Hi everyone! Today, I wanted to talk about routines.
I don’t know about you, but I have a routine since a long time. Actually I have several routines, one that’s more at the beginning of my day, to have a good start of the day. And the second one is more in the evening to have a good night sleep. I’ve decided to create these routines for my own wellbeing, for my own health.
I wanted to recently make some changes into this routine. Add up things, remove things because I wanted to put more mental health check, like my self-coaching and these kind of things. And I had left that far for a while and I wanted to introduce that into my routine.
So I wanted to review this routine and I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about this with you today.
How to start if you don’t have a routine yet
I don’t know if you have already. If you don’t, the interesting thing to ask for yourself is:
- why am I going to create a routine?
- what are the results that I expect from the routine?
And based on these results, you can come up with a list of actions that you can take. You make a list of all the actions that you can think of. And then, what you are going to do is that you are going to select one or two, not more, actions that you want to take.
And once you have decided about this action, you’re going to check how you can couple this new task, this new action as part of your routine from something that you are already doing every day. For example, maybe you drink a glass of water.
And once you have identified which actions you’re going to couple to that, you can try to do that the next morning (if it’s in the morning).
What matters is really that you follow your own rhythm. I am not in favor of waking up at five in the morning. I really like to wake up early, but because of my own rhythm not because I read somewhere in a book that we have to wake up at five in the morning to be successful. This is not what it is about. It’s really about creating a healthy habit and creating a routine that will bring yourself some results.
You’re going to add these tasks to this thing that you already do so it’s like a piggy bag on this action that you’re already doing. And it’s a trick to help you, take these new routine in action. And what you need also to check is, after a few days of this routine, are you really feeling better, healthier, whatever your goal is? So that you can see if it works, if you have to adapt and how you can do that.
And once you have set up this habit, the second habit on this routine for yourself, you can start to add another task. If you’re going to have several things done as part of your own routine. But really do that once at a time and keep the new routine on for several days, something like a month, for example. We usually say that a habit is created into 21 days. That really depends on what you are trying to introduce as a routine. So you can create routines like that.
What if you already have a routine?
If you already have a routine like me, you are going to ask yourself if you really achieved the goal. You’re going to review your own results. And then you’re going to follow the same pattern, basically, as I just said.
So based on these new results that you want to achieve:
- What are the actions that I already have?
- And what are the new actions that I can think of?
And based on that, you will need to, maybe, remove one action from the routine you already have and add a new one so that you don’t overcharge yourself with too many things to do in your routine. I don’t believe there is really a rule, it really depends on how much things do you want to do in your routine.
So for example, my routine in the morning, might have three to four different things that I’m doing one after the other. But they are really quick. So I’m working out for 10 to 15 minutes, then I take a breakfast, then I do my self-coaching and these kind of things.
And within an hour, something like that, I am able to do all the things that I want as part of my routine. It’s the same in the evening. I don’t do much in the evening, basically. It’s about meditating and also disconnecting myself from the digital devices. So really disconnecting myself from work before I go to sleep.
It’s really definitely on you to find what’s the right balance for yourself.
- How long do you want this routine to last. Is it an hour? Is it only 20 minutes?
- And what’s the results you want to achieve?
So what can you do to feel healthier into 20 minutes?
Maybe it’s just one workout in the morning, every morning, with some stretching, why not? And some relaxing music at the end.
Maybe it’s just, going out for a walk, after you had lunch. And you can grab some colleagues with you.
Maybe it’s meditation or mindfulness before you go to sleep. So you have a good night’s sleep. And you add up to that something like: I’m disconnecting from all my screens, 30 minutes before I go to sleep and I grab a book or something like that.
There are many, many things that you can put into a routine. And it’s really up to what you want to achieve and what the results you have in mind for this routine.
So yeah, go try what you want to do as a routine, try many things. Come back if it doesn’t work, you don’t have to stick to it. You can change it and have fun it, and I hope you will benefit from having a great routine.
Bye bye!
NB: This text is a transcript of the video 😉
