Direct Your Life: Part 9 Begin Your Routine

We’ve discussed the importance of ritualizing the activities or creating habits associated with moving you toward your goals. Now let’s examine the process of how you could begin your routine.

Let’s assume you wake up one day and decide that you would like your weight to be 15 pounds less then it is today. Since you are not exercising currently, you decide to join a gym and work out 5 days a week in order to lose the weight. The first day your alarm goes off at 5am, you get up and go straight to the gym. The next day your alarm goes off at 5am and you hit the snooze bar, but you do manage to go over lunch. Day three you ignore your alarm, work through lunch, but make it to the gym on your way home from work. If you are operating this way, what are the odds that you will still be going to the gym regularly 6 months from now? The reason that those odds are low is because humans function better when they can perform the same tasks at the same time on a regular basis. If you are serious about reaching your goals you must make the activities associated with reaching those goals as “automatic” as possible. This is how you will ensure that you create powerful habits.

Start by getting up every morning and compiling your “to do list” immediately. Next, check off your items as you finish them and commit to completing each item on your list everyday. Not only will you have created a starting point for a powerful, ritualized system, but the probability of you reaching those goals will increase exponentially.