How To Get Things Done With Rituals

I was talking to a girl once about her desire to lose weight. She said that her goal was to lose weight but her life was too ‘up in the air’ so was never able to be fully consistent with any plan. This was also a girl who would have numerous business ideas but fall by the wayside every couple of weeks. The first couple of times I admired her enthusiasm until someone who knew her longer informed me that this happened all the time.

One of the important realisations that a new business owner must accept is the notion of ‘delayed gratification’. Even with technology getting better all the time, business success doesn’t happen overnight and those that have an attitude of it wanting to happen overnight tend to pack up shop pretty quickly. Gary Vaynerchuk in his latest book ‘the thank you economy’ advises business owners to play the long game, opting to develop relationships rather than deliver sales pitches.

So how do you ensure that you remain consistent long enough for you to experience a consistent level of success. Simple; you formulate a ritual until the actions become habit.

The brain does not like doing a lot of things that are mentally taxing over a continuous period of time. It uses a lot of energy and it slows us down (think reading a map when we get lost; we tend to stop and look rather than continue in motion.). So the quicker we can do something without much thought process needed, the more effortless we can do the task. By religiously following a ritual of actions, you are conditioning your mind to perform these actions without much thinking required.

In the book ‘the way we’re working isn’t working’ Tony Scwartz talks about the power of rituals and describes the process as “highly specific behaviours, done at precise times, so they eventually become automatic and no longer require conscious will or discipline.”

What would you like to get good at in your business? What can you do on a consistent basis that will ensure you do what is necessary. A number of people have a morning ritual that is intended to give them the best possible start to the morning (10min meditation, 30 minutes exercise, 20 minutes reading) with a focussed mindset instead of that foggy, hazy experience you get when you have just crawled out of bed.

For other people they may have more of a work ritual where they do a series of tasks each day to bring their business forward (3 phone calls to potential clients, 20 minutes social media engaging, send follow up emails to yesterday’s clients).

For me personally I have a quick fire ritual in the morning where I do 10 minutes ideas brainstorming, 20 minutes reading and 10 minutes writing the coming days tasks. I find when I do this it puts me into a more focussed mindset, compared to the times when I have started the day reading my social media pages or the news websites.

Performing a new ritual can be hard at first for the following reasons:

1. It is new so the neural pathways in your brain are not powerful enough to flow easily through at present.

2. The ritual is competing against what you were doing prior to integrating the new ritual. This is more familiar so will require less energy for your brain to perform if given the option.

Despite this, by having a clear intention of what the ritual is for and what benefits you aim to get as a result of consistently implementing the ritual, you will find focus overcomes obstacles on your pursuit for a profitable business.

Aaron Morton
www.ajmorton.com - Blogging on a mindset for business success