I’ve been writing about habit creation lately, focusing mostly on a book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear.

Habits are the part of your life that is on autopilot. Good habits mean automatic progress, or at least the absence of some problems. Bad habits mean guaranteed misery and frustration.

Habits become your identity. Anything you do regularly ends up being part of your internal description of yourself: “I am a smoker” “I am a meditator” “I’m a life long student of the blues”.

One way you can stack the deck in favor of deep music practice is to make some area of your home get in your ears, face, or both and tempt you to pick up an instrument. An instrument that is right there, ready to go. As I write this, I have two harmonicas on my desk, within easy reach of my right hand.

You can work at this identity thing from the inside out and from the outside in. Use your imagination to create a new musical vision for your life. A vision that throbs with emotional power. You can’t change your world with dry ideas and tepid emotions. Whatever is holding you back has some kind of emotional power over you and you have to generate some serious emotional mojo if you want to bust out of the way things are and go to a new level of musical aliveness.

Go watch a movie like “Rocky” and connect the dots again between training like your life depends on it and then and showing the world everything you’ve got. If you can look at your harmonica and see it as a way to go through the looking glass into a fantastical world of creative magic, then you are on the right track.

Creating a practice space can be part of this process. Here are some photos that readers sent me of their practice spaces. One of mine is a simple mini stand on top of a file cabinet. One sheet of music propped up, and a metronome. It catches my eye and reminds me that there are things to learn, skills to develop…

If you feel like it, send me a photo of your practice space, or anything in your world that excites your musical imagination. Thanks!

Below are a couple of shots of one of my practice areas – a small stand on top of a file cabinet, enough room for a piece of sheet music and a metronome…