Resultify Your Routine!
Using the Power of Routine to Change Your Life
Hello, my friends! I hope you are treating life well. Have you ever found yourself living your life on auto-pilot even when you don’t want to? Have you ever stepped back from your life and looked at the results of your choices? Regardless of whether the results are good or bad, it should come as no surprise that those results are consequences of your habitual routines.
Routines, whether big or small, are what constitute your life. Even if you consider yourself to be a spontaneous person, and you break from routine often, that, in and of itself, is part of your routine! In short, most of us live a life filled with routine that can either promote the results that we are looking for–or sabotage them all together.
Where Our Routines Live
Routines are nothing more than habits that stem from various triggers. This being the case, it is important to know where these habits “live.” Your habits live in the part of your brain known as your subconscious mind, NOT the conscious mind. To illustrate my point, when is the last time you consciously thought about going about your morning routine? Did you get up and have to ponder about what to do next? Did you ask yourself if you are going to brush your teeth, put on your clothes, or take a shower? You probably didn’t spend much time considering your morning routine because they are already stored in your subconscious mind.
Routines can become deeply embedded into our subconscious mind and can have a profound effect on not only our physical habits, but also our mental, spiritual, and emotional habits as well. The problem that most people have when trying to change a habit or a routine is that they try to change everything at once. When this approach is used, the subconscious mind fights back, which triggers other physiological systems. These physiological systems, in turn, release stress hormones, such as cortisol.
Under these psychological and physiological conditions, it becomes almost impossible to focus and it becomes easy to feel overwhelmed. If change is to occur, we need to become acutely focused on one thing at a time!
The Menial to Mega Motivation (MTM) Principle
In my most recent E-Book, I spoke of a principle that I coined the “Menial-to-Mega-Motivation Principle” or “MTM” principle. Say, for example, that you look at your personal development “to-do” list and see a list that is not only daunting in nature, but also utterly impossible to complete if you tried to complete it at once. “Where do I start” is a common phrase I hear from clients trying to improve their lifestyle.
The MTM principle is simple. It is based on the principle that we human beings have almost limitless potential and capability when we stay focused. And to stay focused, we need to keep our area of focus very narrow.
The principle has a profound impact concerning our daily habits and routines. We often stay in our routines because we find it to daunting to change them! In the following challenge, we are going to use our God-given power of focus to change a single routine that we know is not healthy!
The MTM Challenge!
Step #1: Eliminate an undesirable routine
To begin your MTM challenge, I want you to simply find ONE routine that you would like to do without or at least minimize in your life, such as watching a sitcom after work, or spending too much time on social media. Your routine can be long or short–I don’t care. If you are honest with yourself, I guarantee that you will find routines in your life that are keeping you from living your life in the way that you would like to live it!
Step #2: Fill the void with an empowering activity
If you just eliminate your routine without replacing it with a rewarding and empowering routine, I can personally assure you that you will revert back to your old routine. Why? It’s because your old routine satisfies a need or fills time in your life. In short, you do it because it gives you a short-term reward.
I want you to find ONE empowering activity that you will use to fill the void of your old routine. A couple of ground rules here: It must be empowering, meaning that it contributes to your development, and it must be rewarding. Exercise would be a perfect example. It is both physically empowering and psychologically rewarding when it is completed.
I can promise you that if you change just ONE routine in your life, it will have a positive, compounding effect into many other areas of your life. So make to the resolve to do it now, and begin to make positive changes in your life today!
Life is good!
Griff
