Shift #3: Apply HEAT
by Charles Barnard
Our lives consist of many, many habits. Why does it seem so hard to create good ones? Think about that for a moment. Isn’t it true that you have many habits that get repeated daily? How many of those habits were purposefully created to support your emotions and your attitude? If you are like most people, not many. We train habits. The third shift in thinking is recognizing the need to apply HEAT to your life – habit, emotion, attitude, training.
Creating habits around managing your emotions and shaping your attitude is all about training. You first train the habits, and the habits train the emotional thinking and attitude management that supports your overall well-being. Habits are easy to form, yet they are not easy. The action steps you should do are generally easy, doing the consistently is not typically easy. Building morning and evening rituals into your life is about building habits. One of the most effective ways to do that is to stack habits.
When you develop one habit first and then add another onto it, and another, and then another, soon you will have all the rituals established that you really need to have. Everyone’s rituals will not be the same, but the elements should likely be the same.
The primary purpose of the morning rituals is to get you mind and body ready for the day. The two primary purposes of the evening rituals are to get the mind and body ready for a good night sleep and to reflect on the day to learn, grow, and reset. There are three essential components to a purposeful ritual – mind, body, spirit. The elements overlap with each other. There is no order nor prescribed length of time, but reality would dictate that you should probably be spending about 30 minutes in the morning and evening.
The elements of the mind include planning your day, reflecting on your day, and some sort of personal growth. The elements of body would include an exercise program that involves, strength, balance, endurance, and flexibility. The spiritual components would include things like breath work, prayer, meditation, or mindfulness practices. All these components influence each other. Your body work improves your mind and spirit while your spiritual practices help your mind and body, and practices of the mind help your body and spirit. They are all interconnected.
The mind work is associated with your attitude. It is all about feeding it positive messages. This is commonly done by repeating daily favorite adages, parables, quotes, or sayings that uplift and support the formation of the beliefs of a champion. Reading those twice a day is a great habit to form. Beyond that reading and listening to podcasts or taking classes all help develop your knowledge and then applying that knowledge leads to wisdom. To begin though simply reading a few adages and then paying attention to what you are thinking about – positive or negative thoughts – throughout the day will help train yourself to be aware of the negative thinking patterns that may creep into your life.
In the evening ritual the mind work will be reflecting on the day. You want to think about what valuable life lessons you might want to file away as well as write down in your journal all the things your grateful for. A couple of adages such as count your blessing one by one and see what great things God has done could be read. Writing your reflection down in a journal is the key to making it work.
In the morning and evening you should also do something physical to get the body going. It does not have to be a workout, though you should create time in your week to get workouts in. The morning work could be a walk, some light stretching, a few calisthenics, or some activity that will get your body moving and the blood flowing to start your day. The evening physical ritual has a slightly different purpose. In the evening, you want to release stress that accumulates during the day to help induce a good night’s sleep.
The last component of the morning and evening ritual should be spiritual practices. The spiritual practices are an essential part of training your emotional management skills and working on your positive mental attitude. The recommended components include breath work and prayer and or meditation and or mindfulness practices. Prayer has two components. One involves simply talking to God and the other involves getting into a meditative state where you can also listen to God – being quiet before the lord. Meditation is training yourself to be able to clear your mind of all conscious thoughts. It takes a lifetime of practice to master. Mindfulness on the other hand is about training your mind to focus on one thing only. It is about that single minded focus. Breathing is directly connected to those three practices. Breathing helps control the state you are in.
Carving out the time for these rituals can be the ultimate challenge for most people. Many people have routines not rituals, especially younger people. The morning routine may be more in the line of the comic strip character Dagwood Bumstead rushing out the door because he is going to be late. Many, many high school and college students have such a morning ritual. Get up, quick shower, grab a quick bit to eat and out the door. Evening rituals for adults and students often involve watching television and or playing video games to unwind before going to bed. Those are not rituals, but routines. The rituals are what you will use to apply HEAT. Applying heat is about training and keeping those habits that are essential for healthily managing and constantly training good emotional practices and a positive mental attitude.