Every believing Muslim wants to pray five times a day.
Virtually every Muslim I know who has even the slightest interest in spirituality or religion either has this as a goal… or an accomplishment.
Over the years, I’ve coached literally hundreds – maybe even 1000’s – of people to establish the Daily Quran Habit and the Daily Prayer Habit.
And the method I share with everyone who asks this question is a little bit counter-intuitive… And yet it’s very simple. But don’t be deceived by its simplicity. When you implement it, it really can be life-changing.
It’s based on the idea that the number one determinant as to whether you actually achieve your goals is NOT the amount of short term action you take.
When most people try praying five times a day, no matter how many prayers they actually make, they face some amount of guilt if they didn’t get a perfect score of 5 out of 5, on time, every time.
Sometimes people start out trying to immediately do all five prayers every day, in the mosque. While that can be good for a short term high, it’s not the best technique, if the outcome is to permanently pray five times a day. (Because most people who do this all in one go at the beginning don’t stick with it for very long – most quit within the first few days, then beat themselves up about it). Note: The Prophet (peace & blessings upon him) warned us about trying to do too much worship in one go. A little amount that builds up always works out better.
Instead, I have a much easier, much more powerful technique that doesn’t even require that you start praying all of your prayers.
It’s very simple.
Get out your journal, or get a sheet of paper and put it somewhere that you’ll see it every day. Across the top, from left to right write M T W T F S S, representing the days of the week and add along the left side of the page in a column right F Z A M I, representing each of the five daily prayers.
The technique is simple.
Each each night before you go to bed, put an X in each of the 5 boxes that represent today, for each prayer that you actually made. If you missed a prayer, leave that box blank.
At the end of the week, you’ll have a very clear picture of how many prayers you actually made. The vast majority of people either underestimate or dramatically overestimate the number of prayers they actually do on time. It’s as if our emotional highs and lows that we attach to our prayer performance seem to cloud our judgement as to how well we’re actually doing.
This is probably the fastest, easiest method to maintain your focus on your prayers every week. And without doing anything else, you’ll automatically start praying more.
The weird thing is, using this technique you don’t actually need to try to get yourself to pray more. You’ll automatically pray more without trying.
Remember, more effort isn’t the real problem here. It’s clarity and FOCUS.
In other words, you’re already trying to pray five times a day. The problem is that until now you didn’t have a clear, emotion-free way of managing, measuring and directing your focus to know how well you’re doing.
If you’re further along the journey and you make on average three or four prayers a day, or make all your prayers, but not always on time, then this tracking process will be extremely valuable because you’ll have a clear indication of how many prayers to make up.
By the grace of God, I regularly pray five times a day and it’s pretty rare that I miss one. But I still use the tracker most of the time, just to make sure I catch myself if I ever do miss or delay a prayer. Plus, if you’re feeling up for the challenge, you can use the same tracker to increase the amount of sunnah (additional prayers) that you pray. (Just make a note at the bottom of the page about what, specifically, the ‘X’ means on this week’s tracker).
This technique is nice and it works and I definitely recommend you use it immediately if you want to increase your prayers.
However, this is just one of dozens, probably hundreds of life enhancing methods that I share with my coaching clients all year round.
No matter which area of life you want to improve whether it’s spirituality, productivity, relationships or business, you could do a lot worse than talking with a Certified Switch Coach to give you the best tips, tricks and a clear plan to move forward.
Let’s face it. Tracking your prayers is relatively easy.
Dramatically transforming your relationship with Allah and with prayer itself so that it becomes the highlight of your day and the thing you most love to do each day, instead of a ‘chore’… that requires a little bit more spiritual insight and depth.
The kind of insight and depth that people get on a regular basis when they have a 1-to-1 session with Certified Switch Coach.
Here’s where your transformational journey begins:
