Balancing your drive for improvement with the patience and quietness required of a discipline like this can be tough. You may spend time in a lie down and find that you can’t let yourself quiet down, or that you keep criticizing yourself for not feeling any changes or improvements.
This is natural, and it is a good thing in the sense that it means you really want to improve and you are taking your practice seriously. But often being hard on yourself is only going to distract and frustrate you when you could be spending your time more constructively.
An important skill to develop in order to overcome this challenge is learning to frame your practice goals in ways that make it easy for you to succeed in the short term while laying the groundwork for a process-based mentality that will help you succeed in the long term.
For example, if you want to get better at directing in the lie-down position, you can commit yourself to just five minutes in the morning and at night to simply get into the lie-down. For the time being, you don’t have to direct, you don’t even have to be “quiet” — just keep your eyes open and see if you can stay attentive to your surroundings. If not, that’s ok. You don’t have to be a master of directing immediately. What you are really doing here is practicing consistency without worrying about results.
Framing your practice goals in this way — where you can congratulate yourself on sticking to your plan even if you don’t think you “performed” particularly well — means that overtime you will build both a balanced commitment to working on yourself regularly as well as the actual skill that comes with putting in the time this work requires.