The Curse of Routine
Sure - many of you might not have noticed, but that’s essentially the POINT! You’re being robbed. Every single day when you are locked into your routines, you feel comfortable. You don’t stretch. I was in Santa Cruz a couple of years back (I was supposed to head down to Santa Cruz again this year to meet up with Robert Dilts and Judith DeLozier, but I wasn’t able to) and I ended up being a whole lot more curious, really, about what I wanted to do with my life. It was a real eye-opener to discover how a routine made me sick. Literally. I mean I was squirming on the floor like a worm (well… not really). It was some kind of flu bug, and I just felt ill for a couple of days before I was up and about again.
The excitement came when I saw and experienced things I’d never seen before. I mean, those of you staying in the US and Canada, it’s common for you to see racoons. You probably think of them as pests more than anything else. I had to walk past a waddling group of racoons, a mother and her two little kids. She snarled. Boy did she snarl at me. Anyway I waved goodbye and that was the end of it. She waddled off with her two little ones in a sort of a dance to raid some other trash bin.
Now, for some people, maybe this experience is nothing. But let’s do a quick check - how many of us have stretched on a daily basis? Our thinking? Our feelings? Our behaviors?
Probably it’s strange to hear me say this (after all, I’m the guy who trains people to be personally effective, right?), but often I feel like my down periods are times when I make space for myself to grow again.
In moments of adversity, you empty your comfort and this will fuel you to go to the next level of personal success.
Anyway, enough of my ramblings and on with the completion of my BOOK! ;)
Tags
Deep Thought, Finding Purpose, General, Human Tendencies, Rules of Living
August 8th, 2006 at 11:24 am
hiya Stuart,
although downtimes feel like they don’t serve any direct purpose, i’ve found that my mind turns contemplative after the first 5 mins (whether taking a long walk, waiting for someone).
often we’re in the hurry-burry frentic pace of life, that our inertia caused us to feel that ’slow time’ is wasted time.
consider for a moment, the opportunity to evaluate:
1) where you are now
2) where you want to be
3) where you should be
there’s usually a gap between all three and sometimes there isn’t enough ‘thinking’ and too much non-directed ‘doing’.
if we can achieve synergy between all three (yes…definitely challenging) we can ensure we’re more consistently on the path.
(this is from the guy who’s been sucked into one warcraft game too many over the last couple of weeks.)