The Six Step Framework To Develop Life Enhancing Rituals

Have you ever tried to make a change in your life to find you just didn’t have the willpower to carry it through?

Well, today I have a simple six step framework for making changes in your life called ‘The Life Enhancing Framework’

Before I go on to show you the framework I’d like to explain it a little more to help you get the most out of it.

If I were to ask you what rituals you have in your life, what would your answer be?

A lot of us don’t even know we have rituals in our lives, but think about these rituals that most of us perform: brushing our teeth, showering, having breakfast, lunch and dinner, going to work, taking the kids to school, going to bed at a certain time – that’s only a few, I’m sure you can think of many more.

A ritual is something you do every day, or most days,  without consciously thinking about it.

Good and bad rituals

There are a lot of good rituals we have in our lives, but there’s also a lot of bad ones we could be getting rid of.  With this framework you won’t have to focus on getting rid of bad rituals as the good ones you are going to create will push the bad rituals to the side.

As an example I consciously created a life enhancing ritual of becoming an early riser and it has really helped push my productivity up and helped with relaxation and exercise.  Now, getting up early is not everyone’s cup of tea, but it gives you an idea of the power of rituals..

The Life Enhancing Framework

Step 1

The first step of the framework is to identify nine rituals in your life that you would like to implement. Don’t worry we aren’t going to implement all nine straight away, that would be overwhelming

Write down life enhancing rituals that you might like to introduce in your life; meditation, yoga, more exercise, walking, drinking more water, actively listening to people, That’s 5 or 6 off the bat straight away and you will come up with others; spending time with family, hobbies, anything that you can think of.

Just make it nine at the moment. This is the first step of creating a new ritual.

Step 2

The second step is to reduce the nine life enhancing rituals down to three life enhancing rituals.

The way you’ll do that is to identity the three most important ones to you. So take your list and pick out the three that are most important to you, and the most likely ones you’ll implement straight away. Remember it’s the most important ones to you, not to anyone else, just to you.

Step 3

Now prioritise them, with most important one at the top of the list.

Step 4

The fourth step is to look at the top priority ritual and look for the path of least resistance.

By that I mean which path is most achievable i.e. You want to implement a new exercise routine at 5.30pm on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday, look at the path of least resistance. If you’ve got children to take to afterschool clubs, perhaps your partner doesn’t come into after 5.30pm or perhaps you have working commitments so 5.30pm might not be a good time to implement that life enhancing ritual.

Whereas if you look at the path: 6 am in the morning, you don’t necessary have to go to the gym but you could go for a walk every morning at 6 am before anyone gets up, so you are available and no one is demanding your time and you can still get the exercise that you want every day. Now this would be the path of least resistance.

If you choose a harder path to follow there are going to be roadblocks that get in your way.  This makes it less likely that you will succeed in making this a ritual.

Step 5

Number 5 in the framework is to set a specific time every day to implementing this ritual in your life.

As I said in the previous example if you want to set a specific time of six o’clock to start walking in the morning for half an hour, which means every morning without fail you get up about 5.30am, get dressed, have a shower, get your clothes on, relax for 10-15 minutes then at 6 am you go out for a walk for half an hour.

The reason it’s important that a specific time is set is to condition your body clock, and if you miss doing your life enhancing ritual, your body, mind and spirit will almost start to yearn for it.

Step 6

The sixth, and final step, is to carry out the life enhancing ritual every single day, if you can.

If it’s a form of exercise it would be great if you could do it every day, that’s if it’s a gentle exercise. If it’s a gym routine it may not be possible to do every single day.

There will be other life enhancing rituals that you can do every day; drinking more water, perhaps a litre or more, but do it at a specific time every single day. You have to try and do it every single day if you can, that way you’re body, mind and spirit will get used to it.

I hope you understand the framework for introducing a life enhancing ritual into your life. What will happen over the weeks and months is that your life degrading rituals will start to diminish as more and more life enhancing rituals come into your life.

Willpower

I also want to speak about willpower.

Studies have shown that you only have a certain amount of willpower. It has been shown that we haven’t got a limitless supply of willpower because it takes mental energy to force your will on something, and this is what you are going to be doing when you are creating a life enhancing ritual
. You are going to be forcing your will, and yourself to start this ritual. It’s going to take a lot of mental energy at first. After maybe three or five weeks it’s going to become an unconscious habit. This is the state we want to get to, we want the ritual to become an unconscious habit because when it becomes an unconscious habit you no longer have to think about it. It means that you are expending much less mental energy on it.

