Broken routines
Published: Sun, 09/23/18
It is quite a while since my last broadcast email. Why? Basically the routine broke and I had a struggle to restart it. Maybe I have today, but we shall see. When a routine is broken we realise just how important routines are and how hard they are to restart when we allow them to be broken. In my case I am going to blame a quite large project we undertook which took up quite a lot of time, a lot of energy and a great deal of thinking power. The result was that I did not seem to be able to find the time, energy or thought to actually write anything. Perhaps even worse, this break in routine has meant that it took me over four months to complete my second distance learning programme of nine modules even though I had completed the nine modules of the Foundation programme in the nine weeks as I had intended. It took a bit more time to edit and automate the programme but I got it done quite quickly.
However, the second programme is three months overdue. I did get the final module out on Wednesday, I have made some improvements to the videos that accompany the programme and we are editing the text now. My intention is to have the programme automated by next week.
There are all kinds of reasons why routines get broken, or even just never properly established in the first place. What is even worse is restarting a routine and this can be more difficult than starting an activity from scratch. For one thing there can be a good deal of shame in having failed to manage a commitment, even if that commitment was only to one’s self. There is a fear of having lost whatever had been learned and the embarrassment of having to learn it all over again. There is also the worry that having broken a routine once that it will get broken again. So, perhaps it is best just to write it off to experience and give up.
Personally, I don’t intend to give up. I will re-establish a routine of regular writing, broadcasting and updating web pages as well as developing further programmes. It is not pleasant writing or posting this as I am embarrassed by the gap since the last one but I guess it is better late than never.
The other side of having had my own routine break is that I am realising how hard most people seen to find it to maintain any kind of routine of training or activity. Fifty percent of men over fifty years of age are supposed to be clinically obese. I am not sure how accurate that figure really is but it does rather suggest that a lot of middle aged people do not have a consistent routine of exercise and diet. When doing my best to teach Stav it gets awkward when people pay for a month’s training but can’t actually manage to turn up once in the month so that I can actually teach them. It is well known that commercial gyms have annual contracts for members which mean paying £40 per month. Yet four members out of five will attend maybe twice in the whole year. Are the gyms being unethical to take so much money for nothing? Or does it just show how hard it is to maintain a routine beyond getting up in the morning, going to work,
getting home, sleeping, and doing it all again tomorrow? Of course really disorganised people do not even manage that.
It is a bit of a cliché that successful people do not do what others can’t, successful people do what other people won’t do. The most useful thing you can do in life is establish productive routines and stick to them. If the routine does break for some reason then successful people restart it again as soon as possible, probably with safeguards to make the pattern of behaviour more robust in future.
At least my personal routines of training are fairly robust. I just need to maintain my schedule of writing from now on. I have also managed to maintain a regular routine of teaching, something I have done pretty effectively over the past 25 years. However, it would be nice to teach more then one person at a time, but other people’s routines are effectively out of my hands.
Of course the the important thing with broken routines is not to beat yourself up about it, just pick yourself up and start again gently and persistently and just get over being ashamed.
regards
Graham
PS Last weekend we had the Stavcamp with Ivar. We had fun and I hope everyone who attended got what they needed from the event. The next two events we have lined up for October are a seminar in Somerset on the 6th
http://www.somersetstav.co.uk/daytrain.html and a Seminar here in Beverley on the 20th, more on that very soon.