encouraged to craft a single day at a time rather than “a good life”. A “good life” — at least, in Sophocles’s sense — can be only the sum of good days, lived by a character that is shaped by good days well spent.

The approach is anything but simple. Mr Stanley’s research has been wide-ranging and holistic, and the course includes a great deal of information, presented in contrasting ways. It used visual learning and statistics, and I admit that the engineering/design language was sometimes hard for me to translate into my own frames of reference; but there is also conversation, reading, empirical observation, insight, dreaming, and prayer.

The course encourages both a spiritual and a pragmatic approach to practical problems, such as how to manage available energies most effectively, or how to tackle difficult tasks.

Bruce Stanley

It is concise: six weeks of evening Zoom sessions, each lasting 90 minutes, shared with a handful of participants. It is supported by four workbooks, with a fifth currently in production. It is also open-ended, with participants offered opportunities for private contact with Mr Stanley.

The workbooks are Mr Stanley’s digest of management, biological, and psychological research, with a wealth of information and charts, suggestions, different models, and questions. For example: are you a labourer or an architect in relation to your day? Does your day happen to you, or do you make it happen to your own specifications?

There are pages to read, pages to fill in, and far more than this course participant could possibly digest within the compass of six weeks. That’s fine: there is no set pattern for this individual work. And what a beautiful day looks like to each of the participants will have many different ingredients, determined by work demands, physique, spiritual life, and the complexity of relationships and events.

Self-care has a workbook of its own, which, with the body-clock workbook, is a key component: we were encouraged to realise that rest is multi-faceted and necessary, and actually one of the less mysterious ingredients of creative genius.

The weekly Zoom conversations are not about checking scores, but exchanging ideas and experience.

After the course, everyone is invited to join an ongoing online community of “apprentices” to continue the conversation and share their experiences, learn from one another, and support each other. To use Mr Stanley’s own crafting metaphor, how often someone goes back to the drawing board and approaches the work bench and which tools and materials they pick up throughout the course are very much up to them.

 

SO, HOW to make, or craft, a beautiful day? Mr Stanley spent years coaching clients who were encouraged to set goals for an imagined future. But the first thing is to concentrate your efforts on this one, present day.

With such a tight focus, the work is then to draw up a blueprint, considered from four different angles: body, mind, spirit, and interaction with the world.

The programme is informed by the engineering concept of “dynamic affordance”, whereby you assess the properties of the materials you are working with — their strengths and limitations — and work with these rather than against them. In this exercise, the materials are your own inner and outer resources.

The design of a beautiful day begins with an intention and ends with very simple evaluations of each of the four areas of your basic physical and mental energies, your spiritual or inner life, your daily productivity, and the meaning or values that drive it.

Because the course acknowledges that body and spirit are factors, it is unsurprisingly popular with clergy and clinicians. If you have chosen to work in a job that demands long hours, compassion, emotional energy, and intellectual effort, you’re more likely to be seeking rewards that are more spiritual than financial (which tends to rule out most traditional life-coaching).

The invitation to live well, one day at a time, is very consistent with traditional Christian teaching, and also the practice of mindfulness. The challenge of crafting a beautiful day has its roots in the earliest humanity in the book of Genesis, created as craftsmen and women in God’s image, working for joy, resting creatively.

Laurie Vere is a priest’s pseudonym.

 

Apprentice Course over Zoom. Six weeks. Weekday evenings. Costs £120. daycrafting.com/courses

Bruce Stanley is also about to offer one-to-one apprenticeships over four one-hour sessions for busy people.

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