Know Your Performance Patterns and Operating Rhythms

You know that disclaimer they use in television commercials for mutual fund companies—past performance is not a predictor of future performance? That's actually not so true when it comes to following through on your routines. If you've had trouble sticking to routines in the past, you probably will again in the future unless you take a little time to analyze what works best for you in terms of your natural performance patterns and operating rhythms. For instance, if getting up in the morning is a struggle for you, telling yourself that you're going to get up at 5:00 AM everyday for 30 minutes of cardio probably isn't a great strategy for success. Sticking with that example, maybe spending 30 minutes on the treadmill or elliptical machine is your personal idea of hell at any time of the day. It's good to call all of that out in advance and choose accordingly. Maybe a brisk walk during the day would be a better option for you. To take an example from the relational domain of routines, it wouldn't make a lot of sense to say you're going to have dinner with your family five nights a week if you've got a houseful of teenagers and both you and your spouse work outside the home. Maybe going out for brunch on the weekends would work better for you—or not. The point is to take some time to assess and be realistic about your recent performance patterns and operating rhythms when you are selecting routines that will help you show up at your best.

Pick the Routines That Are Easy to Do and Likely to Make a Difference

The reason I've talked about this principle throughout the book is because it's so damn important. As you choose routines for your Life GPS, start with easy ones that will make a difference. There are so many things you could choose to do on a regular basis that are relatively hard to do that would make a difference. The problem is that they won't make a difference because they're too hard for you to either learn how to do or fit into your life. For instance, going to a 90-minute yoga class five days a week would probably make a big difference for you. The problem is you probably can't identify the 10 or so hours a week—at a minimum—it would take to fit in all of those chair poses and downward facing dogs. So, why not start with a 30-minute online class you can do in your living room three times a week? That's still going to make a difference for you but is a lot easier to do. After a month or two of that, add in a class at your gym on Saturday or figure out a way to get to a class at a studio on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Before you know it, you're doing yoga five days a week. It just didn't require an upfront commitment of 10 hours a week. (And, again, I'm not saying you have to do yoga. It's just an example.)

Schedule the Big Rocks First

This is another one that we've talked about a few times already. It bears repeating, though, as you work on setting yourself up for success with your routines. The very word routine implies that you're going to do something on a regular basis. If they're actually routines that help you show up at your best and make it more likely that you create the outcomes you're hoping for at home, at work, and in the community, they're big rocks. Schedule them first. To take an example from earlier in the book, Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta schedules dinner with his dad and other family members and friends on Tuesday nights. He's been doing it for 40 years. Does it happen every single Tuesday? Nope, life does have a tendency to intervene, but because the Tuesday dinner is a standing commitment on his calendar, he's compelled to ask if another request for his time is worth missing the big rock of having dinner with his dad. Once you identify the routines that matter most to you, get them on your calendar.

Master Your Inner Monologue

So, getting those big rocks on your calendar is one thing; actually following through on them is another. If you're human (and who here isn't?), you've had times when that inner monologue starts cranking in your head as the calendar notification starts flashing for that commitment you made days ago. While the script can vary, the monologue is along the lines of, “Oh, man, I don't feel like doing that at all. Maybe I should just skip it today.”

Danae Ringelmann of Indiegogo knows all about that monologue and has observed through the years that when it's telling her to skip something she's committed to doing for her own good, she almost physically feels the urge to not do it. That's become her signal that she needs to suck it up and do it anyway. She first noticed the dynamic in a public speaking course that she signed up for in college. Like a lot of people, the idea of speaking in public made Ringelmann anxious and she regularly had that inner monologue telling her to skip the class because it was just too uncomfortable. She went anyway and, as it turns out, it changed the course of her life. As she told me:

Public speaking has become one of the critical ways we've grown Indiegogo. We had no marketing power. We had nothing. All we had was ourselves. We had to get out there and talk. It actually became critical for me to learn how to do that. It became critical in our success.

That was kind of the first big lesson. So anytime where I literally have a physical reaction to something, that's my trigger that that means I need to do it.

Recruit Some Buddies

Whenever we run a group coaching program in my company, we always have the participants pair up as peer coaches for the duration of the seven-month program. The expectation is that they spend at least 20 minutes a week—10 minutes in each direction—coaching and encouraging each other to keep going on whatever it is they're working on. When I debrief people on what they get out of that process, one of the most frequent responses is, “I didn't want to show up for my call not having done what I said I was going to do last week, so I went ahead and did it.” It's that whole accountable partner thing.

You can and probably should use the same principle to help you follow through on your most important routines. Recruit some buddies to be your coaches and accountability partners. Tell them what you're working on and ask them to ask you how it's going on a regular basis. Better yet, ask them to join you in the routine. On the relational routines front, for example, it's hard to have a date night by yourself. On the physical routines, you're a lot less likely to skip the workout or the class if you know that a friend is there waiting on you. On the spiritual routines, it can be really meaningful to share what you're doing and learning with a friend or family member who's on a similar path.

Ask for Feedback

As you recruit some buddies, give them permission to give you feedback on the routines you're engaging in for which they have line of sight. When you do, you may want to give them a guideline that was first proposed by the Apostle Paul: “Speak the truth in love.” In other words, ask them to keep it real while holding your best interests at heart. When I was interviewing her for this book, Kaye Foster Cheek had a great line about how she thinks about the value of feedback from family, friends, and colleagues: “You know, I am human, so there are days when, as my son would say, ‘I need my posse to straighten me out.’” Make sure you have some good buddies in your posse who will give it to you straight.

