Perform your little rituals

Perform your little rituals

See yourself as a shaman or medicine man who needs to dance and sing
to get the healing started.
Make up a ritual that is yours and yours alone—a ritual that will be your
own shortcut to self-motivation.
As you read through these various ways to motivate yourself, you might
have noticed that action is often the key. Doing something is what leads
to doing something. It's a law of the universe: An object in motion stays
in motion.
The great basketball player Jack Twyman used to begin each practice
session by getting to the court early and taking 200 shots at the basket.
It always had to be 200 shots, which he counted out, and it didn't matter
if he already felt tuned up after 20 or 30 shots. He had to shoot 200. It
was his ritual, and it always got him into a state of self-motivation for
the rest of the practice session or game.

My friend Fred Knipe, now an Emmy award-winning television writer
and comedian, does something he calls "driving for ideas." When he has
a major creative project to accomplish, he gets in his car and drives
around the desert near Tucson until ideas begin to come to him. His
theory is that the act of driving gives the anxious, logical left side of his
brain something to do so the right side of his brain can be freed up to
suggest ideas. It's like giving your child some toys to play with so you
can read the evening e-mail on your computer.
In his book about songwriting, Write from the Heart, John Stewart
writes about composer and arranger Glenn Gould, who had a ritual for
finding a new melody or musical idea when he seemed to be stuck and
nothing was coming. He'd turn on two or three radios at the same time,
all to different stations. He'd sit and compose his own music while
listening to music on the three radios. This would short-circuit his
conscious mind and free up the creative subconscious. It would
overload the left side of his brain so the right could open up and create
without judgment.
My own ritual for jump-starting self-motivation is walking. Many times
in my life I have had a problem that seemed too overwhelming to do
anything about, and my ritual is to take the problem out for a long, long
walk. Sometimes I won't come back for hours. But time and again
during the course of my walks something comes out of nowhere—some
idea for an action that will quickly solve the problem.
One of the reasons I think this ritual works for me is that a ritual is
action. Starting a ritual is taking an action that leads toward finding the
solution. The dancing medicine man is already doing something.
Make up little rituals for yourself that will act as self-starters. They will
have you in action before you

"feel like" getting into action. Rituals always override your built-in
hesitation so that you can get yourself motivated in a predictable,
controllable way.
If you are not a writer or painter or poet, you might be thinking right
now that this does not apply to you. But that's what I would call the
creative fallacy. In fact, your entire life is yours to create. There are no
"creative" professions that stand apart from others, like an exclusive
club.
Martin Luther King Jr. used to say, "Be an artist at whatever you do.
Even if you are a street sweeper, be the Michelangelo of street
sweepers!"

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