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If you’ve been in the Tai Chi game for long enough it’s impossible to not recognise the hard truth that you can’t progress very far without daily practice. You have to practice this stuff every single day or you won’t see any real progress. That requires time, and unless you’re independently wealthy, you’ll find that there are already a lot of competing demands on your time, even your ‘free’ time. Add kids into the mix and your me-time shrinks to absolute zero faster than Jorge Masvidal running across the ring to flying knee poor Ben Askren in the face.

Quite often though, we could make time to practice, but we just don’t have the motivation. We get distracted by all sorts of other fun pursuits, like social media, TV, Netflix, Box Sets or listening to music, things that simply occupy us rather than fulfill us. In the old days, these used to be considered treats, but now they seem to be the main course.

If we cut all that out then I’m willing to bet that we’d have more than enough time to practice Tai Chi in our day. We just lack the proper motivation.

I’m no expert on motivation. In fact, I should be writing a piece of very dull freelance work right now, but instead, I’m here procrastinating on this blog by writing this article for you all about motivation. Ironic, huh?

So, I thought I’d ask somebody who is an expert what they thought would be the solution to getting our butts outside to practice Fair Lady Weave the Shuttles (even when it’s cold) should be. Mark Manson writes lots of books and blog posts about getting yourself together, getting motivated and getting stuff done. You can read his whole article on motivation, but the top line is that his advice is alarmingly simple – instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, just do something.

It doesn’t matter what it is, just do something, and build from there. Hopefully, that something will then inspire you to do something else, and so on.

So rather than starting your morning by looking at your phone, just pick one warm-up exercise and do it. After that, you might find you want to try another, and another and so on, until you’ve built a practice out of positive curiosity rather than enforced discipline and willpower, which never lasts.

Try it, and let me know how you get on. Go do something now.