Review Your Life GPS Weekly

If you haven't already downloaded a copy of the Life GPS worksheet from ootma.eblingroup.com, now is a great time to do that. We've already had some extended conversation about determining how you are at your best and, in this part of the book, the physical, mental, relational, and spiritual routines you want in your life to reinforce that. In the next chapter, we'll talk about the outcomes you're hoping to gain by showing up at your mindful best more often. You'll stand a much better chance of staying true to your intentions if you capture your thoughts on a single piece of paper. The Life GPS worksheet is designed to help you do that.

Once you have your answers to the three big components—how you are at your best, the routines that reinforce that, and the outcomes that you hope for—written down, your Life GPS becomes much like the GPS app on your smartphone or the one in your car. Once you enter a destination in the GPS device, you have a much better chance of getting there. When you make a wrong turn in your car, the GPS is able to adjust the route for you because you've already entered where you want to go into the device. Do the same thing with your Life GPS; write down where you want to go and then regularly assess your progress. My recommendation is that you keep your completed Life GPS nearby—at your desk, in your planner, on a bedside table, or in a PDF reader on your tablet are all good candidates—so it's easy for you to glance at it once or twice a day. On a weekly basis, I recommend taking 10 or 15 minutes of reflection time to pull out your Life GPS, look over each of the three main components, and ask yourself, “How am I doing?” If you're like me, you'll probably identify a number of things that you need to adjust in any given week. Pick one or two adjustments to make that are—you guessed it—relatively easy to do and likely to make a difference. Save any other potential adjustments you might make for later. A weekly quick and easy review of your Life GPS can help you stay focused on your mindfulness alternative.

Celebrate Your Wins

We've heard several times from Teresa Amabile, Harvard Business School professor and coauthor of The Progress Principle. The focus of Amabile's book and work is the factors that keep people engaged with their work. The primary finding of her research is that if they recognize even one thing each day that they accomplish on something that matters, most people stay motivated and engaged.

The same principle applies to you. As you follow through on your routines, take just a little bit of time to acknowledge your efforts and whatever progress you're making. I know from experience that sometimes it seems like you're not making any progress at all. It can feel like all effort and no progress, and, then, seemingly out of nowhere, you have a breakthrough. It wasn't out of nowhere of course—you were putting in the road miles that made that breakthrough possible. John Rawlinson, the former actor and model who made a career shift to bring integrated wellness practices to hospice patients and their families, shared a Latin phrase with me that describes this process: festina lente, which translates as “make haste slowly.” You keep at it and keep at it until you see progress. Then you still keep going. Give yourself credit for both the effort and the eventual outcome. Celebrate all of your wins.

Move on to the Next Play

Remember, it's yoga practice, not yoga perfect. The more we can accept the fact that we're not perfect, the easier it is for any of us to do better. Not long after the Seattle Seahawks won the 2014 Super Bowl, I heard an interview with the team's sports psychologist, Michael Gervais. Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll hired Gervais a few years before to, among other things, teach the team how to meditate and do yoga. (Meditation was optional; yoga was mandatory.) In the interview, Gervais talked about the mind-set that Coach Carroll asked him to help instill in the members of the team. It was all about moments. Even world-class athletes have moments in a game where they blow a play. The goal of Gervais and the Seahawks coaching staff was to help players learn to forget that blown play moment as quickly as possible because the next play could be the game changer, and they needed all of their awareness and intention focused on that moment.

The same principle applies to you when you miss a day, a week, or more of an important routine. When you miss it, let go of the guilt. That doesn't do you any good and just worsens the fight or flight, overworked and overwhelmed feeling. Move on to the next play. Figure out the one or two things you want to do differently tomorrow to get back on track. That doesn't have to be the full-blown routine, by the way. Something—no matter how small—is better than nothing.

Scale Back

There are times in life when you reach a tipping point. Adding one more thing can bring everything crashing down like the last block on the shaky tower in a game of Jenga. The same thing can happen with your routines. Adding one more can totally upset your operating rhythm and create a negative ripple effect across the board. If that happens to you, scale back. Refer back to your Life GPS and remind yourself of the routines that are most clearly in the sweet spot of relatively easy to do and likely to make a difference for you. Regroup by focusing on just that really small number of routines and let yourself off the hook for the others for now. If they're still important down the road, you'll get back to them.

Create Leverage

When it's time to regroup, look for the routines that create the most leverage in your life and double down on those. For instance, if walking is a routine that works for you, keep it because it doesn't just have physical benefits, it also has mental benefits, relational benefits if you share your walks with someone you care about, and even spiritual benefits if it gives you the opportunity for reflection. That's a lot of leverage for an investment of 20 or 30 minutes a day. When you feel like you're off track, look at your routines with leverage in mind. Those are the ones where you want to invest whatever time you have available.

As we wrap up this part of Overworked and Overwhelmed, I hope you have some new insights about the routines that will work to help you show up at your best and create the outcomes that matter most to you. Let's continue building your mindfulness alternative by considering what those outcomes might look like and why, while it's important to have an idea of what they are, you'll want to hold the specifics loosely.