What Is The Difference Between Habits, Routines And Rituals?
So, what’s the difference between habits, routines and rituals?
Is it important that you know the difference anyway?
I’m Sonia Harris, and I’m actually sitting in my favourite spot in this park. It’s actually the second highest point in London.
I’ve just finished my walk, and I was thinking about habits, routines and rituals because I didn’t know there was a difference. I used to just use the terms interchangeably, morning habit, morning routine, morning ritual.
It wasn’t until I was able to distinguish and understand the difference that my approach to my morning ritual changed. I call it my mindful morning ritual, and I use those terms “mindful” and “ritual” purposefully.
So, what’s a habit?
We all have habits, our days are full of habits aren’t they? Some people in the mornings, they have the habit of drinking maybe one or two cups of coffee. When you put on your trousers you’ll put one leg in before the other whether it’s left or right.
You just do that unconsciously. So there are habits that we have throughout the day and we just do them unconsciously. We don’t think about it.
Routines are really a set of habits, and forgot to say that, habits are behaviours and actions that we take.
Routines are really of a set of habits, actions that are sequenced together. I’ve got into a habit of doing certain things when I get up in the morning. They’ve changed over time depending on what was happening.
So I’d have a routine and then without really thinking about it something might happen and then my routine changed. It all depended on what habits I was applying at the time.
Recently I had to start looking at what I was doing with my days, because I felt that I wasn’t being as productive as I could be. I wasn’t getting enough sleep, so one of the things I wanted was to get more sleep.
Getting more sleep meant, of course, going to bed earlier, and because of some of the activities I’ve been doing in the evenings, it meant I would have less time to do them.
Also, during the day I had very low points in my energy, so I knew that I had to do something differently to what I’d been doing before.
I started to look at what I was doing in the mornings, and what I wasn’t doing in the mornings. As soon as I started doing that, I became mindful of what I was doing, and I started to think about, what I was doing a couple of years ago, I had this morning ritual and I just felt great.
I got so much done, and I wanted to get myself back to that, but I needed to do things slightly different because I didn’t want to fall off the wagon again.
So I just wanted to share with you, that if you want to change a habit, or you want to start a ritual, it’s important to understand that there is a difference between habits, routines and rituals.
A ritual is something that is mindful and is purposeful. You are aware of what you’re doing and there is meaning to each of the actions that’s within that ritual. You do it, it’s not just by accident, you don’t just do it mindlessly.
So my morning ritual … each element of it has meaning to it, and it’s moving me in a certain direction. Since starting I’ve noticed that I’m more focused during the day. My energy levels are definitely increasing just because of what I’m implementing in the morning, my morning ritual.
I have a pre morning ritual as well, and I shared that in the video I recorded yesterday.
If you’d like more tips on how to be more productive to get more done
with less stress check out my free PDF download http://soniamharris.com/9productivitytips
I am passionate about helping people. I have done this in the offline world for years as a coach and trainer. Since getting online a few years ago I have learnt a ton of cool stuff. I still have a passion for teaching and coaching so now I love to help home business owners be more productive, get more done with less stress even if they’re juggling a full time job, business and life.
Skype: vitality4life
Email: Sonia@SoniaMHarris.com
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Email: Sonia@SoniaMHarris.co
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Originally published at www.soniamharris.com on June 11, 2017.
