Stuck Inside Our Routines
Routines are a great vehicle for change. But sometimes we get so caught up in whether we’re doing the routines right that we can find ourselves unintentionally stuck inside of them.
And what I mean by that is we can get trapped in our desire to strictly follow the process of the routine, instead of really pausing to notice whether the routine is actually helping to deliver what you need, in that moment, and whether the routine is actually aligned with your purpose for creating the routine in the first place.
In this episode I’ll guide you through a simple thought process you can apply to your current routines to make sure that the routines you have are truly serving you, and that you’re not caught up in serving them.
Episode Transcription
Intro:
Routines are a great vehicle for change. But sometimes we get so caught up in whether we’re doing the routines right that we can find ourselves unintentionally stuck inside of them.
And what I mean by that is we can get trapped in our desire to strictly follow the process of the routine, instead of really pausing to notice whether the routine is actually helping to deliver what you need, in that moment, and whether the routine is actually aligned with your purpose for creating the routine in the first place.
So in this episode I want to guide you through a really simple thought process you can apply to your current routines to make sure that the routines you have are truly serving you, and that you’re not caught up in serving them.
Here we go.
Main:
Routines are a powerful mechanism we can use to make changes to our lives. But in studying routines and how people use them, there’s a really interesting thing that comes up a lot that actually can impede our progress - and it’s that sometimes we get so caught up in whether we’re doing the routines right that we can find ourselves unintentionally stuck inside of them.
So let’s just start with some fundamentals. If you think about it, at the heart of every routine is a framework that we’ve designed to be a vehicle that serves us in some way. It’s a vehicle in the sense that it helps you to facilitate some sort of change; it helps you work through something; it gets you from one place to another; it helps you apply a method to something that makes doing that thing simpler or easier.
An exercise routine is a vehicle. A morning routine is a vehicle. Work routines are vehicles.
And so in that way, the purpose of a routine is not so much about the routine itself, it’s really what the routine is helping you to become.
But sometimes, when we’re trying so hard to make changes, what we end up doing is forgetting that routines are vehicles that are intended to serve us, and instead we end up falling into the trap of being preoccupied with serving our routines.
And what I mean by that is sometimes we can become so attached to whether we’re actually doing the routine, that we lose sight of whether we’re experiencing the shift or the change that we set out to experience in the first place.
In other words, we get stuck inside of the process instead of whether the routine is actually the right vehicle for us to experience the shift that we want to experience.
Let me give you an example. I think morning routines are a good one for us to look at. So much has been written about morning routines, and for many years I was obsessed with my morning routine, and at one point I curated or at least tried to curate the first hour to two hours of my day in a way that, looking back on it, was purely formulaic.
So I was lining up four, five, six things back to back, and the routines consisted of moving onto one thing only after I had finished the thing before. So I couldn’t start reading for 10 minutes until I had finished a full glass of water. And then I couldn’t start writing a page in my journal until I had finished my 10 minutes of reading. And then I couldn’t mobilize for 10 minutes until I had finished writing a page in my journal. And on and on.
Eventually though I realized that instead of actually benefiting from the water, the reading, the writing, and the mobility, I was trapped inside of and completely preoccupied by the process around the routine.
So I would get up and maybe make it three-quarters of the way through a morning routine but maybe not the whole thing. Now doing 3/4 of it I’m sure had left me in a much better position to show up at my best that day than I was when I woke up, but I found myself being focused on the fact that I didn’t complete it, and my mind would chalk that up as a loss. I was stuck inside the routine.
So you can see that there’s an undertone here of perfectionism. We are all so prone to focusing on trying to make and do things perfectly, and that desire to be perfect and to do things flawlessly can hide under the surface and impede our efforts to work on ourselves. And as soon as we start to shift our focus to perfection it’s got us. We’re trapped. We’re trapped in the mindset of being someone who’s trying to do something perfectly, as opposed to being someone who’s listening closely to gain a better understanding of what we need, in that moment.
Going back to my story, at some point I realized that I was approaching routines completely backwards. And so gradually I started to shift from a rigid routine to what I would call a loose framework that I now use that allows me to listen closely to what I is that I need that morning, and in that moment.
