Daily Rituals Are The Key To Managing Your Energy And Consistently Being Productive

Curt Nelson — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 01:41:34 +0000

“We are what we repeatedly do” Aristotle

Daily Success Rituals are the center and “Foundation” for accomplishing everything in your life that you need to do during the day and for managing your energy more effectively & efficiently.

Your Daily Success Rituals simply determine what “1 thing” you will do at a set time, for 45 – 90 minutes without interruption. Your goal in setting up positive rituals is to do the ritual long enough that it becomes a behavior that’s automatic and is something that simply comes natural to you.

A ritual pulls at you by some deeply held value. Using will and discipline to get things done require you to push yourself to a particular behavior which is usually more of a struggle.

If you look at any part of your life in which you are consistently effective you will find that certain positive habits make that possible.

Here are the main reasons why you should implement daily success rituals:

Create structures and boundaries
Manage your energy better
Get more accomplished in shorter amount of time
Allows you to push away distractions and focus on “only one thing”
Focuses your attention
End bad habits of procrastination and randomness

Without daily rituals you probably do all this stuff, right….

Unconsciously get busy or sidetracked and procrastinate
Use will and discipline to get stuff done
Are managing your time and not your energy
Avoiding stress instead of seeking stress
Think positive thinking will get stuff done

Let me point this out. The Rituals don’t give you success. Taking action implementing and executing does. Implementing and Executing is a whole different ball game as that’s the hardest part. We’ll talk about this in another post.

By creating Rituals you do on a daily basis you end the bad habits that you do throughout the day that don’t get you anywhere.

The main book that talks about all this is The Power of Full Engagement by Tony Schwartz. If you buy any book in the next 3 months, buy this book and read the whole thing. When I first bought this book, I read half of it and never got started on anything and didn’t pick up the book again until a year and a half later, don’t do what I did…!

Sometimes our Attitudes get in the way. Even things that can improve our life dramatically. If you currently have a TERRIBLE ATTITUDE don’t let that stop you from purchasing the book and using the information.

Tony says in his book that the challenge of great performance is to manage your energy more effectively in all dimensions of our life and this is driven by four main energy management Principles:

Manage all of our 4 main forms of energy, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual
Balance Energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal
Push beyond our normal limits – follow by rest and renewal
Build positive rituals that are very specific

Lets Get Started Setting Up Your Daily Success Rituals…

The first thing to do is look at your life as a whole, so we’ll look at the 6 major parts of a Kickass Lifestyle.

Health
Wealth
Relationships
Self-Development
Fun & Adventure
Contribution

I would recommend setting 1 ritual for one of the Categories. If you try to set too many you will most likely get disappointed and fall right back into your current habits. They key is to set a ritual and keep to it for 30 – 60 days.

When you have that current Ritual down, then create a new ritual and do it for 30 days along with the 1st Ritual you’ve set.

You can use look at my Daily Rituals that I set up to use as a guide in setting up your own rituals.

The key in creating your rituals is stacking rituals that relate to a different area of your life. Don’t stack work onto work. Stack work, then do something physical or emotional.

Once your start implementing your daily ritual you might become bored, frustrated, feel awkward or have negative thoughts come into your head like, its boring doing the same thing every day like this or what’s wrong with what I’m currently doing. That’s just your brain trying to take you out as your trying something new.

Also realize that all of us have habits, they are either positive or negative. Your going to do pretty much the same thing you did yesterday, if its a positive habit, great. If not start right now with a positive ritual.

Setup conditions that will increase the odds of you sticking with your rituals you create.

Set specific times and days of when you will do the ritual
What exactly will you do during this time and for how long (an engagement period of focus should never last longer than 90 minutes as you start to lose focus after that).
Connect with your purpose for setting up the ritual through reflection
Don’t frame an intention Negatively like, I won’t … or I will not…
Be willing to get out of your comfort zone
Make incremental changes focusing on one significant change at a time
Look for it to take 30 – 60 days before you have consciously ingrained the ritual into your life
Hold yourself accountable at the end of each day. This is the gap between your intention and your actual behavior.

If your interested to see how your currently balancing all forms of your energy you can take one of the self-assessment tests for free and there’s a more in depth test for $49 at Power of Full Engagement.com. These tests will take a closer look at what’s going on beneath the surface of your lives.

So, do you have any bad habits that you would like to turn into positive habits. Start by setting up a ritual to help reverse it into a positive. Sooner or later these little things will turn into BIGGER things. So tend to them now. Who knows they may already be BIG.

What Is A Kickass Lifestyle…?

Curt Nelson — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:46:23 +0000

A Kickass Lifestyle is made up of 6 major categories.

Health
Wealth
Relationships
Self-Development
Fun & Adventure
Contribution

Your job as a person living here on planet earth is to define to yourself what exactly does your Kickass Lifestyle look like in all of these 6 major categories…?

Do you want to be 400 lbs. have no energy, have trouble sleeping, or need to take prescription drugs because of a lack of education or do you want tons of energy, know exactly how to workout and eat and have the body you want…?

Do you want to constantly worry about money, live in fear, work at same boring job and have no freedom FOREVER or do you want a Location Independent life where you can travel and have residual income coming in…?

Do you want relationships with people you like, trust, respect and people that make you laugh or do you want relationships with people who talk behind your back, co-workers you don’t care for, or people that don’t help you improve your life…?

Do you want to improve your life and others through self-improvement or just vegge out and never learn anything new ever….

Do you regularly go on vacations or are you shackled to chains because of your current modeling of the people around you…? Do you experience FUN and Adventure on an on going basis or is it something that happens very rarely…?

What do you want to Contribute to others in your life…?

Now lets get thinking here… What Is YOUR Kickass Lifestyle and how do you want your life to be..?

What we need to do here is make a list for each area and set a few goals.

HEALTH

What do you want your body to look like…?
What will you do to keep your body in shape…?
How do you currently think about health, fitness and nutrition…?
Where will you go to workout and what will you do when you get there…?
What are your current Health Habits…?
What do you currently eat on a daily basis…?
Do you eat “Strategically” or do you eat to eat
Why do you want to be Healthy… for you and your kids and to set a good example…?
Who will you become if your healthier, will you attract different types of people, will you feel better…?

Now unless you are perfect you have set some goals here, right… come on lets get going.

If you don’t like setting goals look at solving a problem instead of goal setting. Theres a book called Stop Setting Goals if You’d Rather Solve Problems by Bobb Biehl for more info.

If your problem is that you weigh too much, to solve that problem you might set a simple ritual of exercising 3 times a week with specific exercises and exercise routines, and changing your nutrition program. And still eat those foods you love 3 times each week. If you try to go completely cold turkey and eat all good stuff you’ll end up back on all the stuff that made you weight more than you currently like.

After you get done with the Health part of your life move on to Wealth and ask the same types of Questions.

These same types of helpful Questions all start with Who, What, Why, Where and How.

Now get going on this, now, PRONTO…! The Quicker the better and you will thank yourself for it.

KickAssLifeStyle.com » Relationships

Daily Rituals Are The Key To Managing Your Energy And Consistently Being Productive

What Is A Kickass Lifestyle…?