Here’s your weekly reminder to choose what’s useful or beautiful.
Hi! I’m so glad you’re here. I was afraid I’d scared you off with last week’s story about my magical swamp turtle experience. I mean… that’s not what you signed up for, right?
Actually, why do you subscribe?
Ok. Onto the words.
I wrote a big long letter about leadership that I’m saving for next week because it’s already Friday afternoon and ain’t no one want to think about “being a leader” when they’re headed into the weekend. You’re probably on your way to the bar or the woods or yoga or pickleball or whatever.
Instead, may I share something I learned this week about habits and rituals?
Ritual vs Habit
I got to bask in the presence of Michael Bungay Stanier (MBS) this week as part of coaching.com’s Summit webinar series. If you don’t know MBS, he’s a delightful speaker and author of The Coaching Habit, one of the best books for managers (and coaches) I’ve ever read.
Michael’s session was about using rituals to help yourself and your clients (if you’re a coach, because that was the audience).
He began with this simple and powerful explanation of the difference between a habit and a ritual.
Habit | what | practical | mindless
Habits about what you’re doing. They’re practical, perhaps what you need to do. Habits are generally mindless.
Ritual | how | symbolic | mindful
Rituals are about how you do a thing. They’re meaningful and symbolic. You do a ritual because you want to. They take focus and attention.
Because habits are mindless they reduce cognitive load, which is crucial in our culture of speed and overstimulation. But mindfulness is also a salve to a busy mind. It brings you into the present moment, which activates the right hemisphere of your brain — the half that is selfless and expansive1.
You might already have a mindfulness-focused ritual like meditation or breathing exercises. What I liked about Michael’s talk is the notion that any action done with intent can become a mindful ritual.
Moments for ritual
When’s a good time for a ritual?
Beginnings, openings, welcomes
Transitions, thresholds, crossings
Endings, grieving, letting go
Any moment in which you purposely choose to intensify, slow down, and focus
These aren’t exclusive to each other. Endings of one thing are beginnings of another. You choose which moment is more meaningful to you.
Michael brought up a concept that I’ve read about in Chip and Dan Heath’s book, The Power of Moments, which is that people tend to remember beginnings and endings better than the in-between. Add a ritual (think graduations, weddings, funerals) and we’re definitely more likely to chisel that into our long-term memory.
Directions for ritual
Without
Within
This is about the direction in which you’re connecting to power. Are you facing out or seeking power within? Neither is right or wrong. It’s a matter of what sort of ritual you want to build. Perhaps brewing an espresso connects you to yourself, while kayaking in a river connects you to nature, God, the universe, etc.
Size of ritual
A ritual can be tiny like a nightly goodnight kiss or lighting a candle before you begin writing in your journal. It can be large like throwing a party with 200 of your closest friends to celebrate a milestone birthday. And it can be somewhere in between. Listening to a podcast on your commute home.
Action of ritual
What are you doing? What verb? Verbs help mark the boundaries, define the beginning and end of the ritual. Are you burning, marking, washing, ringing, lighting, folding something? When you’re done, the ritual is over.
Get started
Michael gave one of my favorite pieces of advice for any new endeavor, which is to create a crappy first draft. What’s the smallest way you could experiment? What’s your best guess as to how this might work?
Good luck!
This pair of antique mahogany side chairs are part of one of my family rituals. It’s a decent-sized ritual. Every autumn, usually November, we do a photoshoot with the kids each posed on a chair. We’ve dragged them (the chairs, but also the kids) to the beach, the mountains, my husband’s wood shop, the greenway (see above), a public park, the train station, etc. The photos become our holiday cards which our extended families eagerly await to see how much the kids have outgrown the chairs. So, of course, we must carry out this ritual forever and ever lest we disappoint the fans.
Do you have any rituals that you’d like to share? Maybe you’ll inspire someone reading.
Thank you for reading my words. Your attention is a gift.
Love,
Kate
Like this letter? Will you help others get value from it, too? Please tap the heart, restack, forward it, share on your socials. Thank you.
If you’re done being impatient and are ready to create the change within yourself, reply this email or send me a DM. I coach dissatisfied overthinkers.
Brain hemispheres was not part of Michael’s talk. It’s from Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s Whole Brain Living, which I’ve been noodling on and loving.