If you spend any time studying the world’s most successful and productive people or high performance athletes, you will discover that they all have many things in common. One specific common denominator is the ability to create and maintain healthy rituals that allow them to maximize their time, energy, and focus throughout the day. What is a ritual? Rituals are essentially habits that we can create and repeat over and over. What can make a ritual special is that they can become sacred. Just as religious ceremonies perform certain rituals, the daily actions you take over and over consciously or unconsciously are also affecting your daily life. When you take control and create rituals that feed your soul, you take better control of your destiny. Below are some steps to help you begin on your path to establishing rituals that feed your mind, body and spirit.
Baby Steps. You may have a very clear vision in our mind of who you want to be. The healthier version of you exercises every day, loves juicing, and is a meditation junkie. The reality is though you may be starting with getting in 1-2 workouts a week, 5 minutes of meditation, and simply remembering to eat our vegetables. Rather than get overwhelmed by how far you are from your grand vision, it’s important to begin where you are and take small actions. Start by writing down that grand vision –who you want to be at your best in all areas, and then make very small actionable goals that you can do daily for each. If you want to make time for meditation maybe you begin with 5 minutes, and then slowly increase in increments until you reach your goal.
Push through resistance with preparation. This is also known as stop saying YES to your excuses. When we are trying to make major changes, it can be easy to listen to that voice in our head that seems to come up with every and any excuse to not follow through. The hardest part of changes is pushing through resistance and showing up, until we get results. That may mean going to sleep in you workout clothes so you can roll out of bed in the morning and hit the gym, setting meal prep days on the weekends so your nutrition is on point during the week, creating a healthy snack drawer at work so you don’t give in to office sweets. Very often when we live a life that is ritual-free we are used to being at the mercy of our circumstances. Creating rituals empowers us, and preparation helps us honor the goals we set one day at a time.
Create accountability. We all need different levels of accountability to have success and you may think you can go it alone, but by doing so you may being doing yourself a disservice. Why? The power of minds in agreement is real, and it’s important to work with someone who knows more than you in a specific area so that your actions can be more effective. Every seen someone desperate to reach a goal and trying everything and anything, expending all their energy only to burn out when there is no progress? Take that same person and give them a mentor or coach who has achieved or knows how to achieve the goal and they almost get a “shortcut” blueprint to reach their goal faster, calmer, and with more laser focused energy. Accountability can also be created by including others in your ritual. Maybe you go with friends to yoga regularly, or set gym dates with your bff. Bringing others along makes you more likely not to forget and also makes the experience a social one.
Set Reminders & Notifications. In order for a ritual to become one, you need to repeat it often. That means scheduling in time daily or weekly, and making sure you show up nine times out of ten. When you start to prioritize your rituals and write them down in your planner and set notifications on your phone, you are more likely to remember to do them in the first place, and start hardwiring your brain to make it a habit.
Tracking & Journaling to Assess Impact. Tracking can feel tedious for some, but for others it serves as a gentle reminder of our success or failure with implementing new habits. It doesn’t have to be boring, as now there are apps on the iPhone to track almost anything from water intake to mediation. You can also make tracking fun by using gold stars or stickers in your planner. Make it festive so that you are celebrating the small daily wins. Beyond tracking, even more important is really taking note of how our ritual is slowly shifting our lives. One amazing way to do this is to journal daily and note any changes in the flow of your day, emotions, and overall energy. This allows you to look back and review how your new ritual is improving your life and gives you positive data to support continuing it, or adjusting to better suit you.
Choose Rituals that Bring Your Joy. Part of the way you can create lasting rituals is to actually incorporate things in our lives that you love to do. Your ritual should give you more energy, peace, or add to your emotional, physical, or spiritual wellness. As you practice them, it’s really important to stay completely present and focused on the joy they bring you, and in the space of gratitude that you have taken time out for yourself.