The more life enhancing rituals you have in your life the less mental energy you will be expending while still gaining all the benefits of having life enhancing rituals.

To try and explain a little further here is an example, when you first start to drive you had to concentrate really hard; on the wheel, peddle, gear stick etc. You couldn’t really let your mind wander at all when you first started to drive because you had to concentrate so hard. You had to force your will to concentrate on all the other drivers on the road, as well as focusing on what you were doing. However, once you become an experienced driver you no longer have to concentrate so much, it becomes an unconscious process. You can listen to the radio; you can concentrate on a CD or audio book or the person speaking to you next to you.

There are lots of things you can do when you’re driving. You shouldn’t be driving when you are fully concentrating on something else but your mind is really split in two places at one time. This is because the driving becomes an unconscious act so you don’t have to expend the mental energy on driving anymore.

So that’s the place we want to get to when we are creating life enhancing rituals in our lives.

It’s unbelievable to identify what rituals you have in your life and it’s unbelievable what we can achieve if we can develop more life enhancing rituals in our lives.

8 Destructive thinking patterns and how to change them

It can be extremely difficult to focus on the good when, seemingly, bad things are happening in your life. However you can train your mind to focus on the good things in your life rather than dwelling on the bad. No it’s not one of those positive thinking articles that you’ve read all over the web and are sick and tired of. This is about changing the way you think, changing your thinking pattern. Do you use any of these thinking patterns in your day to day life?
8 limiting patterns of thinking

1. ‘Life is shit’ Thinking pattern –Everything in life is bad, everybody is not to be trusted and nothing good will ever happen to them e.g. “I won’t get that job, the interviewer didn’t like me, I didn’t particularly like them anyway.”
2. ‘Unsubstantiated conclusive’ Thinking pattern– You tend to make a lot of conclusions without any evidence to back up your conclusions. This can be a really destructive pattern as it can limit you in seeing reality for what it is e.g. “He walks a bit funny, he must be gay.” (I actually heard someone saying this about a colleague last week).
3. ‘Never to me’ Thinking pattern – This is when you think nothing good will ever happen to you. This can be a deep seated way of thinking and it is a deep down inability to believe you are worthy of anything good happening to you e.g. “I’ll never have money, I’ve never had it before so I’ll never have it in the future, might as well carry on with this shitty job, at least it pays the mortgage.”
4. ‘The negative psychic’ Thinking pattern – Presuming you know what people are thinking about you and it’s all bad. e.g. “She thinks I’m an idiot, I’ll try to avoid talking to her.”
5. ‘Should, would, could’ Thinking pattern – This type of person knows what they have to do to change their life, they are capable and they know it and they would do it if only……… e.g. “I know I could go to university and I would, but I’m just to busy with other things right now, I’ll apply next year.”
6. ‘Emotion based’ Thinking pattern – Your emotions control what you are thinking and therefore your vision of what reality is e.g. “I feel incapable of doing that so I must be incapable”.
7. ‘It’s all my fault’ Thinking pattern – You see yourself as being the cause of everything bad that has happened e.g. “It’s my fault he left me for another woman.” You’ll notice this type of person does not take responsibility for the good things that happen.
8. ‘They’re all wrong’ Thinking pattern – You see everyone as incapable of doing anything right and your way is the best way to do it e.g. “He can’t do it right, I’ll stay late tonight and fix it when he’s gone.”

These are just some of the common thinking patterns I have come across in my life and I have used some of them myself, I used to use mix the ‘Never to me’ and ‘The negative psychic’ thinking patterns about everything, “She’ll never go out with me she thinks I’m an idiot.” I made a conscious effort to change what I believed about myself and what I believed about the world and it has literally changed my life.

How to change the destructive thinking patterns

The first stage of changing is to recognise the problem – You will find a lot of people in life who just don’t think there is a problem so there is no need to change. If this is you then do nothing. If you want to change you must think there is a need and you will start to recognise what things need to change and it usually starts with your perception of life. Everybody’s perception of life is different, therefore everyone’s reality is different. I don’t live in the same world as you and you don’t live in the same world as me. That might sound a strange concept to some people, but think about it for a few minutes, it could change the way you see the world. I’ll give you an example:

In 2004 I took a redundancy package from my place of employment and received about £10,000 for my troubles, not a lot at all when I was earning £25,000 a year when I left. I was speaking to my friend about it and he thought I was absolutely nuts to do it, especially since I was married with two children. I explained to him how free I felt and what plans I had to start an online book dealing business and my wife was right behind me. He still thought I was crazy. My perception of the world was one of opportunity, life was great and I was free from the rat race for a while and I would get to see my wife and children a lot more than I had, I was ecstatic and if it didn’t work out I had a lot of skills to offer another employer. My friends perception was one of doom and gloom, he needed the security of a full time job even though he hated it and was working 12 hours per day. It turns out I worked at it for 1 year made a good profit but gave it up due to a huge downturn in business. At the end of it I was still optimistic as I knew I was good enough to get another job until I could do something else.

