How to build daily rituals into your life, for resilience and joy
There are simple daily rituals you can incorporate into your life to build more resilience – the foundation for your overall happiness in life.
True resilience is more than bouncing back from twists and turns in life. True resilience is a built-in foundation that allows us to flow with the change and use it to grow.
The way we learn to do that, change our relationship with change, is by incorporating simple daily rituals – a resilience strategy. These can be applied personally or professionally to mitigate risk.
In business that risk could be lack of innovation, missed opportunities and not meeting goals. In our personal lives, that risk could show up as stress, burnout, illness or depression. These are the things we want to avoid, not try to tackle when we’re already in the midst of the crisis.
Rest and Relaxation
Man, it is so hard to just relax, isn’t it? This is why rituals are so important. If we don’t build rituals in, it just won’t happen. And by the time we need the rest, it’s almost too late because we’re reaching exhaustion and now a higher level of rest is required. It makes much more sense to do a little bit every day.
Let’s Talk Rituals
→ PAUSE. Meditation or an adult time out, so to speak, is a great way to reset and something most of us just don’t get unless we make it a priority. Establish a specific time each day to stop and think about the most important things in your life. Or to think about nothing. To settle your mind, to repeat a mantra (I love my life!) or to make a mental checklist of things you’re grateful for.
→ THINK. When our minds are constantly inundated with so many things and so much noise, innovation, creativity or solutions can be fleeting. In our professional lives, this applies too, because when we’re always thinking about everything else, there’s never time to imagine new things. Innovation is a side effect of resilience! When we have time to pause and think, to clear our minds and be conscious and thankful for life, we create space to innovate as well.
→ REFLECT. I love to journal in the evenings because it allows me time to reflect on my day. To consider the things I was thankful for that day, the things I want to remember. It creates space for me to just be in that moment and soak up an entire day of my life, how I spent it and what was important. We have to make time to see where we are in life, each day, so we are conscious of how we are spending our lives. When people talk about waking up at 80-years old wondering how they got to where they are, to me that is terrifying. I want to live this life in awareness and I believe you do too.
How Long? Just ten minutes a day, and you’ll find yourself feeling more in control and making better choices than ever before. You’ll find that change doesn’t disrupt your entire life and resilience is easy to practice. You’ll feel more settled because you’re making your decisions with more thought and confidence. You’ll feel more joy because you’ve taken time to be thankful each day. These small pivots make a huge impact.
When? The easiest way to preserve a ritual and protect it from the world around you is to do it first. The morning is the one time of day when you can truly control your time. You may want to place some parts of your ritual in the evening or spread them throughout the day, but if you want to be sure something happens, the best time to do it is when you wake up.
Very Important Pivot Points
Rituals are daily. If you exercised for three hours once a month and sat at your desk the rest of the time, would you consider yourself healthy? What if you ate nothing but a salad for a whole day, then fast food for the next twenty-nine? Would you consider that healthy?
- For rituals to work, consistency is more important than duration.
- It’s better to do a ritual for ten minutes every day rather than an hour once a month because habits are built by repetition.
- Even if you start with a few minutes a day you can build on that so be gentle with yourself and just start!
- To be truly resilient, it requires a practice – rituals – designed to minimize the risk factors we talked about earlier.
- When you create intentional time to pause, think and reflect, you simultaneously create space to reframe thoughts to your advantage. When you change from your default way of seeing things, your life changes too – quickly. Because you’re now in a space where you are seeing your own life through a more clear lens, a lens that is serving your greater purpose.
- For example: If you wake up in the morning and say to yourself, ‘I love my life,’ Then your conditioned mind will, unconsciously or consciously, look for evidence to prove that your life is worth loving.
