Homeplay (Take-Home Practice)
Practice between sessions that you designed yourself, so that some part of you actually agreed to it.
Description
New skills need practice, and one hour a week is not much of a dose — for parts work or for anything else. Yet many practitioners have given up on homework entirely, on the grounds that most people don’t do it. Fair enough. Most of us have unhappy associations with the word.
So: homeplay. The difference isn’t the activity, it’s who chose it and why. The person comes up with the candidate practice, and then we go looking for objections before committing: is a part dreading this, is a part agreeing in order to please somebody, has this been tried before, what happened last time. Then an agreement, with a time limit, a backup plan, and an answer to “what happens if you don’t manage?”
The design goal is that it can’t fail. Do the practice and things go as hoped: good, your life is a bit better. Do it and something unexpected happens: now you know, and the steps were small enough to walk back. Don’t manage it at all: you have found a trailhead, because apparently that wasn’t as small a thing as you thought. All three are wins, as long as something changes as a result. The full method is here.
What Homeplay (Take-Home Practice) is NOT:
Not homework, and not a test you can fail. Also not something to hand to somebody: assign it and you are back to compliance, and compliance is what you will get.
Examples:
“There is no way I’m doing that. What about this other thing instead?”
Agreeing to try something twice, rather than forever.
Spending the next session on which parts ate the homework.