And I eventually realized that for me, the point of any morning routine I engage in is that I want to participate in a process that allows me to position myself to show up at my best in that moment, and for the rest of my day, based on what I’m observing about myself, in that moment.
And so here’s the reason why I’d invite you to consider whether sometimes a framework might be a better fit for you than always having a rigid, step by step routine.
Who we are energetically and what we need fluctuates from day to day, and because of that, rigid routines doen’t always serve us. So have you ever gone to bed one night feeling great and then for some reason when you wake up the next morning something inside of you has shifted, like you wake up feeling sad or unsettled or anxious - or on the flip side, maybe you’ve been struggling for a while and then after a night’s sleep you wake up feeling great.
Nothing that you can put your finger on has necessarily changed since you went to bed the night before, and you can’t really tie that shift to anything specific. And who knows why this happens, mercury might be in retrograde, or Jupiter is upset, I don’t know.
But what we do know is that these types of energetic fluctuations are, and always will be, part of the human experience. No matter how much we try to forecast what we’re going to need, we can never plan out something that will always fit perfectly.
And because these kinds of shifts can happen so regularly for us it doesn’t seem to make sense to always approach taking care of ourselves with formulaic responses.
So I want to suggest that you become curious about the structure of your routines, and let’s just continue to use the morning routine as an example.
Instead of waking up every day and jumping headfirst into your routine, consider pausing for a moment and asking yourself this question: what is it that I need right now? What is it that I actually need in this moment?
It’s so rare that we actually pause and step out of autopilot to ask ourselves this question, or that we just take a moment to survey our body and our mind.
Things like, is my body sore, am I feeling tired, are there parts of me where it feels like I might be holding onto stress, in terms of your mindset you can ask questions like am I experiencing any anxiousness, do I feel tired, am I feeling energized and happy today, am I holding my breath in a way where I’m already starting the day with my chest being tight, things like that.
And asking this series of questions allows you to become a little more aware and in touch with what it is that you actually need, in that moment, based on how you have shown up energetically.
And then once you ask those questions it gives you the ability to design what happens next with an intention behind addressing those specific things that your body and mind are telling you are the most present for you on that day.
The point here is that you give yourself a loose framework to operate inside of that allows for adjustment and is aligned with your present needs.
And in doing this I think it helps us flip from being someone who is routine driven to someone who is intention driven.
Now if your intention is to be someone who is following a routine, because you’re training for a triathlon, or you are being best served by a back to back process, or you want to use the structure of a routine as a vehicle to get you set up with some solid structure in your day, then that’s great and then it would be important to follow a step by step routine.
So I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting that there’s no value in following step by step routines. What I am suggesting is that you will serve yourself at the highest level if you spend some time getting clear on what it is that you’re looking to receive. It’s the difference between moving with intention and just wandering.
There’s something else lurking under the surface here that I want to bring up.
As you’re thinking about your routines, consider whether you ever unintentionally beat up on yourself when you catch yourself not following a routine.
We can easily fall into this trap of beating up on ourselves when we set out to follow a routine and we don’t do it perfectly. Or we observe other people who are routine-driven, and we wonder why it is that we can’t follow through in the way they do.
Here’s the deal. It’s great to be able to learn from other people and to observe, but that observation also has a potential to cause friction between what we think we should be doing and what our body and our mind are actually signaling to us is what we need.
So be aware of this and instead of focusing on whether you’re doing the routine perfectly, focus instead on sitting with and soaking in the value you’re getting from each and every part of the process. So try to gently take yourself away from a place of judgment around whether you were able to do something exactly the way you had it mapped out in your mind, and instead celebrate the fact that you’ve done something for yourself that helped you get that much farther along that day.
It’s those small incremental moments stacked up, day over day, that are th real wins. Those are the reasons why we do our routines in the first place - it’s not about the routine, it’s about what it brings you.
So my request to you is to look at your routines or habits as your servant, as opposed to a structure and a process that you have to serve.
And I know this can be challenging, but the closer you listen, the more you’ll be able to gently let go of any pressure you might feel to follow a routine that may not be suiting you, and shift to a place where you’re living inside of the value of that process instead.
Go have a great workday.