Exercise 5 — The one that resists

Choose something that matters to you and that you suspect should not be a drill. Attention to one particular person. A grief you are in the middle of. Bedtime with your kid. Prayer. Whatever is actually yours.

Now do the conversion anyway. All five steps, honestly, well — a drill you could hand to a stranger. Then write one paragraph on what running it would cost.

The point of the exercise is what you will discover in the doing: the method does not refuse. It will produce a clean, dialable, gradeable drill for bedtime, and it will work, and that is the problem. Your child will feel the room become a scoring occasion before you notice you have made it one. There is no judgment inside the method about what deserves to stay ungraded, and none can be put there. That judgment is yours, it is separate, and it needs its own reps — this is one.

Finish by deciding among three things: run it, run a stripped version with the verb and no grade, or run nothing. Two sentences: the decision, and the reason.

How to tell it's any good. If the conversion you produced came out mushy or half-hearted, you protected yourself by doing the step badly, which is the ordinary way to fail this exercise. Refusing a weak drill costs you nothing and teaches you nothing. Go back, make it genuinely good, and then refuse it on the merits. And if you worked it through and concluded that drilling this is fine, check one thing: is your success condition judged by the other person's experience, or by yours? That usually settles it.