How sticking to a routine can help your development!

Here is a subject I am just learning to re-incorporate into my life: the importance of sticking to a routine to get you where you want! Routines are challenging to me. Just writing ‘sticking to a routine’ makes me cringe… I KNOW with my mind, that routines, consistency, and positive self-discipline help you get exactly where you want to go… but I get bored with the idea of routines, I feel tied down… so, creating and sticking to structure, routines, consistency, are concepts that go under the category of ‘challenging areas’ for me. It is one of those things, that I know with my mind are important to create and uphold, yet I keep finding ways that will diverge me from doing it. Highly annoying. Then something happened…

…I TRULY realised that I have to ACCEPT this as a big challenge of mine! I have to admit it. And I TRULY realised that by sidetracking it, that by not having routines and consistency in my activities, I actually experience major BLOCKAGES- I am kind of standing in my own way and it makes it so much harder for me to reach whatever I want to reach- in those areas of my life where I don’t apply routine and structure.

Now it’s not like I didn’t know this before, but I just hadn’t connected all the dots yet- I hadn’t FULLY realised that I cannot hide from the challenge. I really can’t ‘beat it’ by cheating!  Running around it in circles does not give me the experience, the courage and the success of actually having done it. I realised that the only way to ‘beat it’, is to walk right through it- and to do exactly what I am trying my best to avoid: Bow to the routines, the structure the self-discipline and the consistencies- accept that this is something I need to learn the value of, ‘tedious’ and ‘pointless’ as it may seem to me.

I have probably run away from this issue in past lifetimes, maybe many past lifetimes, and now that I have become fully aware of it, now that I am conscious of the consequences, now that I see I am just holding myself back from reaching certain next steps, now is the time I can turn this issue around and ‘rise from the ashes’!

So how do I do it? I think I start by tidying up, by simplifying, de-cluttering, organising (writing lists or making charts maybe), using color codes, making a schedule- all the while knowing that INTEGRATING A NEW HABIT takes a few weeks. After some weeks it starts to become a ‘routine’ and you can begin to see ‘consistency’; you can see things starting to shift.

Maybe it will feel like you actually have MORE TIME on your hands than you did before, because you have now removed the clutter, i.e. all the things you kept staring at again and again and moving around from one place to the next without actually dealing with it properly and deciding ‘where it goes’ and what role it should have in your activities, if any at all. The clutter is no longer there, it is not cluttering your mind anymore, you have actually freed up mind-space, thought-space and your heart has an easier time getting through to your body letting it know what the next step is in order to get closer to your current goal(s).

Your mind is not blocking your heart. Your mind is working WITH your heart AND your body.  You have become like a heart-mind-body-‘being’. There is flow. The universe can flow through you uninhibitedly. You can move on from your status quo!

THIS has now become my goal. To reach that uninhibited flow. And this is just one challenge that I have become aware of, and have gotten my AHA-moment on how to circumvent. I think this is how I need to work with my challenge of working a routine, self-discipline and consistency.

Maybe you can recognise the process and convert it into something that could help you in your life?

Marianne Johansen

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