There's something fascinating about human behaviour. We like to think of ourselves as logical beings, doing the right things in line with our judgement. But there's many things of which we know that they're right, yet still we don't do them. Like regular physical exercise.

In those cases we find excuses like "It's not because I don't want to, just that my job is very demanding and I don't have the time" or worse "I'll do it tomorrow". Those excuses help us externalizing the responsibility for our failure and avoiding the internal conflict between what we know is the right thing to do and what we actually do.

For most people it's difficult to overcome this behaviour - creating rituals may help.

As I described earlier referring to research conducted by Loehr and Schwartz, rituals are an important part of athletes ability to create and maintain mental energy. Rituals in their case help them getting in the right state of mind. They are like a trigger for the brain to switch into a certain pre-trained mode. Without those rituals, their thoughts may continue to wander around, their body might not be alert, and their performance would suffer.

Those rituals do not only help athletes during a competition. They can also help us in our everyday lives. With rituals we train ourselves to do something that is not natural to us. If we want to get into regular physical exercise, forcing ourselves out for that one big workout every other week, is not the way to do it. It will be a one off - until we feel guilty enough to do it again (that’s when we can no longer externalize responsibility). If, however, we start exercising every day, we train our brain and set new triggers. There's no need to do go to the gym for this or spend hours on a full workout. A 15 min walk to start with will do the trick.

The same applies to anything we deem important, but don't act upon accordingly. Creating rituals is not only a great tool to improve athletes' performance. It also helps to overcome our natural behaviour of resolving internal conflict by externalizing responsibility.

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Please share any comments and inputs you may have (comment function, twitter, e-mail, etc.). In my short write-ups I address topics that I am particularly interested in because they align with my values and beliefs. As such, they are always a reflection of my ideas, thoughts, and opinions. The only thing I am positive in that regard is that I do not have all the perspectives, all the knowledge, or all the facts - help me be better tomorrow.