Everybody’s view of the world is different and it all comes down to the thinking patterns you use in your daily life. If you think life is wonderful you will notice the wonderful things in your life, if you think life is shit you will find shit things about life. Change your thoughts and you literally change the world you are living in. First you have to recognise your destructive thinking pattern.

The second stage is to be aware of when you are using the destructive thinking patterns – We can employ different thinking patterns depending on what we are doing in life. For example you could use a positive thinking pattern at work as you are very confident in your ability and yet use a destructive one when it comes to looking for love. Recognising when you use destructive thinking patterns can help you to change that pattern. Now that you have recognised when you use the destructive thinking patterns it is now time to change it.

The third stage is to replace the bad with the good – This is something that you don’t do immediately. You don’t say to yourself ‘I’ll never be able to do that”, which is you old thinking pattern, to “Oh yes I can”. That won’t work. You have to let the old pattern die slowly whilst slowly introducing your new improved thinking pattern. Here an example:

You are out in a club and you want to talk to someone you are attracted to. Your thoughts are “ She’ll never talk to me, she’s gorgeous.” You will immediately recognise this pattern of thinking and tell yourself something good about yourself e.g. “I’m good at _______(FILL IN THE BLANK), it can be anything. This will not immediately help your situation but it will slowly begin to change your old destructive thinking pattern with a new one.

This stage takes place over time and is not done immediately. The best time to change a destructive thinking pattern is to let it run it’s course and slowly replace it with a thinking pattern that is better for you. I know people want a microwave life, stick it in the micro and it’s ready in 3 minutes, your life is not like that and you cannot change in 1 day, unless something drastic happens.
You can work on more than 1 destructive thinking pattern at a time.

To recap

To change your thinking pattern you have to

Recognise
Be aware
Slowly change and introduce a new thinking pattern
Keep working on all your destructive thinking patterns

Change your life with your new way of thinking

Recognising and changing your way of thinking can be a long process depending on what patterns of thinking you employ and how badly you want to change. People can change, do change and change for the rest of their lives, I know I have, so don’t be thinking you’ll never be able to change, you can and you will if you really want to.

After a few months you will see a huge difference in your life and you will want to use your new way of thinking to good effect. You will start to notice new types of people enter into your life who can help you reach the goals you have in life and in turn you will help them reach their goals, don’t worry about how just now.
Take time to think about your goals and take the time often to do this. I take time every day to think about where I want to be in life and slowly but surely it happens. Personally I find it better in the morning to really think about my goals and then again at night just before I am falling asleep. It works for me but you will have to experiment a little to find your way of thinking about your goals.

17 Things I Wished I’d Known When I was Younger

1. I wish I’d known that failure was an option.

2. I wish I’d known there’s a difference between friends and drinking buddies.

3. I wish I’d known honesty, in all situations, is always, always, always the best policy.

4. I wish I’d known how to grow a pair and be more assertive.

5. I wish I’d known how to feel comfortably weird about being a little weird.

6. I wish I’d known how much my mum and dad really loved me, and all the warnings I got came from a place of love.

7. I wish I’d known that my thoughts don’t have to dictate my life.

8. I wish I’d known that home really is where the heart is.

9. I wish I’d known that intelligence is not something you’re born with, it’s something that can be worked on.

10. I wish I’d known that being positive can really change your thoughts which can indeed change your life.

11. I wish I’d known how to be myself more and not tried to imitate Tom Cruise’ (Top Gun) confidence (Although singing, ‘You’ve lost that Loving Feeling’ to girls sometimes did work )

12. I wish I’d known that the jacket of life could be altered to suit me.

13. I wish I’d known how to say No!

14. I wish I’d known that the phrase ‘just try it’ should apply to everything we do in life.

15. I wish I’d known that not being perfect is okay, and, in fact, striving for perfection is an impossible task.

16. I wish I’d known that not being ‘well off’ didn’t mean I didn’t have a rich life.

17. I wish I’d known that losing myself in a book wasn’t a substitute for living.

A Little Black Pen