The mini rituals that help you get going

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? Creativity is a habit. I learned that from possibly my favorite book about creativity, which is called The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. In this book, I think right in the beginning, Twyla talks about her morning routine, which is: she wakes up every day at 5:30 in the morning.

[00:00:37] She puts on her workout clothes. She goes downstairs outside her house, she hails a taxi and she goes to the gym. The ritual, she calls it a ritual, is not the workout or going to the gym. The ritual, the trigger, as James Clear might put it, is the act of putting on her workout [00:01:00] clothes. Once she's done that, she is now in this mindset and it has triggered this whole habit she has around how she starts her morning, which gets her going and helps her be creative that day.

[00:01:15] I was thinking about the power of such routines, such rituals or such triggers, if the word ritual is triggering for you. and I realized that almost everything that I do successfully that is also consistent, always has some kind of trigger/ritual attached to it. For example, for the last two weeks that I've been doing this podcast, I have kind of unintentionally or maybe intentionally kind of began a ritual of my own. Every single day,

[00:01:50] once I wanna get, when I wanna get ready to record this podcast. I go to my kitchen. I grab a glass of water. I bring it to my desk. I [00:02:00] drink the whole glass of water. Then I pull myself towards the desk, get myself aligned, open up some software, and then I take a deep breath, and then I start recording. I literally do this almost every single day.

[00:02:17] and if you wanna see like what that whole process looks like, I actually just made a video about how I record this podcast every single day. I'll put it in the show notes, but I was thinking about how a lot of these times, if you think back in your own day, I bet you you have small triggers or small little rituals that you do before certain things.

[00:02:39] Maybe it's taking a deep breath before you go into a meeting or you know, doing a little stretch right before you wake up and get outta bed. I don't know. There almost always is with almost everyone that I've noticed. What if you were to do that intentionally? I think James Clear basically talks [00:03:00] about that in Atomic Habits, his book, where you create triggers or use something that you already do in your life and make it into a trigger to help you do this new thing that you wanna do.

[00:03:14] For example, for me, I've been following Twyla Tharp's, pretty much her advice, and in order to make sure that I wake up and I work out, or at least do yoga, which is a small workout, I make sure my workout clothes are just ready to go, and the first thing I do when I wake up is go to the washroom, brush my teeth, and then I put on these clothes that are already there for me to put on.

[00:03:39] No thinking involved. And once I have the clothes on, it's like, well, I have my workout clothes on. I might as well go do a workout. Right? I haven't been perfect yet. There are days when I sit down after that at my desk and I just like, record the podcast episode first or do something else. But I know that if I keep at it, I will be able [00:04:00] to make that trigger work for me and make getting that workout done much easier than it is right now, because, as we talked about it before: getting started is much harder than being able to keep going, which incidentally is also Newton's first law, right?

[00:04:20] Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. So I guess the thought I want to leave you with today is think about something you wanna do that you're having a hard time doing. Now, what is a ritual or a trigger that you can create in your life that will help you do this thing and get you in the right mindset, to make it easier for you to just get going.

[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.